Money for local communities is great. That’s why our community steering group set up the GROW Fund to offer unrestricted grants of £25k to participants.
Recent events, however, have made clear that money alone isn’t enough to overcome the deep-rooted inequalities that persist in our society. Belfast’s Bash Café, a victim of the recent racist riots across the UK, has said that they will not reopen even with fundraising efforts reaching nearly £150,000.
What We Learnt about Social Investment Readiness
Building a resilient community means addressing not only economic disparities but the social and emotional barriers residents in our borough face.
Our starting point for our first social investment readiness programme, GROW Fund, was understanding what others were doing. So, we contracted Impact Hub London to provide our grantees with the common preparatory steps for social investment such as budget forecasting and theory of change.
When reflecting on our grantee feedback and our commitment to participation, we learnt that we can do more to tailor future support to local needs.This includes facilitating conversations that not only focus on business growth but also on entrepreneur’s wellbeing and building positive connections.
So in the run up to the next iteration of the Fund we will begin facilitating conversations between former GROW Fund applicants and grantees to gather their insights for the next cycle, ensuring that our approach remains responsive to emergent economic and social challenges.
Local Mentors
When we launched GROW Fund, we thought the borough lacked aspirational business personalities. Since then, we’ve become familiar with local business networks and have built deeper relationships with local business owners who are keen to share their experience with others. We are getting better at data collection to help us identify and engage some of these people as mentors. We continue to scout high streets and business forums for more. We will rely on them to create a circular mentoring system for future cycles of GROW Fund.
Participants in future GROW Fund cycles will be encouraged to ‘pay it forward’ by mentoring others once they have the experience and capacity to do so. Our hope is that this will also build connections and cohesion across communities.
Traditional investment often overlooks the pressure that funding places on businesses and we acknowledge that the GROW Fund placed significant demands on our grantees. While we provided funding, we also asked them to think bigger, manage more money, and devote more time to business development than ever before, without fully considering their other life commitments.
Supporting Entrepreneur’s Wellbeing
To address this, in future we’ll include emotional and wellbeing assistance to help founders establish healthy habits from the start. We hope these practices will be passed on to their employees and shared when grantees become mentors in future GROW Fund cycles.
Over the past year, we’ve also had conversations with other funders who aim to provide holistic, capacity-building support alongside their funding, hoping to maximise their impact.
We are excited about the GROW Fund’s ability to test new ways of capacity-building, to deepen connections across the community, and to teach other funders who are willing to learn.
Join us on this journey. Together we can make social investment more accessible. Contact Kate to find out more.
Read more about GROW Fund in the learning report.
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