Kathryn Cross, executive director of communications at the U.N., recently conducted a virtual seminar with Don Gips, CEO of the Skoll Foundation; Elizabeth Cousens, President and CEO of the UN Foundation; and Nicole Taylor, president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to learn how these organizations and the nonprofits they support are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nicole Taylor, President & CEO, Silicon Valley Community Foundation
The leadership of eight local Community Funds in the Bay Area quickly joined forces to create one regional fund to support individuals and families hit the hardest, said Nicole Taylor. In addition, the Bay Area Community Funds established a relief fund earmarked for nonprofits, as well as a fund dedicated to providing relief for small businesses. The regional fund was able to serve as conduit for two counties to put public dollars to work locally.
Taylor urged foundations to use a racial equity lens when addressing the impact of COVID-19. As she pointed out, the pandemic has hit low income, immigrant, and communities of color hardest, with a disproportionate rate of illness and death. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Taylor said, foundations must learn to support the black community in terms of building its own power around racial equity and social justice, addressing systemic disparities, and systemic change.
As a new generation uses social media to get the word out about protests, and hundreds of thousands of people respond within minutes, Taylor is encouraged to see that generation think critically and strategically about how they demand our leaders move forward. But they can’t do it alone, she says. “Our generation has to push forward with philanthropic resources to make systemic change.”
Don Gips, CEO, Skoll Foundation
From producing the movie Contagion, to aggressively funding disease detection networks, Jeff Skoll has worked for years to both raise awareness to the danger of a global pandemic and strengthen the capacity health systems. In March he made a gift of $100 million to fuel the Skoll Foundation’s COVID-19 response.
“With that additional $100 million in funding we began running a sprint and marathon simultaneously,” said Don Gips, CEO of the Skoll Foundation. The sprint focused on immediate response, with $50,000 grants in targeted emergency funding for this community of social entrepreneurs as they work to both sustain their core mission and impact, and in some cases, pivot their approaches to respond to COVID-19.
The Skoll Foundation deployed $3.2 million in rapid funding while developing a longer-term program to award larger, more targeted emergency grants within its community. The goal, says Gips, is to help preserve the long-term impact of our community of social entrepreneurs by addressing the financial repercussions of COVID-19 and prioritizing organizations that are underrepresented or less proximate to sources of emergency funding.
In California, the Skoll Foundation has invested in the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles to provide core support for COVID-19 response in the most vulnerable LA communities. It has also invested Governor Gavin Newsom’s California Connected campaign, a multi-pronged contact tracing and public awareness effort to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and to protect public health and safety.
On the African continent, the Skoll Foundation is working with philanthropists like Strive Masiyiwa and Richard Branson on low cost breathing devices. Some of its first COVID-19 response funding went to the Africa Center For Disease Control to help it function as a system orchestrator that can set standards, and work with local governments and manufacturers of breathing assist devices, ventilators, and personal protective equipment. Instead of 50 countries competing for ventilators, the Africa CDC can put in place a single platform to distribute the equipment where it’s needed most. It’s a great example of government, business, and philanthropy coming together to solve a life or death problem, said Gips.
Looking at investments through an equity lens, Gips says the Skoll Foundation is asking how it can do much more to work at the roots of systemic problems. “How do we address systemic differences, support voter registration, and organizations working on these issues led by people with the lived experiences on these issues? The COVID pandemic has forced us to reimagine how these systems can be made to work better for all of us, whether its racial justice, an inclusive economy, or a stronger global health system.”
Elizabeth Cousens, President & CEO, UN Foundation
In less than three months, the Solidarity Response Fund, spearheaded by Elizabeth Cousens, raised $222 million for the World Health Organization. Designed to help individuals, companies, philanthropies, and organizations address the risk of COVID-19, the Solidarity Response Fund garnered contributions from nearly 500,000 individuals and 140 companies around the world. At the time, they became the single largest donor ever to WHO. As a result of this “early money,” WHO had the flexibility to direct funding where it was most urgently needed.
As of this writing, the fund has distributed 70 percent of funds raised. That enabled WHO to make purchases of bulk commodities, invest in critical research, and help develop humanitarian work, including at Africa CDC, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, UNICEF, and the World Food Program. Thanks to the money raised by the Solidarity Response Fund, WHO sent millions of testing kits to over 120 countries world wide, PPE to 135 countries in urgent need, and created training courses in COVID-19 in 29 languages. In addition, its Global Solidarity Trial is a real-time effort to examine the effectiveness of therapeutics so doctors can make instantaneous course corrections for their patients.
“COVID is forcing us to confront the range of inequities we’ve tolerated for far too long,” said Cousens. “We cannot let this opportunity go by without decisive and irreversible change. It’s going to take brave and bold action. It will take intention, strategy, dismantling attitudes, and bringing in the voices of those most affected and impacted. At this moment in our history we can’t be anything less than 100 percent focused on changing laws, changing policy, and changing behavior.”
