Interview – Danyal Sattar


INTERVIEW – DANYAL SATTAR


“In recession after recession, there has always been a surge of interest in social investing.”


With the UK heading for what is believed to be an unprecedented downturn, Big Issue Invest chief executive Danyal Sattar tells Mark Dunne about how investing to make a social impact could help.


How has the lockdown been for you? Just like everyone else, we have been get- ting to grips with what this new normal looks like. We are a non-profit social enterprise that has about 20 members of changed


our working practices


staff. We in


response to the virus before the lockdown and are struggling to serve our clients from home just like everyone else. We invest in about 200 organisations, with around 170 on our lending side and the


rest in our fund management portfolios. Like any other business in the UK, we have had to adapt.


16 | portfolio institutional July 2020 | issue 94


We invest in some extraordinary organi- sations. Connection Crew is a good exam- ple. They fit everything for events, from setting up tables and chairs to building entire sound stages. The reason why they are a social enterprise is that they initially employed homeless people. To this day, about a fifth of their workforce at any one time is homeless. You can imagine what it’s like when you rely on events and a pandemic happens. They went from looking at a healthy order book for March and April to literally zero. How do we support organisations like


that through this? Simple: we had to do what every financial organisation had to do, which is to freeze loans, increase cap- ital payments and reinvest. Connection Crew is one of those busi- nesses. We offered a loan to help them hibernate through this time because they know that as soon as this comes to an end, whenever that is, organisations will need to set up events.


They had one final bit of business before they hibernated, which was helping to fit out the Nightingale Hospital at the ExCel Centre in London. That was a little bit of good news for them.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44