Investment Director
About the Investment Team
The Investment Team is responsible for selecting portfolio partners, managing our charity investments and supporting our portfolio partners to improve and scale their impact.
The Investment Team also leads the Impetus Leadership Academy, a leadership development programme to support talent from ethnic minority backgrounds in the UK youth sector to progress into senior leadership roles.
The team is made up of 18 people, including former teachers, charity chief executives, charity impact leads, management consultants, social investment portfolio managers and impact consultants.
The team is led by a Portfolio Director who sits on the Senior Management Team. The Portfolio Director has 5 direct reports: a Deputy Portfolio Director, three Sector Leads (who lead our work in School engagement, School attainment and Employment Sectors) and an Impact Lead. Sector Leads line manage 6 Investment Directors. Investment Directors line manage Investment Managers (currently 5). Investment Directors and Investment Managers tend to primarily focus on a sector but might have mixed portfolios, depending on need, experience and interest.
The Investment Team has a good track record of role progression. All four Leads and a number of our Investment Directors were promoted from within the team.
The team is passionate, rigorous, determined, creative and warm. We come from a range of backgrounds and bring a broad mix of perspectives. We care deeply for our colleagues, our portfolio partners and the young people we serve.
About this role
We believe that all young people deserve to succeed in school and in work, whatever their background. As we enter a challenging time with rising inflation and a likely recession, our work feels more vital than ever before. The role of Investment Director presents an exciting opportunity to contribute meaningfully to the charities portfolio partners we serve, the team itself and the whole of Impetus.
We support a portfolio of 23 high potential charity and non-profit partners in the youth sector, helping them deliver benchmark-beating employment and education outcomes for young people, and to grow.
We believe the strength of our approach resides in three things:
- ?Building deep, trust-based, sustainable relationships with charity leaders by, investing time, kindness, integrity and honesty.
- ?Providing our charities multi-year, unrestricted funding to help them become sector-leading organisations and scale their impact.
- ?Offering tailored advice to charity leaders’ most pressing and strategic questions, including their mission, programme design, performance management, growth planning, and financial resilience.
Charities and funders often comment on the quality of our people. Our team is analytical and data driven; we are deeply relational, low-ego and collaborative. We actively invest in our colleagues holding regular training and community of practice sessions, and use skills-based assessments to tailor development.
As an organisation we seek to embed diversity of thought, background and experience in every aspect of our work and actively challenge our assumptions to better deliver change. Over the past two years we have taken action to help reduce racial inequality in the youth sector. In 2021 we launched our Connect Fund to support diverse leaders and their robust solutions to the entrenched employment gap faced by young people from ethnic minority backgrounds compared with their white peers. We have also built a highly regarded Leadership Academy for emerging youth sector leaders from ethnic minority backgrounds, with generous funding from State Street Foundation.
If you are looking for a role combining strategic thinking, analytical insight and influencing emerging leaders, as well as the opportunity to work with a supportive team to transform young lives, I hope you will apply to work with us.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Sebastien Ergas
Portfolio Director
Key responsibilities
Finding high potential charities and non-profit partners for our portfolio
- Identifying potential charitable organisations for investment
- Leading in-depth due diligence process within the scope of a grant round, to assess and build partnership foundations with potential partners – covering leadership and governance, and their impact, scale, and partnership potential;
- Modelling from first contact of origination, our approach to engaged and trust-based investment management support;
- Developing and presenting high quality investment propositions to our Investment Committee.
- Managing relationships with partner Chairs and CEOs
- Agreeing Service Funding Agreements, including appropriate annual investment milestones to allow for a clear assessment of re-investment potential at end of phase
- Regularly monitoring and assessing partner progress / risks against milestones and making evidence-based recommendations on progression or exit to Leads, Portfolio Director and the Investment Committee
- Escalating key risks on performance, leadership and safeguarding
- Conducting annual partnership review with Sector Leads and partner CEOs
- Working with Impetus Finance colleagues to ensure timely distribution of grant payments, in line with Service Funding Agreements.
- Providing direct support to CEOs and senior colleagues on key strategic topics, using a mix of at least monthly one-to-one meetings and group facilitation to: • clarify theory of change,
- define long term ambition,
- develop growth strategy
- achieve a step change in the delivery and performance management of outcomes,
- strengthen leadership (individual and collective) and governance capabilities,
- develop path to scale,
- build financial resilience;
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