Our Work

Supporting social enterprise

NESTA believes that 'people-powered' public services can offer radically different, cheaper and better solutions to some of society’s biggest challenges.

In order to understand how we can unlock the power of the social ventures behind this innovative new concept, we are working with the UK’s leading social entrepreneurs, social venture intermediaries and pioneering public services.

Our work is based on the knowledge that for social ventures to operate on a scale that will make a sustainable difference to the UK, they need to be able to access investment capital and advice in an appropriate form and at the right time. In order to achieve this, we need a functioning, larger scale social investment market.

NESTA has been working for several years to support the development of the social investment market, for example by:

  • Making cornerstone investments in two pioneering social venture capital funds: Bridges Social Entrepreneurs Fund and Big Issue Invest Social Enterprise Investment Fund
  • Supporting social venture intermediaries – the organisations that stimulate, incubate and take to scale social innovations. For example, we have incubated organisations like Participle and Thinkpublic, and provided risk capital for the development of new services to support community enterprise, like the Young Foundation’s Health Launchpad and Unltd’s investment readiness service, Unltd Advantage.
  • Commissioning the Young Foundation to map Social Venture Intermediaries (SVIs) in order to improve the understanding of the role and approaches used.
  • Addressing the structural barriers to investment, for example supporting the CSFI report on Tax Incentives for investment in social enterprise.

In the past year, NESTA has launched two new initiatives to build the social investment market:

  • Through our Social Venture Intermediary Fund we will provide funding and support to around eight social venture intermediaries to help them increase their impact on innovative social enterprises and ventures.
  • The Big Society Finance Fund was established to prototype potential activities for the Big Society Bank and to commission research to address gaps in the evidence basis that are central to the development of the social investment market.