Pioneers Post

WISE100 Women in Social Enterprise Awards 2025 - just a handful of tickets remaining! The #WISE100 Social Business Women of the Year celebration event is on Thursday 27 March 2025 in Glasgow. Be part of an inspiring event, honouring the UK’s top 100 women in social enterprise, impact investing and purpose-led business. Tickets are free but limited – reserve yours now! https://lnkd.in/eT4THHkv NatWest Social & Community Capital

📣In-person tickets for the #WISE100 Awards event on 27 March are fully booked but you can still register to join us online via Zoom! Click here to book your place: https://lnkd.in/eDDR3amZ NatWest Social & Community Capital

[Partner post] Good Finance UK is proud to be hosting Good Finance Live, a one-day hybrid event taking place on 29th April 2025 in Friends House, Euston, London & online. The event will be an opportunity to: 💡 Gain insights from peers 🤝 Meet social investors 🔗 Build connections Here are five reasons you should attend 👇 https://lnkd.in/eWcqhdC3

The Editor's Post: An American nightmare? Trump's threat to CDFIs – By Julie Pybus One of the US president’s latest targets is community development financial institutions (CDFIs), as we highlight this week. These organisations offer credit to those people and businesses that mainstream banks deem too risky, which often includes many Black Americans and other people of colour, rural communities, and entrepreneurs with big ambitions but no track record. Campaigners are urging policymakers to reject their president’s executive order, but if it succeeds, it will undoubtedly have a devastating effect on a movement which has a rich and proud history of reaching out to help people from all walks of life to realise their own American dreams. Today’s movement of CDFIs in the US can trace a good proportion of its roots to the civil rights movement of the 1970s which had drawn attention to how banks refused to offer financial services to people living in black and minority ethnic communities. Protests resulted in the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, obliging banks to lend to all of the people that they took deposits from. One way to do that was to invest in emerging locally-embedded financial institutions which had community knowledge and trust. CDFIs in the US get funds not only from the banks, but also philanthropy, corporate donors and the government, which, in 1994, created the CDFI Fund which offers financial support and technical assistance to CDFIs. During the 1990s, the CDFI movement expanded quickly and now there are more than 1,400 across the country collectively managing US$300bn. As an emerging CDFI movement in the UK began to spread its wings in the 2000s, practitioners looked admiringly at their counterparts in the States, highlighting the government support that made all the difference. And they did get UK government backing. In 2001, UK Treasury minister Paul Boateng highlighted an incoming new tax credit for investments in CDFIs. He described how a “strong economy means an inclusive economy". CDFIs provide finance where it is most needed, with an aim of creating wealth where it doesn’t yet exist. By offering tailored support to their clients, they help to ensure that even the riskiest-seeming loans stand a good chance of being repaid. By doing this, they help ex-prisoners set up their first businesses, people with spiralling debts get back in control, and start-up social enterprises to take their earliest steps towards sustainability. If Trump’s order goes ahead and CDFIs in the US are beaten down, surely it would be an own goal. Without fair access to finance, people and enterprises in the most deprived neighbourhoods don’t have a chance of helping themselves out of poverty. The same goes for other countries all around the world too – this sort of capital is vital to helping micro entrepreneurs and social enterprises to get up and running.

This week in the Pioneers Post newsletter ✉️ 🇺🇸 Trump order threatens to ‘cut legs out from’ CDFI Fund, say campaigners CDFI Coalition | Opportunity Finance Network | Mark Warner | Harold Pettigrew, Jr. | U.S. Impact Investing Alliance | #CDFI #CDFIFund 💯 #WISE100 Women in Social Enterprise 2025 top 100 and ‘Ones to Watch’ revealed 🗣️ Opinion: ‘#COP30 must listen to the voices that have been historically silenced’ Adriana Barbosa | Vitoria Junqueira And more... Read it now: https://lnkd.in/ewQb267v #socent #impactinvesting

What happened in the #impact world this week? 🍦 Ice-cream company Ben & Jerry’s relations with parent company Unilever get frostier 🇬🇧 UK’s Community Interest Company Regulator gets streamlined 😡 Social enterprise anger as employer national insurance contributions tax exemption denied and more... Don't miss out, read it now: https://lnkd.in/e4ZzGNqe #socent

NEW: Trump order threatens to ‘cut legs out from’ CDFI Fund, say campaigners One of the US president’s latest executive orders could deal a blow to community development financial institutions, which offer capital to underserved entrepreneurs and businesses. Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/eH5kp6H6 CDFI Coalition | Opportunity Finance Network | Mark Warner | Harold Pettigrew, Jr. | U.S. Impact Investing Alliance #CDFI #CDFIFund

📣Olympic sportswoman to join #WISE100 Women in Social Enterprise Awards 📣 We’re excited to share that Olympic sportswoman-turned-social entrepreneur, Kirsty Gilmour, will be at our #WISE100 celebration event next week. Find out more and see who this year’s finalists are:  https://lnkd.in/eKPC5tap NatWest Social & Community Capital

We’ve announced the shortlist for this year’s #WISE100 Women in Social Enterprise Awards! See who’s in the running here: https://lnkd.in/eKPC5tap

NEW: Our #WISE100 Women in Social Enterprise 2025 top 100 and ‘Ones to Watch’ has been announced. See who's in this year's list of the leading women in UK social enterprise and impact investing! https://lnkd.in/eSz9VUk2 NatWest Social & Community Capital | #SocialEnterprise