Our priorities

Via an EII Task Force review in 2024 and wider stakeholder engagement we have identified the following priorities for 2025-2028.

1. To continue and develop our work with social and impact investors to progress the enabling conditions needed to increase the levels and the effectiveness of EII with particular focus

• Embedding equality impact goals and provisions in existing and developing impact economy legislation, policy and infrastructure, nationally and regionally

• Building investor capacity to put EII principles and strategies into practice

• Supporting the development of a greater number and diversity of targeted equality impact readiness, enterprise development and financing initiatives

2. Explore and respond to key barriers and opportunities to increase equality impact and philanthropy

3. Grow and strengthen the sustainability of EIIP and wider equality impact investing infrastructure

Insight and Influencing

We generate and/or platform research and data that shine a light on challenges to, and opportunities for, effectively flowing finance to social action on inequality. We use this data and insight to inform and influence policy and decision makers and practitioners.

We are currently working with Equally Ours to evaluate their pilot Equality Enterprise Development Programme and are commencing initial scoping of the current state of equality impact philanthropy in the UK. We are utilising insight from the work and previous research to inform developing policy on the impact economy and philanthropy and our own future activities. We are also developing plans for a review of our foundational equality impact investing research including an assessment of the levels of equality impact funds/application of equality impact investing against our 2019 baseline.

Capacity building

Our capacity building has four main strands of work, which continue to develop in line with needs as they emerge.

Training and Direct Support

To date we’ve trained over 120 investors/philanthropists via open foundational EII and Leading EII learning modules which can be accessed here. Many of our network of alumni are now developing EII initiatives within their organisations and in the wider sector. We are currently reviewing our open courses offer with a view to running our next programmes in 2026. As part of this we are exploring further developing our working EII professional standards and competencies framework as a shared sector benchmark. We also provide tailored workshops, courses and consultancy on EII for individuals, organisation or networks on request.

Resources

We both produce and platform a range of practical EII resources on our Knowledge Hub which includes our EII Toolkit.

Awareness Raising and Engagement

Both our foundational and subsequent work has identified a need for our ongoing communications programme which focuses on building and maintaining awareness and dialogue on the relevance of inequality to investors and philanthropists and how they can make a difference. Sign up to our newsletter to get regular updates on our work and from the wider EII community.

EII infrastructure development

Building the capacity of the impact economy ecosystem to fulfil its potential to tackle inequality is a long-term project that requires adequate EII infrastructure - nationally and regionally. As well as supporting our own scale and sustainability, we are advocating for and supporting the development of the wider equality impact infrastructure, including initiatives supporting increased capacity to tackle different forms of inequality or working with particular underserved groups or communities.

Coordinating and Supporting EII in Action

EIIP was created as a means to connect actors in the impact economy and equality and human rights ecosystem, and within them. We convene and support a national EII Task Force, and its various subgroups or initiatives, whose members coordinate and collaborate on on generating more and more effective EII. We are currently reviewing the membership and structure of the Task Force with a view to developing this. We also lead and/or support a number of EII into action initiatives, in particular areas where we and the Task Force identify this will add value or address unmet needs. We will be updating on our next set of EII in action initiatives in early 2026.

Strategic Projects

We have previously led or co-led a number of strategic projects aiming to advance particular aspects of EII including place-based EII, supporting equality transformative ventures, EII impact measurement, EII learning and standards, and shifting power in deal terms. We are currently exploring further work in a number of these areas and others.