This article was originally published in Philanthropy Impact Magazine: Long-term funding and the road to transformative impact: a case study | Philanthropy Impact Magazine Issue 32 Part 2 | 5 June 2025

The challenges facing young people today stretch across Britain – but they’re particularly acute for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

School absence rates have doubled since the pandemic, while suspensions have risen by 80%. For young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, the situation is even worse: 1 in 3 misses a month of school per year due to absences and exclusions. This compounds an already stark attainment gap – just 43% pass English and maths GCSEs, compared to 73% of their better-off peers, the widest disparity in over a decade. Without these essential qualifications, pathways to stable employment narrow. Today, 987,000 young people are out of education, employment, or training – a 10-year-high – and a quarter come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

These young people face additional barriers at every stage in the journey from school to work, cementing existing inequalities. Reversing these trends will require a herculean effort – and it cannot be achieved so long as most funding continues to incentivise relatively light-touch interventions that are not designed for transformative impact.

As Portfolio Director of Impetus, an education and employment impact funder, I’ve seen high-impact interventions from the third sector that support young people to overcome barriers and build successful futures. But I’ve also seen the challenges these organisations are up against – from the sheer breadth of need to the systems that, often inadvertently, push them to compromise their impact, particularly as they try to scale.

Day after day non-profits are working on the most complicated and entrenched issues facing young people. How can a child focus on school – or build skills for their future – when they face empty cupboards, parents juggling three jobs to keep up with the cost of living, and a world that, quite frankly, expects them to amount to little?

Overcoming barriers through intentional interventions

Our experience at Impetus tells us that overcoming such entrenched barriers requires intentional interventions designed for impact. Light-touch, loosely defined programmes can rarely achieve the kind of life-changing impact that enables a young people to thrive when the odds are stacked so high against them.

It goes without saying that making an impact under these circumstances is hard, but we know it's possible: it’s a school that connects an 11-year-old at risk of exclusion with two years of support from a trusted adult who believes in them – maybe for the first time – and reframes what that child believes she can achieve. It’s free, consistent tutoring that enables a 15-year-old missing school to care for his ill grandmother to catch up before GCSEs. It's a targeted skills programme that gives a 19-year-old in a left-behind industrial town the qualifications she needs for stable work.

Truly transformational change requires being crystal clear about what success looks like for the child – the outcome that tells you the child's chances of thriving in adulthood have been significantly improved. Meaningful impact demands intentionally shaping a programme to provide the right type, duration, and intensity of support to unlock change. It means being relentless about quality and consistency of delivery, which requires the tools and humility to figure out what isn’t working, and the bravery to make a change.

Impetus supports highly promising non-profits that are already on this path, using our expertise to give them the essential ingredients to have a real and lasting impact on the lives of young people.

But this journey to meaningful impact takes time, resources, and funding – commodities which are in short supply in the third sector.

Non-profits have no choice but to follow the money, which stifles their capacity to invest in impact. Grants are often short-term, restricted, and less likely to target those facing the greatest barriers to success. To meet the whims of funders, non-profits deliver a range of programmes, to a range of people, to a range of outcomes, making it difficult to build depth of expertise. 

This system makes it near-impossible for non-profit leaders to build the core functions they need to shape programmes for impact, build stable funding streams, test, learn, and improve.

Core functions like impact management, business development, finance, and HR – not to mention talented and committed staff – are what make an organisation effective in the long term, enabling them to meet the challenge of fixing hard problems. But none of that can be paid for if funding is restricted to projects.

Impetus' philanthropic model

Impetus strives to work differently. We provide our partners with long-term, unrestricted funding, which gives them the means to expand their capacity, build and deliver evidence-led programmes, and lay foundations for sustainable growth.

At the same time, we offer hands-on, intensive support from our team of former CEOs, strategy consultants, and impact experts, alongside access to specialist pro bono projects. This professional support enables our partners to focus their mission, develop interventions that deliver impact, shape their growth plans, and build a high performing leadership team.

And the learning never stops: Impetus has gone on this journey with dozens of organisations which are well-equipped to learn from each other and teach us how we can refine our own methods and culture.

After nearly two decades, we’ve seen this model deliver tangible results.

We help our partners to grow – on average, our current partners have achieved a 7 times growth in income and a 6 times growth in the number of young people they reach during their time with us.

But we help them to scale without sacrificing impact.

The road to transformative impact

Non-profits and funders alike want to scale solutions that work, but organisations are often incentivised to scale before they have established meaningful evidence of impact and built an organisation that can scale effectively and sustainably. This takes years – and it’s why we work with partners over the long haul.

For example, over our 14-year partnership, Resurgo grew from a small west London project to an employment charity with 17 centres nationwide – while also developing one of the best-evidenced employment programmes in the sector. IntoUniversity has grown from supporting 750 to over 50,000 young people during our 17 years together, with 61% progressing into higher education, compared to 44% nationally.

This level of impact is staggering, and it makes a real difference to the life chances of young people. With the right support, countless organisations could be achieving the same impact.

But funders must make that possible. We need to find non-profits which have laid the groundwork for transformative impact, and we need to play a more engaged role in helping them build a programme and an organisation that can meet the challenges facing young people. The scale of the need provides an imperative for funders to centre their philanthropy on what really works to achieve impact in the long-term – and we must rise to the challenge.