Big Issue Invest is looking for Inclusion Partners

Over the next month, we are looking to find four individuals or organisations to help us reach the most impactful social entrepreneurs in their field or area as we deliver the Social Enterprise Support Fund (SESF).

Big Issue Invest is looking for 4 Inclusion Partners to help us reach the most impactful social entrepreneurs in your field or area. You would be supporting us with outreach efforts during a period before the SESF Application Portal opens for the second round of application submissions.

Our priority areas are London, North West, South East and East of England.

The SESF launched in 2021 is delivered by a consortium of 5 partners (Big Issue Invest, UnLtd, Resonance, School for Social Entrepreneurs and The Key Fund) working across the social enterprise sector to support entrepreneurs to rebuild and recover their businesses following the Covid-19 pandemic.

We are looking for partners with diverse-led boards and senior management teams to reflect our ambition to ensure our outreach is equitable, diverse and reaches organisations that face barriers in applying for grant funding. We also welcome partners who reach communities who are using their lived experience of a social issue to lead change.

To do this, we want to connect with the enterprises you work with, especially those working with marginalised communities (i.e. Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic, LGBTQIA+, disabled) and those who have the best solutions to loneliness, community resilience and long term economic, social and cultural health. The new fund’s priority areas for communities are:

• Managing poverty, debt management (e.g., tackling inequality, homelessness)
• Enabling routes back to employment (e.g., skills and job training, access to vacancies, job creation)
• Overcoming educational disadvantage (e.g., helping disadvantaged children and young people catch up)
• Improving physical health (e.g. working with sufferers of long COVID, or existing health conditions worsened by COVID)
• Improving mental health (e.g., young and older people, bereavement, domestic and child abuse, addiction

We are offering Inclusion Partners a fee of up to £1,200 for their time for signposting social entrepreneurs operating in London, North West, South East and East of England to the online portal.

We are inviting expressions of interest outlining:

• Your role in building resilience in your geography, focusing on your track record of working with marginalised communities;
• Your ideas for developing an inclusive pipeline for social enterprises and charities to access the funding and support;
• Your approach to identifying the key needs of marginalised communities to restart and recover from the effects of the pandemic;
• How you are representative of and embedded in one or more marginalised communities.
• An outline of your timeline and budget for the fee.

You can download the full brief and our inclusion targets for the fund here.

If you are interested in applying for this role, please complete a short Expression of Interest form accessible through this link at latest by noon on the 7^th of February 2022.

In case you have any questions that you would like to discuss with us, please contact Stepan Zelinger at Stepan.Zelinger@bigissueinvest.com