Big Issue Invest

OVO is a production company that provides various staged productions that include shakespeare productions, thomas middleton, christopher marlowe, anton chekhov, henrik ibsen and j.m.barrie, alongside classics by harold pinter, arthur miller, terence rattigan, caryl churchill and lucy kirkwood.

Nickel Support is a community interest company supporting neurodivergent adults and adults with learning disabilities. The organization has a simple vision, to ensure every trainee they support leads a more fulfilled and purposeful life. Employment is a key focus, but the organization supports trainees in all aspects of their lives.

Emmaus Communities enable people to move on from homelessness, providing work and a home in a supportive, family environment. Companions, as residents are known, work full time collecting renovating and reselling donated furniture. This work supports the Community financially and enables residents to develop skills and rebuild their self-respect.

Arkbound Foundation is a nonprofit organization that aims to promote reading accessibility and diversity in the media sector. They manage initiatives that enable individuals from deprived backgrounds to start their individual media businesses, write to publishing standards, and break into the publishing and media industries. In collaboration with other organizations, they support and mentor emerging writers so they can create works that are widely read and that remove unfavorable perceptions.

East Durham Community Initiatives is a a housing support charity for vulnerable young people.

SouthGen is a Southwold and Waveney Valley-based community benefit society. SouthGen is a charitable community benefit society that is democratically run by its members, on a one member, one vote basis, irrespective of how many shares they own.

Sunderland Home Grown provides opportunities for adults with learning disabilities and mental health problems by creating training and employment opportunities as well as promoting social and therapeutic horticulture.

VU X Earth Limited (“VU”) is a social enterprise, and owner of the Village Underground and EartH Hackney live performance venues in London.

Five Lamps aims to ?transform lives, raise aspirations, remove barriers and offer choice to families, business and communities?. They are a charity that supports the community by re-investing any profit back into the business. They are also known as a social enterprise, registered charity and community development finance institution.

HCT Group is a social enterprise in the transport industry. Their story starts in 1982 with the formation of Hackney Community Transport, providing low cost minibuses for local community groups – a service they provide to this day. In 1993, with traditional grants under threat, they came to the realisation that the best way to become a sustainable social enterprise was to become an effective enterprise. They began to compete for commercial contracts in the marketplace to ensure they could continue to provide community transport. HCT Group service users This approach has seen HCT Group grow from a handful of volunteers and a couple of minibuses, with a turnover of £202k in 1993 – to a large scale social enterprise with 800 employees, ten depots spread across London, Yorkshire, Humberside, the Southwest and the Channel Islands, a fleet of 500 vehicles and a 2013/14 turnover of £43.7m. Their commercial track record spans a wide range of services – from London red buses to social services transport, from school transport to Park and Ride, from community transport to education and training. They now deliver well over 20 million passenger trips on their buses every year. You can find a full breakdown of the services they provide across the group here.

www.stateofambition.org helps young people build support networks around their ambitions. The young person creates a Postcard of Ambition and then they campaign for 21 days to raise their profile and have the right conversations. SoA facilitate this by feeding the campaigns through employee networks at brands in The Movement. This gets the young person with a career ambition, closer to the people already in that industry, whilst giving brands a great way of being attached to a social mission, an easy way to give back, brilliant exposure to a generation of customers and access to a more diverse talent pool. The whole process uses the power of the right company to inspire the next generation with the right influences. Whilst doing this, we also run workshops and talks that inspire young people to be resilient, confident, selfless, fearless and collaborative. 70% of our net profits are used to provide grants and scholarships to young people to help them with their ambitions.

Callbritannia is an outsourced customer call center. It has ten centers across the UK and works with both the public and private sector. It also has a technology partner, Infinity CSS, which offers to optimize call processes and duration, reduce repeat calls, improve call outcome results, achieve significant outbound productivity gains, and simplify compliance and reporting.