News Archive
Celebrating ICOF 50th birthday – looking back at our loans – Highland Homecare
Founded in 1994, Highland Home Carers is now one of the major independent providers of home care and support services in Scotland, employing over 250 staff. Employee owned since 2004, and the largest employee owned business in Scotland, provide Home Care, Support Work, and Complex Care. We worked with HHC in 2014 to support them […]
Fifty years of friendship and finance – meet Simon Ryan
We’ve been celebrating our fiftieth birthday by looking back over the projects we’ve loaned to and the people who have worked with us along the way. Today we meet Simon Ryan of The Peninsula Trust in Cornwall who we also spoke to during COVID. “I started work on The Peninsula Trust in 2013, and I started talking to Ian […]
Celebrating ICOF 50th birthday – looking back at our loans – Manchester Tree Station
We’ve supported the team at Manchester Tree Station tree, sorry three, times since 2000. Now called simply The TreeStation, they as a hub for a broad range of wood related activities in Manchester. Still led by strong ethics, The TreeStation is a not-for-profit organisation, registered as Society for the Benefit of the Community (BenCom), making it […]
Delight as village raises enough to save its pub and heritage
We are really pleased to be able support The George Community Pub, in Wickham Market, Suffolk, with an offer of finance to lever in significant support from the The National Lottery Heritage Fund and other match funders The George Community Pub will receive additional funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund bringing their total grant […]
Fifty years of friendship and finance – meet David Ralley
We’ve been celebrating our fifty years of friendship and finance by talking to the people who have worked with us along the way. Today we meet David Ralley, whose ICOF story goes back to our very beginning “Ernest Bader had built a successful chemical company. It was called Scott Bader as Dora Scott, his wife, […]
Celebrating ICOF 50th birthday – looking back at our loans – The Phone Co-op
Now part of the Midcounties Co-op, The Phone Co-op was an independent consumer co-operative until 2018. It provides landline, mobile telephone and Internet services, including web hosting and broadband, for business and personal users. We supported them in the late 1990’s as they brought in better IT and improved their offices. We can vouch for […]
Fifty years of friendship and finance – meet Jo White
We’ve been celebrating our fifty years of friendship and finance by talking to the people who have worked with us along the way. Today we meet Jo White, Executive Director of Co-operative Futures ‘It was about 2010 or 11 when I became ICOF Chair, and I was in that role for eight years. I’d been on […]
Join a new generation of co-op & community business advisors
The barefoot programme is a six-month course to support co-operative and community business leaders to use their experience to become advisors and mentors for other businesses that are planning to start or scale. This support will reach a range of different business sectors in the UK co-operative and community business economy. The next programme starts […]
Celebrating ICOF 50th birthday – looking back at our loans – Ecosulis
Originally Bath based and family owned, Ecosulis are dedicated to recovering nature, by designing and delivering efficient and scalable nature-based solutions for people and planet. We worked with them in 2007 when the existing family sold to a management buyout and Ecosulis become an employee-owned cooperative. At that stage, the company specialised in the delivery […]
New £6m fund partnership set to increase the availability of finance to smaller charities and social enterprises
Launching today, we are incredibly proud to be part of the new £6m fund partnership, the Thrive Together Fund The new Thrive Together Fund will provide unrestricted funding to unlock the growth of small and medium sized charities and social enterprises. This bold new fund is operated through a delivery partnership made up of Social […]