Cameron Burgess · Pau, France
Founders, executives, program officers, investors — different roles confronted with the same false choices.
There’s a better way to scale without compromise.
Impact innovators served
Countries
James Baldwin · As Much Truth As One Can Bear, 1962
The Question.
Nobody designs it this way. It’s what happens when the work is urgent and the money is short: the organisation comes to run on the discretionary commitment of the people inside it, and then treats that commitment as though it were infrastructure. It’s not — and hiring doesn’t fix it, because the problem is how decisions, authority and accountability are arranged, not how many hearts and minds there are.
The usual response is to blame the funders, the overhead culture, the impossible expectations — all partly true, and all of it changes nothing, because it presumes we have no agency, despite being part of the problem.
The harder question is the more useful one
Who are we being, that this is the experience we keep having?
Cameron has spent more than thirty years asking it — of the leaders he works with, of the people who fund them, and longest of all, of himself.
Three things are necessary for a bird to fly — the two wings, and the tail as a rudder for steering. Jnana (knowledge) is the one wing, Bhakti (love) is the other, and Yoga (action) is the tail that keeps up the balance.
Swami Vivekananda
The Impact Innovator Framework
Almost nobody in this sector talks about love, and yet without it we wouldn't exist. So why is it the one thing that never appears in a strategy document, a board pack or a due diligence checklist?
Social change is not for sociopaths.
Love without knowledge creates well-intentioned chaos. Knowledge without action generates analysis paralysis. Action without love becomes soulless execution. Ten foundations put the three in balance — in the organisation, and in the people who run it.
The record
From micro-enterprises to multinationals and multilateral initiatives.
We’ve been commissioned by the institutions that fund the sector, and by the organisations they fund; by movements and networks; and by people running something out of a spare room.
Gates Foundation · GIZ
Sustainable Sanitation Alliance
An intervention on a funded alliance that had stalled, commissioned by the two funders in partnership.
SDC
Senegal River Basin
Taking the systems design in From Billions to Trillions and applying outcome-based funding to a basin-scale programme.
HitNet
An indigenous digital ecosystem.
Strategic guidance and revenue modelling to graduate a university program into a social enterprise placing digital hubs in remote and Indigenous communities.
Zebras Unite
Earned revenue for a movement
Working with the founders to design a global cooperative movement, including commercial service offerings, founder representation, and a way for the community itself to earn.
01 · Writing and research
Read the work. Or commission it.
A project, a concept paper, a theory of change that has never been properly articulated — Cameron writes the version that builds sector-wide authority, and attracts funding: white papers, concept notes, systems analyses, commissioned research.
Here is one of them, in full.
BUCKMINSTER FULLER
02 · Organisational design
If it only works when you’re in the room, it’s not a system — it’s a dependency.
The Foundations process, at the scope the problem needs: ninety minutes on the question in front of you, a commissioned program or process design, or three days offsite with your leadership team working through all ten foundations.
Rumi · rendered by Coleman Barks
03 · If you fund it, or invest in it
The organisation you’ve backed can’t perform without key people. That's your exposure, not their character.
Overhead or outcomes; returns or results. You have the data — you know which organisations are struggling and why. Twelve- and eighteen-month grant cycles shape an organisation’s design as surely as any board decision does, and capacity investment reads as overhead precisely when it’s the only thing that would change the outcome. The Foundations audit runs the same process on the organisation you’ve backed, and gives you a written account of what’s structural, what’s personal, and what it would take — sized to sit inside the signature authority a program officer already has.
Writer · Speaker · Mentor
Cameron works on the structural causes of fragility in impact organisations — how decisions, accountability and money really move — with the people who run them and the people who fund them, over more than thirty years and 45 countries. He's a co-founder and CEO of Armillaria, a co-founder and Executive Director of Holo Ventures, and lives in Pau, in the French Pyrenees.
Start a conversation
It’s the question at the start of every engagement. Thirty minutes, no pitch: a direct conversation about what you’re working on, what it’s costing, and where the answer leads.