Becky John

We are almost at the end of our series of interviews with friends made over the last fifty years. Today we speak to Theodora Hadjimichael, Chief Executive of Responsible Finance, the membership organisation for not-for-profit lenders, of which we are a member.

“We have about 50 members overall that do similar lending to ICOF, supporting small businesses, social enterprises, community groups and individuals. The overall goal for us is to help more communities and people reach their full potential and be able to grow because of the access to finance that they’re getting.

We’ve always had a good working relationship with ICOF which was probably one of the first community development finance institutions or social lenders in the UK. I’ve been at Responsible Finance for about 10 years and have been involved with ICOF and worked with Alain and Tim for all that time. They’ve always been very active in the membership and the network, too. ICOF has always been an important part of the movement.

We work really closely with all of our members, and as a membership association we’re here to make sure they have the resources and the knowledge and the tools that they need to grow to have more of an impact. Alain and Tim contribute a lot in terms of trend spotting – they see patterns and are always very willing to share learning from projects and programs they’ve run.

I’ve found it particularly interesting hearing about the work ICOF does with organisations around decarbonising, decarbonisation and net zero, and in ways that they’ve funded social enterprises and community groups to work towards those goals. This is a big opportunity and challenge for the whole country, and ICOF works proactively with organisations and community groups in this space. They’ve done things around solar panels, heat sources and energy generation which helps really small organisations become more resilient. Often they couldn’t get the funding elsewhere and it makes a huge difference to them. I’ve found those stories inspirational and it’s something that ICOF seems to be leading the way on. There’s a lot that we can learn from them in that area.

ICOF is unique in the sector as our only member to focus particularly on co-operatives and community owned organisations or assets. There’s a lot of potential across the country and in different communities, but probably a lot of communities don’t know they exist and are an option.

We’re really supportive of the work ICOF does. After COVID people spend more time at home and in their hyper-local areas – community assets and spaces feel more and more important. I think there will continue to be a lot of interest in community ownership and buying community assets from people all over the UK/country. We’d love to see that part of ICOF’s work grow and we want to support them in any way we can to do that.

Happy birthday ICOF!  We’re thrilled to have you as part of the Responsible Finance membership. We’re very impressed and grateful for all of the impact that you’ve had on your customers and communities over the years. So thank you so much, and a very happy birthday.”

In our series chatting with people who have been part of the ICOF story over the last fifty tears, today we speak to Ella Smyth, Funding and Partnerships Manager for the Co-op Foundation, the foundation of the Co-op Group.

“I started work with the Foundation in 2017 and in my first year at the Foundation, we were looking to set up a loan fund to support community businesses. We had no experience of lending as we’d just done grant making in the past. We looked for someone who could be our advisor on that fund, who could help us with the due diligence and advise us on how to set it up using their knowledge of what was going on in the market. We wanted to understand where we could best fit in, to complement what was going on and offer something useful to the organisations out there with the money that we had. We had an initial chat with ICOF, who then bid for the tender to be our advisory partner and were successful. We ran our first pilot at the end of 2017, and then the fund ran up until 2020.

Working with ICOF was interesting for me because I was new to funding in general. I was trying to get my head around grant making and then loans were something totally new. I learned so much about what the world of social lending is about from working with the ICOF team, about lending to cooperatives but also to charities and other social enterprises. Through 2018 and 2019, in particular, when the fund was really in its full flow, Tim was my main contact, we travelled the length and breadth of the nation together going to visit all of the organisations we invested in – we ended up funding close to 50. We were on the road a lot, and on the sea and in the air! We visited the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, and went right down to the bottom of Cornwall, as well as Northern Ireland. We met some really amazing organisations, some that were quite a bit quirky, a bit off the wall, some that were just absolutely rock solid and knew exactly what they were doing.

I come from a community development background so it was easy for me to see how they were doing in terms of their community engagement and that kind of thing. But I was less confident about the business side. Luckily Tim always knew exactly what he was talking about with the business and finances, and through that process, I learned so much from him in terms of what to look for in their financial projections, etc… It was so helpful to learn from Tim and the team to get that insight into what a viable project looked like, what was kind of okay and what felt risky. We were okay with taking some risks, but we just needed to know what the risks were.

One of my favourite organisations that we visited was Iona Village Hall. We had to take various trains, planes and automobiles to get there including multiple ferries to and from the island of Mull. We went into this incredible 90 year old village hall, which didn’t have any heating but had been serving the people of Iona through the winters for the previous 90 years. It was definitely time for a new one! We were able to go ahead and give them some funding. We definitely saw a wide range of places – cities, towns and villages in the middle of nowhere. I don’t think there were any that we visited that we then didn’t go ahead and fund, if they wanted the funding – a few that we offered to managed without us.

Working with the ICOF team helped us to pick up things at an earlier stage which weren’t going to be appropriate for us, so they didn’t get to the stage of board approval with no chance, and we didn’t want to waste the applicant organisations time either.  The fact that we did those visits meant we built up a good relationship with those organisations, and since then, many are still in touch with us now. Many are still in repayment and I think we’ve got that trusting relationship because of that the way that we’ve worked with them initially. With ICOF, we really engaged with them to get their business plan up to scratch, we gave them lots and lots of feedback, which they always appreciated, and then went and did the in person visit. So now if they have any issues, they come and tell us. It’s not like we suddenly wait until they haven’t repaid, then we uncover a can of worms – a good relationship means we can have a  honest conversation with them.

We’ve carried on working together since the fund closed in 2020, just not as intensely. ICOF now look after our direct debit loan repayment collections and are there for ad hoc expert advice and support with our portfolio. We didn’t have the set up to do the collections and loan management in the Foundation and as ICOF do we use their back office service, they continue to look after that element of the portfolio  for us. Anne does all the collections, sends it through to our financial people, and keeps it all up to date so we know exactly where we are. So working with ICOF back office function has been so helpful, to always have that live view of what’s going on. We can always ask Anne for an update and she will always know what’s happening. It’s great to know that’s all organised.

They also provide ongoing monitoring of the portfolio, and help us out if organisations want to take repayment holidays or they’re having issues – ICOF have a look to see if we can shuffle around their repayment plan and they help us to understand what’s going on with their bigger finances.

Overall the relationship with ICOF has been, and continues to be, really positive. Those human relationships are so important because lending and funding can feel quite impersonal sometimes. We have a really nice partnership there.

Happy birthday ICOF – you are the jewel in the co-operative crown! A lovely, lovely team and I wish you a wonderful birthday and all the best for the next 50 years.”

In our series of conversations with people we’ve known across our first fifty years today we met Matt Fazal, Portfolio Manager at Power To Change.

“I am relatively new to the sector, I joined Power to Change in 2019, working across various activities on programme improvement. Before that I was working for grassroots charities and then I saw an article in a newspaper about community business, and thought, ‘wow, this is exactly what I want to do”. It was really serendipitous. Ten years ago, I wrote my dissertation about the decline of pubs in rural areas, and I interviewed the first ever community pub in England, so it was kind of full circle for me. I always wanted to do something that supported communities to bring things into ownership. I really enjoy being able to support communities to bring back some power, rather than it all sitting in the hands of private individuals. The breadth of the sector means it’s really interesting – I love the fact that we support bookshops, people’s pubs, community shops, all kinds of different and wonderful businesses. This is the stuff I wanted to do, so I’m very happy that I’m here, in this space, now.

Since May 2021, I’ve been working on the Community Shares Booster fund, supporting community businesses. We have often funded alongside ICOF. It was great to be able to learn from their expertise in terms of – for example – assessing the financial stability of the organisations we’re supporting. One of the key programs Power to Change worked on alongside ICOF was the More Than A Pub project – I wasn’t involved in it but I know that the relationship between the multiple partners was really beneficial. 

Power to Change and ICOF predominantly work together through the Booster Fund now. ICOF sits on the panel and helps with the assessments. If we are investing equity into community share offers, ICOF will sometimes provide loan finance or equity financing alongside the Access Fund money that’s coming to the booster fund. We work collaboratively to decide which organisations we’re going to collectively support. We worked together to support October Books. They were looking to refinance some loanstock. We were able to put in £25k in equity, and ICOF were able to come along and support as well and it was like a really good opportunity for us to work together and really support them. ICOF were able to offer quite a different perspective, because they already had money in with them as well. It was a nice collaborative relationship in the sense that, through our various experiences with October Books, we were able to collectively come together to make a decision about how best we can support them. 

I think the sector and movement is gathering more momentum and the need is only increasing. We’re seeing a lot of really important community assets falling out of community hands, whether that’s struggling to compete on the private property market or regulation making it quite difficult – Scotland has the Community Right to Buy, we don’t have that in England. So, we’re navigating a challenging landscape and it’s more important than ever that we’re working collaboratively to challenge some of these issues. Within Power To Change at the moment, we’ve got a real focus on supporting high streets, making sure they are actually reflecting the needs of the communities that are in them. It comes back to that community power piece. People often don’t feel like they have power or agency over the decision making, they feel like they’re being told that’s what’s happening without being consulted. If you listen to your community and find out what they actually want, then you can collectively decide what’s best. 

Happy birthday to ICOF! Although I haven’t been in the sector long it’s been really, really great to work closely with you, on  a personal level and as part of Power To Change. It is really good to have other advocates in the sector for the community business movement and growing community ownership and community power in England. Here’s to many more years of their support for the sector.”

As we head towards the end of our fiftieth year, we’re closing our year-long interview series by talking to people at key organisations which we partner and work with. Today we meet James de le Vigne, CEO at the Employee Ownership Association (EOA)

“I’ve worked in the sector for a good while and I’ve always known about ICOF. I joined the EOA on Valentines Day in 2022, and before that I led the Co-operatives UK Development Team for eight years. For the last two and a half years of that, I was a director of the Coop Loan Fund (CLF)

I enjoyed supporting the CLF. The fact that cooperatives contributed to that fund meant that there was an inbuilt understanding of what coops are about, what they’re trying to achieve, and why they might need a more aligned lender – someone who understood their structure and who actually saw that as a strength to their business rather than a rabbit warren of governance that needed explaining. With ICOF steering and managing it, on behalf of those coops who had put funds into it, it often provided the final piece of the financial jigsaw for new coops, coops undertaking new initiatives who needed investment into their premises or facilities, or coops who were just looking for grant funding to try and develop a new product or service.

The CLF helped a lot of fantastic businesses to get their projects over the line. We saw really strong success rates and very few business failures. This meant that that fund has continued to recycle its capital and grow.

Later, as I was exiting Co-operatives UK, I had the pleasure of working with the ICOF team on a big funded program which was trying to fund community groups through community share mechanisms and blending community shares with the debt facility provided by ICOF. That was seen as really quite pioneering in a space that has itself proven to be really pioneering. And so I’m excited now in my new role to see that program up and running.

As we look to the future, I’m glad to see ICOF writing about its EDI journey – one of the reasons I said yes to the CLF is that I wanted to be part of improving diversification of their board. When I joined the board, it was all men, I was able to recommend a few potential candidates, one of whom subsequently joined the board.

A lot of the early ICOF loans were about worker buyouts to create worker co-ops, elements of which have shaped today’s employee ownership models. In terms of their values, that alignment and understanding of the governance models that are likely to exist behind employee owned business is really strong. But nowadays, we are seeing lending requirements within businesses that are transitioning to employee ownership in the tens of millions, which is above the kind of capital that CCF has in its place.

SMEs at large across the UK struggle to access capital. The growth of the CDFI network and business lenders like ICOF is really important in plugging that gap. ICOF’s strong track record  is a great example of what the CDFIs can do and should be doing and the type of support that they can offer. I see them being able to lend into employee owned businesses or cooperatives, as well as other forms of social enterprise and charity and being part of that broader narrative around business with purpose.

The community model is really powerful. I attended both party conferences recently to hear our political parties on both sides of the house acknowledge the role of community owned enterprise. I would love to see the hard work lifted from those groups, because it is a huge slog to get those initiatives up and running and to create that blended finance package that enables them to acquire assets, but it’s a model that works, that should be accelerated. and grown. What I’d love to see is more medium to large businesses engaging in that, investing their capital in mechanisms like community shares to give back to the community. I see a greater pluralisation of the economy more generally on the horizon. These creative instruments like the employee ownership trust – which is only 10 years old itself – the community benefit society and community shares have the potential to come together. I can see CDFIs playing a really important part of the narrative around regional banks, and even with structural funds, perhaps like the British Business Bank – finding an alignment between what they’re trying to achieve in terms of big business, but actually recognising that majority of the UK is employed in SMEs and micro enterprises and actually channelling some of that that large funding and the dormant bank funding back into places like ICOF to enable them to do more.

I also think targeted regional approaches are going to be really important so I can imagine a world where ICOF is potentially focusing in on their local footprint around the Bristol area and encouraging new institutions to emerge in other geographic areas. Small and local is going to be a real value add and so understanding your local business space is going to be increasingly key. I think ICOF have probably got a role in that.

So happy, happy birthday to the team, past and present. Congratulations on all that you’ve done, this it’s not an easy space to work in. My message to you is keep going because I think everything that you are doing is an example, as a beacon of opportunity that others might follow. So keep going.”

Many of the friends we’ve made over the last fifty years have crossed paths with us time and again and that’s certainly true of our interviewee today. Here we meet Danyal Sattar, Chief Executive of Big Issue Invest (BII)

“ICOF really are the pioneers of social impact investment in the UK, there’s just no doubt about that. They were there before anybody else, really proving you can lend to cooperatives, charities, social enterprises, and you can get your money back. It’s never easy, but they were real pioneers in that and have always had a good track record as a lender.

I’ve known about ICOF for many years and through many different roles. It was probably in the 1990s that I first heard about ICOF, when David Ralley was the Chief Executive, and then I ran into them again during my time at the New Economics Foundation when there was work there around common ownership. Then in about 1995 I worked with ICOF and for Pat Conaty to set up Aston Reinvestment Trust, now ART Business Loans, in Birmingham.  Steve Walker joined the team as CEO to really get it going and Steve is still there to this day. ICOF were a key partner.

A key part of BII relationship with ICOF has been their ability to do fund administration on behalf of other organisations. They ran our lending portfolio back office, and that was a really crucial service. And they did that for a range of organisations because it meant others didn’t have to reinvent doing your back office time and time again as a new start community finance organisation. That was a very good service for us to have. We’ve only recently taken that in house, after it being with ICOF since shortly after we started in 2005, which I think shows how successful ICOF are in delivering that. That was at the core of our longstanding relationship with ICOF.

Kevin Lloyd-Evans, who previously worked here, now works for ICOF. When Kevin was at BII and the pandemic started, he just said , ‘Let’s put my mobile phone on the front page of the website’. There was a message there quite literally saying, ‘Call me. I’m Kevin, here’s my mobile phone number, call me if I can help’. His attitude there was emblematic of what ICOF are about and what they are doing – Kevin had that people focus that ICOF has and so his new role with ICOF was a great match.

ICOF are part of a great tradition. In 1542, the Sir Thomas White loan charity was set up in Leicester to make micro loans to apprentices who were to buy their own tools and thereby increase their income. So since 1542, at least, in the UK we’ve been setting up social investment organisations, including the first building societies in 1775. It goes on from there. So that’s the long tradition that ICOF have been working within, in creating a financial institution to support organisations who aren’t supported by the mainstream. It is amazing what they’ve been doing. And since they started in 1973, Ecology Building Society came along in 1990, then Triodos Bank came onto the scene, then Unity Trust Bank and a whole plethora of community finance organisations. More recently organisations like us at BII, but ICOF really has been a pioneer here in the UK, showing how the social economy is so much wider than charity, than just social enterprise. They show the social power of cooperatives which are a key part of our third sector in its widest sense, and they’ve been there supporting people who’ve got together to help themselves and help their communities. That’s an amazing thing… I mean, they were going in 1973 and The Credit Union Act was passed in 1979. So they’ve been going since before the formalisation of credit unions! It is truly extraordinary.

A very, very happy birthday to Industrial Common Ownership Finance, also Cooperative and Community Finance as it’s known today. What a fantastic 50 years it’s been in supporting our sector and we’re so pleased you’ve been here. You’ve been inspirational to me and so many others, let alone the practical work that you’re doing. So a very, very happy birthday.”

Today in our series of interview with friends and partners from our fifty years, we speak to Nick Temple, Chief Executive at the Social Investment Business 

I first came across ICOF while I was at Social Enterprise UK. We had a lot of cooperatives in the membership and we were working out what our member social enterprises and cooperatives needed. One of the finance options, and one of the organisations that we heard a lot about, that really understood social enterprises, because they came out of that movement themselves, was ICOF. It was great to learn about them and their role in the market, and understand how they compared to everyone else and what they could offer in terms of different finance options.

The ICOF team are great. They’re an organisation that comes across as one without an organisational ego, where the values that you read about on the website are actually lived in the people and your interactions with them. We find them very straightforward, very transparent, committed to the cause, as you might expect, but really easy to work with as a result. And I mean, that’s just nice, right? When organisations are what you would hope they would be and they live that in their operations and their communications and their dealings with you. The whole team reflect that, and as a result, our team really liked working with them. I know that the same is true for the organisations they support as well. There’s no grandstanding, they’re just motivated by getting the right finance to organisations at the right time in the right form for them to try and help them do more of their good work.

I started at SIB in January 2018 so I’ve been here for six years and SIB has been around for 20 years, but we have aspirations to be around for 50! We’ve worked with ICOF directly at SIB, both on the Reach funds, where we’re helping to provide a grant mix to allow projects to get investment ready, and most recently, and really excitingly, we’re working with them on the Thrive Together Fund which is a smaller loan fund with multiple partners. We serve as the infrastructure and the backing for it all but we’re working through and with specialist partners of which ICOF are one and we’re just delighted to be working in partnership with them really, tapping into their expertise to hopefully achieve more impact. The Thrive Together Fund has been hugely popular – if organisations are interested in that sort of finance, then it’s a great opportunity.

In some ways, ICOF is one of those slightly unsung heroes of their social investment space. They obviously came out of the co-operative movement, which is a big part of the wider social enterprise movement, and they’ve worked really effectively for many, many years. People sometimes assume social investment started in 2012, when Big Society Capital was established. We’re always keen to be very clear that there’s a longer history here and we’re building on the work of each other – we were an organisation that built off the work of ICOF. Locality was also one of our founders, and so, similarly, we came out of the movement of practitioners about community ownership – it’s that broader movement that we’re all hoping to support so we learned from them and built upon their work. ICOF are continually evolving and iterating what they’ve done over the years to meet the needs of the organisations they work with and support better as time has gone on, and we aspire to do that too. We’re supposed to be a learning organisation as well. It’s not just about the amount of money you’re getting out the door, but it’s the quality of it, how well it fits the needs of the organisations. And so I think social investment business, that’s the sort of learning we would want to take from an organisation like ICOF that’s been around for more than twice as long as we have.

There’s a really significant need for the sort of work ICOF does and hopefully the sort of work we do as well. That’s partly around the need for different solutions. Community ownership of assets, of spaces, of social infrastructure is really important. In terms of the finance, whichever government gets in is just not going to have as much money, so we’ve got a duty to make the money we have got go further. From our perspective, social investment used effectively can help that money, the scarce money we have, go further. I see an ongoing role for the sort of work we do, and possibly an expanded role, in the forthcoming years as well.

A big happy birthday to you ICOF. 50 years is a huge amount of time, something to be incredibly proud of. The ripple effect of all the work over that time is difficult to quantify, but has been huge and transformative not only for the individual organisations you have worked with, but also the communities that they’re based in. So here’s to the next 50 years and an even bigger cake with even more candles.