 Good evening, everyone, welcome to New America, New York City. For those of you who are new to New America, we are a nonprofit, nonpartisan civic enterprise at Think Tank. And my name's Georgia Levinson-Cohen, and I run the Program on Profits and Purpose at New America, which is really a program that examines social entrepreneurship and social investment. So I have the all stars of my field here tonight. I'm thrilled. I also, I don't know where Tyler went, but I want to thank Tyler Bug at New America who makes everything in New America, New York City happen. And also, Ann-Marie Slaughter, who's not here tonight, but who is our CEO and really helping to build up more programming like this in New York. So it's terrific. As I said, profits and purpose in it, we don't tend to think of Think Tank as very entrepreneurial places, but this one actually is. In addition to research and writing, we also get to do a lot of really interesting and fun programming like the one tonight. And for profits and purpose, we've done, we've really looked at innovation, social innovation in the public sector. We've had Nick Kristoff for a few discussions. We were doing a really interesting partnership with the Museum of the City of New York, looking at different forms of activism and did an event a few weeks ago on urban green innovators. But I really wanted to address this sort of social entrepreneurship and social investment topic head on, I think in part as an excuse to get Cheryl and Liz together and even plotting for that for a while. And then the genesis of this panel has recently met Jake and read his book and sort of said we have to connect all the dots and bring everyone together. And then I sort of said, and we really did the youngest face that sort of who really represents the field today and how do we really think about social entrepreneurship and changemaking and really energizing young people to think about tackling some of the world's most challenging social, environmental and economic problems. So we have just a terrific lineup of, we're in for a real treat tonight. So thank you all for coming. I will introduce everyone briefly. The bios are pretty amazing, but I'll give a little bit of a snapshot. Karim, so I decided to do it in newbiness order. It's very new to the field order. So Karim, all the naga is the founder and CEO of Practice Makes Perfect and also an Echoing Green fellow. We'll talk a lot more tonight about Echoing Green 2013, is that right? And the founder and CEO of something called Practice Makes Perfect. Karim will talk much more about his work, but essentially what he's doing is addressing the achievement gap in a number of interesting ways, but mostly focusing on one of the great disparities that has to do with summertime enrichment and really the disparities in summer academic programming between lower income and higher income peers. And he's doing that sort of a full time set of summer programming that's terrific and is working here in the US and based in New York to his right. Jacob Leafs is the founder and CEO of the Ubuntu Education Fund. And we have a recent author of a book, I Am Because You Are, of the same name and we will have signing of the books in the back. Jake went to South Africa in the mid 1990s, I think really to observe the elections and then set up the Ubuntu Education Fund in 1989 and sort of didn't leave. Spent so in the next 15 years or so really creating extraordinary cradle to career sort of whole child focused set of services for children in the community, in the townships in Port Elizabeth, but for a community of 400,000 people they're really serving 2,000 children very deeply and very intensively. And like Kareem, Jake has, I won't go through them, you can see in the bias but has really sort of won or been recognized with every kind of young leader and young service award you can imagine. This is an accolade and recognition heavy group. Next to Jake is Liz. Lockett is a good friend and colleague and really an inspiration. Liz is I think not only leading but helping to define and shape the impact investing field. So Liz is the president of something called the Social Entrepreneurs Fund, which is TCEP. Prior to heading TCEP she has extensive experience in philanthropy and in business analytics and in technology. So her career in the private sector prior to she got an impact investing in the Persian Square Foundation, which is an impact at philanthropy but prior had a career at Citigroup and also was a founder and then vice president of the flowchrome analytics. So essentially brings all of those business investing skills to her work at TCEP where she's, Liz and her team including a pretty incredible investment committee. She'll talk to me about folks that's on early stage at Goody Stakes and really in impact companies and also across a range of industries and I hope you'll talk a little bit about some of those investments. And then finally and I'll let everyone actually speak for themselves. We have Cheryl Dorsey who doesn't need a whole lot of introduction but I'm delighted to have a real pioneer and not just leader but I think icon at this point in the field and has really created the field of Social Entrepreneurship. Cheryl's the president of Echoing Green which is a global organization which seeds and unleashes next generation talent to solve the world's biggest challenge through the fellowship program and others prior to becoming the president. Cheryl, which she assumed in 2002 said numerous leadership entrepreneurial and service roles has served in two administrations, as White House fellow various high level decisions that department of labor and elsewhere and currently for those of you applying as a vice chair for the president's commission of White House fellowships. Again, very highly decorated in a number of fields. I think leadership, service, medicine, I mean, you name it. But interestingly was one of the before is the first Echoing Green fellow herself to assume to run the organization. So I think in 1982 was awarded a really interesting. 92, I'm old, I'm not that old, 90, 92. 92, sorry, 92 was awarded to run Family Man, is that right? Which is a community based mobile health unit in Boston. So please help me welcome the group and then have some questions and then I will open the field. So thank you all. Actually, Cheryl, if we can start with you, I would just, I would love you all to reflect a little bit just for a few minutes on your own story, sort of how, and we don't have to talk about it as social entrepreneurship, we could just really think about it as changemaking. But how you came to the work, you do a little bit of sort of personal color behind it and what your work looks like today. Sure, thank you guys for coming. I appreciate you taking the time. Georgia, thank you for moderating. And I'm so excited to be joined by such incredible leaders across the space of social innovation. So I always enjoy these opportunities. I think I came to this work in a fairly circuitous way. I was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. I'm the child of two public school teachers who taught in the Baltimore City School System for 30 years each. My dad was the first person in his family to go to college. My mom was the second. And living in a household with teachers, education was the instrument to move our family forward. And my mom was a guidance counselor so it was all about college prep all the time. Went off to Harvard College and was a pre-med student. I was the first person in my family to go to medical school. But I came of age, especially in an African-American family where success was either doctor, lawyer, engineer, and we sort of had pretty strict slots on what professional trajectory looked like. And I just didn't know much more than that but was pretty good in math and science so really got pushed to that track. And when I was in college was sort of clear or sort of clear that I didn't necessarily feel that in my heart and soul but I just didn't know what else to do. And when your whole family is like we're gonna have a doctor in the family, we're gonna have a doctor in the family, it's hard to go home and tell your family that's not what you wanna do. And clearly was not courageous enough to do it because I ended up going to medical school and then had taken time off. I was at Harvard Medical School and had gotten a scholarship to go to the Kennedy School of Government. And was fortunate and open to the universe where I was reading the Boston Globe and they did a seminal series called Birth and the Death Zones. And it was a five-part series about infant mortality rates in inner city Boston. At the time, black babies were dying at three times at the rate of white babies, which is horrific enough. It's even worse when it's happening in the backyard of some of the world's greatest medical facilities and to think that Boston had the third highest rate of black infant mortality in the country only behind Washington, D.C. and Seattle, Washington. Really interesting, right? And the first of the five-part series had a photo of a young mother kneeling before the grave of her baby that she had just buried. And I can still see it and it just makes me, I'm like tearing up even thinking about it because she could have been my sister, she could have been my cousin, she could have been me, right? And it just didn't make sense to me how in a land of plenty, two blocks away from Brigham and Women's and Mass General, this young lady had to bury her baby. It was just horrific. And it was sort of this moment of obligation where, for whatever reason, I just couldn't get it out of my mind. And it became sort of this beautiful, awful obsession. I just couldn't stop thinking about it. It ended up talking about it and found my way to the woman who would become my partner or my mentor or my dearest friend, an obstetric anesthesiologist, Nancy Oriol. And we just started thinking about this idea and sitting at her kitchen table and came bridge with the dog barking, her kids screaming, it was just a mess. We sort of came up with this idea of like, what were we gonna do about this problem? And we decided to start a mobile health unit. Doesn't seem that innovative, but at the time the notion of using culturally competent services to engage people into existing services was new. And sort of a new way to think about addressing racial disparities. We didn't know what we were doing. We had never run anything. It never started anything. And here was this newly minted fellowship program called Echoing Green. And they took a chance on me and it absolutely changed my life and helped make me into the person that I am today. And it's just one of the most transformative experiences in my life because they believed in me when nobody else did. And they backed Nancy and I when nobody else would. So that's how I came to the work. Thank you. I have to go after Shale. No. I'm sorry. No. I'm sorry. See. I am a child of Jewish immigrants but many generations later. And grew up in New York City. I sort of always wanted to work in the public sector but had a non millennial view of income and felt I should pay off debts and make enough money. So my first job, I actually spent all my summers working at the city council president and the borough president of New York City who many of you may or may not remember was little, I won't say his name. But I got to work in the ombudsman office which was really an exciting place to work because you sat, it was essentially the precursor to 311 and you sat at the front line of all the inbound calls and people walking in with every problem you can imagine. And I was 15, 16, 17 years old and got to spend time sort of solving problems for people in New York. And that was a great experience and sort of transformative for me. And I do remember one time a woman calling me with dimes, a while ago, from a pay phone that she was, her boyfriend was going, was beating her up and she had been running around trying to find a women's shelter. They were all full and she couldn't get in anywhere and it was too late to get a cord injunction. So I was trying to solve this problem at 17 and I managed to get the red cross to take her for the night. So she kept calling me in between phone calls. I talked them into taking her even though it wasn't a fire or a natural disaster. They agreed to give her one room for that night. I remember just thinking, I solved a problem. I can't believe it. Anyway, so that, it's interesting because now a lot of our investments really sit at that intersection. They really sit in the middle of making services more accessible for underserved populations. And you know, a lot of the social services available to people are very difficult to access. And that is one of our favorite investment areas. Sure, so I was 13 years old and I moved to London, I'm American and started to get into a lot of trouble. It's a big city, I've come from a suburb around here. And one day I stumbled upon this march in Hyde Park which was a Fremondella march. And for whatever reason, with no connection to South Africa, I was captured by it. The music, the sound, I started volunteering. And then when I was 17 in 1994, they were taking 15 of us from 15 different countries down to observe the country's transition to democracy. And we spent six weeks meeting with everyone from your Robert Island Freedom Fighters through to your Eugene Tarabalange, your right wing neo-Nazis and everyone in between. And one evening we were in a place called Alexandria which is all shacked. It sits in the shadows of Santon which is the economic hub of the entire continent. And it's in the middle of Johannesburg, skyscrapers like Lower Manhattan. And I meet this woman and you're 17, you know everything, you're very confident. And she's telling me how she waited 30 hours to cast her ballot and I'm saying, she was quite big, she was quite old and I'm like, I don't understand, what do you mean? She's like, you don't understand. And she tapped me on my shoulder instead of waiting 85 years and walked away. And I grew up in a home with two parents who both went to university and had a lot of privilege and I just never thought about freedom and democracy and these concepts. And the next day I heard a woman speak who was working a new constitution there. She was a law professor at Penn in Philadelphia and I was like, this might take it back. And so a year later I ended up at UPenn and I go find this woman and she wanted nothing to do with an 18 year old. And I bugged her and bugged her and we became friends. And we just got internet on our campus and I found a job down in South Africa. And so I convinced her to sponsor me for six months. I get down there and of course there was no job, I was scammed. And I didn't know what to do. So I got on a train headed out of Cape Town and about 18 hours into this train ride I struck a conversation with a guy who invited me to go off in a place called Port Elizabeth which is a very industrial port town on the Indian Ocean side. It's a place people leave, they don't go to. And this guy was a black South African who said, I'm coming to townships, have a beer with me. And on the surface was a 97, I symbolized everything wrong in the country. I went with him and it was, you know, went to his little bar which is a shack basically and place went silent, seen out of a movie over and looks at me and one guy in the corner motion be over. And I sat with him and he was a school teacher and I was a entrepreneur. It was nothing to do with nonprofit education. It was never gonna be a career. And he said, why you work at my school? I said, okay, we need a place to live and I moved with his family that night. Now I spent the next six months with his family living in this community. And I definitely overly romanticized the poverty but those six months shaped my whole view and development. A lot of money was pouring into the country, post-departile philanthropic money, a lot of huge organizations that we all know from around New York, D.C., E.U. And everyone was coming into the country and through these communities of work I was living in and defining success by how many classrooms they build, how many libraries they put out and so forth and they'd move on. And I kept, I look at these kids, these little girls have been raped or living in a shack and thinking, the country's saying, apartheid's over, you can do whatever you want, you go to university. And these organizations say, look at all the great work we're doing but everyone's defining success purely by these outputs. And I knew I didn't get to where I was with a windup computer and a cup of soup and it takes a huge investment. So I said, let's start our own organization that would not work with the top academic kids but the bottom of the bottom of the kids. So we decided we'd start with the kids who've been raped or lost their parents. If we invested in them the same way someone invested in me, could we get them out of poverty? And that was 17 years ago. So I started this on the Penn campus just when I was 21 with, at least you have credit cards away on this call, I don't know if anyone remembers, but I took eight of them and started a boom too. So that's the journey. So my story started with my parents and both my parents are Egyptian immigrants. They came to the US to start a family and provide them with a better life. The traditional immigrant story. Unfortunately for us, my father passed away when I was a lot younger. I was one of five. My brothers and I wound up selling candy on school nights and weekends just to make ends meet. And then by virtue of just growing up in a low income neighborhood, we went through some of New York City's most struggling public schools. I had 60 absences in seventh grade because I wasn't engaged and I feel like going to school. My dad didn't graduate from high school in Egypt. My mom had only finished high school in Egypt and now they were in a new country and didn't really understand the educational experience here. And so there's never any pressure to really go to school or do well in school or use that as an avenue for success after. I wound up going to my local high school. My high school had a 55% graduation rate. 20% of the kids there were college ready. 10% probably matriculated and graduated from four year schools. I didn't think of those as disparities or inequalities at the time I was going through it. And I was fortunate that a series of nonprofits and mentors kind of stepped into my life and ultimately changed my life prospects. Wound up going to Cornell, graduating the top 10% of my class. And in the process of being at Cornell, I ran across a scholarship that was supposed to help me fund my education. The United Negro College one at the time said that they'd give $10,000 to any student who can come up with a solution for the achievement gap that involved corporate intervention. And as you can imagine I was 17, I knew nothing about the achievement gap and I knew nothing about corporations work, but obviously I wanted $10,000 from Cornell. And so you start to learn and up until that point in my life, I was a very rugged individualist. I felt like the kids who worked hard were the ones who were gonna make it and the ones who didn't are the ones who aren't. And I had my older brother as my prime example. He didn't wake up early to go to school. He didn't stay up late to do his homework. It was no surprise when he dropped out of a two-year college. It just made sense. And then I started to think back to a lot of the sociological influences. Had it growing up in a single parent household, being raised on government aid or hanging out with the kids we hung out with who didn't value education influenced the way or its role in our lives. And we all know today if something's important it gets priority. If it's not, we just discard it and we don't pay any mind or attention. And in that moment I began to empathize a lot more with the situation. So I didn't win the scholarship but the numbers to me weren't just numbers. They were real people. I wasn't an economist sitting there was the kids in my own neighborhood, the kids I played football and basketball within high school and in my own household, my one-year-old brother at the time my father passed away, he was still growing up and going through our system. So when you grow up poor, you obviously wanna be rich and got involved with a nonprofit where I got a mentor and the mentor was like, listen, you're hardworking. You should go into financial services, a Wall Street is sort of the route. So I did my internships at Goldman Sachs and at BlackRock, simultaneously my sophomore year started a nonprofit to kind of pay it forward. And I didn't start with the intention of building a nonprofit or an organization. I was really committed to making a difference in my neighborhood. Non-profit just happened to be the tax structure that was gonna help us achieve that goal or mission. And ever since then it's been an uphill battle to try and change the system that we're in. I picked summer because they say that two thirds of the achievement gap can be directly attributed to unequal summer learning opportunities. And frankly, our summer school system is broken. And there's an opportunity to redesign and reimagine that and start to build traction and bring in a whole new group of investors and people behind this vision of trying to create equity over the summer. Thank you, that's terrific. So one thing that's very clear in each, so we have four amazing individuals, but everyone's been very clear that their journey here has involved a lot of other people and organizations and mentors along the way. And one in putting together this panel, I also realized that all of you intersect with some other of you and your work in some way. Not a hundred percent, but they're a very nice connection. So Cheryl, maybe I'll start back with you again. I'd love you to just reflect on either who seated here in terms of their work and or other individuals and organizations as you are, as you run, I can read in your building this field. How do you think about your work in relationship to others and how do you draw others for support? Well, maybe I'll just sort of use my colleagues here on the panel, because I think it illustrates so beautifully how the social entrepreneurship ecosystem is structured and is growing and changing. So I've learned so much about impact investing by working with Liz and tapping into all that she knows about this space. So interesting, like Echoing Green was founded, the real pioneers here are the founders of General Atlantic private equity firm. They founded Echoing Green in 1987. As best I can tell, it was the second or third earliest founded social entrepreneurship funder in this country. It really has been one of the pioneers. And when you look at everything we've funded, we've funded 640, 650 social entrepreneurs working all over the world. We really are best in class angel investors of next gen social entrepreneurs, early funders of Teach for America, City Year, Michelle Obama got money from Echoing Green, really extraordinary array of next gen leaders like Kareem. But prior to 2006, literally all of the business plan submissions we saw were of next gen leaders starting pretty traditional not-for-profits. And then all of a sudden, in 2007, like 15% of the submissions were suggesting either a for-profit social entrepreneur or a hybrid non-profit for-profit combination. Every year it's ticked up to the point that this year 50% of our submissions are suggesting double bottom line or triple bottom line businesses. And I think it's an interesting phenomena that all of these young leaders are recognizing there's simply not enough philanthropic capital to solve our social and environmental problems at scale. Until you tap the capital markets, we're not gonna get anything. And in some ways, the hallmark, the Sinequanon of social entrepreneurship is the blurring of sectoral boundaries. Let's get out of our silos, public sector here, business here, social sector here. Nope, these guys are completely disrupting the rules in the way that we think about cross sectoral fertilization. So the impact investing phenomena is really easy. Jacob is another example of these incredible next-gen leaders who are global citizens of the highest order. I'm the oldest one on this panel. I didn't come of aid with tech. I did my thesis on a typewriter with Whiteout. Like that's how far back I go, right? But you guys are global citizens of the highest order. And we have seen a market uptick in the number of social entrepreneurs who are focused on global issues. Like literally 50% of our deal flow this year came out of Africa. Fascinating, is our fastest growing market in terms of next-gen thinking, leadership. And they're a really interesting group of young leaders. When you look at the number of for-profit submissions, African-based entrepreneurs, about 46% of their proposals were suggesting for-profit or hybrid submissions versus only like 27% of those working domestically. A really interesting phenomena that the belief that business is gonna drive social change. I think that's an interesting global phenomena. And then Kareem, it's just fascinating. Like again, in my day, again, there were very sort of traditional pathways to pedigree and accomplishment and achievement. Doctor, lawyer, engineer. And the fact that Kareem came out of Cornell University so incredibly sought after. The financial services guys are kicking themselves that they couldn't get him. But for you, there is a life of achievement and leadership that has a cachet that didn't exist in my generation. So this next-gen millennial bubble that believes that doing good and doing well are synonymous and conflated, I think is really exciting. And I think everyone, all of these guys represent that in some way, shape, or form. Totally agree. I actually think there's enough philanthropic capital out there. I think too often, at least when we're seeing more and more of these hybrid models, and they're terrific, and a lot of ways I wish I had developed that. However, I see every year we've been involved with a philanthropic pool of money, just say South Africa alone or globally, or even here domestically has increased. The issue is that there's incredible mediocrity, and I don't think there's this healthy relationship between the funding community and the practitioners and other organizations, and this idea that none of us can accomplish anything in 12-month grant cycle. Most of what we're all doing doesn't work. If all we were, you go to Davos, you go to Clinton Globe Initiative and stand up there. Everyone's doing half what they said. There would be no poverty. It's so true. It's so true. And so how could we create an environment that would allow for a healthier discussion, allow for more risk, allow for a longer-term commitment? And that's really, I think, where I'm seeing a lot of, my personal passion now is, how can we encourage philanthropists to commit in the long term? Let's measure these organizations to measure the success, sort of against where they've come from, not against where they're going, and understand that a lot of the organizations with those Koreans doing what we're doing, we can only control what we can control. I can work with a kid from, we start with pregnant mothers now, and share a healthy birth and take them through, work with a child for 16 years and this child was 17 years old. She went to a tavern place and she was raped. And a donor of mine said, oh, she was 18, she just started her first year of college. And a donor of mine said, what was she doing there? I'm like, what were you doing at 18 years old? It wasn't this young girl's fault. And we have to create a healthier, I think, discussion between the funding community and the practitioners. However, I do also believe in everything you're doing, what you're doing as well. I'm just saying, there's an incredible amount of philanthropic money out there. And I don't think it's being invested wisely. Let's get you, having worn both hats, you've sort of gotten some of the same issues, but at a major foundation and now also really looking at for private companies, could you come in a little bit on the different roles and sort of what you look for now as opposed to what you looked at? Yeah, so I think this is, this is a really difficult question to answer, obviously. There's a great deal of subjectivity involved in measuring impact and measuring philanthropy and what resonates with people. So, and I think that's true both philanthropically and in the investment side. When you're talking about impact, you're often have to concede that there's a great deal of subjectivity around what people view as impactful. But if you were looking at a continuum of impact, because people are often saying, well, let's just divide the world and to impact the way we look at risk and let's assign various kinds of returns associated with that level of impact. And if you were looking at a continuum, you'd never agree at the middle. There's no way that you could say that I think investing in a saving baby seals and you'd like to help the homeless and we can talk about the relative value, you'd probably win, but anyway, it's very subjective. But on the outside, I think you can agree. So I think of the very clearly human rights and disaster relief are things that are 100% impactful. Most people can agree on that and they agree that that is the realm of philanthropy. There's no money to be made in human rights really or in sending money after an earthquake. On the other side of that continuum, there's impact and there's these great efficiencies which people are calling impact investments like eBay, Etsy, Uber, all of these vowel companies have created efficiencies in markets that have created impact. I mean, you can now create jobs from people who are homebound. You can, for disabled people, can get a taxi without having to go anywhere. There are definitely disadvantaged groups that are benefiting from these efficiencies. But I would say that is the outer realm of what you would define as impact. So our investment strategy is really coming in from there a little and looking at efficiencies in markets that are intentionally designed for disadvantaged or underserved communities. And so we look at creating those efficiencies, access to services, access to products that are targeting low income or prisoners or emerging markets and trying to make sure that those efficiencies are underwritten to get to those people. So in the middle are the companies that are hitting break even. This concept of operational self-sufficiency comes up a lot in nonprofits now. A lot of high net worth individuals or ultra high net worth individuals made their money in the capital markets and look at that kind of efficiency. They're very scrutinizing of nonprofits and saying, look, you've built this organization. How much are you paying people? What do you spend on lunch? They're sort of scrutinizing the way you run the organization. So it gives a disproportionate amount of scrutiny to nonprofits that are not necessarily given to for-profits. And I think that middle ground of hitting operational self-sufficiency for a nonprofit where some of their money is coming from earned revenue is sort of the golden ring for nonprofits now. People like donors choose this one that comes to mind which is, you're probably familiar, but it's an online community where you can go, public school teachers post whatever they need for their classrooms and you can go online and fund them. Every dollar that you give about, I think it's now down to 14 cents goes to overhead and that's it. They don't fundraise and every year they lower by growing the scale of their business. They lower the amount of overhead for each donation. People love that model. It took them 10 years to get there but they really did a great job building that organization and now it's held up for a lot of other organizations as sort of what you're trying to achieve. So I think that continuum is a good way to think about the space of sort of 100% nonprofit and then the potential for investing in something that could be very profitable and in the middle are these nonprofits that are viewed as hybrids but are registered as 501C3s. Okay, great, thank you. And I wanna come back to the sort of overhead and general capacity building question and what that costs but I also wanna encourage us to ask you, are you sort of still in somewhat of a startup mode and clearly even just to become an equipping fellow you're asked, what is your impact gonna be and how are you gonna measure it? And as you think about the work you're doing you said, oh, we just happen to be sort of registered as a 501C3, not the for-profit nonprofit question but what do you really think about in terms of your longer term outcomes and how you demonstrate success towards those outcomes? Well it's funny, I think the social entrepreneur starts out of frustration whereas your for-profit entrepreneur in most cases starts out of opportunity. There may be some overlap there and I can tell you, I remember my senior year I was thinking about do I go into the for-profit space and work in financial services or do I work on my nonprofit? I wasn't sitting there and thinking about what the impact investor was gonna look at at the end of the day. I sort of looked at the education reform landscape and saw that so many of our most admirable reformers, people like Wendy Kopp or Arnie Duncan, Diane Ravage, even President Obama, I was like these are all incredibly admirable people but not one of them has ever been tour through an inner city public school. And so when you talk about firsthand perspective I just felt like it wasn't there. So much of our reform was driven from this outside looking in perspective instead of an inside looking out. And so I wasn't sitting there thinking about how am I gonna measure the impact of the work I'm gonna have or the kids that I'm gonna be serving. We kind of then have to evolve and shape shift so that we can meet those different criteria to get that funding. And I think really early on it's being able to have that flexibility without compromising what you really need to work on and it is finding the right partners. So Echoing Green was one of those partners for us and that's been a blessing and an opportunity in and of itself, like having access to that alumni network. I then got involved with an incubator called B-Space and I remember my post senior year, maybe the first week or two out of school, I had mentored a kid and helped him get into Cornell and I was having a pre-freshman discussion with him and I was like you need to take this class on that class, don't take that professor, she sucks, join this club, there's no need to get your internship. And at the end of that discussion I sort of found myself sitting there and thinking like where is my pre-freshman business startup mentor to make sure that I don't make the same mistakes that I could potentially make. And I remember reaching out to B-Space and the incubator I was in. I was lucky enough that they found Jake, they were like hey we know this awesome kid out of U-Pen who started a non-profit 15 years ago and can relate to everything that you're going through and we'll see if he's interested in mentoring you. And Jake has been an advisor and a friend for the last two years. So yeah, I think early on, less so you were thinking about that market impact. I think by the nature of our organization and the fact that I had this like business background, we started building a hybrid. And I say we didn't start a non-profit for the sake of starting a non-profit because I think you start with your mission first and your goal and then you sort of work backwards and figure out what legal structure you need to be able to carry that out. And if it is a non-profit, there tends to not be a market. If it's a hybrid, maybe there's something in between. And if there is a market, you should definitely be a for-profit in that case. So now it's figuring out how do you tell the story that you need to elevate your impact and take it to the next level. So I want to ask your mentor to your right. So Jake, one of the things you do really well in the book is you actually push, I think with 15 plus years experience now in a field, you sort of really talk about impact and scale and the choices that you've made to go sort of very deep in the lives of a smaller number of children and families and remain in one community rather than, and I imagine that you shared that viewpoint where you might be getting advice from others that sort of say, this is how you get to scale and scale means this and this is how you measure impact. And I know you have some different views that aren't always, that buck the general wisdom a little bit on this. And I'd love you to just talk about that a little bit. So one of my greatest achievements was getting cream out of Washington, DC. And so they know, but I think it's going deeper into one area. So when I started this, there was very few opportunities. My college advisor said to me, what are you really gonna do after the summer? Social entrepreneurship wasn't a word used on campuses yet across America. And I didn't really know what I was doing. And as we started to grow, I realized to get the credibility to play with the big boys, I need to design programming that would have loud numbers, big splashes. So we designed really output-driven programming. And before I knew it, the money flooded in. Huge money. We raised eight, nine million bucks a year. You could do a lot of work in South Africa with that. And I was getting invited to all the places, all these, I was getting all the awards and accolades. And then I was at this PEPFAR conference which was a US government initiative to, on the President Bush to allocate enormous billions of US dollars to address HIV across Sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti. And we had a group, and we were probably the top health professionals in the country and around the world from Hopkins, Harvard. And we spent an entire week in the Pretoria discussing what could have been anything but human beings. We dehumanized it so much with our outputs and this and that, and I started to realize that PEPFAR was giving us over a million bucks a year. They'd show up once a quarter and say, hey, great news, I got out 300,000 bucks for you. All you have to do is go do X, Y, and Z. And I'm like, but that's not what we do. And it was killing, it was, we called it drug money. It was exciting, it was sexy. And I realized it was raising children's, it's not scalable, unfortunately. It will work for you, it didn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. It's terribly individualized. And so we started with grade eights and I'll never forget a mentor of mine, Jeff Canada. And I was, I had one of these days when I was trying to pull my hair out and I was at the Herald Children's Zone. And he said to me, let me show you something. He walks me over to his clinic. He says, take a look. I said, okay, and he says, I said, are these your high school girls? And he goes, no, these are my moms. Now he's 16, 17. He's like, if you don't start with pregnant mothers, there's no point in, you're just not gonna be able to, it's too late in the game. And that's really how we started to buck that trend of going to scale. And I don't think as a sector we own, we undermine ourselves. We, you know, if you were starting a for-profit initiative, you would talk so much about what does your investor portfolio look like? Who do you want investing in you? We don't do that. We just accept the money and run in every direction. And so we start to say to ourselves, how do we weed ourselves from an $8, $9 million, $10 million organization? And we brought ourselves down to where we're doing better work today with $5 and a half million a year in South Africa than we did with $9 million. We have investors who actually are in it for the long term. And we were a happy organization. We're doing really solid work, we can prove it. I loved what you said, some of those questions. My favorite is, Jake, we love what you're doing, but how can you reach more kids for less money? And I use that, no, I use that all the time because think about that question. Like, you don't ask that with your own children, right? You say, how can I get my kid the best? You know, you don't say, well, you need glasses. Well, I'm not a vision parent. No, you're not a visual organization. You buy them glasses. And so we're not, we don't think that everyone wants to speak on a big innovation. We think it's an older recipe. It's how do you raise children? You give them what kids all around the world deserve and that's everything. And you stick with them through the tough times, through the tough times and it doesn't always work. But you try your best and that's how we looked at scale, going deeper as opposed to more kids. So, Liz, I'm gonna ask you a related question. And Cheryl, I love you both. So you're both in the business of identifying entrepreneurs with a lot of potential and then giving them a lot of what they need to sort of take off and how do you wrestle a little bit with some of these tensions between recognizing that ultimately you do want to get cost, you know, you can't be profligate and wasteful and people actually can't invest in bad things. But also knowing that people may need, in startups, for-product startups, they may need some resources that are a little counterintuitive to get going to ultimately be successful whether it's for-profit or non-profit. Yeah, these are difficult questions. I'd say two examples come to mind. One is I'm on the board of Root Capital, which is a 15-year-old organization that sort of pioneered lending to agricultural cooperatives, mostly starting with coffee and then expanding. And what's interesting about them is they, you know, their product is debt. They lend money and they do receivables lending against forward contracts with people like Starbucks and Green Mountain Coffee. You know, for 10 years they had 99% repayment rates in Latin America and then East Africa and then started to expand. So they had the same thing. They started getting a lot of, you know, wealthy investors, donors saying, look, you know, you're making 12%, 13% on these loans. You should, first of all, you should be for-profit, but if you're not gonna be for-profit, you should grow. You should, you know, solve this problem, reach everybody, most of the world's poorer farmers, lend money to all of them. So they tried to grow and they tried to go really quickly and they moved into West Africa and they moved into places they hadn't been and they started lending against nuts and cocoa and mangoes and Haiti and they sort of started expanding all over to solve everyone's problem at the same time. And as you can imagine, that doesn't go so well. And then they realized, well, we can't sort of make everybody happy. Some people want us to scale. Some people want us to stay in one product, though it's becoming, they did such a good job that they crowded in the industry and so you had all these other people investing and so now is that they were losing these loans to people lending much larger organizations at 9% or 8% with the ability to lose money and just sustain the losses for several years on a much bigger balance sheet. What's interesting about that organization, the reason I bring it up is they could grow and they could also become profitable and they could even become a for-profit were they to go upscale. So were they to stop going to the very most remote places of the world on the very longest bus rides to the most saddest farms you really have ever seen where there seems to be no water and no fertilizer and very poor seeds. If they didn't go to those places and offer them something, they would make more money. They could go to the ones in the Monsanto supply chain or in some of the ones that are much larger with a lot more contracts. So keeping to their mission was what they did and they scaled back and they started not taking that kind of money and they said, this is our mission. We're not gonna hit operational self-sufficiency at 100%. We're actually gonna keep lending to the people we know and keep doing it the way we know how. But sitting in those board meetings is interesting because you've got people who really understand debt and you have people who come from ag lending and nonprofits and those board conversations are really at that very essence of what everyone's talking about, which is this is the soul of our organization. It's what we built. It's what will probably make them go down in history and hear the people saying, but your risk portfolio is getting more risky and you're charging less every year and that doesn't work over time. So that's the right conversation. You have to have a real product and you have to stay true to what you care about. So that's one I think illustration where I see it in those board meetings, the tension between the two. One of our investments in our portfolio is a company called Pigeonly, which is a, started by a former inmate. He spent five years in federal prison for selling marijuana and while he was in prison, he made friends with a white collar criminal, started writing a business plan and he realized while he was there that he was trying to call his girlfriend and his family and it was about $50 for 10 minutes on the phone. So there's a terrible extortionary thing going on where a couple companies own the rights to use the phone in federal prisons and state prisons and it's prohibitively expensive. So this is one of the reasons that when people get out, they have no connections. They have nowhere to go. They couldn't afford to really stay in touch. So he decided to solve this problem. He built this inmate API where he now scrapes all the federal prisons and knows where everyone is, which is kind of cool. So people are transferred all the time without any acknowledgement. You don't have to let your family know when I move you to Texas. So he now knows where everyone is and he does direct mail and he sends them notes and says, listen, welcome to Texas. And he gives people, he's built a voiceover IP call. So every call now is local and he caps it at about $10 a month. So you can make basically the amount of minutes you're allowed as an inmate. He can't overcharge for that anymore. So wherever you are, he sends you that phone number and then you can let your family know. So he's building this wonderful, with great insight and great sensitivity to the population he's addressing, where many of the for-profit inmate businesses are not quite so sensitive to that population. He's selling directly to inmates and he's keeping very focused on the mission. And so the way that this company will scale and the way it will remain true to that mission is keeping him as the CEO. He has a super majority on the board, which means that he'll always be able to out-vote the investors, which almost the investors feel is the right way to go because none of us can really have the insight he has. As he reminded me when he changed his logo and I said, I like the other logo better. He said, you're not the target audience. That's a good point. Anyway, so I think that's just an example of governance, being one place where you can maintain your mission in a for-profit company. Cheryl, I had actually another question for you. Then I'll open it up. So Cheryl, I think it was on your buy on the Echoing Green page. You sort of end with this career, this life question that you have, which is what would you attempt to do if you could not fail? Which is tremendously inspiring and a horizon opening in some extent, but there's also interestingly a lot of discussion in this sector now about what failure really means and that in fact, if you're in Silicon Valley or you have a portfolio of companies, you fully expect and hope and celebrate those failures and that feels a little bit different when you're reporting when you're a non-profit and you're reporting to funders and Jacob, you talked about this too, so I try to look for you to talk about how you start to think about failure as something that we learn from and course correct from and we can speak very candidly about or as something that this as a sector is still evolving as a mission. Yeah, I think that's such an important point that we don't talk enough about failure so that what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail as a Robert Schuller quote and I have a paper way that sits on my desk and it's sort of a reminder that we need to do more in our sector to not only tolerate failure but to celebrate it and embrace it. I sort of feel especially with the younger generation there's such shame attached to failure instead of recognizing it as sort of experiential and a wonderful learning opportunity, people feel ashamed of it. They think it means something inherent about them as opposed to wow, okay, I pressure tested something, I didn't work, so now I course correct. So at Equing Green we're sort of very deliberate to talk about it. We've got sort of a whole rule break around how do we select these amazing next-gen leaders like Kareem, right, and we've got, you know, one of the qualities we look for is resilience because we know you're gonna fail. I mean that's just part of the entrepreneurial journey and it's not about when you fail or how you fail, it's just how you're gonna get up once you fall down and keep going and that's what we're looking for. So I think that's the first thing. And then secondly, I mean I think the real value at Equing Green, we don't give a lot of money but it's more about sort of being embraced by this peer-to-peer community so you're now on this journey with a whole bunch of other like-minded folks so the ability of you all to sort of share lessons learned, no need to reinvent the wheel but also to be held up when you fail but to share the learnings and to sort of work your way through it. Years ago, he hasn't come to our conferences recently but the former head of public allies, Paul Schmidt, a wonderful social entrepreneur, used to come and always do the most highly rated session at our new fellows conference and it was always like the 10 dumbest mistakes I made and it was sort of a picture of him in a dunce cap and he literally would walk through slide by slide and it was so awesome because to these young startup social entrepreneurs, Paul Schmidt, like running one of the largest social enterprises, the one that Michelle Obama started in Chicago, it was a big deal for him to stand in front of them and say, oh gosh, let me share with you how I stumbled and boy, I totally goofed on that but here's how I thought about it and it's such a freeing experience and it's something we try to think a lot about and I think there is always that tension like, well, the work that folks are doing, it's about sort of working with constituents and it's really life and death stuff so can you afford to fail? But I think when you come at the work from a position of trust and dignity and respect, nobody expects anybody to be perfect but you're in conversation together and you're trying to figure it out so I think people have a lot of grace if you show up and say I might not know anything or everything but I know a little bit of something and together we're gonna try to figure it out so I think that's the kind of culture we try to create. I think perception is very different though in the nonprofit space and the one example I always go back to is during our first year, we got a $100,000 grant from the Persian Square Foundation actually, $10,000 is earmarked for the curriculum. I had hired our first employee at the time and I was like, hey listen, here's $10,000, like get the curriculum done pretty much and I just wanna see the final product so he comes back to me at the time this is before I became a management expert and he's like, hey listen, I got two people, I'm gonna hire them as subcontractors, I'm gonna pay them $3,000 each and then I'm gonna incentivize them with a trip to the Bahamas and I'm gonna come under budget by $2,000 and I'm like, sure go for it, right? Like why not? And he's like for profit companies do this all the time and I was talking to one of my other friends and I was like, hey, this is what's going on and he goes, Karim, do you remember when we were in our training in financial services and they said, how would you feel if this sort of popped up on the front cover of the Wall Street Journal and you should always ask yourself that question and in that moment I realized that had that come up on the front cover of the Wall Street Journal they wouldn't talk about the non-profit executive who saved $2,000 in the curriculum or came under budget, they'd talk about the non-profit executive who was misusing donor funds and flying or sending the trips to the Bahamas and so perception in this space is still very different we canceled the trip obviously, we paid the subcontractors a little bit more and then we came at budget and so there's still a lot of area for improvement and work and I don't, I use that example to be really funny in some cases but at the same time just to show that it isn't always about the most effective use or efficient use of resources in this space, as a donor you should care about getting the best product done and the time that needs to be done, not so much how the money's being spent, we don't ever chase the for-profit and ask them what they did with their trip, you just care that they came under budget in that case and I think there's just certain things that you still can't do in the non-profit space. Well every day we're asked, I mean, I loved the story but every day we're asked, well how much are you spending on your staff salaries this year? Well how much are you, what's your overhead? That's a business decision, that's a line item. Ask me am I achieving what I've said I'm gonna achieve and they said, and that's changing the conversation and I really put the blame a lot more on the non-profit sector that we need to stop undermine ourselves, we need to take back this create a stronger or cohesive voice and we're all out there defending ourselves individually, we need to come together and create some sort of platform where we can be in a stronger, I mean I actually blame a lot of Northern California, I mean I raise a lot of money out there and everyone's talking about all their startups that never made it. If I tell one person about like something of one pilot initiative that they didn't make, yeah I lose my funding from them, it doesn't make sense. There's actually, I'll open up to the floor. So you deal, your investment, you deal with investors who in their day job actually do presumably have that mindset which is we hit one out of the park but the rest we sort of, they're baking into their larger portfolio and do they bring that same intellectual honest about sort of risk return to the discussions and let me, if there are other comments, I mean I'm just wondering how much that really translates. I'd say the only thing ultra high net worth individuals have in common is that, first of all whether they earn their money or inherited it is a huge difference and then whether I think they all feel a great burden of philanthropy. They feel very, all of these people are extremely philanthropic but feel that if anything happens to them or their money these causes, if I'm funding your school and I'm your biggest donor and I run out of money that's a huge burden to think that your school would shut. So I think that is something I see as a theme among them. In terms of their risk return it's really individual and that's what's so interesting about the collaborative nature of our fund is that we have that conversation together and somewhat of a Jeffersonian investment club because we have a bunch of very successful people in their day job trying to figure out where the intersection between philanthropy and investing lies and where their comfort level is with it. So a lot of what we're doing here in their mind is exploring that. The amount of money here at stake for them is not make or break. So they're really interested in putting it to work and figuring out what happens. Let's figure it out. Is it like venture returns? Is it like philanthropy, 100% losses? What part of their own personal balance sheet is it coming from? Because if this works for them there's quite a lot more capital where that came from and if this group of investors that sit at our table move forward with the strategy of impact investing they are very catalytic for a space of other people with significant resources. Can I just say to them, I think we've got a structural problem that for those of us who run non-profits quite often our customer is different than the constituents we serve. Our customers are quite often those donors who want, they ask that ridiculous over, I'm so with you Jacob, it's just maddening. We are pulled in different directions and it totally distorts the marketplace. It's a disaster. And then I wish, I'm so with you and I feel like we should just sort of storm the gates and say we refuse to operate that way anymore. And I was really heartened a couple years ago when like charity navigator, guide star, BBBY did this open letter to the field sort of like let's bust the overhead myth. We know it's ridiculous. You would never ask anybody building their for-profit enterprise these questions. Why do you do it to us? And it didn't get much traction. It was exactly the right message. It's something that sort of, I think tamped down on our ability to sort of execute against what we know how to execute against. And I just was a little disheartened that it didn't get more traction. You just hit on my favorite topic, rating agencies and charity navigator was founded by a disgruntled donor with no experience in a sector, right? A $1.5 million budget. By the way, he was taking a 10% of that salary. So don't even, four employees trying to measure the, they're trying to give rating over 8,000 organizations across the market. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. And then you have another side to give well who's trying to argue that a $10 bed net is a better investment than $150,000 we might spend on a university degree for child. They're both, could be quality investments. And I think the rating agencies is probably one of the biggest culprits. I mean, people go to these, we all do. And at least guide star is committed to simply being, not judging, but one of transparency. Which is what we should all be held to is, we have flaws. This is how we're spending our money and let the person investing the money choose if it's the right way. Yeah. All right, thank you. So I'm going to let, I know we have a lot of questions. So let me open up to the floor. Yeah. So I have like 50 million but I'll start with one. I've been having this conversation interestingly and I'm glad to hear it's on a higher than broader level. But I'm hearing in the nonprofit world people bragging that all the money they're raising goes directly to the program. And I've had arguments with people about it now. It's like, how do you think the programs get done? And so that's one. And another, this very well off, very well to do woman whose husband is in head funds. She's volunteering to run this whole organizational effort and is looking down on those of us in the nonprofit who make $10,000 a month. Like how dare they make $10,000 a month and thinking that. And so I think I'll leave this question here or comment. I think it's critical what you're saying as leaders in our field or from a different purge. Really, I make more effort to get this conversation restored if it didn't work a few years ago. Not only are nonprofits put to a different and higher standard, but it's completely an absurd way that we're judged and we're no one else's. So I thank you for the conversation and I ask that you try to expand it. I think it's incredibly damaging when organizations say, oh, our board covers this, there's still donations too. We're proud, our annual report just came out this week. We show that 65% of our money goes into staff compensation. I don't need any more pencils and computers. I need doctors, nurses, psychologists, coaches, mentors. I need good people, charter accountants, lawyers. That's who we need to run and where we came out with is we don't know the impact yet that I'll have on us, but it's the truth. And then you call it overhead, you call it programs. I don't know, I mean, one of your larger one of your investors is committing a quarter million dollars a year to hospital, that's five years, simply for HR to build our HR department. That's not sexy, it's not exciting, but God, is that, that's how you build real sustainability, right? I mean, that's a backbone of a company. And we need more philanthropists, I think, who are taking a stand. I was just with a young hedge fund manager today who just actually along these lines committed a half million dollars to a specifically for a vesting program for 14 of our top talented and online companies, welcoming for five years. That's awesome, that's a weekend now. I can take a breath and say, okay, I've got a five year, some five year time period to really sort of really plan, think about and take a deep breath and try to do some awesome things with it. Let's see it. Yeah, I mean, I was talking to someone at breakfast today about the nonprofit space, at least from what I've seen in the last two years and there's a competition, but there isn't a whole lot of collaboration. I think everyone sort of just goes about their business and if someone reaches out to help you out, if there's something they're not eligible for, they'll kind of throw it out there and say, hey, this might be a fit for you, but there isn't this constant, hey, let's help each other or let's team up on this one thing and let's push this initiative forward. And in many ways, you wind up risking that time that you have called overhead and putting it towards something else that donors may not like. And so you wind up focusing your time on your programs and your efforts. It's such a mess. I mean, the latest canard is, and I wonder if you guys, it's the whole thing around scale, right? It's all about the volume-based approach and I'm just like, well, you can be big and crappy, right? So, I mean, the notion of we've got to get to scale and we've got to get to 100,000 served or whatever, it's just these conversations are disconnected to the work that so many of us do and it's really just tough and it would be nice. How do you create a forum and honest, transparent conversation around how stuff really gets done? But I don't know that many four, I don't see that many four where those conversations really happen. I don't see them very often. Funding and investments-based. Do any of you guys sort of have any insights or any experiences with like crowd funding or crowd investments and how that's changing stuff sort of beyond the large institutional donors or investors or kind of high-med-worth individuals and companies or it's a big goal? And if there's any more to this from that? I've earned over $50,000 in peer-to-peer investments. That's how we got started. I literally started running triathlons and asking people for five and $10 donations. The reality is that most donations come from individuals and they come from people asking. So, for us, it like accidentally happened that I was asking all these people who ultimately became our donor base when we started to segue and build an organization and I had been donating for two or three years in a row when it became time to build our board. There was a group of people that I can go into and tap into and say, hey, you sort of already been involved with what we're doing. We want to take this to the next level. Can you get involved? I think it's changed the paradigm for how long it takes you to get started. Most people my age have come from wealth who are starting nonprofits. I didn't and there was still a platform and an avenue to get the seed capital that I needed and then ultimately to get the bridge financing that we needed to take it to the next level. So it's made it more accessible for the everyday person to be able to solve the problems that they really care about. I'm terrible at it. We have not figured it out. I have only one organization in my portfolio doing it. It's worth mentioning because it's an interesting situation but it's called Liberty Injustice and it's a women owned factory in Liberia and this gentleman who's really extraordinary set up this factory several years ago, started hiring women to run it and managed to get several different organizations to come in and they were tooled to build to put together pants, men's trousers, trained these 300 women and as they were about to just start they had all the materials on site, a bullet broke out. So the factory shut and over the course of six months they sort of are likely to shut down. They were really having a terrible time. What's interesting about the your question is that he now, then he had all these, well first it's worth mentioning that none of those women and none of their family side of people were allowed because of the information they got from formalized employment. So just as a measure of impact I felt pretty good about that. Despite the loss of the money we felt that that was probably the strongest impact we could have had. But he's now taken all that fabric which is not really sellable and nothing you can do with it and started to build school uniforms out of it. He's like, how can I fund this school uniform project? Have you heard about this? So he's building school uniform. He's creating it. He's hired back a bunch of the women to build uniforms and he's selling t-shirts called uniform online. And he's doing a Kickstarter sort of t-shirt sales hoping to sell t-shirts for as much as $10,000 and as little as 10. And hoping to kind of get the factory up and running because he's going through that he has to restart the due diligence process with Itochi and Jaqru and all these organizations which takes 18 months. I think the one thing we've seen is that it is a really interesting tool. It is not a panacea and it works best for people who already have really good social networks that they can tap. What we've seen is some social entrepreneurs who come from low resource settings actually think they're gonna be able to go out and do these Kickstarter campaigns. It doesn't work because they don't have sort of the inherent built in social media network. But if you have it, it is a great tool. Because you have a background in medicine and one of the things that people look for is outcomes analysis. And if you can perhaps help people to understand because I think a lot of this is trying to explain that people don't really understand what you're doing. If you can show them where it goes and show it convincingly, then it seems to me that that's something that's very compelling for donors. Absolutely. And I do see a lot of our earlier stage social entrepreneurs who are using technology tools and platforms like Salesforce and using other ways to sort of sweep up and sort of keep data that allows them to sort it and crunch it and share it. And I think that we are trying to demystify and make it less scary for people to think about measurement and evaluation. Like for a lot of people, they get scared. They're like, wait, I just wanted to serve people and like, what is all these tricky things? But when you start to talk to people about how do you actually create a cultural round performance and how are you executing? It makes it easier to engage in the conversation about how do you track what you're doing. And what you're measuring, by the way, I think is worth noting what you measure to measure impact in some of these, particularly in for-products, will evolve. And I think that's, well, it's true for both. So what you're measuring when you get started might not be what you're measuring down the road. So you might be measuring how many kids come through your program, but then ultimately over time, you're measuring the course of their life and the change in it. But you can't measure that in the short term. We're measuring right now the number of phone calls and the amount of money saved in these prisons by the population impigantly. But over time, we'd like to show that those people get out and go back to jail less. Can't show that for a while. I think that's a very good point because most of us tend to focus on short-term goals and short-term profitability and short-term outcomes often times the real costs and the real outcomes are really much longer than that. Just a couple of things. Sorry, sir. Now I was going to say a couple of resources. So there's a great book by Mario Moreno called Leap of Reason, venture philanthropist who I think sort of sets out a nice framework about how do you think about these things. And a scholar at Harvard Business School called Al Nor Ibrahim that talks about how to think about what to measure depending on what type of organization you are. And I found that stuff very helpful. In our case, I mean it's a long journey. It's 18, 20 years to get the child from the university of employment and there's some huge wins along the way. Keeping a child alive, keeping their mother alive, keeping them, improving their literacy, because on and on. But it's sort of for us and we started to, because it's such a high-cost investment, we need to show people the return that these children who go through our program put back into society as opposed to the kids in our community, not in our program, that actually drain society. And while we extrapolate that they didn't begin to show it, we are oldest kids only a few years out yet. But it's already remarkable the difference. And so looking through the economic lens which helps us speak to sort of a lot of financial world which is our core funding base. I do want to go back just in a, probably ending pretty soon, but just encouraging people to think about the right questions. I share a story that happened six weeks ago with a family foundation that's been supported for seven years. One of the sons who was in private equity just joined their board, family foundation, he said to me, so I looked at his, I was in there presenting at their board meeting and he said, I have a question. I said, okay, looked at the audits that I see you spent a million dollars on fundraising this year, so yeah. And that was it, he stopped there. So I'm sorry, he said that seems like a lot. Supposed to even asking me, what did I produce with that? And then asking, once you learned that it was over six million dollars, why not ask him, why didn't you spend two million dollars to produce, you know, potentially raise well and think really good work we can do. And I use that as a, you're just a good example of trying to hold the non-profit sector to the same standard as the for-profit sector, which isn't that high by the way, the bar's pretty low. And, you know, we hear about all the scandals and everything in the non-profit sector, let's not approach it. I mean, not every, most organizations that they're doing really good work, whether they're hybrids, whether they're social enterprise, but non-profits, microfinance, whatever, they really are and don't approach them with this idea of it's a scam, they're misusing my money, they're, you know. Yeah, I'm pretty sure everyone up here could have found a more lucrative path, you know. But one thing I thought was worth mentioning on your outcomes measurement is there's things called social impact bonds now. And they're trying very much to take the burden off of taxpayers and to say, we'll privatize it and we'll measure something and we'll show that we save this much money by, you know, anti-recidivism or taking some portion of society that's a taxpayer burden. What they can, because they're outcomes-based and they really have to measure and demonstrate what they're doing in order to pay back the bond, they only take binary outcomes. So they're only looking at, are you in jail or out of jail? Are you a pregnant teen or a non-pregnant teen? Did you graduate from high school or didn't you? They can't take any of the nuanced, sort of, beautiful work you're doing, which is, was this child loved? Did somebody watch it grow up and make sure that they got to the right place? That's fair, it's not a binary outcome and anyone, you know, understands that. So I love the concept of trying to make these financial products, but I think ultimately, these are social hairballs that are very complicated to solve and picking them apart is really the investment space that I try and bring my own investors to a comfort level of saying, two X would be fantastic X, you know, because we're dealing with something really difficult. Can I ask Jacob a question? I'm curious now that you've reached a certain amount of scale, do your donors or funders, are they pushing you to do randomized control trials or is that something you're putting forward? We're looking at it, we're not getting the pressure from our donors. So we've now, I talked a lot about the type of investors I want, they're sort of, they believe in us, they like what we're doing, they're slightly more hands off. I'm just sort of, which is great, it allows us to, just because you've made a billion dollars betting on Apple, it doesn't mean you care about Apple runs its company. They don't, just because you don't have some little poverty, just because you were successfully able to build up a company and I could sell it. And I needed to find a donor base that could stick with us, allow us not to go to scale and spread out geographically and focus deep down. And yes, we're on 17 years, I've been doing this, it's a long time. We can actually prove the model's worth. But to have that discipline, it's been very tough to say no, and I could list 100 things I've done wrong and learned and, I don't know, I don't know. Speaking tonight, how's everything? You know, obviously these are all socially social missions with your organizations. That, you know, in an ideal world, maybe government or the actual public policy sector would be able to address. And so maybe there's a gap because, you know, local government hasn't figured that out or they don't have the capacity or whatever. So I'm just wondering how or if your organizations are working in your respective areas with the local, municipal, state, national, whatever governments to try and facilitate something like knowledge transfer or capacity transfer, if that's appropriate and how you're doing that. I guess we're in New York City, so we're local and we are working with the city government. The reality is that we can't solve this summer crisis with the philanthropic dollars that you need. In New York City, there's about 800,000 kids in any given school year that are either not on grade level or are low income and should be in some sort of enrichment program. A quality summer program is gonna cost you about $2,000 a kid. So you're talking about a $1.6 billion investment here in New York City alone every single summer. I can't raise $1.6 billion, these amazing people haven't seen them raise that $1.6 billion yet every year. So it is some of those transitions will have to happen at a city level. We're funding will have to be reallocated. It sounds like a lot of money, but it's actually 5% of our public school budgets here. This summer for the first time, we're actually having kids who get credit for coming to our programs in the same way they would have gotten credit had they gone to a traditional summer school program. But it is, it's huge. You can't take on these problems, at least when there's a market in this case and not use that as an opportunity to leverage the organization. And I mean, for us, we have two customers. It's the donors and the schools. The schools actually pay a fee. And so a lot of our work is performance driven on both sides. Look, I mean, the interesting, sort of the early iconic social entrepreneurial leaders, the hallmark of social entrepreneurship was like, government is broken. We as citizens will come in and fix the market failure. But for a lot of folks, the government is the source of growth capital, right? So as a lot of these enterprises were trying to get to scale, they were bumping up against this lack of capital. So they sort of shifted and started to engage. And the Obama administration set up the historic White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. And I think it's done a great job using the bully pulpit and using some levers around innovation funds, the Department of Education and Corporation for National and Community Service to sort of invest venture philanthropy dollars into some of these enterprises doing a lot around social impact bonds, trying to bring in more impact investing dollars. So I think this administration has been hospitable to social entrepreneurial thinking and ways of doing. We'll see if it continues. I hope it will. Because one of the interesting things about this space is it really is an alliance-based model of change and it's sort of non-partisan in its purest form. It's about solving problems and sitting down at the table in an alliance-based method. And so there's hope that government could be seen as a partner. But I think these are really early days. We'll see if any of it sticks. All right, on that last note about the cross-sector collaboration of partnership, I think that's where we also began. So I will ask everyone to thank our panelists. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.