Frontier Brokers’ 2020 in Review- Collective Achievements in Unprecedented Times
As 2021 begins, our network wanted to reflect on the exciting yet unprecedented year past, acknowledging that for many social entrepreneurs and supporters of social entrepreneurs, it has been a more financially-stressful time than ever before.
For us, COVID-19 resulted in barriers and delays to project implementation, as many financial service providers focused instead on emergency financial situations, coupled with investors’ hesitance to commit capital.
The Frontier Brokers Network ultimately built back better in 2020, working to achieve significant milestones despite the barriers and limitations we faced- individually, and as a network. We believe that our network achievements can be attributed to two things: utilising the power of technology, and our unique approach to partnerships and collaboration.
“Anticipating the economic effect of the pandemic on social enterprises, we have been very responsive and…able to work around the situation by utilizing our digital tools… We took advantage of the fact that despite the travel restrictions, people can actually move freely at home through online webinars and training. As a matter of fact, we were even able to surpass [some of our targets].”- Equity @ Scale
Scaling Frontier Innovation initiatives such as the Frontier Brokers were identified as part of SFI’s 2020 Partnership Study to have a unique approach to partnership, and in particular, aspects such as leadership, decision-making, and reflection. This was linked with increased efficiency, accountability and improved overall communication.
So… what did Frontier Brokers achieve in 2020?
As of November 2020, our network had facilitated AUD 7.2 million in debt and equity across seven social enterprises.
We had also trained 2,139 stakeholders in Gender Lens Investing (GLI) between April and December 2020- a huge leap from the 554 investors trained in the previous period, as highlighted in the below graphic.
Our network has also nearly doubled the resources we disseminated in this period, from 30 in April 2020 to 54 total as of October 2020.
In fact, one of the network’s 2020 highlights was the collaborative development and launch of our GLI animation in December. Our video was subtitled in English, and multiple Asia-Pacific languages, for ongoing use amongst as well as beyond our network. So far we have had interest from the ecosystem to further subtitle the video in Vietnamese and we are in the process of completing this additional language!
To top off our year, the Brokers were selected as an Impact Market Builder of the Year Finalist in the December 2020 Australian Impact Investment Awards!
What’s in Store for 2021?
These results represent a small selection of our achievements together as a network in 2020. We look forward to sustainably continuing our collaboration and knowledge sharing into 2021, to continue to promote GLI through unbiased lending and training opportunities, and direct capital to social enterprises across Asia-Pacific for continued positive outcomes. We’re grateful to our MEL partners, Moonshot Global and Living Collaborations, for gathering and collating data on network progress, and are excited to continually measure impact — which is part of our commitment as a network.
Excitingly, our network will continue to share learnings and collaborate on the development of new, free-to-use resources. Follow us on Linkedin and YouTube if you haven’t yet, so that you can keep up to date with our bigger and better achievements in 2021- we’ll have some exciting new projects coming your way soon!
More information on the Frontier Brokers Network can be found on our website: https://www.scalingfrontierinnovation.org/initiatives/brokers/
Or follow us on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/frontier-brokers-network/
