Happy Birthday, Purple Shoots!
Richard Kirtley, Jul 24, 2026
Thirteen years is an odd anniversary.
It’s long enough to know whether an idea works, but short enough to remember why you started.
When Purple Shoots was founded in 2013, the proposition was remarkably simple: people who had been excluded from mainstream finance still had good business ideas. A poor credit history wasn’t the same thing as poor judgement. Someone claiming benefits could also become an entrepreneur. With affordable finance, practical support and someone willing to back them, people could build businesses that changed not only their own lives but the communities around them.
Thirteen years on, that idea has been tested hundreds of times over.
Since joining Purple Shoots four and a half years ago, I’ve had the privilege of seeing that philosophy put into practice. I’ve met entrepreneurs who had been turned away elsewhere, people balancing businesses alongside caring responsibilities, individuals rebuilding their lives after illness, unemployment or homelessness, and countless people who simply needed one organisation prepared to look beyond a credit score.
The stories are all different, but they share something in common. Very few people come to us asking for sympathy. They come asking for opportunity. That distinction matters.
Too often, discussions about poverty focus on what people lack. We talk about deprivation, barriers and disadvantage. Those things are real, and they shouldn’t be ignored. But after four and a half years at Purple Shoots, I’ve become convinced that we don’t spend enough time talking about potential.
Potential is everywhere. Opportunity isn’t.
That’s the gap Purple Shoots has spent thirteen years trying to close.
The evidence increasingly suggests that this isn’t simply the right thing to do; it’s the economically sensible thing to do.
Our latest impact analysis found that every £1 invested in Purple Shoots generates £4.20 in returns to HM Treasury, through increased tax revenues and reduced demand on the welfare system. Beyond that, every £1 invested creates £14.25 of wider economic benefit within local communities. Those aren’t abstract figures. They’re the cumulative effect of hundreds of people creating income, spending locally, employing others and building businesses that simply wouldn’t have existed without access to fair finance.
Perhaps the most striking thing about our work, though, is who we support.
More than 70% of our borrowers are receiving benefits when they first approach us. Almost 60% have already been rejected elsewhere. Nearly a quarter tell us they were advised not to apply for finance at all.
Think about that for a moment.
Not declined.
Discouraged from asking in the first place.
Yet, given the opportunity, many of those same entrepreneurs go on to build sustainable businesses, repay their loans and contribute to their local economies.
That should make us question some of the assumptions we’ve built into our financial system.
We often confuse financial history with future potential. We use yesterday’s circumstances to predict tomorrow’s possibilities. But entrepreneurship has always been about people doing something that the data couldn’t quite foresee.
That’s what I’ve learnt during my time at Purple Shoots.
The loan itself matters, of course. But what we’re really providing is belief, expressed in a practical form. We’re saying that someone’s idea deserves a chance to succeed or fail on its own merits, not because an algorithm decided they looked too risky before they’d even begun.
As Purple Shoots celebrates thirteen years, that’s probably the achievement I’m proudest to be part of.
Not simply the number of loans we’ve made or the businesses we’ve helped to create, important though those things are.
It’s that, for thirteen years, this organisation has quietly challenged one of the most persistent assumptions in finance: that exclusion and potential are somehow the same thing.
They never were.
And after thirteen years, the evidence is becoming impossible to ignore.