Faith in the Impact Economy: A Breakfast Panel at Mansion House
Last week, early on a working morning, we gathered in Mansion House: one of the grandest rooms in the City of London, built to project wealth and permanence. The coffee was poured, the pastries passed around, and faith-inspired investors and entrepreneurs from the UK and across the world sat down together to ask a simple question: what is all this money for?
The Lady Mayor, Dame Susan Langley, gave us the answer in her welcome. The true strength of the City, she said, lies not in the capital it commands but in what that capital can achieve. It is a striking thing to hear in that building. She spoke of a growing partnership between finance, government and business to do good with our collective time, money and talent, and she was clear that capital in the City should deliver positive change as well as profit.
Taking stock
Our UK panel, chaired by Dominic Llewellyn OBE, took stock of where we are. The impact economy now accounts for around 15% of UK GDP. That is not a niche. It is a substantial part of how the country earns its living, and it is growing. Heather Davenport, in her last week at the Office for the Impact Economy, joined Luke Fletcher of Bates Wells and Dame Elizabeth Corley of Schroders to reflect on the progress made and the work still to do.
What emerged was a picture of several forces working together: values, faith, talent and purpose. None of these is enough alone. Values without capital remain good intentions; capital without purpose drifts towards whatever pays fastest. But where they combine, they become a powerful driver of economic and social change.
A global table
We were then joined by Brian J. Grim of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation, who brought with him recipients of the Global Business and Interfaith Peace Awards. Jian Shen, Matt Eyring, Po-Wen Yen and Sanjoy K. Roy spoke about businesses as different as film, literature festivals and transformative employability programmes. Their traditions differ. Their contexts differ. Yet each described faith as something that shapes what a business is for, whom it serves, and how it treats the people who work within it.
This matters to us at the Joseph Centre. We exist to champion dignified work, and dignity is never abstract. It is lived in the body: in the hours someone works, the wage they take home, the respect they are shown, the chance they are given to grow. An employability programme that brings someone back into meaningful work is a recognition that every person has gifts to offer, and that a good economy is one which makes room for them.
Holding the tension
None of this is easy, and the morning did not pretend otherwise. There will be moments when the most profitable decision and the most just decision point in different directions. Faith does not dissolve that tension; it gives us the resources to live within it truthfully. It asks us to see capital as a gift held in trust rather than a possession to be guarded. It reminds us that markets are made of people, and that solidarity is not a luxury we can afford only in good years.
The capital of the City is vast. The question the morning left us with is the one the Lady Mayor posed at the start: not how much there is, but what it can achieve. We left Mansion House convinced that the answer is still being written, and grateful to everyone who joined us in writing it.
Our thanks to Dame Susan Langley, Dominic Llewellyn OBE, Heather Davenport, Luke Fletcher, Dame Elizabeth Corley, Brian J. Grim, Jian Shen, Matt Eyring, Po-Wen Yen, Sanjoy K. Roy, and all who came.
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