Shivani Garg-Patel, Chief Strategy Officer at the Skoll Foundation, recently joined philanthropy consultant Alix Lebec in a conversation for her series Wealth, Power, and Social Change. They talked about Shivani’s path to her current role and how the full range of philanthropic financial levers can be deployed to fund social change on a systemic level.
Alix Lebec: I’ve had the luxury of working with you on initiatives with water.org and Water Equity and as you’ve been leading the Skoll Foundation in so many exciting ways. I thought it would be so timely to have you join this conversation that we’re having, unpacking the trends of what has not necessarily been working in philanthropy, but more importantly, identifying the unique opportunities we have now. Tell us a little bit more about you and your journey before we get started?
Shivani Garg Patel: My journey has been one that’s crossed sectors. I started off in the private sector. I worked in the tech world as a product manager. I worked as a strategy consultant, advising fortune 100 companies on their tech and innovation pathways. Then I did a bit of work in the public sector as well, doing similar advisory work. I was always looking for ways to map my skillsets that were growing earlier in my career to my values, and really wanting to feel like I was directly driving change at a social level and for people and planet.
I started my own nonprofit in the global health space around maternal and child health and ensuring access to treatments in remote and rural areas where there often wouldn’t be medical services. That was such an experience of being an entrepreneur, raising capital, and building something brought to bear the skills that I had up until that point.
The Skoll Foundation for me was always such a light in terms of what it meant to be able to look at gold standard organizations, social innovators, social entrepreneurs, and to get to work with many other people who were inspirations to me was such a gift. I’ve worked across our portfolio team, helping to lead the Skoll Awards program, and now sit in the role of Chief Strategy Officer.
Lebec: We are all so lucky to have you in that role because you bring that duality of mindset from someone who’s been in the trenches who has done the work and you know what it’s like to go out and raise capital and execute, while also being on the other side of that conversation and guide decisions that are going to determine how millions of dollars are spent to do good in the world. From your perspective, what are three ways in which philanthropy today could be even more impactful?
Garg Patel: In this moment where we have some of the toughest challenges of our time, it comes down to three things that we could do differently around the what, the how, and the who. And for me, the what is funding at a systemic level—taking those proof points of social innovations that truly have that ability to scale at a systemic level. It may become adopted by government. It may become adopted by private sector. It might transform policy. That’s scale of impact, not scale of an organization. We need more unrestricted funding, more resources, more efforts going to that systemic level.
The how is using all the tools at our disposal, from grants to the full balance sheet of investments with market-rate returns, program-related investments, mission-related investments towards impact. I think there’s such a missed opportunity with not looking at the full toolbox. We’re fortunate to partner with the Capricorn Investment Group, our investment manager to really think about how we can have mission alignment in the investments that are made in the endowment. So we’re putting it to use. Much of that has been on the climate space to date. Another piece of this is in more mission-aligned investments. And we’re looking for ways every day of how we can work together further to deploy those tools.
The third is around the who. If you’re going to fund at that systemic level and drive that lasting change, how do you find the people embedded within those ecosystems? We look for those who have been on the front lines, experiencing the challenges firsthand, and the proximate grant makers who fund people who are local to those communities or to those challenges, people who’ve spent decades of their lives amidst the challenge.
Lebec: You’ve been talking a lot about making change happen at a systemic level, but what does that mean?
Garg Patel: For the Skoll Foundation, it’s durable, lasting change and getting at the root causes. How do you look at what breaks down those barriers so change can happen at multiple levels to start getting at the root causes. Some of those changes are more tactical, like a direct service or product to get part of the way there, but it’s not in and of itself enough.
How can you start shifting where resource flows go? How can you start shifting policies and practices that then will have more of a long-term change and that shift in what the current state is? And then the ultimate next level is that mindset and behavior change. We see narrative change as a tool to shift that mindset and behavior. If you can see change at all those levels, that’s where start to get to the root causes of these challenges that we’re facing.
Lebec: And women represent half the population—we need to be in positions where we are leading conversations and decisions on how capital is being utilized. What is the narrative around women, wealth, power, and having social impact in the world?
Garg Patel: Well, you mentioned WaterEquity, and our combined effort around that. The market opportunity to get access to safe water and sanitation solutions is something like 18 billion dollars. The price tag to solve the water and sanitation challenges right now and the crisis by 2030, it’s over a trillion dollars. We committed a $10 million dollar equity investment, which partly unlocked a hundred million dollars in institutional capital. This was something that we funded building on the backs of years of demonstrated impact.
There was a market for microloans for water and sanitation solutions and that’s funding at a systemic level. It’s not just trying to get access to a pipe, right? Or a toilet. It is about how do you change the financial markets, these institutions, and where the capital flows to start to meet the scale of the challenge. We’ve always had mission alignment at the core and now we are working with our investment manager, Capricorn Investment Group, on a set of investments that really intersect in two of our five priorities as a foundation around economic inclusion and racial justice.
Lebec: You know, what I love about everything that you shared is looking at social innovations that are driven from the local communities and harmonized with intermediaries who are striving to do change and the funding side of really thinking about all the levers you can pull—all the different financial tools you can utilize. There’s so much that philanthropy could accomplish.
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