The chairman of The Big Issue and chief executive of Big Issue Invest because...

• • As chair of The Big Issue, Nigel Kershaw used to manage the magazine's publishing operations and has developed several social businesses. As CEO of one of those initiatives, Big Issue Invest, he's now overseeing a £4m fund that provides loans of between £50,000 and £500,000 to social enterprises such as Jamie Oliver's Fifteen, and Pines Calyx, an environmentally sustainable conference centre near Dover.
  
  • He's a social entrepreneur who's not afraid of making money. "There's nothing wrong with having profit," says Kershaw. "It's how you reinvest it that's key. We have to know that our clients are sustainable, profitable businesses because we're not a charity."
  
  • He's proud of the team he and Big Issue founder John Bird have assembled for Big Issue Invest. Combining big City talent and social banking experts, the team shares a common vision: "In most financial institutions, the deals are the end. With us, the mission is to effect social change—the deals are just the means to that end," says Kershaw.
  
  • He's a creative thinker who's looking at how the business models of the City can be applied to social enterprise. "We want to nick all the City's ideas and just adapt them," he says. "I think you can learn from anything. A social hedge fund? I think it can be done."
  
  • He plans to turn private equity on its head by creating a £10m buy-out syndicate that instead of stripping assets and slashing jobs will buy companies and turn them into social enterprises. "I want to give private equity investors an opportunity to give something back, though not by way of charity. We want people to invest in social businesses where year after year they see both a social and a financial return."
  
  • He's excited about Big Issue Invest's latest venture—a social credit scheme that will give the financially excluded access to credit. "It'll take hundreds of thousands of people away from predatory lenders," he says. "What's more, we've created a new model for assessing creditworthiness that will completely change the marketplace."
  
  • He maintains a sense of wonder at what Big Issue Invest is achieving. "We've funded a gas fitting and maintenance company and 75 per cent of its workforce are young kids from some of the UK's most deprived wards. The business sounds mundane but with the proper training those kids are getting, that's three generations of welfare dependency cracked."