A candid look at what foundations and CSR teams are seeing across delivery partners, the patterns behind mentoring that performs well and the common conditions that strengthen or undermine outcomes.
Shape the insights. Receive the report and a tailored feedback note based on your input.
Mentoring is everywhere; quality is uneven and visibility is limited.
Mentoring sits across many portfolios because it is expected to build capability and strengthen outcomes. Yet it is often hard to see how well it is working in practice or whether it is delivering value for money, until issues surface late.
When mentoring underperforms, consequences are real as outcomes weaken, delivery partners struggle, participants lose out and risk rises. Most of this becomes visible when it is already costly to fix.
We’re developing a report that will pull together what foundations and CSR teams are seeing across delivery partners, the patterns behind mentoring that performs well and the common conditions that strenghten or undermine outcomes.
The aim is to provide practical insights to support stronger decisions about where to back mentoring, how to oversee it and what to expect from partners.
This first edition report brings together insight from a small group of UK foundations and CSR teams to surface what is often hard to see in funded mentoring programmes delivered through partners. It is not a review of portfolios as a whole.
It focuses on themes such as:
How mentoring is being funded and used through delivery partners in UK programmes
What mentoring is expected to achieve across programmes and where expectations vary
The conditions linked to stronger mentoring outcomes across delivery partners
Common failure points and early signals of quality drift
What helps mentoring hold quality as programmes grow or spread across partners
What funders and partners can influence in design, governance and live delivery
Practical insights to strengthen oversight, consistency and sustainability
This report does not evaluate or rank foundations and CSR teams. It looks for shared patterns, pressure points, oversight practices and practical learning that shape confidence and can strengthen funded mentoring outcomes in a broad range of delivery contexts.
This report is for executive directors, grant directors and programme leaders in UK foundations and CSR teams who fund mentoring through delivery partners and want to:
If you’d like to have your views included, we can either have a 45 mins conversation or you could complete a 30-45 mins questionnaire.
As a thank you, we’ll send you:
All insights included in the report will be anonymised and no foundation or organisation will be named or identifiable without your explicit permission.
If you’re not able to take part but know peers who fund mentoring through delivery partners and may be interested in contributing and value these insights, we’d be grateful if you could share this page with them.
