New Connect Fund grant to extend EII activities and impact
By Ceri Goddard, EIIP Director
We are delighted to announce that the Connect Fund has agreed a two year core grant towards further developing EIIP. It will support us to maintain our key coordinating and capacity building activities such as the UK Taskforce and our web-based knowledge hub for the wider EII movement, but also to step up efforts in three key priority areas. Firstly, further increasing investors’ understanding of the multiple systems and dimensions that drive inequality and the full breadth of EII strategies and practices they can draw on to tackle these. Secondly, developing clear standards, and related professional learning/ competency frameworks, for different aspects of EII, including impact measurement. Thirdly, continuing to build the capacity of investors, and the sector as a whole, to deliver and innovate EII in ways that see these standards as a floor and not a ceiling.
Building on our work to date
The support of the Connect Fund (CF) has been critical in the development and impact of the EIIP to date. In our first phase, an initial grant supported work to explore how far investment was connecting to or engaging with equality organisations but also the wider equality and human rights movement and its priorities and standards. We were able to define key EII principles and strategies and identify what would increase their use in investing.
In our second phase a further CF grant supported creation of the UK Taskforce and, combined with additional support from DCMS, work by its members, and others, to both build the conditions and infrastructure that supports EII and to innovate as individual investors or infrastructure bodies.
Future priorities and plans
Our priorities and plans, for the next two years reflect of number key challenges to be addressed and opportunities to be grasped, if we are to support the step change that this needed for investment to play the far greater role it could in tackling, not perpetuating, rising inequality.
The first of these is the clear need to raise investor’s awareness of the multi dimensional and systemic nature of inequality further still. In particular how powerfully it can impact or be impacted by their actions and, relatedly, the full suite of EII strategies and practices that can be harnessed to ensure that impact is positive. Despite the significant rise in the number of investors engaging with the EIIP agenda, this remains clustered around only certain issues such as lack of diversity in their own make up or amongst the entrepreneurs they are financing. Whilst this renewed focus on diversity and inclusion is of course welcome, it remains far short of harnessing the full potential set of strategies that could make a difference, including those focused on the kind of system change demanded by equality and human stakeholders. As well continuing to capture and share examples of these strategies we will be supporting the Taskforce, in collectives and as individual organisations, to pilot or demonstrate or innovate across the EII spectrum.
Our second priority, developing clearer standards, responds both to a challenge and an opportunity arising through increased investor engagement in equality impact. On the one hand this has increased the risk of equality impact washing. On the other, it has generated a demand, from a vocal , and growing, minority of EII pioneers (who see EII not as desirable but as essential, and not niche, but substantive component of investing) for more detailed guidance and deeper capacity and competency, in their organisations or across the sector. Our plans for developing clearer professional standards and related learning offers, for current and future entrants to the sector, are ones we hope will mitigate this risk and address this demand.
Finally, as EII and the impact it can help to deliver become more defined and more central to impact investing, so the need to build individual investor and wider movement capacity continues to grow. Thus we will step our efforts to build this capacity as well as larger scale, longer term and sustainable equality impact infrastructure that is needed to finish the job. In this, developing EIIP’s own capacity and sustainability for the task ahead will be central.
This includes developing and building the core executive and EII associate team as well as adding new members to the Taskforce and collaborating with a range of new partners. In all cases, continuing to combine insights and experience from both the fields of impact investing and equality and human rights will define our work.
As a first step we are delighted to announce that Rana Zincir Celal, who joined EII as senior associate in 2020, will become EIIP Co Director. Rana will continue work closely with me to develop and deliver across our strategy, increasing our capacity to engage with the growing range of strategic partners and collaborators that make up EIIP. We are also planning to increase support to EII UK Taskforce member and/or EII pioneer led projects that advance our shared goals as well expanding our team of EII associates, specialist external individuals and partners who drive work in particular aspects of EII. Providing the means for different actors in EII to join forces and co-ordinating efforts in this way has been key in EIIP’s impact to date and will become even more important if we are to embed but go much further than our impact to date.