Social Enterprise Fund
Email: http://socialenterprisefund.ca/contact/
Website: http://socialenterprisefund.ca/
Phone: 780-756-0660
Office Headquarters Address:
9613 111 Ave, Edmonton, AB, T5G 0A9
Background
Year Founded: 2008
Mission & Mandate: To provide support to Alberta’s social enterprises and social entrepreneurs of any corporate structure through access to social finance.
Description: The Social Enterprise Fund provides patient and imaginative capital that is needed by social enterprises to accomplish their mission for public benefit.
Sectors
– Addressing Systemic Racism
– Affordable Housing Biodiversity & Conservation
– Business & Financial Literacy
– Cleantech
– Community and Social Purpose Real Estate
– Community Arts & Media
– Community Economic Development
– Co-operative, Community & Social Enterprise
– Education & Skills Development
– Employment & Training
– Food Security
– Gender Equity
– Green Buildings & Retrofits
– Health & Well-being
– Indigenous Social Entrepreneurship
– Renewable Energy
– Sustainable Consumer Products
– Sustainable Finance
– Sustainable Food, Fisheries & Agriculture
– Sustainable Resource Management
– Sustainable Transportation & Infrastructure
– Youth
Fund Characteristics
Social Enterprise Fund
AUM: NA
Vintage year: NA
Closing year: NA
Fund term: NA
Asset class: Private debt, Private equity, Guarantees
Investor eligibility: Institutional, Accredited
Minimum investment: NA
Geographic scope: Provincial, Alberta
Committed capital: NA
Average investment size: NA
Investee type: All, with provincial or national registry
Investment stage: Seed, Early, Mid, Late
Success Story
Jasper Place Wellness Centre
Edmonton, AB
Social finance investments provide multiple layers of social, environmental and financial value. For example, a SEF investment to a single Alberta non-profit is providing all of the following outcomes (and more):
– The Jasper Place Wellness Centre creates employment for barriered employees (many of whom were previously homeless) paying total annual wages of more than $1M in 2019, in addition to providing the first benefits plan many of these employees have ever had. In the same year, the organization kept more than 80,000 mattresses from the landfill, rescuing and reselling the components to make their business profitable.
– The same organization is using an investment from the SEF to develop and build affordable and supportive housing. Once a building is complete and occupied, the capital will be reused for the development and construction stage of the next property, with more traditional financing partners providing the on-going mortgage at market rates.
– The same organization is using an additional loan from SEF to build a new community centre for their operations, as well as housing another non-profit that provides services to new immigrants (earning rent in the process). The centre will include an expanded medical clinic (fourteen doctors as compared to their current two) and a community kitchen to expand their current food security work.
All of this from a charitable organization that began as a community drop-in centre serving the homeless in a disadvantaged neighbourhood, and largely made possible because they have access to social finance.
