When the Problems Accelerate, So Must We 

By Don Gips and Marla Blow 

As we sat down together to prepare this letter in anticipation of our 20th Skoll World Forum, we reflected on the legacy of social innovation that this event marks and the challenges still facing our field. During our discussion, we discovered that we’re both haunted by the same recurring anxiety: that we’re not doing enough to fulfill Jeff Skoll’s vision of supporting remarkable innovators as they drive toward a sustainable world of peace and prosperity.

Who’s the “we”? It’s the two of us. It’s the Skoll Foundation as a whole. It’s foundations writ large. It’s governments. It’s the private sector. It’s all of us.

And what urgent challenges are we referring to? Fundamentally, it’s the interconnected priorities that form the backbone of our work and the 20th Skoll World Forum (April 12 to 14): strengthening health systems and preventing pandemics; mobilizing climate action for a sustainable planet; creating inclusive and sustainable economies; promoting effective governance; advancing justice and equity; and enhancing information integrity.

The Skoll World Forum is the greatest public expression of our platform model that brings together social innovators and partners from across the social sector, philanthropy, government, and business to accelerate solutions to pressing global problems.

We believe that to achieve our aspiration to catalyze truly transformational change, we need to listen deeply to the social entrepreneurs and innovators with whom we work; center equity in all that we do while decentering ourselves; and find ways to invest, connect, and champion their work.

We are heartened by the progress and energy we see within our community of grantees and key stakeholders. But, as our anxieties illustrate, the challenges are escalating faster than the solutions. That is why we need to find ways to accelerate the work of the social innovators who are tackling our planet’s most existential challenges.

The challenge we face is how to do even more to support their efforts to influence the complex systems in which they operate—not just with our financial resources but also by listening more and then championing their work through storytelling and connecting them with other funders and partners who are key to tackling the challenges they face.

We believe this is the right time to do so. It’s the right time because of the growing urgency of the problems. It’s also the right time because we see new windows of opportunity opening across all our issue areas.

Our 2023 Awardees are at the forefront of seizing these opportunities to drive change. We applaud their efforts to date and highlight their work as exemplars in the field of social innovation:

• Indigenous Peoples’ ancestral territories contain 40 percent of the world’s intact ecosystems and almost a quarter of all remaining forest carbon. Globally there is a new recognition that we need to support the Indigenous guardians of these ecosystems. Indonesia is leading the way in slowing deforestation with Skoll Awardee AMAN, a grassroots network of 19 million Indigenous Peoples on the frontlines of protecting some of the most important carbon reservoirs on the planet. To fend off threats, AMAN is working to win legal control of their territories and has secured approximately 15 percent of their ancestral forests.
• In public health and pandemic prevention—an issue that knows no geographic boundaries—we’ve witnessed incredibly nimble and user-responsive technology solutions from another Skoll Awardee, Reach Digital Health. Reach Digital Health leveraged its bidirectional health communications platform—already refined in South Africa through its MomConnect work—to develop a COVID tool that the South African government and World Health Organization embraced to help deliver accessible COVID information and collect valuable real-time data.
• The U.S. federal government’s Inflation Reduction Act, American Rescue Plan, and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act are infusing trillions of dollars into America’s economy, providing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rebuild a more equitable and green economy. Skoll Awardee PolicyLink has been at the forefront of ensuring that these government funds flow to and benefit often marginalized communities.
• Indigenous leaders are now in key positions of authority in Brazil’s national government, giving a huge boost to forest guardianship in Amazonia. Skoll Awardee Conexsus leverages the power of business and finance to help communities develop sustainable forest economies. This includes work to shift underlying economic incentives, such as by redirecting federal subsidies from cattle and soy to sustainable commodities that leave the forest “on its feet.” Conexsus Co-founder Carina Pimenta has accepted a position within the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change in Brazil as the National Secretary for Bioeconomy, a new department that signals the government’s commitment to combating deforestation.
• In the U.S., Skoll Awardee Protect Democracy has been a central player in coordinating efforts to support the integrity of elections and democracy, building a cross-ideological coalition that uses multiple innovative approaches to protect our republic and constitution. The 2022 elections defied some dire predictions, ultimately being seen as free, fair, secure, and trusted by most Americans. Protect Democracy is widely viewed as a key player in that outcome. Protect Democracy also played an instrumental role in the passage of the bipartisan Electoral Count Reform Act.

These Awardees and the amazing community of social entrepreneurs and innovators with whom we are privileged to partner have challenged and inspired us to keep searching for new ways we can enhance their impact.

Below are three efforts that we’ve undertaken to accelerate their progress. All three of these accelerators are still relatively new to us, but we’re seeing signs that they’re working. We hope you will join us in improving and refining these ideas and testing them in your own social change efforts.

Accelerator One: Coordinating Collective Action with “Systems Orchestrators”

As we talked to our community of Awardees over the past few years about how they could accelerate their impact, we noticed that a number of them were shifting their focus beyond their own organization to changing the whole field. This insight drove the Foundation’s strategic evolution, building on historical successes supporting social entrepreneurs and expanding that support to include the different types of social innovators working across sectors.

In studying successful social change efforts, it became clear that there was almost always an organization playing the role of a systems orchestrator. These are backbone organizations that drive coordinated, collective action across an entire field of actors and sectors all aimed at achieving the desired systems change.

The Bridgespan Group has done compelling research on the role of systems orchestrators (they call them field catalysts). “Equitable systems change requires a diverse set of actors playing distinct and complementary roles across a field or ecosystem...field catalysts harmonize and drive that multifaceted work, serving as a kind of nerve center for the matrix of activity needed to transform our inequitably designed systems,” according to Bridgespan’s report. In the Skoll community, we see three ways in which systems orchestrators emerge: an existing social innovator evolves its work to include this role, an innovator launches an entirely new effort, or a funder drives the creation of a new effort.

Skoll Awardee Health Care Without Harm illustrates the concept of a systems orchestrator. Health Care Without Harm has always aspired to be the “Intel chip” for sustainability in health care and has spent 27 years building partnerships in the health care sector to drive better health, climate action, and equity outcomes. From the beginning, systems orchestration has been core to their DNA and vision for the global transformation of the health care sector to embrace equity and environmental sustainability.

Over the past year alone, Health Care Without Harm has partnered with the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change on the Race to Zero program, helping 68 health systems and more than 14,000 hospitals across 24 countries lead climate action initiatives. Collaborating with the World Health Organization and the British government, Health Care Without Harm helped secure commitments from 62 nations as parties to the Paris Treaty Conference of Parties (COP) to design low-carbon and resilient health systems.

To build momentum for decarbonization in the U.S. health care sector, Health Care Without Harm partnered with the National Academy of Medicine and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to recruit more than 850 hospitals—in addition to the veterans hospitals committed by President Biden’s executive order—to join the Health Sector Climate Pledge to get to zero emissions. This put more than 20 percent of the U.S. healthcare market—representing more than 1,100 hospitals and tens of billions of dollars—on the path to better health, equity, and climate decarbonization and resilience.

We see a huge opportunity for philanthropy to support systems orchestrators more deeply and expansively. Given the scale of impact systems orchestrators are helping drive, it’s hard for us to imagine a scenario in which the big, audacious goals that we have set for ourselves can be achieved without them. Yet the common theme we hear from systems orchestrators is that raising funds for what they do is challenging.

Their work is not easy to measure using traditional tools. Just as roads and bridges are often taken for granted until they crumble, infrastructure-building in social innovation is hard work that isn’t often celebrated or acknowledged. That is why we have completely revamped our evaluation and learning process to focus on shared outcomes, signals of progress, and “contribution” instead of “attribution."

Accelerator Two: Engaging More Partners—including Government—in Collective Action

We know that we can’t achieve transformational social change on any of our priorities if we don’t join with others across sectors. Philanthropic giving by U.S. foundations amounts to $90 billion a year—a mere drop in the bucket compared with the resources needed to address the challenges we face and with the resource flows from governments and the private sector.

Trillions of federal dollars in the U.S. alone have been made available to create a more equitable and green economy and restore trust in the government’s ability to deliver for its people. Unfortunately, these dollars, given complex procurement processes, too often are inaccessible to social innovators and their solutions and do not reach the most marginalized communities and most proximate leaders. 

To address these needs, we have been working with Hyphen, a nonprofit intermediary, who partners directly with the White House, federal agencies, and philanthropy in the U.S. to maximize the impact of these historic federal policies. With racial equity as its driving force, Hyphen helps unlock federal resources, including $427 million in Fiscal Year 2022, for underserved communities and grassroots organizations across the country.

Internationally, we have been working with a global coalition called Unlock Aid, to support the locally led reform agenda at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Unlock Aid has succeeded in advancing reforms within the agency to make accessing USAID funding easier and more transparent and in increasing USAID appropriations for social innovators by $350 million in FY22. They have been a lead contributor to several pieces of legislation that support social innovators, most notably the bipartisan Fostering Innovation in Global Development Act.

A compelling example of our work to collaborate across sectors has been the opportunity to support the integration of community health workers in the delivery of primary health care in Africa. Today, community health workers provide essential care for some of the most marginalized communities. Strong community-based care systems can be the first to slow future pandemics. They are often the first to detect outbreaks and engage with vulnerable and affected communities. Despite their crucial role, approximately 80 percent of community health workers work without pay—and the majority are women. This status quo persists despite peer-reviewed research that demonstrates the intuitive conclusion that community health workers who are paid and properly trained achieve far better health outcomes in their communities. 

Skoll partners have helped catalyze a movement for professionalizing Africa’s community health workforce. Three Skoll partners—Financing Alliance for Health, Last Mile Health, and Community Health Impact Coalition—teamed up under the leadership of Nobel laureate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to create Africa Frontline First (AFF). AFF is an initiative designed to help 10 African countries build high-functioning, resilient, country-led community health systems. This effort will result in a dramatic increase in paid, professionalized community health workers by 2030, through unique partnerships between governments, donors, implementers, and technical allies.

For its first move, Africa Frontline First came together with the Global Fund, Johnson & Johnson Foundation, and the Skoll Foundation to create the Africa Frontline First Catalytic Fund (AFF-CF). AFF-CF, hosted at the Global Fund, mobilized $100 million in commitments. It will improve community health programs that serve nearly 146 million people across eight African countries: Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Senegal, and Zambia.

As these examples illustrate, the Skoll Foundation is leaning into robust partnerships, working first within our own sector of philanthropy and reaching out and across sectors to some of the largest sources of capital and reach: the government and the private sectors.  

Accelerator Three: Mobilizing All Our Assets, Not Just Grant Dollars

To maximize the resources we can use to accelerate change, we are mobilizing not just our grant dollars but our endowment as well. We are fortunate to have the help of Capricorn, the B corporation that manages investments for all entities connected to Jeff Skoll. Capricorn has already implemented a mission-aligned investing framework at our Foundation, with a focus on investing in deep technologies and climate solutions.

In partnership with our investment manager and Jeff Skoll Group partner, Capricorn, we continue to increase our focus on centering equity in our endowment—and by doing so, make an even bigger social impact while also meeting our overall portfolio risk-and-return objectives. We have always leveraged the Foundation’s endowment with an impact investing lens. In a capital markets arena in which less than 3 percent of private capital investment goes to women and people of color despite their comprising nearly 70 percent of the population in the U.S., we are taking a targeted and deliberate approach to invest in new asset classes and underrepresented fund managers in support of economic inclusion and racial justice.

For example, last year we invested in Apis & Heritage Capital Partners (A&H), in collaboration with the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. A&H, a Black-owned firm, buys businesses with large workforces of color and helps the employees become owners. In doing so, A&H helps generate wealth-building opportunities in marginalized communities. “There are two traditional paths to build wealth in America,” A&H co-founder Philip Reeves often says. “You can own your home or you can own your business. A&H focuses on the latter, especially for workforces of color, which have been shut out of equity ownership for so long.”

We believe that foundations can reflect their mission through their investments, creating scalable impact while meeting risk-and-return objectives in a variety of ways. Early signs are that these impact investments are delivering returns consistent with the Skoll Foundation’s long-term average performance while helping to shift inequitable systems in ways we couldn’t do with grants alone.

Our Unwavering Belief: Change Is a Team Sport

We see these three accelerators—investing in systems orchestrators, driving collective action in close partnership with others, engaging policymakers, and using 100 percent of our resources to drive social impact—as core to the Foundation’s mission to act as catalyst and accelerator of transformational social change.

We are not naïve about the degree of difficulty inherent in activating each of these accelerators—nor about transcending our recurring anxiety dreams—but thanks to Jeff Skoll, our Board of Directors, and our larger community, the Skoll Foundation is in it for the long run.

Making meaningful, measurable progress on the world’s most urgent problems will take working in deep partnership with doers and donors, scientists and storytellers, governments and businesses. It will require us to center equity in all that we do, from whom we fund to how we work. We need everyone to engage—from the grassroots to the centers of power—to accelerate systemic solutions. As Jeff has always said, social change is a team sport. 

As we prepare for our 20th Skoll World Forum, we are humbled by the thought of returning to our first in-person gathering since 2019. The Forum is an important part of our platform for accelerating social innovation which allows us to invest, connect, and champion the solutions of the world’s most dynamic social innovators and entrepreneurs. It remains a profound privilege for us and the Foundation to serve in this way.

We stand ready to come alongside our peers and partners to do our part, invite others to the table, and contribute to a solutions mindset that puts greater emphasis on our common purposes and shared humanity.

When the problems accelerate, so must we.