Welcome to the latest round up of Impetus news! In this issue:

Impetus turns 21! • We talk to Labour List about lessons from our work with charities • Are you subscribed to our policy newsletter, Impetus Insights? • Impetus Leadership Academy update • Careers

This is the online version of our quarterly 'News Bites' newsletter. Subscribe to our newsletters to get News Bites direct to your inbox every quarter:

Happy Birthday!

In 2002 when the Impetus Trust was founded, it was the first organisation in the UK to apply a venture philanthropy approach to achieving social change. Following a merger with the Private Equity Foundation in 2013 and a rebrand in 2019, Impetus and our unique model is going strong. We now support 25 high potential charities providing them with the funding and the tools to grow and deliver on their promises to the young people they serve. But we don’t stop there. We take the lessons we learn and influence government and the wider sector to help transform the lives of many more young people.

Even good charities can get better – and getting better means more young people succeeding. We provide the expertise, the funding, and the support to help charities on a journey to real impact.

- Nat Sloane, Co-Founder of Impetus

Watch this space for more on our 21st Birthday celebrations over the next few months.

A Driving Impact workshop with our charity partner Generation UK

Lessons from our charity impact work

For every new charity that joins our portfolio, we run four, day-long ‘Driving Impact’ workshops to kick off our work with them. With their senior management teams we explore areas like how their interventions can support more young people, their mission, outcomes and who they want to focus on serving.

With seven new charities joining us over the last eight months, you can imagine how busy we have been!

What lessons have we learned in more than 20 years of running these workshops to help charities increase their impact? We wrote for Labour List about how they would translate to government and what being mission-led means in practice.

The charities in our portfolio all have one thing in common; they’ve taken the brave step of holding themselves to account for the missions they want to achieve. This means seeking the unvarnished facts, searching your soul when you get it wrong, but holding the blueprint for impact in your hands when you get it right.

- Sophie Manning, Investment Director

Education and employment policy insights

Have you read our new policy newsletter yet? Impetus Insights takes a monthly dive into the latest news, articles and ideas about education and employment policy - and what we think it means for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, along with updates on our own policy work.

The June edition looks at:

• A recent Higher Education Policy Institute survey which suggests the average time spent reading each UCAS personal statements is two minutes
• New research that finds employers want extroverted employees – an interesting insight into what drives the employment gap
• An update on our work on school absence with Public First, School-Home Support, and our charity partner, Khulisa

Our focus is on the outcomes that we know work to improve the life chances of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds – educational attainment, access to higher education and sustainable employment.

- Ben Gadsby, Head of Policy and Research

Impetus Leadership Academy update

As we begin interviewing for our third cohort of the Impetus Leadership Academy who will start in September, the current cohort have been taking part in masterclasses on fundraising and finance, with insights from the Impetus team and also our co-investment partners CD&R.

ILA members also spoke at our event 'Building truly diverse organisations’ earlier this month. The room heard from our expert panel of Sherine Mahmoud, Head of Exchange Programme, Forward Institute; Raj Tulsiani, Founder and CEO, Green Park and Louis Howell, Founder & Director, 7PK and Revolution Hive, as they tackled topics including:

• The importance of living cultural values
• The role of leaders in creating space for honest discussion
• How to ensure power and decision-making structures reflect the diversity of an organisation

Careers

We’re looking for three new team members:

• Director of Philanthropy and Partnerships
• Investment Manager
• Executive Assistant

For many of you it won't have escaped your notice that this means our hugely talented Director of Philanthropy and Partnerships, Harriet Gugenhiem, will be sadly leaving Impetus in late October.

Harriet has been an invaluable senior colleague, supporting Impetus in every possible way to deliver our mission over the last 8 and a half years – strengthening our people, culture, charity partners and relationships with our donors. She played a key role in helping Impetus win the £200m Youth Endowment Fund contract in 2019, has been relentless in growing our income from existing and new sources, has taken our events to new heights and brought in the funding partners to enable us to implement our multi-fund strategy. We'll really miss her.

The good news is that this is a brilliant role for someone out there. We're looking for someone to develop and implement a strategy that grows philanthropic, sponsorship, events, partnership funding and grant income for Impetus directly, as well as for the organisations we support.