Two years of the Equality Enterprise Development Programme yields important successes and learning
By Aimee Dorsett-Brown, Equally Ours
Funded by the Access The Foundation for Social Investment, and delivered alongside a coalition of partners including Social Investment Business, the Association of Mental Health Providers, Centre for Youth Impact, Equally Ours and Homeless Link, the Enterprise Development Programme offers tailored support to civil society organisations thinking to explore new models of trading or looking to grow existing ones as a way to build up financial resilience, grow unrestricted funding and foster innovation across the charitable sector.
The equality strand of the programme, led by Equally Ours, follows on from one of the key recommendations from the Equality Impact Investing Project’s report, From Principles to Practice, which highlighted the need for greater investment in enterprise generating capacity building within the equality sector.
Two years into its proposed three years of involvement in the programme, the equality strand continues to go from strength to strength. To date, we have worked with over 30 organisations at varying levels of their enterprise journey.
Training and consultancy remains the most popular trading model to emerge from the programme, with many of the organisations requesting grant funding for a one-year funded post to get things off the ground.
Programme participant MindOut received an initial grant of 28k to finance a four-day a week post to fund the recruitment of a Business Development lead. One-year later, thanks to receiving initial seed capital funding from EDP, the organisation has brought in more than 80k in unrestricted funding and been able to both grow the role to five days a week and have it be self-sustaining. This is a pattern that is repeating itself across the programme’s three current cohorts.
Organisations continue to remain cautious about social investment, feeling unready to take what is deemed the plunge, a feel which in doubt heightened due to the uncertainty of the last 18 months.
As Equally Ours begins to look forward towards the creation of its Alumni Network as part of Access’s Enterprise Development Programme, we’re keen to ensure that a variety of flexible and suitable finance is pipelined into the sector so as to support its growth and sustainability.
Contact Equally Ours to learn more about the equality strand of the Enterprise Development Programme and its developments.