Recorded on Monday, Jan. 13, 2025
TRANSCRIPT
Jason Zengerle '96 Welcome everyone. It is great to have you with us tonight. Thank you so much for joining us for this SwatTalk about personal philanthropy and the Trump era featuring Jude O'Reilley from the class of 1994. This evening's talk is as always sponsored by the Swarthmore Alumni Council. My name is Jason Zengerle. I'm a member of the class of 1996 and a member of the Alumni Council. Before we get to Jude's talk and I turn things over to our moderator for the evening, Jenny Li Shen, also from the class of 1994, I just want to go over a few preliminary pieces of business for those of you who are new to SwatTalks or for our regulars who just need a reminder tonight, we'll go like this for the first half hour or so, Jude and Jenny will be in conversation. Then for the second half hour, Jude will answer any questions you might have. Please ask your questions by using the Q&A feature at the bottom of Zoom and please be sure to include your name and class year when you do so. Jenny will collect those questions and will pose as many of them as she can to Jude during the q and a session. And now that is out of the way. I will get out of the way and turn things over to Jenny.
Jenny Li Shen '94 All right, thank you Jason. Well, good evening everyone. Thank you for joining us. It's going to be great and I actually want to just acknowledge before we get started, I'm actually based in Los Angeles. We are in the midst of quite a regional tragedy, so for those of you from Southern California, I'm here too and we will get through this. It's a long journey. We're still figuring out actually how to kind of end these fires, but the Palisades at 14% at Eaton at 33% kind of extinguished. We still have a ways to go. 12,000 structures have been destroyed. It's quite a large area in total about 40,000, which is about the size of Washington D.C. So yeah, I just want to acknowledge that it's a really difficult time for those of us here in Southern California and in fact, perhaps this conversation tonight can kind of give you focus, spur you into action right here in our region. For those of you here and those of you who are not here, there is much to do and much that we can do together. With that, I want to introduce Jude and our topic. We are at the precipice of a second Trump presidency with the inauguration next week. This topic comes at a time, not just politically, but as a society where Jude firmly believes, as do I, the question about the role that we can play in the world, the feeling and the desire to take action, but perhaps a question or unsureness about what we can do might be hanging in how you feel and how you're thinking and how you are acting or not yet acting. And so this opportunity really came about to say, Hey, let's talk. It is an absolute honor to have Jude here to help us frame this conversation and we want tonight to be a great conversation.
So what Jude's going to do is kind of give an opener starting with kind of how this topic, why this topic is so meaningful to you right now. But let me first introduce Jude and just actually I should introduce myself. I'm a class of 1994. I'm here in Southern California. Some of you might know me and Way-Ting Chen, also class of 1994 started Blue Garnet. The Garnet is an ode to Swarthmore and the deep social responsibility that is part of our DNA from Swarthmore College. Blue Garnet is a social impact consulting firm. We work with leaders to combine business acumen with the passion for social impact and together they can do great things. We've been around for 20 years here in southern California and it's what we love to do. We help leaders really ask and answer the question, ‘So what? You have been working really hard, how is the world different because of your efforts?’ That's about me, but about Jude right now, Jude is a principal of Dovetail Collaborative. It's a network of philanthropic professionals dedicated to increasing, meaningful giving with nearly 30 years of experience, 30 Jude! 30 years of experience in technology leadership and entrepreneurship in the private sector and also in the world of social change. Man, us Swatties, we know how to go between the various sectors, right?
He has been responsible for the Skoll Award of social entrepreneurship and funding within the Skoll community, and he's actually launched more than a hundred consumer and enterprise products at Amazon, Trucera and Adventail. Most recently, he was CEO of VolunteerMatch. Some of you may have heard about VolunteerMatch or even used it to find your own volunteer opportunities, but it's the largest network of volunteer talent. He received a BA with high honors in history from Swarthmore. He lives in the state of Washington. And just something interesting, he has volunteered in nearly every place he's ever lived from working in homelessness in New York, Seattle, and St. Paul to mentoring early career professionals in Silicon Valley and Stanford to delivering trauma care and some hot chocolate even as a ski patroller in Lake Tahoe and Washington State. But one of the most interesting things besides talking at length with Jude at our 30th alumni reunion this past spring was that I recently learned you really, you got to know President Jimmy Carter and last week you got to attend his funeral. And so yeah, maybe you can share a little bit about that as well, Jude. So without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to you.
Jude O’Reilley '94 Thank you so much for that generous introduction and thanks to Jason and to the Swarthmore Alumni Council for the invitation to be with you today and to all of you for taking a little bit of time and what our, I know busy lives to talk about something that's very dear to my heart and to my, I would say both my work and a lot of my hobbies and that is how do we live out our opportunity for personal philanthropy? Philanthropy is kind of a 10 dollar word, so let's give it a 2 dollar definition. What I'm talking about today is giving our time, our talent, our treasure to making the world better. It's not just about money. There's a good money component and the money's important and we're going to spend some time talking about that, but we're all in different boats, even if we're in the same sea when it comes to money. And similarly with our time and certainly perhaps with our talents as well, but we all have an opportunity to draw from one of those three wells as we think about the world that we face today and no better time to do it than given the recent political transition and these times that we find ourselves in America, my comments aren't going to be particularly partisan. I have strong political beliefs as I know many of you on this call do, but regardless of who won this election, the most pressing problems of our time remain pressing and therefore so does the opportunity for all of us to do some good with respect to them. So I'm going to highlight real quickly those top three and just focus more on the what and the why, and then as Jenny and I get into your comments and questions, hopefully we'll have a chance to get into the how as well. And so my hope is that over the course of the next hour, you have not just maybe some inspiration to think about how you take action in your life and your community and your world, but also some concrete ways to demystify that process. I used to do this on behalf of billionaires who could essentially afford to hire vast staffs of people and armies of researchers to focus where they're giving and where their action was in the world. And yet I think much of the work that we did pretty is reasonably straightforward and is work that any of us could be doing simply to have more impact in the world.
And as Jenny referred to before, my inspiration for that is I have to say very much the life of President Carter. I wasn't at Carter's funeral last week, Jenny, just to be clear, I was at the every person, every citizen kind of events that you could just by having your purse or bag scanned by the Secret Service could attend, but I did attend a lot of them and a few side parties too, but a lot of stuff on a very cold street in Washington DC last week, and I had a number of just incredible conversations and met some amazing people I'd like to highlight one Los Angelino in particular that I will just never forget. His name is Jose Tobar. Jose and I met at the US Navy Memorial while Carter's casket was being moved from the Hearst to the Casson and being led by horse down Pennsylvania Avenue. And it was one of the things I was hoping for and flying out to DC was just to meet somebody who had been inspired as I was. I used to work for President Carter, and so the natural question for him was what drew you here in particular? What drew you here from la? And what he shared with me was that President Carter had built his house in 1993 as President Carter and Rosalyn had built his house and he had met President Carter as a very young man. He was like 10, 12 years old, and he was just like, I couldn't mean I had to be here and I'm getting a little choked up talking to you about it now. We were both kind of crying about it and talking about it, and one of the things that he took away from that was not first of all, his family his mother still lives in this house and it's the center of their family. It is where they come for holidays, it's where they come together as a family and President Carter built it, but his emphasis was not on the house or the physical structure, which as we know are as temporary and fragile now as they've ever been. It was on the conversation that he was able to have with President Carter who while in the process of that Carter was there to build and be a part of this volunteer effort, something that he didn't need to be a former US president to do something any of us are invited to do. It was being listened to by Carter. It was that, and he showed me a photo of it, which I would happily share with you of just Carter looking at him face to face and the experience of somebody who's part of a volunteer effort who connected with another human and benefited from it enormously for his life and his family is still benefiting it from it. Today I've got a text in to make sure he's okay, and if I'm checking my phone, it's going to be too in the hopes that he acknowledges that everything's okay in his community. But it was just an extraordinary conversation and it was a reminder of President Carter's example of living out his values boldly in the choices that he made as a human. And I want to talk about three opportunities that we have to do that in our own personal philanthropy.
First, let's talk briefly about why this is important. You and I and other givers with under $10 million in charitable assets in a year are 70% of philanthropy. So sometimes when you think of that word, you think of the Gates Foundation or MacArthur or McKenzie Scott or these big multi-billionaire names, and of course they have enormous impact and leverage and dollars deployed in the world of philanthropy, but actually a billion dollars is given by people like you and me every day. So we are actually the majority of philanthropic giving, so that's number one. Number two, we are the lifeblood of volunteer support that is essential to essentially every nonprofit by law. A non-profit at least of a certain size has to have a board, and that's a volunteer board. You can't pay a nonprofit board. So every volunteer, every going nonprofit organization in America has a need for volunteers. That volunteering curve has essentially stagnated. Unfortunately, many of us are giving more hours, but fewer people are volunteering by and large. It's not necessarily declining, but it has essentially, I won't say peaked because I think there's more good to be done in the future, but it is not growing, it's certainly not growing in the numbers it was before. So you and I have an extraordinary opportunity there as well. You and I also bring a special set of gifts to this world. First and foremost, a uniquely valuable education, but also a set of skills and life experiences that we can bring to volunteering, we can bring to giving, we can bring to service in the nonprofit community and that's extraordinarily valuable. And whether you graduated last year or you graduated 50 years ago, you've got something to give to those organizations and we'll talk concretely about what some of those opportunities are because I think those opportunities have never been so real.
A majority of Americans today, according to a poll led by Vanderbilt University that they've been running since 1939, a majority of Americans, it's 63% believe that our democracy is under threat in the United States. So that's a good reason to get started right now. We have something that I think many of us, I won't say took for granted, but assumed would always be with us in our grade school civics lessons, for those of us that had those. We might've taken for granted is now by many Americans, maybe some of us viewed it as being under threat. And because democracy is an idea, the fact that that idea is in people's minds is evidence in itself for some significant concern. I'm not going to belabor what's happening in this world as we are reminded of in LA, but the crisis of climate that is affecting our entire planet except to say it's not affecting us uniformly. People in different parts of the country, in particular different parts of the world like the global south are feeling that disproportionately. One of the clearest calls I heard for climate action wasn't just Greta Thunberg, though that was an extraordinary one. It was a young woman from the Marshall Islands who felt the impact of the climate crisis lapping up on her front door every day and knew that she would be one of the first nations to disappear because of climate. So we are living in significant times and in a point of significant and dramatic change when it comes to climate. We could go on and on, but I'll cite one more and that is the work of Vivek Murthy, which came out in May of 2023. Many of us read the Epidemic of Loneliness report that the Surgeon General's office put out, and that highlighted a crisis of connection in our society.
In particular a crisis of connection that's felt by the eldest in our community and some of the youngest teenagers. One of the statistics that absolutely blew me away in that work was that young people, if you compare the experience of young people now and 20 years ago, have experienced 70%, that's seven zero less physical contact, like time spent in physical proximity with their friends, which is to say my experience of being a teenager, if I can still remember it, is profoundly, profoundly, qualitatively different than the experience that my teenage children have, is just their incomparable experiences. The beauty and part of the theme of our conversation today is those crises on one hand also create opportunities. That crisis of connection, the closest to a concrete recommendation, I won't say the closest, one of the concrete recommendations that Vivek Murthyi gives in that document is actually about being of service. It's the sense of purposefulness and action and connection that comes from being at work in the world, and that's a profound opportunity that I think we have, that our families have, that we have to be in connection with our friends and family while also doing things that are measurable and important in the communities we serve. So that's just by way of getting started. Why don't I turn it over to you, Jenny, at this point for any questions that are on your mind and then we can turn it over to the broader group.
Jenny Li Shen '94 Yeah, thank you. Thank you. I know you want to get into each of those, the tying talent and treasure. Would these opportunities be as clear to you if a different ticket had won?
Jude O’Reilley '94 Yes, they would certainly would be as clear to me personally, and actually I would suggest there would be clear to many of us as well though perhaps with different levels of intensity. The climate has been growing since the birth of the industrial Revolution, those numbers and that reality is incredibly hard to affect as we all know. While I feel an even greater sense of urgency personally knowing that the US federal government will have less of a leadership role, undoubtedly in the next four years than we've had in the prior four years, the necessity for action has never been more real. And so while it might increase the intensity and the energy that I have to engage in that kind of work, it was going to be just as clear in a different kind of administration. If anything, I hope it's even more inspiration for those of us that have experience, lived experience, educational experience, expertise to give in support of some of the world's most pressing problems to bring them to bear today.
Jenny Li Shen '94 Thank you. Thank you. Well, going back then, I know oftentimes when we talk about time, talent, treasure, we could start with the dollars, the monies, that 1 billion, but based on what you were just saying regarding the loneliness report and just being of service, maybe it's just fresh in my mind even right now sitting here in Southern California, perhaps can we start there? I would love to hear more about maybe start with time, start with talent. How would you help this audience who we all have that unifying experience of Swarthmore, which having again attended the 30 year reunion, it's ever more clear how that has impacted my personal life and the ability to have connections with other Swattie. What would you say? How would you frame either time and talent? How would you encourage us as a community?
Jude O’Reilley '94 Yeah. Well, let me highlight one opportunity that I think all of us have on this call that brings together both an opportunity for social connection and also an opportunity to effectively support the nonprofit community and the issues that affect the communities that we live in or the communities that we care about. And that is, I'm going to use a super boring word that's incredibly important in the world of nonprofits, and that's governance. If you've not been a part of a nonprofit organization before, you might not know that the difference between a good nonprofit and a great one is the people who are on its board have a profoundly different role in the nonprofit world than they do in the for-profit world. And boards are different and they're different life stages depending on the nature of the nonprofit organization. But at every stage, maybe different composition and different technical goals, the leadership, the executive responsibility of that board is vital to that organization's success.
It is, I would say nothing else. If you have 10 minutes to learn about a nonprofit or three questions that you could ask a nonprofit CEO to understand that that's an organization that's worth your time or your dollars, it's to actually understand their board. That will tell you not just the quality of the current leadership, but who's responsible for the next generation of leadership and the next generation of strategy for that organization. And it's something again, whether you just graduated or you are in the prime of your career or you're in retirement, that you have an opportunity to give something. If you're a lawyer, if you've got technical financial, if you're a CFO, if you've got technical expertise, definitely boards are probably clamoring for your attention. But if you have lived experience as a person who has been a beneficiary of a particular nonprofit program, you are gold.
If you're both of those things, they're going to bring you on right away. I have a friend who's responsible for at use at risk educational funding at the Gates Foundation. He was himself once a quote at risk youth. He brings something very different to that work than somebody who has merely an educational experience and that hard to serve community. He brings something that comes from who he is and how he grew up that makes him better at that work, I believe. And many nonprofit leaders agree. And so that opportunity to contribute in governance, which is also incredible opportunities to grow in your own leadership abilities, to connect with other professionals that might have similar values and provide a vital service to the nonprofit community is something that I think many people don't feel invited to, even though the opportunities are out there hiding in plain sight.
Jenny Li Shen '94 I was going to go down and ask you more about governance because I think sometimes people are like, well, how do I even start? What does that even mean? But I want to be responsive to some of the questions that are coming in. So actually I'm going to turn us a little bit if that's okay. I have Rebecca Enon who's really eager to hear about want what you can say about treasure perhaps for her. She's saying, I feel like I have much more free money than free time at this point in my life.
Jude O’Reilley '94 Kind of works that way, or at least it's been working that way in my life. Totally. So let's talk about treasure a little bit. First of all, there's a story that I have not heard, I've not heard talked about enough or read enough about, and that is the impact of the 2017 tax code changes on American philanthropic giving. So the changes that we experienced in 2017, which changed the rules around itemized deduction, the second most boring thing I'll talk about today, poked a 20 billion hole in annual giving to nonprofit organizations. That is a huge amount of money at a time where we were in no position to experience any stepping back from our commitments, from our challenges that face us as a community. So that's a huge number and it's doubly important because individual giving that you and I make in 99.999% of the time is what's called unrestricted core support, which is worth more than gold to nonprofit organizations. What few people realize that even today, even despite rhetoric to the contrary, most big institutional funders give some form of unrestricted, I'm sorry, of restricted funding. So they're paying for the execution of a project or the delivery of a particular strategy or support for a broader strategic initiative.
It is a very confining way of being funded as a nonprofit leader, I can tell you this from personal experience, it's also a very expensive one in terms of managing the overhead on the nonprofit organization because not only do you have to deliver that work in a particular kind of way, but you have to report on that to a government authority or to a large philanthropic institution. So that's very expensive money and it actually leads some nonprofits to take on grants that they actually can't afford to deliver on, which is a cycle that in particular internationally oriented nonprofit organizations have been struggling with for a long time. So what we give individually, you and I, ordinary folk is worth more than gold to these nonprofit leaders and we're doing a little bit less of it because of these changes in the tax code. We are also giving money in ways that aren't too dissimilar than the way our grandparents gave money, and that is a profound problem.
If you look at trends in American individual giving over the last 20 or 30 years, we tend to give in three broad buckets. The first, believe it or not, is organized religion. The second is health and human services, and the third is education. You might think differently, but I think all three of those areas are incredibly important and are deserving of our support. I also think though that the issues that face our planet have changed a lot in the last 30 years and that we as individual philanthropists have an opportunity to do much more, even if we don't have more money to give, we have new ways of giving that can make our money go farther. And I'll give you just a couple of concrete examples. We've got a real diversification problem. If we invested in nonprofits, if we invest in our retirement, the way we invest in nonprofits, we would be retiring at 90 on $15,000 a year. And that's because we tend to focus on three or four mainstay organizations, which tend to be tried and true brands that we might've become familiar with because of family history or familiarity or work in our community. They are immediately adjacent to us. They reflect more about our lifestyle than they do about the planet that we live in, and that's a conundrum. There is a very strong bias for the familiar in our philanthropic giving, and that's something we have an opportunity to overcome. We can overcome it in the same way we did with our retirement money, which is through diversification. And I'll give you a very specific relevant example. Many of us are right now very focused on what's happening in LA and we could choose to give our dollars to the multinational multi-billion dollar nonprofit organization that Amazon might invite you to give to when you're shopping or that you might see a banner ad for when you're going through media, and that is likely a worthwhile cause that's, sorry, a worthwhile organization that has had some diligence behind it, but it's only one and likely focused on responding to the fires, not mitigating future fires.
You could instead give your dollars, same dollars to a fund for the Center for Disaster Philanthropy. The Center for Disaster Philanthropy has a balanced portfolio of organizations that includes disaster recover focused on the California wildfires, but is focused also on recovery, on mitigation, on community level support across a much broader range of organizations, greater and more diverse leadership, greater and more diverse organizational support. And so that kind of taking that attitude that we take to our own retirement savings and starting to applying it to our giving of treasure is one of the core messages I'd love to leave you with today. It's a little bit harder to do. It requires a little bit of additional diligence, but it enables you to have much, much more impact when you are with your philanthropic dollars.
Jenny Li Shen '94 That's great. Thank you. Jude, there's other questions. Actually the questions are really coming in so we can kind of focus there unless I want to make sure time, talent and treasure, other thoughts that you want to tackle in terms of the talent piece. I think we haven't given a little bit of time to that and then we can go continue on with some questions.
Jude O’Reilley '94 On the talent piece. So I think I got across some of it. I think the major issues there, Jenny, and I know you've got some quite a bit of experience of your own on governance, so I'd love to hear any thoughts that you have as well. And I don't want to scare people on nonprofit board work. It is no light investment and you're going to want to understand an organization reasonably well before you take on that responsibility, but it's an incredibly high leverage one, you could tiptoe into that world by moving from standard off the street, volunteering to skilled volunteering roles, so taking on roles that actually require specifically the expertise that you might have generated through the course of your career and your work so you can get to know both an organization and also contribute if you've got one hour to give, you can give an hour that's worth 10 hours from somebody who might not have that same expertise or that same work. So for example, if you have a medical certification or you have a financial certification or a leadership experience that might have additional support for nonprofit organization, you can do that as part of your diligence process. And many particularly younger people do volunteer as the first step in their process of long-term giving. You can also use it to get a field level, street level view of an organization before you decide to take on higher levels of responsibility like governance.
Jenny Li Shen '94 That's right, that's right. I want to move us to our questions, but I'll make one comment since you asked about governance. That's a whole other topic, SwatTalk that we can do because truly what Jude said, the difference between a good organization and a great one is the board and I have worked with so many different types of boards, but when I get to work with a great board or help develop a great board, it ultimately means the difference for the impact in the world. That's how it's real. And I wanted to address the comment earlier that maybe I'm in a season of life where I just don't have a lot of time. There are different nonprofit boards. There's the roll up your sleeve, I'm going to need eight to 10 hours at least a month, maybe more, or there's the four hours a month, two to four hours a month type of board. So there are different kind of boards that you can find which require different amount of your time, but for all of them they can take your perspective and your skillset. So definitely have confidence in that. Whatever you can contribute from your critical thinking skills that you've got at Swarthmore are going to be valuable. Okay,
Jude O’Reilley '94 That's a great point. Jenny.
Jenny Li Shen '94 I want to go back to some of the questions, so I'm going to try to group some of these. Some of the questions related to the treasure piece are some of the different ways to give. I know Jude, you had mentioned you're even doing something innovative about mutual funds for giving. You've talked a little bit about giving circles in the past. This question actually is about donor advised funds and in particular we have Steven Eubank who's got some involvement with a small family foundation. And so community foundations offer these donor-advised funds. So maybe if you can comment a little bit about them as a vehicle, but also in particular for Steven, some of the challenge is keeping families engaged in the process and vetting kind of Don for instance. So it's not just the donor part, it's the advised fund, the advised piece of it. I don't know if that question makes sense.
Jude O’Reilley '94 Yeah, it does though. There's a lot there and I'm probably going to offend somebody on our call with the following comments, and that is that it's really unclear to us at this point I should say, it's unclear to me whether funds are doing more good than they are harm, and that's a controversial statement. I know that lots of people, lots of organizations that fall under that umbrella are doing extraordinary work on the main. However, they appear to be a very large parking lot for resources that would otherwise be deployed to organizations that clearly need them. Donor-advised funds on average give 25% of their corpus of the resources that have been already tax advantaged and donated by those that give. So in some cases, I would say many cases donor-advised funds have become more of a wealth advisory instrument than they've become a tool for social change. And that's not that they couldn't become one either through government regulation or through individual initiative, but one or the other ideally both will be necessary for donor-advised funds to live up to their potential. So let's say that's a critique. It's also a profound opportunity to get that money moving in a direction that's actually going to address some of these highly time-sensitive issues. Opportunity number two is many donor-advised funds.
You are the donor, you're doing the advising, so they're not necessarily simplifying for you the diligence process of selecting non-profit organizations that align with your values or interests. Some do, but many do not. Many instead refer you to third party philanthropic advisory firms of which there are many if you are a family office and if you have a $10 million to give, it may be well worth your while to engage a firm like that to help you establish and define your strategy. If you're an everyday giver, that's unlikely to be useful to you. Obviously it's going to very high overhead based upon what you're likely to be giving over the next couple of years. So the level of advice, let's say it varies wildly depending on the firms you're working with. Some community foundations in particular, I know some of the smaller community foundations that are focused on a more explicit and discreet set of issues buck both of those trends they deploy deploy the vast majority of the resources that they receive, and they're very good at good localized support for helping you understand where in your community you can target those dollars. So if you're lucky enough to work in a community that has that kind of support, you are lucky indeed, and they can be very effective for donors of a wide variety of sizes. They can be a very effective tool for helping develop your own philanthropic strategy.
Jenny Li Shen '94 Great, thank you. Thank you. Okay. There's a question here, kind of taking us in a different direction around the public media with proposals from the incoming administration to eliminate the federal funding for PBS and NPR. Kind of a specific question, but it's kind of a different topic that we haven't tackled yet. I guess have you spoken or any thoughts about how that might impact or how we might respond with our personal philanthropy?
Jude O’Reilley '94 Yeah, so I would say first of all, outside of my expertise is political giving. So I'm not going to comment on the things that are about 5 0 0 3, 5 0 1 C four giving or other funding that's outside of 501(c)3 work, which is by definition largely nonpartisan. But there are plenty of things that we can do within the nonprofit community to affect issues as relevant as that one and also the mechanics and delivery of our democracy. This is beyond partisanship. These are opportunities that we have to help the wheels of democracy move more effectively. And I'll highlight just two that are relevant to the question. There are groups of journalists, there are nonprofit organizations that focus specifically on enabling journalists to do their job in very hard to reach places. One is the organized crime and corruption reporting project, which is focused explicitly on supporting journalists all over the world in very hard to serve areas that are being in their work to combat misinformation, government control oppression, and to help them get politically unpopular news stories out in front of the international media. So there are organizations and there are many others that I'm sure Jason and other experts, other people who have firsthand journalistic experience could help highlight. So there are organizations that folks explicitly on misinformation and on supporting journalism. There are also organizations, successful large scale nonprofit organizations that are providing bipartisan nonpartisan support for the wheels of democracy. So what happens next with that information? One that springs to mind is the Center for Technology and Civic Life. So the Center for Technology and Civic Life is one of those organizations that supports the very front lines of our democracy poll workers who help manage the administration of elections. They tend to get a lot of visibility when we're right in the election cycle, which is three years after when they needed the money to help build the infrastructure and create the expertise to manage the administration of elections. We in America have a very complex democracy. When one of my colleagues asked President Carter once, would the Carter Center evaluate the upcoming US elections, this was 2016, he said, absolutely not. The challenge of the American democracy essentially does not meet the parameters of an auditable election from the Carter Center's point of view. And that's because constitutionally we push that authority down the states and the counties to administer those elections. The Center for Technology and Civic Life helps address that. So for many of these really fundamental challenges that our democracy faces, there are effective nonprofit organizations working in that area today.
Jenny Li Shen '94 That's great. Well, let me turn to Sandra Bain's question actually here. She's appreciating the conversation that we're having right now. Love to hear your thoughts about measurement and accountability and how we should think strategically and compassionately about our personal philanthropy and civic work. Since we're Swatties, we're also busy. We want to ensure we have the greatest impact without driving ourselves or others crazy. So it's kind of a question, how can we think strategically, compassionately, but also then with measurement and accountability as we make our decisions around where to invest our time, talent, and treasure?
Jude O’Reilley '94 I love that question, especially it's nuance because I think sometimes in the abstract it simply becomes a question of how do I use my dollars for the greatest benefit? There's a whole movement called the Effective Altruism Movement. It's very much inspired by the work of the political philosopher Peter Singer that is focused on how we do the most good in the world. And that's a profoundly important question. Sometimes however that movement lives out forgets the other part of the other comment embedded in there, which is without driving people crazy, because the desire for more and more information for impact measurement's expensive and not all nonprofits are in a position to measure every aspect of their work in particular. And none of us should be asking nonprofits to measure aspects of their work that have already been well studied in social science where you've got decades of research to support, why do I need this nonprofit organization to prove to me that a particular type of in-person tutoring for young people is an effective intervention when social sciences already told us it does. Just for instance, and while out of curiosity and good intention, many donors of a wide variety of sizes can really get wrapped around the axle with the organizations they serve by diving, by putting so much primacy and so much emphasis on measurable impact that they actually forget. There are many other things that are, I won't say beyond measurement, but require a different variety of measurement. One that is more qualitative perhaps and less quantitative that actually have been proven to have much more lasting results for affecting change over the long term. It's very difficult. For example, it would've been very difficult to challenge the NAACP's strategic litigation plan in the 1960s for measurable results when they had two or three Supreme Court cases ahead of them that they'd spend years supporting, their measurable results were low. The long-term impact changed our society, and yet sometimes as givers we get into this like, show me how many malaria, anti malaria bed nets you delivered on any given day, forgetting that there's a broader context in that community or in that country, a different type of investment or different type of question that we could ask, they would actually be much more impactful. So sometimes that question leads us down a road that is, I think avoids investing in solutions that really are truly societal changing, like strategic litigation, but that are very hard to measure and also drives up the cost for nonprofit organizations. We can also get obsessed with metrics, and this is a little less true than it was a few years ago, but it's still true that seem like proxies for social change, but have some significant unintended consequences. One of those is an obsession with overhead. So many, I heard this from a family office recently over lunch and it kind of made my heart break a little bit to hear them describe their approach to giving, which focused a lot on dollars delivered towards programs. So that ratio, which there were a few influential organizations in the world of philanthropy about 10 years ago that put a lot of emphasis on overhead and really highlighted the percentage of your dollar that goes directly to beneficiaries as if a nonprofit organization was simply a pass through and didn't have a human resources department to manage, didn't have labor all over the world whose wellbeing and job satisfaction enabled them to deliver their work that didn't have all of the cost to administer and grow, that any for-profit corporation would struggle with or have to maintain that emphasis on simply the dollars out the door developed a kind of short-termism in philanthropic thinking that we're still trying to unwind.
I think there's a greater acknowledgement now that a dollar spent building a healthy nonprofit employee who's going to love to go to her job every Monday morning and is going to stay and build her craft over the course of time and is going to become a well tenured and experienced employee, it's going to provide a higher level of service and a higher level of impact both to her colleagues and to the people the organization serves. And so I'm saying is an obsession with measurement is something or a certain kind of measurement can actually lead us down a really difficult path in the nonprofit community.
Jenny Li Shen '94 Can I also make a comment and then we do need to get to some other questions. So I just want to offer a resource. There's some work done called the overhead Myth. Actually if you go to YouTube, there's some really great just short videos to learn more about this overhead myth. But I also want to mention that I think our fellow Swattie, if I could just ask you to think about it from an investment kind of perspective, when you're thinking about measurement and outcomes, which I think it's not a terrible thing, it's actually quite good. Think about your time horizon. What patients do you have as a donor and investor in not just this organization but this issue? How long will it take to solve and get to some of the root causes? Are you an investor that really is thinking kind of long-term? So then what are those measures that are more long-term? Because we can sometimes get, and this is the other issue I want to mention, is that we get stuck on measuring outputs instead of outcomes. How many people showed up to the event as opposed to those who showed up, what happened? So just want to add those couple of things, but if I can turn to another question, can I
Jude O’Reilley '94 Just tag onto what you were saying, Jenny, just for a second? I'll be brief. I totally hear you and I think that's a great answer. Particularly if you're prepared to give $5 million, which is say engage in a dialogue with an organization about its impact. If you're not, and I'm personally not, you're a smaller dollar giver, then actually what I'm going to look for is transparency from that organization. I'm going to look for them to be communicating to me with no additional, I'm not asking them for anything new. I'm just saying you should just be clear about your program's efficacy. What are you measuring to assure that you're doing a good job? And I'm going to look for, let's say they're a social service delivery organization. Are they measuring customer satisfaction, the people who are the customers of their work, or would they recommend them to others? The same way if I was looking at a retail store and I wouldn't be asking them questions, I would be interrogating the data that they presented. I'd be measuring them on the transparency of their programs effectiveness, not simply can they respond to my curiosity about how the organization is being successful. Back over to you.
Jenny Li Shen '94 That's great. Thank you. Thank you. Alright, Wilbert Greenhouse Wilbert is an officer of a local chapter of Keep America Beautiful. His question is about how to get young people kind of excited about recycling, picking up trash from the street, even in their own neighborhood. How can we attract younger people to give an hour, maybe two hours a month while they're doing some good and fun too? So this is a question about engaging in maybe a younger generation, how do we get those volunteers to participate in activities?
Jude O’Reilley '94 Are you saying that David Sari's pioneering work in picking up trash was not sufficient to rally a new generation of young people? Maybe that has more appeal to a certain Gen X individual like me. The reasons why young people volunteer are profoundly different generationally, and you may already know this if you don't, there's some great research on this subject. There is much more emphasis among young people on personal brand building, like communicating their values publicly than earlier generations. There's much less interest in kind of the big words of the 1950s and sixties, like altruism and benevolence, words like that do not resonate well with younger folk. There's much more focus on entrepreneurship and on demonstrating an ability to grow something and have a contribution. So engaging young people not simply in the delivery of a service, but also in the design of a service in particular in areas where they might have a lot of experience, maybe far more than your own staff. How do you spread the word effectively on TikTok? That might be something that energizes a group of young volunteers far more than the types of things that might get me to show up, for example. So those are just some ideas. The big takeaway I would say is dive into that research around why younger people volunteer because it is profoundly different.
Jenny Li Shen '94 Thank you. Alright. Actually a few different questions. This came back from when we were talking about governance. If I could turn us there and then I'm also, we have 10 minutes left too, so I want to leave a few minutes at the end just for you to wrap up. So we'll take as many questions as we can, but I'm trying to look at the time as well. So what is a great board? That's one question. Thank you Mark. Ow for that. What is a great board? And then do boards have significant annual kind of requirements for annual giving? How does that factor in? Is there a time funding trade off as folks think about stepping into the board role? Emma Ferguson was asking about that, so
Jude O’Reilley '94 That's great. And so embedded in that question is that your board will be giving and not all boards do. That's a conversation to be had between an executive team and a board. If somebody's considering you for a board, it's one of the first questions I'd ask. Is there an expectation? I think good boards are very concrete about that and clear about that expectation and that it isn't typically one answer. Having one answer is a great way to reduce the diversity in almost ways. You could measure diversity
Jenny Li Shen '94 To clarify what you mean by one answer, you're saying
Jude O’Reilley '94 If you're like there's a buy-in, it's $25,000, then simply you've cut off a lot of early career professionals who would have no ability to sign up for that, for example, and many others. And some boards do have sort of a country club approach. It's a minority though more and more I think boards are clear in acknowledging what their financial expectations are and often will have no expectation other than that you will be an effective exponent of that organization, which is so you'll be well-informed and passionate about communicating the mission of that organization and open in terms of introducing them to other people in your network that may in fact be contributors and supporters. I won't say there's one best practice, but I would say that's clarity, good clarity of communication and expectation when it comes to financial contribution, I would say is definitely one of the signs of an effective board. Another,
Jenny Li Shen '94 Can I add one piece love, which is that some foundations that give to nonprofits want to see a hundred percent board participation, and I have seen great boards who also care about diversity and inclusion, not just do that, but in fact are just saying, we're looking for a hundred percent participation. We want our board members to be invested in the organization, but give what is meaningful to you. So there's an opportunity and maybe as you're looking for boards, Emma, that that's a question that you can ask. How do you think about that? What considerations do you have around that? So go ahead.
Jude O’Reilley '94 I'm sorry. Really well said. And there are some boards explicitly, they are a fundraising board that's wholly their mission. They have often, we hope that's a subcommittee and not a board, but there's a certain stage of an organization's growth where that is their number one priority and the board's very clear about that, that you may or may not affect your financial responsibilities as a board member, but it will definitely affect what they presume will be your responsibilities as you join the board. And that's important to know upfront and for whom, for example, you might have more money than time that might be a good fit. That's exactly what you're prepared to do. And engaging others around that is a relatively low cost ask for you and it has. That's straightforward for you. Many other boards, however, will really,
Jenny Li Shen '94 If it's okay, I'm so sorry Jude because I'm looking at our time. I hate to kind of interrupt you, but I'd love you to get to what is a great board too.
Jude O’Reilley '94 Yeah, well, I was going to say boards that actually own trusteeship executive responsibility, not simply the financial health of the organization, but that organization's ability to have impact on the issue. Many people complain and I think this complaint is justified that there's a lot of overlap in the community. I know that there's four food banks in my community. Why isn't there just one that's much more efficient than those other four? That's a governance issue. Unfortunately, there are no market incentives. In fact, there are disincentives for nonprofits to combine forces. But it's a very reasonable question for a board member who's got a trustee attitude to say, why are we in this business and are there organizations that we could be partnering with to do our work more effectively? That's part of what being a trustee is that you are a trustee to the community that is being served not to the organization. That's a very fundamental difference than the way you might operate on a for-profit board. But many people come to nonprofit boards because they've been successful in for-profit boards and they don't make that switch into a trustee mindset. But great boards and great board members really own that. They say, my responsibility actually here is to make sure that these public dollars, these dollars that have been donated to us at tax advantage are spent effectively to solve this problem up to and including the point that says there's a better way for us to be doing this. And so to create the context for those types of challenging questions.
Jenny Li Shen '94 Thank you. All right. There's a question here and I'd love to hear your perspective on this. There's a lot more questions than we're going to be able to get to. So I apologize in advance if we don't get to your question. This is a question from Egan Tur plan. How do you balance the importance of funding new emerging nonprofits with the value of maintaining longstanding civic infrastructure, sometimes older nonprofits?
Jude O’Reilley '94 That's such a great question and it gets to the heart of what I think is one of the key challenges about personal philanthropy today, which is that we, because we've got limited time, I don't have time and energy to diligence a bunch of new organizations that I might not be familiar with, but organization X has been marketing to me for years. I'm familiar with them. We have a history of giving to them and my family. I understand what their annual report looks like. I feel like I know them. I'm familiar with the organization. Meanwhile, there might be a more impactful model right across town that just happens to be newer. I think you solve for that the same way you solve for it in your own 401k, which is you build a portfolio of giving, which includes earlier stage organizations with potentially even more innovative solutions side by side with kind of the blue chip investment in the space, which might be a 20 year nonprofit that has a clear and ongoing track record for doing good.
Jenny Li Shen '94 That's great. We have some very specific questions. Questions about how do we get climate to be more of a priority? We have questions. I have a hundred thousand dollars in a small charitable trust. What's a magic formula to give it away each year to maximize their overall money of the years that we get in interest? But there's kind of a calculus problem there, and actually some people have spend down foundations as well. I'm trying to think through, we've got three minutes and then I also want to give you time to wrap up on any of your key points. There was also another question on could you repeat your recommendations? I feel Sure.
Jude O’Reilley '94 We'll, we'll try to summarize a bit without going over too much ground. Again, lemme say to some of the more specific questions. I think I'd answer that by saying we are not alone in this. We are not the first people to want to have impact. Even on some of these issues that seem like they're not getting enough attention, there are thousands if not millions of people who might care about similar things. Many of them are working in concert today. It's just a question, not just about identifying. So we could go say, I'm going to go do this research. I'm the first person who ever asked this question. You still say, you could instead say that one hour I'm going to go out and research other people who are doing something similar. One of the big and growing movements in this space is something called giving circles. And organizations like philanthropy together have directories online where you can find other people who care about those issues perhaps as much as you do, and have done various aspects of their diligence. And it can bring to you a portfolio of organizations that you might support in that space for funders or for individual givers of a wide variety of sizes from hundreds to millions of dollars a year. There are many of the questions that we ask in philanthropy have been asked of nonprofits before. And the best of the giving circles, like the best of the donors have written those answers down and can provide a good community foundation can provide a portfolio that you can invest in. So yeah, we're not alone. Philanthropy Together and other organizations like it and local giving circles in your community are a great place to start.
Jenny Li Shen '94 That's great. I see that we're one minute away. Jude, there are so many questions here. I feel like there's a lot of great conversation that could just keep us going. There's one that I'll just mention and then turn it back to you. Would you address humility as a virtue in philanthropy?
Jude O’Reilley '94 Oh wow. There is a wonderful Jewish perspective on giving, which I will include in the follow-up materials, which talks about essentially the levels of philanthropy from ‘I'm giving a million dollars and I want the world to know about it and I'm a good person’, all the way through to the type of giving that no one will ever know or recognize. That is purely about you investing in something that you care about with your time or your talent or your treasure. So going back hundreds of years, religious scholars have thought exactly about that question. We are living in a very performative time and that performance sometimes feels like it's taking center stage. But rest assured, the more you get to know these nonprofit organizations, the more you get to understand the people who support them. You'll discover just our legions of folk who are working largely anonymously on the most pressing and difficult challenges of our time. Once upon a time, that was my whole job, was to go out and learn about those people and learn from them. And that was remarkable and I tell you, it gave me incredible confidence that while the world is currently a challenging place, there are just as many folks on the other side of that bat who are working hard to make it better. In terms of your broader questions, I think some follow-up materials would be useful. So if you want to reach out to me personally, I'm happy to pull something together that will list some of the scholarly resources that we pulled from today, some of the organizations that we've mentioned, and places to go for more information that will help you give your time and your talent and your treasure in ways that are ever more effective. And why not make that a Google Doc? So if you've got ideas that are on your mind, you can add them there too.
Jenny Li Shen '94 That would be amazing. People are loving that. And we will definitely take the questions, particularly the ones we did not get to, and think about them so that we have resources to address your questions in the resource. Well, I think that's it.
Jude O’Reilley '94 This was fun. Thank you. And be well.
Jenny Li Shen '94 Alright, thank you everyone. Bye.
