Assets and Anchors

Key findings

The literature confirmed some important barriers across the enterprise support and social investment sector:

— There are structural/systemic barriers concerning the support infrastructure for social and community enterprises which mean that monoritised ethnic communities are scarcely represented.

— Minoritised ethnic social and community enterprises feel that available support often does not recognise their unique and varied needs. As a result, there is an over-reliance on informal personal, family and community networks to access resources such as information, contacts and finance.

— Although there is clear preference for grant funding, repayable loans are also an important source of external finance for minoritised ethnic community and social enterprises. However, evidence shows that the current demand for social investment of minoritised ethnic organisations is limited.

— Capacity building concerning business and financial management skills was identified as a key barrier which determines the organisations’ chances of accessing external finance and winning contracts. Filling application forms and writing bids is often considered complex, burdensome and time consuming. The findings from the “baseline” analysis of a sample of the three commissioning organisations’ existing programme data are as follows: