A social adventure

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At last UnLtd, the successor to Millennium Awards, is about to open for business. Alex Klaushofer asked its head, John Rafferty, how this new fund will work

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UnLtd was set up in 2000 to run the successor scheme to Millennium Awards. It will award £4.5m a year to individual social entrepreneurs, generated from an endowment fund of £100m. UnLtd is a consortium of seven not-for-profit organisations: the Community Action Network, Changemakers, the School for Social Entrepreneurs, Senscot, the Scarman Trust, Comic Relief, the Ashoka Trust. Still technically the ‘preferred bidder’ for the endowment fund, UnLtd will gain independent charitable status once the Millennium Commission grants it final approval by the end of November. It will launch its UK-wide grants programme shortly afterwards.

John Rafferty, the chief executive of TimeBank, which promotes voluntary work, has been on secondment as UnLtd’s acting chief executive since December 2001.

As an endowment fund to support social entrepreneurs, UnLtd is the first of its kind. What sort of organisation is it going to be?
The first year we’ll make a thousand awards of £500 to £5000 to people with good ideas who have the kind of leadership capacity to deliver a project which will be of benefit to the community. But the way we’ve designed this is that you get a customised package of both cash and fairly high levels of support for you as an individual. In the first year we also want to make about 50 ‘level two’ awards up to £15,000 for, again, talented and committed individuals, but we think that at level two they should have a more developed project idea or even have a project off the ground. The second part of the design of UnLtd is to have a research institute which we’ve been developing over the last few months. That’s rooted in the realisa-tion that social entrepreneurship is coming higher and higher up the agenda. And there’s lots of anecdotal evidence that social entrepreneurs really make a contribution to improving the social capital within local communities. I was looking at some figures from the United States last week which show that within five years a successful social entrepreneur will reach 10 times the beneficiaries than at the beginning of one of these awards. The research institute will develop new research methodologies to examine, in quite a hard-nosed way, the impact of social entrepreneurs. The third thing we want to do is develop a social venture fund. We’re examining different models, from a social venture – where we’ll go and find venture capitalists or philanthropists to invest in projects – right through to a model where we would be an accelerator. So if you’ve got a very successful project running in Manchester we’ll want to find ways to build support for you, and financial investment and business planning to help your project become replicable by other people in different parts of the country.

Is UnLtd going to fill the gaps left by other traditional grant funders, or is it aiming to develop a new funding model?
I think it will do both. We can’t be all things to all people, but our talent will be supporting really good ideas and projects and building support mechanisms around people. That will involve, in some cases, a cash award, in others it might be us being a broker, and helping them access other forms of funding. We are going to be running a very significant mentoring programme; we will be arranging placements in the private sector. 

Can you tell me about the coming together of the seven consortium partners?
Each of these partner organisations absolutely recognised the growth in the field of the social entrepreneur, and the need for a coordinating body, a little engine that would drive the movement forward. Coincidentally with these discussions, the Millennium Commission decided to lay in place an endowment to keep their work with Millennium Awards going, so with considerable assistance from McKinsey, the management consultancy, the seven partners came together and drafted the plan of awards and fellowships, the research institute and social venture fund. 

How does your background fit into this project?
I suppose I’ve always been an entrepreneur myself. I’m very privileged to have always worked in the third sector, with the exception of about six months. My first job was running a very small volunteer bureau in Glasgow that, over 10 years, covered two-thirds of Scotland. We then launched the Scottish Foundation for Social and Economic Development and it ran five enterprises on a commercial basis. I was then the first director of the National Lottery Charities Board in Scotland which had some parallels with this: no offices, no grant-making systems, no nothing; we started from scratch. I’m not going to comment on the Community Fund – it gives out a huge amount of cash, therefore it does need a more bureaucratic approach – but at UnLtd we are determined we will be completely people-centred.

Can you clarify your position now in terms of TimeBank and UnLtd?
TimeBank agreed to loan me to UnLtd in December of last year and the book has been out of the library longer than we expected. The Millennium Commission will take the final decision to transfer the endowment in the next few weeks and I’ve said at that point, if people at UnLtd want me to become their chief executive permanently, then I’ll happily do so. I think we’ve reached an agreement there and I’m talking to TimeBank trustees and staff as to the future for TimeBank. 

We still don’t know the exact date the Millennium Commission will give UnLtd final approval. How soon afterwards can you open for business?
As soon as is reasonably practical after the Commission takes the decision, we’ll open the application line nationally. And then we’ll be up and running – first grants at the end of January, I hope. And monthly thereafter, for 10 months of the year – this is absolutely continuous grant-making. Our target is to deal with applications within six weeks, except in the summer holiday when it may be up to 10 weeks.

We recently advertised for our regional coordinators because we want to hit the ground running. 

Will you be sharing office space with other organisations?
Absolutely. In Wales, for example, we’ll be sharing with the Community Action Network; in Scotland we’re sharing with the Scottish Social Entrepreneurs Network. The London office is going to be based here in Elizabeth House at Waterloo, with 13 other organisations and we’re looking at Leeds and Birmingham, as we might be located there. It’s always best to be with other like-minded organisations. It keeps you absolutely rooted in reality. What we’ve set out to design is a young and energetic organisation which will go to our customers rather than them coming into offices with their application forms to be interviewed. So the staff will be mobile; they can log on from their laptops anywhere and be in the grant-making database. We want to travel the country going to where people are in local communities and using our partners’ networks to reach them. CAN, for example, have 700 partners and we know that there are organisations everywhere that will give us a desk and a place to meet people.

What sorts of things are you looking for in awarding grants?
We have deliberately not defined this. So we haven’t said we want that number of projects from people interested in promoting the environment, that number from people developing services for the elderly. Level one grants are to support talent, commitment, vision, and leadership within local communities – they’re much more about the people than the projects they develop. We do want people to graduate from level one to two. So we’re much more focused on supporting the individual – if your project lasts for a year, we’ll have four project-shaping meetings with you during the year. One of these will be about ensuring the money was spent properly but essentially these meetings are entirely about you, how you’re getting on, what your training and development needs are. We’ll provide access to training and mentoring –there’s a whole menu of support.

At level two, it’s much more balanced between your needs as an applicant and the project. We want to see the project more developed, either running in its beginning stages, or a project you’ve already developed. Over time our monitoring and evaluation system will show us the geographical spread of awards; of course we’ll be interested in ensuring that we’re reaching the more marginalised people and that we have a balance between different areas of activity. But we’re not going to be prescriptive about it.

There’s a tension between allowing the degree of risk necessary for innovation and being seen to be spending public money wisely. How do you envisage managing that tension?
The trustees have been very clear, that at level one, they want to invest in individuals and yes, they will provide awards for projects breaking new ground. The project might not provide the outcomes that the award-holder thinks. As we assess this, if we find that you’re developing greater skills as a community leader, you’ve perhaps embarked on some training and qualifications, you can now administer a budget much more effectively than you could at the beginning of the project – say we’ve given you a grant of £3,000 to develop a community hairdressing service and actually you’ve found that the customer base is not what you thought it would be, we would absolutely not consider that a failure. We would see the personal growth – you and the qualifications you’ve obtained – to be an enormous success. 

Social entrepreneurship rests heavily on the flair of individuals and it can be difficult for the work they initiate to sustain itself. What’s your take on that?
That’s a key thing: our institute is interested in doing a longitudinal study to look at how social entrepreneurs sustain their work. Do they lever other funds? Are their projects replicable? Do they affect public policy? All these questions UnLtd wants to investigate. 

UnLtd can be contacted at The Mezzanine, Elizabeth House, York Road, London SE1 7NQ; tel: 020 7401 5305; email: info@unltd.org.uk

UNLTD ACCOUNTABILITY

‘We’re a charitable body, but we’re not accountable to the Millennium Commission or the Secretary of State. In the trust deed there is provision for the appointment of a Protector, who must ensure that we’re meeting the terms of our trust deed, and the original intentions of the donor, who is the Millennium Commission. The Protector has very extensive powers, including removing the trustees, so we’re very interested to find out who the Protector is. The Millennium Commission appoints the first Protector; thereafter the Secretary of State appoints the Protector and if the Secretary of State doesn’t within three months, then we do.’