A few years ago, I assumed my organisation was too small to borrow. Our turnover wasn’t impressive by anyone’s standards and the idea that a lender would hand us £100,000 – over a third of what we turned over – to invest in our own development felt, frankly, like something that happened to other organisations. Bigger ones. More established ones. Ones that had somehow already crossed a threshold we hadn’t yet reached.
We borrowed the £100,000. And in doing so, I became what Good Finance and I would later call an outlier: a social investment recipient in one of the lowest-uptake regions in the country.
I’ve been thinking about that word – outlier ever since. Because the more I look at the data on social enterprise in the East of England, the less I think the problem is that organisations here aren’t ready for social investment. The more I think the part of the problem* is that nobody has ever helped them see that they already are.
* There’s a lot more of a problem in the absence of an East-Anglian shaped social investor
Two facts that shouldn’t sit side by side
The State of Social Enterprise 2025 data for the East of England contains a tension that deserves more attention than it usually gets.
- 77% of social enterprises in the East see financial barriers as their biggest obstacle to growth.
- In the same dataset, 61% didn’t consider any form of external finance – not grants, not loans, not anything – in the last twelve months.
When the thing you say you need most is the thing you’re least likely to seek out, something structural is going on.
That structural thing, I’d argue, is this: the East of England’s social enterprise sector has been built on, sustained by, and taught to think in the language of grant funding. And grant funding, for all its value and in spite of the many current challenges, has quietly remained the only financial conversation most organisations are having.
How grants became the only story
This isn’t criticism. It’s context.
The voluntary and community sector in this region – as elsewhere – grew up on grants. Infrastructure organisations speak grants. Reporting frameworks are built around grants. The relationships between funders and funded organisations have, for decades, been shaped by grant cycles, grant conditions and grant renewals.
So when 68% of those financial barrier concerns turn out to be specifically about obtaining grant funding, that’s not a failure of imagination. It’s a rational response to the environment organisations have been operating in. Grants are what they know. Grants are what their boards understand. Grants are the conversation their peers are having. Grants are a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The problem isn’t the thinking. The problem is that the thinking hasn’t kept pace with two things that have changed: the scarcity of grant funding and the genuine availability of something else.
Who we actually are
Before we talk about what social investment is, it’s worth pausing on who the 9,700 social enterprises (54% are CICs and many are charities) in the East of England actually are – because the data paints a picture that most of those organisations probably wouldn’t use to describe themselves.
- The median social enterprise in the East has been trading for eight years.
- 88% are real living wage employers.
- 74% of leaders have lived experience of the social issues their organisation addresses.
- 52% are actively developing new products and services – a figure higher than the UK average.
And crucially: 55% of income across the sector comes from trading.
Trading with the general public (22%), with the public sector (20%), with the private sector (13%).
These are organisations that are already operating in commercial environments. They’re managing delivery contracts, maintaining customer relationships, generating earned income and demonstrating impact.
That’s not a sector that needs to become something different to access social investment.
That’s a sector that’s already doing the things that make social investment accessible – without necessarily knowing it.
When an impact investor looks at an organisation that’s been trading for eight years, pays the real living wage and has leaders with deep personal connection to the mission, they don’t see a charity that can’t take on repayable finance.
They see exactly the kind of organisation they’re looking for.
The 35% – the most interesting number in the data
There’s a group in the data who deserve particular attention: the 35% of social enterprises in the East who considered applying for external finance last year and didn’t.
Not the 61% who didn’t consider it – shifting that group is important work, but it’s a longer journey and above my paygrade!
The 35% who got close? They’re one good conversation away.
What stopped them? The three most common reasons were economic conditions (21%), not wanting to take on additional risk (17%), and a broader catch-all category that likely contains a great deal of nuance, uncertainty and unfinished thinking.
None of those reasons are unreasonable.
Risk aversion makes complete sense when you don’t fully understand the product you’re being asked to consider. “Not the right time” often means “I don’t know enough to judge whether it’s the right time.” These aren’t objections to social investment – they’re information gaps dressed up as conclusions.
Which means the barrier, for many of those 35%, isn’t financial readiness.
It’s access to the right conversation.
What social investment actually offers
Social investment isn’t a replacement for grant funding and it isn’t right for every organisation. But it is a genuine option for far more organisations in the East than are currently considering it – and it works differently from what most people assume.
It’s repayable, but repayable finance in the social investment world is not the same as a commercial bank loan. Lenders in this space are investing in your social impact as much as your financial return.
- Terms are often more flexible
- Support is often more present
- The relationship between investor and investee tends to look more like a partnership than a transaction – I can certainly vouch for that
It comes in different forms – loans, patient capital, blended finance (including unrestricted grants) and capacity building – designed for different stages of organisational development and different growth ambitions. And there are people and tools specifically designed to help you work out whether it’s right for you, before you have to commit to anything.
If any of this sounds like your organisation
The East of England has two case studies on Good Finance from organisations who’ve been through this: Your Own Place CIC in Norwich (ahem) and Mentis Tree CIC. It’s not just CICs though. There’s charities locally too – such as the Swan at Gressenhall that issued community shares and Asperger’s East Anglia.
They are not outliers in the way I once thought I was at Your Own Place CIC. They are organisations (including charities!) that were already doing the work, already building the track record, already demonstrating the impact – and found that social investment gave them the means to do more of it.
If you’re a social enterprise or charity in the East that’s been trading (or even considering it), generating income in any way, and wondering how to fund your next stage of growth or development – the question isn’t whether social investment exists for organisations like yours. It does.
The question is whether you’ve got the information you need to make the decision.
Read the East of England case studies on Good Finance: goodfinance.org.uk/region/east-england