Alliance in collaboration with WINGS has been commissioned by Propel Philanthropy to conduct a 10-part interview series on the work of Social Impact Infrastructure Organisations and the benefits they bring to the sector. This interview series is aiming to collectively galvanize a significant change in how funders and others think and feel about building infrastructure, unlocking global resources, and establishing robust ecosystems.
These interviews will are being published here. In this instalment of the series of conversations with the representatives of social impact infrastructure organisations (SIIOs), Andrew Milner talks to Karen Ansara of NEID Global.
AM: Could you start, Karen, by telling us a little bit about NEID Global. What do you aim to do?
Karen Ansara, NEID Global.
KA: We’re a network organisation and our aim is to unlock money for global good by building a community of funders who are committed to solving global problems which are often connected to local problems as well. Our folks are investing in all kinds of crises around the world, in all of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goal and in 82 countries, and we’re the connective tissue that brings them together to learn about what each is doing, to share their expertise and information, and to collaborate so that they end up giving more, and giving more effectively.
You are more than just the platform, you’re actively involved in that, aren’t you?
We’re building a community of donors, so our efforts are focused both on learning about issues as well as learning about each other. We offer some 50 learning events a year, most are now virtual, some are in person in different parts of the country. We started in New England though, so we have a concentration there. We also have social events where we explore some deeper issues related to being philanthropists like the power we have to share – the lessons we have learned, how we might misuse it – so we’re educating about issues to invest in but also how to do it with a spirit of humility and a practice of equity, how to do it right and how to do it well so that we can make a greater impact. But throughout it all, our foundational mission has always been to increase the flow of international philanthropy from the US. Even though US$484 billion was donated in 2021, only six per cent of it went to solve global problems. So our objective is to help Americans who have philanthropic resources to realise that these problems are ours, too. Americans have caused some of the global problems, and they invariably affect us here, so we want to increase the percentage of the pie that goes international, way beyond six per cent.
In some ways, the UK’s like this too, but in the US, there’s a kind of insularity about its philanthropy very often, so you’re consciously trying to break that mould.
Right. It’s so short-sighted for us to think that we only have the responsibility for solving problems in our own backyards. Climate change is the perfect example. Among other things, it’s creating mass migration and we have to invest in the countries where desperate people are coming from to help them solve the problems and make them more liveable and just societies. Making those connections, helping Americans be less short-sighted, frankly, is central to our goal. But also to be listeners, to be humble, to invite perspectives from abroad to influence our practice.
You’re one of the founders of the organisation, aren’t you?
Yes, fifteen years ago we started a pilot called New England International Donors, because there were over 200 international development organisations based in the Boston area, but now we’re coast to coast. In fact, we have members from 22 states and we have members from some foreign countries, including the UK and Central America. We want to grow this movement by building communities of internationally-focused donors, especially but not exclusively in various parts of the US, so we want to have clusters of folks in at least five cities within two years.
Is there a deliberate intention to try and get more donors from overseas as well?
To some extent, but it’s not the core of our mission because every nation, every geography has a different philanthropic culture. Here in the US, we see that governments cannot solve many of these problems or do not have the political will to solve them. Markets can’t solve them all, so it’s the responsibility and the privilege of individuals and foundations to be very bold changemakers in solving many of these problems. So yes, we welcome people from other countries, but we have this distinctive mission in regard to American philanthropists to broaden their lens and sense of responsibility.
The struggle is in convincing the larger foundations in the sector to support the infrastructure because if we want to solve global problems, we have to reach these individuals who are the bulk of the giving overseas.
Was there some initial trigger to setting NEID up or was it just seeing the need?
That’s a great question. When we started in 2008, I had heard that in 2006 only two per cent of all US philanthropy went globally, and so our mission was to increase that, but also to increase the thoughtfulness behind global giving and its ultimate effectiveness. For me personally, as an individual donor writing cheques on my kitchen table, I wanted a place to learn. I needed a community. I needed people to inspire me and with whom I could share some of the joy and satisfaction I was finding in giving for education for Afghan girls, for example, or to develop water projects in rural Nicaragua. So, I have always felt, and this has played out in practice, that the community is the most important thing that we are building. People come for the programming, but they stay because of the strength of the community.
People on your website say they become friends as well as collaborators. How important is that relationship?
This is a place where you will find kindred spirits. You will find people who share your values, who can’t sleep at night because they know about people who are suffering in other parts of the world. They’re aware of the climate catastrophe, but they need other people to join with so that we can make change together and feel less impotent about what’s happening all around us. So yes, it’s a place where people often find their best friends, their partners both socially and philanthropically.
When we started this 15 years ago, there were a lot of affinity groups for professional grantmakers on different topics; peace and security funders group, international human rights funders group, international education funders group, but they were primarily for professional foundation staff, and they were siloed. And this is the problem with international philanthropy – people are often doing it in a very insular siloed fashion, they don’t know what others are doing, especially individual donors don’t have the opportunity to know what the larger foundations are doing, what their strategies are, what their learnings are. So we bring together those different populations, the professional staff of foundations, individual donors who are working out of donor advised funds or out of a family foundation. We also bring in impact investors and philanthropic advisors – all those in the ecosystem who can teach each other and be role models for each other about how to do more and do it more effectively. We provide the platform – the infrastructure – to leverage their expertise and amplify their philanthropic investments.
Is it sometimes a challenge bringing those different groups together?
We haven’t found that at all because the professionals love to share their knowledge and they also need community, not just an affinity group that meets once a year, but a sense of shared friendship and purpose with others who are on this journey. What has been hard is finding all the individual philanthropists, because we look for people with a capacity to give at least ten thousand dollars a year – although our members’ giving ranges from US$10,000 to US$14 million a year or more. A lot of them are hidden behind donor advised funds, for instance, so the network aspect is really critical to make individual connections to donors who are giving in the international space. You need to partner with other donor networks and philanthropy serving organisations to help uncover those folks because we all have something to offer to help them be stronger.
What’s the split between foundation officers and individuals in your network?
Right now, about 45 per cent of our members are foundation staff and/or trustees and the rest are individuals. The foundations bring multiple staff, so this year alone, we’ve had over 300 distinct member participants in our programmes. and we want to grow that in two to three years to five hundred participants a year. So, we have a major expansion plan going on right now. We’re out there in key cities having events, recruiting members and hopefully providing value.
What kind of commitment do you require from your members? You mentioned that individuals need the capacity to make at least US$10,000 in donations, but is there a scale of community membership fees?
We try to be very accessible and open. Our membership gifts, as we call them, are US$750 for an individual and their family and US$$1,500 for an institution, because they have multiple potential participants. Over time, some of our members, as they realise this isn’t just a transactional relationship where they pay dues and they get some services, but they’re actually helping to build a movement, will give more. And we fundraise on top of our membership dues. We have an annual gala and we solicit some grants. I would say our membership revenue is about a third of our budget. Fundraising is another third, and some special grants are in there as well. We also offer a bi-annual Symposium with The Philanthropic Initiative, an advisory firm out of Boston, and we raise sponsorship money from that. It’s the Innovations in International Philanthropy Symposium happening September 7 and 8 in Boston.
Frankly, one of my disappointments is that philanthropy serving organisations, particularly donor networks, are often in competition with each other. We don’t collaborate enough.
Is that the hard part, finding the extra money?
Yes. I’m sure you’re hearing this from other people that you’re interviewing, too. The struggle is in convincing the larger foundations in the sector to support the infrastructure because if we want to solve global problems, we have to reach these individuals who are the bulk of the giving overseas. Too do that, to mobilise them and to make them more effective, you have to build out the infrastructure, you have to provide some staffing to support them, and to connect them you need the online infrastructure. For instance, we just instituted something called Mighty Networks which allows our members to directly connect with each other, to share information about all their grantees and to invite others to join them in events. Amplifying the work of all the discrete donor and funder entities requires investing in the infrastructure.
What’s your argument when you go to these big foundations to try and persuade them to put their hand in their pocket?
Well, it’s pretty basic. We can do more if we do it together. We can inspire more if we’re talking to each other. We can do it better if we’re learning from folks on the ground. A lot of donors in the US don’t have a way to hear the voices, the needs, the priorities of people on the ground, but we make that possible through our webinars where we bring them in to talk directly to our members. If we want to make change happen, we’ve got to invest in the infrastructure to do it.
Do you set an agenda? Do people come and join and then more or less find their own way, or do you give any sort of steer?
People usually come in with their priorities already set and they’re generally people with international giving experience. Only about 14 per cent who come into our network have not given internationally before. So, they come in with their passions, their investments, but they want to see where their work fits into the bigger picture. They want to know what they can learn from other donors and other NGOs doing the work, and they often bring those learnings back to the organisations that they’re on the boards of or that they’re major donors to. So, they come in and get more, frankly, sophisticated about the field that they are giving in. But in the process, they’re exposed to other sectors, other organisations, other donors, and what we find is they often expand their giving into other areas. When you hear a peer talk about why they give to a certain organisation to solve a certain problem, that is so much more effective than reading a report or a news article. The Hewlett Foundation came out with a report a few years ago that showed that the most effective donor education is peer-to-peer. So, we help them connect and talk with each other, and we also bring experts into the room, but many of our folks are experts already.
So a rough analogy would be a university where most of the learning takes place not in the formal lectures or tutorials, but actually in bars or drinking coffee round a kitchen table.
That’s absolutely correct. In fact, I am in a leadership development programme at Harvard right now and we get great lectures, we can attend any class we want, but really, the best learning is from the other people in the program. So that’s the kind of atmosphere that we’re trying to cultivate here.
You have a number of thematic areas on your website – climate change, human trafficking, etc – who sets those?
I would say about 80 per cent of our programming is driven by member interests, but our staff and our programme committee have their ears to ground. They’re hearing new trends and opportunities, so we also present to our members cutting-edge issues and new approaches that they would not necessarily have heard of before. So, it’s a mix, but we’re very member-responsive. Every year, both in the membership applications or reapplications and in a summer survey, we assess what the interests are of our members. We know they’re funding all the 17 SDGs, but we can see that there’s a large cluster focused on climate change, a large cluster on global health and a large cluster on education. Geographically, we have a lot of Haiti donors, interestingly enough, and we have a lot of Africa donors. So we have four affinity groups, one in global health, one in global education, one on Africa, one on Haiti to help those people find each other and share what they’re doing in those areas. But the topics of our giving circles, of which we have two or three every year, change and are determined by our members and our surveys. We’ve had three or four giving circles already related to climate change. We’ve had some related to justice – we had a global racial justice giving circle and an economic justice giving circle – we’ve had an immigrant and refugee giving circle, girls education giving circle, and more. What’s unique about us is, as a I said before, we try to break down silos because you can’t solve poverty unless you educate girls. You can’t educate girls unless you provide clean water. You can’t solve climate change unless you’re training smallholder farmers on how to sequester carbon in the soil. You just can’t solve these problems in silos.
Looking at your website, I’m impressed by the reach of what your community does. It’s very nuts-and-bolts – providing five ambulances in a region of Ghana, training for boys in Kenya – it’s often very grassroots.
The giving circles are very grassroots, and the nominations for grantees come from the members of the giving circle, and they’re often deeply embedded in Ghana or Nicaragua, or wherever, so they nominate organisations and then all the circle members vote. But they’re wrestling with how to read proposals, how to make choices between these organisations so they’re learning from other philanthropists how to be equitable and how to be as effective as they possibly can be.
How do you go about tracking the effects of your members’ work? Is that important to you?
It is very important to us, but it’s almost impossible for us to track the ultimate impact on the ground because there’s so many causal factors. So, what we track primarily is the impact on our members. As I mentioned, we do an annual survey where we assess our member satisfaction with the programming, but also their sense of community, how strong they feel bonded to the community because that’s the driver of all we do. So, we have developed a baseline and we are now measuring the increase – hopefully – in each of our members’ philanthropic output globally year-to-year. We also measure how many grantees they give to, and we’re measuring how many meaningful connections they have to other NEID members. But ultimately, we wish we could address the impact on the ground. The US$650,000 we’ve given through giving circles is one form of impact we can measure, but those contributions are just the tip of the iceberg because the members participate in the circle and then their ongoing giving is influenced so that they’re personally giving more to those particular grantees or that sector. It’s a tiny indication of where people’s philanthropy will flow in the future.
Just to be clear, you set up the giving circles, but do you also fund them?
NEID Global doesn’t fund them directly; the members fund the chosen grantees through a Giving Circle platform called Grapevine. They put twelve hundred dollars in the pot at the beginning of the giving circle. For instance, we had an Oceans Giving Circle recently. If you’ve got 20 members in a circle, it’s more than US$20,000 to start with, but by the end of the seven sessions that we hold, people double the pot, so generally we have forty to fifty thousand dollars to grant out to about four organisations. We ask for only $1,200 in the pot because we want to get people in the door. We don’t want the dollar amount to be any impediment to testing the water, so to speak.
Looking at your various initiatives, which do you see as the most successful?
I would say these giving circles are a signature offering for sure. There’s over 2,000 giving circles in the US, but only a handful that are globally-focused. We’re modelling how to do international giving circles, which we know are so effective because of the community element. The other thing we do, as I mentioned earlier, is offer a symposium every other year in partnership with The Philanthropic Initiative. It’s a day and a half and it’s on philanthropic approaches that one can use when doing global philanthropy, and we get hundreds of people who attend each one. We had a virtual one two years ago which was incredibly successful, and we had speakers from many, many countries coming in, so we were exposing people to a broad swathe of the international development community. I would say that’s also a signature accomplishment of NEID Global and The Philanthropic Initiative.
Conversely, any disappointments – things you’ve tried and they’ve not worked as well as you’d hoped?
Frankly, one of my disappointments is that philanthropy serving organisations, particularly donor networks, are often in competition with each other. We don’t collaborate enough. We’re in competition for dollars and we’re in competition for members. But, at NEID Global, we’re trying to model something different, so we’re actively building partnerships. We are developing a half-day forum with a group called Confluence Philanthropy, which focuses on impact investing particularly around climate change. So we’re leveraging the resources, the members, the staff of that network and exposing our members to it as a resource for them. We also held a half-day session called ‘Linkages’ with the Women Moving Millions network on finding and funding women climate change leaders from around the world. We want to do a lot more of that and our symposium is one way that we showcase other leaders and networks in the global philanthropy sphere. So that’s one area of personal angst. The other would be that it is not easy to convince big foundations to fund infrastructure or the kind of work we do because it’s not visible. Likewise, individual donors often want to see on-the-ground work for themselves; they want to visit the ultimate beneficiaries in other parts of the world. You can’t see or touch so well the software you use to connect members together, for instance. It’s just harder to convey that the infrastructure, the staffing, the systems, are what make the music in a network – and facilitate the ultimate work on the ground.
You’d think the foundations would get it more readily than individual donors, given the view they have over the sector.
You would think, but the big foundations want metrics. They want to measure what happens on the ground, understandably. What’s the ultimate impact of your work for that farmer in Nigeria, for that woman in Bolivia? You can’t really with integrity make a direct line from the kind of work we do to that ultimate impact.
You talked about competition. There are quite a lot of infrastructure bodies or philanthropy support organisations in the US. They’re not doing the same thing you are, but is there a finite amount that foundations are willing to give to infrastructure – ‘we’ve funded X, so we’re not going to fund Y’?
I don’t know. I’ve recently heard about a group of infrastructure funders but whether they have portions of their budget that they allocate to this kind of international work or not, I don’t know. I think the importance of funding infrastructure is a very new realisation for many of the larger foundations and I think they’re still pioneering how to go about it, how to make choices, where to invest.
The thrust of your work is getting more US philanthropy dollars overseas. How much of a barrier to that have post-9/11 and money laundering restrictions been?
One of the benefits of a network like ours is that we can help our members navigate those restrictions. Many of our grantees through the giving circles, for instance, don’t have a US 501C3 charitable status, but we connect those grantees to intermediaries who can manage the grants according to US legal guidelines. Likewise, we can help connect donors who discover an organisation they want to fund some place that doesn’t have that tax deductible status to the intermediaries or the fiscal agents they need to facilitate the gift. But that has typically not been a barrier to giving. There’s so many tools out there. We just have to connect those resources to the members. We’re not philanthropic advisors, we’re not helping each philanthropist determine their individual strategy, but we’re the connectors to the resources that help them do it.
How do you see your most important contribution to the sector? Is it creating that community that you talked about earlier?
Yes, and we’re building a movement. We’re changing mindsets. We’re making it the norm for people to give internationally. Fortunately, the amount of dollars going internationally has increased year to year over the last two to three years, but it needs to increase so much more. You need to make it commonplace, like everybody in your neighbourhood does it or all the family foundations have a portion of their portfolio that goes internationally. We did an event recently with the National Center for Family Philanthropy, and we had over 160 participants who wanted to learn about giving globally. So I think opening people’s minds is our most important contribution, and then giving them real tangible examples of how they can invest and make a difference.
In a sense, you’re trying to create a snowball effect, to create momentum behind …
Yes! We’re really about building a movement and, to do that, we have to have nodes of members in other parts of the US beyond New England. We’re actively recruiting members in Northern California, in Chicago, in New York, we’re going to explore Denver and Washington, DC, for instance. We have to create the energy in these places where there’s a lot of philanthropic capacity and curiosity and commitment. So, it’s about moving from community to movement.
You’ve incorporated perspectives on indigenous philanthropy, on racial equity into your work. Is that something that’s recent. that’s come about because of a general change in sentiment?
Yes. I think we’re all growing. The last few years have been a watershed of awareness about different kinds of oppression, and that’s why we had a giving circle focused on global racism. We also had a pillar of our last symposium and of this coming symposium focused on racial equity in philanthropy. We have convened a commission to focus on how we can move the global philanthropic sector towards more racial equity in our philanthropic practice, so that’s core to our work right now. But also we’ve become aware of indigenous-led philanthropy so we had a giving circle focused on investing in funds led by indigenous people and we just concluded an economic justice giving circle because we’ve become more aware of the fact that the lack of worker rights, the lack of a voice in the political system, in the taxation system often leads to suffering and poverty. We’re sharing the fact that a charity mindset does not get to the root of these problems. You have to look at the lack of rights, at the injustices that undergird everything.
Is that a big change for your community?
Yes, but our members are very open to this. It’s been a change for me, too. I felt that I was enlightened and funded with a rights-based orientation, but I didn’t realise how much I didn’t know about injustice in this country and abroad until I took deep dives through NEID, and through my own reading to understand the roots of the problem. In fact, today, in a couple of hours we’re having a discussion with a former professor from Harvard (who is now leading a foundation)on the evolution of concepts of human rights and how we can apply those to our own philanthropy.
I believe the passion is there, and once some of those folks have more of the financial resources, they’ll do incredible things, but we have to give them ways to engage that are easy, accessible, effective and really make a difference in the life of the donor.
You’ve got this set of aims – building a community, inspiring donors and grantmakers in the US to give more internationally and expanding virtual and in-person events. These are developing what you’re already doing. Do you see any changes of direction coming along?
There’s one somewhat new orientation for us which is also seeing the NGOs, the grantees of our members, and the grantees from our giving circles, as a secondary constituency. Ultimately, those are the people we are aiming to serve. I’m sure you’re very aware of the discussions around trust-based philanthropy, and we try to emulate those practices in our giving circles where we’re listening to the wishes and the direction of the leaders on the ground. And we’re lowering our barriers, our prescriptions for how they should apply for funds from us. We’re trying to model true partnership because we’re all in this together. That emphasis on the grantees as our constituents is a fairly new shift for us.
Listening to you talk, you say ‘we’ and I don’t get the sense of strong distinction between those running the organisation and the organisation itself. Is that another element of community?
Yeah, we have a tiny staff of four. We’re small but mighty. We have a very active board who run committees and often lead our giving circles and our webinars. So again, we’re leveraging the expertise of the members, and the staff is essentially providing the opportunities for the members to teach and share. So, yes, there’s not a strong distinction. Our staff are incredibly knowledgeable and capable but at heart, we are not a staff-centred, staff-directed organisation.
Talking about the NGOs as a constituency, you’re removed from them in the US. How do you hear those voices from the ground? Are they mediated through your members?
We’re really intentional about having leaders from the ground in all our webinars. While we bring in the PhD experts and the CEOs of international NGOs, they’re always coupled with, say, the leader of the Human Trafficking Organisation in the Philippines, or someone from doing ocean conservation in Timor-Leste. This is a shift in the last couple years. Now that we have virtual programmes, we can bring those people in. We’re always trying to bring our members face to face with the ones who are doing the work on the ground.
Thinking five years ahead, where would you like to see NEID and what do you need to get there?
Let me talk about three years ahead, first of all. We have a strategic plan to have 500 individual member participants in our programmes. We want to be very active in five hubs of the United States plus have members throughout the country. I mentioned before we now have members from 22 States, but some states only have a couple of members each. We need to really build out the membership. Each one of our members and NEID Global as a whole are changemakers. We want to be the go-to place for global philanthropy from the US. Nothing too small!
For a small organisation, that seems a tall order.
Yes, we need more investment, we need more staff. Particularly we need at least part-time staff on the ground in these geographic hubs, because facilitating in-person connections is really key to building long-term relationships and the community. So, yes, it’s a tall order and we’re looking for the funding to get there, because we don’t have time to waste. I don’t need to tell you that the climate catastrophe is here and a US$30 trillion wealth transfer will happen in the US by 2040. Where’s that money going to go? Some of it’s going to go to philanthropy, and we don’t want 94 per cent of that to go just in the US. We need to capture that money to go globally but we need to lay the foundation now so that people are motivated to do that.
It gives you hope. Even with Covid, we have made so much progress as humanity in eradicating poverty, in improving global health outcomes, in educating more girls.
How optimistic are you about that? A new generation brings its own ideas, but then they tend to settle to a more conservative outlook as they get older. Then again, it’s a generation that has had different experiences, that can see climate change happening, that is aware of ethical consumerism and racial injustice. So how optimistic are you?
I’m incredibly optimistic. I was on the board of a group called call Millennium Campus Network which is training thousands of students every year to make a social impact. And they have ten times as many applicants as there are members. There’s so much passion and drive and a sense of urgency amongst the younger generation that are in college now, or even ten years out of college and a true spirit of innovation and partnership. I believe the passion is there, and once some of those folks have more of the financial resources, they’ll do incredible things, but we have to give them ways to engage that are easy, accessible, effective and really make a difference in the life of the donor. The most moving thing to me has been to see how being engaged in global philanthropy changes the philanthropist and the people who are lucky enough to work with these foundations. It broadens your mind, expands your heart and makes your life so much richer. So, it’s really a two-way street. When we give, we get so much in return.
Looking back over the NEID experience, what’s your greatest source of satisfaction?
I think it’s that. It’s very personal. It’s seeing the lives of the philanthropists change and then infect others with their passion. It’s giving the young woman in her 30s who has just inherited the leadership of her family fund the opportunity to meet people who are 20 years further down the road and to develop her whole grantmaking portfolio based on the wisdom she’s gleaned from others. It’s seeing the couple who were professors at a local college inherit a fund and make seven million dollars a year in grants to grassroots organisations they never would have heard of without NEID, and this is by their own testimony. It’s seeing people come together to learn about an issue like ocean conservation and using the oceans as an engine to mitigate climate change, and seeing that once the giving circle ends, they don’t want to stop getting together. They take field trips together. They stay in communication. They’re changing the priorities in their lives and that’s infectious. When they share that with others, it motivates others to come alongside. So that’s my personal satisfaction in the work. And then the other thing is, I get to see all these communities around the world where our members have had an impact either through our giving circles or their own philanthropy. It gives you hope. Even with Covid, we have made so much progress as humanity in eradicating poverty, in improving global health outcomes, in educating more girls. We often don’t hear about all the positives because we’re trying to beat the drum about the ongoing need – but so much is changing in a positive way, and we’re part of it.
Andrew Milner is Features Editor at Alliance magazine.
This interview is being shared free-to-read as a part of the Propel Philanthropy interview project. In addition to this article series, Propel Philanthropy collects stories demonstrating that modest grants can drive but results. You can learn more here.
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