December 14, 2019

Big Issue Invest Talk

The CEO of Big Issue Invest, Old Leightonian Danyal Sattar, provided a fascinating reflection on ethical financing models on the last day of term in the latest of our Ethical breakfast series. These talks for Sixth Form Economics and Business students aim to instil a sense of social responsibility and awareness of ethical enterprise in our future business leaders.

Danyal’s presentation offered an entertaining overview of social investment, the reinvention of the model by each generation and the key players in the history of financing organisations and initiatives with a social purpose. The Sixth Formers were rapt as he briefly described his career setting up Charity Bank and heading up the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a Quaker enterprise, before joining Big Issue Invest which provides finance to socially conscious organisations who may otherwise struggle to get it.

Based on the “not everyone knows a rich bloke” philosophy of founder, John Bird, and with an outlook of “Anything you want you should be able to get” the Big Issue Invest model helps fund small charities, large scale projects tackling social issues, transformational finance for innovative projects and money to promote participation schemes and nurtures links to the Big Society Capital scheme established by the Labour Party, to extract ‘forgotten’ money from the core capital of the major banks.

Peppered with amusing anecdotes and personal experience Danyal’s talk gave the students an excellent understanding of the variety, both in nature and in scale, of social investment finance and reiterated that the value lies not just in the monetary funding but in the difference that funding can make to communities around the world.

Old Leightonian Danyal Sattar presenting

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