 So thank you so much for everyone for coming. My name is Meredith Hanley. I'm our director of development here at New America. So welcome Monday night. Love that y'all are here for this. We host a lot of important policy and practice discussions about a myriad of tech issues and education and better life and political reform and not so much on the larger ecosystem of nonprofits and policy and practice. And so this is sort of my fun hobby because we live it here. Everyone lives it here. But I'm really happy we're doing this event tonight with Kathleen Kelly Janis about her new book, Social Startup Success. This is what I would call an active reading book. So work with me here. Does anyone ever open up a book and then you realize very quickly that you need your highlighter and those little tabby things that sip on the edges and then like a nice color pen where you can write things in the margins. This is that book for me at least where you open it up and then you realize also too after you've assembled those little bits that you also need to start a separate reading list. So I've chucked my new year's must read list and now I've assembled a whole new reading list based on the little gems that Kathleen has put in this book. So I'm hoping you'll be as inspired to read this as I was to get through it. So Kathleen is the author of Social Startup Success, how the best nonprofits launch, scale up and make a difference. This is particularly interesting to have this conversation here at New America because we have evolved from your, as traditional as New America ever was, think tank to a national networked model. And so we are living these concepts of scaling and sharing ideas and people and work across the US. Kathleen herself is a social entrepreneur, a writer and a lecturer at Stanford's program on social entrepreneurship. She's an expert on philanthropy, millennial engagement and scaling early stage organizations. As an attorney, she spearheaded numerous social justice initiatives. And this book, as I said, stands out amongst the rest. She had the last five years traveling across the country, visiting founders and leadership teams, funders and dozens of social entrepreneurs, detailing findings and details about best practices. So in this book are about testing ideas and measuring impact, funding experimentation, which is my personal favorite, and leading collectively. She is joined today by our fearless leader at New America, Anne-Marie Slaughter, who's the president and CEO and the Bert G. Kerstetter University Professor, Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton. Anne-Marie joined New America five years ago. This is your fifth anniversary, well four and a half, 2018, I'm projecting a little bit. Four and a half years ago, from her time at Princeton from 2009 to 2011, she also served as the director of policy planning for the United States Department of State, the first woman to ever hold that position. And prior to her government service, Anne-Marie was the dean of Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She's written or edited several books of her own, her most recent success also about networks, the chess board and the web, strategies of connection in a network world. She's joined by another wonderful New America pillar here, Cecilia Munoz, our vice president of policy and technology, and the director of New America's national network. Prior to joining New America in 2017, she served on President Obama's senior staff, first as director of intergovernmental affairs for three years, followed by five years as the director of domestic policy council. When it comes to working with nonprofits, understanding how to scale them and the implementation, these two ladies have it all wrapped up. Prior to her work in government, she served for 20 years at the National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Hispanic policy and advocacy organization, where she was senior vice president for the office of research, advocacy and legislation. So please welcome Kathleen to the stage. She'll tell us a little bit about her book and have a really good conversation with these three wonderful ladies. Thanks again. Thank you so much, Meredith, and thank you, Anne-Marie and Cecilia and everyone at New America for having me. It's so great to be on week three of the social startup success epic book tour. You know, it's exciting for me to be in DC personally. I started here back in high school as a congressional page and a couple of my page friends are here. And so really, you know, that was where my social change career began in a way. This has really come in full circle for me. So I'm on week three of the book tour and the question that I get asked the most, it seems, is why on earth did you decide to write a book during the same time that you had three children in three years? I have a five-year-old, a three-year-old and a two-year-old. And I can tell you, I answer always the same and looking out to see so many policymakers, nonprofit professionals, you know, people who are making a difference in this world. We all care about social change because this work matters. Everyone in this room in one way or another is doing their part to help make the world a better place. And what's exciting is that we have seen a groundswell in innovation over the past couple of decades, whether it's new forms of philanthropy or new ways of applying innovation to nonprofit work. And that's a good thing because there's no shortage of problems that we must solve in this world, whether it's climate change or increasing inequality or racial injustice issues. The problem is that not all nonprofit organizations are created equally, that having a good idea or good intentions is simply not enough to assure that an organization will achieve impact. And I thought I would start this conversation with a story that really embodies the reason why I wrote Social Startup Success. And it's a story of a former Stanford student, Rob Gittin, who like many of my students, selected his class schedule based on classes that met afternoon because he liked to sleep late. So he stumbled into this class called Homelessness in America and he fell in love immediately with the kids that he was working with. He was volunteering with Homeless Youth in San Jose and he found this passion in helping to connect these kids and rebuild trust where these kids had been left at every single stage of their development behind by the criminal justice system, by the foster care system, by their parents, by government. And so when he graduated, he needed to figure out a way to continue working with these kids. And so he wrote his Echoing Green application to get seed funding for his work. He started an organization in San Francisco called At the Crossroads and he was off. He spent 24 hours a day practically from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. every single night doing outreach with Homeless Youth in San Francisco and he quickly realized that he was only gonna make a small dent in the problem, that he alone was not gonna be able to help all of the children that needed his help in San Francisco and that if he wanted to make a difference, he was gonna need to scale his organization. But he was 22 and he had never been hired before, let alone hired anyone else himself. He had no connections to high net worth individuals to help him fund this organization that he wanted to start and he didn't know where to begin to measure the impact of the work that he was doing to see if he was on track to achieving his goals. This is the story of so many social entrepreneurs and early stage nonprofit professionals and I know this story well because it was my story too. When I was a young lawyer in San Francisco, I spent my days billing hours at the law firm and my nights co-founding Spark and organization that engages young professionals in new forms of gender equality, new forms of philanthropy to support gender equality and it was amazing. We had a ton of buzz, we had lines around the block for our events, we were doubling our revenue every few months and then like two thirds of nonprofits in the United States, we hit a wall at $500,000 in revenue. We couldn't get past that wall to get the money that we needed to scale our impact. I became really curious, who are the organizations that are getting past that wall and what are they doing differently that we obviously were not doing at Spark? And so for the past five years, I have traveled the country serving hundreds of social entrepreneurs, their staff, their beneficiaries, their funders, all to get to the bottom of this single question. Why is it that some organizations succeed and scale and others don't? And so put simply, social startup success is the playbook that I wish I had when I co-founded Spark. It's the playbook that my Stanford students have been asking me for for years. It's an insider's look at the five best practices that I talk about in the book about how organizations scale. And I hope that readers will come away from reading social startup success with a strong sense of what it takes to make a difference in the world. The problems that we're facing are huge and as Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka is fond of saying it's no longer enough to just give a man a fish or even teach a man a fish. We need to revolutionize the fishing industry. That's what social entrepreneurs are doing. They're not just satisfied giving a homeless person a bed or a meal. They wanna solve the underlying problems that are resulting in homelessness in the first place. Social entrepreneurs and small nonprofits are also critical to policy makers because they're testing ideas in small and nimble ways that government never could. They're the incubation arm for government. Take for example, Alan Casey and Michael Brown who had this idea when they graduated from Harvard Law School to start City Year to engage young people in service. That idea was so effective. It caught the eye of Bill Clinton and became enacted as AmeriCorps which has served a million young people who have contributed 1.4 billion hours of service in this country. Another example that I talk about in social startup success is Ellen Moyer who founded the New Teacher Center because she saw her students graduating from the University of Santa Cruz from the Department of Education and dropping out as first year teachers because they couldn't handle it. And so she started this mentoring group on a small scale, pairing her first year teachers with mentors and the program was so successful that the state of California adopted it as mandatory policy and just last year alone, New Teacher Center mentored 40,000 new teachers in the state of California and increasing teacher retention by 30%. So these are really critical ideas that came from, everybody has to start somewhere. And as I think about what I hope social startup success will do is what if we provided Ellen Kasey or Ellen Moyer or the next generation of Ellen Moyer and Ellen Kasey with the tools that they needed to break through that revenue wall sooner so that people like Rob Gittin who has taken 20 years to scale his organization at the crossroads can work through that much more quickly. I just don't think that we have 20 years to waste and so I'm excited to use this book to help maximize the resources that we have in an already starved sector and to hopefully help maximize all of our collective potential to make social change. So it's not often that I get to moderate a panel where all of us have such a direct stake in what you're talking about. As you were talking about the $500,000 wall which is getting from zero to enough scale to have a couple of people start doing things. I was thinking that about a year into this job I was talking to a friend who has spent years working with nonprofits in different ways who just said to me that the journey from 20 million to 50 million so much bigger than what you're talking about and nevertheless is the valley of shadow. And it's a similar point that you can get, there are these milestones where you get big enough to do something but how do you keep growing and above all, not just keep growing for the sake of it but keep growing so that you can maximize your impact which is what's so important. So I've got many questions for, and Cecilia has seen this in both from her government portfolio but also from 20 years in the business. I guess the start with it doesn't seem accidental to me that you have a new book called The Social Startup which is not language that Washington typically uses and that you are from the other coast. So I wanted to ask to what extent do you think Silicon Valley and what you might call the new philanthropy has influenced this model or is even responsible for it and is there a way, if that to the extent that's true how do you transfer it to older models of here think tanks or NGOs or charities all the terms we traditionally use for organizations working in the public good. We like to use the word disruption a lot in Silicon Valley and I think that there has been an enormous disruption in the social sector, in our region and across the country really that has started with these early stage organizations often funded by donors who want to see things run differently and who are excited by new ideas and new approaches such as a really strong approach to tracking metrics and looking at impact in data driven ways to determine whether we are really actually on the path to making impact. To looking for more sustainable sources of income and trying to figure out how we can make our nonprofit less reliant on philanthropy so that they can eventually be more sustainable in the long run. So I think that all of those trends are really exciting. I think they also have their limitations and so I think that what's great about sitting on the sidelines on the other coast maybe is that you can draw from the best of what these new trends are showing improving and implement those strategies in any organization. You saw the California impact on government. Well and I think one of the challenges that connects to what you were just saying is that there are, you know, drawing on my years even before government there are organizations, institutions, folks that have come into being. I consider myself as someone who comes from the civil rights community that have deep knowledge about a particular set of problems and challenges and don't necessarily have access to some of the tools that you're talking about and the part of what we're working on here at New America focuses on tech and helping empower those kinds of organizations with sort of not just tech tools, but tech thinking. But we have this challenge where I think there are organizations which have been, which are doing good and important things but they're using the same toolbox that they've been using for the last 30 years or longer as well as this sort of wave of entrepreneurship and one of the challenges is how do you make sure each of these informs the other? That I worry a little bit about each side not quite knowing what they don't know. And so one of the areas we're working in here which is a challenge is trying to create tables where you have this sort of deep knowledge about the African American community or the Latino community or whoever it is at the table with folks who are innovating and how they tackle and applying a new skill set and how they tackle problems and making sure each is informed by the other when they don't start from the perspective of believing that there's value at being at the table with folks, the folks who are on the other side of the table. If that makes sense. As a follow up and let you respond, what do you do with people who don't want to be disrupted? I mean the whole, you know, the California sort of zeitgeist is disruption is good. That is not often the, certainly not the response of bureaucrats but often not of communities or of community organizations who see their livelihood in the traditional way they've been doing things being disrupted. Well, there will always be a very important place for community-based organizations. And although two thirds of the nonprofits in the United States are $500,000 in below in revenue and for many organizations that is simply not enough to survive and they need more capital to get off that treadmill because we have great ideas dying on the vine because they can't get funded. There are also many organizations for whom $300,000 is plenty of money to run a great organization in a community. I'm from a small town in Napa, California and we have many community-based organizations that are doing very important work that should not scale and should not disrupt but can learn to modernize based on new practices and tools and strategies that have been proven to make organizations more efficient and more effective and that ultimately funders are gonna be looking for. And so if you don't jump on the bandwagon you're not gonna get funded. One of the best practices for nonprofits and you talk about it and I've seen it in other places is monetize your assets. Figure out, you just said, how can you be sustainable? And all of us in this room have had the experience of philanthropists, individual donors, foundations saying we'll give you the seed money and then you'll figure out how to make it go of its own accord and often when that grant runs out the bicycle falls over because there's no way to make it sustainable but the question I have is how do you know if you're just pursuing sustainability doesn't that often skew your mission? Isn't it like a startup that says Twitter started out selling one thing and then discovered that product didn't work but this one was really working very well and so they switched to what they could sell but that's a very different proposition than the nonprofit world. You can't just go where the money is. Well this is a really big problem is that philanthropy in many ways has swung too far in the other direction that philanthropy is expecting that nonprofits will become more sustainable without really fully recognizing the challenges that come with mission drift and separating from your mission when you are pursuing profit. And I think we have to recognize as a sector that there will always be a role for philanthropy to play. If it were profitable to bring clean water to Coca-Cola Africa, Coca-Cola probably would have done that a long time ago. So we can't use market solutions where we're solving problems that have been created by market failures. On the flip side of that, every organization needs to figure out the right funding model that works for them and so there are circumstances where an organization could be fully sustainable but maybe philanthropy could help enhance their mission. So for example, Hot Bread Kitchen is a nonprofit in Harlem that is doing amazing work training, low income women to go into jobs in the food industry. When Jessamyn Rodriguez started the organization, she thought I'm gonna be fully sustainable, we're gonna fund the programs for the training, the women with the bread sales and wholesale that they sell bread to Whole Foods and to JetBlue and with income from this incubator that they run. Well, first of all, I was on stage with Jessamyn the other night and she said if she had it all over again, she never would have chosen bread because she didn't realize the profit margins were like this big and actually pest controller laundry would have been a much better choice. But second of all, she realized very quickly that she was selling her programs short by only going after profit that in fact by increasing her philanthropic income, she could enhance the programs by for example, providing childcare for the women while they were in the program or keeping the women longer in the program than might be profitable. So I think that what's critical is that every organization figure out what level of sustainability is appropriate for their mission and for their organization and push back on funders when they ask those hard questions. Some organizations will never have any form of earned income. Accountability Council, which is represented here tonight. I'm on the board of this human rights organization. We're fighting for people's human rights. They will never pay for that representation and that's okay. And that is still an important role for us to play but philanthropy is gonna have to fully sustain our work. Fair enough. But it's a tremendous challenge and you're right that the sort of direction of the conversation is going in to a certain extent is undercutting the notion that there is good work to be done that isn't gonna be able to find a way to be sustainable. That that and that is a reality that we need to recognize and that the sources of philanthropy and the extent to which people are engaged in contributing to these kinds of solutions is another thing which has to expand. And part of our challenge is something that we think about here is making sure we're engaging in storytelling about what local innovators are accomplishing so that people regain a sense of agency that we actually have the capacity to solve or just collectively solve our problems and address them because that's in part one how you infuse a sense of hope into a fairly cynical time but it's also how you get people connected in contributing either as volunteers or with the resources to making sure that these programs run. Have you seen successful social startups using crowdfunding? Speaking of expanding the range of donors. It is one form of funding. It is not an easy form of funding. Okay, that's why I'm asking you about how successful have you seen anybody's. You know, and again, it depends on the model. Charity Water is an example of an organization that has decided from the very beginning that they were gonna capitalize on the 43% of donors in this country that don't trust charity. We're gonna get them by showing them exactly where their dollars are going and for them, crowdfunding has been really successful because they have been using these really creative strategies like donate $26 for your 26th birthday in lieu of gifts and getting all your friends on Facebook to do the same and by knowing who their audience was and what was going to be the most effective fundraising strategy with that audience they have been able to cover. Now, they also raised tens of millions of dollars at their annual gala every year to compensate, so. And that's a very traditional way of raising money. Let's shift and talk about leaders a little bit. There's a section in social startup success on leadership that I thought was just terrific and again, very, very concrete. But I hear this and you write about it that funders complain that they're not enough effective leaders and effective organizations by which they mean sustainable and using sort of new practices. But at the same time, we all know many, many social entrepreneurs and I would just say non-profit leaders who complain, we've got the leadership, we just don't have enough places to pitch. In other words, I often think if I could turn New America or any of our organizations into a social enterprise, I could pitch lots more people who have pools of money. How do you bring those together? The sort of complaint that they're not enough effective leaders and lots and lots of leaders who say, give me a chance to show you that I'm effective but don't seem to be able to get in the door. Leadership in the non-profit sector is a challenge because the jobs pay less. I mean, it's a challenge. Less money, more me. In Silicon Valley, we see this a lot where the non-profit sector is competing with the tech sector for talent and especially with technology jobs and tech non-profits in particular, they find it very challenging to compete for that talent. On the other hand, as I see with my students at Stanford, there's no shortage of super talented young people who are mission-driven and wanna go into this sector. And I think as a sector, it's our obligation to infuse capacity building and management training and all of the things that have become commonplace in the for-profit sector that nobody's born a manager. Try to intrude strategies that you learn by doing and by being trained and mentored by people who have done it before you. So I would say 90% of the people that I interviewed from this book had a management coach and that's great, we should talk about that because it's not cheap, but it's an investment because leadership turnovers are expensive and so there's no reason why we shouldn't be investing in that. 90%, that's a really striking number and did their donors pay for that? Absolutely, absolutely. It's becoming more common for funders in particular, for foundations to offer that as a part of their grant making process. I used to joke with fellow leaders in the sector that I worked in that the management piece was in the category of not the reason you went into this work. Like nobody, not a lot of people lead in non-profit because they wanted to go into non-profit management. It's a set of skills you learn because you wanna deal with homelessness or you wanna do good work for the world. But it seems like, again in the startup context, that there is a theory of the case that the person, the entrepreneur who starts a company isn't necessarily the person who should be managing a company once it's off the ground. We assume that with respect to a company, to an entrepreneur and we don't necessarily make that assumption in the social entrepreneurs and I think one of the big, big challenges of the non-profit sector is that the innovators who come up with ways to solve problems or who build institutions to tackle problems don't start out necessarily being best suited to manage organizations. It's not kind of why you go into this work. Some turn out to be really talented at it, some don't but it is hard to build a management structure where you bifurcate those things and you have a charismatic leader do the charismatic leader thing and with somebody who's doing the day-to-day management, it's a classic, classic problem in the non-profit sector and we're not applying the same wisdom to that sector that we're applying to other kinds of entrepreneurs. It's even worse in the thinking part of the non-profit sector, think tanks and universities where I spent most of my career. It's people who choose that life generally prefer books to people. That is exactly why you go into something that lets you spend most of your time with books or now screens so that it is affirmatively at the opposite end of what makes a good manager. Well, it's interesting that donors will pay for that. One of our donors is actually funding consulting on change management which is like coaching an organization, not coaching a person which I think is terrific because that's exactly the kind of thing a for-profit entity would be able to pay for that a non-profit entity can't, but donors can make it much more effective. So what's the role of government here? I mean, this is one way of reading this. Again, East Coast, West Coast, different politics is social startups are the libertarian answer to taking care of public problems. Not government, but everybody just get out there and create your own social enterprise and then we can do it with for-profit and non-profit and leave the third sector out. So how do you think about the role of government? Well, government's critical. I mean, if you look at the organizations that have scaled, government has been a critical component of that scaling process, whether it's enacting something into policy like we saw with AmeriCorps or whether it's providing funding from health and human services budgets at the local level, for example. If you look at the annual budget of the city of New York, it's $22 billion that's in one city in one year. I mean, there isn't a foundation that is giving away close to that amount of money. And so we need to be thinking from the start of when an organization launches, what is the end game? What is the goal? What is the end goal? Just like we would ask in the case of an investment with your exit strategy for a company, what is your end game and how do you anticipate bringing this idea to scale? When I noticed from a number of the examples that you cited were great idea that was so great that a government took it on, right? And that's frequently, and this is true of philanthropy, very frequently the investments that they make are in the hope of demonstrating a really good thing so that government will take it on and be able to do it at scale because the notion of a handful of foundations being able to do something of that kind of scale is mostly not possible. And so which is why the sort of national conversation we're having about sort of government, like do we want it or not? Do we like it or not? Should it be sizable or not? It's critical, we've stopped thinking of a democracy as really an investment in our collective capacity to solve problems and to do good things. And there is a disconnect between the conversation about sort of people I think of as do-gooders, right? The people who start organizations, the people who are out there trying to solve problems and government and we can't allow the kind of cynical portrayal of government to undercut our capacity to solve problems at scale. We really need to reinvest in remembering that this is a mechanism for really doing huge things. It's the biggest thing that we've accomplished as a society have come at this intersection of people mobilizing and government taking on a social good that we've agreed that we need to advance. I'm starting to think about this actually as the collaborative economy. The Brookings has a new paper out. See, we actually cite other. But a great new paper out called The New Localism where they talk about successful cities, successful change really coming from the ability of all three sectors to collaborate. That that is the key. And many of us have been talking about public-private partnerships for a long time in government and out of government. But this is really where everyone expects the others to collaborate and wants to, as opposed to when I was in government, most private sector folks, when we came knocking for public-private partnerships, they knew that what we really meant was, we will come up with the idea and you pay for it. And they weren't interested. So each one of those has to think about how to do that. Well, and government as good and as important as it can be, it has a long way to go to learn how to be data-driven for example, or to apply some of the principles that you described to make sure that you know if you're investing in a program, where you expect it to go and what you expect it to achieve and to be willing to disinvest in a program if it's not achieving what you intended which government is also terrible at. And among the most exciting things that I worked on when I, in my time in government that trying to replicate a little piece of here has to do with again bringing tech thinking to the government table so that you can begin to transform both the thinking and the design of programs and you can start using the technology that's changing the way all of us live and work to also drive how government acts and how efficient it is and how well it addresses, provides services to the people that it intends to provide. So we've come to expect to be able to get information or order things or do stuff online that with government processes, we're still doing on paper. And that's just because of paper, right? And that's just really the failure of these kinds of institutions to be able to adjust and adapt. Well, and I think that's where when we think about scale, government is one way of scaling. But technology is a whole new frontier that really the tech, the nonprofit sector has just begun to dip its toe into in terms of thinking about scalable solutions using technology. So on that, I've got lots more questions I could ask you, but this audience is just as engaged in these questions as we are up here. So I'm gonna turn it over to a question and answer. Just wait for the microphone and please introduce yourself. I don't believe that nobody has a question right here. Hi, I'm Stephanie. I'm walking in with accountability council. Kathleen is our wonderful board chair. We appreciate her every day. So ask her a really hard question. But getting to the nuts and bolts of this, I know that a lot of nonprofit leaders are very busy and also a lot of nonprofits are understaffed. So how do they make, you spoke about trainings, but how do you make the space to even consider changing things? I think probably one reason why a lot of nonprofits are on this kind of continuum of doing the same thing is that they don't have time to think of anything else. So I love your insights on that. That was a good question. Well, it's been coined the nonprofit starvation cycle that we expect and even the sector itself has come to expect of itself to do as much as possible and solve these very huge social problems that we're facing using as little money as possible. That has to change. That has to be a culture change that we all make, including nonprofit leaders who stay up at all hours of the night doing 10 different jobs because they feel like they can't pay themselves to hire other or hire other people. Well, and I sent out a couple of foundation boards and I'm increasingly finding that it's important for philanthropy to think about this, about creating the space for nonprofit leaders to step back to see the broader landscape to be able to think strategically. In the current moment that we're in, which I think of as there are a lot of things that are on fire and a lot of people doing a lot of firefighting. Firefighting is obviously urgent. You have to do it if it's right in front of you. But there's also a real risk that if you're not able to sort of get up in the airplane and see the whole landscape that you will not be preparing for other dangers or challenges that await you. And one of the roles that philanthropy can play is to be to help leaders, the thinkers who are running these kinds of organizations who are up to their eyebrows in firefighting, have the capacity to step back and think strategically and see the larger landscape. It's to a certain degree, in philanthropy you have a little bit more capacity to do that yourself and creating that capacity also for the people that you fund I think is especially in moments like this one where it feels like there is so much for people to address and respond to. It is a really vital part of the exercise. So I have a great idea that every time a foundation wants to do a strategic review, the two worst words in the English language, for people like me, instead of doing one, they should pay for one of their grantees to do a strategic review where it would be set. There was a question somewhere here. I'm Steve Rickard with Open Society. And we're very happy to have Cecilia on our board. But you're in Washington and a lot of the nonprofits here, their product is advocacy. And I've started reading the book which is terrific, congratulations. Have you thought about how your five tools or your five approaches apply to an organization where their mission is advocacy? What does it mean? Who are the beneficiaries? What are the metrics? What does it mean to test? All of the mechanisms that you described. Have you kind of tried to think through or talked to organizations that do advocacy? Absolutely, I mean most social entrepreneurs who are trying to solve the underlying problems that are causing the problems that they're serving in the first place are doing advocacy work. And all of these strategies that I talk about are challenging when you talk about applying them to advocacy work. Accountability Council is another great example for the policy change that we wanna see in holding international financial institutions accountable will definitely not happen overnight and it's gonna take decades to get to where we would envision the world being. And so does that mean that we get to wait for that day to measure impact? No, we have to determine whether we are on track at every step of the way. And when I went into this research I thought well a lot of this is donor driven that people are measuring impact using key performance indicators and all these fancy data driven tools because they wanna satisfy donors. It's not true at all that the best organizations bake this into their DNA because they truly believe that if they are not making impact then they need to stop what they're doing and change direction. And so that I think is hopeful. And so figuring out yes it is harder to figure out key performance indicators when you're looking at a transformation over decades but it's not impossible and there are strategies that I talk about in the book that will help you get there. Great. Yes right here in the front. Oh and then I'll come back to you in a second. Ladies this is truly a pleasure. I don't have any of you on the board so that's a possibility. My name is Michelle Joseph and I'm the executive director of the Student Global Ambassador Program. And my question is focused on what we do. We work with STEM sustainability and social justice issues for seventh graders and up. We're trying to infuse technology in what we're doing and with the educational system because it's so broken we're having issues with how to do that best so that it's welcome. So the kids love it but we're trying to figure out the next step and you've touched on that but I would like to get your take on that you know with regard to digital natives how could we get them engaged in knowing that we're dealing with a broken educational system. Just a thought. Wow. So in social startup success I my unit of analysis is the organization how can organizations be stronger because my theory of change personally is that if we can be more effective and developing strong organizations that we can maximize our resources as a sector. That is not exclusive of also having systems in place so that every organization can achieve their goals. No organization is going to be able to achieve their goals without all these other kinds of assumptions. In your case one assumption being true is that you have to have an education system that is going to accept new forms of education in order to be effective. And so part of developing a strong theory of change process is looking at what all the other actors are doing in the sector and figuring out who is in charge of making sure that all of your assumptions actually happen and become true. And if there's no one filling those gaps then maybe you need to take a different tax. And that's something that changes regularly as we saw over the last year that you can be on track and have everything moving smoothly and then there's a administration change and your theory of change might change. There in the back. Hello, my name is Mark Hannis. I'm working on a project called The Orange Book to increase diversity and inclusion in federally appointed positions. And on that note, I know School Foundation is looking. It is in a single digits I believe the number of women, social entrepreneurs who are able to get to mezzanine level size. So we know of the few examples of Wendy Kopp or Natalie, Jacqueline Overgrads, but it's pretty rare to find women social entrepreneurs at maximum scale. And I'm curious, there's a big conversation generally but with women in the private sector and other places are what similarities or differences are you seeing vis-a-vis gender and successful social entrepreneurs? Thank you. Well, I could talk about this for hours. I mean, this is actually the issue that I think my research has made me most passionate about because there are dozens of stories that I feature in the book of some of the most inspiring change makers who are doing incredible work in our society. What keeps me up at night is who got left out of this book. Who is not getting funded because they don't go to a top school or because they can call themselves a community organizer even though maybe what they're doing could be called social entrepreneurship and get funded in another world or because they are a person of color or a woman and experience implicit bias. And the data, the very little data that exists shows that some pretty stark disparities. Women founders get funded at a rate of half as much five years out as their male counterpart. The more than I would have thought, I would have thought it was a service. The same is true between people of color and white founders. And when you look at the makeup of foundations, it's pretty clear why that's true. 85% of trustees of foundations are white, three quarters of foundation staff are white. And the idea of starting an organization is a privilege. You have to have resources to be able to say, I'm gonna take six months off and test out this idea because seed funding doesn't exist. You have to have a proof of concept to get funded, even echoing green. And so I think we need to really think about how we are supporting early stage organizations because we can't build a pipeline of diverse leadership until we start supporting those organizations from day one. Well, and that goes back to Steve's question about advocacy as well. That's frequently where women, where people of color who are trying to change things get started. And I can say this, having done that word for many, many years, it is discounted frequently as having value in some of these other settings and particularly settings where you can access resources. And so people kind of making the leap from advocacy to something else or to something that is recognized beyond an advocacy context is like a tremendously important point and not enough of us succeed. Got time for one more question because we then have a book signing and I definitely don't wanna take time away from that. Last question. Oh, well, last two questions. I'll take, we'll take two together and then you all can conclude. Go ahead. Hi, Kat Duffy with Internews. You know, we're a global human rights NGO and one of the things that we're working on globally is trying to connect technologists to policy advocates at sort of nascent internet freedom organizations all over the world and about 30 countries. And one of the big challenges that we're facing is not just the gender divide but the generational divide. That we have extraordinary capacity on the advocacy side in particular among human rights activists and advocates who have no understanding of technology do not wanna be bothered, right? It is overwhelming. It messes with how they know how to do things. And then we have these really amazing young active vibrant thinkers on the ground who are coming in with sort of technological solutions but there isn't a great deal of respect on either side for the lessons learned, right? I mean, and those can be amazing connections when they're made. And so I was wondering sort of in your research if you have been coming up a little bit against that generational divide in terms of thinking about innovation versus practiced management skills, practiced fundraising, practiced strategy, the ability to have the long game and step back which people who've been doing this for decades sort of bring to the table and if you've seen any good examples of that really working well or things that I should definitely not do in many, many countries. So hold the response, hold on. We're gonna take that last question. I know both of you, Cecilia's living that day by day. They're on the aisle in the back, sir. Hi, Paul and Arsissa with the ARP Foundation. Quick question. How do you define success of a social entrepreneur? Is it just because you're able to raise enough revenue or is it something to do with sustainability or outcomes or struggling with the impact around measuring success? So those are two great last questions. I'll take the first one. And you can include that when you get a little bit up. So the question you raise, we deal with every day in our public interest technology project which is really about trying to bridge this very gap and the experience that a number of us had in the Obama administration with the US Digital Service was that part of my job was to persuade the policy nerds to sort of accept engineers and product developers at their table. And when it worked, it was because we had a problem in the middle of the table that urgently needed to be solved and everybody's a problem solver. And so when you, if the conversation was about something, about a problem that needed to be solved, people were willing to drop their barriers and recognize the skill sets that were at the table because they all ultimately contributed. If you were just having a more theoretical or general conversation, then it was really hard to bridge those barriers. So it's the thing we are trying to replicate and we'll see if we succeed, maybe we won't, is that we're trying to create tables where kind of people, I think of as doers, people at NGOs and technologists who are civically minded who want to help change the world are sitting at the table with a problem in front of them to begin to iterate on how to solve it. No, you should talk, you should talk. I'll just add one little point on that because my background is in gender equality work and let me tell you, we have the generational divides there as we all know. One strategy that is super effective is two-way mentoring and creating frameworks for people to learn from each other. It's super powerful, just framing it in that way and giving people the tools to ask different questions and frame their interactions in different ways can be really useful. How do I define success? That's a great place to end. Every organization has to define their own version of success. You can be an organization, we all know these organizations that are raising a lot of money and having very little impact, that happens. Hopefully market forces prevail and I'm more worried about the organizations that are having phenomenal impact but don't have the tools to sell their story, to really trace the impact of their work and to get funded as a result. So my hope is that this book will give people those tools and that the more that we can think about our role as funders, as board members, as volunteers, as helping the capacity of organizations so that they can do a better job of doing the very important work that they do, I think our whole world will be better because of it. I'm not gonna improve on that. Join me in thanking our fabulous panel. Thank you.