Bridges Impact Report 2017
2017 has been another busy year for Bridges: we closed our largest ever fund, launched pioneering new strategies in both the UK and the US, made a number of exciting new investments across the platform, and even changed our name: to Bridges Fund Management (to better reflect the breadth of our platform).
Within the portfolio, we have seen record levels of growth – and continued to deliver some powerful social and environmental impact. This report draws out some of these stories in more detail, but just to take a few headline figures from across the portfolio this year, our investments have:
- Delivered 1.3m hours of quality care
- Provided healthcare services to almost 40,000 people
- Helped over 2,600 children achieve better educational outcomes
- Averted more than 30,000 tonnes of carbon emissions
- Supported over 2,600 jobs
2017 has also seen a continued rise in the number of new entrants coming into sustainable and impact investing. This is a hugely exciting trend; and a much-needed one, given the scale of the problems we face. But it presents a challenge, too: as these new entrants join the field, all with their own goals, metrics and methodologies, how do we make sure that everyone thinks and talks about ‘impact’ in a broadly similar way? If we fail to get this right, there’s a real risk that expectations may become misaligned and different actors along the impact value chain may end up disappointed.
A key part of the answer, we believe, is the Impact Management Project: an industry-wide effort (facilitated by Bridges Impact+) to agree on some common fundamentals for how we talk about and manage impact. Our report this year includes a special section that introduces some of the key concepts emerging from the Impact Management Project, and explains how this emerging consensus is informing our own approach as an investor.