Esmée Fairbairn Foundation: Social Investment
Esmee Fairbairn Foundation
Open (ongoing)
Advice services
Arts, culture and heritage
Community and neighbourhood development
Community development
environment
Gender equality and sexual orientation
Housing and homelessness
Human rights and equality
Natural environment and climate
organisational development
People with disabilities
Performing arts
Refugees and asylum seekers
social enterprise
Social welfare and poverty
Sustainable development
Sustainable energy
Trading
Young people (13-25)
Antrim & Newtownabbey
Ards & North Down
Armagh City, Banbridge & Craigavon
Belfast City
Causeway Coast and Glens
Derry City and Strabane
England
Fermanagh and Omagh
Great Britain
Lisburn and Castlereagh
Mid and East Antrim
Mid Ulster
Newry, Mourne and Down
Northern Ireland
Scotland
Wales
Large (over £60,000)
Overview
They invest in organisations, funds and projects that achieve impact that aligns to their strategic priorities. Their investments generate financial returns as well as impact and these are recycled into new investments.
Why social investment
Organisations often use social investment to increase their sustainability and impact – perhaps by purchasing an asset, developing a product, expanding their team or improving their cashflow. Learn more about the different types of social investment and whether it's right for you at Good Finance.
What they offer
- As every organisation is different, they work with applicants to find the type and terms of investment that will best help them to achieve their missions.
- In practice this means they offer loans (secured and unsecured), equity, fund investments and everything else.
- Explore a list of their recent social investments to find examples of their funding.
Eligibility criteria
To be eligible for social investment, you must:
- Deliver or plan to deliver measurable outcomes that align closely to the priorities under our aims.
- Be a charity or social enterprise or have a structure that includes a Mission Lock or be willing to add one.
- Demonstrate a suitable repayment or exit plan for the investment you are seeking.
- Be operating in the UK.
They are particularly interested in supporting
- Organisations led by, and for, people with lived experience of the issues they are working on.
- Ideas with the potential to influence wider positive change, help attract mainstream finance into impact or disrupt broken markets. See their Investment priorities for examples.
- Ideas, structures and interventions that meaningfully involve their communities.
- Impact that intersects across one or more of their Aims.
- Partnerships and collaborations.