Resonance - Twenty Years Of Impact - Report - Page 89
MORE IMPACT
2 FUNDS
LAUNCH
2021
FUNDS
UNDER MANAGEMENT
£250M IMPACT
274K+ PEOPLE
are homeless in England, including 126K children27
RESONANCE KEY MILESTONES
FUNDS LAUNCHED
• Resonance Everyone In Fund
• Resonance Community Developers
PEOPLE
• Tim Pope joins Resonance board as a non executive director
COLLABORATION
• Working together with four of its sector peers, Resonance distributes £3.2m
through the Social Enterprise Support Fund to 120 organisations needing
extra support through the pandemic
PARTNERS
• The number of housing provider partners grows to over 20
INNOVATIVE
• The Women In Safe Homes Fund appoints an all-women Senior Board of
Advisors to provide support, knowledge, lived experience and perspective to
the fund to ensure its success in creating positive impact for women.
• Big Society Capital and Schroders launch the Schroder Big Society Capital
Social Impact Trust plc, listing on the stock exchange
2,700 PEOPLE
in England are sleeping rough on any given night27
DAVID WALTON
DEVELOPING HEALTH
& INDEPENDENCE (DHI)
Turning lives around
The challenges and uncertainties facing vulnerable
groups feel more pronounced than ever. The cost
of living crisis coupled with the pressures of the last
two years means demand for our services never been
higher, and we expect that demand to only increase. But
through innovative, solution focused work we believe we can continue to deliver
impactful support that transforms lives.
Our services help people to recover from drug and alcohol misuse and tackle the
issues and complexities linked to improper housing and homelessness. We believe
that if people are given a safe and affordable home along with the right support,
they can move on from the experiences that led them to access our services in the
first place and achieve their full potential.
Working in partnership with Resonance
We first heard about Resonance’s work during the launch of the National
Homelessness Property Fund in Bristol. In 2020, we were looking to significantly
scale up our social lettings agency ‘Home Turf Lettings’ and the opportunity arose
to take on the management of Resonance’s Bristol portfolio. We’ve now taken
on the management of this portfolio comprising ninety-nine properties and are
successfully working in partnership with Resonance.
We are also in the process of launching a really exciting project with Resonance
that will provide supported accommodation to thirty-four former rough sleepers in
homes right across Bristol. We’ve developed a great working partnership, based on
a shared social purpose and set of values that clearly align.
The impact of Resonance
There is a real lack of social housing and affordable private rented options in the
areas we work within. As a result, many vulnerable people, including families and
children, are stuck in insecure and sometimes unsuitable accommodation, or
even, in the most extreme circumstances, forced to sleep rough. In these situations
people are often unable to address support needs. Physical and mental health can
deteriorate and it becomes increasingly difficult for people to achieve their potential
and move on.
Resonance targets investment to tackle these issues and has delivered at scale.
Their work is underpinned by a clear theory of change and a commitment to
ensuring that properties act as a platform for residents to turn their lives around.
This creates an ongoing legacy for every person that lives in one of these homes.
The future of impact investing
Sadly the cost of living crisis and the withdrawal of COVID-19 benefit uplifts
is putting ever increasing pressure on many of the people we support. This is
happening in real time and the response of organisations like DHI needs to be
as swift and targeted as possible. Impact investment can respond to these issues
quickly, and at a meaningful scale.
Source:
27 Shelter 2021
88
We feel that by working with Resonance we can respond meaningfully to these
systemic challenges and help even more people to make real changes in their lives.
JOHN WILLIAMS
RESONANCE
Early learnings
I joined Resonance in late 2012, and feel a massive
amount of pride in watching the business grow from
five people to fifty people strong over almost ten years
with each and every one of us all focused on delivering
positive impact to people using investment! Coming
from a corporate and investment banking background
the term “social impact investment” was new to me at
first, but once Daniel and Simon opened my eyes up to this new way of working I
didn’t hesitate in leaving my corporate banking role to support Simon in building
our social impact fund management business. I had also been involved in property
development, so I was enormously excited to be part of the team to launch the
first two Resonance Community Asset funds: Community Share Underwriting
Fund and the Affordable Homes Rental Fund. From this beginning our aim was
to develop and launch the first homelessness property fund and I worked closely
with the team at St Mungo’s to make this a reality. Once the funds were launched, it
was critical that we grew the infrastructure to support them, which meant a bigger
team. We needed people to source properties out in the community, negotiate the
purchases and carry out the necessary refurbishments.
St Mungo’s were a determined and resourceful partner and we worked well
together. They taught us so much about the difficulties faced by charities and
housing partners that needed more homes in order to meet the ever increasing
demands being made of them, whilst the number of social homes available was
diminishing. We also worked hard to secure the first London local authority
investment into the fund - trying to convince them that social impact investment
could assist them in meeting their housing obligations. We were delighted that
Croydon Council was the first local authority of many to invest. Thirteen local
authorities have now invested (or committed to invest) a total of £190m in our
impact property funds – many of them returning to make second and third
investments.
Both the growth in funds under management and our number of staff have
grown at a steady rate since 2013, as we launched new funds and brought in new
members of the team across all our departments. We also expanded our property
team, bringing in more people with experience to help us grow the funds in such
a way that they would become more attractive to larger institutions. The biggest
rise in our funds under management came between 2020 and 2021 - during the
pandemic - when we launched four impact property funds, a truly amazing team
effort. Having discovered that place base investing is an effective way to deliver
homes in areas that are experiencing real need, it became clear that adopting a
focus to address specific groups that face especially tough challenges in housing,
would also be a practical solution. Hence the development and launch of the
Women in Safe Homes fund, the world’s first gender-lens property fund providing
housing for women experiencing homelessness or who are survivors of domestic
abuse. We developed this ground-breaking fund in partnership with Patron Capital.
Ordinary homes on ordinary streets
The Resonance Supported Homes Fund was also launched, after years of work
following the publication of reports released after the Winterbourne scandal, to
provide supported homes for people with learning disabilities and autism.
I am so pleased that at the time of writing we have reached the milestone of £300m
of funds under management, working with more than twenty housing partners,
in a number of regions across the UK. But we are not going to stop there. We will
continue to work with investors and housing partners to help ensure that we help
reduce the number of people currently sleeping rough, sofa surfing or in hostels,
providing them with a safe, secure and affordable home that will be the stepping
stone to helping them move on with their lives. I’d like to thank my colleagues
at Resonance who have never stopped believing in what is possible and work so
hard to achieve it. Also the amazing housing partners and investors I have had the
joy to work with over the years too. As Managing Director of Property Funds I am
dedicated - and excited - to be starting on the journey to the next twenty years.
We were still a tiny voice
The Real Lettings Property Fund 1 closed with £57m of investment and
purchased around 260 homes around London. From the experience we gained in
managing this fund, we knew that to make an even greater difference to tackling
homelessness we would need to develop bigger funds.
It seemed to make sense having rolled the fund out successfully in London, that we
should expand the successful formula out to other areas in the UK that faced similar
challenges. We agreed to expand into two other regions, in addition to Greater
London: the South West and the South East. This idea of ‘place-based investing’
has become more mainstream, and we like to think that we have been pioneering
this for years with our property funds. In order to expand the geographical reach
of the property funds, we also needed to partner with housing provider partners in
these new regions. This has been a key focus of mine over recent years, alongside
working with local authorities. I was also responsible for looking for a wide range
of impact investors that had shared values and aims, as well as looking for a riskadjusted return, such as local government pension schemes. One of my highlights
has been seeing the first investment from a pension fund into one of Resonance’s
funds, when Greater Manchester Pension Fund invested £10m into the National
Homelessness Property Fund 2.
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