All the ways Big Issue Invest is working to eradicate poverty and help people gain a better hold on life

So many people do not know about Big Issue Invest. They know about our work on the streets and with homeless people, but they don’t know that about 20 years ago The Big Issue created an investment business. But if you had read your Financial Times last week you would have seen Big Issue Invest closing the first part of one of its funds. Fund IV is for social investment in businesses “creating impact in the housing, care and social infrastructure sectors”. 

John Gilligan, who sits on Big Issue Invest’s fund management board, says potential investments range from inner city nurseries to affordable housing and hospices that help communities work better. 
And the money for such investments comes from banks, trusts and businesses, as well as through Big Society Capital, an investment fund set up by a previous government – not from street sales of our magazine. 

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The idea is that Big Issue grows into the community and becomes more useful to all and sundry, and through such support can begin to head off the causes of homelessness: poor wages, poor health, poor family support, poor education etc. Preventing homelessness needs to be addressed in society as a whole, and Big Issue Invest is an arm of Big Issue Group as it tries to slay the dragon of poverty. 

Over the last 20 years Big Issue Invest has invested in over 500 social businesses to help people gain a better hold on life. And help prevent homelessness in the lives of many. 

What’s so interesting to me is how it underlines the PECC method that I have been keeping foremost in my mind for a few decades. PECC means Prevention, Emergency, Coping, and Cure. Interventions by government or charities can be measured by this simple tool: does the investment or project PREVENT poverty? Or does it respond to the EMERGENCY of poverty, when it happens? Or does it help people COPE in poverty, help support them to manage better while remaining in poverty? Or does it CURE poverty? 

What was shocking was the figure that 80% of the money and effort that went into poverty alleviation was going into Emergency and Coping. That meant that Prevention and Cure were the Cinderella parts of poverty alleviation. But if you are serious about getting rid of poverty you have to address Prevention and Cure seriously. Hence the expansion of The Big Issue through setting up a separate social business called Big Issue Invest. An attempt to grow the Prevention and Cure side of our work. 

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Last week in parliament we also had our second All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) meeting on Business Responses to Social Crises. This brought business, politicians and individuals committed to getting rid of poverty by businesslike means together, not forgetting our work around housing and campaigning to end the terrible blight of no-fault evictions. All of this stuff has to be kept in the air at the same time. 

My opinion on poverty has been expressed so many times. I have been given the opportunity to say, and do say, that to end poverty we have to stop spending money simply on keeping people in poverty. Leaving a situation where the only thing some people get from the previous generation is the inheritance of poverty. Of course, we hear all the time of people escaping their impoverished beginnings; there isn’t a politician or columnist in the land who doesn’t let you know that somewhere in the background of their lives there was poverty looming. How many times have I sat and listened to people trace their own escape out of the poverty of some generations ago. 

But the fact that some get out doesn’t mean all can get out. And now there are too many people slipping into poverty who previously did manage to cover their costs and outgoings. 

The continuing and pernicious use of no-fault evictions is impoverishing people who often have never come anywhere near poverty before. The current crisis in housing means that we all have to do more around activism to ensure this government or the next do not let people slip into the treacle of poverty through homelessness. 

What is so astonishing is the incredible cost the government has to incur for homeless families and individuals once they have lost their homes.

This flies in the face of rational government because in the end it is a waste of resources and the biggest of resources: the lives of our children who are caught in the Bastille of homelessness because their parents are evicted and made homeless. 

As a child who suffered the collapse of my family and eviction and being taken into care, I dread the echo of this happening in other people’s lives and the scars left on their children. 

So the idea of creating a business that extends the work of The Big Issue beyond the emergency of homelessness to invest in prevention and cure: this is the area that I see us needing to grow. And fortunately we seem to be pushing at an open door. 

The fund part closed having raised £20 million and intends raising that figure to £100 million. That is a very large piece of clever investment in the lives of people in need. And that is why we are excited about the development of this part of our work; backing up the day-to-day, feet-on-the-ground work of The Big Issue in helping people face the crisis of homelessness in their lives. 

John Bird is the founder and editor in chief of The Big Issue. Read more of his words here

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