What is the Reach Fund?

Social investors are often approached by charities and social enterprises who require extra, final stage support to raise investment.

Through this programme, social investors can refer these organisations to the Reach Fund to apply for grants to pay for the support they need. To date, we have awarded almost 800 grants totaling more than £8.9million, with an average grant size of £11.2K.

How can I apply?

If you are talking to a social investor who is a Reach Fund Access Point about raising finance from them, they may need some information from you before they can invest.  If you need help providing this information, you can be referred to the Reach Fund to request a grant to help with this.

After being referred to the Reach Fund by your social investor you will be asked to complete a Stage 1 application; the stage 1 form can be found on this website in the How to Apply section . This will then be used to help decide whether you should proceed to a full grant application.

If you are approved to apply, you will then work with your social investor to develop a support plan and apply for a grant. If your grant application is then successful you can use this funding to pay for the support you need.

Why the fund is designed this way

Many charities and social enterprises require extra support in areas such as governance, financial modelling or business planning in order to gain investment.

Other programmes such as the Investment and Contract Readiness Fund and Big Potential have provided grant support to help charities and social enterprises raise investment.  However feedback from investors indicated that final stage support to help investment take place was very much needed by many organisations.

One of the reasons that Access was setup was to develop capacity building programmes that could help more charities and social enterprises take on social investment. The Reach Fund was one of the first programmes they funded.

What types of organisations are eligible for support?

There is no requirement for organisations to be a particular legal form in order to apply.  However, to be an eligible social enterprise and able to apply to the Reach Fund, organisations need to

• Have a clear social mission
• Distribute less than 50% of post-tax profits and reinvest at least 51% of surpluses into pursuing their social mission, and
• have a constitutional or contractual lock on their social mission, dividend and surplus distribution policy (also known as an asset lock).

Organisations must also have good governance, and a minimum of 2 independent Directors; the fund cannot support sole traders