Latest Guest Interview:
Andrew Wolk: What Changes When We Start with Outcomes
For more than two decades, Andrew Wolk helped social sector organizations build better strategies, measure their work, and strengthen their impact. But one question kept nagging at him: If so many organizations were reporting success, why weren’t more people’s lives getting better?
Across the communities he studied, progress on outcomes like education and housing remained stubbornly slow, and in some places, things were getting worse.
Which led him to ask: What if we’ve been optimizing for the wrong things?
Today, through Finding Common Purpose, Andrew is putting that idea into practice, helping communities focus on what would actually make life better for the people who live and work there.
It’s Andrew Wolk on The Business of Giving.
More Guest Interviews
Democracy Starts in the Hallway: Students Bringing Students to the Ballot Box
Every year, four million students graduate from high school in this country. Most are old enough to vote, but too few get the encouragement and support to take that first step. My next guest set out to change that by enlisting students to help their classmates register to vote and have a voice in the decisions that shape their future.
Jahnavi Rao founded New Voters while still in high school. It now runs student-led, nonpartisan voter registration drives in 1,300 high schools across 42 states. Here’s the number she built the whole organization around.
We talk about the near-peer organizing playbook that got 85 percent of her own senior class registered to vote in three days, the research network she built to study a question almost nobody studies, and why spending her days with teenagers is what keeps her hopeful about the country.
It’s Jahnavi Rao on The Business of Giving.
The Broken Matchmaking System Between Funders and Nonprofits
Most tech founders don’t have to convince anyone that software is a good idea. My guest had to build hers for a sector she describes as twenty years behind everyone else. It did not always go smoothly.
Maya Kuppermann co-founded Temelio, the platform that now moves more than a billion dollars a year in grants between foundations and the nonprofits they fund. But in the early days, one of her very first clients had a very different verdict.
That client is still with Temelio today, one of a hundred and fifty. We talk about what it took to get there, why the matchmaking between funders and nonprofits is broken, what a bad grant application actually costs a nonprofit in wasted hours, and the “useless” feature she refuses to take out of her own software.
It’s Maya Kupperman on The Business of Giving
What If Philanthropy Funded Capability Instead of Reputation?
Many companies that survive their first year have something working quietly in the background: an early check from a parent or a well-off friend. My guest today leads an organization for founders who never had that check..
Shawna Young is the CEO of Camelback Ventures, a New Orleans accelerator that puts fifty thousand dollars, and a community, behind early-stage founders whom traditional capital routinely overlooks. A chemist by training and a former science teacher, she thinks hard about who gets seen, who gets funded, and why the gap between the two is so wide.
And sometimes, the best way to understand who gets overlooked is to look at who had the idea first.
It’s Shawna Young, CEO of Camelback Ventures, on The Business of Giving.
Latest Articles
The Field That Was Hiding in Plain Sight
The Hidden Health Toll of Where We Spend 90% of Our Lives
We spend 90% of our lives in buildings. Ishita Das of the Milken Institute explains why that number should change how funders think.
A growing body of evidence shows that specific design features move our stress hormones, focus, and brain activity. The science exists in pockets. What has been missing is a field to hold it together, and the capital to build one.
Notes #145: Before You Remove the Bottleneck, Find Out What It Was Holding Back
If this bottleneck vanished tomorrow, what would break that nobody’s watching right now?
The Cheapest Cure Might Already Exist. So Why Isnt Anyone Using It?
Why Cheap Generic Drugs Never Make It to Cancer Patients
Some of the most promising cancer treatments are not multibillion-dollar new discoveries. They are affordable generics already sitting on pharmacy shelves, backed by published data but lacking a commercial sponsor to bring them forward.
Dr. Laura Kleiman of Reboot Rx built a nonprofit to fix this market failure, using AI to sift through half a million studies and surface high-potential treatments. Proof that a treatment works does not guarantee it reaches patients, meaning clinical adoption requires its own deliberate investment.
Latest The Paths Forward Segments
Nurturing Excellence and Equity: Insights from the Vera Institute of Justice
For this edition we are going to visit team members at the Vera Institute of Justice. Their mission is to end the overcriminalization and mass incarceration of people of color, immigrants, and people experiencing poverty.
Cultivating Wellbeing: The VillageReach Story of Transforming Healthcare and Workplace Culture
Today we’ll be visiting team members of VillageReach. VillageReach works with the government to solve healthcare delivery challenges in low-resource communities. It is a global organization with offices in Seattle, Washington, Nairobi, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique and DRC.
Noora Health’s Unique Approach: How ‘Doing the Needful’ Transforms Nonprofit Success
Noora Health seeks to improve outcomes and strengthen health systems by equipping family members with the skills they need to care for their loved ones. They envision a world where patients and their caregivers are a core component of healthcare delivery, and family member training is a standard of care.
SPEAKING, MODERATING & COACHING
A key differentiator of the highest performing nonprofits is their belief in Executive Coaching...and not just for the senior staff but for people throughout the organization. Not only is it transformative for the individual but for the whole organization. A "coaching culture" is becoming synonymous with places people thrive and want to stay.
Harvard Social Enterprise Conference
ABOUT DENVER
Radio Show Host, Speaker, Moderator & Executive Coach
Denver Frederick is the Host of The Business of Giving.
Each week he interviews nonprofit CEOs, corporate leaders, philanthropists and social entrepreneurs on the solutions that they are working on and investing in to make this a better world.
Denver is a Certified Professional Coach for leaders in the social sector. He is also a sought-after speaker on how to create healthy and robust corporate cultures in nonprofit organizations.