The Charities Aid Foundation’s social investment arm, CAF Venturesome has invested in two Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) to help young people in the UK out of homelessness.
CAF Venturesome will put up to £375,000 into Aspire Gloucester and Fair Chance Rewriting Futures, which will work to help young people who are not in education, employment or training to turn their lives around.
CAF Venturesome is providing up-front funding for the projects, which will be carried out by three expert youth homelessness charities CCP, P3, and St. Basils.
The projects aim to move 450 young people in need into employment, education or training over a three-year period, working in Birmingham, Solihull, Walsall, Coventry and Gloucestershire.
CAF Venturesome has now supported five Social Impact Bonds. SIBs can be an innovative way to give voluntary organisations an opportunity to tackle vital social issues and help improve publicly funded interventions by making payments dependent on the results that are achieved. Investors fund the project at the start and then receive repayments as outcomes are delivered.
Outcome payments for these two programmes are being funded from the £15 million Fair Chance Fund, which was launched jointly by the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Cabinet Office in April 2014, to tackle youth homelessness.
Social investment intermediaries Social Finance and Triodos structured the investments and raised the required capital to fund the interventions.
Gareth Zahir-Bill, senior investment manager at CAF Venturesome, said: “We are delighted to be involved in these projects helping to transform the lives of young people in desperate need across the UK.
“We have supported five high impact and innovative SIBs and the challenge now is to look at those investments as they mature to understand their impact, and compare this to what could have been achieved using more traditional models, such as providing capital directly to charities and social enterprises.
“As more SIBs are brought to the market and become easier to establish, risks must be better shared across stakeholders, including commissioners, delivery partners and investors. Only when this balance is achieved will the market reach its full potential to sustainably deliver impact.”
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