The Impact Trust is a not-for-gain public benefit research and advocacy organization dedicated to facilitating effective flows of capital to sustainable, responsible, high impact social and environmental investments.

Their work seeks to promote inclusive growth and sustainable development and make high impact investment a reality at scale by:
 

• enabling more and better allocations of capital and other essential resources to anti-poverty initiatives and high impact social and environmental purpose endeavours
• educating institutional and retail investors about the options for high impact responsible investment that are available to them
• advocating for a more enabling environment to support and incentivize responsible investment including investment in the small and medium enterprise sector
• supporting the development of intermediary and marketplace infrastructure in order to improve systems for transparency, credibility and comparability across impact investment options.

 

Their key activities include research, advocacy, policy design, financial sector education and product development.

Their Work

They focus their efforts in three distinct areas and their key activities include research & policy design, advocacy, and financial sector education and innovative infrastructure, product and programme design.
 

Research & Policy Design
 

Their research efforts are aimed at understanding the root causes impeding the effective allocation of resources to responsible investment and addressing barriers limiting the creation of an enabling environment for high impact small and growing businesses and the transition to a low carbon green economy. Whilst their policy efforts have primarily focused on improving the regulatory and tax policy environment affecting SMEs and social enterprises, increasingly the Trust has been engaging with environmental policy to consider how this may promote more sustainable development policies and programmes, promote environmental citizenship and encourage the creation of a more circular, green and blue economy framework.
 

Advocacy
 

Their most significant achievement and source of leverage is their impact on Government policy for SMEs, social enterprises and the investors who support them. This has been achieved through extensive mapping of the sector, broad based engagement with industry stakeholders, detailed research into the impacts of existing policy and regulatory requirements and analysis of global practices that have supported the thriving of this ecosystem elsewhere. By advocating with policy makers and industry leaders to enable the practical implementation of solutions to overcome barriers to inclusive growth & development and advocating to investors and actors in the sustainability / impact investment sector to encourage greater connection and cooperation, they believe their research has had a strategic and practical application.
 

Policy / Programme / Infrastructure / Product Design & Development
 

The Trust seeks to explore, mostly in collaboration with its implementing partners, the potential for its research insights to have applied and practical value. Accordingly it seeks to design products and programmes that can be tested in real world settings to achieve its impact objectives. This may include designing an impact bond for financing private sector renewable energy installations or for public sector service delivery, establishing the accreditation framework for impact advisors and implementing the programme of assessment for the iX, supporting the testing of credit guarantee use in support of SME financing or devising programmes to encourage environmental citizenship and the creation of eco-enterprise incubators.