Fair for You: taking on the rent-to-own sector with ethical loans for essential household items

Make An Impact Podcast

English - April 28, 2020 14:00 - 21 minutes - 15 MB
Non-Profit Business Entrepreneurship social impact impact social enterprise purpose social venture impact measurement social entrepreneurship purpose-led businesses impact management social entrepreneurs Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed

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Next Episode: How a social enterprise supporting vulnerable people is sustaining itself - Jonny Kinross, Grassmarket

Angela Clements is Chief Executive of Fair for You Enterprise Community Interest Company, an ethical alternative to high cost weekly payment and "rent to own" stores.

Fair for You is a lending company, wholly owned by a charity, providing small loans for people to buy essential items for they homes. It does not give cash loans, it gives access to affordable credit.

On an average Fair for You loan, a borrower will save £500 in interest compared with rent-to-own stores, according to research by the The Centre for Responsible Credit. With an average loan size of £300 this is a staggering amount.

Running this multiple-award-winning social enterprise is Angela's dream job despite the initial "battle for survival and fight for funds" and other challenges competing with huge, well-resourced competitors.

She believes all and any credit should benefit a household, not create legacy debt.

In this episode, Angela describes:

After working in a bank she ran one of the UK's largest Credit Unions for 10 years.When high cost credit expanded it made a huge impact on poverty.The path to launching Fair for You, including the most effective research, why the business plan had to be thrown away, and securing regulatory compliance.Competing with high cost, high interest lenders with enormous marketing budgets.How social investors support Fair for You.The five most important things she learned from market research about people who are vulnerable and need credit for essential purchases. How Fair for You measures its impact and the difference it makes.Making ethical credit mainstream and commercially sustainable.

Hi, I’m Heidi Fisher, the host of the Make an Impact Podcast. I'm an impact measurement expert, passionate about helping you make a bigger impact in the world by maximising the impact your services have.

I can help you to measure, manage and communicate the impact you have better to funders, investors, commissioners and other stakeholders, and to systemise your data collection and analysis so that it frees up time and doesn’t become an additional burden.

I love helping you to measure social and economic impacts, including Social Return on Investment or value for money assessments, as part of understanding the change you make to peoples’ lives.

You can get in touch via LinkedIn or the website makeanimpactcic.co.uk if you’d like to find out more about working with me.