Our mission as an organisation is vital and remains unchanged: we find social entrepreneurs with bold solutions to today’s challenges. Through funding and support, we help them realise their potential and create lasting change. To sustain this mission, we continue to review our own operations to ensure that we are serving our social entrepreneurs in the best possible way.

Our expenditure baseline has grown from £7.9m to £9.25m in the last three years. The income from our endowment, the Millenium Awards Trust, only covers a portion of this; the rest we raise through external partners. In the current economic and funding environment, it has become clear that our current cost base is unsustainable.

We carefully considered what a sustainable expenditure baseline would be for UnLtd. Getting to this cost level has required a £1.3M reduction in budget. In January and February, we consulted our team on a 15% reduction in headcount, which we have now done through three rounds of careful consultation and dialogue (including integrating great feedback and ideas from colleagues wherever possible).

This is a real loss for us– we are sad to see 10 valued colleagues go. This is not a plan that we as a Board and Executive team have come to lightly, and we explored many different options in getting to this point. But it is what we must do to ensure we can sustainably achieve our strategy and continue to offer market leading support to social entrepreneurs and break down the barriers that they face.

We have had to say goodbye to great and valued colleagues who have contributed deeply to UnLtd. They have a fantastic record of supporting social entrepreneurs, and we encourage others to consider them for future opportunities in the sector.

At UnLtd, our changes include:

• Recognising that our social entrepreneur support requires ever more pre-application support peer-peer support and data management. We have shifted resources in our Social Entrepreneur Support team to reflect this.
• We have further bolstered our ability to deliver social entrepreneur support, by introducing additional digital, design and delivery capacity into our user journey team.
• We have sharpened and increased our focus on new partnerships, and our delivery and community development capacity with existing partners.
• We recognise that our influencing is most effective when built around partnerships and senior stakeholder engagement. We are stepping down our policy and public affairs work, while continuing to actively contribute to sector collaborations including the Social Economy group, led by Access Foundation, which is so successful in working with social entrepreneurs and government on the campaign for dormant assets to support the sector.

We appreciate and understand that this has not been an easy process for anyone, and that it will continue to be challenging as we take time to process our loss, work through the change that we are experiencing, and reconnect with each other. We will continue to reflect and learn from our experiences. We will always do everything we can to support our fantastic social entrepreneurs and the social enterprise sector. We look forward to working with you towards this shared mission.