On 29 December 2025, it’ll be 50 years since women in the UK were legally allowed to have a cheque book, open a bank account, or get a mortgage without a man’s permission. (Yes, really. Nineteen. Seventy. Five. Let that sink in.)
Fast forward half a century and here we are at Kindred – possibly the only social financial system designed and led by Black and white women in the UK. And it’s not just for women; it’s for any social entrepreneur around here who doesn’t have access to money. That’s what happens when women get involved: we include people.
Here’s the thing. Every other bit of social finance seems determined to take the old financial system – the one designed by rich white men to protect their wealth, their interests, their rules – and somehow use it to create “inclusive economies”. A system designed to exclude us… is used to include us (*put the exploding head emoji right there*). It’s like knitting a jumper out of barbed wire and wondering why we bleed.
When we don’t quite fit the criteria; when the rates of return on our inherited poverty don’t deliver the percentage over gilt (or guilt) required; when the assessment prices the risk to wealth (but never the risk of poverty, or the price of inequality), we are offered extra support, a mentor, told to ‘believe in yourself’ – and taught financial literacy in a language we don’t want to speak.
This system wasn’t built for us. It wasn’t built for most people, to be honest. It certainly wasn’t built for the social economy. And yet we are asked to squeeze ourselves in, reshape ourselves, and call that inclusion.
Meanwhile, we just… didn’t. We built something else.
Kindred was co-designed by the people it serves. Originally 150 – now 1,500 – socially-trading organisations across the Liverpool City Region built Kindred together, and the evidence is piling up: it works for the people the current system doesn’t work for. It works because it shares power, and money, between us. It works because it centres values and reciprocity amongst us. It works for 51% women founders, 31% of Black and minority founders and 100% ‘can’t get a loan from anyone else’ founders, who make up Kindred's investment book and the 1,500 membership pipeline.
It works because Black and white women and men, with lived experience of financial exclusion – not banking – run it, shape it, steward it and serve the entrepreneurs – and the places – it exists for. Kindred money isn’t my money or your money. It’s our money, designed to oil the wheels of inclusion, accelerate impact, and grow jobs and turnover at a rate of 20% to 50% year on year in places the market has failed.
This is high growth by any measure – proof that if you want a financial system that delivers inclusion you probably shouldn’t rely on one designed for exclusion. It tuns out those with little money are expert in it.
No one gave us permission to build Kindred and it is just the proof of concept, the prologue. So, 50 years after women were first allowed to sign their own cheques, here’s to signing off on something bigger.
Investors welcome.
Permission not required.
Photo by Documerica on Unsplash