1.    Progress over perfection

Start small if you need to or start slowly if that suits you but just start. Don’t wait for the perfect conditions (they don’t exist). It’s likely that you’ll never have all the answers or the ideal conditions or perfect policies in place before you start, but in our experience, momentum beats inertia.

2.    Active alignment

Taking an impact approach takes commitment and effort. You need to be vigilant, proactive and hands-on, bringing key stakeholders on the journey while building knowledge and aligned partnerships. The right partners at the right time make an enormous difference. Finding them (and being prepared to walk away from partnerships that are no longer aligned) means having the courage to ask uncomfortable questions and do the right thing even when it’s the hard thing or may result in short-term losses.

3.    Accept that failure is a valid outcome

If we accept volatility and uncertainty in traditional markets, we need to accept failure as a valid outcome in other forms of investments. There will be things that simply don’t work. There will also be things that are unknowable, even with the best due diligence, until they reveal themselves.

Sometimes, when an investment falters, you’ll be able to pinpoint that the due diligence let you down. Other times, you’ll realise that even if you had the opportunity to do it over again, there wouldn’t have been anything you could have done differently. This was our experience with two deals, one of which resulted in a $500,000 loss, another of which has had the value of the asset greatly diminished.

Learn from the failures but keep moving forward; hindsight is a beautiful thing.

4.    Don’t overlook gender

There’s no escaping the fact that women are underrepresented in finance and investing. Figures from the Financial Services Council show women make up 27 per cent of investment management teams. Gender diversity tracking and targets exist, but more needs to be done to build talent pipelines and policies that attract and retain more women to the field.

This applies to us too. As we prepared this report, the lack of gender diversity in our direct orbit was unmissable: our Investment Committee is overwhelmingly male and the case studies in this report include many more male founders than women. We are assessing gender diversity and targets across our fund managers and our own structures to hold ourselves accountable to the same metrics.

5.    There are different tools for different opportunities

Market forces alone can’t fix everything and not every good idea is investible. Market forces and entrenched systems have led to, and perpetuate, inequities in our society. There needs to be a willingness to try different solutions, tools and investment methods, otherwise you need to accept that not every deal is for you or not every idea can become a deal.

 

6.    Know your horizons and invest accordingly

You don’t need to be the largest foundation to be an impactful one. As a perpetual foundation our long-term horizon means we can weather storms and we are prepared to do that. We would rather know we investigated every opportunity to align investments with values and impact and risked (and encountered) some failures than be passive about it. Similarly, we acknowledge that our investment choices (avoiding harmful, but often high-performing investments) contributed to the fact that our impact investments have outperformed our traditional investments. For us, the value of capital to do good now outweighs the potential of a perceived ‘safe’ percentage increase in our corpus in future years.

 

7.    Learning never ends

Learning isn’t finite. There’s no end point where it’s defensible to stop learning, particularly with an issue as challenging as poverty or in a field as dynamic as social change. Opportunities to create impact in the spaces where investing and philanthropy intersect will continue to evolve and that’s something we’re excited about.

The Wyatt Trust is 140 years old in 2026, and we’re still learning.

These learnings and an additional Case Study: 'Eighteen months, seven investors, $5 million, one business…no deal' are featured in The Wyatt Trust: Perspectives on Investing report.