Resonance - Twenty Years Of Impact - Report - Page 47
2005
C 15K SOCIAL ENTERPRISES
in the UK - 300% growth in just 2 years4
2006
11.4M PEOPLE
living in poverty in the UK*5
IN THE NEWS...
IN THE NEWS...
• YouTube comes online in February
• WikiLeaks launches
• National minimum wage increases from £4.85 to £5.05
• Ellen Johnson Sirleaf becomes President of Liberia - Africa’s first elected
female head of state
• Hurricane Katrina causes devastation in New Orleans
• Daniel Craig makes his debut as James Bond in Casino Royale
RESONANCE AND THE BREWER
FAMILY MOVE TO CORNWALL
FOLLOWING THE CHARITY
BANK PROJECT, AS MANY
OF RESONANCE’S CLIENTS
NOW CORNWALL BASED.
*After housing costs.
Source:
4. Greater London Authority Economics - A review of London Annual Business Survey 2007
5. IFS Report Poverty & Inequality in Britain: 2006
46
1.6M HOUSEHOLDS
in England are on housing waiting lists6
TIM WEST
PIONEERS POST
We were both beginning our adventures
in how to change the world
I first met Daniel at a social enterprise event in the
early noughties when we were both just beginning
our adventures in how to change the world.
The Blair Brown government had set up the first
Social Investment Taskforce in 2000 to look at “How
entrepreneurial practices could be applied to obtain higher social and financial
returns… and to unleash new sources of private and institutional investment”. It
had also launched a Social Enterprise Unit to explore and champion new forms of
business trading with a ‘triple bottom line’.
I’d been working as a journalist covering subjects such as social housing,
economic regeneration and corporate responsibility and had met a series of
people running things called ‘social enterprises’. These were not projects or
fundraising charities – but trading ventures creating income to address social and
environmental challenges in their communities. The people running them were
different: they were innovative, they networked, they took risks, they were ‘social
entrepreneurs’. So I took a risk too and in partnership with some publisher friends
and a social entrepreneurs’ network I launched Social Enterprise Magazine (now
Pioneers Post). It began as a monthly, printed newsletter sent to 1,000 people. We
also ran events – two of our first conferences were about very obscure topics:
‘Procurement’ and ‘Social Value’ (plus ça change).
“Social enterprise” - just a ‘niche’ New Labour fad?
Despite all the excitement around social enterprise and investment, however,
both Resonance and Social Enterprise Magazine were a bit too early. Nobody
really ‘got it’ at that point. I recall the then CEO of the National Council for
Voluntary Organisations, Sir Stuart Etherington, telling me social enterprise
was just a ‘niche’ New Labour fad. A small social policy firework which, like a
firecracker clamped between the buttocks of a football fan, would be a pleasing
spectacle for a few seconds but would soon burn out and leave charities to get on
with the proper work in the premier league of social change. Of course, twenty
years later and there are hundreds of thousands of social enterprises generating
billions of pounds to solve the big challenges of society and the planet, and the
global impact investing market is now more than $1 trillion. Resonance manages
more than £300 million and Pioneers Post has a global audience of more than
200,000.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Daniel at various points during this journey.
When we started running events like Good Deals (the annual UK social investment
conference) Daniel was a regular speaker and a ‘dragon’ in our Dragon’s Den-style
pitching sessions. He also invited me down to the Resonance ‘shop’ in Launceston
to talk about marketing, and our creative agency worked on an early website
redesign and some broader communications. I’ve been checking the Pioneers Post
archives and Resonance is mentioned in 89 stories. These track quite a pioneering
journey: from small beginnings in east London with £50,000 start-up investment,
to £50 million from Big Society Capital plus much more from local authorities and
foundations. In 2014, Resonance pioneered social investment tax relief in Bristol;
in 2019 Resonance won our Good Deal of the Decade Award for £200m funds
created with St Mungo’s homelessness charity. We also covered their launch of the
world’s first property fund with a gender focus, supporting women experiencing
homelessness or who are survivors of domestic abuse.
In 2019, we were asked to work with Daniel and other UK social investment
leaders to produce an event called The Gathering – essentially a chance for the
sector to take a ‘warts and all’ look in the mirror, challenge itself on how to grow
and work more collaboratively. An event founder, Daniel was one of seven on the
steering group. Though sometimes like herding cats, they were single minded
in their mission to make the event meaningful, useful and authentic. Daniel was
persuaded to step into the limelight for a brief but impressive double act with
Danyal Sattar (CEO of Big Issue Invest) in ‘The Dan Show’ – in which the audience
of 150 sector leaders was made to consider (and vote on) some big questions
about their future: Have the ‘sharks’ in mainstream investment already claimed
impact investing? Will social investment get ‘Ubered’ by technology? Is our
addition to debt finance making us weaker?
Focus on the heart of the matter
Daniel has always struck me as a bit of a secret social entrepreneur. Very unlike
the alpha types who often seem to dominate the impact world. He’s a kind of
Clark Kent of impact investing – mild-mannered, softly spoken but with a hidden
strength of will and clarity of purpose that is a real superpower. An engineer who
ditched an early career in food manufacturing to become an expert in poverty; a
finance CEO who has grown one of the UK’s most important impact investment
firms without having had any previous finance experience. Oh, and he did it
while choosing to escape the rat race to seek “a balanced quality of life” (as he told
us in a Pioneers Post interview a few years ago) with his family in a small market
town in Cornwall.
There’s a hint of Victor Meldrew or Basil Fawlty in Daniel too – not in the
misanthropic sense at all but more of a grumpiness or impatience – even an
anger perhaps – at the injustices he sees in society. When I’ve asked Daniel about
his work, his answers are shaped firmly around serving the needs of individuals
and communities; his focus not on the clever innovations of his latest fund but on
the issues at the heart of the matter. Sure it helps to be clever (and Daniel clearly
is) but it seems to me that Resonance’s success – and therefore its impact – is
more about ‘thoughtfulness’ in its fullest sense: combining intelligent thinking
and commitment to mission to create innovative solutions to very challenging
problems.
Daniel has clearly also got an excellent team working with him, and he’s had
some fine mentors; you need special qualities to grow and lead a successful team,
and to persuade others with different talents and shared values to help you steer
the right course.
What of the future?
There’s a school of thought that says the issues social investors are addressing
are so complex and offer such small margins that only a few can reach the scale
necessary to sustain themselves. If so then Resonance seems well positioned. I
was speaking recently to another successful social entrepreneur working at the
most challenging end of the social housing and homelessness sector and he said
Resonance was the organisation he rated most highly (and watched most closely
as a ‘competitor’). There’s another school that believes mainstream investors have
already stolen the clothes of impact and will take all the big opportunities for
themselves. This is a challenge that Daniel and his team are surely thinking about.
As he once told Pioneers Post: “Our vision is of a world where money serves
people and communities, not the other way round.” No pressure, Daniel – but
we’re relying on you and the other true pioneers of impact investing to make sure
this vision is realised.
Source:
6. GOV.UK - Live Table 600: Numbers of households on local authorities housing waiting lists by district: 2021
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