Venturesome was delighted to count with such a diverse set of organisations, ranging from the Congregation from Marian Mission to major homeless charities:
Furthermore, Venturesome had the privilege of having two amazing speakers that helped us to bring social investment and social impact to life.
PRISONERS ABROAD
This year marks the 40
th anniversary of
Prisoners Abroad. This brilliant charity was introduced by Richard Price, Chairman of the organisation, and Adrian a service user of Prisoners Abroad. Prisoners Abroad is a human rights and welfare charity providing humanitarian aid, advice and emotional support to British people affected by overseas imprisonment.
Richard stressed how Prisoners Abroad provides an essential service, translating human rights law into practical life-saving actions, and how they are the only ones providing it, to British citizens overseas.
“I am delighted to have this opportunity of thanking CAF Ventures for their support and the significant impact this has meant in enabling us to continue our work especially with those released from prison back to the UK.”
Richard Price, Chairman of Prisoners Abroad
To explain the “why and how” this matters Prisoners Abroad introduced Adrian, one of their former service users.
He delivered a moving and eloquent speech, explaining the service user perspective of the support provided by Prisoners Abroad.
CHANGE PLEASE
The issue of homelessness in the UK has been a growing problem in the face of budget cuts and the cost of living increasing. Change Please trains people who are homeless as baristas and provides each person with a London Living Wage job, housing, a bank account and mental health support. The model aims to work with a small number of people at a time and offer them a life changing intervention designed to support them to move on to employment and more stable housing. Change Please was launched in November 2015, since then it has grown rapidly, securing bars in offices of major corporates and retail sales through Sainsbury’s.
The event, and speeches, demonstrated the importance of providing affordable and flexible repayable finance to social enterprises and charities in order for them to achieve a high social impact. Holly stressed how our wholly-philanthropic social investment funds allow Venturesome to support high impact social organisations with the risk-bearing social investment they need.
We were delighted to welcome 100 guests. On behalf of all of us at CAF, we would like to say thank you for joining us at our reception, it was a really memorable event.