investment case study

Established 1952Leader: Seán Campbell, CEOInvestment fit: Youth mental health /

Improve young people’s resilience

Total ONE Investment: €8.7 millionDuration of investment: 9 years (2005 – End 2013)Reach at investment: 30,000Reach at divestment: 60,000Staff: 319 FTEVolunteers: 5,442

Investment in Foróige

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Investment in Foróige 2005-2013

“ David certainly might have given up a lot easier instead of growing up into a young man with confidence in himself.”

David Coleman first met Paul Hogan in August 2009. David’s father was bringing him up alone, along with three other children. The then 14-year-old was acutely shy and found it hard to express himself or even look at other people. It made it tough for him to make friends or engage with his teachers. He was falling behind.

Paul had just lost his job in a bookmaker. He always had a feeling he wanted to do something for others but didn’t know how. At 34 he wanted to change his career and go into social work but had no qualifications. He saw an advert in a local internet café for something called Big Brother Big Sister. He went to the office of BBBS up a stairs on top of a pharmacy on Pearse Street in Ballina, Co Mayo where it shares a few rooms with its parent Foróige, Ireland’s biggest youth development organisation.

It wasn’t an instant click when David and Paul first met.

“ David was very shy when we first met,” Paul recalled. “His head would be down and you couldn’t get anything out of him. He was low in confidence for family reasons and he had personal issues. You literally had to drag things out of him.”

Paul and Kieran. Participants of our Big Brother Big Sister programme

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David, who is now 18, found it hard at first to relate to his new Big Brother.

“ It was difficult at the beginning as it took us quite a few months to earn each other’s trust,” he said.

Gradually through hanging out together the two of them became friends.

“ I said I was always there to talk to him if there was ever anything that he needed. Just call me. He would say ‘Yeah I will,’ but he never did until after about six or seven months. It was nice when he felt he could ask me something.”

Playing pool or going for walks gradually David opened up to Paul and learned how to talk to other people and engage with them.

David - “ I was very shy but I have changed a lot because of Paul. ONE of my favourite times of the week was when we met up. We became very good friends. I am a different person because of him now really,”

“ I think other young people could use a friend if they have problems in school. I was so negative when I was younger. I cheered up a bit and started looking at things more positively.”

Paul - “ The difference is hard to explain if you weren’t there, to see David change from someone who was so shy he could barely look at you, to see him grow and become more confident has been great.”

I grew up in Dublin and I saw how people got involved in drink and drugs. If you’re not getting any guidance that is the way you can go.”

David completed his Leaving Certificate last year and he has applied to join the Irish Army. At the same time he is considering other jobs or even moving to Canada. He has options and has the self belief to explore them.

It is these friendships that change young people’s lives that are the secret to BBBS quiet success. In North Mayo alone it has matched this year 22 young people in the community with older mentors while developing a school’s initiative teaming up 250 older secondary school students. What BBBS achieves doesn’t make the headlines, Louise Tuffy, head of BBBS in North Mayo, acknowledges. This can make it a hard sell, but Foróige has done the research to show its importance.

“ Our research shows that BBBS delivers for young people. They are more likely to go to college, have a better outlook about their future and avoid anti-social behaviour.”

“ This costs peanuts compared with what the state spends later on (if young people don’t get support). If the government had any real foresight, they would see that it saves them so much money in the long term.”

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Paul - “ BBBS can do so much for young people and take an awful lot of pressure off other services as well.

If David didn’t get brought into this set up what way would his life have gone? It might have gone off the rails. We don’t know. David certainly might have given up a lot easier instead of growing up into a young man with confidence in himself.”

“ I just knew there was something in education beyond the classroom that I wanted to get involved in.”

At either end of Seán Campbell’s office in Foróige’s headquarters in Park West, Dublin 12 are posters of two of his heroes: John F Kennedy and Barack Obama. In between them is a map of Ireland packed with dots representing 600 youth clubs and 150 projects run by the youth development organisation he has led since 2003.

A Dundalk man, Campbell dresses simply and talks in a down-to-earth way. When you get him going, he has a passion for working with young people that is infectious. He is steeped in the tradition of Foróige but at the same time Campbell has a radical edge that is prepared to try new things.

Campbell runs through Foróige’s history fondly. He outlines how it grew from being an off-shoot of Macra na Feirme in 1952 into a national organisation. In the early 1960s the Kellogg Foundation, set up by the cereal making Quaker family, had invested in Foróige and allowed it for the first time to hire full-time professional staff. Among the staff hired was Michael Cleary who went on to become a visionary chief executive of Foróige for the next 36-years. Campbell’s own involvement with Foróige also spans decades. He began in education as a secondary school teacher in Ballymun Comprehensive.

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Campbell - “ Shortly after I started, I decided that I had been extremely lucky in life and I had an urge to give something back,” he recalled. Aged 22, he moved to Zambia to work as a volunteer teacher from 1983 to 1985.

Education was key in Africa. It was the difference between a life of poverty and opportunity.”

When he returned to Ireland, Campbell found it hard to settle back into formal education.

“ I got a temporary job in Dundalk teaching remedial second year business studies. They [his students] no more wanted to be there. I just thought there must be more to education than this. I knew there was something in education beyond the classroom that I wanted to get involved in. Teaching was just too confining. It wasn’t for me.”.

He saw a job advertised in a newspaper for Foróige, an organisation he had never heard of and decided to apply. At 25 he became regional youth officer in Mayo.

“I knew within six months of being in Foróige I had found a vocation.”

Campbell’s task was to recruit and train adult volunteers to work with young people. He loved his job as it gave him flexibility to be creative.

Campbell - “ Everybody in Foróige is encouraged to bring their own personal stamp to the work.”

Three years later Foróige received state funding to expand its management and Campbell was chosen as head of regional development for the West of Ireland from Donegal to Cork.

“We pushed the boundaries.”

Innovations like neighbourhood youth projects to work with at risk kids and the teenage health initiative all started in the West before being rolled out in the rest of the organisation. Campbell, after starting on the bottom rung was now a leader in Foróige.

“ We had the network, the name, the credibility. We had economies of scale.”

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The project that brought Foróige onto the One Foundation’s radar was the Big Brother Big Sister (BBBS) programme. BBBS was founded in 1904 in America, by a court clerk called Ernest Coulter. He started to befriend and mentor young boys who came before his courtroom in order to help them avoid prison and make better life choices. Over the decades BBBS grew into an influential organisation in America which helped hundreds of thousands of young people reach their potential by finding them older mentors.

Campbell knew his Foróige staff and volunteers were finding that some vulnerable children needed regular one-to-one support. He had heard about BBBS and wanted to explore could their programme be brought here. In 2001 Campbell along with staff from the Health Service Executive went to BBBS’ headquarters in Philadelphia to see if what they were doing would work here.

Campbell - “ We saw the programme operating on the ground and I felt we could integrate it very easily.”

A trial in Galway followed. The results were encouraging and Foróige started to expand BBBS in the West.

“ This was having someone from the outside taking an interest in kids who a lot of people weren’t taking an interest in. I saw that it was very powerful,” he said. Expansion was ad hoc and Foróige did not have enough resources to move too quickly.

In 2003 Campbell became chief executive of Foróige aged 42. He took on a staff of 120 people versus the 24 when he joined. It was a big task and managerially Foróige was stretched just to keep going. Towards the end of that year Campbell met with Deirdre Mortell, co-founder of the One Foundation along with Susan Coughlan, a management consultant, who was working for her at the time. One Foundation had heard about BBBS in America, as it tried to learn about the best techniques in venture philanthropy. It believed that BBBS was a proven programme that could be scaled-up in Ireland but it wasn’t sure whether it could work with Foróige.

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“ They talked to me about the programme. They asked me could we scale the programme? It was a general chat.

I got a letter about a week later saying ‘thanks but no thanks.’ The One Foundation, while they thought the programme was great, felt it didn’t fit their criteria.”

ONE’s business model was to invest in organisations and not in programmes within organisations like BBBS and Foróige. It didn’t feel the fit was there.

Lane-Spollen - Emma Lane-Spollen, deputy chief executive of ONE, explained. “ We didn’t go with Foróige because it was too big and it was outside the venture philanthropy model,”

Campbell rang up Mortell and told her: “I understand completely where you are coming from but you are wrong.”

ONE put it up to him to make a proposal. It offered €10,000 to Foróige to produce a basic plan and Coughlan agreed to help out. Campbell and his team in Foróige were at the beginning of a steep learning curve.

Campbell - “ It was both challenging and invigorating trying to put it together. We struggled hugely.”

Lane-Spollen helped refine their pitch in terms of finances and projections where Foróige was weakest. The report was enough to convince ONE to give Foróige a marker investment of €100,000 to fund the production of a full business plan. ONE still had many questions but Campbell believed he could convince them that BBBS could be delivered through Foróige’s existing structures.

“ You had all the advantages of piggy backing on Foróige. We had the network, the name, the credibility. We had economies of scale. It is an incredibly powerful programme but it is even more so when it used as part of a menu of services.”

Foróige, he acknowledged, had a mindset back then that was holding it back.

“ One Foundation assumed that because we were to them a big organisation we had the capacity to put resources into developing plans.”

“ It nearly killed me physically. It was morning, noon and night while keeping the show on the road.”

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ONE helped Foróige strengthen its management capacity by helping it hire John Cahill, a long-time staff member, as deputy chief executive and chief operations officer. This gave Campbell more time to think strategically but it was still hard going for Foróige.

“ Emma was just brilliant,” Campbell recalled, “But I nearly walked away twice before we got to the pitch. They were too demanding at the time. They were expecting an awful lot more than we had the capacity to deliver. A couple of times I just said ‘feck it, it’s not worth it’. They didn’t know how we operated and we didn’t’ know how they did.

I had a fair bit of experience in the voluntary sector but the whole business model was absolutely alien to us,” he said. “The demand and the rigour to be able to stand over your figures and project forward was something that had never been asked of us before. I had no expertise.

We wanted to move BBBS from being a pilot to going national. It was a five year vision for how you would grow the programme, how you’d use their funding to leverage other funding.”

In total Foróige hoped to expand the programme from dealing with 120 -150 matches to over 3,200 per year. Foróige was looking for €2.5m from One Foundation. Atlantic Philanthropies, Ireland’s other large private-sector foundation backed by Chuck Feeney, heard about what was going on. It agreed to match ONE’s commitment, but only if Foróige’s business plan met ONE’s criteria.

Youth Expo 2012. Foróige

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“ In essence I was pitching for €5m,” Campbell said, “It was huge and unheard of. Five years at €1m a year.”

After a lot of hard work in 2005, Foróige was ready to meet the board of One Foundation, to present its plans.

“ I had never done a pitch like it before so it was fairly nerve wracking. I had 12 slides ready and perfect but after slide two they just started throwing questions at me.” Declan Ryan, co-founder of ONE, was first to go “way off script.”

“ Declan was fascinated by the cost per match and how we would compare internationally. Because we were within Foróige... We were about half the price [of what it was costing elsewhere].

At the time we thought we were doing incredibly well to get it down to €1000 a year per match. We have it down now to less than €300 per year. That is because of Foróige’s network.”

The proven impact of BBBS overseas also impressed Ryan.

“ Coincidentally, I met a Texan guy doing business in Warsaw at the same time ONE was assessing BBBS,” he recalled. “He was successfully taken care of by a Big Brother in his hometown in rural Texas when he was kid. He couldn’t speak highly enough about BBBS - thus I thought we should back it in Ireland.”

When he left the room after an hour Campbell remembered thinking Foróige had done well. “I knew we had grabbed them,” he said.

Within a few days Deirdre Mortell rang Campbell to tell him he had been successful.

“ It was a game changer. To get ONE and Atlantic at the same time!” Campbell recalled with a broad smile.

“ I didn’t realise then how huge it was. I was naive enough to think this was just money and an opportunity to grow the programme. I didn’t realise all the other stuff that was going to come with it.”

Culturally there were still differences between Foróige and ONE’s approach.

“ We were three or four years into it before they were convinced we were worth investing in. We had to realise that what they were offering was something that the organisation should embrace. That took me a while.

I came from a very traditional youth work background which was get money from government, do your work and you are accountable about once a year and that’s about it.

This was: You’d better be hot, delivering what you’re saying you will do. It was a whole different way of thinking and being accountable. It was much more of a partnership than I envisaged. They were challenging but in a supportive way.”

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Each year Foróige was hitting its targets with BBBS. In its first year of funding in 2006 BBBS expanded into 13 counties leveraging off Foróige’s existing network. By 2013, it had 3,200 active matches both in schools and communities, split on a 80:20 basis.

As BBBS took off, One Foundation teamed up again with Foróige to grow the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship or NFTE for young people. It, like BBBS, was already a proven programme in America.

Liavan Mallin, an entrepreneur, had got the programme going in a few sites in Ireland. Foróige was a natural fit to roll it out nationwide.

Lane-Spollen - “ She was looking for scale up money. Foróige ended up bringing it in and we were part of that.”

“ Your programmes may be world class but your infrastructure is rubbish.”

In late 2007, after seeing BBBS and NFTE take off the One Foundation began to talk to Foróige about an even deeper investment. This time it wanted to invest in Foróige itself.

Campbell - “ We persuaded them that we had what it took to give them a vehicle to achieve their mission on a very big scale. We had all the attributes to ensure their investment would be worthwhile. It was a whole cultural change for us as we had to embrace a business way of doing things.”

“ Foróige offered a number of things: we were a truly national organisation and we were capable of delivering. We had delivered on BBBS (and NFTE) so I think they saw that we had a vision for youth work that was very strong.”

Mortell - “ We had learned a huge amount. We realised that we needed to do an investment upstream in the organisation itself.”

“ We had invested in NFTE and BBBS and through these experiences we found that Foróige is pretty amazing itself. We never really looked at it because we thought they were too big and scary. But when we got to know it, we saw we really could make a change.”

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Lane-Spollen -

“ Foróige is in almost every single county. We saw there was a distribution channel.”

“ There are not many things – the GAA, the Catholic Church – that have a co-ordinated imprint across the country like Foróige has.”

It was now 2008, and ONE was in the second-half of its ten year lifespan. It believed Foróige was a “supertanker,” where more investment would allow ONE make a lasting impact for the better in young people’s lives.

Mortell - “ We said we should do an investment to help them scale to 100,000 young people from 30,000 young people over ten years.”

Campbell -“ At that stage, ONE realised just how good we were in terms of delivery and the impact we have on young people. But they also said ‘Your programmes may be world class but your infrastructure is rubbish’.”

Lane-Spollen - “ There was limited management capacity. It goes from the CEO effectively down into operations. There was no one with HR expertise. There was no IT guy.”

Foróige had good finances and administration but it had a very flat management structure.

“ Seán Campbell had no PA or secretary and he was running a €20m organisation. Communications with all their leaders and volunteers – we are talking about 4000 volunteers - was all done through letters. They weren’t asking people for their email addresses. They were dealing with young people but they didn’t have the ability to text them. Everything went into frontline services. There had never been any investment in the core of the organisation, and systems and processes, apart from finance.”

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“ The frontline can only be good for so long if the rest of it is not being invested in. We saw with Foróige that they were at a point when they might stop being able to grow, and risk would grow instead - that something would go wrong.”

Campbell and his team made a pitch to ONE for its biggest ever single donation: €5m. Foróige was working with 30,000 young people and it felt it could reach 60,000 in five years and 100,000 in ten with ONE’s support.

Mortell - “ Seán spoke for 15 minutes. He talked about the work they do with young people, how powerful it is, how much young people, especially in rural Ireland, need that in their lives today and that they really believed they were world class in their services even if they couldn’t prove it.

Seán had huge ambition. Foróige had a good solid track record. Seán has a massive commitment to young people which just oozes out of his pores. He knows what he is talking about. You knew he deeply cared about the 30,000 people they worked with and he really wanted so many more young people to benefit.”

ONE made the decision to invest in Foróige. In its report explaining its “investment rationale,” it gave five reasons for investing:

1. Outcomes: Core to Foróige is building the young person’s resilience, confidence, and knowledge to navigate the world. It about the development of the whole person.

2. Reach to young people: It is a national organisation reaching 50,000 young people per annum (33,000 on a weekly basis). We can invest in its growth.

3. Physical location: Present in 24 counties. Locally rooted within communities. Strong distribution / partnership potential.

4. Portfolio synergies: Significant potential synergies with Headstrong / Jigsaw, SpunOut, Reachout, BeLonGTo and Barnardos in terms of furthering their strategies and ours.

5. Leadership: Foróige is an influential voice in Ireland on youth development – with potential to be stronger on issues affecting young people and in enabling young people’s voices to be heard nationally on the issues that concern them.

ONE believed Foróige had the ability to deliver but it wanted to ensure that if it helped it expand, it would do so sustainably. It was a good thing that Foróige’s staff were loyal and stayed with it for decades, ensuring its culture was strong and focused on making a difference. However, ONE wanted Foróige to hire in some outsiders too who could bring in different skill sets that it was missing.

Campbell poached Jonathan Tiernan, a staff member with ONE, to join him as strategy analyst. Tierney was a [teacher studying accountancy] who had studied at the University of Notre Dame in America. He helped Campbell deliver stronger business plans and start to think even bigger.

ONE also helped Foróige to think about telling its own story.

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Campbell - “ It was always the culture of the organisation that those who needed to know us knew us. Because of government funding we didn’t need to get out there and tell our story. The young people, their families and their communities, they were the people we needed to tell our story to. It was the culture to talk down the organisation. Those who were involved knew the value of it.

The organisation was at a point at which we were working with increasing numbers of very disadvantaged young people but we never talked about that work because we thought it would stigmatise the young people. ONE challenged us to find positive ways to tell our stories.”

ONE allowed us beef up communications, develop online, have social media for the first time, develop IT, fundraising, state of the art financial and data management systems.”

“ It was that whole infrastructural piece and the capacity to try out different ways of delivering our programmes. We now could start to think strategically about how we grow and reach out the organisation.”

Creating a research unit paid dividends too as Foróige could now produce credible reports proving that they were making a difference.

“ We have evaluated three or four of our key programmes so we have proven for the first time ever how big an impact youth work has. It has given huge validation to staff and volunteers in what we are doing.”

Campbell’s office is full of different manuals setting out best practice and techniques for working with young people dealing with the different challenges of growing up.

“ We have developed an ability to write up what we do,” Campbell explains. He takes out a manual called A Life of Choices to help make his point.

“ This is for very at-risk teenagers, teenagers that are in trouble with the Guards and things like that. It is a manualised programme for staff interacting with young people. It has a core basis and then there are elective modules so you can tailor it. This is the core stuff that they would do and that’s how you’d do it. There are session plans all there.”

He flicks through the manual pointing out the issues it deals with like anger management, drugs and gangs.

“ Foróige had a very good ethos, philosophy and way of working but how did I know that the programmes that were being run in Donegal were as good as in Cork or in Tallaght or wherever? We needed to have quality assurance and data management techniques to ensure all our programmes are delivered equally well.”

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Campbell cites a leadership programme that is accredited by NUI Galway as another example. The programme targets fifth and sixth year students and offers them a certificate in youth leadership and credits towards their primary degree.

“ The young people that we would work with some of them would never even aspire to university. Some of the youngsters would go from stealing cars to actually graduating from a leadership programme and are now working with the guards on how to mentor other young people who are getting in trouble. It is incredible stuff.”

“We were that close to getting it mainstreamed.”

Within five years of ONE’s investment Foróige had hit its target of helping 60,000 young people a year. It had the capability to merge with Ogra Chorcai, bringing its numbers to 64,000.

“I t was the biggest merger in youth work history,” Campbell said. “We took on 70 staff. We did that seamlessly because of the training we had.”

It took 18 months of planning before the merger went ahead in 2012.

“ We would never have thought of it or been capable of doing it without the training we got around business planning, the use of consultancy and change planning that we got from ONE.”

But it wasn’t all success. Foróige’s hopes of mainstreaming BBBS as a nationwide programme by convincing the state to take over its funding from philanthropy failed. In 2011, Foróige came close to its goal but it was caught out by Ireland’s economic collapse.

“We were that close to getting it mainstreamed.”

He had met with Brian Cowen, the Taoiseach, Mary Coughlan, the minister for Enterprise and Barry Andrews, the Minister for Children, Campbell explained. They were all supportive of BBBS.

“ We got it on the agenda of the last cabinet meeting of the last Fianna Fail government. Brian Lenihan (the Minister for Finance) said ‘No he was not leaving legacy programmes.’”

Ireland was on its way to an EU / IMF bailout and Lenihan was not prepared to fund anything new, regardless of its merits, as he knew savage cuts were ahead. Afterwards Campbell was disappointed.

“I was looking for €3m a year to mainstream it but we didn’t get it.”

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ONE and Atlantic agreed to extend their funding by two more years to give Foróige time to go again. It is currently in the middle of a lobbying campaign to win fresh support.

“ We’re doing a lobbying campaign locally and nationally. It makes sense on so many levels, we know that it saves the state multiples of what it costs,”

“ These young people could have serious mental health problems. We are keeping young people out of care. There is strong evidence that young people who have mentors delay getting involved in drug and alcohol abuse. That itself should fund the programme.”

BBBS cost €900,000 a year to run and it faced a budget shortfall of €600,000 in 2014 after ONE ended its funding.

Campbell had the statistics ready for the politicians when he met them.

Just 15 people being deterred from criminal activity would save €600,000.

Sixty-two young people not developing alcohol addiction would save €600,000.

Twenty-three young people going to third level education would save the state €600,000 based on graduate likely incomes.

“ Changes in the behaviours of only a small number of its participants would reduce the need for expenditure on a more costly future.”

As at June 2013 Campbell still did not know which way things would go but he was determined to fight for BBBS. ONE had helped give him the skills to do so. Foróige has been fundamentally changed by the One Foundation, Campbell believes.

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“ It has given us huge confidence. The One Foundation has given us a business sense that would have been unheard of.”

“ What One Foundation has done more than anything else for Foróige and particularly for me is that it has given us the confidence to actually really push ourselves. Foróige has been transformed because of the faith that ONE has in us regardless of the money.

It has given us huge confidence. The One Foundation has given us a business sense that would have been unheard of. Now our expertise is being sought out overseas. I am in negotiations in the Middle East for contracts that might be right across the whole Arab world ...It is Foróige International.”

Foróige’s proven programme content he said was also of interest to Northern Ireland’s government as well as in Britain. Campbell’s team believes that it will be able to finance itself by offering its services and advice overseas.

“ We are developing a business model that will finance the organisation and serve our social justice agenda and grow youth work across the world.”

Foróige has won its first contract already in Qatar to teach young people entrepreneurship through sport. It continues to find it hard to raise funds to expand but it is working on a new way of doing things.

“ ONE have helped us develop a Foróige alumni programme. We would have had probably anything between 250,000 and 300,000 past members around the country who have never been reached out to.”

“ Part of what we want to do is develop our alumni to reach out to them. The vast majority of those people would have really good memories of the organisation. For some of them it would have been life changing. Being able to mobilise that as a supporter, both in finances and advocacy and volunteering, could be huge.”

Mortell - “ A key part of our investment was in developing a fundraising function so they could gear their organisation up to replace our money. It was about looking at Foróige holistically. If you invest in a business you invest in having the best branding, communications, experience for customers, and all that kind of business stuff. It is all about the core organisation’s capacity. You don’t insist that everything goes down into the front customers’ sales service. Helping Foróige to realise it needed a strong core was a big change.”

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“The difference.”

Both ONE and Foróige have different insights about what is to be the long-term legacy of their partnership.

Mortell -“ We care about youth mental health. It is a spectrum. We wanted to build resilience in all the young people in Ireland so we don’t need mental health services or any of that stuff. Let’s not just put all the resources down the crisis end.”

“ Foróige had the biggest reach and that is why we invested in them. They had the reach to go from 30,000 to 60,000 and not 3000 to 6000 and do it really well.”

Ryan - “ Philanthropy to me is all about impact. There is no better group in Ireland than Foróige to make an impact with teenage kids.”

Campbell believes partnering with ONE has fundamentally changed Foróige.

Campbell - “ We have upped the quality of youth work in Ireland because of the involvement of the One Foundation. It has given us the confidence to position youth work as a major contributor to the lives of young people in particular because education has fallen down.

I would argue very strongly that formal education is not giving kids the key skills they need in the 21st century: leadership, independent thinking, entrepreneurship. These are the key skills that will make the difference in the modern high tech society. We can do it not only in Ireland but internationally.

“ We have the capacity to do it because of the One Foundation. That is the difference.”

Author: Tom Lyons

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