What happens when a philanthropic foundation decides to offer repayable finance for the first time? Anything from stronger relationships with investees to “awful situations”, as we heard in a workshop exploring this question at the EVPA annual conference in November. Pioneers Post digs a little deeper…
About three years ago, a grantee of the UK-based Rank Foundation posed an unexpected question: is there scope to repay our grant?
It was the prompt, says deputy CEO Caroline Broadhurst, for an approach that the 50-year-old foundation has since been testing: offering what they call ‘repayable grants’, which average around £100,000. One of these was repaid in full earlier this year, and payments for the others are “looking good”, according to Broadhurst, who was sharing her experience at last November’s EVPA Annual Conference in The Hague. By 2021, it expects to have distributed about £1m in repayable grants (its overall giving averages £6.5m a year).
Read the entire article on Pioneers Post.