Access - The Foundation for Social Investment

Access – The Foundation for Social Investment drives systemic transformation in the social investment market, empowering charities and social enterprises to achieve financial resilience and sustainable impact in underserved communities. Guided by values of partnership, openness, long-term thinking, and equity, it champions patient, flexible, tailored finance to unlock growth for mission-led organizations historically excluded from mainstream capital. Its theory of change centers on wholesaling resources to intermediaries, catalyzing capital flows to grassroots enterprises addressing poverty, deprivation, and inequality through trading models that create jobs, strengthen community cohesion, and foster economic inclusion.

It prioritizes cross-cutting interventions building trading capacity and investment readiness for social enterprises delivering community development, employment training, youth work, poverty relief, and support for ethnic minorities, rural communities, and deprived areas. Funded activities include blended finance mixing grants with repayable loans for community businesses tackling food insecurity, social isolation, homelessness prevention, and family support; enterprise development grants enhancing organizational capacity for earned income growth; subsidised patient capital testing innovative models like community-owned enterprises, minority-led ventures, and youth-focused trading initiatives; and market-building pilots enabling smaller organizations to scale services such as peer support groups, mentoring programs, skills training, and local outreach addressing barriers faced by care leavers, refugees, disabled people, and families in crisis. Impact seeks resilient ecosystems where social enterprises drive preventative community-led solutions, holistic economic empowerment, and lasting social outcomes in marginalized contexts.

Exclusively funding social investors and intermediaries—not frontline charities or direct projects—it avoids traditional sectoral silos, statutory services, or non-trading activities. Distinctive as a field-shaper, it targets overlooked groups via geography, ethnicity, or scale, prioritizing Black and ethnically minoritised-led funds, rural enterprises, and youth organizations with lived experience leadership. It demands flexible, responsive approaches aligned with evidence-based enterprise growth, grassroots innovation, and systemic de-risking for inclusive social transformation.