The Client: shaping money for social impact

Access began in 2015 with an endowment of £100m to spend on smaller, simpler, better-shaped money for the majority of social enterprises and charities in England; in contrast to the minority of larger organisations that social investment seemed to be serving. Access’s money is designed to support organisations as much as deals, making grants to build capacity, and blending grants with loans so that smaller amounts can be lent to smaller organisations effectively. Its hypothesis and hope is that as charities and social businesses are enabled to become more enterprising and resilient, their positive impact on people and communities will be sustained or grow. Access is also modelling this by investing its endowment to make a difference as well as make a return, through its model of total impact.

The Challenge: designing and learning with a limited lifespan

For an organisation with a 10-year life, Access’s challenge is to learn fast enough to make a difference in a decade. Evaluating its programmes after three years, or five, would only give it the chance to change once or twice in its lifetime. The challenge was to design and learn rapidly and continuously, sharing its experience with a view to changing systems. Sharing matters to Access because it’s an organisation that doesn’t intend to live forever, but it wants to create something that endures. For the Curiosity Society, having a client that has learning, design and systems change in its DNA is an absolute joy, and what makes our relationship with Access a partnership, not a project.

“Consultants often do a good job of recycling what you already know, but in a neat and coherent way. Working with the Curiosity Society is so much more valuable than that: they change how we think.”

Seb Elsworth, Chief Executive at Access

What We Did: from listening to network leadership

We began our learning partnership with Access by playing a card game – an organisational personality test disguised as a card game, helping Access and its partners to describe how they understood their impact and imagined the future. It informed the development of Access’s refreshed strategy, including a stronger orientation to the needs of charities and social enterprises.

Our work together has varied from delving deeply into the process and outcomes of particular programmes, facilitating feedback from partners about Access, identifying cross-cutting lessons, exploring the significance of its role in social investment, and encouraging the perspective of network leadership and movement building (as a good fit with Access’s limited life and desire to leave a legacy). These are all works-in-progress, which is probably how a learning partnership should be.

What Happened: learning x design + repeat = normal

Access has normalised learning not only to serve its own programmes and the charities and social enterprises it supports, but also as an experiment for other foundations and funders. Each programme takes the best of what has gone before and absorbs it into its design. The Local Access programme, for example, incorporates learning from the Growth Fund (blended finance), Reach Fund (capacity building for investment), Enterprise Development Programme (diversified income and trading for resilience); Connect Fund (ecosystem and infrastructure support); and Total Impact (investing to make a difference as well as a return).

What’s next? As Access moves into the second half of its ten-year life, it has recognised that learning is the work; especially sharing learning to shape systems for the future