We are delighted to announce that our fifth annual social impact report for the Community Land & Finance CIC has now been published.  The report covers the two community asset funds: Community Share Underwriting Fund (CSUF) and Affordable Homes Rental Fund (AHRF), and highlights the impact achieved by our investees throughout the year, and their journey with social investment.

CSUF helps address the problem of community-funded projects, which need to build confidence and momentum as they pursue community share offers to finance their work.  During the year March 2016 to March 2017, the fund successfully deployed its final investment. £600,000 was invested in Southill Community Energy for their solar farm scheme, for a project worth over £4m in total.

AHRF aims to tackle the growing housing crisis by lending to community groups, which have been set-up specifically to help families and individuals find affordable homes now and for future generations. These community groups have difficulty borrowing money from banks, because they are too new or often need a more flexible lending solution. We will keep investing through this Fund until August 2018.

The impact we have achieved across both funds so far is remarkable – all thirty-seven homes built through our AHRF investments are now fully tenanted, improving the quality of life for their residents and creating stronger communities; and through CSUF, community groups have built confidence and credibility.  More than half of our investees have gone on to raise further community share offers for new and more ambitious projects.

Overall, we have invested in sixteen projects worth £23m across both funds, and underwritten a further five projects with CSUF. That is an average of 130 local investors per community share offer, and a total of 74 adults and 50 children housed in affordable, high standard homes.

With this social impact report, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to our investors, Investment Committee members, non-executive members, and investees, for their trust and engagement over the years.  We took on this journey with you, and we look forward to continuing walking down the road of community lending with existing and new partners for social impact.

We hope you will enjoy reading about some of the highlights of our fifth year of running these funds, along with the long-term view.

We are now beginning to build on the success of these two community asset funds by looking at the next generation of community lending funds, enabling us to keep supporting community groups in raising their ambitions, growing local solutions and building more resilient communities.

Download the report