When I watched last week’s Budget 2025, I felt the tension many of us in the charity sector recognise immediately. Yes, there is welcome support for families: changes to welfare, cost-of-living relief, and steps that will help stabilise household finances. But the same Budget also underlines the limits of what the state can do. Public finances are stretched. Long-term investment in opportunity, in education, skills, youth employment, remains constrained.
For young people from disadvantaged backgrounds that distinction is everything. Stability is necessary. But stability alone doesn’t get you the grades you need. It doesn’t connect you to opportunities. It doesn’t erase deep-rooted inequalities in educational attainment, access to sustained employment and life chances.
That’s why at Impetus, we believe this moment strengthens, not softens, the case for bold, strategic philanthropy.
Let’s be honest: no Budget, however generous, can dismantle the systemic barriers young people face, from lost learning through school absence and exclusions, stagnation in key attainment qualifications, to a lack of access into sustained employment. While these issues affect all young people, they disproportionately affect those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
That’s where Impetus comes in.
For more than twenty years, we’ve backed the most promising non-profit organisations working with these young people, not with short-term grants, but with a partnership model offering:
Our partners don’t just “deliver programmes.” They shift trajectories, keeping young people in school, supporting them to achieve crucial qualifications, or helping them find their first stable job. We help them grow, increase their impact, and build resilience.
This is the difference between plugging gaps and building ladders.
The Budget places additional pressure on many households, including those who might otherwise donate. With frozen thresholds, higher taxes on income and assets, and continued economic strain, disposable income is tightening.
Recent data from the CAF UK Giving 2025 report reinforces this trend: fewer people than ever are giving to charity. Charities are now relying on donations from just 50% of the population, down from 58% in 2019 - a reduction of around four million donors.
Rising costs and growing demand point to a simple reality: this is not a moment for small, occasional acts of generosity. It is a moment for thoughtful, long-term investment in the organisations doing the hard work.
Impetus’ approach has always been rooted in long-term, evidence-led, and impact-focused funding, an approach that resembles an investment portfolio more than traditional charity giving. It means backing organisations for years, not months. It means trust, ambition, and scale.
If your philanthropy is to matter five years from now, it needs to be built on these principles.
Look at AllChild (previously West London Zone), one of our long-term partners. When they joined our portfolio, they were small but ambitious. Through years of Impetus’ investment and support, they grew into a confident, impactful organisation reaching thousands more young people.
Or look across our portfolio: organisations working on school engagement, educational attainment including socio-emotional learning, and sustained employment. Organisations that have evidence, ambition, and the will to scale. Behind each charity is a young person whose life path just shifted, because someone believed in long-term investment.
That’s the multiplier effect of philanthropy done well.
And if we’re talking about impact, we must talk about Gift Aid.
Public awareness of Gift Aid is high, around 80%, according to the Charities Aid Foundation last year, yet it’s still surprisingly absent from many donor conversations. It sits in finance teams, fundraising systems and end-of-year reports, but rarely in the heart of donor engagement.
That’s a missed opportunity.
For every eligible donation, Gift Aid adds 25% extra, at no cost to the donor. In a world where donors can feel squeezed and charities feel stretched, that uplift is not administrative detail, it’s transformational.
This should be part of every conversation with supporters:
A donor may feel unable to give more right now, but reclaiming Gift Aid is giving more, instantly.
If we want to make every pound work harder, Gift Aid has to be front and centre.
If the Government’s message in this Budget is: “We will keep the system stable,”
our message is: “Let’s build the system young people deserve.”
We need donors who see philanthropy not as generosity, but as justice.
We need funders who understand that structural inequality isn’t shifted by crisis response, but by long-term investment.
We need partners who choose courage, who back evidence, who value impact, who stay the course.
Because the next chapter of this country shouldn’t be written by postcode or privilege. It should be shaped by potential, supported by systems that believe in young people, and funded by people willing to take the long view.
At Impetus, we are ready. The question is: will you join us?
