CASA is an employee-owned social enterprise that provides high-quality domiciliary and complex health and social care to the elderly, disabled and vulnerable. Its business model leads to higher levels of employee satisfaction, retention and ultimately a higher quality customer care.

See more on our Core Assets social impact bond here.

The Hub pharmacy is a new community pharmacy group that aims to improve local health outcomes by providing preventative health services in underserved areas. Additional services include help with smoking cessation, weight-loss and minor ailments, with a focus on helping patients adhere to dosage regimes, thereby reducing costly drug wastage. Many of the pharmacies also offer extended hours healthcare services, assisting the urgent care crisis by enabling patients to visit pharmacies late at night or on weekends.

See below how the Hub pharmacy is helping the local community in Warrington.

While backed by Bridges, Babington supported over 32,000 learners, and helped over 3,700 formerly unemployed people to find work. In 2015 alone, Babington trained 1,600 16-18 year-olds at risk of becoming NEET (not in education, employment or training), with about two-thirds of its students coming from underserved areas of the UK.

HCT Group, a social enterprise bus operator that uses its profits to provide community transport services and training, raised a pioneering £4m round of investment from a group of social investors led by Bridges in 2010. Having exceeded all its growth and social impact targets under our ownership, HCT was able to raise a second round of social investment this year – thus providing a successful exit for Bridges and the original group of social investors.

See how HCT is transforming the lives of thousands of vulnerable people.

Ways to Wellness is a programme designed to help people living in the Newcastle West area better manage their long-term health conditions. Financed via a social impact bond – funded by the Bridges Social Impact Bond Fund – Ways to Wellness aims to complement primary medical care by giving patients more confidence to manage their conditions and make positive lifestyle choices. Patients are helped through a range of community-based activities, including getting more active and learning to eat more healthily. Its aim is to reach 11,000 people over the next seven years.

This video shows off some of the pioneering work that Ways to Wellness is doing (and explains how social impact bonds have made this possible).

Michele on Bloomberg

A social impact bond-funded programme run by Career Connect, a charity that helps disadvantaged young people in Merseyside achieve better education and employment outcomes, has become one of the first in the world to over-deliver against its social objectives and repay all the loan capital (plus interest) to its social investors. It has now been recommissioned to deliver a second programme.

These are significant milestones for the nascent market in social impact bonds (SIBs), a concept that has been attracting growing interest from policymakers and investors around the world. Both Career Connect and Teens & Toddlers – a Manchester-based charity that has also delivered a successful SIB-funded programme – serve as timely illustrations of SIBs’ potential to produce better outcomes at lower cost to the taxpayer, while also helping to inform future policy.

Career Connect was originally commissioned to deliver the three-year ‘New Horizons’ programme in 2012 by the Department of Work & Pensions (DWP), as part of the latter’s Innovation Fund. The aim was to work with young people on Merseyside – with a particular focus on ex-offenders, those in or leaving care and those with learning difficulties – to help them improve their attendance and behaviour at school, achieve educational qualifications, and move on to further education or employment.

Funding was provided via one of the world’s first social impact bonds – in which Bridges Ventures (‘Bridges’) and Big Society Capital were the lead investors – with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) agreeing to pay for a pre-determined range of positive outcomes. Triodos Bank was responsible for structuring and performance-managing the SIB.

The programme initially provided a wide range of support to young people of different ages, but it quickly became clear that early intervention at 14-16 was the most effective approach.  Career Connect focused on working with young people to re-engage them with education, delivering better-than-expected improvements in school attendance, behaviour and attainment. Helping these young people to leave school with better qualifications substantially increases their life prospects – and should result in savings to the taxpayer over time through reduced welfare payments.

As a result, the Career Connect SIB has been able to repay all of the risk capital to its social investors, plus interest – and was recently re-commissioned by the DWP to deliver a second three-year programme (as part of its Youth Engagement Fund).

Bridges has made a short film celebrating Career Connect’s success. In it, operations director David Howard explains how the SIB’s long-term, outcomes-based structure allowed Career Connect to pioneer new approaches – and how the increased focus on data and impact measurement (a key part of the SIB process) helped it to identify the most effective interventions and shape the programme accordingly. It also features the story of Ricky, a successful graduate of its innovative ‘Mental Toughness’ course. The film can be viewed below.

Andrew Levitt, Investment Director at Bridges (and Career Connect SIB board member), said: “The Career Connect story provides demonstrable proof that the excitement around social impact bonds isn’t just a case of hype over substance. The structure of the funding allowed Career Connect to experiment with new approaches, while the clear feedback loops inherent to the SIB model helped them to identify the most effective and focus their programme to reflect that. With a standard contract, none of this could have happened. And the results are clear: demonstrably better outcomes for the young people concerned, and clear long-term savings for the DWP. Not all the early outcomes contracts will be this successful – but it does show what can be achieved, particularly as we learn more and more about what works and what doesn’t.”

Kieran Gordon, chief executive of Career Connect said: “We have really valued the opportunity to work with social investors in delivering support to the most vulnerable young people across the Liverpool City Region.  We have seen real impact in terms of better attendance in schools and improved behaviour amongst those who have been on the New Horizons programme – and consequently their exam results have shown dramatic improvement.  We also take great pride in the fact that so many young people are today in a job with training having been through the programme.”

Katrina Cross, performance manager for Triodos, said: “Career Connect’s work with young people on Merseyside, focusing on Mental Toughness and confidence, has delivered real improvements in their engagement with education, and educational attainment.  Over time during the programme, the Career Connect team worked closely with Triodos and the SIB Board to implement a rigorous standard of project management and granular performance information, which resulted in continual improvements in the performance of the programme.”

Career Connect is not the only provider to have demonstrated the viability of the SIB model.

Teens & Toddlers, a charity that pairs at-risk teenagers with nursery children in an effort to foster greater responsibility and empathy, was also commissioned by the DWP’s Innovation Fund in 2012 to deliver a three-year intervention programme in Greater Manchester. Again, the contract was structured as a social impact bond, with up-front funding provided by a group of social investors (including Bridges) and the DWP agreeing to pay for certain outcomes. Social Finance was responsible for structuring and performance management.

Teens & Toddlers has also now fully repaid the capital invested – and like Career Connect, it has recently been recommissioned by the DWP to provide a second SIB-funded programme.

Notes to editors

About Bridges Ventures 

Bridges Ventures LLP (“Bridges”) is a specialist fund manager focused exclusively on sustainable and impact investment. It invests in high-impact SMEs, properties and social organisations that can generate superior returns for both investors and society as a whole, focusing on four key impact ‘themes’: health & wellbeing, education, sustainable living and under-served markets. It manages almost £600 million across its Sustainable Growth, Property and Social Sector funds.

The Bridges Social Impact Bond fund – the first of its type in the world – was launched in April 2013 with Big Society Capital as cornerstone investor, alongside Omidyar Network and Panahpur. It held a final close on £25m in September 2014. The fund provides investment and support to charities and social enterprises delivering intervention programmes that substantially improve social outcomes.

The Social Impact Bond Fund also has a co-investment agreement with Bridges’ other Social Sector fund, the Bridges Social Entrepreneurs Fund. Seeded by the Bridges Charitable Trust, this fund was launched in August 2009 and has raised nearly £12m for investment in scalable social enterprises and charities with sustainable business models delivering high social impacts.

About Career Connect (www.careerconnect.org.uk)

Career Connect is a charity that is passionate about providing high-quality independent careers advice, bridging the gap to learning and employment and better life chances for young people and adults. Established in 2001 as Greater Merseyside Connexions Partnership, it brought together some of the highest qualified and experienced Careers Advisers from across the area.  Working together as a team of experts on education and careers, it extended its services beyond the Merseyside region into areas across the North-West and further afield. The company was renamed Career Connect in 2014 and has become a leading provider of careers information advice and guidance to young people and adults.

About Teens and Toddlers (www.teensandtoddlers.org.uk)

Teens and Toddlers was founded in 2001 to address the social exclusion of young people. The charity inspires disengaged young people from disadvantaged areas to succeed at school, in work and in the community. It does this by giving them the life skills and self-belief they need to understand who they are, who they can become and what they can achieve. To date, Teens and Toddlers has reached over 10,000 disadvantaged young people and children in England.

In her talk, Michele highlights the growth of the impact investment sector, discussing how impact is becoming both an imperative for businesses and consumers, and an opportunity for investors.

Watch the video of Michele’s speech below

One of the main obstacles currently, he argues, is the lack of a clear and broadly-accepted definition of what we mean when we talk about impact – at every stage of the value chain. Rather than focusing on impact measurement, Brian argues, we need to take a more holistic approach and think about “impact management”.

This means developing a convention to help asset owners articulate their impact objectives – where they want to invest, who they want to reach, what problems they want to solve, how much risk they want to take – and translating these preferences into investment decisions. This will make it far easier to align expectations across the value chain about the kind of impact sought and the kind of impact information that needs to be reported.

Read more on this here.

You can also watch Brian’s talk on impact management at The Economist’s inaugural impact investing conference below.