Making Impact Investible in the CEE Region – Beyond Grants

Central and Eastern Europe is a region bustling with opportunity when it comes to social entrepreneurship. The Marc Impact Programme, co-founded by ERSTE Foundation, Erste Social Finance, SIMPACT & IFUA Nonprofit, and co-funded by the European Union, is one of the leading initiatives aiming to unlock this potential by providing tailored knowledge and training to entrepreneurs.

High-impact entrepreneurs in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) play a pivotal role in strengthening prosperous and democratic societies. By combining business acumen with a social and/or environmental mission, they demonstrate that purpose and profit can successfully align. Their potential to drive meaningful change at scale is evident, yet largely untapped.

Despite this promise, these entrepreneurs remain heavily dependent on grants. This dependency creates vulnerability and hinders their ability to access sustainable financing and develop the skills required for long-term resilience. As a result, their capacity to scale impact is significantly constrained. Research shows that 80% of high-impact organisations in the region face financial barriers that limit growth and innovation. Structural challenges include low levels of awareness and equity capitalisation, underdeveloped partnerships and ecosystems, limited and unstable revenue streams, the absence of a clear theory of change, insufficient impact measurement practices, a lack of collateral to secure financing and untested innovations constrained by scarce resources.

The Marc Impact Programme was designed to address these systemic barriers, which are critical to unlocking the full potential of high-impact entrepreneurship in CEE and enabling leaders to contribute meaningfully to inclusive and sustainable development. With 15 million people at risk of poverty in the region, Marc empowers bold entrepreneurs to lead change. Co-founded by ERSTE Foundation, Erste Social Finance, SIMPACT & IFUA Non-profit, and co-funded by the European Union, the programme bridges critical gaps in funding and know-how, helping impact enterprises grow, adapt and build a more inclusive, sustainable future.

The first edition of Marc (2024–2025) demonstrated clear advantages for participants. Organisations that took part highlighted the value of personalised advisory tailored to their unique scaling journey, access to relevant funding pathways and impact-centric support instruments, and the long-term support of a regional impact community. Marc’s theory of change model is ambitious: to grow a more resilient social economy sector in CEE, strengthen high-impact entrepreneurs and foster supportive ecosystems around them. Within five years, Marc aims to train 400 ventures across seven countries, of which 30-50% will improve their finance and impact models and 25% will successfully scale or transform their ventures. To achieve this, the impact model is backed by rigorous measurement-tracking outputs (organisations trained), short-term outcomes (organisations reporting improved business and impact skills) and long-term outcomes (organisations that scaled or transformed).

Although Marc has just completed its first year, results are already promising. During 2024–2025, more than 180 entrepreneurs were scouted in Austria, Romania and Hungary. Out of 145 applications, 70 ventures were selected and trained. Among them, 88% declared improvements in their business model, 50% strengthened their impact model and 14 organisations secured external funding across the capital continuum, diversifying their sources and raising €2.9 million between October 2024 and August 2025 to finance their scaling.

The diversity of Marc’s participants reflects the vibrancy of the impact economy in CEE. More than half of the ventures are impact-first enterprises and tech startups with impact, while others include: NGOs with business activity; employment-focused social enterprises; and businesses rooted in organic, natural and traditional values. Many focus on supporting disadvantaged groups, transforming food systems or reducing waste, while others work in culture, education, renewable energy, sustainable mobility or fashion. Many struggle to define and measure impact, particularly in advocacy, and require a wide range of tailored financial solutions, from recoverable grants, impact loans that can convert into grants, social banking and social finance loans to equity and blended capital.

Marc’s ability to deliver its outcomes stems from how it was designed. Even before its launch, the founding partners asked a critical question: Can a single actor, a lone programme or one financial instrument truly shoulder the complexity of today’s intertwined social, ecological, geopolitical and technological challenges? The answer was clear: no. That is why Marc is not just a capacity-building programme, but an entire platform with strong infrastructure and governance, enabling multiple actors — impact advisors, social bankers, investors, finance experts, foundations and even media outlets — to collaborate. Together, they contribute not simply to deploying grants or financing impact, but to making impact financeable, embedding outcomes into the core of investment decisions.

In its first year alone, beyond the co-founding partners, 39 corporate or private volunteers and 36 mentors supported the development of impact enterprises, mobilised by local programme partners — Impact Hub Vienna in Austria, Synerb in Romania, SIMPACT & IFUA Non-profit in Hungary — alongside Erste’s social bankers in each country.

A milestone of Marc’s work is the re:Marc event, the international celebration and pitch day showcasing the first successes of the ventures from the bootcamp. The first edition, hosted at Future Health Lab in Vienna, brought together 80 participants, 10 regional impact investors and 42 Marc ventures that prepared pitch decks, with 9 selected to present on stage and three awarded.

The winners demonstrate the programme’s transformative power. In Romania, Help Autism was able to scale its social franchise model from 7 to 50 centres, signing three franchise contracts, and launching a new therapy centre in Bucharest already. Help Autism also secured a €1m loan from Erste Social Banking in Romania to support growth. In Austria, ByeAgain secured a €350k subordinated loan from Erste in Austria to expand operations, hire staff and increase inventory, enabling them to create 30 jobs for vulnerable people by 2030 while saving 10,000 tons of CO2 through circular economy practices. In Hungary, ssh boards, a social innovator in sustainable straw-based insulation, is moving from surviving solely on traditional grants to exploring a catalytic outcome-linked grant, a crucial step in preparing for future equity investment.

All three awardees gained visibility in national media and across the Erste network, serving as powerful evidence that economic value creation and social value creation can reinforce one another. At the same time, they highlight an enduring challenge: while “convenient” impact ventures — those where financial and societal returns align — may increasingly access financing, “inconvenient” impact ventures remain overlooked by traditional finance. Marc entrepreneurs are showing that balancing inconvenient impact with financial sustainability is difficult, but not impossible.

As Alexandru Aramă, founder of PiciordePlay and a Marc alumnus, reflected: “As a result of the programme, we developed a clearer and more compelling project narrative, which we now use in funding proposals and stakeholder communication. Notably, we received a pre-approval for a social impact loan from BCR Social Finance — our first step toward blended finance. Internally, we gained clarity on our scaling strategy and formalised key processes to support long-term growth.”

The broader question now is how to leapfrog the development of the social economy in CEE: not only to bring impact to capital, but also to bring capital to impact — especially to areas that remain unfunded under mainstream finance logic.

This question is central to ERSTE Foundation’s agenda. As a core shareholder of Erste Group, ERSTE Foundation reinvests a portion of the received dividends through catalytic grants- where no financial return is expected – as well as throughcapital and guarantees offered free of charge or at below-market rates. These resources are directed toward areas of societal impact, which are often overlooked by traditional markets due to risk-return constraints. This commitment led to the co-founding of Erste Social Finance, where ERSTE Foundation holds the majority share and operates as its impact-first investment arm. In practice, the Foundation provides funding to Erste Social Finance at below-market returns, enabling it to extend subordinated loans to high-impact ventures. By supporting organisations that are outside the scope of traditional finance, the Foundation aims to de-risk these ventures and make them investible, transforming impact from something subsidized to something investible.

This is why ERSTE Foundation remains Marc’s principal funder and will continue to support its expansion, alongside new partners eager to leverage philanthropic capital and impact-first financing to strengthen ecosystems and build investment readiness across CEE. With co-funding from the European Union under the EcoVolve project, Marc will expand in 2025–2026 to Croatia, Serbia and the Czech Republic; launch a Marc alumni network across six countries; and bring together even more impact investors. Ninety new entrepreneurs will be trained, with 50% improving their financial and impact models, 25% scaling or transforming and 18 pitching at re:Marc Budapest in 2026.

Marc’s message is clear: impact is designed, not left to chance. Its ambition goes beyond a regional capacity building programme; it is a platform that co-creates ecosystems where impact-first ventures can thrive and where financing models evolve to serve both “convenient” and “inconvenient” impact. In doing so, Marc is reshaping the landscape of high-impact entrepreneurship in CEE, proving that when purpose and profit align, both society and business prosper.

The EcoVolve project — “Evolutionizing Ecosystems for Social Enterprises in the CEE Region” — is a multi-stakeholder initiative co-funded by the European Union. It brings together a consortium of leading institutions including ERSTE Foundation, ERSTE Social Finance, Erste Group Bank, IFUA Nonprofit Partner, SIMPACT, and Impact Europe, under the shared mission to strengthen the social finance infrastructure in Central and Eastern Europe.