The Sleeping Giant Awakens: 5,000 CICs, 1,000 Members and the Microboom Changing Everything

CIC is a sleeping giant. Half-arsed and halfway — that’s where we are right now. But something is shifting.

In November, a record 165 new CICs were incorporated in a single month. We’ve now passed 4,455 on the register, with growth rates that consistently outpace almost any other business form. At current trend, we’ll hit 5,000 sometime in 2011. Let me say that again: five thousand community interest companies, created from nothing in just over five years, with virtually no central support or marketing budget.

The Association hit 1,000 members in December. It was only in October 2008 that a motley crew of around 80 CIC founders gathered in Vauxhall and decided that the CIC legislation needed a voice. Two years later, a thousand organisations have decided that voice is worth joining. If your network can double in a year without a marketing budget, something must be happening.

But I want to be honest about where we are. We’re still in the first phase. I’ve described it as putting up a flag post and doing the odd war dance around it. We’ve established that CICs exist, that they’re growing, that the model works. What we haven’t done yet — what we need the next phase for — is to build the infrastructure that turns a microboom into a macro-effect.

That’s the question I keep coming back to. Can the CIC microboom create a macro-effect? Can a legal structure that was barely noticed by the mainstream media five years ago become a significant force in the UK economy?

I believe it’s inevitable. It’s just a matter of how quickly.

Internationally, the UK is already viewed as having taken a lead. Students and policymakers from other countries come to us to understand how CICs work. We’re seen as pioneers. The JP Morgan report on impact investing, published last year, identified social enterprises as a distinct and growing asset class, and CICs are the most clearly defined legal vehicle for that asset class in the world.

And yet, as I said in July, success brings its own challenges. The funding cliff edge in March will hit many organisations hard. Local government contraction will test business models that depend on public sector contracts. GP commissioning is going to reshape healthcare. Personal budgets will change social care.

These are the conditions in which CICs either prove their worth or fade into irrelevance. I think they’ll prove their worth. I think the combination of commercial flexibility and locked-in social purpose is exactly what the coming environment demands.

We’re not pretending to be the answer to everything. But the growth — 5,000 CICs and counting — deserves some attention. And if we can make the case effectively, maybe even some support.

Not funding for a few chieftains. Funding to get information and investment structures organised.

We’ll do the rest ourselves.