Q&A with Barking and Dagenham Giving and Lightbulb Trust: Lessons on place, impact investing and community power

As part of our ongoing learning focus on place, we spoke with Géraud de Ville de Goyet, Chief Executive of Barking and Dagenham Giving, and Luisa Gockel, Director of Lightbulb Trust, to unpack these questions.

Barking and Dagenham Giving is pioneering community-led investment, launching the UK’s first fund of its kind in 2023. Meanwhile, Lightbulb Trust takes a broader approach to impact investing, supporting tech-driven ventures while maintaining a strong commitment to community-focused grant-making in West London.

In this conversation, Géraud and Luisa share their experiences, challenges, and lessons learned on how funders can empower communities and drive sustainable, locally rooted change.

Luisa, what have been some of the most surprising or eye-opening moments in your impact investment journey?

Lightbulb Trust is still pretty young—just six years old—and from day one, our founders decided we’d do both grant-making and impact investing. We’ve always seen ourselves as a learning organisation, so there was this real appetite to try both and learn as we went.

At the time, we didn’t know many other small foundations doing direct impact investments in tech-based start-ups, but we went for it. It felt like an amazing learning opportunity.

In terms of lessons, there are loads, but one that really stands out is how important trust is. That applies to both grant-making and investing. Trust, transparency, and honesty are key, especially with founders, but also within the investor community.

I was very surprised to hear some of the stories from founders about impact investors being unkind during due diligence calls or not being transparent or responsive when they can’t invest. For me, one key thing is that yes, investing is an important job, and investors play a key role in the ecosystem, but we are not the protagonists here. The founders are starting a business from scratch, often with great personal costs, financially, emotionally, mentally. It's not for everyone, and I really have a huge amount of respect for that. So, I don’t see myself as a gatekeeper to capital. I’m here to serve impact founders. Of course, we’re a small foundation—we can’t invest in everyone. But if we’re not the right fit, we always try to connect them with others. That feels like part of the job.

Géraud, what drew you to impact or social investment, and what have been the key lessons from that journey so far?

Barking and Dagenham Giving is still quite new—we formally launched in 2020—and our first lever for change was through grant-making. Because participation has always been central to our ethos, we naturally leaned into participatory grant-making from the start.

Our interest in investment came a bit later that same year, when we secured a significant chunk of funding—around £1 million, with the promise that more could follow. That opened up the opportunity to explore whether we could apply participatory principles to investing, too.

It's worth saying - terms like “impact investing,” “social investing,” and “social impact investing” are often used interchangeably, but they mean slightly different things. Traditional impact investing often tries to balance social impact with profit. But what we’re focused on is social impact investing—putting money to work in ways that align with our mission, not just the bottom line. And for us, that means participation has to be built into the process, not just in what we invest in, but how we invest.

So we now have three main strands of investment. First, we’ve invested in progressive impact funds and investment trusts - like the Growth Impact Fund, Next Energy Solar Fund, and Snowball. Second, we set up our own blended finance initiative to support local charities and social enterprises, offering them grants, support to become investment-ready, and access to loans. And third, we’ve ring-fenced £1 million to invest in community-owned space. We're working with 20 local residents to shape that vision together.

In terms of lessons, yes, participation takes time. But not much more than a traditional due diligence process. The difference is who’s in the room. Instead of just a closed group of professionals, you're opening the door to wider community involvement. So, it’s more suited to long-term, patient investment. It also fundamentally changes the relationship people have with money.

And it’s not about people versus experts, either. It’s people with experts. You create space for challenge and dialogue. And in my experience, it leads to really thoughtful decisions. I always say - nobody in these groups would suggest drilling into the Arctic to make a quick profit, just so we can give out more grants to the local community. People see the connection between ethics and impact. They think holistically. And that’s the real strength of working as a group.

Q: When you first introduced this initiative to residents, were they skeptical? Given that most hadn’t been involved in financial decision-making before, how did you get them on board?

Géraud: At first, we didn’t quite know how to do it ourselves. We borrowed the methodology we’d used for participatory grant-making. We invited about 40 people to a two-hour workshop, brought in an expert to explain the basics - impact investing, ABC investing, all that - and then said, “right, now we need to design an investment policy together.”

Afterwards, one community leader told me, “It’s lovely to be invited to the party, but I feel like I’ve eaten and drunk too much, I just want to go home!” That really stuck with me. It made us realise this needed a more bespoke approach.

So instead of just running a few workshops, we committed to something deeper. We brought together a group of 15 residents and asked them to work with us over a longer period. We paid them for their time—it cost around £50,000, covering residents’ fees and external consultants—and over seven months, we met regularly to unpack the principles of investing, understand community priorities, and shape something meaningful together.

Looking back on your impact/social investment journey, is there anything you would have done differently? If you had a chance to do it all over again, what would you change?

Luisa: Looking back, I think we should have believed more firmly in our capacity to build a unique approach instead of waiting to feel "ready”. We spent a lot of time quietly learning behind the scenes - testing things, watching others. But in hindsight, there’s a lot of value in “learning out loud” - sharing what we’re unsure about, what’s working, and what isn’t. It creates space for connection and reminds others that they don’t need to have everything figured out either.

As a small, nimble organisation, we’ve always tried to stay curious and open to new ways of doing things. But I’ve realised how often funders operate from a place of fear - fear of getting it wrong, fear of scrutiny, fear of not being robust enough. I know I slipped into that mindset too, asking more and more questions, adding extra layers of due diligence - not because the founders weren’t strong, but because I felt pressure to cover every angle.

Looking back, I wish I’d recognised that sooner. Yes, we need to be responsible and rigorous, but we also need to be brave. Change doesn’t come from playing it safe. Trust, clarity of purpose, and proximity to the people we serve are just as important as any spreadsheet, especially for place-based funding.

Géraud: Sometimes I wonder if we could have been more strategic about how we communicate our work. I often joke that when asked to speak about what we do, I say, "we’ve got no idea," to get people to laugh. But the truth is, there’s some reality in that. People find it refreshing, but it also risks downplaying what I truly believe: that what we’re doing has transformative potential. I worry it’s sometimes seen as just a cool innovation that works in a specific context and can't be scaled or replicated. But I’m convinced the opposite is true. This needs to be scaled and replicated - it could make impact investing so much more meaningful.

I’m now focused on connecting with other places across the country. I've been in conversations where people say, “it’s great what you’re doing, but unless you’re scaling to hundreds of millions, we’re not interested.” But the truth is, we don’t need hundreds of millions - we need just a few million to get things started. The gap between the work of smaller, innovative organisations and the mainstream impact investing market is huge. That’s where the disconnect lies, and figuring out how to bridge that gap and bring those innovations to scale is a key question.

One analogy that comes to mind is from Nassim Taleb, who talks about "skin in the game." He says people should share the consequences of their decisions, good or bad. As a trader, if you make a good investment, you profit; if it’s a bad one, you lose. We’re building on that idea by expanding it. It’s not just the investor who has skin in the game anymore - it’s the whole community. In a participatory, place-based investment context, everyone feels the consequences of those investments. That’s the transformative potential here - expanding the concept of “skin in the game” to the entire community.

Q: As part of our learning programme on place, we’re interested in understanding how to grow the assets and wealth of local communities. While impact investing is one approach, what lessons do you think other places can learn from your work?

Luisa: Growing community wealth needs to go beyond just bringing in capital. It’s about shifting who controls that capital and who benefits from it. From my perspective, it often means investing in leadership, infrastructure, and ecosystems, not just individual organisations in isolation.

First, leadership: How can funding models move beyond just focusing on institutions and start prioritising people? Many of the leaders we work with are overwhelmed and need more support. Investing in training, coaching, and upskilling these leaders is essential to ensure they can grow alongside their organisations.

Second, infrastructure: We’ve seen how important both physical and social infrastructure are to community wealth. Things like neglected playgrounds or underused community centres, for example, often hold deep meaning for local people but require investment to remain places of connection. 

And lastly, ecosystems: There’s no point in pouring capital into a geography, no matter the size, if you’re not strengthening the relationships within it. The goal should be creating a local ecosystem where the sum is greater than its parts. A practical step we’ve taken is launching the Integration Challenge, which supports small-scale collaborations between partners. It’s been incredible to see people excited to collaborate, build trust, and strengthen the social fabric of a place.

Géraud: I agree with everything Luisa has said and would just add that the infrastructure we focus on includes not only physical spaces but also the "soft" stuff - relationships and the networks of organisations that exist. These soft infrastructures are often overlooked, but they’re incredibly important.

In places like Barking and Dagenham, which face post-industrial challenges and high levels of deprivation, we’ve done studies on the social sector. What we found is that despite the high need, there’s a lack of charities or social enterprises to meet it. Many people are providing support informally, but small, volunteer-led organisations often struggle because they don’t have the time or resources to even apply for funding. This creates a vicious cycle where these groups can’t grow, and the lack of funding keeps them stuck.

We’ve been focused on investing time and resources to build collaboration, support partnerships, and create resilience. We’re encouraging people to think beyond small grants, helping them see that they can grow into larger organisations with bigger resources. Funders need to invest in this infrastructure, whether through organisations like ours that focus on building soft infrastructure, or by directly resourcing organisations with unrestricted grants and long-term funding.

Want to find out more? Our 2025 Festival of Learning is now live, so London Funders members can sign up for free sessions where some of these issues will be explored further, including Community Wealth Building 101 with the Democracy Society, and Place based change with The Social Innovation Partnership & Renaisi. For these and other sessions, visit the Festival website here