There was money sitting in dormant bank accounts in the UK until a decade ago, but it's now being used to create jobs and improve the lives of people in some of the country's poorest areas, the Guardian reports.
Thanks to the British government's dormant assets fund, which was established in 2000 to take advantage of the country's " golden age" of capitalism, hundreds of millions of dollars have been made available to community organizations in some of the country's most troubled areas.
"By giving local entrepreneurs access to the finance and support they need to grow their business models, often in places where standard forms of investment are hard to secure, it enables them to boost the local economy, get more people into work and help people struggling with the cost of living," says James Westhead of Big Society Capital, one of several organizations that have received funds from the fund.
"The current funding model has been so successful that earlier this year we launched Local Access Redcar & Cleveland and Hartlepool," Westhead says.
"If we're able to set up this kind of initiative now, just imagine what we could achieve if the government doubled the money available through this second round of dormant asset funding." Read the Entire Article
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Ganesh Natarajan is the Founder and Chairman of 5FWorld, a new platform for funding and developing start-ups, social enterprises and the skills eco-system in India. In the past two decades, he has built two of India’s high-growth software services companies – Aptech and Zensar – almost from scratch to global success.