Advancing Educational Innovation Through Strategic Investment
At Camelback Ventures, our commitment to transformative educational innovation is rooted in a fundamental conviction: proximate leaders—those with deep, lived experience of the challenges they seek to address—are uniquely positioned to develop groundbreaking solutions. Recently, we have been focused on understanding the impact these leaders are having on student outcomes and the best ways to scale that impact. Check out the summary of our findings in the report below.
Challenges of Breaking Through Early-Stage
Camelback has invested in and supported 100+ early-stage ventures developing education focused ventures including schools, EdTech software, and supplemental education programming. After completing our Fellowship program, we’ve witnessed persistent challenges among our education nonprofits preventing them from organizational growth beyond early-stage including:
- Difficult fundraising environment with funders shifting their investment priorities
- Grant funding not covering key operational functions needed to execute and scale work
- Leader burnout due to the endless cycles of fundraising and the constant context switching needed to run the various organizational functions
- Limitations in clear stories of impact on organization beneficiaries
“Funders want you to solve systemic problems that took over 100 years to create with one year of funding. We need to set realistic expectations for the outcomes we can demonstrate.” – 2022 Fellow
Piloting Holistic Approach to Venture Support
Between 2022 and 2024, we engaged in several new activities to address these challenges focused on two critical research questions:
- What impact do proximate leaders have on K-12 student outcomes?
- What strategic supports most effectively accelerate venture scalability?
In partnership with JCRG USA Inc., a research firm specializing in methodologies that center historically marginalized perspectives, we aimed to answer the question of impact on student outcomes across education nonprofits in our portfolio. To better understand the types of venture support that have the greatest effect on venture scalability we rolled out new investment activities in two domains: leader wellness support and operational support.
Leader Wellness Support
These investments hoped to address the issues of stress, overwhelm, and burnout that plague the entrepreneurs in our portfolio to build resilience through their demanding leadership journey.
- Unrestricted Wellness Micro-grants – These grants allowed leaders to decide how to invest in their own wellness (i.e. spa day, therapy sessions, meal prep, etc.).
- Wellness Retreat – This curated all-inclusive retreat was focused on rest and restoration for organization leaders. We provided opportunities for exercise, meditation, plant-based community meals, reflective workshops and engaging conversations.
Operational Support
These investments were aimed at tackling the more tactical challenges our portfolio members have expressed including: education sales, hiring, and launching new products/services.
- Sales and Hiring Workshops – We provided skill building workshops for leaders to better navigate the procurement processes with schools/districts and for staff key positions in their organizations.
- Talent and Innovation Grants – These grants were intended to solve the challenges with capital needed to staff key positions and launch new products, programs, or services in response to the needs of their target beneficiaries.
Key Findings
1. The Power of Proximate Leadership
Our research validates the critical importance of leadership with profound community understanding and lived experience. While there is limited evidence of the impact of these programs on student outcomes, proximate leaders are collecting feedback from key stakeholders–including schools and families–that demonstrate unique capabilities:
- Recognizing overlooked community assets
- Developing contextually responsive solutions
- Establishing deeply resonant connections with students and families
2. Wellness as Systemic Strategy
The need is clear for wellness support as many of our portfolio members struggle with their entrepreneurial journey leading to burnout. Leaders need time to pause, reflect, and strategize to drive the change they hope to see in the world. However, our findings reveal that effective support must be intrinsically linked to organizational capacity and capital. Key insights include:
- Leaders perceived the social-emotional investments as having an immediate positive impact on their mental health and wellbeing.
- The lasting effects of these interventions need to be examined as it is not clear how long these impacts are felt and how this improvement impacts the organization.
- Wellness strategies need to address root causes of burnout from their work including workload management and lack of access to capital.
3. Building Organizational Capacity
As these early-stage ventures grow, their leaders can no longer wear all the hats. Operational investments allow leaders to grow their teams with full-time or fractional support bringing in expertise in key functional areas that support the venture’s sustainability. Preliminary research indicates that strategic operational interventions generate organization growth. Our key insights include:
- All entrepreneurs receiving multiple grants demonstrated annual revenue increases.
- Ventures were able to retain or expand staff using these investments
- Leaders reported that enhanced capacity allowed for venture to reach more beneficiaries
Conclusion
Our research underscores a fundamental truth: supporting educational innovation requires a holistic, nuanced approach that centers the experience and potential of proximate leaders. By providing strategic, comprehensive support, we can transform the trajectory of educational ventures and, ultimately, create more responsive, effective learning ecosystems. At Camelback we are committed to continuing to refine this approach and sharing with our partners and funders in this work.
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