 Good afternoon everyone if everybody could just move in just a little bit We want to have a really great discussion here And I know it can be a little difficult for those who are sitting in that kind of middle area So come on down we can see you come on come on somebody move for me just so I can Yep. Yes. Thank you guys So welcome to our panel Accelerating the NGO using accelerator models to drive impact in global development To introduce myself my name is Savannah Miller and I work for care USA. I'm the program officer for innovation and design at care And when we were coming up with this panel, I was doing some work in tandem with MIT and doing some research to kind of figure out What was out there in the accelerator space for NGOs? What were some of the trends? What were we seeing? You know the direction in the space? What was happening and as we are looking around we saw a really huge level of diversity Just a lot of different types of users a lot of different geographies a lot of different definitions of what accelerator meant So to get started I want to just have all of our panelists introduce themselves and we're gonna start with Matu From World Vision. Yeah, so hi everyone. My name is Matu I'm from World Vision Canada if you don't know World Vision is one of the oldest NGOs in the world We have about a hundred country offices 40,000 staff and we work across the board in terms of health water sanitation education And we run an accelerator like program called the social innovation challenge So the social innovation challenge was really developed in response to a lot of our field offices Having challenges in sectors like agriculture and education and really not knowing how to find a solution So us as World Vision Canada developed the social innovation challenge to catalyze and really capture some of the Amazing technologies that come out of academic institutions in Canada and apply them to our field work in Kenya the Philippines Mexico so how that works in practice is we have an open call for applicants in a certain sector area this year It's agriculture We wait six months and solicit applications at the end of six months We work with the team of experts to pick ten organizations that go through an accelerator Bootcamp at the end of the accelerator, which we'll definitely get into later on We pick two organizations that receive up to $50,000 worth of funding grant funding from our end And then we work with them for a full year to help implement their solutions with our field offices on the ground Awesome Michael great Michael in the car I'm with and lead the social ventures team at Mercy Corps a global humanitarian organization Not quite as big as world vision beginning up there working in some of the most fragile places in the world And I'm actually going to be talking about Gaza skygeeks, which is a tech hub and incubation sort of incubator that we have in Gaza And I'm here representing Ryan Sturgill who directs that program and couldn't be here So we're gonna actually cheat and read from some of his notes because I don't want to screw it up I've been to Gaza a couple of times in visiting. It's just a tremendous space And we'll obviously be talking more about it But Gaza skygeeks is a program of Mercy Corps and seeded actually with our friends over at Google.org And the mission is to support Gaza's growth into an internationally competitive hub for tech products and services It does that by supporting a community of startup founders freelancers and coders Under one roof and connecting them with the investors mentors and infrastructure. That's needed as you're building out a tech Hub and a startup incubator The entire existence was premised on the fact that Gaza is isolated cut off from the rest of the world But actually has access to high-speed internet and their tremendous level of education and engineering education in Gaza So building off of that. They really wanted to take advantage of that and build a sort of economic engine Within Gaza. So we'll be talking more about it, but it's a it's a tremendously impressive program Becca great. Hi everyone. I'm Rebecca holiday. I'm from Care USA. I'm the director of partnerships for innovation I'm based here in San Francisco, but we're closely with Savannah and others on a number of initiatives Coming out of the innovation department at care. So today talking about our accelerator We call it a scale by design accelerator. It's it's young But Taking advantage of actually cares long history and global footprint. So cares been around since just after World War two And with presence in over 90 countries and a couple of years ago We took a hard look at some of our really more impactful and powerful programming that we've seen sort of emerge and evolve over Over the decades and when one of the trends that we noticed was it was taking a really long time for some of these important programs to Take hold and even take flight and and to scale across the organization to have to reach those real numbers that we were hoping to see And so we we have designed a program that looks and and sort of harnesses That that sort of spirit of innovation and really powerful programming internally a care For a program to give a select sort of cohort of a program staff That's a year-long program where they participate In a series of of labs and then that culminates also in a in a two-week boot camp And we do our own sort of version of a pitch night, but the idea is to kind of bring Adapting from the private sector models of accelerators and it with an NGO twist You know, how do we take and give these our development practitioners our project staff the tools and resources And and sort of that mindset mindset shift to think about what are those pathways to scale? How do we short-circuit that you know a 20 year trajectory of what what took our village savings loan association program? How can we short-circuit that so maybe it's five or ten years? And and what are the different ways that we can bring in new approaches to partnership to do that as well? And last but not least Stephanie Well, thank you so much Savannah for convening this conversation and inviting FHI 360 to be a part of it and thank all of you for coming I'm really excited to see this crowd here And I see a lot of familiar faces who I know are doing quite similar work and accelerators and NGOs So hopefully we can have a good discussion at the end of this time So my name is Stephanie Marino Turpin. I lead our partnerships team at FHI 360 FHI 360 is a global development organization working in what we call integrated development Which includes workforce development health and education all of the drivers of systemic poverty throughout the world We work in more than 60 countries. So we're operating at a fairly large scale And our accelerator program has its roots back in 1990 when FHI 360 created a commercial entity and clinical research spun it off sold it for a 20-fold return on investment and then use that capital to endow what we called the FHI foundation and The FHI foundation has filled a really important gap in our resourcing model where we're now able to invest in ideas that are kind of Pre-evidence before we can make a compelling case to donors and really test some of those ideas to see if the possibility for scale is there About five years ago. We created something called the catalyst fund which was investing in Ideas products and services that were coming out of our technical teams and our programs to really see you know What had merit and what had that ability to scale and now we're launching with the next version of that catalyst fund is which we call FHI ventures FHI ventures is an accelerator model that we'll be working with ideas that come internally from FHI 360 as well as Enterprises that we source externally from throughout our 60 plus country offices We're looking for companies that are at the post prototype or early revenue stage And we'll be providing investment mentoring coaching and some additional business development services And our goal with FHI ventures is really to find those ideas that can go to scale so that we can attract some additional private capital provide some wraparound services and Hopefully help those ideas scale faster Awesome, so as you can see we have a pretty wide range of what an accelerator is defined as right So to start us off. I kind of want to get Deep into what are your motivations for each of your organizations? To take on the challenge of an accelerator for an inferred, you know the NGO context Stephanie I'll start with you As one of the kind of as one of the models that we were looking at When Karen MIT we're doing some of this initial research Why do you think that we're actually seeing more accelerators based out of NGOs to begin with Yeah You know what I love about this conversation is it's a really specific example of this much larger trend that we're all talking a lot about It's so capped and in the rest of our professional lives About all the disruptors in global development and this growing intersection space between for-profit and nonprofit models So I think we're in a really interesting period of experimentation where we're seeing NGOs adopting more commercial approaches We're seeing for-profit businesses think more seriously about Sustainability and social impact and importantly we're seeing capital coming from all across the spectrum from grant capital to market rate Investments that's funding those kind of ideas So I think accelerators are just one kind of example of that period of experimentation that we're seeing in this sector But I do think it holds special interest for NGOs Really for two kind of oppositional reasons the first being that it's based on a strength in the second being that it's based on a lot of our weaknesses Yeah, so the strength is that for the past few decades a lot of INGOs like FHI 360 and some of the others on this panel have really named our core value proposition as Capacity building or technical assistance for local change makers who sit closer to the problems we're trying to solve Over that time, I think we've seen the face of those change makers shift a bit They're not always civil society organizations anymore Sometimes they're for-profit businesses sometimes their social enterprises and sometimes their organizations with a blended model And so we want to be adaptive we want to change with our partners and we want to be responsive in Continuing to deliver on that core value proposition of capacity development but maybe in a different way and Then the weakness side is I think accelerators are really built to help private businesses do a few things that NGOs Traditionally have not been very successful at doing and I would include in that list Flexible design to very quickly iterate around a prototype get customer feedback and change your approach in an agile way Traditionally NGOs design and then we implement on that design and don't really have great feedback mechanisms to change along the way Accelerators are built to seek investment private capital obviously is a new area for a lot of NGOs And then the third that I think is really important here is accelerators are built to help ideas scale And that's something that I think NGOs have struggled with for a long time So in a private sector accelerator from the beginning the accelerator is talking to those businesses about how are you going to reach? millions more people next year or the year after in NGOs We might set very ambitious targets for the number of people are going to reach and then we just kind of run like hell after those Targets knowing that we're running towards a cliff that we're going to fall off of at the project end date without necessarily Great coping mechanisms for what comes after that to extend or to grow the scale of the impact that we've created so I think we're seeing now that With the scale of global development challenges We're trying to address the ambition of the SDG who's I think we're seeing more clearly than ever that we have to get better at those Yeah, completely agree So the and I wanted to kind of talk with all of you about this question To be really simplistic about our models that we have here We have two kind of global internally facing models So care skill by design accelerator and FHI 360s catalyst fund and then we have two more local national level models Taking on external applicants, right? That's mercy course Gaza sky geeks and world vision social innovation challenge so why did each of you guys decide on that particular audience and then What you know what kind of pushed you for that towards that focus? I think with with with Gaza sky geeks It was very much about flipping the script in Gaza So in Gaza you have 80% of people benefiting from international aid Extremely isolated people generally can't leave at all But a really high level of education and a desire to rebuild their economy themselves And they have the lifeline of actual and pretty good sometimes better than here internet access So how do you take advantage of that talent which is trapped almost you know in an island that you know Gaza is no bigger than no much bigger than Manhattan And and kind of flip the script on what that is and so you know what Gaza sky geeks It's really been trying to build as a community so you know at different times they began by doing some tech training in a more Traditional development approach and saw the opportunity to actually accelerate some early startup businesses And what you realize over time is that actually you have to build the whole community You have to have a coding academy. You have to have freelancers You have trained an ability to get some different work that way some of them can eventually form businesses and the startups There's seven now actually pitching In Jordan and Turkey that have come out of the the Gaza sky geeks accelerator so again But it's it's about changing that narrative. And so we're very much focused on Those startups and those people and the in the space itself. I mean, it's like walking into a Google startup space when you go into to Gaza and the Gaza sky geeks and it's tremendously inclusive about 50% of The people coming through or women which is a little bit more rarity in the Middle East. So it's really impressive So we Quite honestly before we launch your social innovation challenge tried to do this internally We spent a full year thinking about how world vision can leverage its strengths internally to develop social enterprises we failed none of the social enterprises got off the ground and There was wasted resources and we just didn't have the capacity so our Automatic reaction to that is if we can't do it internally How can we look externally and leverage some of the technologies that are really coming out of these academic institutions out of these social? Enterprises and create a place where we can use them to help the work that we're trying to do So our accelerator really came from a place of failure and realizing our core capacity is not to build new Companies and to build new technologies. It's to help them implement in the ways that we work Sometimes pivot pivot pivot Just to kind of pile on there so putting on my social ventures had a mercy core We also have an externally facing social venture fund investing in early-stage start-up businesses But it's built off of when I first came we the team emerged a couple of years back at mercy core We focused on internally and said all right. We have this great platform We know the problems on the ground. Let's you know take some of our internal entrepreneurs Start get started businesses and spin them out. I mean how hard can that be? We actually did know the problems really deeply But we didn't have and we didn't have the incentive structure to for entrepreneurs to thrive internally So we said from the social venture side Let's work with entrepreneurs that are working right right alongside us and look at that platform Which all of our NGOs have as an asset to those entrepreneurs? And so we see it as both a way to help accelerate those entrepreneurs But also as a learning laboratory these entrepreneurs and these businesses that we're investing in can do things that an NGO We can't do yeah, so that's that's very much how we landed on and I would say I love the word learning But I think in general NGOs are afraid of the word failure and we don't embrace it positively enough So I love hearing you I say that but I will just outright and say we failed more learning from it And that's something because we aren't flexible enough and can't iterate fast enough We haven't really embraced that culture of failure yet Rebecca I would love to hear from you about because skill by design accelerator is still we're you know We're only in our second year, but we're currently trying to do what world vision kind of failed that so how are we doing? I mean, I think we Get it sort of an expansive definition of accelerator and also, you know while some of the participants may see their pathway to scale or their their sort of You know plan for sustainability to spin off But I think in a lot of other cases, you know We're not we're not saying that that needs to be the path they go on and I think if you take that pressure off But you don't have to become a business And that that you maybe look you know help them, you know find ways to partner with local government or other NGOs Or you were on a panel yesterday where they're saying, you know scaling could be someone else adopting your model And sure that doesn't solve your sustainability problem But if we're talking about a broader mission and broader goals that is success, right? And so I think you know We're still testing this out And I think we're the first to admit that we're continuing to tweak and I'll have a chance to say a little bit more about what We're thinking about for next year, right? But but certainly I think we still believe that there is a viable internal opportunity To to provide some new resources some new thinking For our own staff and and so far certainly we've seen a lot of interest We had a lot of applications from all over the world again this year And the team seemed to be responding but but yes I mean we you know we need to come back here in a couple years and say well Where are we on that those pathways to scale and and I think the jury's still out on that And we're still fighting that good fight too at FHI 360 of helping those internal ideas scale whether through for-profit Businesses or philanthropic funding we have this catalyst fund which last year I believe received over a hundred applications for funding internally which were fairly high quality Applications that I think we're really research-based that commercialization of course is the difficult part and we have launched two commercial entities Both with successful exits so we know that pathway is possible But it's certainly a challenging one and I think Mike you hit the nail on the head there with getting the incentive structure Right, I think it's a very challenging thing to do within an international nonprofit governance structure yeah, so we so we've kind of touched on the like nimbleness of the idea of an accelerator and maybe the slightly less nimbleness of the Traditional NGO structure, so I wanted to kind of dive into that and look at What the compatibility really is for these kind of accelerator models and you know traditional NGO development programming So Rebecca wanted to start with you How does the skill by design accelerator interact and like affect the rest of Cares core grant funded business. Yeah, that's a good question I'd say we're still on that learning journey But I think it's you know the core accelerator team is extremely small And so to be successful you have to find internal partners and internal champions Whether it's you know the the technical staff on the different areas that care focuses on in terms of its programming to the care Office country directors, etc. So we're You know, but we have seen some some interesting ways of uptake, right? So some of our alumni from cohort one that participated in the year-long program and then have graduated We're seeing them sort of branch out and share some of the learnings and sort of be almost mentors or advisors to other care country offices, so so that it's not just if only if you are in you get accepted to the program Do you get to access the resources? And I mentioned this earlier, but we're we're looking at the design for the next cohort So we start in May. It's a May to May cycle So we're in the midst of cohort to but having to think about what is next year look like and we It looks like we're going to be partnering with cares women's economic empowerment and food and nutrition and security teams so so kind of Honing in a little bit more in terms of a thematic focus But also then bringing those Program staff into the process a little bit more because the idea you know it again You don't want this to stop after a year. What what is that? What is the baton handoff if you're learning about really interesting? You know programming opportunities in Ghana that could be extremely relevant in you know in Bangladesh What what is that? What does that connectivity look like and and how do we work with our our program staff to help kind of? disseminate that across the organization and then the last point I'd make on that we're also Just the curriculum itself that we've developed and we continue to tweak and refine because it's a definitely a moving target in terms of What's the right tools and and materials for our teams? But you know again, we have these labs that we've created but then Our care Philippines country office raised its hand and said hey We're starting up these humanitarian innovation hubs and we'd actually like to adapt the scale by design curriculum to start our own sort of Work with local Filipino civil society organizations around humanitarian innovation And so we said great and you know and we're working with them to adapt it But it's a great way that we're seeing that it doesn't just sit in the silo of this accelerator program So Michael and Matthew I have a question for you guys. How is your accelerator funded? Funding is the internal problem of the the NGO We are very lucky at World Vision Canada to have a supportive internal innovation program. So We actually won something like a sharks tank or a dragon done internally at World Vision and got $50,000 worth of seed funding to launch the first version of the social innovation challenge What we didn't expect to happen was during the second challenge We had a lot of high-network donors come to us who have an entrepreneurial background and say how can we participate? How can we fund this this program and the second iteration of it was in energy? So we had two high-network donors one that was a major CEO of a solar manufacturing company And one was a major CEO of a hydrogen manufacturing company energy company and they came to us and said we'll find the prize We're really interested in looking at the technologies that come out of it and potentially working with them and So along with that funding I think this is where we really got them to participate was they were a judge within the accelerator pitch day they worked with the teams and the accelerator mentored them provided technology and in contextual support and Really have had really positive feedback on their experience with the social innovation challenge So building on that model for us in the future as we launch more challenges are one this year's agriculture We go back to our donor base. We go back to our high-net worth Philanthropy advisors and ask them who's working in agriculture. What major technology companies do we have in our donor base? Do we see as potential opportunities and are they interested in funding this? Yeah, I think we've thrown everything at Gaza sky geek so that started with you know great partners like Google.org that you know wanted to raise awareness around tech and entrepreneurship in Gaza So we brought on corporate partners some foundations Most recently we had a crowdfunding campaign that was very successful and both successful in They raised a few hundred thousand dollars But also brought a tremendous number of people into that network which become mentors for a lot of the entrepreneurs And techies that are going through I mean the Gaza sky geeks in Mercy Corps have had a Tremendous record of bringing people across the border as mentors if you can imagine the very few people can leave Gaza So bringing in folks with that Silicon Valley background and in tech hubs coming in and mentoring those you know early stage businesses the The techies has been just tremendous that crowdfunding campaign was really both fundraising and sort of awareness And now we actually have the the Dutch government is coming in now that we they can really see a bigger picture of that ecosystem So you know a coding Academy the freelancing Academy that we have all those pieces coming together We're seeing some larger partners come on board and we're hoping to continue to build and there's the possibility And I think the team once they can get Gaza sky geek settled Maybe taking the sky geeks model to some other tough spots. So we'll see And I had this this question with Rebecca you in mind, but really I would love any of you to answer it So what limitations have you seen with running a program model taken from the private sector and Translating it over to this specific NGO development environment Yeah, so I three quick things on that I go on forever probably and I come from the private sector So I'm new to the nonprofit sector too So I think I'm a couple things so I'm on the innovation team at care And we're actually doing a lot of new exciting things and that's that's great You know, we've got our impact investing arm. We've got a new consulting model that we're experimenting with You know a whole sort of R&D unit that we're building But I think there's a risk there that it's you know people Who've been at care for for decades maybe may see it as like oh just so that's the innovation team doing their like new thing Or that accelerator is just a side project And so we're still you know We really have to work hard, you know to build those internal partnerships and to say that no we're we're here We're here to stay and for really important reasons And you know, we've talked about another theme I find I hear it You know at this conference is around you know the sort of future of the international NGO and the kind of critical need to Transform the operating model. So Also, just I mean, you know, you can't just take the curriculum from a private sector focused accelerator That's you know, maybe work is used to working with entrepreneurs and just you know handed off to project staff within care Again, this is for our internal model internally focused model You know, we again, it's a huge mindset shift So we've had to work really hard to adapt the materials and we're on our third even sometimes fourth iterations of a module to see like Okay, what does that uptake? And we know we're doing some of this work. This material is doing it remotely over Webinars and then you know, we have to translate the materials into a number of different languages So that you know, that's tricky and I'm not saying that other that the private sector doesn't have to deal with that But I think for us to be to think about the the baseline that we're working with which is people who've generally been working in the NGO space And the development, you know in the development world for for most of their careers And then look working within a large organization is just tough, right? I mean and I mean I came from a large multinational corporation before that the US government So I like to say I'd like a black belt in bureaucracy, you know, you can get around it But you know just our procurement systems and anything to just quickly change and if we want to work with a new partner You know like, you know a new consultant maybe to help us design something and they're not on our approved vendor list Like God forbid how long does it take to get them added to our vendor list or you know, I Probably But we have tremendous tremendous support from our leadership and we're seeing a lot of Enthusiasm from from our teams on the ground and that's what matters and so, you know for those of us, you know A day-to-day kind of we can we can plow through the bureaucracy to make sure that we can still keep this going for the organization Any other dirty laundry we want to I think just one of the the big things I've noticed really recently is language and The language of Silicon Valley Startup culture Accelerators is not pervasive in the development sector and especially within the staff that work in Canada in the USA But more so on the ground in in the countries that we work in so we've very intentionally positioned our Model as a challenge and as a competition in Entrepreneurship to get away for some of the language that someone sees for the first time and is very very frightened of working in that space because they've been Working with the NGO for 20 years and and are afraid of what's going to happen as the NGO evolves Yeah, so before we get into some Questions from you all in the audience which get them get them going in your heads. I wanted to ask you Stephanie What kind of part how partnerships played a part in your work and and what kind of air what areas do you see new Collaboration happening. Yes. I love that question because I think the type of work that we're trying to do with an NGO It's so much easier and I think ultimately more successful when we work in partnership with actors who look different than we do So I think about the partnerships that we need in kind of two buckets. The first is local partners So for all of us we work for NGOs that are based in the US and Canada a lot of the places We're trying to accelerate companies are not in the US and Canada And so we need to be really conscious of what's already happening in the entrepreneurial Ecosystems in those countries and make sure that we're really linked in with the entrepreneurs the investors the existing Accelerators and incubators and all of the business development services that already exist in that country So that the work that we're doing is additive and not duplicative Luckily, that's very similar to a lot of the partnership work that our organizations are used to doing So I think we're well prepared for that task Maybe the more challenging bucket for partnerships is partnerships with private sector actors and For those partnerships, I think we have a lot of work to do to get better at really listening well speaking each other's language and Really honestly Communicating the value that we each bring So when I look at the assets that FHI 360 has and I think this is shared with many other IMGOs I think of a really deep understanding of the problems that we're trying to solve and best practice in those areas of social change I think about networks and knowledge about how to operate in many of these emerging markets And I think of an understanding of grant and philanthropic capital and how to blend that with private capital Our growth edge is return-seeking investment When you look at private sector accelerators and investors and you think about their assets and their weaknesses They're really inverted and so for a partnerships person That's really exciting to me because it means that there's really fertile ground for some mutually beneficial partnerships to spring up there I would be so excited to see a for-profit Accelerator that's really successful at scaling businesses to partner with an NGO Where they continue to provide their business development services and their connection to investors and the NGO provides some targeted Advice about the impact model and best practice in global development I think that could be a really cool type of partnership that I'd love to see more of yeah completely great so I think maybe we have a mic man or woman someone Yay, so if we want to just open it up to questions We'd love that we want we really wanted this panel to be super interactive and we know there are probably lots of fun questions brewing, so My name is Chris Johnson and choice humanitarian. Thanks for this discussion I'm interested in any thoughts or Strategies that you guys are aware of are thinking about in terms of partnering with small grassroots NGOs Who are a lot more nimble? Maybe a lot more innovative and progressive and in touch with those communities who have innovators or as an NGO small NGO wanting to be an innovator in terms of Bringing in revenue models to sustain the NGO itself as well as the populations they serve in partnership But not having the capital or access to the markets that would get behind that in terms of accelerator labs Training you guys talk about internal and you talk about access to the entrepreneurs on the ground but How can the grassroots NGOs play a space in? Addressing their own financial needs in innovation as well as being a good partner of accessing and Achieving the goals that you guys have set up Yeah, I can take that real quick So I was remiss when I said we are and we are an internal primarily internally focused model But for this year, we're experimenting You know, we've opened it up to a couple of our peer NGOs So we have a team from World Wildlife Fund and a team from Habitat for Humanity participating and it's sort of it's a we're testing a hypothesis that this is Relevant for other NGOs and I think our dream our dream one day is that it's absolutely not about care staff But it's it's a broader, you know model for the NGO community And whether it's run out of care or it's run by another sort of umbrella organization, you know Who knows but but I think that and to make it available for those grassroots Organizations would be I think really powerful and I think we need to get out of sort of Headquarter-centric mindset, you know my my dream for and if you know funding permitting one day, you know It doesn't you know, the team doesn't sit out of Atlanta to run the program But we you know can decentralize it and have either whether it's a country level accelerator or at the very least regional level Accelerators which I think would then also really bolster some of the partnership opportunities. So we sometimes they're scratching our heads How do we get a mentor who sits maybe in San Francisco to advise a team in Vietnam? And it's like no forget it. Where are the mentors in Vietnam that are you know, they can be really powerful Yeah, totally agree with that I would just add some compassion that I think the same disruptors that big I NGOs face are facing are the same disruptors that Small NGOs are facing but they have a little bit less cushion for that innovation The flip side is that smaller NGOs can be a lot more nimble and more innovative So I would expect to see a lot of experimentation with new forms coming out of smaller NGOs that hopefully we can learn from as well I'd give a shout out to groups like village capital which took it sort of acceleration model and created Ville cap communities and said okay Well, how can we teach this methodology to kind of all comers and they convened a whole set of Different community Ville cap communities that learn the curriculum. They shared it and they're testing out and different So that type of replication. I mean that's scale And they did a good job of getting a lot of things off the ground. So Is this on there we go I'm Mike Shanley. I'm with connected. We're a USA advisory firm that help clients work with USA Do you guys see given the restrictions with a lot of bilateral and multilateral donors that that could be a good funding source for this Types activity or is this gonna be someone's gonna have to come from more private foundations and high-net-worth individuals? Yeah, what one thing I won't name the funder, but it's a bilateral and it's not USA ID that I recently saw where It was coming down from so they wanted to support Tech hubs in the Maghreb in Sub-Saharan Africa. It was very much driven from the funder's point of view of what those communities needed And you read through the RFP and our teams put together But it wasn't you know put together proposal But it wasn't built on what I think likely the entrepreneurs would have wanted in those markets So you have that sort of bad game of telephone where the funder tells the the implementing agency What to be done and then all of a sudden the entrepreneur that you're creating services that aren't even needed And you know potentially the funds aren't even flowing down to those more grassroots Organizations that are doing the work So I think we have to get it right and communicate up from the entrepreneur or whomever you're working with to say Here's what's what's likely needed It's gonna have to be iterated and it's gonna have to be some flexible kind of funding and that's you know What we have with Gaza sky geeks with the Dutch coming in is giving that flexibility sort of iterate But again, you know, it's gonna be the There's interesting teams global development lab at USAID and others get it and so we'll see how it plays out over time Yeah from our end Like Rebecca said, we're still learning. This is still a learning process for us and we haven't quite figured out What is the best way to do it? And I think what we find from high net worth individuals and foundations is that they're more willing to come along with Us in that learning process and take those risks when we reach out to some of the government agencies and the bilateral Organizations, they often want a tried and tested model, which our accelerator isn't so I think as it grows and as we kind of Ferment some of these cement some of these processes We could go to bilateral and organizations But the flexibility in the risk-taking Capacity from foundations and in high net words is really what we're after right now I would agree with that But I do think there's an opportunity for scale with USAID that a lot of private foundations just frankly aren't able to match So the vast majority of FHI 360s funding comes from USAID including some of our most innovative work They fund our work in last mile connectivity for some emerging markets where we would really love to see a guy Gaza skygeeks at some point, but the internet just isn't there yet So I think USAID can be an important partner in this I think it's just important to make sure that it's coupled with some more flexible funding so that you're able to really have This scale, but also the more agile partners who can come in a little faster, but probably a smaller ticket sizes And it's I think it's a scale of some of those USAID your grants that allows I mean frankly our social development team is funded off the core funding that comes off of those large grants So our ability to do that work is based upon the fact that we we have these large partners And so you start to carve out some of that to work on some interesting I think we had somebody right there Hello, perfect. My name is Marcy. I work for PSI. I'm interested for those organizations that are which is a large health NGO For those who don't know us probably many here For those who are looking at supporting enterprises outside of your own enterprises Is there what's the motivation for that? Is it purely are to altruistic? Is there a profit motivation and how do you structure those deals? Yeah, would argue and I think this point was made by Merly yesterday This is not going to make money for this is not revenue So if it don't bet on entrepreneurs that way When I when I put on my sort of social ventures hat for Mercy Corps, it's very much that learning laboratory What can we what can those early-stage enterprises that are innovating around an alternative credit scoring? Algorithm for smallholder farmers or a different type of distribution model What can we learn from that and potentially carry that into some of our other programs and what we want to bet on? It's also leveraged. I mean we have about a 15 to 1 leverage ratio the money that we've put into those Social enterprises and the code the kind of co-investment and follow-on financing that they've received. So it's it's great leverage So that yeah Our primary motivation is absolutely impact to I don't think this is going to be a huge revenue driver for FHI 360 But I do think an exciting differentiator about this is that it won't lose a hundred percent of the money We put into it which is our current operating model when you take a grant a hundred percent loss impact creation But a hundred percent financial loss here You know any cost recovery and hopefully sustainability is you know a vast improvement in terms of recycling the amount of Resources that we have to continue scaling impact over time And if the if the enterprises work there, you know the support is overused, but they're sustainable They grow the engine is their own revenue and their own growth and they they move beyond and hopefully get to scale So I think that's the bet. Yeah cost recovery I mean I think is a huge one for a huge opportunity for a lot of these models Maybe not totally in the green But if you can get poor part of the way there for a lot of us in our sector, that's that's that's huge Where who else do we have great? Eve Lair from Holt Business School And I actually built many of the things in the social innovations at Mercy Corps that Michael and his team took part When it came to incentives, I saw you guys all shake your heads like oh, yeah Incentives, can you talk a little bit about what those incentives are and how they kind of play out in Organizations that are supposed to sort of try to treat everybody equally Sorry incentives to incentives to support the types of investment so looking externally instead of internally or even internally how you're motivating and incentivizing people So I can tell you from our internal failure is that we didn't have the right incentives because We didn't have any performance metrics or time set aside or compensation tied to here's your innovation idea now run with it and Create a scalable enterprise. We had one person who actually had some time back filled within the organization He was the most successful because there was some time and incentives associated with his idea from From our model right now I don't think the incentives are needed because our I'm situated within our impact investing and innovation team This is our mission as a five-person team to find new ways to explore development work with Accelerators so really for us the big change was spinning this out creating it into a new team and putting performance metrics Reporting around our ability to innovate and use accelerated models We've found a good way to piss off country directors To offer this you know ability to you know people were starting their own enterprises But these are the highest performers on the big grants that we had in a place like Uganda and all of a sudden They were working on a startup and not putting their time into those programs So I think we you know for us for Mercy Corps. It was about okay. Let's spin this out Let's work with entrepreneurs that are external There's there's all sorts of mechanisms and obviously you guys are working on them to to innovate internally and get those Mechanisms right we found for launching for-profit enterprises. We were gonna look external Yeah, I would just say we're we're very much working on it still You know we we have a small prize You know it's sort of like a little boost of some grant funding that we give a subset of the teams But but it's it's not enough for them to go running off for for several years on their own And so so but in some ways maybe that's okay, right? So it's also building out a broader ecosystem of support across the organization And and working in many ways with our with our partnerships teams our regional partnership directors to think about What are the different ways that are you know, how can we help? I think it like expand the aperture of what it you know What it means to like what would be a next step and what types of other? Private sector or or other organizations could could our teams think about working with You know some of our teams are doing some really cool work in education And so I've been in talks with Coursera here in Silicon Valley to think okay Well, they might not think that that's an opportunity, but actually it is really powerful and then you know the other piece that we Admittedly really need to kind of double down on now that we're in our second year is what does alumni support look like? So what is the incentive to to go through a program that where you know It doesn't just stop at the end of that year and we've got someone coming on board to really focus in on that And in the cases of those those programs that may spin off into or try to spin off into social enterprises What what is that dedicated kind of internal? resourcing and and kind of mentorship look like but we're very much I feel like I'm a broken record here still on that learning journey Oh Greetings, and thank you very much for this great dialogue and discussion. I'm Linda Barnes with bloodworks our Mission is innovation in blood and blood transfusion to save lives I had a question about intellectual property and as it relates to entrepreneurial pursuit and Moving innovations out into a global arena Often I see restrictions being placed or intellectual property discussions in contracts related to perpetual royalty-free Access to license and the ability to sub license the entrepreneur's product to others I was curious if you've it's how you've overcome that and what experience you've had with respect to intellectual property Who wants to tackle this one? Hard one and this may not be a direct answer to your question But I do think for grant funded organizations intellectual property is a really tricky question Because oftentimes the donor who's funded your your grant which fueled the work that you did Either owns the intellectual property or requires that you have like open source common license Which makes it more difficult to commercialize So this is something that to USAID's credit They're really thinking carefully about and I'm hopeful that we might have some clearer guidance from them that Gives us a little more space to innovate at least for those innovations that were funded out of USAID work But I think for grant funded organizations IP is a sticky issue that we at least have to navigate on a case-by-case basis with our legal team Okay, I think we're just gonna take two more questions. So we'll have you first Um, hi, my name is Aaron. I work for UNICEF USA. I was wondering what are some of the impact metrics that your Programs kind of tied to and held accountable for and for shorter term programs Do you track or you look to track outcomes after they? Certain investments or programs have left the program. So if an accelerator program is on a one-year term Once that thing that you're accelerating has left. Are you tracking their longer term success? And so the way that we do it at World Vision is that Our first challenge was around health and wash and we aligned our impact metrics to what our grants team use To track their overall portfolio of of health and wash and they've been doing it for for Tens of year decades of decades now and they know what they're looking for So the way that we work with our enterprises is that we ask for three metrics very generic metrics that these enterprises can report on all across the board if they're in the health program and then we work with them to Get impact metrics and outcome metrics on a case-by-case basis because every enterprise is really different So it's one of the really challenging things for us is because there are no two similar enterprises entering our Accelerator program. We can't ask them all to use the same 10 metrics. So finding that flexibility has been a key learning for us We have from the again from the social ventures perspective That's the role that Mercy Corps can help play with these impact entrepreneurs or for-profit businesses But we know how to do monitoring and evaluation of impact and we can help them sort of both define that impact Define the metrics and we did generally do that in the due diligence phase before we invest and then we track those Metrics and we can go into a kind of breadth depth and reach So we get very specific about the metrics that we're tracking with them and help them sort of define that and hopefully Very much related to their business metrics so that it's natural for them to track these things So if you know a given agent has an increased revenue of this much You're gonna be able to hold on to that agent. So that's on the social venture side I would say from the Gaza sky geeks. There's a lot of sort of Output sort of levels. So how many people went through the coding Academy? How many people are on the freelancing training platform? How many starters have been accelerated? But I would caution that in the in Gaza sky geeks case. That's a community that you're building over time So I you know, yes, you want that flowing through and then when you get these larger grants That's what they want to be tracking But I think there's something to be said for that which is not Unmeasurable but it's harder to measure in creating a community in a tech hub in Gaza and how that can play out over time So I think there's there's an argument there and a narrative that we can work on Yeah This has been a tough one for us and actually frankly part of it has been about resourcing it So we you know didn't have a budget to hire a full-time M&E person for to look at our accelerator The program writ large and then to really carefully track each of each of the the teams in both cohort one and cohort two So Admittedly we're paying playing a little bit of catch-up right now on that front But also butting up against and you mentioned this the challenges of you know within art We we pride our program in its diversity in terms of the geographic spread and that sort of sectoral or thematic You know differences, but that makes it very difficult to them You know to not only roll anything up into you know of some broader indicators, but then also for you know We you know we brought in someone to help with some of the initial sort of outcome harvesting work that we did out of cohort one and and they They were having a very difficult time because the teams were so different And then we've also had some attrition You know we you know a couple of our teams They you know they didn't end up getting follow-on grant funding and so the program isn't going on and and so yes I mean I think that is an indicator in and of itself that we you know can take some degree of ownership over But there's also just turn up staff turnover in our sector that I think is is a reality That that we're also kind of grappling with so so we're We're kind of figuring this out And I think it's a space that probably amongst ourselves can probably learn learn from each other a little bit more and find you know find out What what is working and why and start adapting? Great and do we have one more question great Hi there, my name is Sandra Butler and I work for the Consortium for affordable medical technologies at Mass General Hospital in Boston We also we work with entrepreneurs in low resource settings and also offer acceleration support My question is we are a non traditional team in the four walls of a hospital And I know from my experience now and my career path navigating from a USA ID Funded role initially to trying to find private sector dollars in my world is global health But more generally development is a really tough path to follow And often there are traditionalists that as soon as you talk about money in the development world You've lost mission. You're no longer doing good Whether it's advocating for your own salary so that you're not living in this kind of martyrdom world that you should do this for free Or talking about profit or return on investment So I'm just curious as kind of more traditional actors where you are in the development space What sort of challenges you've had internally to sensitize your own colleagues to the type of work that you're all doing and trying to Incorporate into a more traditional development space. It's a great question I'd like to think that I'm basically going to be fired every day If 50% of the organization is against what we're doing, that's probably a good indicator We're going on the right path and it has been hard. It's hard to absorb For you know again wearing the sort of social ventures hat this type of work weight We're working with for-profit entrepreneurs. We're in vet. We're actually taking equity stake We're gonna own a piece of their company. I guess and that you know, how could we possibly do that? But as you sensitize them and say, okay, take off your non-profit or for-profit hat What are these people doing? They're innovating on certain ideas. They have a certain model It's gonna help carry them forward We want to bet on them and this is the proper way to do it the grant doesn't work in this particular case a for-profit investment Does so you you sensitize and have that conversation over and over and helps over fine I mean, it's good to also put pressure on our team to say all right Can we defend this type of approach? You know we this is still an ongoing experiment for Mercy Corps We've done ten investments over the last two years But are we finding that the entrepreneurs benefit from the linkage to the platform and we're starting to see that really well But again, it just takes time at the board level and you have to get those conversations right too again Not a revenue generation tool for it Not not the new way that INGOs are going to work and everything's gonna be impact investment Clarify what this tool is and kind of go forward that way For us it's really been Bringing whoever we need internally and want to work with on much earlier in the process So now we launched launcher agricultural challenge this year We brought our country directors in Kenya, Philippines and Mexico Started talking to them in January of last year and we launched the the challenge last this September So getting them involved in the process and giving letting their ideas kind of also accumulate within within the Accelerator and providing them an opportunity to give their voices in has really been a big learning for us because quite frankly without The support of the country directors. We can't do any of the work that we're doing so Really making sure they have a voice in the process is contributing to to our success within that that endeavor Yeah, I mean I would echo the the country director our country office level buy-in is critical When our when cares chief innovation officer came on board about a year and a half ago She started kind of you know talking to folks at the headquarters level and certainly faced whether it was a quizzical look Or just flat-out like resistance to what she was talking about and then she said forget it And she left town and she practically traveled for an entire year and really spent the time With with frankly the people that matter most our country office staff and and I think there she validated Why we exist and why it's important and and that's continued to be our North Star is Actually away from the big orange box in Atlanta So I think it's being it's you want to obviously play nice in the sandbox and and and get the people You know get those critical folks on board early on but also to kind of Bear in mind that you know you don't have to have the entire organization on board There's gonna be some level of discomfort and that's probably a good sign and to remember who who at the end of the day within your Organization are the most critical kind of target audience and and sort of customers in that Yeah, find your first adopters find those champions. It only has to be a handful Yeah, and then you can really kind of I would just add that some of the opposition that I've experienced has come from kind of Binary thinking of if we take this route, then it means we don't care about our traditional grant funded business And we won't continue to work in that way I don't think that's true And I think we can move beyond that question of is it a burning platform Is it not a burning platform will the age check stop coming next year or 50 years from now? I think all my messages is that this is another way to create impact And if we can do something that also creates impact in an agile sustainable way While continuing to have a flourishing core business Fabulous and then we'll kind of see how things evolve over the next few years because frankly none of us really know yeah So thank you all for your really fabulous questions today I want to kind of end our panel with some key learning So, you know, we only have about a minute and a half left But if you could each give your key learnings that you've learned over the last couple years As you're kind of on this accelerator journey And you know what what what can we share? I would just like the last conversation We had the biggest key learning for us is building buy-in and building trust with the organization that we work in it is a new model and Making sure that they're on board in supporting us in every way is key to success I think for us just get started I think you know that these you can have conversations with your board with staff for and it can go on for years and there There's no sort of urgency. I think what I love about the you know We have a small team within mercy core mercy coral has an environment that said, okay We're not gonna be a lot of resources, but go out there and just do it and we got started and we learned from that doing So I'd say just kind of get started Yeah, I think one learning is that it's like to be transparent Early and often about about both successes, but also the challenges and failures So we're out there sharing our materials with other NGOs and another folks and not saying that it's perfect, right? But what I think that's part of that learning process that we want to kind of make it more open and permeable I think a key lesson for me is that the right types of partnerships are really game-changing So I would say be really proud of the value that your organization brings to the space and humble About what you don't yet know and look for those mutually beneficial partnerships that can help us all go a little faster Wonderful. Well, thank you guys so much for coming out to our panel and We'll yield the floor to the next group. Thank you