Grant Round: Finding our next charity partner
Will you apply to our social and emotional learning (SEL) grant round?
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Impetus today announces grants to the Jon Egging Trust, Khulisa and Kids Inspire.
In backing these charities, Impetus will be supporting three new organisations who support young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to develop social and emotional learning (SEL) skills.
These new investments build on what we’ve already invested in the charities Football Beyond Borders and West London Zone, meaning we have now committed over £2.1m to supporting charities developing young people’s SEL skills.
Alongside financial grants, all of our charity partners receive co-investment opportunities, access to our world-class pro bono network and the dedicated support of our Investment team, who help their leadership to deliver meaningful, benchmarking beating, sustained outcomes for young people. Together, these charities support over 7,500 young people per year.
We can’t wait to start working with these three high-potential charities. It’s crucial that young people have the opportunity to build their social and emotional learning skills - we will work shoulder-to-shoulder with these charities to help them become stronger organisations that transform the lives of the young people they serve.
- Tanya Curry, Interim Chief Executive, Impetus
Why these three organisations?
We received over 190 applications to become an Impetus charity partner through our SEL grant round - our first ever open grant round.
We ran a rigorous process to select these three organisations. We reviewed each application thoroughly and paired responses with desk-based research to reach a shortlist of 20 organisations. We then had calls with the CEOs of each shortlisted organisation to review their leadership, programme, impact and growth potential. Finally, after identifying our top three, we spent eight weeks carrying out further due diligence while building partnership potential with each charity.
Through this process, we got to know these three organisations well - so, what jumped out at us about the Jon Egging Trust, Khulisa and Kids Inspire?
The Jon Egging Trust (JET) is a well-networked and high-potential organisation.
JET was founded in 2012 by their inspirational CEO, Dr Emma Egging OBE. Emma has led the organisation impressively, building a strong and talented team dedicated to JET’s mission and developing key partnerships.
JET offers long-term support to vulnerable young people who are struggling to engage at school and may have lost focus, confidence and self-belief. JET's programme combines unique team building and workplace experiences in the STEM, military, space and business sectors – intentionally designed to develop social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies – with in-school sessions to translate learning into the classroom and inspire engagement with learning.
They have grown from working in a single school, to 48 schools across the last decade, reaching 687 young people through their ‘Blue Skies’ programmes across predominantly underserved rural areas of the UK including North Wales, East Anglia, and the South-West.
Khulisa is a highly impact-focussed organisation, with firm foundations in place and a hugely talented CEO.
They have worked in the UK for the past 15 years, working with marginalised or excluded young people whose behaviour is deemed challenging or anti-social, and equipping them with the skills to choose alternatives to violence and crime.
Working in schools in London and the North West, Khulisa delivers their flagship programme, Face It, an intensive, therapeutically-led six-week programme aimed at improving young people’s SEL skills. They also deliver an SEL Curriculum and trauma training to staff in schools.
Khulisa’s programmes are proven to be effective in reducing re-offending and improving participants’ mental health and wellbeing and they are currently going through an independent evaluation testing the impact of their programme on young people's educational outcomes. Since launching their first pilot in 2009, they have delivered over 230 behaviour change programmes and delivered mentoring support to more than 3600 offenders and young people.
Kids Inspire has grown significantly over the last 2 years as demand for their support has risen.
They expect to deliver therapeutic services to nearly 2,000 young people this year across Essex and Suffolk.
Their CEO, Sue Bell OBE, started her career in teaching, working as a Behaviour Support Teacher, before training in psychotherapy and founding Kids Inspire in 2007. With this unique and deep expertise in education and mental and emotional health, Sue is renowned for her work with children and young people, working closely with key stakeholders in the field of clinical research to support the organisation’s delivery and growth.
Kids Inspire provides specialist support, including creative therapies, to support young people and families affected by trauma, distress, or negative experiences. The charity is dedicated to promoting self-awareness, self-resilience, and positive relationship building for young people aged 0-25, helping them to improve mental health and reengage in education.
I am absolutely chuffed to bits that JET has been selected as one of Impetus’ chosen charities. The entire JET team is incredibly excited about how this collaboration will further strengthen our impactful programmes and enable us to transform the lives of even more young people across the UK over the years to come. Thank you, Impetus!
– Dr Emma Egging OBE, CEO, Jon Egging Trust
We're delighted to join Impetus's portfolio of charity partners. With their help, we hope to scale our social and emotional learning programme to reach more young people in schools across the UK. With this greater reach and targeted support from the Impetus team, we hope to build our evidence base to prove that greater wellbeing leads to improved attainment, attendance and engagement for all young people.
– Cara Cinnamon, CEO, Khulisa
Impetus’s expertise and funding will support Kids Inspire to grow in size and impact so that the ever-increasing mental health and social emotional needs of young people are met. Our creative trauma-informed therapeutic services help young people and the adults in their lives to recover from adverse childhood experiences so that they can engage fully in educational and social opportunities and go on to lead emotionally healthy, aspirational and fulfilling lives.
– Sue Bell OBE, CEO and Clinical Director, Kids Inspire
Why social and emotional learning skills?
Social and emotional learning (SEL) is an integral part of children and young people’s development. The Collaboration for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) defines well-rounded social and emotional development as ‘the ability to recognise and manage emotions, develop caring and concern for others, make responsible decisions, establish positive relationships, and handle challenging situations effectively’.
We believe that learning social and emotional skills can help young people to succeed in school, work, and life.
There is strong evidence, from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) and the Early Intervention Foundation, that high-quality SEL interventions can lead to significant learning gains over the course of a year. And we know from our Youth Jobs Gap research that the better your qualifications, the more likely you are to be in employment, education or training after school.
But EEF's evidence also shows that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds aren’t always given the opportunity to develop the social and emotional skills they need at the same rate as their better-off peers.
What next?
In addition to funding, we will also work shoulder-to-shoulder with these charities’ brilliant leaders to help them grow their charities so they can transform the lives of more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
We have also commissioned The Centre for Education and Youth to produce a report on the current state of play of social and emotional learning, including a review of existing research on what works, expert interviews and case studies of the five charity partners. The report will be launched at an event in October, with more details to be released in due course.
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