Impetus - The Private Equity Foundation aims to transform the lives of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds by ensuring they get the right support to succeed in school, in work and in life. The charity funds and builds the most promising charities working with these young people, providing core funding and working shoulder-to-shoulder with their leaders to help them become stronger organisations.
Impetus has been applying its model to charities for 21 years, focusing on outcomes that are proven to make the biggest impact on young people’s lives, supporting them to achieve age-expected SATS at 11, GCSE English and maths (grades 9-4) by 19 and then to access university or sustained employment.
Impetus provides unrestricted funding to enable the charities it works with to become stronger, better and bigger organisations. It works with charities over the longer-term because its experience shows that building organisations that have real and scalable impact and are delivering robust outcomes for young people takes years of intensive support, and long-term, open-ended grant support.
Impetus partners with other funders to help its charities expand and it aims to influence policy and decision makers to fund evidence-backed, impact-led interventions so that all young people get the support they need.
In March 2025, Impetus launched the following two grant programmes:
Attainment: Through its Attainment round, Impetus will seek to fund a single organisation to:
- Work to improve school attainment outcomes for underserved students in mainstream schools, and
- Support young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to secure expected standard in their SATs and/or GCSE Grade 4 in English and/or maths.
Skills: Through its Skills round, Impetus will seek to work with two organisations supporting young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) into sustained employment through skills.