A Bath charity that has been helping disadvantaged people in the city since 1174 wants to hear from social enterprises and other charities that could benefit from a new £4m lending fund.
The St John’s Hospital Social Investment programme is designed to support growth and development of social enterprises and charitable organisations with social, cultural and environmental aims. 
The loans will be from £25,000 upwards and will be made over the next four years. They are designed to help local people and communities make a step change in the services they provide.
Examples of what this could be include:
• Growing and developing the organisation
• Supporting day to day expenses to set up a new project
• Buying and refurbishing a property
• Employing more people
• Buying vans, trucks and other equipment so more people can benefit
The programme will run alongside the charity’s existing grants programme that has been running for more than 20 years. Last year it made grants to individuals and organisations working with disadvantaged people and communities totalling around £450,000.
According to figures from the West of England Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), there are 600 social enterprises in the West of England with an annual turnover of £380m, representing 2,800 voluntary groups, some 250 Community Interest Companies (CICs) and co-ops and in total sustaining 10,500 jobs. In the Bath & North East Somerset area alone there are 400 registered charities.
The social investment market is growing rapidly in the UK as charitable organisations and enterprises are seeking alternative ways to attract financial support. The amount lent to enterprises that help deliver sustainable social change and impact has risen to £202m in the past two years, creating or safeguarding 210 UK social ventures. Now 15% of UK SMEs are social enterprises, employing more than 2m people.
Head of social investment at St John’s, Sue Cooper, said: “St John’s has engaged with a wide range of local charities through its community grants programme and identified a number of organisations whose turnover was too large to qualify for a grant, but who were struggling to access capital to help them sustain their services.
“A fund such as this enables social enterprises to expand in a way that makes them more resilient, able to deliver more and wider services and ultimately be more sustainable, rather than relying on smaller one off grants.
“These are loans that will make a considerable difference to the impact enterprises can make on the local community by enabling them, for instance, to purchase equipment, expand premises or employ more people”.
Sue added “We are very excited by what is a ground breaking project for St John’s and a natural progression of what we have been doing for 840 years in the city.”
The programme is being launched with a series of seminars about social investment and enterprise and how the programme will work. The first, hosted by law firm Thrings in its Bath office earlier this month, heard from Triodos Bank’s head of corporate finance Dan Hird and Sarah Forster, deputy CEO and director of development for Big Issue Invest, the social investment arm of the Big Issue Group, as well as Sue Cooper from St John’s.
