Looking beyond 2025’s data to insights from the last five years of annual reviews, five key themes reoccur every time.
• Money
• Collaboration
• Employment
• Property
• Leadership burnout
Kindred helps STOs raise and manage money and broker collaboration across the sector. What has changed is the scale needed: STOs aren’t just asking for support, they’re asking for more of it, for longer – and for organisations further along in their growth. That’s what Pathfinder’s scale-up support answers directly: more money for organisations ready to grow their impact again.
Responses from 2025 feel less like a new set of issues and more like evidence that investees are moving from start-up problems to scaling and infrastructure problems.
Property is becoming more urgent, not less. Space remains one of the strongest recurring themes across all years and strengthens the case for Pathfinder’s property holding company. STOs tell us, consistently, that secure premises are the barrier standing between them and growth.
While growing organisations continue to invest in staff wellbeing, fair pay and distributed leadership, many remain overly reliant on their founders – leadership burnout is the biggest risk, in spite of growth. Regardless of investment, STOs identify difficulties recruiting and retaining people with the right values and commercial/ social business skills. Naming this honestly, rather than folding it into a tidy solution, is part of the ongoing conversation which needs addressing at a higher level: in commissioning practice, in funder expectations and in how we all talk about sustainable leadership.
What comes next goes beyond the organisations themselves. The evidence shows that the social economy creates good-quality jobs: flexible, rooted in the places that need them most, and often a route back into work for people the mainstream labour market overlooks. It’s catalytic, too, attracting follow-on investment, rather than waiting for external money to lead the way.
By supporting individual organisations, working with partners and connecting them to each other, we strengthen the ecosystem they’re already part of.
What does system change actually look like? It involves building the infrastructure where we can and being honest about where we can’t and where we need to work in partnership.
Kindred’s role has always been to support individual organisations, working with partners and connecting STOs to each other. Pathfinder continues that, with more reach, scope and scale.