Alison Macklin, Community Business Manager at Plunkett Foundation explores the importance of measuring your social impact after a Good Finance workshop at the Facing the Future Together conference. 

Advisors and advisory organisations are critical in supporting charities and social enterprises on their social investment journey; whether that be with financial modelling and business planning, or leadership training and impact management. 

Welcome to the fourth and final blog of our Summer Sounds series, where we delve into the world of social investment and its incredible impact on organisations dedicated to supporting marginalised communities

Welcome to the third blog of our Summer Sounds series, where we delve into the world of social investment and its incredible impact on organisations dedicated to empowering young people

For our second Summer Sounds Blog series, we explore Three podcasts that demonstrate how social investment can be used to tackle Refugee-based challenges in the UK. 

For the first of our Summer Sounds Blog series, we explore Three podcasts that demonstrate how social investment can be used to tackle housing / homelessness challenges in communities across the UK. 

Earlier this year, the 6,000th user completed Good Finance’s ‘Is It Right For Us’ tool, which helps charities and social enterprises to determine whether social investment is worth exploring. In this post, we explore what we can learn from these results and how it challenges our assumptions of the typical Good Finance User.  

Many community groups find the prospect of raising the significant funds required to convert local assets, such as parks, libraries, pubs, cinemas and more, into community ownership, ensuring local people have control over these spaces, particularly daunting. In this blog, we'll go over the idea of using "match funding" to break down the target sum and achieve the goal for community ownership using a variety of funding sources.

We're looking for a Learning Advisor and a Content Creator to help us with our User Voice project

This year’s International Women’s Day theme is #EmbracingEquity. In this post, we the Good Finance team explores how our work embraces equity. 

In this special International Women's Day spotlight piece, we hear from Eloïse Day (Founder and Chief Creative, Effervescent) who shares her reflections about taking on social investment. 

The UK Social Enterprise Awards took place at the end of last year, shining a spotlight on some of the country’s leading social enterprises. The winners were a real reflection of the strength and diversity of the social enterprise movement, which continued to deliver for people and planet, in spite of the pressures placed on businesses by the ongoing cost of living crisis.

Sarah Benn, Membership & Training Manager at Plunkett Foundation, explores Community Shares, how they work and why they're integral to supporting community-owned businesses to thrive and survive in 2023. 
 

Towards the end of 2022, we asked charities, social enterprises and community organisations to tell us more about how they’ve been affected by rising energy costs. 
 

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School for Social Entrepreneurs explore how social investment can be used effectively to scale your organisation and the impact it is able to deliver. 

Lucy Findlay MBE explores common barriers to accessing finance, including her own lived experience as Managing Director at Social Enterprise Mark CIC, and challenges social investors to escape the 'business-as-usual' approach that enables inequity. 

2022 was a turbulent time for many charities, social enterprises and community organisations. We wanted to start the year with a bit of positivity, celebrating the impact created by inspirational individuals, with help from social investment. 
 

Smile Together is an employee-owned dental social enterprise working across Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly which is dedicated to tackling oral health inequality. In 2018 they received social investment from Big Issue Invest to help open a new purpose designed, accessible dental centre.
 

I joined the team at Good Finance in June 2021 whilst completing my Level 3 Digital Marketing Apprenticeship with Multiverse. During this time, I’ve had the opportunity to develop my skill-set whilst learning about some of the incredible and life-changing work that charities and social enterprises are carrying out across the UK. The time has really flown in and as I prepare for the next step in my career, I wanted to reflect on some of my key learnings from the last 18 months…

It’s been several months since we hosted the Addressing Imbalance Live event. Since then, as a team we’ve reflected on many of the learnings that have come from the event and tried to understand how we can translate these into real actions. Our ‘Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals’ as Patricia Hamzahee described them. Image

TAKE ME TO THE SURVEY.  Social investors are developing a pilot fund to support charities and social enterprises navigating rising energy costs by improving their energy resilience.  Have your say on how you’ve been impacted and what support you need.

Back in September, we hosted the first Addressing Imbalance Live event. Image

Locality, a Good Finance partner, supports local community organisations to be strong and successful. Lewis Garland, Content and Media Officer for Locality, explores the impact of the cost of living crisis on their members and the users they serve.