History
Shared Interest was the brain-child of Mark Hayes, then an investment banker with 3i, now an academic economist at Cambridge, who was the first Managing Director from 1990-1999. Inspired by the success of Traidcraft in harnessing socially responsible investment for the finance of fair trade, Hayes approached Traidcraft founder Richard Adams in 1986, beginning a collaboration that culminated in the formation of Shared Interest in 1990 as a special form of co-operative saving and loan society.
The initial £100,000 funding (subsequently repaid) for the launch of the Society came from Traidcraft, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, and a similar co-operative established in 1975 in the Netherlands, now called Oikocredit. However the creation of Shared Interest was finally made possible by the action of SIAL (Scottish Churches Action for World Development Investment Association Limited), an Oikocredit Support Association, who provided the first 200 members and £300,000 of capital. Oikocredit was Shared Interest's main channel for lending in its first five years.
Once Shared Interest had reached a capital of £4m (1994), a planned transition took place to establish its own lending business by the creation of a clearing house with what is now the World Fair Trade Organization, to finance directly fair trade between the Global North and Global South and increasingly within Southern markets themselves. Shared Interest continued to support Oikocredit by the issue of loan stock until 2005, after which the opportunity arose for Oikocredit to establish its own UK presence once again through voluntary Support Associations.
Read more about this topic: Shared Interest
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)
“When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?”
—David Hume (1711–1776)