If you work with us, you'll get much more than funding.

Financial investment to early-stage organisations

The Learning Launchpad fund provides investment to organisations in their early stages of development. We offer investments of up to £30,000.

We are passionate about social impact and innovation, and our priorities are helping you achieve those goals. We structure our investments to make sure that we are faithful to those priorities and also ensure we are genuine partners with you and share in your financial success when you become sustainable.

Normally our investments take the form of a loan, an equity stake or a "revenue participation agreement" (where we take some small proportion of your revenues). If you are successful in proceeding to the final stages of securing an investment with us, we will discuss all the options and details with you.

After we have established a relationship with early-stage investees, we may make a further investment.

Support and incubation

We believe the value of our advice is even greater than the cash investment we provide. We can help you with your strategy, your funding and income plans, your operational requirements, and provide you with the links to experts in education and youth, local and central government, and social enterprise that we know are so important when you’re starting out.

We have even given new organisations the office space they need to start work and get their team working together. For examples of the type of support we can offer please see our portfolio.

If you have an idea, or a fledgling organisation that could use our help, please apply here.

Process

If you decide to submit an application, we follow a four-stage process:

Initial shortlist
After the application deadline, we evaluate all the applications we have received and shortlist the ones we think are most promising and where we think we can make a real difference.

If your idea has not made it through this stage, you will receive an email telling you this within two weeks of the deadline. We very much regret that we will not be able to provide feedback on unsuccessful applications at this stage. For more information, please visit our FAQs or check our blog.

Initial conversation
If you have made it through to our shortlist, you will receive a phone call where you will have the opportunity to ask questions, and we are able to get to know you a little better.

Workshop
The top 10 applicants are then invited to a workshop event where we – and some of our friends in the social investor community and the youth/education world – will work with you all day on your idea, and you will get a chance to pitch your projects on camera.

Review period
If, after the workshop and other conversations, we both feel that we can work together, we will work with you to understand your needs and whether and how we can help. This review period involves further meetings, brainstorms and conversations on the phone over a two week period.

Investment committee presentation
After the review period, where both you and we feel confident that we want to develop a partnership and believe we can add value to your idea, we will make a formal presentation to our investment committee who will need to agree to giving you funding. This presentation is usually six weeks after the first deadline. If the investment committee agrees, we will look to sign a funding agreement with you within two weeks of the investment committee presentation.