There has never been a more urgent need to ensure that Good Finance is addressing the imbalance faced by black and minority ethnic led organisations in accessing information, education, and resources on social investment.

Addressing Imbalance Programme launch

At a time where local communities are being stripped of resources and funding is being squeezed, we plan to make meaningful and long-lasting connections with those working for marginalised communities, so they feel supported.

That is why we are launching Addressing Imbalance and calling for new partnerships. We’d love for you to get in touch if you are a black or minority ethnic led charity, social enterprise, network, membership body, voluntary, community or faith organisation supporting marginalised communities.

How does Addressing Imbalance work?

The Addressing Imbalance programme works inwards from the margins and aims to engage, reconnect, and represent. We will do this by:

  • Having conversations with networks and organisations to form new partnerships and work together to make social investment accessible for your local community.
  • Reconnecting with organisations that we’ve worked with in the past and offer additional support.
  • Improving the representation of Good Finance case studies from black and minority ethnic led organisations that have taken on social investment.
  • Tracking and measuring feedback from our conversations with organisations and consistently measuring progress against our KPIs. 

Why are we reaching out to you?

A reality-check from Charles Kwaku-Odoi, Chief Officer at Caribbean and African Health Network (CAHN), left us with no doubt that we need to adapt our engagement strategy in order to engage those perceived as ‘hard to reach’. This recent report by The Centre for Public Impact UK and Changing Lives, shows that meaningful connection and listening to those we’ve not been able to engage may hold the key to pandemic recovery.

Our Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Engagement Specialist, Manprit Vig, reflects with a decade of frontline and lived experience : “For fundamental change to positively dismantle the systems upholding inequalities, we need to work inwards from the margins by honouring and empowering the wisdom of those facing the brunt of an unjust society at the individual, community and organisational level. New ways of engagement at the grassroots need to be embraced when addressing the deep-rooted inequalities that are clear to see from that viewpoint. Relatability and trust are key to engagement. For example, CAHN circulated videos by Black doctors of information and advice on Covid-19 which was more effective than mainstream communications. From personal experience, this culturally tailored communication was seen amongst the Sikh communities when Sikh doctors did the same to inform Sikh places of worship to close their doors in order to save lives. So we should take the same tailored intersectional approach when it comes to informing all communities on social investment”.

It is evident that marginalised communities don’t have the same progressive outcomes as mainstream communities because their starting position isn’t the same, contending with additional barriers of cultural and socio-economic factors. The Black South West Network report published Nov 2019, highlights “the need for networking spaces and access to information on social investment” as key barriers to growth for diverse-led social enterprises across the South West of England. A recent finding by The Social Enterprise Uk’s Advisory Panel’s September 2020 Poll, suggests these diverse-led social enterprises seem particularly innovative, adaptive and resilient in their response to Covid-19. Therefore, we see it not only as an opportunity but a necessity for information on social investment to reach those serving marginalised communities, so they too can have an informed financial choice over their development.

This necessity to reach out to you is aligned and mobilised by:

  • bringing our Diversity and Inclusion Plan to life, we are actively seeking to work with new and existing partners that serve marginalised communities.
  • our equality pledge drives our intent to reach a wide spectrum of diverse audiences to engage in conversation and make information on social investment accessible, in a way that works for you.
  • striving to be more informed of the needs, barriers and opportunities in serving all communities, so that we can better support social impact collaboratively and systemically - leaving no one behind.

You can find out more about Good Finance’s commitment to diversity and inclusion in our recent blog post here. 

What can we offer to you?

Some examples of the tools and resources we can offer are:

As part of our work together, we will work with you to create tools that are right for you.

What is an Addressing Imbalance partnership?

We aim to form up to 8 new partnerships and work together over the next year. Recognising the additional challenges you may be facing during these tough times, we want to tailor our approach to suit your needs, capacity and time. 

To support our work together, our tiered partnership approach offers one-off payments of either £750 or £250, to kick-start our work together. This will be for your time only, we will provide the tools, content and resources.

You can find out more about partnership opportunities in Addressing Imbalance: A Call for Partnerships brief here. 

What are we asking of you?

We want to be led by your expertise and hear from you how you would like to be informed about social investment rather than expect one-size-fits-all.

From conversations with our partners, we will plan how best to work together. This may include you hosting information events supported by us or creating some content such as blogs and case studies that celebrate your social impact journey.

If you are interested or even unsure if this is for you, we would love to have an informal chat! We are mindful of your capacity and are here to be flexible to talk in a way and at a time that suits you.

You can get in touch with Manprit Vig (mvig@bigsocietycapital.com), Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Engagement Specialist or Emily Liddle (eliddle@bigsocietycapital.com), Senior Communications & Engagement Officer.

For more information, download our Addressing Imbalance brief below.

View our call for new partnerships