CIVA is an innovation centre and charity that has spent decades backing social entrepreneurs and experimenting with how philanthropic capital can support social change. Its approach combines grants, loans, investment, fiscal hosting and practical incubation, aiming to help ventures become more enterprising, financially resilient and capable of generating lasting social impact.
CIVA (the Centre for Innovation in Voluntary Action) was founded in 1995 by Michael Norton CBE, who also founded the Directory of Social Change.
CIVA operates in a space many capital providers find difficult: the early, ambiguous stage where an idea may be promising, but not yet fundable in conventional terms. The entrepreneur may not yet have enough evidence, revenue, operating maturity, governance structure or investor-readiness. Yet without early support, many strong ideas never get off the ground.
CIVA has responded to this gap by acting as infrastructure as well as a funder.
The core design question is: how can philanthropic capital help social entrepreneurs build lasting organisations, whether they operate for profit or not?
Underneath that sit several practical questions:
- When should support be a grant, loan, investment, revenue share, or something else?
- How can philanthropy support for-profit social innovation without simply creating private gain for shareholders?
- How can social entrepreneurs build income and resilience rather than remaining dependent on grants?
- What might reciprocity look like? Could successful beneficiaries contribute money, skills or support back into the ecosystem?
- Could foundations use more of their endowments themselves to create social change?
CIVA's approach reflects Norton's willingness to treat philanthropy itself as something to experiment with. Instead of starting with a fixed distinction between grants and investment, or between charities and businesses, CIVA starts with the social outcome and asks what combination of structure, support and capital might help achieve it. That has sometimes meant grants or fiscal hosting; elsewhere loans, bridging finance, equity investment or experiments with other forms of return.
Not every experiment works. Norton points candidly to investments he now believes CIVA structured wrongly, alongside others that opened up new possibilities. That willingness to act, learn and revise is part of the model.
CIVA’s value lies in how it blends roles that are often separated. As an early investor, it can take risks before the organisation fits conventional metrics. As a fiscal host, it can provide the legal and financial container that allows new projects to operate before they have their own infrastructure. As a donor-advised fund holder, it can help donors move money into social innovation more responsively. As a partnership broker, it can pool relationships and resources around work that no single actor could easily support alone.
CIVA's flexibility brings governance questions. Some of its capital has originated in family philanthropy, making a diverse and engaged board important in testing judgement and widening decision-making beyond individual donors.
But the deeper challenges are structural. Social innovation increasingly crosses the conventional boundaries between charity and business. A for-profit company may be creating significant public benefit; a charity may need to become much more enterprising; and a venture may move between organisational forms as it develops.
This challenges philanthropy to rethink its role - not simply as a grant-maker, but as a source of capital, experimentation and enterprise in pursuit of social change.
CIVA does not claim settled answers. Its role has often been to make these questions practical by experimenting with them.
CIVA treats philanthropy not simply as a source of grants, but as a form of capital capable of experimentation. Its role is sometimes to fund what others will not, sometimes to provide infrastructure, and sometimes to ask whether the conventional boundaries between grant-making, investment and enterprise are still useful.
It is a reminder that not every social entrepreneur needs to become investment-ready, and that capital serves best when it is designed around what the work needs.
- Enterprise is not the same as becoming investable. Social entrepreneurs can build revenue, resilience and reciprocity without necessarily entering conventional capital markets.
- Philanthropic capital can take many forms. Grants, loans, bridging finance, equity, revenue participation and hosting can be combined around what the work needs.
- The charity/business boundary is becoming more porous. For-profit social innovation creates new questions about public benefit, private gain and how philanthropic capital should participate.
- Experimentation matters. New financial models develop through trying things, learning from what fails and sharing that learning.
- Endowments are part of the design question. Foundations can ask not only how they spend their income, but how the assets they hold might themselves contribute to social change.