Jane Newman is International Director at Social Finance, “a not for profit organization that partners with the government, the social sector and the financial community to find better ways of tackling social problems in the UK and beyond.”
Social Finance UK started in 2007. Since then, the organisation mobilised more than £75 million of social investment being behind the first Social Impact Bond. It has also developed and implemented a range of programmes that help with addressing difficult social challenges. This has included providing help to prison offenders, those who are not in education or employment or training (NEETs), rough sleepers and those in poverty. The organisation has also provided thousands of microloans in Wales at an affordable rate, and helped 15,000 families to gain access to nursery places and children’s services for free.
The organisation was responsible for helping to get the Social Investment Bank off the ground, as well as pioneering Social Impact Bonds, Development Impact Bonds, Jam Jar Accounts and a fund known as the Care and Wellbeing Fund. The approach taken to enable the organisation to have achieved so much in such a short time has been to carry out detailed analysis to understand problems in depth from both a finance and social perspective.
Jane Newman´s job consists of developing an international network of impact investment intermediaries in order to develop Social Impact Bonds.
Before Social Finance, Jane was Director of Governance and Company Secretary at The Social Investment Business, the UK’s largest social investor. Most of Jane Newman’s previous career was dedicated to leading international law firm Simmons & Simmons, where she acquired broad international experience, having held positions as Managing Partner in Germany and as head of its Mainland China office.
In the following interview, Jane Newman tells us about what has been her experience of leading Social Finance and explains what is social investment:
You can check I’M Magazine to watch the rest of Jane Newman interview.
Ana Teresa Silva is a journalist, writer and life coach.
After many years as a freelance journalist, working on TV documentaries and for several newspapers and magazines, she founded I’M Magazine, an international digital magazine that covers projects and extraordinary people that are changing the world.
Since 2008 she has been interviewing social entrepreneurs and innovators, futurists and change-makers, thinkers and facilitators from all over the world and sharing compelling life stories, ®evolutionary roads, projects for a sustainable future and ideas in motion…
Ana Teresa is also the Managing Director of a portuguese digital magazine on health and well-being. As a writer, she authored 6 books (one of her novels won a 1st prize fiction award), and she has also written 2 children’s theater plays and a daily TV series. Her last published novel, “Amanhã é outro dia” was published in November 2014 by Talent Hunter Editions.
She works also as a Life Coach and PsyCH-K facilitator.
