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The NESsT Venture Fund is a philanthropic investment fund providing financial and capacity-building support to a select portfolio of social enterprises owned and operated by civil society organizations in Central Europe and Latin America. All of the social enterprises in the NESsT Venture Fund portfolio are intended to generate revenues to help diversify the financing base and further the mission of the parent nonprofit organization.
The NESsT Venture Fund is intended to further the mission of NESsT to address the limitations of the nonprofit capital market at multiple levels:
At the start of our work in 1997, NESsT recognized a strong need and market opportunity to help local CSOs in the emerging market countries of Central/Eastern Europe and Latin America to diversify their financing base and decrease dependency on an ever-decreasing pool of international donor assistance. However, in order to help CSOs to generate untied, core financing to sustain their activities, NESsT found a significant gap in accessibility to capital for social enterprise activities.
The NESsT Venture Fund was launched in 1999 as a response to two primary obstacles NESsT identified in the nonprofit capital market of Central/Eastern Europe and Latin America:
- Insufficient Capital: CSOs lack access to mainstream financing sources to capitalize their social enterprises. Without such support, CSO self-financing initiatives will fail;
- Insufficient Capacity: CSOs lack sufficient capacity and skills to develop their social enterprise ideas. Without appropriate assistance, CSOs cannot efficiently manage self-financing strategies and could potentially threaten their mission-related activities.
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