Impetus Trust was the brainchild of Stephen Dawson, a British investor who led London-based ECI Partners, and Nat Sloane, an American-born entrepreneur, investor, and management consultant who has spent most of his career in the UK. Except for a just-the-facts-ma’am bio of Sloane, who continues to serve on the board of Impetus-PEF, you’ll find almost nothing about them on the Impetus-PEF website. Dawson and Sloane have taken great pains to avoid fanfare and limelight.

Dawson and Sloane became not only Impetus Trust’s key funders; they got deeply and personally involved in every philanthropic investment they made. [They] were particularly frustrated by the lack of scale in the social sector. Both men had significant professional experience helping companies grow and expand. Their mindset was, “If something’s good, it should scale.” And yet the funding system in the social sector practically ensured that good organizations would stagger along at modest scale. In the world they came from, investors deploy capital over the long term to build great institutions. In the social sector, charities are caught in a starvation cycle, living hand-to-mouth on small, short-term project grants.

It’s only been four years since Impetus-PEF began its performance pivot. Many aspects of their efforts, including the performance-management system, remain works in progress. But its leadership, management, and staff clearly have built an enduring commitment to, in words, it shares on its website, “learning from and improving our own performance.” It’s relatively easy to challenge your grantees to improve their performance. It’s much harder to be introspective on your own.

But it will take much more time and rigorous external evaluations to know whether the foundation and its grantees are having a macro-level impact on the UK’s education and employment challenges.

Read the full article about philanthropy scale fromLeap Ambassadors Community