Finance For Sustainability

Finance For Sustainability

Project: Community Partners 
City: London  Grant: £60,000

Finance For Sustainability functions as an incubator to create and sustain new advisory and investment companies for the social sector to address gaps in the social and environmental impact investment space.

This grant will allow Finance For Sustainability to undertake a 9-month strategic market research and business plan for Community Partners. Community Partners will be an online and physical platform to provide capacity building support to community and social enterprises. The focus is to aggregate, simplify, and improve the quality of capacity building and advisory services offered to Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprises (VCSEs). The community will enable VCSE advisors to better deliver high quality, targeted, user-friendly support. The network will work as a membership organisation for VCSE advisors, charging an annual fee and conducting a regular approval and feedback process for vetting the quality and relevance of advisor expertise.

The Community Partners network would bring significant benefits to improve the resilience and robustness of the VCSE advisory market; help grow VCSEs; and enable individual advisors to improve the quality of their offer via joined up marketing, skill development, knowledge exchange, sharing of best practice and collaborative delivery of services. Shared resources via the network can improve the sustainability of capacity building services; lower costs, improve transparency/feedback and reduce the ‘boom/bust’ reliance on subsidy for capacity building.