Making evergreen funds work for local authorities

So what is an evergreen fund? Quite simply, it is a pool of money that is used to make a range of equity investments - for our clients that usually means in housing connected projects so that the investments are secured - that fit with their objectives. For councils for instance, those investments are typically in the council’s own borough or region. Whilst they tend to start quite small (particularly if it’s a pilot) over time it creates a vehicle which eventually becomes self financing and can even give the organisation a return over and above the core delivery of housing strategy objectives.

Over time this builds into a pot that is self financing and, with careful management, continues to grow (some angel investment groups take this approach for instance). The limitation is that those investments need to be equity based (real assets) which can give a return, rather than services which typically have limited revenue generation opportunities.

And the benefits are great: it is easy to flex the pool of funding between investments as opportunity or need arises (and often without having to go through a long and difficult procurement or planning process). Gemini can help you keep track of it all through our online Business Intelligence tools giving you near realtime access to the data so that you can drill down to a very granular level to discover what is really useful. And we can help you run the whole fund or simply manage the loans through their own suite of mortgage and loan management tools depending on the availability of your own resources.