Many of today’s complex societal challenges require governments, foundations businesses and – often – the social sector to provide their unique skills, experience and insights to solve them. There is an increasing necessity for cross-sector collaborations.

We have built many impact strategies and cross-sector collaborations and enabled global partnerships. Our experience includes:

• Place-based social impact investing: We are working with Cambridge City Council and It Takes A City to explore ways social impact investing can be secured to improve the lives of local people and build a better and more sustainable city for the future as part of the Council’s Our Cambridge programme.
• Tackling family poverty with Amazon and Gordon Brown: We worked with Gordon Brown and Amazon and charities in Fife to create a business model, business plan and fundraise for an innovative partnership between Amazon, Gordon Brown and charities in Fife.
• Catalysing a Covid-19 response: Our team built YourNeighbour, UK church response to Covid-19, including a network of 1,300 churches and 40 denominations and charity partners caring for their communities in crisis – work included providing 2.8m meals during the Summer holidays and creating a national helpline for vulnerable individuals.
• Enabling global partnerships: We worked with the UK Government and the White House to create a trade mission for social innovators and impact investors.
• Building collaborative programmes: Our team built a cross-sector collaboration between Johnson and Johnson, UCL, UK Cabinet Office and a housing association to create a technology accelerator tackling health inequality investing in tech startups.
• Partnering to tackle global poverty: Our team worked with the World Economic Forum, the Overseas Development Institute and IKEA Foundation to build a partnership exploring how innovative finance could help humanitarian crises.

Social impact investing is an exciting and rapidly growing industry powered by investors who are determined to generate social and environmental impact as well as financial returns. This is taking place all over the world, and across all asset classes.

We have unique insights of social impact investing from policy creation through to advising on deals. We have helped high net worth individuals, institutional investors, foundations and governments create strategies, products and partnerships that have raised over £1bn. Our work has included:

• Charitable endowments: We work with large charities to help them understand how best to invest their endowment to maximise impact - including into social and impact investing,
• Impact analysis: We have worked with a number of funders and investors in the UK and internationally to create theories of change and impact analysis to help inform where best they deploy funding to maximise impact.
• Property and housing: Our team designs investment solutions that fund housing for vulnerable people – including the homeless and people fleeing domestic abuse - across the UK
• Outcomes-based financing: Our team led over 25 social outcomes contracts projects across homelessness, health, children’s social care and young people.
• International development: We have significant expertise in how innovative finance can support the Global Goals, working with organisations including UNDP, Argidius, Delta Philanthropies and Spring Impact.

Often start-ups struggle to get to scale. Large organisations are often disrupted by new organisations. Collaboration between start-ups and large corporates is key for fostering innovation. Collaboration should benefit both sides, helping corporates to enter and create new markets, and start-ups to develop their products, and to scale. Complications commonly arise from a clash of cultures: agile versus static work processes, different work ethics and different levels of appetite for risk.

Corporates and large charities and social enterprises are increasingly applying this methodology in social innovation; both creating products and services and working with smaller organisations that both tackle poverty and creates business opportunity.

We have unique experiences across corporate innovation and corporate social innovation including:

• Research: We worked with the World Economic Forum to design methodologies and approaches that enable innovators to work with corporates to achieve scale. We have also worked with Power to Change Foundation on building corporate partnerships.
• Strategy and implementation: We have advised multinationals on how to create social innovation strategies that align with their organisational objectives to create impact.