Below are illustrative case studies of work in which we've played a key role. In each of these, we've done much more than make funding recommendations. We've designed programs, put together great teams of people, acted as thought partners and connected the talent and resources necessary to make good ideas into great initiatives.
New Apollo
We began with a simple idea for a project to encourage the deployment of clean energy technologies. With some early funding from the Nathan Cummings Foundation and a little research and development, it became clear that with proper framing and the addition of a diverse pool of talent to round out our team, this idea could accomplish many of the things our clients had envisioned as a new approach to climate philanthropy. New Apollo developed around a demand for a ten-year, $300 billion public investment in the transition to a clean energy economy.
As it turns out, the fresh insights we brought to the challenge - combined with the funders' patience and commitment - were critical to the creation of the green jobs movement, shaped tens of billions of dollars in public investment, and played an important role in advancing renewable technologies as a viable alternative to fossil fuels.
Apollo represented a paradigm shift in climate policy, from a market-centered approach to the public investment strategies embodied in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Those bills alone will generate over $1 trillion for the transition to zero-carbon energy.
The New Apollo Project succeeded because we refused to accept conventional wisdom; at a time when environmentalists focused on stopping bad things from happening, we organized a powerful movement around an inspiring story. New Apollo was bold and inclusive and grounded in America's best traditions, emphasizing innovation and American ingenuity. The name, an homage to the moon shot, was a reminder of what we can accomplish when we come together to do big things. We elevated the idea of public investment in public goods, offering an alternative to the idea that markets alone could solve the climate crisis.
People all over the country – workers, low-income communities of color, business owners, college kids, techies - responded passionately to New Apollo. They self-organized around its grand vision, with 72 state and local chapters appearing in the year of its launch (including New Apollo board member Van Jones' Green for All). Popular support translated into real change; President Obama used the New Apollo blueprint to guide over $90 billion in clean energy funding as part of the The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. That's at least one reason that green jobs are now the single fastest growing category of new jobs in the nation, and the costs of solar power and battery technology have plummeted.
Marguerite Casey Foundation, Children & Families
Jim Casey was the founder of UPS, and for several decades he and his family dedicated their philanthropy to providing direct services to children in foster care. Convinced that their work could only go so far without changes in public attitudes and policies, we were asked to help with the development of a new foundation dedicated to changing the policy environment for low-income children and families. We delivered by working with a talented board and staff to create the vision, mission and initial grant making strategy of the $600 million Marguerite Casey Foundation (MCF).
We recognized that racism and poverty were at the root of what we wanted to address, and that we'd need new ways of seeing the problems if we were going to open up new solutions. We found our answers in the families and communities the new foundation sought to serve; people who had been commonly described as "disadvantaged," "under-served," and "at-risk," were in fact highly resourceful at coping with difficult situations. Their communities had reserves of cultural wealth and connections that made them resilient in the face of hardship and discrimination. We sought to help tap that potential and in the process began creating a movement of working families advocating on their own behalf for change.
MCF has built a strong track record, providing ongoing, committed support that has nurtured effective, vibrant activism within and among families, enabling them to advocate for themselves and improve the systems that shape their lives. With an emphasis on organizing at the local level, social and economic policies have been advanced that promote the development of strong families and strong communities. Well over two million Americans have received leadership training and issue-education. And the need to combine single-issue movements into cross-cutting and more powerful formations has been recognized and undertaken with the foundation's support. This is long-term work that requires humility and patience, and we're proud to have helped set it in motion.
George Soros & Needle Exchange
Public policy responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic have often been set back by conflicting and contradictory ideas about what constitutes morality. Early on, government officials were slow to invest in prevention and care, expressing the notion that people who were sick were to blame for their situation, that they'd made bad choices and committed immoral acts, whether they were gay men or IV drug users. Philanthropist George Soros saw things differently, believing that human beings like to have sex and get high, and that it would be immoral to let them die from a viral infection that could be prevented with simple, common sense measures including access to clean needles.
In the face of considerable political opposition, Mr. Soros' Open Society Institute (OSI) called on cities to adopt policies that would enable drug users to exchange dirty needles for clean ones. To facilitate this shift, and to by-pass the inevitable fights over public financing, OSI asked us to help create the nation's largest needle-exchange funding program. Working with addicts and former addicts, we got the fund set up, made grants all over the U.S., and in the process began to change public attitudes. Slowly, one by one, cities changed their policies, and as a result many IV drug users survived to deal - or not - with their addictions. We haven't won this contest; powerful constituencies continue to insist that helping people who inject drugs rewards immorality. But we helped stake out a position that, for a new generation, looks so much like common sense that they find it hard to believe that there was ever a controversy.
Spitzer Trust: New Approaches to Climate Change
"Climate change is a huge concern, but we're not sure how we can make a difference." This is the question we were asked to answer when the board of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust decided it was time to make their philanthropy more strategic. We engaged an array of experts who helped us look at the problem from dozens of angles, from the opportunities and challenges presented by populations emerging from rural poverty, to the climate benefits of educating girls, to the threat of ocean acidification. We looked at the funding patterns that have shaped billions of dollars in philanthropic resources already spent on the issue. And we considered the possibilities for making progress in today's polarized political environment.
We kept coming back to one fact that seemed to have been mostly overlooked by funders and advocates: a significant share of global greenhouse gas emissions (including two-thirds of China's emissions) come from industrial activities that cannot be electrified. That is, there is no ready way to use energy from the wind and the sun - philanthropy's go-to alternatives to oil, coal and gas - to solve a big part of the problem. This raised the question: who is working to ensure that there will be cheap, abundant zero-carbon energy to make the steel, aluminum, glass, concrete and chemicals that are so important to modern economies?
The answer is a $12 million annual fund to encourage public policies to accelerate the commercial development of the full range of technologies that will be required, not just to de-carbonize electricity grids, but to ensure that we have zero-carbon transportation fuels and liquid fuels for high-heat industrial applications that can't be electrified. Working with a bi-partisan array of experts, the fund is testing the hypothesis that these goals might be a way to bring leaders together across party lines. As we learned with New Apollo, sometimes more progress can be made on climate when we don't talk about climate. Economic competitiveness, jobs and prosperity may be a better way to win; we don't need to be right, just effective.
Shaharit: Israeli Lessons for America?
Our democracy seems to have lost the ability to bring us together in common cause. As Americans distance themselves from engagement, corruption flourishes, feeding further cynicism and indifference; we enter a downward spiral of alienation from each other and our own politics. Together these trends threaten the country’s ability to respond to crises and makes America an unpredictable and potentially dangerous actor in world affairs.
In order to chart a different course and ensure that America is a positive force in the 21st century, we will need to nurture a new generation of leaders and cultivate a different kind of politics.
Sometimes inspiration comes from unexpected places. We were fortunate to be present at the birth of an experiment in civil dialogue that is beginning to see positive effects in Israel, called Shaharit. In Shaharit's early days we were able to organize support from the Ford and Nathan Cummings Foundations to test the idea that this experiment in Israel aimed at helping a divided people learn how to get along with each other might provide a useful model to address our own country's challenges.
Shaharit brings together people from across Israel’s many divides, Jews and Muslims, Orthodox and secular, peace activists and settlers, to create strong relationships and build trust. The work is founded on an understanding that people are embedded in their “worlds of meaning,” the liberal universalists who dominate higher education and the media among many. Rather than trying to convert each other, the people who make up Sharharit have found that common ground can be discovered by taking each other seriously, recognizing that no one is going away, and that a better future will be created by reaching across the divides that inevitably arise between people who see the world in different ways.
The Shaharit experience has been shaped at a basic level by dialog that, when it works, transforms everyone in the room. From that beginning, those who are interested inexorably change, allowing movement towards one another in the desire to live well together. People in dialogue have also become people who can disagree, deliberate, and act to solve problems together.
Over the past decade Shaharit has developed a network and moved from early, sometimes difficult encounters, to engagements with each other, working together to solve problems and imagine a country they’d all want to live in. Shaharit (the Jewish morning prayer), has evolved to create a think tank, a leadership incubator and a community development hub. It runs dozens of programs and recruits and supports candidates for office. It can now claim city counselors, mayors and even members of Knesset - the national legislature - as part of its burgeoning network.