by Denver Frederick | Sep 21, 2026 | Guest Interview
Most mentoring programs ask for a year, maybe two, and rely on volunteers who come and go. My next guest built something almost radical by comparison: a paid, professional mentor for every child, for at least twelve years, no matter what.
Terri Sorensen leads Friends of the Children, which selects some of the most vulnerable four- to six-year-olds in the country—kids facing foster care, homelessness, and deep poverty—and pairs each one with a mentor who stays for their entire childhood, tested now by a twenty-year randomized controlled trial. But ask her what actually makes it work, and she doesn’t lead with the data.
We talk about keeping that promise for over a decade, scaling from one city to nearly fifty, and the young man who just graduated law school with his Friend still by his side.
It’s Terri Sorensen, CEO of Friends of the Children, on the Business of Giving.
by Denver Frederick | Sep 16, 2026 | Guest Interview
There is a strange injustice sitting on pharmacy shelves. Some of the drugs there, already approved, already cheap, may hold real power against cancer. Not after another decade of trials. Now. The evidence often already exists. What doesn’t exist is anyone with a financial reason to bring it forward.
My guest built her organization to close that gap. Dr. Laura Kleiman ran a data science center at Dana-Farber when her own mother was diagnosed with cancer there, and kept finding promising research on existing drugs that no company had any incentive to pursue.
Here is how she frames the problem:
It’s Dr. Laura Kleiman, Founder and CEO of Reboot Rx, on The Business of Giving.
by Denver Frederick | Sep 11, 2026 | Guest Interview
Every night the news shows us floods, fires, and wars that force people from their homes. Then the story moves on. But for the people who have been displaced, that is when another story begins: Where do they go, and how do they rebuild their lives?
For nearly 50 years, Alight has been working on that question. And its CEO, Jocelyn Wyatt, believes the humanitarian system too often succeeds at keeping people alive without creating a path for them to move forward.
Jocelyn came to humanitarian work through design rather than the traditional aid world, and that perspective has shaped how she leads. The people Alight serves aren’t beneficiaries waiting for help. They’re customers with skills, ambitions, families, and futures of their own.
We talk about what happens after the emergency, why humanitarian aid can measure the wrong things, and what it really means to give power to the people closest to the problem.
It’s Jocelyn Wyatt, CEO of Alight, on The Business of Giving.
by Denver Frederick | Sep 8, 2026 | Guest Interview
We spend almost our entire lives indoors, and we rarely ask what all that time is doing to us. My guest has spent the past year building the case that the rooms we live and work in quietly shape our stress, our focus, even our brain activity, and that philanthropy has a rare chance to act on it.
Ishita Das, a molecular biologist, is part of the Milken Institute’s science-philanthropy team, where she helps funders decide where their money can move science fastest. Her year-long investigation gave a scattered field a name: neurospatial design.
We talk about the evidence that a room can change your body, why the field stayed invisible so long, and how a donor turns scattered work into something that lasts.
It’s Ishita Das on The Business of Giving.
by Denver Frederick | Jul 20, 2026 | Guest Interview
He never wanted to be an administrator. He wanted to be a therapist, and to work in a food pantry. Instead, J. Antonio Fernández has a job that no layman had held in more than a century. He leads Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York. Not one organization, but 82 of them, 9,000 employees, more than 400,000 people served a year. And he still turns up at the food distributions most weeks. Ask him what people get wrong about the work, and he doesn’t hesitate. We talk about the federal money that has disappeared, about being a landlord in a city debating rent freezes, and about the one thing he is certain no technology will ever replace. It’s J. Antonio Fernandez on The Business of Giving.
by Denver Frederick | Jul 11, 2026 | Guest Interview
My guest today came to philanthropy through the lab bench, not the development office. Melissa Stevens trained as a biochemist, and for nearly two decades at the Milken Institute she has put a scientist’s question to an entire field: what does the evidence actually tell us about where a dollar of high-risk capital does the most good? As Executive Vice President for Strategic Philanthropy, she helps families and foundations give serious money away, and give it away well. And she is watching history arrive in real time. Eighty-four trillion dollars is changing hands, the largest transfer of wealth ever, and the generation receiving it has no intention of inheriting the old model of giving.
