Here are three ways to be effective (and creative) in your philanthropic endeavors
Around this time last year, I was experiencing some of the most beautiful moments in my life cuddling with our baby boy. I used to think the greatest unconditional love is what moms have for their kids until I had a baby. No matter how much I love my baby, he makes me feel that he loves me more. So, I guess it’s an infinite loop of positive reinforcement. As I was getting used to the new found love, one day, I came across this image of a 2-year-old boy in a red t-shirt lying face down lifeless on the coasts of Turkey. I cried, feeling helpless. What did the boy do to deserve this, and how unlucky the parents must be to lose such a precious angel? Why do the place and conditions you are born into have to be such big factors in deciding your fate? It is not the first time these questions occurred to me. But this time it hit me harder.
3 million children under five years died in 2015 due to conditions that could be prevented or treated with access to simple, affordable interventions
Donating to organizations helping with refugee crisis was one option, but how do I know which organization is having an impact and not adding to the disruption? And what about day to day less publicized suffering? To put things in context, about 3 million children under five years died in 2015 due to conditions that could be prevented or treated with access to simple, affordable interventions — that is around five children every second. There are around 60 million kids out of primary school. Almost half the world, over three billion people, live on less than $2.50 a day. 20% of the planet’s population uses 80% of its resources and consumes 30% more than the planet can regenerate. With so much inequity in the world, each one of us has an obligation to give back and be active forces in leveling the playing field. While you are here, check out Giving What We Can’s calculator to find out how rich you are on a global scale.
But where do we start? Do we make donations or work directly for causes? How do we know if we are optimizing for impact? These are some hard questions which hinder giving and effective altruism.
Charitable donations are a form of investment, which has social returns instead of financial ones. Yet, we rarely embark on the same amount of due diligence and analysis as compared to buying stocks, for example. To have the biggest impact both empathy and critical thinking are necessary. I believe our generation has some great resources and frameworks at our disposal to have a tremendous impact. In this article, I make an attempt to collect some of the compelling and nontraditional paths millennials are taking to boost their impact.
Effective giving and earning to give
How can I do the most good with my donation?
Traditionally, charities are rated based on what percentage of the money goes towards program related activities versus operational costs. I believe this is not the best metric. It is entirely possible a charity has minimal overhead costs but does not have a real impact. See Dan Pallotta’s talk on “The way we think about charity is dead wrong.” And moreover, some charities are 100 times or 1000 times more effective than others. In this regard, I love what GiveWell and Giving What We Can do. They are organizations which perform rigorous evidence-based research on the outcomes of charities and rate them by their impact. They mainly use randomized control trials to check for evidence of successful interventions - Much like how pharmaceutical companies vet out new drugs. These organizations importantly help us answer the most crucial question in giving — How can I do the most good with my donation? For the more general form of the same question “How can I do the most good in my lifetime?”, I strongly encourage checking out Effective Altruism and 80,000 hours (Yes, you guessed it right, that is the number of hours we spent in our day jobs).
This leads us to an interesting case where you might be able to optimize the impact by deliberately taking a high earning job which is morally neutral or positive and donate a very significant portion of your earning. The premise here is that some people have skills which are better suited for earning money than doing good directly. This approach is most efficient for cause areas where there is a funding gap. For example, long lasting insecticide treated nets (LLIN) is one of the most cost-effective ways to prevent Malaria and it is funding bounded right now. Very roughly, cost of saving a life is ~$3000. Also, check out this beautiful map which shows the progress made so far. Just take a moment here and think about saving a person’s life who is close to your heart. Saving a stranger is not much different when you consider their loved ones.
For inspiration, check out this Boston couple who donate half their income every year and so far donated more than 400K.
Pro bono Volunteering and Social Intrapreneurship
Volunteers get to contribute their expertise and time, which might be more valuable than just donating money
Pro bono volunteering refers to companies and individuals volunteering their professional skills to assist nonprofit organizations in creating or improving their business practices. This is good as volunteers get to contribute their expertise and time, which might be more valuable than just donating money. For example, as most organizations do, nonprofits also can benefit from cutting-edge technology, but it is often expensive to hire full-time technical teams. But domain knowledge is also crucial to have most impact, so just tech skills alone would not help. Pro bono volunteering helps with this problem by connecting social sectors and tech workers on a semi long term projects. But I think there is immense value if you can channelize tech challenges from social sector to tech expertise in your company, there by amplifying the impact. This liaison is where social intrapreneurship can be effective. You can help run your internal philanthropic efforts and specifically drive the tech-for-good aspects of it to drive product roadmap features which help small businesses and non profits. For example, mPesa, a mobile phone-based platform which contributed to a dramatic increase in the percentage of adults with access to formal financial services in Kenya, was started by a few social intrapreneurs at Vodafone. If you want to find more resources about social intrapreneurship, check out The League of Intrapreneurs and the impact work toolkit from Net Impact.
Being a data engineer, I am familiar with pro bono opportunities in data science and related fields. So here are some pointers: Datakind, Bayes Impact, DeltaAnalytics and Statistics Without Borders provide with medium term opportunities to collaborate with nonprofits. There are more competition-style opportunities like Kaggle competitions for Govt and Nonprofits and Drivendata. There are also more academic style opportunities like “Data Science for Social good fellow” at the University of Chicago. Also, check out “Datalook’s Definitive Guide” for more details on these opportunities.
As we talk about optimizing impact and skills, I would like to mention technologies like AI, specifically Deep learning, which I firmly believe can be great tools for massive impact in the coming years. Deep learning, through multiple layers of hidden neurons, allows us to model very complex nonlinear functions, which by definition of Universal approximation theorem can be used to model almost anything. With the ubiquity of GPUs and higher level language abstractions to run neural networks, innovation in the field is flourishing. And it is proving to be successful in socially relevant problems such as detecting Breast Cancer and Diabetic Retinopathy(most common cause of blindness among diabetics). Here are some deep learning resources you might want to check out. I strongly recommend fast.ai’s MOOC — “Practical Deep Learning For Coders” which Jeremy Howard and Rachael Thompson are offering from this week. I just completed the in-person version of the course and can vouch for it. Not just the content is very hands on and current, but there is also an emphasis on social relevance and ideas being exchanged on how to use this technology for greater good. Bonus — all proceeds from the course are donated to Fred Hollows, an organization which can restore vision for an individual for as little as $25.
Social Entrepreneurship and Impact Investing
From Wikipedia — “A social enterprise is an organization that applies commercial strategies to maximize improvements in human and environmental well-being — this may include maximizing social impact alongside profits for external shareholders.” Just to be clear, a social enterprise can either be a for-profit or a non-profit entity. This is an entrepreneurial option where you can lead and innovate a solution to a problem by establishing a company focused on solving that problem for the poorest socio-economic group or “Bottom of the pyramid” (BoP), as it is often referred to. This approach is especially useful in areas where there is no established scalable solution to the problem, and it is ripe for innovation. (You might want to check out an argument for talent gap versus funding gap here.) A well-celebrated success in this space is Muhammad Yunus who was an early social entrepreneur who pioneered micro credits. Some other more recent examples include Thorn, which drives technology innovation to fight the sexual exploitation of children; Simpa networks, making clean energy affordable and accessible to everyone; Unima, taking diagnostics to the 2 billion people in developing world. For more role models in this space check out this new age social entrepreneurs who won accolades from the World Economic Forum, Forbes 30 Under 30, and the Schwab Foundation.
More links for interested folks:
- Must-read books for aspiring social entrepreneurs
- Resourceful networks like Ashoka Changemakers and Skoll Foundation.
- Ideas for Social enterprises from GiveWell
Impact investing challenges the long-held views that social and environmental issues should be addressed only by philanthropic donations, and that market investments should focus exclusively on achieving financial returns
But it is often harder to make profits when you are catering to the poorest of the poor. That is the main reason most of the economy revolves around the affluent for bigger margins. Impact investing challenges this long-held view that social and environmental issues should be addressed only by philanthropic donations, and that market investments should focus exclusively on achieving financial returns. It does so by optimizing not just for financial returns but also for social-environmental impact. More capital flowing into Social sector encourages long-term planning for sustainability as well as fosters innovation.
Again the fundamental difficulty here is — it is easy to measure financial returns, but it is rather hard to measure impact. In the Impact Investing world, there are various frameworks and tools to gauge the impact like GIIRS, IRIS, B Certification, Demonstrating Value, etc. I see some of them are more outcome based and some are more efficiency and transparency based. It would be interesting to see progress in this area. Ultimately, this research and tooling around Impact measurement would be tremendously impactful if it makes it easy for all organizations to make impact driven decisions just like how natural it is today to make decisions based on financial value.
Stanford Social Innovation Review is an excellent source to follow the SoCap(Social capital) world as well as other innovations in philanthropy space. As more shareholders value impact I think it becomes imperative for all companies to report on impact along with financial gains. It turns out you can in fact set up legal structures to formally define intentions for the triple bottom line: Profits, environmental impact and social impact — L3Cs and Benefit corporations fall into this category. You can also chose more traditional legal structures such as LLC (like Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative), Nonprofit or Hybrid (A nonprofit and a for profit like Omidyar Network).
Eventually, I wish all enterprises would be social enterprises, measuring not just their profits but also their impact. So impact conscious millennials can feed in this parameter in their career decisions. A simpler starting point maybe for Glassdoor to include the“Impact” criteria for employees to rate on just like work/life balance and CEO ratings. I am sure Cloudera, my previous employer, would come up pretty high among mid sized tech companies — its product has a big impact in the Social sector, and it provides various pro bono opportunities to its employees through Cloudera Cares.
Closing remarks
This list is in no way an exhaustive list of paths for optimal impact, but just a starting point. Activism, public policy making and influencing, basic sciences and political sciences research, meta-charities, and traditional local volunteering are some of the other forms. We can choose our impact strategy just like how we choose our investment options in our portfolio based on our risk tolerance and current financial and personal situations. We can either chose one path, or try out different ways over a period.
Either way, I think it pays off to start early and evaluate your strategy periodically to maximize the impact over the lifetime. As Melinda Gate’s mother said, “To know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, that is success.” Here’s wishing everyone an even more successful (read impactful) 2017!
Acknowledgements: Thanks to my wonderful husband/critic Venu Satuluri and my best mentor/friend Anjana Prabhakar for providing feedback on an earlier draft. And special thanks to all the wonderful people who inspire me every day!
Update: I have received messages mentioning that this advice applies to non millennials as well! In hind sight, I feel so too. So updating the title to reflect the same.
