From Fighting Poverty To Ending Malaria

How bringing together such diverse groups as the Robin Hood Foundation, the United Nations, top Universities, numerous non-profits and the U.S. government can dramatically increase the impact on the most pressing social issues of our time.

Transcript

Good evening everybody.

Thank you so much for coming.

I'd like to welcome all of you to tonight's event,

Active Collaboration for Transformational Change with Jeff Walker,

Jennifer McCray,

David Saltzman,

And David Bornstein.

I'd also like to welcome everybody who is joining us in cyberspace via our simulcast.

We hope all of you will participate in the conversation as well.

You can tweet questions to hashtag collaborate NYU or at NYU Reynolds.

I thought I'd start with a very quick survey.

I'd like you to raise your hand if you're currently in or once studied at a business school.

All right,

We got some business folks here.

Raise your hand if you're currently in or once studied at a public policy school.

All right,

Great.

We got some policy folks.

Education.

A couple of education folks.

I'm going to go out on a limb here.

Law.

All right,

Excellent.

So we really do have a great diverse mix of disciplines here.

And I think that's really important because I think it's a reflection of how seriously the NYU Reynolds program takes cross university engagement.

It's really the secret sauce of the program.

It's business students working with public policy students,

Working with med school students,

Law school students,

Engineers,

And on and on across all of NYU's schools.

And we take this so seriously because we think that engaging many diverse disciplines is critical to unlocking the power of collaboration,

Which is really what tonight's talk is all about.

Our incredible panelists,

Who like all of you,

Come from very diverse disciplines and professional backgrounds themselves.

Jeff Walker from the world of finance and world health.

Jennifer McCray from the world of philanthropy and fundraising and HIV prevention.

David Saltzman from the world of innovative grant making to fight poverty right here in New York City.

And our moderator,

David Bornstein from the world of journalism and now solutions journalism,

A new field that he's helping to create.

All of these panelists are here because they have hard won lessons from their respective and very varied fields that they want to share with you about how collaboration can and must be used if we are going to have a shot at building innovative solutions to our most pressing problems and our most terrible injustices.

And that's really the power and promise of social entrepreneurship.

To develop innovative,

More effective solutions to social change.

But here's the rub.

A lot of us grow up believing that competition is best at spurring innovation.

It's what makes capitalism so special.

It's what makes entrepreneurship so sexy.

There's a lonely entrepreneur somewhere toiling away in a garage building the next great disruptive technology.

Or there's a social entrepreneur who by sheer force of will and genius and charisma is going to realize great social breakthrough while flying solo.

I don't think this is really an accurate picture.

I think true social entrepreneurship offers a much more collaborative approach to problem solving.

It's problem solving that embraces many different stakeholders.

It aligns resources.

It crosses the public,

Private and citizen sectors.

And sometimes it even open sources its technology all in the name of realizing sustainable,

Scalable,

Innovative solutions to our most pressing social problems.

I think we have a long way to go before this becomes the conventional wisdom.

Earlier today I Googled competition and social entrepreneurship is a good thing.

And I got 64 million hits.

But when I Googled collaboration and social entrepreneurship is a good thing,

I only got 4 million hits.

I think today we're going to hear a lot of things that may challenge this very popular but perhaps misguided perception.

So please join me in very warmly welcoming to the NYU Reynolds stage Jeff Walker,

Jennifer McCray,

David Saltzman and David Bornstein.

Well thank you,

Gabe.

This is a,

It's quite a hinge moment in the field of social entrepreneurship and social innovation.

Over time we've really moved from a focus on individuals to enterprises to these collaborative networks.

And Jennifer,

Jeff and David really have spent many years weaving together these kinds of collaborative networks,

Figuring out how to resource them,

How to fund them and really figuring out how to align the incentives,

The egos and really the cooperative element that makes them work.

And also the internal side,

The internal motivations that get people to align themselves and really in some ways put the task ahead of themselves in many cases.

So let's just,

Speaking with Jeff first,

What's the imperative behind this collaboration sort of shift in mindset?

What do you think is driving it?

Hello guys.

Thank you David for moderating this.

I appreciate it.

I think it's an evolution.

It's not like,

Oh my God,

We were all wrong and now we're right.

Right?

It's an evolution saying we keep trying to figure out how to scale impact in these social endeavors that we're all involved in but it's reaching a point where I don't know,

We're just not,

It's not working exactly right.

Sometimes it's frustration that gee,

Politicians can't solve all our problems.

Huh.

Well gee,

The nonprofit sector isn't solving all the problems either or the business sector.

But you know,

We're at this point in life where people actually start saying what if we scaled by talking with each other?

Instead of arguing about impact investing being right or social bonds being right or social enterprises are right,

There's no right model to actually impact an end decimal area.

What we found was bringing businesses together with multilaterals,

Together with nonprofits,

Together with business,

Together with local businessmen as well as global businesses creates a model if we all have the same common goal,

Decimal area and lowering them,

It unifies us.

And so it moves our egos to another place.

So this collaborative structure is actually more fun too.

It's you know,

I call it,

You know,

It's just like playing,

You know,

Instruments and playing together in a jazz band.

And so what is that like?

We've all felt and listened to music over time.

It feels great.

What is that playing together where you have to manage your ego?

You have to actually have people so that they recognize there's a good instrument and there's a good player over there and there's another guy that you have to listen to and let me pull back and listen to them and let me improvise as well.

And so we've got to blend and learn and then oh,

There's an audience.

I have to learn from the audience too.

So let me open up to that audience.

And so this collaborative process is actually one where people call almost a spiritual activity transformational and so they want to do it again.

Let me do it again.

We're starting to find that happening in places like malaria and you'll hear a bunch of others where this is more successful by actually lowering the walls,

Having a managed ego,

Figuring out some common measurable outcomes.

And so we're seeing that in malaria,

We're seeing it in nutrition,

We're seeing that in early childhood and donors are actually opening up more of their pocketbooks because they're feeling involved in collaborating the process.

Great.

So let's to paint a picture of what this really looks like on the ground and you know,

David,

You were talking about the work that Robin Hood has done with the veterans.

How does this really look like when you make this jazz music play?

You're a rock and roller though,

Son.

Rapper,

Come on.

So Robin Hood has existed for 26 years fighting poverty in New York City and we've served veterans since day one.

But we serve veterans not so much as veterans we serve them as poor people needing some sort of assistance.

So if somebody was hungry,

We made sure that they received food and we didn't check to see whether or not they had been in the military.

But a few years ago,

We started to see a large number of people who had volunteered to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan return home and they were in a world of trouble.

Many of them were homeless,

Many of them were suffering from post-traumatic stress,

Many of them were having trouble finding work,

Many of them were having trouble readjusting to home life.

And we got together with Admiral Mike Mullen,

Who at the time was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

And he said,

You know,

We in this country are very good at recruiting people to fight wars and we're pretty good at fighting wars,

But we're really terrible at looking out for people who volunteered to serve.

And so let's see if we can set up a partnership with Robin Hood to make New York City a model for the rest of the country when it comes to serving veterans and their families.

And so we recruited an advisory board that Admiral Mullen agreed to co-chair and other people on the advisory board included Tom Brokaw and John Stewart and Brian Williams,

Lloyd Blankfein,

Who's the chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs,

People from all sorts of major financial institutions as well as major corporations and a number of veterans.

And we came together and said,

Okay,

What is it that we need to do to help veterans?

And we came at it from all sorts of different angles and we were able to dramatically lower the number of veterans living on the streets of New York City.

At the time that we started this effort,

There were more than 300 homeless veterans living on the streets,

Not in shelters,

But living on the streets.

Tonight there will be fewer than 25 veterans living on the streets of New York City,

And I think that in the next year New York City will become the first major city in the United States without a single veteran living on the street.

More importantly,

We were able to work with a number of major employers,

Not just in New York City,

But across the country,

Who are providing jobs to hundreds of thousands of veterans and made it a priority.

We also worked to try to move the Veterans Administration to do a better job of serving veterans.

That's been much tougher,

I think,

Than anybody other than Admiral Mullen anticipated it to be.

And we've been able to work to make sure that veterans have easier and better access to mental health care providers.

Now,

None of that would have happened if Robin Hood had tried to do that on our own or if one individual had tried to do it on her own or his own.

It was the fact that it was a collaboration,

A public-private partnership,

Bringing people together from different disciplines with different experiences who could apply pressure in different ways.

That made it possible for any real and meaningful change to take place.

So in some ways you're redefining,

So if we think of the social entrepreneur as the social innovator that has been described a lot,

The social entrepreneur is an enterprise builder,

Let's say.

In this case you're talking about a switchboard mechanism,

A recruitment mechanism,

An alignment mechanism.

Is that essentially the role that Robin Hood is playing?

Are you sort of now playing this coordination switchboard function?

I think that we play multiple roles depending on the nature of the collaboration and the nature of the partnership.

So sometimes we're,

To use your phrase,

A switchboard operator,

Which I think is an antiquated phrase and most people here wouldn't know what that means.

Is there a 2.

0 version of that?

You're a node.

Other times we're playing different roles.

To use Jeff's metaphor,

Sometimes we're the lead guitarist,

Sometimes we're a rhythm guitarist,

Sometimes we're a bass guitarist depending on what the band needs.

And that's kind of the fun and interesting part is that you get to,

Again staying with Jeff's metaphor,

You get to use different chops at different times.

Let's talk about malaria.

Both you,

Jen,

And Jeff have worked on this issue and this is a massive global collaboration that has so many parts in it.

Can you describe the work that you've done and just paint a picture of what's actually happening today vis-a-vis malaria and eradicating it?

So there's a whole effort around global health and one of the great models to start collaborations that are successful,

You're trying to look at and say,

Have there been other successful ones I can use as a model?

And malaria seems to be one of those.

So deaths of malaria have come down over the last six years from a million one per year down to 450,

000 this last year and it's on track to come down to near zero by the end of 2015.

It was a collaboration that came together but it wasn't simple.

It wasn't like,

Ah,

Where are we going to do this one,

Right?

And so there's a guy named Ray Chambers who in particular took some ownership of this and saw some kids in malaria comas and said we've got to do something about this.

But the reason Ray was a good person for this collaboration to be built around,

And there was lots of people involved,

But he was an honest broker.

So I think it's important when you're developing a collaboration to have somebody who's an honest broker.

Ray didn't know all the science behind malaria.

He didn't know all the science about how to prevent it,

But he knew how to ask the questions.

And so Ray knew that he could go out and call some people together,

He had a great network to pull from,

And say we need to stop this.

We need to lower the deaths.

What can we do?

And he found out there was bed nets.

And so after,

Believe it or not,

It took a couple years to figure out and get everybody to agree that bed nets were a good answer.

Gates Foundation wanted to do vaccines only and Ray said by the time you finish the vaccines,

20 million people will die.

Do you really want to only focus on vaccines?

And that changed their minds.

He got the White House behind it because of his other networks.

He got Global Fund to support and back.

And what he said was what are these levers that we in the business world could use and understand,

Logistics wise,

Et cetera,

To build these collaborations?

And gee,

We ought to get Exxon involved.

And so their community,

Where they were doing business,

Was in areas at a high malaria rates.

And so it was natural advocate and supporter for malaria initiative.

Who would have guessed that?

Exxon?

But it was natural for them.

And used Acumen.

So Acumen had a portfolio company that they could build,

And they did,

In Kenya to support and build bed nets.

Xumitomo.

But then also he said,

They're going,

How do we get Save the Children on board?

How do we get the faith-based community on board?

So World Vision came on,

And in Nigeria actually helped us figure out how to get the Christians and the Muslims to actually open up their networks and start distributing nets.

So all of a sudden he started asking these questions about how do we get things done if we have a common measurable goal?

And they set up something called Alma2015.

Org.

You can go online and see it.

And how do we measure it?

So how can we all continue to go back and say where are we?

Decimal area,

Distribution of bed nets by country every four months.

They get together with the African presidents and ministers of health and say where are we?

Are you behind?

Are you ahead?

Is there issues that we need to get more nets?

Is there financing problems or issues?

We need consultants to come out with logistics plans.

So he took a very collaborative process and said I have more power if I unify everyone who has a common goal,

Which is lowering deaths from malaria.

I don't have to worry about one NGO funding itself and backing that one NGO to solve the problem because it's impossible.

How do we get local businessmen in Nigeria,

In Zambia to actually have these common goals and have them feel like they can participate?

So when everybody feels like they understand their roles,

Understand the goals that they can achieve together,

Measure them,

Feedback,

Communicate.

So this honest broker,

Ray,

This common measurable set of goals,

Collaborative glue,

Which is the team that Ray built,

Which is a small number of people who actually can say between the meetings I'm going to hold you accountable.

I'm going to make sure the resources are around.

So a slight investment,

For example,

McKinsey,

We paid McKinsey to do an analysis saying what's the ROI on bringing out bed nets.

Turns out it's a 10 to 1 payback.

$5 billion invested,

$50 billion payback in 10 years.

Global Fund said okay,

We're buying.

So it's not just HIV.

It turns out we need to add malaria as well.

And so people were unified around it,

Rallied around it and started now saying how can we tap into the malaria networks and rebuilding community health worker strategies,

Tapping into that malaria network that we can rely on.

Polio was almost finished.

Obviously it was another kind of collaboration.

Jennifer can talk about hers in prevention of mother child transmission.

In fact,

I think it's a great story.

Maybe tell that one.

Sure.

Yeah,

So we're working on very similar actually,

Similar model to the malaria one.

And we're working on we have a very specific goal on a specific deadline of eliminating mother to child transmission of HIV by December 31st,

2015.

And we're on trajectory to do that.

And it's a global stakeholder initiative that has this kind of connective glue that's holding it together by the private sector.

But we're working with the UN,

We're working with UNAIDS,

With U.

S.

Government,

With African governments,

Obviously,

Most importantly civil society implementing partners.

And it's become this unifying principle around we can actually get this done.

The science is there.

The money is there.

The political will is there.

Now how do we continually find these catalytic high leverage opportunities that can unlock where we're getting stuck.

And I think in fact all of the work we all do in the end is about always finding and by the way I think this is just like life lesson is where are we getting stuck.

We were just talking about the flow state right before we came on stage.

So much of it is resources,

For example,

I absolutely know and fundamentally believe that resources,

Not just money,

But time and networks and creativity and life experience and people's passions flow but we put all these obstacles and barriers that block the flow of those.

So much of our work in being collaborative leaders is really understanding what those obstacles are and how do we get rid of them or how do we at least see through them so that they're not stopping us.

And so these examples are great examples where we're seeing obstacles and just consciously removing them.

You left the cherry.

It just launched today.

Talk about BornFreeAfrica.

Org.

So it's yeah,

BornFreeAfrica.

Org.

Well we've been doing the work actually for a couple of years so we've been very involved in Nigeria in particular and which accounts for 28 percent of the burden.

Some of my colleagues who lead the effort are here and we have a fantastic team who are actually sitting in the Ministry of Health and we as the private sector have really been and it's a big private sector collaborative with Chevron and MacAids and J&J and General GE and others who are helping us find catalytic talent who can make sure that we're meeting these goals.

But in the meantime it became clear as we were working with on the advocacy side that we needed a general awareness campaign and so launched today a massive initiative.

You may have seen it and certainly hopefully you will see it in the next couple of days with the fashion industry.

The fashion industry has been long partners with the AIDS issue and so we went out and recruited 22 women designers who are moms ranging from Stella McCartney and Prada and Victoria Beckham,

Etc.

And they all designed these beautiful pieces,

A piece for a mom and for a child and partnered with Amazon and we're selling those on,

It's actually Amazon's first foray into anything international and we're selling it on there and it's raised a lot of visibility because the collection itself is a very beautiful fashion I think has that kind of interesting sex appeal that doesn't always come with the kind of work we're all trying to do and it's all moms.

And so we really talked to all these designers and said each and every one of you had an HIV test but not one of you had to worry about whether your baby was going to be HIV positive or not.

And so it really resonated with the designers themselves and they have been just fantastic in terms of telling the story and being partners with us.

So it launched today so feel free to go on to Amazon,

Shopoff.

Com and buy your born free Prada skirt.

It will be matched.

And it's matched.

Dollar for dollar MacAids is matching,

100% of the proceeds by the way are going to the project and MacAids has very generously given us a match of every dollar that's given will be matched up to $500,

000 which is fantastic.

But over the last couple years the number of transmissions has gone down,

Right?

Yeah,

We've had a 33% decline in the last,

Since 2009 and we're absolutely,

The trajectory is phenomenal.

Our strategy,

Our collaborative strategy is really one as I said about finding these catalytic places where we can inject talent into particularly the countries that are most stuck.

So we have seven countries that we've identified,

We have fantastic talent on the ground who are literally,

It's old school blocking and tackling,

There's no big secret bullet behind it,

It's getting women into clinics,

Getting women initiated on to treatment.

The process has been simplified over the last couple years because the drug regimen and I won't get too into the weeds has been much more simplified.

But it's absolutely a story that I think exemplifies how the global community,

Civil society,

Implementing partners in the private sector can come together and again certainly with African governments as champions and of course the women themselves to really make this happen.

A lot of it I believe is the specific goal and the specific deadline too.

I just want to hit home,

You know,

The impact that we're talking about here of pretty much ending homelessness among veterans in New York,

Reducing malaria from,

What did you say,

2.

1 million to 450,

000 and in the case of mother to child HIV transmission I think gone from a 400% increase in clinics in Nigeria that now provide these antiretrovirals.

So like from 500 to about 2,

000 clinics and increasing to five.

This is really,

Really quite dramatic impact and it's not the kind of thing that,

I mean my field,

Solutions Journalism,

Is trying to help people understand where these opportunities are to actually address these,

Trying to slay the dragons of our time and to help people understand that these are doable challenges.

They're hard and the interesting thing is that there's now a shift in the skill set that we're asking people to master in order to put together these collaborations and as Jeff alluded to it,

You do have to sort of check your ego at the door but I would imagine in that glue that you talked about there's a lot of very high level skills in terms of bringing people in,

Helping them to see how they fit into a larger picture.

There's probably a lot of empathy,

A lot of very high level social skills in sort of forming these collaborations.

That's what I'm intuiting.

What have you actually seen in terms of building these?

How do people prepare for it if they're in college or in university today or wanting to get good at it?

I think this is the new generation is already set up for collaboration and so there is some of the older generation particularly in academia where they're not used to collaborating.

So a tenured professor in my experience is a pretty lousy collaborator.

A politician is a pretty lousy collaborator and a doctor is a pretty lousy collaborator but I'm kind of okay with that because I want doctors to be pretty confident.

But the issue of what does that mean?

It was that experience.

Guess who has these skills?

Business types.

So 15 years and older business types,

They're looking and dying to work on these kind of issues.

How do they become successful?

Through collaboration,

Through growing networks.

That's kind of what our book is about is that generosity network.

How do you find these opportunities?

How do you find people to work together?

How did David build a board of people who really like hanging out with each other talking about philanthropy and they actually have similar passions?

And so these managed ego kind of operations,

This might be the Peter Drucker kind of next career opportunity that you can join up with.

And guess who also are natural great partners?

Individuals coming out of school,

21 to 35 who are passionate,

Who understand how to work in flat structures,

Who know what a network really is like.

So these are natural partners coming together for a lot of these social enterprises and so they're starting to recognize that no matter how good KIPP schools are,

And they're awesome,

Today they have 150 schools.

In five years their goal is 500 schools,

Which is great,

But you know how many schools there are in America?

They'll never scale.

So how do you take these ideas that are generated by the great social entrepreneurs and try to figure out how to scale them?

These are really interesting puzzles that people who are like looking at these higher goals,

Which a lot of people are these days,

Want to work on.

Want to work on these puzzles.

You know I would just add that the skill set to me really is about finding ways to break down again these barriers and these walls and to see that none of this stuff is disaggregated.

Even though we're working on HIV or malaria or veterans and homelessness,

None of that is disaggregated from any of the other work we're doing.

So it's a point of entry.

So how we all look at the world,

And I think that's a changing mindset that we all see since we live in such a more globally complex place,

Is that to say clean water is disaggregated from girls' education is disaggregated from extreme poverty.