...and who get’s left outside it.
By Richard Kirtley, Apr 17th 2026
There has come a point in my work of Purple Shoots where the individual stories begin to blur into something larger. Where what first arrives as a single conversation, a single situation, a single person trying to take a step forward, slowly begins to reveal a pattern that sits beneath it, and over the past few months at Purple Shoots, that pattern has been coming into sharper focus in a way that feels both clarifying and, at times, quietly unsettling, not because it is unexpected, but because of how consistent it has become.
What we see, day in and day out, are people who are ready, often more ready than they realise themselves, with ideas that are grounded in real experience, with skills that have been built over years, sometimes decades, and with a determination to build something that offers not just income, but a sense of stability and dignity, yet despite all of this, they find themselves caught at the very earliest stages, not because the idea lacks merit or because the person lacks capability, but because the systems that sit around them were never really designed to accommodate the reality of their lives, and so what should be a starting point becomes, instead, a barrier.
It shows up in ways that might seem small on the surface but carry significant weight in practice, where access to something as basic as a business bank account becomes uncertain or delayed, where a lack of formal credit history is interpreted not as absence but as risk, where past financial difficulty is treated as a permanent characteristic rather than a moment in time that someone has worked hard to move beyond, and what is striking is not the presence of these barriers in isolation, but the way they repeat themselves with such regularity that they begin to feel structural rather than incidental.
Much of our recent work, particularly through ongoing conversations around improving access to finance for ethnic minority business owners, has only reinforced this, as we continue to meet individuals who are already trading, already generating income, already contributing to their local economies, and yet remain excluded from the very systems that are supposed to support enterprise, not because they are doing anything wrong, but because they do not align neatly with the assumptions that those systems have been built upon, and those assumptions, more often than not, remain invisible to the institutions that hold them.
What this has begun to do, almost without us setting out with this intention, is to help us see the edges of that system more clearly, to understand where it holds firm and where it begins to fracture, to recognise the points at which people fall through not as anomalies but as outcomes, and in doing so, to shift our own perspective from simply responding to need towards understanding the conditions that create it.
At the same time, and just as importantly, we are seeing what happens when even a small part of that system is approached differently, when time is given for someone to properly explain their situation rather than being reduced to a set of metrics, when underwriting becomes something relational and iterative rather than a one-off decision, when support is not something that sits at the margins but is integrated into the financial journey itself, and while the results of this approach are rarely immediate and almost never linear, they are nonetheless real, visible in the gradual movement of people who might otherwise have remained stuck, and in the confidence that begins to build when someone feels seen rather than assessed.
This is not work that lends itself to simple narratives of scale or efficiency, and it does not produce clean, headline-friendly outcomes, but it does begin to challenge a deeper assumption that sits at the heart of the current system, which is that exclusion is somehow inevitable, when in reality it is the product of design choices that have been made, often unconsciously, about who fits and who does not, and once that becomes visible, it opens up the possibility that those choices can be made differently.
There is something quietly significant in that realisation, because it suggests that the role of organisations like Purple Shoots is not limited to operating within the gaps that exist, but can extend to helping redefine the shape of the system itself, whether through the way we lend, the partnerships we build, or the insights we share, and while much of this is still emerging, still taking form through practice rather than theory, it does feel as though we are moving into a space where the work is not only about supporting individuals, as vital as that remains, but about contributing to a broader shift in how financial systems understand and respond to the people they are meant to serve.
The stories will always begin with individuals, and they should, because that is where the work is most human and most grounded, but taken together, they are beginning to tell us something more, something about the limits of the current model and the possibilities that sit just beyond it, and if we are willing to keep paying attention, to keep listening carefully to what those stories are showing us, then there is an opportunity here not just to support people more effectively within the system as it stands, but to play a small part in reshaping it into something that works, more consistently and more fairly, for everyone.