Funded Work

The Connect Fund provided grants to social investors, advisors, interest groups and networks active in the social investment sector in England to develop shared initiatives to address gaps in the infrastructure of the social investment market.

The Connect Fund provided grants to voluntary sector infrastructure organisations, membership bodies, councils for voluntary services, networks and community foundations in England to enable the development of shared approaches to engage with social investment.

The Connect Fund had two funding strands:

• The Building Infrastructure Fund (BIF) provided follow-on funding to existing grantees to develop and embed new methods to engage VCSEs with social investment.
• The Enterprising Ideas Fund (EIF) supported social investment intermediaries providing flexible finance to catalyse new business ideas, either through feasibility study grants or social investment.

Following the uncertainty brought by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Connect Fund continued to support projects seeking to increase the Equality & Diversity of the social investment market, and in addition operated two temporary funding programmes:

• The Business Support Development Programme supported projects that prepared infrastructure organisations to provide appropriate business support into the recovery phase and furthered our understanding about what the sector needed to adapt and be resilient to future shocks.
• The Flexible Finance for the Recovery Programme gathered ideas and solutions to aid the development of Access’ £18m+ Flexible Finance for the Recovery programme, offering development grants for fund managers to develop new patient and flexible forms of finance to support the sector through the recovery.