What is Active Philanthropy?
Our approach to delivering social change is to ‘invest’ in organisations that have the leadership, the track record and the passion to make a step change in their impact.
We believe that by building their core engine we can increase their impact and reach. This means we have to get up close, to deeply understand the organisation. Our role is challenging, provocative, at times uncomfortable and at its best transformative.
We support organisations in developing their strategic thinking, in prioritising and goal setting. Once this roadmap is in place, we invest in leadership, the development of strong, highly-engaged Boards, fundraising and the improvement of assessing and reporting on performance. Typically, we make multi-annual investments which enable leaders to develop robust, efficient organisations that achieve significant results and long-term impact for the people they seek to help.
Click here for the principles of active philanthropy.
Case Study on Active Philanthropy - Headstrong
Headstrong – The National Centre for Youth Mental Health (Ireland) – was seed funded by The One Foundation in 2006 with a mission to empower communities to support young people in Ireland aged 12-25 to achieve better mental health and wellbeing. Based on models in Australia and the UK, Headstrong works with existing health, youth and other services to ensure that young people in local communities around Ireland can get the help they need when they need it.
One Foundation commissioned a feasibility study to design a response to the clear need and to understand the scale of investment that might be needed. It hired a CEO and seconded a One Foundation staff member to support him as the start-up team, and a co-founder of One Foundation led the Business Planning process to secure start-up investment. One Foundation holds the Chair and both co-founders sit on the Board.
In its first year of life, Headstrong hired a team of 11, produced research on the state of youth mental health in Ireland, secured the support of the Minister for Health, and developed the first county-wide plan for youth mental health (to serve a youth population of 38,000) in Galway, it’s first Jigsaw site. A second site is now also operating in Ballymun. The Jigsaw model is an innovative, evidence-based approach for organising services and support in this regard. Its basic premise is that, whatever their level of need, young people should be able to access quality support, when they need it, in settings where they feel safe, comfortable and respected.
Headstrong has leveraged One Foundation’s investment by 75%. A start-up investment of €1.32 million enabled the Headstrong management team to secure a further €1 million from the state for its first year. The Jigsaw pilot site in Galway was a partnership with the Health Service Executive, with the State providing €1.6 million of funding over 3 years to help fund key staff recruitment including a Psychologist and a Consultant Psychiatrist.
Success for Headstrong will be when the ‘Jigsaw model’ proves its effectiveness in the 5 demonstration sites and the HSE & psychiatrists mainstream ‘Jigsaw’ as an approach to organising and delivering mental health services to young people.
What we've learned so far -
We have done some things well and some things not so well but here are a few things we learned about the power of philanthropy and how to make it work…
- Emerging issues can be spotlighted by philanthropy to accelerate attention, e.g. care for separated children, and integration
- Philanthropy can catalyse activity to create new fields, for example social entrepreneurship and youth mental health.
- Philanthropy can strengthen advocacy voices, although it does take time to build capacity and see the impact you seek on a policy agenda or on public attitudes e.g. children’s rights, increased public funding for mental health services, public funding for an early intervention approach to children’s services.
- Philanthropy can help to scale programmes rapidly, e.g. Big Brother Big Sister and Social Entrepreneurs Ireland.
- The impact of philanthropy can be accelerated significantly through active co-investment with other funders – philanthropic, state or others.
For more information on Active Philanthropy visit:
European Venture Philanthropy Association (EVPA)
