The Cultural Impact Development Fund offers repayable finance between £25,000 and £150,000 to socially driven arts and cultural organisations working with the people and communities in greatest need. We aim to enable enterprising, ambitious organisations to adapt their business models in order to increase their financial resilience and achieve their social impact goals.

Our investment takes the form of unsecured loans and/or quasi-equity, tailored to the circumstances of each organisation. We also offer a blended loan and grant finance package whereby the level of grant funding is, on average, 10 per cent of the total investment offer. We do not offer standalone grant funding. As part of our commitment to social impact, the Fund also offers financial offsets in recognition of the achievement of social impact targets. The financial offset takes the form of an annual reduction to the interest rate on the loan portion of an investment where the total repayment period is three years or more.

The Fund is supported by Access – The Foundation for Social Investment through the Growth Fund programme, with finance being provided by its partners, The National Lottery Community Fund and Big Society Capital. Browse the fund portfolio.

As a dedicated arts and culture investor, we believe the sector plays an essential role in our everyday lives, in the forging and understanding of our identity, and in growing the UK’s economy. We also recognise the power of arts and culture to engage the most marginalised and vulnerable communities and help tackle deeply entrenched social problems. This is why we set up a fund to support the financial resilience and impact capacity of arts and cultural organisations working with the people and communities in greatest need.

Alongside this, In March 2018 we published a report examining the landscape for repayable finance among arts and culture enterprises, which pointed to an unmet demand for small-scale investment. The findings suggested that 41 per cent of organisations considering taking out repayable finance in the next five years would take out less than £150,000. We want to provide affordable repayable finance that meets the needs of organisations in the arts and culture sector, so we took these findings on board when setting up the Cultural Impact Development Fund.