Hi, I'm Mark Norbury, the Chief Executive of UnLtd. UnLtd is the UK's foundation for social entrepreneurs. We find, fund and support about 750 social entrepreneurs every year. We offer them advice, coaching as well as cash support to get their idea up and running. We're the UK's largest supporter of social entrepreneurs. Our belief is that, if we enable social entrepreneurs to flourish and create an environment and infrastructure that is supportive of social entrepreneurship, that then they will be able to tackle many of the social issues that affect our country, and that they will create role models for business, for the public sector and for nonprofits on how we can combine the best of those three sectors. We offer support right from a £500 award called a Try It award, all the way through to our venture support, which takes an organization which might have about a £250,000 turnover; and through an intense year of education and development, and capital raising, support around routes to market, around the business model, around the rigor of the evidence of impact, takes that venture on a major journey, and they then raise between £50-£250,000 at the end of that to support their next phase of growth. We've supported about 120 ventures through that program. What we find is that the most important thing is that you inspire the social entrepreneur, that you take the passion and the idea they have and you let them thrive with it. What we find is that people get very hung up on the definition of social entrepreneur. What we find is that someone who has the capabilities, the leadership, the energy, the passion, the resilience of having lived through quite often difficult situations, whether it's long-term unemployment, whether it's a health crisis, whether it's being homeless. These people have within themselves the potential to change and to come up with solutions that change how society interacts with other homeless people or unemployed people. So, that's what we do. We help those people get started, and what we find is that they often know best and they come up with the solutions that society needs. We attract social entrepreneurs from all over the UK. We've actually got about 14,000 alumni or award winners. That means that we get significant word of mouth and referrals from anyone who has an idea that they'd like to put into action to tackle a social issue with an earned income model. What we do is we have an open meritocratic process, so any social entrepreneur or person who thinks they might be a social entrepreneur can apply. They submit an expression of interest. Our team will assess those expressions of interest. Those who are successful, which is about half, would then be encouraged to make a full application. Then again, of those making a full application, about half would tend to get an award. We have three types of award: we have a Try It award of £500, we have a Do It award of up to £5,000, and we have a Grow It award of £15,000. Now, the Try It awards are just really for your first idea. With £500, you're not really able to do that much, but you might be able to get a little prototype up, or you might be able to take some time out to put a project in place. The Do It award is for people who are a bit further along. They've done that, they've got some initial traction and proof that there might be something in what they're trying to do and they just want to take it further, and so it goes up to about £5,000 of support they can have. And then it comes with quite a lot more business advice and also coaching support. Then, for the £50,000 awards, these are social entrepreneurs who are enjoying revenues already, and who have got initial evidence that the impact of what they're doing is as anticipated and that it can grow as their income grows, i.e, it's in lockstep between the social and the economic value. That for us is critical because that is the whole point about sustainability and scalability for that venture. So that's what the Grow It award does. Those are the awards. We make about 750 of the Try It, Do It, and Grow It awards every year. Then, as I mentioned, we have our ventures program and there, we'll support about 20 to 25 ventures a year, and it's that much more selective. So we have a higher level of attrition as we select people for the ventures program, because they really need to be able to absorb a high level of investment from UnLtd and from investors, specialist advisers in tax and accounting, in law, in marketing. To do that, they have to be at a capacity and a scale that enables them to absorb that learning. To give you a sense of who we're talking about when talking about our award winners, someone who has won a Grow It award is a guy called Nick, who started a brewery in Sydenham in south east London, which is a brewery where people with learning difficulties come and it's a microbrewery, and they make beer, which is fantastically good beer. But in making that beer, they get skills and they improve their employability. Nick himself had been a volunteer for a UK charity, Mencap that supports people with learning difficulties. He realized that the biggest challenge that many of the people faced in terms of self-worth and in terms of income generation was not having a job, and so he wanted to create this vehicle to enable them to have a job. Now the thing for Nick is, he has managed to put the brewery in place. He's managed to get a group, a team together, but what he now needs is support to take that to the next level and to start brewing at a much greater scale because he's already earning money, so he got a Grow It award to help him do that. Over the course of the next year, Ignition Brewery I think will grow pretty dramatically. On the other end of the scale, one of our award winners on our ventures program is called Oomph! Oomph! works with the residents of care homes, and they'll work very closely with the care workers and with the residents. They began by offering exercise classes and then they found that the exercise classes, they couldn't scale that up because they had their small team running it. So, then they started training the care staff to become trainers and then they realized that was more scalable. Then, what they did is they started capturing a lot of data on the activities and the engagement of both the residents and the care workers. And then what care homes realized is that actually this data was a gold mine. So, what Ooomph! are now doing is helping to transform how the residential care sector works. It used to be that to enjoy any economies of scale in that sector, you just built, it was a property portfolio. But now, what they've done with this data is they've enabled the property owners, the care providers to provide a much better portfolio of activities and services, whether it's community transport, trips to the cinema, trips out to the seaside, gardening visits, whatever it might be. They can organize all of that much better, so the whole sector enjoys better economies. So, actually, care providers can focus much more on the quality of the relationship with residents, and they're now reaching, Oomph!, a million people here nearly, which is an astonishing achievement having been a small organisation reaching about 150 people five years ago. I'd like to share a few thoughts on the sustainability of our award winners. So, one of the things that major supporters of social entrepreneurs like to do is talk about scalability, and I think that's right. I think it's an incredibly important thing in that, if you're trying to tackle a social issue internationally, you have to be operating at significant scale. What we also know is that you can sustain a meaningful venture that is having an impact at a much smaller scale than some of the big famous social enterprises. So of our Do It and Grow It award winners, we would anticipate that two to three years after receiving an award from us, about 80 percent of those will still be going strong, and in fact getting increasingly strong. Of our ventures award winners, we find that the increase in turnover over the two years following that being on the program is 77 percent. Now that's pretty enviable growth, and that is profitable growth. What we also find is that the debt repayment on the capital that those ventures have taken so far has been zero percent, so that they are an enviable financial proposition for the social investment market if it was canny enough to understand that there's a real opportunity here. So, sustainability and scalability are two different things. Now, obviously, what you really want is a scalable venture that is sustainable. We do find that, for example, Oomph! as I've spoken about and many of our other ventures do achieve scale. But for us, what's important is both to do the leadership development piece, to support people who have an idea, who have values, passion, and purpose and to get them going, and to do a piece around organizational development. So, we're building up organizations' strength, and abilities, and track record so that they can move on to achieve scale in due course. So, we have quite a pipeline. So, we'll have Do It award winners who, two years later will be coming on to our ventures program. Similarly, we actually have some Grow It award winners who come on to our ventures program. We like that because it shows how over a one to three year period, these social entrepreneurs are learning, they're strengthening their organizations, and they're achieving greater impact. That for us is really, really important.
