The Business of Giving

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...

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. Brittany Christenson is the CEO of AidKit , the infrastructure beneath some of the nation’s mo...

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 nea...

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. My next guest refused to accept...

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 t...

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,  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 glob...

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...

From the person who co-founded the first nonprofit software company to tackle social problems at scale, Jim Fruchterman returns to share insights from his new book “𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗱: 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗡𝗼𝗻𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗶𝘁 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗔𝗿𝗲 𝗨𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗦𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝘁𝗼 𝗦𝗼𝗹𝘃𝗲 𝗢𝘂𝗿 𝗠𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗦𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺𝘀.” In this conversation, Jim explains why boring plumbing saves more lives than sexy AI moonshots, and introduces the Bett...

Bob Chapman didn’t set out to write a leadership manual when he transformed Barry-Wehmiller from a traditional manufacturing company into what a world peace negotiator would call “the answer to world peace.” He simply started caring for his 12,000 team members the way he’d want his own children cared for if they worked somewhere else. Ten years after publishing “Everybody Matters,” Chapman has add...

Scott Brighton returns to The Business of Giving to discuss Bonterra Que , the first truly agentic AI platform designed specifically for nonprofits. Unlike traditional chatbots, Que can actually perform complete jobs for nonprofit staff, from donor segmentation and campaign creation to grant writing. Through January 31st, Bonterra is offering Que at no cost to its customers during the critical yea...

Hala Hanna is the Executive Director of MIT Solve , a platform connecting social impact innovators with the resources they need to scale solutions that close gaps in equity, learning, health, and climate response. Over the past decade, MIT Solve has selected 600 innovators from around the world, collectively impacting 370 million lives. But what sets this work apart is how they do it. With a 94% f...

When Ike Anand flew into Memphis in the summer of 2020—just one of four passengers on an otherwise empty plane, double-masked with a face shield—he was answering what he calls a calling he couldn’t ignore.  After 15 years scaling Expedia’s global network in Seattle, Anand left the tech world to become the seventh CEO of ALSAC, the fundraising arm of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital . Now he’s...

Angela Williams has spent decades reading the signs that most of us miss—the hairline fractures in systems we’ve long taken for granted. As President and CEO of United Way Worldwide , she leads a network that touches 35 countries and receives 45,000 calls for help every single day. That vantage point has given her something rare: a real-time view of how chaos is reshaping the landscape leaders mus...

When Marika Anthony-Shaw was touring with Arcade Fire , the band started adding a single dollar to every concert ticket—sending the proceeds to Partners in Health’s work in Haiti . Night after night, that simple gesture grew from $3,000 to $10,000 per show. Over nine years, they contributed more than $2.5 million without asking anyone for money. The question became: Why isn’t everybody doing this?...

Plinio Ayala didn’t just leave the South Bronx of the 1970s and ‘80s—he returned to it with a blueprint for economic mobility that’s now reshaping workforce development across America. As President and CEO of Per Scholas , Plinio leads a tech training nonprofit that’s placed over 25,000 graduates into careers earning three times their previous income. But here’s what sets him apart: while most non...

Anne Filipic is the CEO of   Share Our Strength and leads its No Kid Hungry campaign at a moment when childhood hunger in America has reached alarming new heights. With one in five children—nearly 14 million kids—now facing food insecurity, Anne brings both urgency and strategic clarity to a crisis that touches every community in the country. In this conversation, she reveals how recent policy rol...

Welcome to The Business of Giving. I’m Denver Frederick. Right now, in fields across dozens of countries, there’s an invisible race happening. On one side: curious children wandering into what looks like empty farmland. On the other: teams of specialists working meter by painstaking meter to find what’s buried there first. Today we’re joined by Darren Cormack , CEO of the Mines Advisory Group —an...

Picture this: You’re selling your old phone on eBay when a single click offers you the chance to send wildfire relief to LA. No forms, no guilt trip, no second-guessing—just pure impulse-to-impact conversion. You might do it without thinking twice. If you did, congratulations—you just participated in the $4 billion revolution Nick Aldridge has been quietly building for 18 years. While the nonprofi...

Edgar Sandoval arrived in the United States with just $50 in his pocket, unable to speak English, carrying only his American passport and an unshakeable determination. Today, he leads World Vision , one of the world’s largest humanitarian organizations, serving 100 countries and reaching millions of the most vulnerable children globally. From corporate boardrooms at Procter & Gamble—where he h...

What if the secret to changing the world isn’t buried in your bank account, but hidden in talents you’ve never fully recognized? Today we welcome John Studzinski —a financier who survived a near-fatal car crash that killed nine others, a philanthropist who’s discovered over 5,000 emerging artists, and author of the revolutionary new book A Talent for Giving: Creating a More Generous Society That B...

What started as a solo trek through Nepal’s earthquake-devastated Langtang Valley became a global movement connecting adventure with authentic impact. Today we’re joined by Candice Young , founder of Trek Relief , an organization that transforms travelers into changemakers through community-led projects across the world’s most remote regions. From installing solar panels in Peru to rebuilding scho...

Few organizations have redefined what activism looks like in the 21st century more than Global Citizen—a movement that began with three high school friends in Australia and has now mobilized millions of people worldwide, leveraging over $49 billion in commitments that have impacted 1.3 billion lives. At the center of this extraordinary transformation is Hugh Evans , Co-Founder and CEO of Global Ci...

Picture this: You’re sitting in an empty Red Cross blood donation center, knowing that premium streaming content worth millions go unused while nonprofits everywhere struggle to afford basic advertising. That lightbulb moment launched Kris Johns from adtech executive to nonprofit revolutionary, founding AdGood —a 501(c)(3) that’s rewriting the rules of television advertising for organizations chan...

Picture this:  A young lawyer with $3,500 from a church committee and an audacious dream to fix what seemed unfixable—the fact that when development projects failed in low-income communities, they left “a hole in the ground for the next 30 years.” That lawyer was Elyse Cherry , and today she’s the CEO of BlueHub Capital , having turned that modest start into a staggering $20 billion in community t...

What happens when you realize your values guide only half a percent of your wealth while the other 99.5% operates by completely different principles? You become what Sharon Schneider calls an “Integrator.” As founder of Integrated Capital Strategies and author of “Handbook for an Integrated Life,” Sharon works with ultra-wealthy families who’ve grown tired of the schizophrenic dance between making...