A direct cash assistance program used to take months to launch. My guest today turned one on earlier this year in about four hours. The hard part of helping people was never writing the check. It was the system the check had to travel through, a system that for too many people was built to keep them out.
When Sarah Bouchie became CEO of Helen Keller International, she led a listening process across the organization and sharpened how they told their story. That preparation proved critical. Within months, a third of the organization’s revenue disappeared.
What followed: 300 layoffs, a refusal to close a single country office, and six months later, the Kristof Holiday Impact Prize that raised nearly $13 million. But the reason any of that matters comes down to what this organization actually does.
Imagine a child, nine years old, who has never once held a pencil or opened a book. Not because she doesn’t want to learn, but because poverty or conflict or displacement slammed the schoolhouse door before she ever reached it. Across Africa, that is the reality for 80 million children. And once they fall behind, most education systems simply move on without them.
Kyle Clifford took over as CEO of amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, on January 1st of this year. Founded in 1985 and championed by Elizabeth Taylor, amfAR has invested nearly a billion dollars in the fight against HIV and is now expanding its research into cancer, neurocognitive conditions, and immune dysfunction. What makes Kyle’s leadership unlike any in the organization’s history is that he is amfAR’s first CEO who is openly living with HIV. And as he shared with me, his path to leading this organization was anything but planned.
It’s Kyle Clifford on The Business of Giving
What if the entire strategy for fixing how we produce meat has been wrong from the start?
For fifty years, advocates have tried to convince people to eat less. Yet, Â consumption has broken a new global record every single year since 1961. Every. Single. Year. So Bruce Friedrich decided to stop fighting human nature and start working with it.
Bruce is the founder of The Good Food Institute, a global science think tank, and the author of a new book called Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food and Our Future. His argument is simple and a little mind-bending: the goal isn’t a world where people sacrifice. It’s a world where they can’t tell the difference.
That’s the vision. And in the conversation that follows, Bruce explains exactly how close we actually are to making it real, why companies like Tyson are essential to getting there, and why he puts the odds at 95 percent, but only if one critical thing happens.
It’s Bruce Friedrich on The Business of Giving.
Most organizations approaching their 100th anniversary would be looking back and celebrating past achievements. United Way of Rhode Island is doing the opposite. Under Cortney Nicolato’s leadership, they’re taking bigger swings than ever, from meeting a $100 million racial equity commitment ahead of schedule to becoming the go-to source of real-time community data for state policymakers.
Cortney returned to her home state after building a national career because she wanted to help the communities that helped her growing up as a latchkey kid in Pawtucket. She transformed United Way from the inside first, rebuilding the board and staff to reflect Rhode Island’s diversity, before asking anyone else to change.
And when others began backing away from equity commitments, her response was clear:Â
This is a conversation about what it takes to be both an emergency responder and a long-term systems builder, about earning a seat at the policy table with data instead of survey results, and about building organizational culture that will outlast any single leader.
It’s Cortney Nicolato on The Business of Giving.