When I first
joined Key Fund on 10 June 2002, I never expected I’d be its CEO 20 years
later.
I grew up in a
single-parent family in a tough working-class area of Doncaster where
aspirations were low. I expected that
I’d work in a factory or something similar, like my dad and my friends’ parents. But I was relatively smart, and despite a
strong commitment to ‘coasting’ and putting most of my focus on playing
football, I did ok at school and went through to sixth form.
Something
changed at this point and I seemed to flourish, having moved schools. I challenged myself, met some great friends,
and found some supportive teachers, all of whom encouraged me to believe that I
could aspire to something else – and in fact I did, doing well enough at
A-level to earn a place at University, the first in the family to do so.
I emerged at
21 with a degree and no clue as to what would come next. I knew that I had a passion for fairness and wanted
to do something that positively impacted on communities like mine, as I had
seen first-hand what poverty did to people. But that was as much as I knew.
This passion,
via a series of initial wrong turns, brought me to Key Fund, which was created
to move money into places where it didn’t traditionally flow; like the places I
grew up in. It resonated with me and
stirred something. I had found my place.
When I first
joined, Key Fund had provided a few hundred grants and just one loan. Today,
we’ve completed over 2,600 investments, and I’m particularly proud that the
vast amount of these still go into the most disadvantaged places.
But we have so
much more to do.
So, as I reach
my 20th anniversary, I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve learnt over
those two decades and where I think we, that is Key Fund and the sector more
widely, need to focus. So, I humbly
present to you my five key thoughts:
One: Community
and social enterprises are powerful agents of change – but need the right policy
environment.
They can
transform people and places. We face enormous challenges as a society, from the
cost-of-living crisis, to empty high streets/centres and a climate crisis, but I
truly believe community and social enterprise offers many solutions, reaching people
in places where other sectors do not. But they can do much more if the circumstances
are right and this needs to be recognised more in public policy, where sadly it
seems to have slipped down the agenda.
We need to get behind our representative bodies like SEUK, Responsible
Finance, the Social Investment Forum and others to create a more unified voice,
as colleagues in Scotland have.
Two: People do
amazing things but need help – social investment is only part of an answer.
Just repayable
social investment isn’t ever going to be the solution. Community and social entrepreneurs need to get
the right support and the right money at the right time to help them to address
the enormous challenges they face. We
can’t expect enterprises to deliver sustainable impact in marginal markets, in
disadvantaged areas with commercial(ish) models of finance. We need to build a broader range of tools
(including more patient products), but this also includes grants, and lots of them.
We need to work together to make this
case.
Three:
Relationships are key – and we can build better together.
Trading
is difficult and repayable investment is often scary to community and social
entrepreneurs - particularly those from marginalised or disadvantaged
communities, where it is sometimes seen as a failure if you have to take a
loan. The only way to get around this is
to build relationships of trust, working alongside organisations, building
understanding and a shared vision of the future for their organisations, developing
plans together. Too often this is about
us helping them, but it needs to go both ways. We need to open up our funds, building them
with community and social entrepreneurs so that they are truly fit for purpose
and focussed on the real challenges. I
want to see more commissioning with community and social entrepreneurs to
deliver our services, but also more of them on our investment panels and boards.
Four: We need to do better to reach marginalised and
disadvantaged communities.
So many funds do amazing things, investing in people working
in disadvantaged areas. Here at Key Fund,
80% of our investments are in organisations that are in the top 30 most
deprived communities, but people are still being left behind, and whilst ever
this is happening, we can never achieve our vision of ‘successful
communities’. I truly believe that the
more unequal a society is, the worse it is for everyone. So, I believe that we must look at the way we
work and who we work with to increase the flow of money and support to those
places and people who don’t usually get it.
Five:
We need to work together better
to achieve more.
One positive
that came out of the pandemic is that funds and support organisations worked
together with real collaboration and a focus on how our sum was greater than
our parts. They left any competitive drive at the door and collaborated for a
common cause. The challenges our society now faces are huge, and our clients square
up to them head-on. So, we need to work together to rise to that. It demands
all of our efforts, our learning and talents. We also need to be honest about what works
when, leaving self-interest behind and resisting the temptation to present our
organisations or products as the solution.
Many of the points I’ve outlined above are well known to many
people in the sector and are certainly not original – in fact many have been
challenges for a long time. We’ve made
good progress over the last two decades, but we need to reflect the excellence
of our investees and do much, much better.
Myself and the team will be picking up some of the points
above in subsequent blogs over the coming months, and I hope that others will
join in. The recent Adebowale Commission provides some momentum for this
conversation, which we must continue together to address inequality.
Fairness is still the driving force.