Impact Collective was launched pre-Covid in 2019 as a not-for-profit led impact investment initiative for social enterprises. It was a first for WA with collaboration and investment to addressing social and sustainability challenges through impact investing into innovative enterprise models.
Chorus, Rise and Ruah Community Services work collaboratively with social entrepreneurs and change-makers who have business ideas to impact positively on WA communities that align with their organisational missions.
As a collective of leading community services NFP organisations, Impact Collective holds a wealth of sector knowledge, and has been engaged in solving complex social issues for many years.
Impact Collective is working in partnership with Impact Seed, WA’s peak impact investment and social enterprise intermediary, to identify social entrepreneurs wishing to align their enterprise models with the impact areas of the collective, and support them towards impact investment readiness.
Impact Collective received funding from Lotterywest in 2021 to continue its work with impact ventures, and to share tools, templates and lessons from its work more broadly across the WA community services sector.
The upheaval brought by COVID through 2020 has seen unprecedented demand for support services provided by the not for profit community services sector with many hundreds of thousands of West Australians experiencing vulnerability and disadvantage accessing these services last year.
The sector, which employs over 120,000 West Australians in this vital work, is under immense pressure to explore innovative solutions to increased service demand amid funding constraints. The unfolding negative socioeconomic repercussions of COVID has catalysed community demand for a new approach to build back better.
The Impact Collective program focuses on social enterprise initiatives tackling serious issues facing WA communities, such as the rise in Family and Domestic Violence, the lack of transportation options for older people and people with disabilities, the reported increase in loneliness across the community, as well as upskilling the not-for-profit workforce to respond to the changing needs of the industry.