News

We all have pictures and voices in our minds from the last few weeks. For me, the most persistent image is of the migrant workers forced to leave Delhi after lockdown was imposed and walk hundreds of miles back to their home towns, often with no money and nothing to eat.

Small businesses, social enterprises, and charities are vital to our communities. They are also hit hardest by the current coronavirus pandemic and are struggling to access much needed emergency finance to survive this crisis.

An ambitious £100 million programme of loans and investment is announced today to help get much-needed emergency funding to social enterprises, charities and small businesses in disadvantaged areas affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

It is four months since the Impact Investing Institute had its official launch in Sheffield and London, and like everyone else, we are responding to the coronavirus pandemic and its devastating human and economic costs on communities around the world. 

The Impact Investing Institute is very pleased to see the Charity Commission encourage charity trustees to consider whether their investments are informed by and consistent with their charity’s purposes and values (see this blog by Sian Hawkrigg, Strategic Policy Advisor on behalf of the Commission).

Read the full report hereDownload Progress in impact reporting practice will be insufficient to meet society’s global challenges without significant collaborative action by keystone players A new report from the Impact Investing Institute and Deloitte explores current practice in technology-enabled impact reporting.

Comparing different companies’ ESG credentials is akin to comparing apples and pears. But efforts are being made to find the right tools to collect sufficient data and achieve a standard methodology, as Silvia Pavoni reports.

Impact investing – which offers social and environmental benefits as well as financial returns – is still developing but the UK’s newly created Impact Investing Institute, created from a merger of two related bodies, is working to accelerate this, as its CEO Sarah Gordon tells Silvia Pavoni.

A piece in this weekend’s Financial Times shows that there are still some pretty basic misunderstandings around impact investment, which must be cleared up if the market is to grow as we want it to.

First announced in June, the UK’s newest impact investing body launches this week. We met CEO (and former business journalist) Sarah Gordon, who spoke to us about the rise of enlightened boardrooms, why she’s so keen to avoid reinventing the wheel – and why the startup will soon be having a few words with its…