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  • Esmee Fairbairn Foundation: Social Investment

    Created: 04/07/2025
    News/Events Category: Funding and Finance
    This item will show under the following categories: Children and Families   Climate/Environment   Employability  

    Esmee Fairbairn Foundation is one of the largest independent grant-makers in the UK. They also offer social investment.

    As well as making direct investments into organisations seeking to create impact towards their aims, the foundation also invests into impact funds, which are managed by other social investors. They offer loans (secured and unsecured), equity, fund investments and everything else.

    There are several investment priorities:

    • Investing in Our Natural World: social investment to organisations working on nature-based solutions towards: preserved species health and habitats, sustainable and ethical food, and clean and healthy freshwater.
    • Creative, Confident Communities: Partner in Place: for organisations working to ensure local economies work better for the people who live there.
    • Investing in A Fairer Future: for organisations who are working to address systemic injustice and inequity.

    Across their funding, they commit to investing into organisations led by communities experiencing racial inequity, as well as building community wealth.

    Who can apply?

    To be eligible for social investment, you must:

    • Deliver or plan to deliver measurable outcomes that align closely to the priorities under their aims.
    • Be a charity or social enterprise or have a structure that includes a Mission Lock or be willing to add one.
    • Demonstrate a suitable repayment or exit plan for the investment you are seeking.
    • Be operating in the UK.

    They are particularly interested in supporting:

    • Organisations led by, and for, people with lived experience of the issues they are working on.
    • Ideas with the potential to influence wider positive change, help attract mainstream finance into impact or disrupt broken markets.
    • Ideas, structures and interventions that meaningfully involve their communities.
    • Impact that intersects across one or more of their Aims.
    • Partnerships and collaborations.

    How to apply

    Apply online by submitting an Expression of Interest.

    Apply at any time.




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