Supporting Phoenix Court's mission to be a good long term neighbour
Phoenix Court Works exists to support Phoenix Court’s mission to be a good long term neighbour and help people realise their full potential. We feel lucky to be based in Somers Town, not only one of the world’s most innovative neighbourhoods for science, technology, and innovation but also one that has an incredible legacy of social justice.
We believe that investment in innovation has a foundational role to play in creating not just economic, but critically, social value that is evenly distributed; and so we call the area which is a five-hour train ride from Phoenix Court New Palo Alto, not because we believe it will become the next Palo Alto but because we want to build a different one, based on values which benefit everyone, not just founders and investors.
New Palo Alto includes cities with great industrial heritages like Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester, and Stoke, as well as world-renowned capitals of culture, policy, and academia like Amsterdam, Brussels, Cambridge, Edinburgh, London, Oxford, and Paris. This dense concentration of capital, talent and business value has made New Palo Alto the world’s second most productive innovation cluster after the Bay Area and now home to over 900 venture-backed companies generating over $25m in revenue, and 210 unicorns each worth over $1bn in 2023.
But against this gleaming backdrop of science, technology and innovation are neighbourhoods, like Somers Town, that have been left behind economically. Sadly this means that even while the economic value produced in this neighbourhood is soaring, 50% of children receive free school meals, 70% of residents receive social care, and adults live 20 years fewer than in leafy Highgate, only 20 minutes up the road. This is not the dividend we should expect or accept in any economy, let alone a G7 one.
We created Phoenix Court Works to help support the long term development of a progressive neighbourhood that closes these gaps and shares the dividends of innovation and economic growth more equitably. We baked this ambition into the economics of our business at Phoenix Court, with an allocation of 10% of the profits of our company and 2% of the profits of our funds to our foundation, Phoenix Court Works. We focus 80% of our grants within a single square mile of our office and now work with over 35 organisations in our neighbourhood.
We hope that, together, we can build a different kind of innovation economy where we can all be excited about new science and technology capable of driving innovation forward at both a social and economic level. As we like to say, it’s taken us 20 years to get to the starting line; now is where it gets interesting.