I’ve spent the past few months meeting dozens of brilliantly bright people trying to answer a fairly simple question – how can we, collectively, make Wales better?
I’m the CEO of a charity here in Wales. I’m still relatively new to the sector, and I’ll admit that – for many reasons – the past few years have been transformative for me.
It’s exposed me to the incredible volunteer base Wales benefits from, some exceptional socially responsible businesses, and countless other third-sector organisations doing brilliant work solving problems hand-in-hand with communities Wales-wide.
The work the Welsh third sector does to support our communities is both challenging and rewarding, offering immediate and tangible benefits to the people of Wales. That is why I love my job and the work we do.
Even so – and despite the encouraging results I see daily at a grassroots level – I can’t ignore the fact that there are larger, systemic issues we must address if we want to truly ‘level up’ our society.
The Challenges Facing Wales
Wales faces significant challenges – anaemic economic growth, lagging educational achievement, a struggling health system, twin climate and nature crises, and – perhaps most soberingly – the fact that 28% of our children live in relative poverty.
These issues are complex and interrelated, deeply rooted in our industrial past and exacerbated by current geopolitical tensions.
Although politicians in the Senedd or Westminster are often blamed, the difficult reality is that the public purse is lighter than ever, our public bodies are underfunded to deliver the scale and pace of transformational change required, and our lead delivery agencies lack the resources to address challenges adequately.
It is these problems – these gnarly, knotty problems – that require bold new thinking and the active participation of every citizen, charity, and business with a will to make things better. The question is how?
The Need for a New Approach
Many of Wales’ businesses, third-sector organisations and public bodies have long advocated for new models of delivering social value, which is something we should welcome.
The challenge, however, is that these sector-leading organisations often act entirely independently of each other, leading to a broad range of well-meaning social value initiatives delivering sub-optimal impact.
How much better could we do if we properly pooled our resources, started working together under a common framework, and better coordinated our work to maximise the impact of our collective activity?
Addressing The Challenges
To try and answer this question, I recently hosted a roundtable meeting with some of Wales’ leading businesses, industry bodies, NGOs and financiers to explore what a new approach could look like. At that meeting, it became clear that there are several challenges we need to tackle if we’re to realise a new ‘Welsh way’ of delivering social impact:
- Leadership: It isn’t entirely clear ‘what good looks like’ when it comes to delivering social impact in Wales. This leadership deficit limits the potential of our collective efforts and leads to the inefficient use of our limited resources.
- Lack of Capital: One of the primary challenges is the shortage of capital available for social initiatives in Wales, hindering organisations’ ability to drive meaningful social impact. Wales’ social investment infrastructure lags far behind other UK nations too, and this underdeveloped ecosystem makes us less attractive to global capital.
- Cross-Sectoral Coordination: Tackling complex, interconnected social challenges requires well-coordinated efforts across all sectors. However, Wales currently struggles to do this well, leading to sub-optimal impact, inconsistent approaches to evaluation, and the inefficient use of capital.
- Lack of Innovation in Social Finance: Generally speaking, there is a lack of innovation relating to the financing of social impact projects in Wales. Traditional grant funding mechanisms often fall short, and there is a lack of ambition when designing social impact projects which means we tend to focus on solving specific localised issues rather than taking a holistic, systems-thinking, approach.
A Proposed Solution – The Social Impact Coalition
The Social Impact Coalition for Wales is an industry-led alliance that brings together Wales’ leading businesses, charities, public bodies and academic institutions. United under one banner, we share a commitment to better coordinate our efforts and – collectively – tackle Wales’ most complex social and environmental challenges.
The Social Impact Coalition will serve as a ‘doing’ platform to help us address the challenges outlined above and aims to build a stronger foundation for delivering social impact in Wales. We will do so by focussing on:
- Unified Social Impact Leadership: Establishing a strong, diverse leadership group to guide and coordinate our collective efforts under a common framework, aligned with the Well-being of Future Generations Act.
- Cross-Sectoral Collaboration: Enabling high-impact cross-sectoral partnerships with the potential to affect systemic, nation-scale change.
- Leveraging Private Capital: Securing significant levels of investment from businesses, benefactors and global impact funders to drive social initiatives here in Wales, for the benefit of our communities.
- Innovative Financing Models: We will advocate for new models of social finance and provide a collaborative space for leaders from the public and private sectors to explore emerging solutions.
Why Wales?
Wales faces some big challenges, but we benefit from a rich history of social entrepreneurship and transformative community action. It is the birthplace of both the co-operative movement and the National Health Service, and it is now home to one of Europe’s most established third sectors.
We also have the world’s first Well-being of Future Generations Act, which legally mandates long-term, sustainable thinking in decision-making across public bodies.
Put simply, we know what good social impact looks like, and – when we work together – our small scale enables us to achieve great things quickly.
Many of Wales’ leading businesses, public bodies, and NGOs are already doing good work in this space, making a real and valuable difference within the communities they serve.
However, I believe that by working together, we could achieve even more. I believe that by working together, we can drive systemic change at the scale and pace necessary to meet the challenges we face. I believe that by working together, we can develop a new Welsh model for delivering social impact; one that enables us to make better use of our limited resources, achieve more than the sum of our parts, and ensure a brighter, fairer future for Welsh communities.
We are still at an early stage of developing this approach, and we will be formalising the founding coalition shortly. We are mindful, however, that we can only achieve our ambitious aims by ensuring a diversity of voices shapes our work from the earliest stage.
If you would like to join us or otherwise support our efforts, get in touch – https://www.socialimpact.cymru/
