Social Incubator Fund

What's it all about?

The £10 million Social Incubator Fund was delivered by The National Lottery Community Fund on behalf of the Office for Civil Society (OCS). It aimed to help drive a robust pipeline of start-up social ventures into the social investment market, by increasing focus on incubation support, and attracting new incubators into the market. This was not funding for frontline social ventures; the Social Incubator Fund provided grants to social incubators, a portion of which formed an investment book which must be invested in social ventures using non-grant financial structures.

The first round of the Social Incubator Fund launched in July 2012, and was aimed at established social incubators based and operating primarily in England. You can read more here The second round, which was also open to newer social incubators, launched in May 2013. The Social Incubator Fund is currently closed to applications, as all of the initial £10 million allocated to the programme has now been committed. OCS is assessing the impact of the current awards before deciding whether to run a third round.

Round one saw four organisations receive funding totaling almost £5 million in early 2013. Just over £6 million was awarded to a further six organisations in March 2014. You can read more about all ten social incubators, which between them represent a wide variety of geographic and thematic coverage, here:

• New social enterprises to receive jump start from government investment
• Regional social enterprises to receive support from £10 million government fund
• UK-wide investment secured to grow the social economy