Category: The Next Series

At a moment of growing inequality and division, who is advancing the vanguard of economic and social progress to bolster our most vulnerable communities? Whose work is fostering the inclusive growth that ensures every individual thrives? Who will set the ambitious standards that mobilize whole industries, challenging their peers to reach new altitudes of social impact? 

In 2024, Impact Next — a new editorial flagship series from NationSwell — will spotlight the standard-bearing corporate social responsibility and impact leaders, entrepreneurs, experts, and philanthropists whose catalytic work has the potential to shape the landscape of progress amid urgent need for social and economic action.

For this installment, NationSwell interviewed Maggie Carter, Director of Social Impact at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Greg Behrman, CEO and Founder, NationSwell: Maggie, was there an early or formative experience that brought you into this work?

Maggie Carter, Director of Social Impact, Amazon Web Services (AWS): 

It all started with my mom, who always led by example. She was always giving back. Whether it was volunteering in my school library or serving hot meals and donating blankets and clothes to the homeless in the DC metro area, she was always giving her own time and bringing the family along for the journey.

When I was in college, we led our first Recycling Awareness Week to kick off recycling on campus, and that experience of building and running a grassroots campaign is where I first got the bug to do something with a purpose, and throughout my career I was fortunate to find roles that combined that passion with sports.

When I was leaving the NBA, I knew that I wanted to get closer to program delivery on the nonprofit side. I made the transition to the UN Foundation and UNICEF, which combined my focus areas: children, education, and health. And from there, I was pitching AWS and Amazon on what a partnership would look like around disasters, emergencies, and innovation. The AWS team said, would you be willing to come build this from the ground up? That’s how I got to where I am today.

Behrman, NationSwell: At AWS, the products are part of the impact — they’re at the center of things. Can you speak to the philosophy behind that model?

Carter, AWS: For us, it’s very much about how our technology has the potential to transform the ways organizations are delivering their programs or services to impact their communities and their beneficiaries. We look at our role as co-building solutions with organizations and helping them to scale their impact.

For example, in Rwanda, they are leveraging secure messaging and AI on AWS to more effectively and rapidly identify symptoms in cancer patients and connect them to oncologists when their symptoms worsen. In Rwanda there’s just one oncologist to over 3,000 cancer patients on average — there’s a huge demand and low supply of doctors, and by using this messaging app, we’re helping those cancer patients that need more critical care receive it sooner.

We also co-built a solution with a small organization called Operation Barbecue Relief, whose mandate is to feed those impacted by a disaster, as well as the first responders to disaster. So we designed a solution with them called Project Smoke — an application to help track and monitor their food supplies so they can better manage resources and deploy them where they’re needed most. 

Behrman, NationSwell: Is there anything else that feels very important and differentiated that people should know about this work?

Carter, AWS: Each of these solutions is repeatable and scalable, they’re not band-aids. For us, it’s important to stay laser focused on the unique value proposition that the AWS cloud has when we’re engaging with organizations in our key priority areas — specifically around disaster response, health equity, and environmental equity.

Behrman, NationSwell: Is there an attribute or an approach or a philosophy that guides your leadership that has helped to make you effective?

Carter, AWS: I put high expectations on myself and I lead by example, so it’s about finding that balance where there’s a high bar but also empathy for what is going on. 

It’s always been in my DNA to be the fixer, the builder, so shifting that mindset to where I’m coaching and enabling my team and my leaders to identify that path forward themselves — that’s been a big learning for me in the last two to three years. 

I’ll also add that it’s been amazing to see employees rise to the occasion. Shifting to this approach really helps them build confidence in themselves to find that path forward — it equips them to be successful critical thinkers, here and beyond.

Behrman, NationSwell: Who are some of the peer leaders you really admire that you want to shine a spotlight on?

Carter, AWS: One who really stands out is Jacqueline Fuller, formerly at Google.org — she is at the bleeding edge, and I was fortunate to work with her and her team when I was at UNICEF USA on some pretty strategic partnerships around Zika and Syrian refugees. I want to also mention Leisha Ward at Target, Paul Poman at Unilever, and Kayleen Walters, the head of impact at Minecraft. 

And finally, my mentor, Kathy Behrens at the NBA. Throughout my career, since I worked for Kathy, I’ve always thought to myself, “what would KB do?” What she’s been able to do with the NBA over time, launching NBA Cares, shifting to the social justice initiative, launching the foundation in the last few years — it’s been amazing to see.

Behrman, NationSwell: Are there any resources — books, essays, poems, quotes — that have informed your leadership that you might recommend to other leaders?

Carter, AWS: I love stories of perseverance — those human interest stories where you see what somebody was able to achieve when everybody doubted them, especially in sports.

I particularly love “The ‘99ers” — the documentary follows the U.S. women’s national soccer team that won the World Cup in 1999. I remember watching it live and crying about how this was opening up opportunities for future generations of women moving forward. I think that team gave women and young girls confidence in themselves to be able to push boundaries, to push the envelope, to go where other girls haven’t been able to before.

At a moment of unprecedented attention, investment, and opportunity for the emerging field of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), leaders are asking: Who is best preparing their organization for the society of the future? Who is innovating today to meet decades-long environmental and social goals? Who is setting standards that catalyze their industry’s change for the better? Who is defining what bold and aspirational look like — and how best to advance that work in practice?

Enter NationSwell’s ESG Next, an exemplary group of investors, executives, authors, philanthropists, social sector leaders, academics, and field builders who are helping to shape business as a force for social and environmental progress, advancing — and even pioneering — the most forward-thinking and effective programs, initiatives, technologies, methodologies, practices, and approaches.

For this installment, NationSwell interviewed Renee Wittemyer, Senior Director of Program Strategy at Pivotal Ventures, about the power of thinking big, the unique outcomes of a targeted universalist approach to impact, and why the internal work that leaders do on themselves matters as much as the external.

Greg Behrman, CEO + Founder, NationSwell: Can you tell us how your professional and personal journey led you to the work you’re leading today?

Renee Wittemyer, Senior Director of Program Strategy, Pivotal Ventures: My journey to this work wasn’t the result of one big, defining moment; it was a series of moments that led me to where I am today. My parents are immigrants from India. I spent my childhood going to India every two years, so even from a young age, I was able to see stark economic disparities with my own two eyes. It was a formative backdrop for my experience of the world. After college, I spent several years in East Africa. I lived in northern Kenya and I worked with a group of women in Samburu, and I became very immersed in the challenges they face on a day-to-day basis: lack of power, an inability to negotiate with the men of their village, the way gender roles within their cultural norms dictated how they show up and what they’re able to achieve. I was there on 9/11, and I remember so vividly that they came up to me and asked me what had just happened in my country, because the men in their village were withholding that knowledge from them.

It was such a stark moment: I realized they were relying on me, an outsider, as their entire access to important knowledge, as a link to the outside world. I began to think about how I can create opportunities for women to access power and information, and how technology can help enable equity and agency. My time with them gave me the passion and the lens I have for international development, for women’s groups, small business, entrepreneurship, and technology — and the intersections between those passions. I found my way to Pivotal Ventures, building a strategy inspired by Melinda French Gates, focused on supporting women’s leadership in tech and innovation, and I’ve been here ever since.  Currently, I lead the philanthropic efforts of Pivotal, weaving in my knowledge of what it takes to advance social progress in the U.S. across all our areas of focus.

Behrman: How would you define this moment for philanthropy and social impact work? Where are we, how did we get here, and where are we going?

Wittemyer, Pivotal Ventures: One of the biggest ways that philanthropy has changed in recent years is that we now do a better job of using the inputs of communities most impacted and having leaders with diverse lived experiences at the table to inform decision making.  The field has also become more diverse, with new leaders coming into philanthropy with different backgrounds that shape their points of view.  These changes have happened because leaders have been intentional about inclusion – in making funding decisions and building their teams.  We have made a big step in the right direction.

Looking to the future, I think it will be important for leaders in philanthropy to learn from the different promising approaches to philanthropy and embrace the fully diversity of strategies that are out there and reflect the needs of different communities, rather than holding onto one relatively narrow approach as the future of our field.

Behrman: What’s unique about the strategies, initiatives, and approaches you and your team are leading at Pivotal?

Wittemyer, Pivotal Ventures: When I had my interview at Pivotal, one of the questions a hiring director asked me was, “Can you think big enough?”

Thinking big is core to us at Pivotal Ventures. We’re focused on expanding opportunity and equality in the United States, and we advance that work through high-impact investments, partnerships, and advocacy. When I started, artificial intelligence (AI) was one of the fastest growing fields with potential for disruption . Women are underrepresented in tech more broadly, but when we looked at the emerging field of AI, the disparity was even more stark. So we thought big: we looked at what was coming, and we started laying out the building blocks  of a strategy so that women are represented in AI and have seats at the decision making tables. 

Thinking big here also means finding great partners who are looking at the root causes and pulling strategic levers in innovative ways. I’m thinking about Pivotal’s partnership with Judy Spitz, the head of Breakthrough Tech AI, an incredible program focused on supporting young women in undergraduate degrees. Her research showed that women who graduated from school with the relevant skills for AI often got slotted into generic roles in the tech industry — getting a job in AI is hard when you’ve just graduated, and even harder if you’re a woman. This program helps women gain practical experience in AI through internships and portfolio-building projects with companies , so they have the skills and experience needed to get AI jobs.

Another area we’re thinking big is around expanding access to mental health supports for young people. Since 2018, Pivotal has worked to address really urgent issues of mental wellbeing among young Americans. That work has taken a lot of forms: we’ve partnered with Harvard’s Center for Digital Thriving. This center aims to provide mental health resources for use in schools, homes, and clinical settings. With the increase in mental health needs and the shortage of professionals and therapists, providing educators and parents with effective tools is critical. As a parent of teenagers myself, I understand the importance of guiding our youth to thrive in our technology-saturated world.

I’d also hold up our partnership with Surgo Health and MTV on a youth mental health tracker that will combine surveys, contextual data, social media insights, and personal narratives to enhance our understanding of the mental health landscape for young people and drive equitable changes.

These approaches emphasize timely and accessible mental health support, with a focus on BIPOC and LGBTQ+ youths. It’s part of our belief in what we call a targeted universalist approach: meaning that if you help the subsets of a population that are the most disproportionately affected by a problem, then you’ve actually created a solution that helps everyone.

Behrman, NationSwell: Which leadership qualities do you actively practice, and how do they contribute to your efficacy?

Wittemyer, Pivotal Ventures: I want to say to other leaders that the internal work you do matters. It helps you understand how you show up, and why you show up at all. For me, I am a social scientist, which means I am always asking questions and reflecting on my leadership and role in the world. I’ve spent many years listening to people’s stories. I’ve lived with entrepreneurs in Bangladesh, I’ve ridden on buses in Tanzania, all just to get a sense of the little nuances that make up people’s lives, the small things that come together to build a culture. My hope is that these moments give me insight into how people from these communities are feeling, even if they’re not articulating it.

I take this passion for listening to people seriously: it’s core to who I am. It’s as important to the communities in which you operate as it is to the teams you manage: how are your people feeling, what does team culture look like, and how can you encourage other leaders to be more curious about it?

Behrman, NationSwell: Who are the leaders that inspire your leadership?

Wittemyer, Pivotal Ventures: One of the leaders who inspires me is Ai-jen Poo, the co-founder and president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Caring Across Generations, is an unwavering advocate for both paid and unpaid caregivers. At Pivotal, where we view caregiving as an impediment to women’s advancement in the U.S., Ai-jen has significantly raised awareness of America’s flawed caregiving system. Her push for solutions like paid leave, a core priority of ours, is truly inspiring. 

I am also inspired by Dr. Alfiee Breland-Noble, the founder and president of the AAKOMA Project. Since the inception of our adolescent mental health strategy, she has been an invaluable partner, bringing critical awareness to the mental health challenges faced by young people of color. Her team’s groundbreaking report on the mental health state of these youths—highlighting the impact of racial trauma and cultural stigma—has been a catalyst for change.

Promise Phelon, founder and managing partner of Growth Warrior Capital also inspires me. Her firm’s commitment to changing our work dynamics and wealth-building opportunities aligns with our values, making them a key partner. Promise is revolutionizing the venture capital (VC) world with her AI-powered platform, which streamlines the creation of essential materials for founders seeking VC funding. Her work is paving the way for a diverse range of entrepreneurs.

These three women are linked by their relentless drive and the common challenges they face as leaders in their fields. As they gain power and influence, they not only excel in their roles but also pave the way for others, embodying the very essence of leadership.

Behrman, NationSwell: What are you reading that inspires your leadership?

Wittemyer, Pivotal Ventures: I’m also inspired by an upcoming book by Dr. Fei-Fei Li. As a computer science professor at Stanford with a tenure at Google, Fei-Fei brings a wealth of knowledge from both academia and the tech industry. Her book, “The Worlds I See,” promises to offer profound insights. Also, she is the founder and chairperson of the nonprofit AI for All, an organization we’ve been partnering with since my arrival at Pivotal.

Fei-Fei was one of the first people I connected with here. Her vision for diversifying the AI field is something I deeply resonate with, especially the necessity for greater female representation. This is crucial not just for reducing bias in technology but also for fostering innovation and economic growth. The absence of women in these conversations has significant drawbacks.

Her book is especially poignant as it delves into her personal journey as an immigrant, detailing how she rose to become a preeminent AI leader. It’s a narrative that’s both emotionally charged and intimately tied to her professional achievements.

---

To learn more about how our ESG Next honorees are shaping business as a force for social and environmental good, visit the series hub. To learn more about NationSwell’s community of our country’s leading social impact and sustainability practitioners, visit our site.

At a moment of unprecedented attention, investment, and opportunity for the emerging field of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), leaders are asking: Who is best preparing their organization for the society of the future? Who is innovating today to meet decades-long environmental and social goals? Who is setting standards that catalyze their industry’s change for the better? Who is defining what bold and aspirational look like — and how best to advance that work in practice?

Enter NationSwell’s ESG Next, an exemplary group of investors, executives, authors, philanthropists, social sector leaders, academics, and field builders who are helping to shape business as a force for social and environmental progress, advancing — and even pioneering — the most forward-thinking and effective programs, initiatives, technologies, methodologies, practices, and approaches.

For this installment, NationSwell interviewed Maryanne Hancock, CEO of Y Analytics, about the importance of centering rigor in impact investing, ESG’s “Fearless Girl” moment, and the surprising lessons that impact leaders can learn from an economist and a can of beans.

Greg Behrman, CEO + Founder, NationSwell: Can you tell us how your professional and personal journey led you to this work?

Maryanne Hancock, CEO of Y Analytics: If I ever get asked to share a fun fact about myself, it’s that my parents were clergy before they met, married, and had me.  My father was a priest, and my mother was a nun, and they were both quite active in the social justice movement at large. My father founded programs for kids addicted to drugs during the late sixties and early seventies, a time when such programs were nonexistent. He met people at often vulnerable points in their lives, helping them build new lives. To this day, there are people alive due to the work he did.

My mother, as a nun, took to teaching in historically marginalized communities. This overall milieu of social work wasn’t just a job for them, but a way of life. Because of them, I’ve always believed you really need to stand in awe of the burdens that people carry, as opposed to in judgment. It’s a philosophy that encourages one to honor, assist, and appreciate people facing adversities, and the complexities of the adversities they face.

Originally, I aspired to become a human rights lawyer, pursuing an education in law, especially humanitarian and human rights law. But a detour through McKinsey shifted my journey. While I was there, I maintained a client roster from the private sector, and I engaged with industries I found fascinating, even if they weren’t glamorous — like waste management, logistics, and energy sectors. At the same time, I delved into social sector projects. Interestingly, the attendees at my logistics or waste management meetings hardly ever overlapped with those at my education or poverty alleviation discussions, which gave me the sense that these were inherently distinct swim lanes. But now at Y Analytics, whether it’s a company engaged in the circular economy and waste, or a fin-tech firm operating in Africa, I get to have all these different interests under a singular umbrella as part of my daily routine.

Behrman, NationSwell: How do you make sense of this moment in ESG? What’s the potential and the promise, and where are the pitfalls?

Hancock, Y Analytics: The image that comes to my mind for the moment we are in societally is the Fearless Girl statue — where you’ve got the bull and the little girl standing there, staring him down. The conventional interpretation of the scene is that the charging bull represents unfettered capitalism, or the “old boys club” of Wall Street, and the Fearless Girl symbolizes the pursuit of gender equality – a counterweight to the imposing minotaur with smoke coming out of its nostrils. 

But I think it symbolizes something bigger. To me, the bull represents this vast set of societal issues we grapple with every day – geopolitical unrest, war, climate change, a pandemic…some so big and so powerful that they feel unstoppable or immovable. 

And then, there’s this Fearless Girl, which symbolizes how we feel amidst all these challenges. But here’s the thing I’m left thinking about: while we can’t ignore the enormity of the challenges symbolized by the bull, what I’d love for everyone to do is to look around and realize that there are thousands of Fearless Girls facing them. The pitfall is to believe you are isolated , as if you’re the only Fearless Girl out there, yet what I see every day are thousands and thousands of people embodying that spirit. This includes teachers, nurses, doctors, firefighters, community members, and also Fearless Girl’s physical home in New York’s financial district underscores the role that entrepreneurs, and the millions of people who go to work every day in businesses, play in meeting the moment.

What’s been inspiring to me is witnessing real actions and conversations happening within businesses — conversations that were unimaginable just five years ago. While the collective efforts may not seem enough to combat the metaphorical bull, recognizing and affirming the existence of these millions of Fearless Girls is crucial. We’ll be a better force for good when we acknowledge how strong this collective truly is.

It’s undeniable that social impact and sustainability practitioners are facing headwinds right now, but there are tailwinds, too. And together, these winds are steering us to a zone of quieter, yet more authentic action. The tailwinds are strong, and interestingly, they align well with good business practices. For instance, utilizing lower-cost energy sources that are renewable is smart business. So is offering products that benefit rather than harm people, and implementing employee policies that create a desirable workplace amidst a talent-driven landscape. These factors reinforce the strength of the tailwinds.

On the flip side, the reality of legal repercussions, varying state approaches, the politicization of these issues, and the potential backlash for greenwashing, might lead to a toned-down announcement of new initiatives and commitments. And this quieter approach isn’t necessarily negative. In my view, it’s probably beneficial. The quieter stance doesn’t undermine the solid tailwinds and the consequential actions they encourage.

Behrman, NationSwell: What’s unique about the work you’re leading?

Hancock, Y Analytics: When the Rise Fund began in 2016, it aimed to accomplish a few objectives. One was to usher scaled capital into the impact space, as there were endeavors to fund social entrepreneurs onto a path of growth, yet they were lacking a significant pool of capital to propel them from early growth to a further stage. That was part of the concept. At that point, the largest impact fund stood at about $500 million while the average was about $200 million, but the Rise Fund came in at $2.1 billion, aiming to attract institutional capital. To ensure this, they committed from the get-go to treat the impact aspect as rigorously as the financial aspect. So they envisioned what later became Y Analytics, an organization meant to bolster capital into impact companies by increasing the confidence in their impact. That was the fundamental premise behind our creation. 

And as they came together, it was actually a call from Jerome Vascellaro, a longtime leader at McKinsey who was then the COO at TPG, and someone well known to my mentors, that led to my involvement. That first call was followed by an engrossing weekend brainstorming at the whiteboard about what this endeavor could evolve into. The prospect of being serious and rigorous about impact, coupled with people who could take action immediately, was just so intriguing to me personally. That’s what made me make the leap.

Here’s what I love the most about what we get to do: we get to turn to the vast amount of research that’s out there about what works to help some of these social and environmental ills, and channel that into our investment decisions and actually make a difference. It’s been so fascinating to observe the evolution of evidence-based approaches in different fields, from evidence-based medicine in the 1980s to evidence-based policymaking in the 1990s and early 2000s. Our big innovation, which I just loved so much, is that we started to do evidence-based impact investing at scale. This methodology allows us to tap into the profound knowledge of individuals who are dedicated experts in specific areas of their fields, from soil’s carbon capture potential to the impacts of digital banking on small to medium enterprises in emerging markets. It’d be almost problematic to leave that expertise on the table.

But it’s also about the unique capabilities of our team. Our roster has included nuclear physicists, economists, and others with diverse expertise; we can bridge the chasm between academic insights and investment professionals, translating intricate research into investment strategies. This human capability, which is unique to have nested within a private equity firm context, can help translate academic discourse and parse through the jargon for insights to inform actionable investment decisions. This multidisciplinary approach isn’t just cool, it’s immensely invaluable in driving forward our mission.

Behrman, NationSwell: To which leadership practices do you contribute your efficacy?

Hancock, Y Analytics: It all boils down to striving for authentic action. I think that’s the key. And by the way, we might not hit that mark every day, but that’s certainly our goal. 

There’s only one joke that I’ve ever been able to remember: You’ve got three folks on a deserted island, and there’s a chemist, an engineer, and an economist, and they have one can of beans and they’re trying to figure out how they’re going to open this can of beans. So the chemist says, well, if we heat it to a certain boiling point, it’s going to explode and we can get it open. And the engineer says, if we hit it against this rock just the right way, it’s going to pop open. And the economist says, assume we have a can opener. 

When I used to think about that, I would laugh and say, oh, that’s so silly. We all know someone who made a comment like that, but then as I delved into this work, I actually started to reflect on that. What if we all thought about what would happen if we had the can opener, that we had the tool we actually needed? We’d see the value of getting the can open quickly and safely, of conserving more beans because they didn’t explode, and seeing that value would actually inspire us to build the can opener, to create the tools we need. Even if it’s not perfect, or it’s just a prototype. It’s really helpful to have a working hypothesis.

Behrman, NationSwell: Who or what informs and inspires your leadership?

Hancock, Y Analytics: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s work with All We Can Save is astoundingly well-conceived, an incredible set of resources for folks, and I admire the heck out of the entire approach from there. And I know he’s a fellow ESG Next honoree, but George Serafeim’s work with impact-weighted accounts is ground-breaking. It’s one of the closest analogs to what we do at Y Analytics.

Sara Menker of Grow Intelligence is a phenomenal CEO, coming from the commodities trading world, originally from Ethiopia. She has created a data company that really has a finger on the pulse of agriculture, physical climate risks and trends around the world. For example, her data immediately identified the drivers behind the current food crisis. She could see that fertilizer prices were spiking. She could see that crops in parts of Asia were failing because it was too wet. 

And lastly, I admire my colleagues at TPG Rise who are investing for impact with so much integrity and success. 

My favorite book would be “Tattoos on the Heart” by Father Greg Boyle.  From a podcast perspective, Hank Paulson’s “Straight Talk”  is excellent. He hosts some fantastic guests and covers really diverse topics. And then, for the psychology of doing the hard work of good work, I love listening to the storytelling of Dr. Bertice Berry. She’s an author, she’s a speaker, she’s done academic work as well in psychology, and she also does daily digital storytelling.

---

To learn more about how our ESG Next honorees are shaping business as a force for social and environmental good, visit the series hub. To learn more about NationSwell’s community of our country’s leading social impact and sustainability practitioners, visit our site.

At a moment of unprecedented attention, investment, and opportunity for the emerging field of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), leaders are asking: Who is best preparing their organization for the society of the future? Who is innovating today to meet decades-long environmental and social goals? Who is setting standards that catalyze their industry’s change for the better? Who is defining what bold and aspirational look like — and how best to advance that work in practice?

Enter NationSwell’s ESG Next, an exemplary group of investors, executives, authors, philanthropists, social sector leaders, academics, and field builders who are helping to shape business as a force for social and environmental progress, advancing — and even pioneering — the most forward-thinking and effective programs, initiatives, technologies, methodologies, practices, and approaches.

For this installment, NationSwell interviewed Kim Dabbs, Global Vice President of ESG and Social Innovation at Steelcase and author of the upcoming book, You Belong Here on the importance of building a global learning community, the power of inclusive design, and the importance of centering the wellbeing of your teams and of other leaders.

Greg Behrman, CEO + Founder, NationSwell: Can you tell us about your professional and personal journey to this field?

Kim Dabbs, Global Vice President of ESG and Social Innovation, Steelcase: Belonging has been my North Star in the work that I do, both in the nonprofit sector and the corporate sector. I believe that everyone has a role to play in this, and part of my journey has been trying to figure out what each individual’s role is, and how to build safe spaces where everyone can be seen, heard and valued in the world.

That’s a journey that began in high school. I remember that early on, during the late ’80s and early ’90s, the AIDS crisis was devastating entire communities. I started volunteering with the AIDS Resource Center when I was a teenager, and through that, I discovered the power of collective action in effecting change.

When I was really young, I took a trip with the AIDS Resource Center to see the NAMES Project in Washington, DC. It was the last time the AIDS quilt was displayed in its entirety; it spanned the entire mall, showcasing art being used for activism and the power of collective impact. When people are confronted with issues in ways that they cannot look away from, that’s when real change happens. That experience truly kickstarted my journey.

Following that, I worked extensively in the nonprofit sector, focusing on arts, culture, and creativity, and the significant roles they play in the world. This path led me through endeavors into equity in education, and now into the work I do at Steelcase.

Behrman, NationSwell: How do you make sense of this moment in ESG? What is the potential and the promise, and where are the pitfalls?

Dabbs, Steelcase: We’re seeing before us the promise of collective action. Right now, I genuinely feel that a movement has been built. Everyone wants to make a difference, and how that difference is manifested varies from person to person, depending on the distinct capabilities or resources they bring to the table. But the task at hand is to align everyone towards the same direction. If we can build a global learning community centered around progress, that’s when real action can ensue. We have to approach this through a lens of abundance, not scarcity; through endless possibility, not fear. 

Yet, we all face resistance at some point in this journey. I see criticism as a good thing. I believe it always propels progress forward, and if you have criticism, it usually means you have a diverse range of people and perspectives at the table. But criticism can get unproductive when it comes at the expense of supporting one another. If we can center that support in our collective success when we make our criticism, I believe we can make a substantial difference in our lifetime. 

That’s easier said than done, and it’s important to remember that this is ongoing work. No matter the difference you and I make in our lifetime, there will always be another generation with their own set of challenges, and a generational workload ahead. Keeping this perspective in mind is crucial too.

Behrman, NationSwell: What’s unique about the work you’re leading at Steelcase?

Dabbs, Steelcase: We know that leaders at large organizations grapple with the questions of how to get better at actually sharing insights so what happens in Hong Kong can inform what’s happening in New York, which can in turn inform what’s happening in Mexico. The work that we’re doing here at Steelcase is about building a global learning community, about building the infrastructure for these conversations to happen. We focus on finding ways we can invite more people to the table, and finding more ways we can share insights, thought leadership, and best practices. The lab is really that community where we come together and say, “we’re going to learn from each other and with each other.”

That’s why we launched our Better Futures Community. Both our internal and external partners, as well as our clients and community partners, are involved because no single organization, industry, or sector has all the answers. The more we can come together and understand, the better. 

We do this through our Better Futures Lab, which is really about radically open innovation. We do this through the Better Futures Fund, which supports promising, new ideas in the areas of equity, education, and the environment, hoping to bring them to a point where we can design proof of concept together and then share it and embed it back into people’s value streams. And finally, we have the Better Futures Fellowship, which is an accelerator and incubator for bold new ideas around equity, education, and the environment. The last fellowship we had was around well-being and education, and the one before that focused on equity and education. We cover different topics every year.

A little bit of everyone’s involved in Better Futures at Steelcase: from our clients to nonprofit partners to architecture and design firms. A good example of this is our Better Futures work with G3ict. Together, we worked on understanding what inclusive design means for the world of work. We conducted a study with them last year to really build the blueprint for the inclusive workplaces of the future.

Because of that research, Better Futures helped support our own inclusive design practice here at Steelcase. As a result, we’re joining coalitions like the Valuable 500 to make inclusive design core to our strategy at Steelcase, and core to how we help create workplaces in the world. It’s really about understanding where that shared value lies, and where we have a chance to actually make a difference, impacting not just the lives of our employees, but the lives of all our clients as well when we bring these concepts into action.

We’re in it for the long haul. People talk about long-term value. For us, it’s always about understanding that change won’t be instant. This is long-term iteration, partnering side-by-side to say, “hey, let’s try to move the needle. Some things are going to work, some things aren’t, but we’re really committed to it.” And if we learn things along the way, we have to share it with others to shorten their innovation time concerning what works and what doesn’t. So, we’re constantly publishing, sharing, and using public forums to help people see and understand. 

With the launch of the lab, part of it is understanding that nonprofit organizations are often focused on the local level, which they should be, but they’re not often plugged into that global community. So, we’re trying to figure out how we use our global scale to help them see different perspectives, get to know each other, and understand new approaches.

Behrman, NationSwell: What would be valuable for other leaders in the field to know about what you and your team have learned?

Dabbs, Steelcase: Last year, our community was dealing with the trauma of the police-involved shooting death of Patrick Lyoya. In that moment, the first thing that we did was reach out to our community partners and give wellbeing dollars to the leaders of the organizations that were on the ground doing community response work, because we knew that there was nothing more essential than supporting people on the frontlines. I remember telling them, “You decide how you spend that wellbeing money, just do something to take care of you. Whatever it takes; you get to decide. But just know that we’re here to support you in your journey as a leader and that your wellbeing matters just as much as the people that you’re serving.”

The people on your teams are the people who are in this work, professionally and personally. We’ve learned that wellbeing is critical. How leaders take care of their teams, how leaders take care of other leaders — all of that matters. 

At our team, we start every team meeting with our team norms. And just the repetition of those norms on a weekly basis keeps everyone focused on the same things, helps everyone understand why we’re doing this work. Little rituals like that that are not to be underestimated in this really deep, heavy, forever work.

Behrman, NationSwell: To which of your leadership practices do you attribute your efficacy?

Dabbs, Steelcase: If you’re going to be a leader in this space and be successful in your leadership, you have to be radical and revolutionary. You have to act with bravery. You are delivering hard news to systems that don’t want to change. So in order to do this work, you need to have the resilience to be able to do that. 

We have to challenge the way things are. And if you’re willing to interrogate systems, if you’re willing to act with bravery, if you’re willing to speak truth to power, those are the things that are going to change the world. And those are things that I try to do every single day.

If a table isn’t set for equity and justice, I’m not going to pull up a chair to that table. I’ll build my own. 

Behrman, NationSwell: Who are the fellow leaders who inspire your leadership?

Dabbs, Steelcase: I think everyone’s doing tough work, right? The majority of people that I find incredibly inspiring are the people on the ground doing the work. I used to be a single parent, going to college, working two jobs, living on the streets. I’ve experienced homelessness. And to me, the people that I look at, it’s really, truly the people that I serve. 

When I look at the adversity that people have to overcome with systems that are difficult, those are the people we should really hold up as leaders. So there are people and organizations that obviously are making a difference, whether that be Acumen, Ashoka or others, that are building these powerful, beautiful networks to make impact happen. But at the end of the day, the people that continuously inspire me are the people that have the most to lose.

At a moment of unprecedented attention, investment, and opportunity for the emerging field of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), leaders are asking: Who is best preparing their organization for the society of the future? Who is innovating today to meet decades-long environmental and social goals? Who is setting standards that catalyze their industry’s change for the better? Who is defining what bold and aspirational look like — and how best to advance that work in practice?

Enter NationSwell’s ESG Next, an exemplary group of investors, executives, authors, philanthropists, social sector leaders, academics, and field builders who are helping to shape business as a force for social and environmental progress, advancing — and even pioneering — the most forward-thinking and effective programs, initiatives, technologies, methodologies, practices, and approaches.

For this installment, NationSwell interviewed Anna Walker, Vice President of Impact and Issues at Levi Strauss & Co., on the unique strengths of an organization’s employees to inform corporate action, the undersung value of employee resource groups, and why coalition building is as much about the “where” as the “who.”

Greg Behrman, CEO + Founder, NationSwell: Can you tell us about your professional and personal journey to this field?

Anna Walker, Vice President of Impact and Issues, Levi Strauss & Co.: I went to graduate school for international economics with a focus on developing economies because I thought — very idealistically — that my path was leading me to work at a United Nations agency, that I’d make my contribution to the world through my work there. So while I was in graduate school, I got my opportunity to intern with the UN through the High Commissioner for Refugees, and it showed me that UN agencies are, by necessity, large, slow-moving, bureaucratic, and probably not a fit for me and my long-term goals. 

That’s why I made my way to the apparel industry: it aligned perfectly with my interests in development economics, and in helping countries moving up the development ladder, because it’s an industry that countries pursue when they’re moving forward on their economic development trajectory, transitioning from subsistence agriculture to labor-intensive industries. And Levi’s was the perfect fit within the apparel industry because it was so committed to supporting responsible practices in the supply chain and supporting workers there. 

Now, Levi’s is 170 years old this year. For most of its history, it owned its manufacturing. But in the 1980s, it transitioned from owned factories to overseas facilities. Employees asked the company, “How are we going to take care of the workers, and ensure the same level of care that they have as our own employees when the factories are owned by others and we’re just sourcing the production?” Because our employees asked our leadership that question, Levi’s was one of the first organizations to have a code of conduct for a global supply chain. Listening and responding to employee is a big part of Levi’s organizational DNA, and a big part of how I knew I’d found the right organization for me. 

Behrman, NationSwell: How do you define this moment in ESG? 

Walker, Levi Strauss + Co: This question is so fresh on my mind because we’ve been analyzing the challenges to ESG and so-called “woke capitalism” following the reaction to Bud Light and Target during Pride month — high profile cases of intense backlash that are such a part of this ESG moment. 

Levi’s is a fairly outspoken progressive company that really believes in using our voice to support the issues that our employees care about and that intersect with our business, and we used the backlash as an inflection point to brief leadership. We told them that we’re very cognizant of this changing environment, we assured them that we’ve taken some time to really stare down how it went for these other companies and why it went the way it did, and informed them of what we were going to do moving forward: remain consistent. Companies stumble when they try to change direction or appease a certain audience in a manner inconsistent with what they’ve said or done in the past. Consistency will be the key: it helps us adhere to what we can control and show up in the places where we can show up authentically.

Another big learning we’ve taken from the moment is that often, if you’ve already been outspoken on something, neutrality or silence isn’t going to be acceptable. Silence can be deafening, and stakeholders have come to count on you to be out there, to be supportive, and to be engaged. And sitting one out can often look like the wrong kind of engagement to them.

Behrman, NationSwell: What’s unique about the work you’re leading at Levi’s?

Walker, Levi Strauss + Co: I’m proud to say that through our long history, most of what we’ve been outspoken advocates on and built our social impact programs around — it’s all been rooted in our employees, rooted in what they’ve come to us and said matters to them, because it’s keeping them up at night or because they’re excited to take part in it.  

In the ’80s, we came out in support of employees dealing with HIV/AIDS, even before the disease had a name. We did that because employees came to us concerned about friends and family, and asked the company’s leadership to do something. They’ve held us accountable, and they keep us engaged. Because it’s real for them, it keeps our engagements from being one-and-done; they’re the reason why whatever we do will be far more authentic, genuine, and enduring. 

That’s what happened with our efforts around gun violence prevention. Our employees asked us how we’re going to support a safer America, which sparked us to create a threefold plan: first, we created the Safer Tomorrow Fund to give to organizations addressing community-based violence; second, we advocated to support efforts for common sense gun safety legislation at the federal level; and third, we engaged and informed employees to give them opportunities to volunteer and give, if they were interested.

When we started to build a broad coalition of companies working with us and supporting similar ends, it was slow-going at first. We sent a letter to the House of Representatives supporting the bipartisan background checks bill. And we only had three CEOs on it when we went to the House. But then, come fall of that same year, we had over a hundred CEOs on the letter when it went to the Senate. And last summer, when the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed, we had over 300 CEOs on the letter supporting Congressional action.  

We’re really proud to be a first mover, to be a bold mover that leverages its globally recognized brand name to build a big tent and create the safe space for other companies to join us in the advocacy. We’re going to be most effective when we’re using our brand to build coalitions and bring others along. 

Behrman, NationSwell: In the case of gun violence prevention, what helped you build such an effective coalition?

Walker, Levi Strauss + Co: It’s all about finding good partners. In the case of gun violence, we worked with Everytown and Giffords, and they’ve been really willing to roll up their sleeves and help to make it happen, to help to build the materials, and to engage and be there as experts when companies have questions. We’re not experts in gun violence prevention the way these groups are, so finding those partners that get the value of bringing the business case to advocacy is key.

As we’ve built coalitions, we’ve learned that it’s not only about who your partner is, but about where your partner is — especially when it comes to congressional advocacy. You know what members of Congress will support a bill, you know who is going to oppose it, and in the middle of all of that is the potential gettables you’ll actually need to make something happen. If you can find the companies that are their constituents in their home states, they’re the best advocates  to those members of Congress to make the case.

Behrman, NationSwell: How does Levi’s decide when to speak out or take action as an organization?

Walker, Levi Strauss + Co: Those actions all come to be through different channels. When the Dobbs decision on reproductive rights leaked, we were ready to issue a statement immediately because employees from our women’s Employee Resource Group (ERG), two years before the draft ruling leaked, asked for a meeting with our CEO and sat down with him to have a conversation on the landscape of women’s rights. 

Traditionally, ERGs allow employees from diverse backgrounds to find each other and deepen their bonds to one another, but they’re also an effective tool for surfacing to leadership those early signs of what’s on the horizon, and what your organization can do about it. Because that conversation happened years prior, we’d already had a lot of internal conversations and got our internal policies and programs in place to be able to move quickly. 

Levi’s CEO is Chip Bergh, and we do a monthly “Chip(s) and Beer” that’s sort of an ask me anything-style town hall with the CEO. That’s where a few of our advocacy and philanthropy actions have started from questions and concerns voiced by employees. Not only is it a powerful forum for directly learning what’s on employees’ minds, it helps you to create and maintain a culture of openness. 

Behrman, NationSwell: To which of your leadership practices do you attribute your efficacy?

Walker, Levi Strauss + Co: I have a smart, creative team that’s willing to try new things, take risks. I try to be the wind beneath their wings, I try to ask a lot of good questions, poke around corners, and support them to test, scale, and find what works and what fits. I encourage speed and smart risk-taking so that we always have time to course correct if we get it wrong. 

Really good leadership comes from finding really good people who are motivated, care, who are purpose and mission aligned with the organization and have a lot of energy about what they do.

Behrman, NationSwell: Who are the leaders who inspire your leadership?

Walker, Levi Strauss + Co: I’m inspired by Vicki Shabo, Senior Fellow, Better Life Lab, New America. Vicki is always advocating and innovating to make paid family leave universally available. I think of Michael Kobori, Chief Sustainability Officer at Starbucks Coffee Company, because he’s always willing to try new things, and he’s unceasingly supportive of his team. Worked along side him at LS&Co. And Hilary Dessouky, General Counsel at Patagonia, as well as Corley Kenna, Head of Communications and Policy at Patagonia, because they’ve been part of making some of the most sustainable business practices and best policies for Patagonia employees happen, and made sure to share those best practices with the rest of the business community.

At a moment of unprecedented attention, investment, and opportunity for the emerging field of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), leaders are asking: Who is best preparing their organization for the society of the future? Who is innovating today to meet decades-long environmental and social goals? Who is setting standards that catalyze their industry’s change for the better? Who is defining what bold and aspirational look like — and how best to advance that work in practice?

Enter NationSwell’s ESG Next, an exemplary group of investors, executives, authors, philanthropists, social sector leaders, academics, and field builders who are helping to shape business as a force for social and environmental progress, advancing — and even pioneering — the most forward-thinking and effective programs, initiatives, technologies, methodologies, practices, and approaches.

For this installment, NationSwell interviewed Miriam Warren, Chief Diversity Officer at Yelp, about how her childhood home was the beginning of her journey to the field, the three questions she asks herself before pushing for corporate action amid pivotal social moments, and the fellow leaders that inspire her leadership.

Greg Behrman, CEO + Founder, NationSwell: How did your professional and personal journey lead you to this work?

Miriam Warren, Chief Diversity Officer, Yelp: My journey started as early as my earliest memories. I grew up in a home where I was the only person of color, and the only one who looked like me. Growing up without other Filipinos meant that I was always trying to understand how I fit in with my family, and more broadly, what family means. I didn’t have the words for it then, but that was the early spark that had me thinking about building communities where different people (myself included) can feel like they belong. 

I found my way to the corporate world, and eventually to Yelp, where I built the some of the first communities of contributors to the site. Eventually, I turned that same attention inward to help build the employee community at Yelp as its first Chief Diversity Officer. 

I feel grateful to be able to do work that is meaningful, helps others, and brings light to issues that aren’t talked about enough.

Behrman, NationSwell: How do you make sense of this moment in ESG? Where are we now, and where do you think we’re going?

Warren, Yelp: Despite the narrative that some parts of society want you to believe, the idea that businesses have social responsibility is not a new one. From the emergence of the cooperative movement in the late 19th century to the creation of the first corporate charitable foundation in the early 20th century, plenty of historical influences—Quaker principles, labor movements, and fair trade practices, among them—have laid the groundwork for demonstrating that businesses have a broader responsibility to society.

More importantly, the idea isn’t going anywhere. The stakes feel even higher than before, whether we are talking about political polarization, climate crises, social and economic inequalities, or any number of other core issues that define and threaten our society. Businesses will play a critical role in supporting their customers, communities, employees, and other stakeholders, particularly to the extent that other institutions that have historically served them are failing.  

Behrman, NationSwell: What are some of the programs, strategies, or initiatives you’re leading at Yelp into which other field builders should have visibility?

Warren, Yelp: We should all strive to be more proactive and less reactive, and the way to do that is to have a preexisting framework for evaluating issues so that we can feel like we are happening to the issues and not the other way around. 

Yelp’s framework asks three questions: how does the issue map to our values? Does it matter to our stakeholders? And most importantly, are we uniquely positioned—through our platform or our business—to drive positive impact?

Let’s take reproductive healthcare access as an example. Our values align with the notion that bodily autonomy matters. It was also clear that the issue matters to our employees, many of whom are located in states contemplating or enacting restrictive abortion bans. We hoped to drive positive change by introducing a travel benefit to ensure healthcare equality for all our workers regardless of what state they were in. We also knew that consumers use our platform to find reliable information about reproductive healthcare services, and that we were therefore uniquely positioned to help them find what they were looking for.     

Behrman, NationSwell: To which leadership practices do you attribute your success? 

Warren, Yelp: I have always felt strongly about the concept of calling people in, not calling them out. We’re all on a learning journey, especially in this type of work. At one time or another we’re going to use the wrong words or frame a situation in a potentially problematic way. I want to cultivate an environment where people can make mistakes and know they have space to learn from it.

It takes a lot of energy to do this work and to maintain the grace, compassion, and patience to meet people where they are. I welcome the opportunity to explain why people use different pronouns than you. I’m happy to discuss your confusion over Black History Month. I won’t lose my cool when it comes to enumerating the challenges that many women, and particularly mothers, face in the workplace. My goal is to engage positively, and if someone feels positively toward me, there’s a good chance they’re going to walk away with a better understanding of why these issues matter to others if not to them.       

Behrman, NationSwell: Who are the leaders that inspire your leadership?

Warren, Yelp: Rodney Foxworth is always at the top of my list. His mission-driven work is incredibly inspiring to me and informs a lot of the way I think about many things, from economic development and philanthropy, to being an effective nonprofit board member.

Erin Baudo Felter at Okta is a fellow tech funder and social impact practitioner whose work I hold in high regard. She and I met through another colleague in this space years ago, and it’s been so useful to think together through issues we’re both tackling. 

Lastly, I’d spotlight Vignetta Charles. She is the CEO of ETR, a nonprofit organization committed to advancing health equity globally. Vignetta’s leadership awes me while also reminding me that laughter and friendship go a long way in making this work sustainable. 

Behrman, NationSwell: What are you reading that inspires your leadership?

Warren, Yelp: I cannot overstate how powerful “The Persuaders” by Anand Giridharadas has been for me. It has given me an incredible amount of hope in a time that sometimes feels hopeless, and it’s given me a lot of fuel to keep going. One of my big takeaways from the book is that people who are engaged in changing minds and bridging divisions should talk much more about what we’re for—not just about what we’re against. That notion has really resonated with me and I’m working on applying it expansively in my life.

---

To learn more about how our ESG Next honorees are shaping business as a force for social and environmental good, visit the series hub. Yelp is a NationSwell Institutional Member. To learn more about membership in NationSwell’s community of leading social impact and sustainability practitioners, visit our site.

At a moment of unprecedented attention, investment, and opportunity for the emerging field of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), leaders are asking: Who is best preparing their organization for the society of the future? Who is innovating today to meet decades-long environmental and social goals? Who is setting standards that catalyze their industry’s change for the better? Who is defining what bold and aspirational look like — and how best to advance that work in practice?

Enter NationSwell’s ESG Next, an exemplary group of investors, executives, authors, philanthropists, social sector leaders, academics, and field builders who are helping to shape business as a force for social and environmental progress, advancing — and even pioneering — the most forward-thinking and effective programs, initiatives, technologies, methodologies, practices, and approaches.

For this installment, NationSwell interviewed Michele Jawando, Senior Vice President at Omidyar Network, about the untold story of ESG’s unlikely allies, the importance of strong and engaged workers for any organization, and why we don’t have permission to surrender to the sorrow — even when working to advance justice becomes incredibly challenging. 

Greg Behrman, CEO + Founder, NationSwell: Can you tell us about how your professional and personal journey led you to where you are today?

Michele Jawando, Senior Vice President , Omidyar Network: I endeavor for my work to be grounded in the simple idea that my contributions should advance and make meaningful contributions to the communities that I serve; that is the single thread that I am proud to be able to trace through my life’s work and purpose. 

It’s a thread that begins with my great aunt, who was both the first woman and the first Black woman attorney on the island of Bermuda; it continues with my grandmother, who was the first Black nurse at a segregated hospital; with my father, who went to law school and engaged his practice in global human and civil rights work; really, through my entire family, who have steadfastly been involved with the social and civil rights movements in Bermuda, Jamaica and here in the US. 

And now, it is with deep humility that I’ve been able to continue it from there on through to every place I’ve worked. All of my work, every single day, is in service of trying to pull that thread forward. Continuing it is a deeply personal, deeply spiritual call for me, and I’ve been fortunate to work at places that can match my passion. 

So it is with reverence for this past and deep appreciation for the present that I’ve arrived at my position in the field.

Behrman, NationSwell: What’s unique about the work you’re leading? What are some of your programs, strategies, and approaches into which other field builders should have visibility?

Jawando, Omidyar Network: We’re trying to figure out how we diversify who’s at the table, who’s talking to investors, and who’s engaged in this conversation.  And we’ve been partnering with a few incredible organizations to help make that happen. One I’m really excited about is the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. You probably don’t often think about faith and corporate responsibility as going hand-in-hand, but ICCR has been working at this intersection for five decades, and successfully engaged Fortune 500 companies from a faith perspective on issues like public health, pollution, and forced labor in ways that have changed corporate behavior for the better.. This is an opportunity to bring a very different voice into this conversation. We’ve also been working with an organization called the Investor Advocates for Social Justice, grounding us in the belief that investing can be a key part of a social justice framework — core to any movement. 

Too often, workers are missing from the conversations on the most important decisions an organization makes. People sometimes forget this, but some of the biggest investors in the world are the pension funds of working people. That’s why I’m really excited to spotlight our partnership with the Committee for Workers Capital; they’re working to center the perspective of workers within the investment community. To have strong corporations, you need strong workers. Including them makes your company stronger, which in turn makes your investments more profitable. It’s a very different way of thinking about smart investments, but I think it’s critical as we move forward. Workers, employees, customers and community members are uniquely positioned to identify when a company is doing something risky — even before the company’s leadership apparatus does. 

It can’t just be about investors, corporate board members, or academics; the present moment is giving us an opportunity to broaden the conversation and giving people more opportunity to see what a co-created future could look like.  If we don’t engage more of these groups at every level of decision making, then they’re missing out on opportunities for agency and growth, and management is missing out on their crucial perspective.  And so I think it’s such a critical moment for ESG investors to really listen to stakeholders to show up differently. But though it’s a great opportunity, it’s also a challenging moment, but only because it’s still so hard for us to have multi-party conversations in this country. 

Behrman, NationSwell: How are you making sense of this moment for ESG? 

Jawando, Omidyar Network: In order to create real change in the system, the conversation around ESG has to be deeply grounded in broader social conversations. 

We all want to see businesses do great work, and we want them to operate sustainably. But I think why we’re having such a passionate conversation about this right now is because we differ on what “great work” and “operate sustainably” mean. We’re seeing ESG as a topic bubble up almost daily because I think each person on the planet is impacted by corporations, and wants to be actively involved in what the solutions are. Changing the framework to make corporations and companies more profitable, more inclusive, more thoughtful — all while adding a greater amount of dignity in the work — is exactly what we need to be doing. 

Behrman, NationSwell: What’s exciting to you about this moment, and where do you see it going?

Jawando, Omidyar Network:  I see policy as an opportunity to scale impact, so I am currently really  interested in what we’ve seen in Missouri, where citizens stood up before the state legislature and said they wanted to see their pensions invested in a responsible and sustainable way  And while we know there’s been an uptick of anti-ESG legislation, the untold story that’s unfolding under the headlines is that you’re getting really interesting bedfellows. Players like the Missouri Chamber of Commerce, SEIU, the Sierra Club — they  were all working together to defeat these anti-ESG bills. There aren’t many places where you’re seeing unlikely allies coming together. You really love to see it.

To me, that’s proof there’s something unique about this work that is positive and is worth fighting for and is worth engaging. But there’s been such a collapse of nuance, which means it’s been hard for people to hold that you can both be profitable and have ESG as a core part of your investment strategy. 

Behrman, NationSwell: What is it about your leadership style that helps you to be effective? 

Jawando, Omidyar Network: As a leader, I strive to acknowledge that the people who come and work with me — or for me — have some challenge in their life that they’re dealing with every day, alongside their work. That acknowledgment helps me as much as it helps them. If I can walk into a workplace, or a board room, or Capitol Hill and recognize that these are people who are dealing with challenges in their lives, the dialogue will be a lot more productive than if I see them all as adversaries or challenges, lead with people’s humanity and it changes the dynamic every time. 

I’m not saying that view doesn’t come with its own set of challenges, but I deeply believe that this is the best approach to leadership. 

Behrman, NationSwell: Who are the leaders who inspire your leadership?

Jawando, Omidyar Network: Edelman CEO Lisa Ross is amazing. Not only is she a people first leader, but she’s also a true believer in the power of representation. There’s something unique about her voice that helps me really grapple with the importance of the work we’re doing.

KR Liu, who heads accessibility marketing at Google, is a constant source of inspiration to me. She’s one of the most profound people that I’ve worked with, one who’s helped me advance my own thinking about accessibility, representation, and policy. She lives with such intention and passion. 

Another leader who inspires me is Nicole Taylor of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. I think it’s hard running any foundation, but when you show up in the valley and you’re trying to hold a lot of different equities all at the same time, it’s even more challenging. And yet, Nicole  does it with such grace, effervescence, and a deep commitment to this work.

The last leader I’d like to mention is Amandeep Singh Gill, who’s the United Nations Secretary General’s Envoy on Technology. Whether you’re a techno optimist or a techno realist, it’s undeniable that technology has a profound effect on society. Amandeep is working to make sure it is not just a catalytic force, but a unifying one. 

Behrman, NationSwell: What are you reading, watching, or listening to that’s inspiring your leadership?

Jawando, Omidyar Network: “Blind Spot” by Jon Clifton has such great insight into why leaders were missing the unrest that led to everything from the Arab Spring to the state of our politics in America — and really asks us to reckon with what we value as a society, and whether we’re using the right metrics for what makes a nation thrive?

I’m loving “How to Citizen” with Baratunde Thurston, who just did an episode on democracy fractals and sci-fi. I’m a big, big sci-fi nerd. I love the way it calls the imagination to a different place. 

Lastly, Ross Gay is one of my favorite authors, and my favorite poem of his called “Sorrow is Not My Name.” I think about it every time the work gets challenging, or it feels like we’re taking a step back. I’d like to read it for you:

“No matter the pull towards the brink, no matter the florid, deep sleep awaits. There is a time for everything. Look, just this morning a vulture nodded his red grizzled head at me and I looked at him admiring the sickle of his beak. Then the wind kicked up and after arranging that good suit of feathers he up and took off, just like that. And to boot there are on this planet alone, something like two million naturally occurring sweet things, some with names so generous as to kick the steel from my knees. Agave, persimmon, stick ball, the purple okra I brought for two bucks at the market.

“Think of that, the long night, the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me on the bus taking notes, yeah, yea. But look, my niece is running through a field calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel and at the end of my block is a basketball court. I remember my color’s green, I’m spring.”

That piece calls me back to all of the things that are beautiful and simple and worth fighting for. We can’t get lost in the sorrow. We actually don’t have permission to do that. Then we start to feel like nothing can change — and I believe deeply that things can.

---

To learn more about how our ESG Next honorees are shaping business as a force for social and environmental good, visit the series hub. Omidyar Network is a NationSwell Institutional Member. To learn more about membership in NationSwell’s community of leading social impact and sustainability practitioners, visit our site.

At a moment of unprecedented attention, investment, and opportunity for the emerging field of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), leaders are asking: Who is best preparing their organization for the society of the future? Who is innovating today to meet decades-long environmental and social goals? Who is setting standards that catalyze their industry’s change for the better? Who is defining what bold and aspirational look like — and how best to advance that work in practice?

Enter NationSwell’s ESG Next, an exemplary group of investors, executives, authors, philanthropists, social sector leaders, academics, and field builders who are helping to shape business as a force for social and environmental progress, advancing — and even pioneering — the most forward-thinking and effective programs, initiatives, technologies, methodologies, practices, and approaches.

For this installment, NationSwell interviewed Jennifer Skyler, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at American Express, about the importance of leveraging your core values in times of disruption, drawing new strength from embracing discomfort, and the timeless, underappreciated value of resilience.

Greg Behrman, CEO + Founder, NationSwell: Can you walk us through what’s unique about how you and your team have approached ESG?

Jennifer Skyler, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, American Express: When I first joined in 2020, my team undertook a comprehensive process to refresh the ESG strategy and framework based on a materiality analysis of key stakeholder issues. That was an important first step — those first efforts culminated in the launch of our ESG Strategy and Framework which encompasses three core pillars: financial confidence; climate solutions; diversity, equity, and inclusion.

That framework guides us to drive action in alignment with our values and address the top issues that matter the most for our company and stakeholders. It provides the guiding principles, operational structure, and resources to be able to make meaningful, positive impact in people’s lives and the world we live in. 

By having a foundational framework in place to address those issues, we can set tangible goals, build action plans to achieve those goals and hold ourselves accountable for progress, and provide transparency into our efforts for our internal and external stakeholders. 

Behrman, NationSwell: How is the work you’re leading at American Express unique?

Skyler, American Express: We have a very special, values-driven culture. As Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, I carry the responsibility of championing the Blue Box values that our company and brand stand for, making sure all our actions and communications are tightly aligned to those values.

I joined the company in 2020 — and as you can imagine, that meant that my arrival was met with the unprecedented challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Before we even began to address those challenges, we committed to one core principle as our north star: that we would back our colleagues, customers, and communities above all else.

That commitment has since proven critical to how we managed to emerge as an even stronger company. From the early days of the pandemic, we doubled down on our backing of our stakeholders. We invested in the health, safety, and holistic well-being of our colleagues through expanded benefits and support programs. For our customers, we offered financial relief to those experiencing economic challenges and evolved our product benefits and services to meet their changing needs in the face of the pandemic. We also provided philanthropic support to economically vulnerable communities to help them address their challenges and support their recovery.

Those investments have paid off a great deal and put us in a strong position today, where we’re seeing great momentum across our business. Our customers and colleagues are sticking with us, and we are attracting many more to our workforce and card member base – all enabling us to deliver record growth rates that we’ve been seeing for several quarters now.      

Having gone through such a pivotal moment at American Express, I have an even greater appreciation now for working at a company with sound and consistent values that you can lean on during good times and bad times.

Behrman, NationSwell: Is there a significant program or initiative you’re leading into which other field builders should have visibility? 

Skyler, American Express: As Chair of the American Express Foundation, which facilitates the company’s philanthropic and community impact efforts and am deeply inspired by the work our nonprofit partners do to improve their communities. In December, we relaunched the American Express Leadership Academy, transforming the curriculum to help enhance the business and leadership skills of high-potential nonprofit leaders to meet the unique challenges of today. Since its launch in 2007, the Academy helped more than 165,000 social purpose leaders reach their potential.

This year, the theme of our Leadership Academy was resilient changemakers, and I think my overall thinking as a communications and corporate sustainability leader over the past few years has really embodied this idea. If the pandemic has taught us one thing, it’s that we can’t foresee the future and the challenges we will face tomorrow. What’s most important is developing the right skills and having the tools to be able to effectively tackle life’s challenges– whatever they might be – and remain resilient.

More personally, I love to support small businesses, whether shopping in my own neighborhood or at local shops wherever I travel. I have now had the opportunity to turn this personal passion of mine into even greater real impact given American Express’ continued commitment to backing small businesses, like through our Backing Historic Small Restaurants grant program in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has awarded $2 million to 50 historically significant restaurants in the U.S. over the past two years and will provide another $1 million to 25 new recipients this year.

Behrman, NationSwell: To which leadership practices do you most attribute your success and efficacy?

Skyler, American Express: One of the behaviors that we’re expected to demonstrate as leaders is courageous and transparent leadership, which has been something I always believed in. Being courageous and embracing discomfort is necessary to be able to achieve growth and realize your full potential.

You cannot grow in your career without discomfort. You must be receptive to feedback and not be afraid to fail to make progress. That’s why I am always focused on challenging myself and my team to think differently, aim higher, and learn from both successes and failures to grow with each experience.

Behrman, NationSwell: What’s inspiring your leadership right now? 

Skyler, American Express: I’m a voracious consumer of so many different podcasts and media – often multiple screens at a time – so if I made a list, it would be ridiculously long. I like to hear all sides of an issue and stay on top of the fast-paced, ever-evolving environment that we operate in.

Of course, every now and then we need a break from the news cycle. Right now, I’m loving Daisy Jones and the Six on Amazon Prime as my respite.

---

To learn more about how our ESG Next honorees are shaping business as a force for social and environmental good, visit the series hub. American Express is a NationSwell Institutional Member. To learn more about membership in NationSwell’s community of leading social impact and sustainability practitioners, visit our site.

At a moment of unprecedented attention, investment, and opportunity for the emerging field of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), leaders are asking: Who is best preparing their organization for the society of the future? Who is innovating today to meet decades-long environmental and social goals? Who is setting standards that catalyze their industry’s change for the better? Who is defining what bold and aspirational look like — and how best to advance that work in practice?

Enter NationSwell’s ESG Next, an exemplary group of investors, executives, authors, philanthropists, social sector leaders, academics, and field builders who are helping to shape business as a force for social and environmental progress, advancing — and even pioneering — the most forward-thinking and effective programs, initiatives, technologies, methodologies, practices, and approaches.

For this installment, NationSwell interviewed Brandee McHale, Head of Community Investing and Development at Citi and President of Citi Foundation, about the unexpected challenges of headwinds becoming tailwinds, the necessity for leaders to break out of their echo chamber for inspiration, and why economic mobility is the foundation of her unlikely journey to the field of ESG.

Greg Behrman, CEO + Founder, NationSwell: Tell us how your professional and personal journey led to this work.

Brandee McHale, Head of Community Investing and Development at Citi and President of Citi Foundation: My work is at the intersection of traditional ESG, business, society, and philanthropy; I can’t believe I’m going to actually say these words, but I’ve been here for 30 years. 

I never thought that this was where I would land. When people hear that I’ve worked 30 years in the global financial services company, they naturally assume I came from Wharton or Harvard Business School — and while those are fantastic places, I actually don’t have a business background. In fact, I don’t even have a high school diploma.

I wasn’t on the path to economic success, and what really got me back on track was volunteering in my local community. Through volunteerism, I built a professional network — and I didn’t even know I was building one at the time. I just got very engaged with volunteering alongside the former mayor of the city where I’d grown up. And it was through giving back and being involved in volunteer service that actually built up my own confidence, and I began to see myself the way others saw me. I went back to school, I got my GED, and I answered some bulletin board ad for a summer internship at Citi in their corporate charitable giving department. 

Beyond that sense of service, what’s motivated me through the years is the knowledge that it should not have been as hard as it was for me to get from where I was to where I am today. We all have an interest in helping others, but my interest is in leveling the playing field to make it easier. There are far too many exit ramps on the path to economic opportunity — and there are far too few on-ramps. And that’s really how I’ve thought about my career. How do we build more on-ramps and shut down those off-ramps?

Behrman, NationSwell: How do you define this moment in ESG? Where are we, and where are we going? What’s the potential, and where are the pitfalls?

McHale, Citi: I tell my team all the time, this is our moment; let’s not blow it. We’ve lost the luxury of saying nobody’s focused on our issues, that we’re the lone voice here in the company. This is now front and center, and there’s a spotlight on us: we have a whole range of stakeholders, investors, employees, clients, and the public looking at ESG now. I think it’s okay for ESG practitioners to feel unnerved by the eyes that are suddenly on us. It can make you skeptical of everything you’re doing; it can even drive paralysis.

And especially in this moment of so much divisiveness, that paralysis is very real. If you try to please everybody, you’re going to please nobody. So you have to identify your North Star and fly consistently towards it. And I think if you stick with your values, while you’re not going to make everybody happy, you’ll have the ability to withstand any potential criticism. 

In the face of divisiveness, you have to be bold. And I’m excited to be bold. But I’m also clear-eyed about the fact that we are in the very early years of thinking differently about the purpose of the private sector — and its role in driving societal impact. For 20 years, the wind has been against me and my fellow practitioners. We all got really strong from flying against the headwind. But it’s a funny thing when all of a sudden the winds change, and suddenly it’s a tailwind and you should be flying farther and faster, but you actually feel more likely to fall because you don’t have the right kind of skills for this velocity.

Behrman, NationSwell: What’s different about how you lead? To which leadership practices do you attribute your effectiveness?

McHale, Citi: Our most important tool is our people — and that’s especially true when you’re an ESG practitioner. When you’re working in large companies, if you have a role that has something related to ESG in it, you probably had a job description that led you to believe that you would be spending your time externally focused.

But if we really want to have an impact, we are internal change agents. So while it may seem as though we are funding external change agents, what’s different and what I hope is the model that I’ve helped to develop, is that we see ourselves as change agents working across the company to influence, again, business practices, to influence strategies, to influence a focus on communities that have oftentimes been left behind, while also understanding how to partner with others externally so we can maximize impact. And to do that, you really need to build a team that feels empowered to use their voice. And in turn then we empower our company, many times not just to engage in actions, but to also use our voice and to ask, what is our commitment to an issue? 

And a great example of this, I think, is our work on racial equity. Like many companies, after the murder of George Floyd, we were searching for what we could do to make a difference. We did do some immediate philanthropic funding to civil rights organizations, but we knew that that was completely necessary, and insufficient. We realized that the real opportunity we have is to step back and ask, what is the specific role that financial institutions can play in racial equity? And for us, it was to look back and say part of what fuels racial injustice in the United States is the long-term perpetual racial wealth gap.

And while we’re very proud of the role that Citi Foundation has played on this issue philanthropically, philanthropy is insufficient to really address this issue. We’re working across the company in a comprehensive way to clarify what our role is in helping people get into the financial mainstream and accumulate financial wealth and assets.

In terms of leadership practice, I’m a big believer in purposefully making space that exists outside of your echo chamber. It’s something you have to practice actively; we tend to not realize we’re on autopilot, going to the same meetings, the same events, and the same conferences. This action can be something simple, like auditing who it is you tend to take your meetings with. But it can also mean getting out of the big cities. I’ve probably spent way too much time in my career thinking that the United States is New York, D.C., and California. It turns out, there’s a country in between these cities. And seeing how these communities approach economic mobility in ways that perhaps weren’t on your radar can give you that spark of inspiration that leaders are so often chasing. 

Behrman, NationSwell: What are some unique programs or initiatives you’re leading that other leaders may benefit from knowing?

McHale, Citi: I’m really proud of our work to help students get to and through college. We identified two primary barriers for students: the first is financial, and the second is navigating an increasingly complex system, especially if these students are the first in their family to attend college. 

To counter these barriers, we started a platform that supports initiatives opening up college savings accounts for young people. It’s an effort we’ve already begun scaling in San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, with more locations to be announced soon. We initiated this approach a decade ago, and the first group of students from the San Francisco public school system is graduating this year. 

It’s an initiative that did more than just give kids accounts — it also changed the narrative around college for these communities from “if” to “when.” We’ve witnessed parents, kids, and family members depositing even small amounts into these accounts, and schools building a culture that focuses on college admissions — not just high school graduation.

The program in San Francisco, which is called Kindergarten to College, has become the framework for these initiatives. Some places even have similar Baby Bonds programs. They all aim to level the playing field by providing the same opportunities that a child born in a high-income family might have, such as a 529 account opened for them at birth.

It’s clear that schools aren’t bankers, and that’s why we’ve helped them by developing an online platform that allows school systems, or large youth-serving nonprofits, to manage the program. They can sign up kids, track deposits, and support families through the program. At the back end, we ensure the system works with various banking partners — whether it’s Citibank or a local community development credit union. This approach eliminates the need for everyone to reinvent the wheel, essentially creating a scalable “franchise” opportunity.
This solution was informed by our philanthropic work. We discovered that, while there is funding available for matched funds, unless programs can run efficiently, they will not be able to operate at scale. 

Another area is our Citi Impact Fund, which invests in double-bottom line companies. It’s important to remember that it’s not just about injecting capital — it’s about support. Providing post-investment support and assisting our portfolio companies to thrive, extend their networks, and boost their revenue-generating opportunities are of the utmost importance.

Though the Citi Foundation’s Community Progress Makers initiative, we offer core operating support grants of $500,000 each and say to grantees, “Go forth. We are not the experts here, you are. We trust you.” We’re not in the business of what I like to call “torturing” our grantees. 

Funding shouldn’t be onerous. Removing that red tape is part of our commitment to ensuring philanthropic capital is the most catalytic resource it can be. It should be the most flexible research and development money that’s out there. 

I’m also excited about the Foundation’s Global Innovation Challenge – Food Security, which is our first global open source effort, designed to improve food security and strengthening the financial health of low-income families and communities. 

The world is moving so quickly; and when it comes to food security, so many issues are interconnected — economic empowerment, financial health, supply chain. It excites me that we are now embracing the ways these issues are interconnected instead of focusing on just one component of them.  

Behrman, NationSwell: Who are some fellow leaders that are inspiring your leadership right now?

McHale, Citi: I’m inspired by the leadership of Kathleen Enright, CEO of the Council on Foundations. She’s tackling some of the hardest conversations in philanthropy today. Janice Bowdler went from the nonprofit sector at Unidos US  to the private sector with JPMC, and now she’s in public service as the Counselor to the Secretary at the U.S. Treasury on matters of racial equity. I absolutely love this multi-sector transition.In the impact investing space, the biggest rockstar is Melissa Bradley. When we were building our Impact Fund, she challenged us to be different – to stop talking and just do it differently. 

All of these women are fearless about giving the counterpoint to what someone may be saying.

Behrman, NationSwell: What are some books you’re reading, shows you’re watching, or podcasts you’re listening to that inspire and inform you?
McHale, Citi: For me, it’s really important to listen and learn from nonprofit leaders and change agents. I follow Financial Health Network’s Financial Pulse survey to keep up-to-date on the financial lives of everyday people around the country. I also really enjoy listening to Jennifer Tescher’s EMERGE Everywhere podcast, which focuses on financial health and breaking siloes between sectors.

---

To learn more about how our ESG Next honorees are shaping business as a force for social and environmental good, visit the series hub.

At a moment of unprecedented attention, investment, and opportunity for the emerging field of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), leaders are asking: Who is best preparing their organization for the society of the future? Who is innovating today to meet decades-long environmental and social goals? Who is setting standards that catalyze their industry’s change for the better? Who is defining what bold and aspirational look like — and how best to advance that work in practice?

Enter NationSwell’s ESG Next, an exemplary group of investors, executives, authors, philanthropists, social sector leaders, academics, and field builders who are helping to shape business as a force for social and environmental progress, advancing — and even pioneering — the most forward-thinking and effective programs, initiatives, technologies, methodologies, practices, and approaches.

For this installment, NationSwell interviewed Vilas Dhar, President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation (PJMF), about what this moment in artificial intelligence (AI) means for ESG practitioners, the importance of pushing past digital literacy and towards digital agency, and the big questions that leaders should ask as we build an equitable and human-centered future enabled by technological innovation.

Greg Behrman, CEO + Founder, NationSwell: Tell us how your professional and personal journey led to this work.

Vilas Dhar, President, PJMF: My life’s journey has been defined by an insatiable curiosity and a commitment to accelerating innovation that sustains human aspirations, creativity, and joy. This socially minded curiosity was shaped by the time I spent with my grandfather in India.  At the start of each visit, I would proudly show him the new tools or gadgets I was developing and he’d always respond in the same way, “Now that I’ve seen how much joy and creativity these tools bring you, how can they also uplift the people in your community, in your family, in the world around you?” 

That question defines so much of my journey and is one I continue to ask myself today. I’m an incredible optimist about the world that we can build together, and that optimism started at a very young age. I had early exposure to amazing technologies: from exploring firsthand the technical innovation behind my favorite video games to hearing my mother describe how a computer was changing her job as an administrator at a university. I saw all the incredible ways these tools helped us spend more of our time doing the things that actually mattered — like connecting to each other — and helped us move away from rote mechanical tasks. Because of these technologies, we were able to use our creativity and inspiration to build cool things that, in a way, improved our lives. 

But at the same time that I was growing up and seeing all the transformative potential of technology, I also spent a lot of time with my family in rural India — in a world where technology hadn’t yet entered the picture. We’re not talking about computers here; we’re talking about basic things like power and running water. I remember these movements of contradiction so clearly because they highlight the frustrating tension that shapes so much of my professional journey: on one side, I have an unshakeable optimism about what we accomplish through ingenuity and shared action; and on the other, I can’t fathom why we are okay with a world where only a few get to enjoy the benefits of that innovation – simply because of who they are or where they grew up. 

We have to change that. 

Behrman, NationSwell: You’re an expert on artificial intelligence. What can you share to help moor ESG practitioners around what this current moment means? How can we lean in?

Dhar, PJMF: When I look out at the world, it feels like there’s actual potential for a transformation of power. These technologies are creating new agency for people across the planet, and we’ve been given — right here, right now — a chance to make decisions that include technology, but aren’t just about technology. They’re about who gets to participate, who gets to decide, and who gets to inform those decision makers. They’re about the uniquely human element of this transformation – one that will affect us all.

The big question isn’t about asking how to better understand these technologies and map their potential to the social justice work we do. We’ve already seen these new technologies do amazing things, from empowering frontline earth defenders to predict and stop illegal logging and poaching, to revolutionizing the efficiency of humanitarian aid delivery after a natural disaster. Now the big questions we need to ask are around our values and what we hold dear; how we’d reshape our very society; how we’d think about democratic and inclusive political processes to amplify marginalized voices; how we’d measure the value of our time and our labor; and how we’d re-design our governance structures and mechanisms of participatory decisionmaking.

We built an entire class of institutions after World War II that did amazing work in creating new economic opportunity and uplifting people across the battered postwar world — but that was almost 75 years ago. And while the private sector has moved forward and civil society has moved forward, we have to ask whether these institutions are ready for the challenges of the 21st century. Are these institutions fit to tackle the enormous scale of global hunger, injustice, climate change, pandemics, and beyond? Our positive frame is to ask, how do we convene all the different stakeholders in society to uplift global majority voices — and not just the Global North? How do we build new multilateral institutions that are fit-for-purpose, community-driven, and resourced to proactively address the major global challenges that we will face over the next 100 years?

Behrman, NationSwell: What are some activations that might enable leaders to better meet this moment?

Dhar, PJMF: Two categories come to mind: intention and action. We have to name and hold a set of intentions around building more inclusive and participatory decision-making infrastructure. That requires those who hold power to open the doors for those who aren’t traditionally included in those rooms, and it requires them to build trust with underrepresented or marginalized individuals so that they are willing to engage with us. 

I have deep trust in communities to define and shape their own destiny. So often, we’ve assumed that those who hold the power, privilege, and tools we are speaking about can make decisions for everyone else. But the truth is, communities are great at defining their own course. If we don’t intentionally engage them as the architects of their own future and proactively equip them with the right tools, opportunities, and support to succeed, then we’re missing the point.

Then, we have to understand that every person on the planet needs to experience not just digital literacy, but digital agency. It’s so easy to say that AI is this new thing on the horizon that’ll affect us in some profound way, but we actually need to understand these tools well enough to determine what their consequences might be on our lives. We need to create and nurture a shared and accessible language to discuss these tools and advocate for equity, justice, and human rights as they proliferate around us. That’s both an individual and collective intention we have to set. 

And then there’s the action. We need a new social conversation about what economic and moral structures we want to build. And we need to include voices across civil society, across government, across business, and across communities. We need conveners who will step forward to bring those groups together. And we need a bold willingness to act, to begin implementing what comes out of these conversations. I believe deeply in honoring human inspiration; what I mean by that is if someone has an amazing proposal, we can talk about it for months or we cantry it within just weeks. It’s the latter approach that will inspire and cement positive change.

Behrman, NationSwell: What are some unique programs or initiatives you’re leading at PJMF that other leaders may benefit from knowing?

Dhar, PJMF: We are re-envisioningwhat it means to be a philanthropy in the 21st century – where  grant making is now just one of the many tools we have to build public trust. We’ve restructured how we think about strategic intervention in civil society, moving from an idea where people apply for a grant and we make a decision — which just feels so disconnected from the outcomes we’re looking for — to a process in which we first strategize with civil society around what an ideal future would look like, and then collaborate with them to build programs to advance that future. That means, while we still make a lot of grants, we also partner directly with nonprofits to build capacity around data and AI, and we partner with governments and academic institutions to build entirely new frames of reference for human-centered AI.

To this end, we’ve recently built and deployed a new initiative called the Centre for Trustworthy Technology in partnership with Deloitte and the World Economic Forum. Together, we’re creating an entirely new convening space to think about policy for the AI-enabled age. We work directly with communities across the United States to support the idea that those who have traditionally been left out should be key architects of not only our technologies, but also of the societies we live in — groups like CodePath, Per Scholas, and The Hidden Genius Project.

We also work with AI scientists from Indigenous communities, and our work with the International Wakashan AI Consortium is emblematic of our approach. We support AI code camps on Indigenous sovereign lands to train young people to harness the power of these technologies and to give them a pathway to educational and professional opportunities. We also support their efforts to build new AI tools and models to preserve Indigenous languages, capturing thousands of years of ancient wisdom and applying that wisdom to a world that uses AI to translate and help young people connect to their own stories. 

Behrman, NationSwell: To which leadership practices do you most attribute your effectiveness?

Dhar, PJMF: My leadership style stems from a core belief that leaders have to be willing to call out what’s wrong in the world today; to call out inequity, injustice, and systemic exclusion as antithetical to the world we want to create. One key part of how I practice leadership is that I question the way things are done, and whether what we’re doing today is actually helping to build a better world. There are two benefits to asking that question. The first is more straightforward: if what you’re doing isn’t actually helping, you can ask the hard questions about what it will take to change the course of your actions; and the second is that by taking this first step as a leader, you enable and empower the community of people who work with you and around you to be able to do the same. 

This is a shared journey. If those of us on the journey can say we don’t like what we do, and if we can say we know there’s a better way, then the question you’re left with becomes a very human one: How do we come together to do better? And the answer to that question contains the real work of leadership, which is all about building trust; about becoming more humble and more curious so that others can make their voices heard; about making sure that our outcomes and our visions are aligned. As leaders, we need to demonstrate that we are truly accountable to each other; and we need to find and build spaces of shared joy to actually incentivize us to do more and do better.

When it comes to some of the issues that we focus on, we’ve become comfortable with the idea that there are technologists who make technology decisions and policymakers who make policy decisions. But for us, leadership is about empowering communities to know that technologists and policymakers should act as representatives of community interests, and that communities, too, have a right to participate in these decisions. At the end of the day, we want to affirm and show that we are here to support and serve communities along their own journeys of self-advocacy and self-actualization. And that also implies a responsibility for us to take shared ownership over the decisions.

Behrman, NationSwell: Who and what are inspiring your leadership right now?

Dhar, PJMF: At a foundation like ours, I come into contact with so many inspiring trailblazers, movement builders, and bold disruptors every day – that I couldn’t possibly name every one. But I’ll name a few here. Brandon Nicholson  runs The Hidden Genius Project, an amazing intervention that gives young Black men a full suite of support and engagement to help them find professions in technology. The Project started in Oakland, but Brandon scaled his work to multiple cities around the country; he’s just an amazing, incredible emerging leader. Gabriela Ramos, the Assistant Director-General of UNESCO, has taken this very deep international, global majority approach to thinking about how AI and technology are transforming all of our political structures. She’s a great writer, an inspiring leader, and a trusted colleague and friend. Michael Running Wolf is an Indigenous AI scientist who has committed his entire life to using these tools to connect people to the stories and wisdom of Indigenous culture. Through his leadership, we have begun to foster the next generation of young Indigenous coders, scientists, and changemakers. 

I also want to highlight the work of our partner: Tara Chklovski at Technovation — an organization that teaches girls technology and leadership skills to catalyze climate action across the globe. PJMF is proud to support and partner with civil society leaders like Tara, who are revolutionizing the application of technology to further social impact, gender equity, and empowerment. I’m sharing a recent quote of hers from THE Journal: “At Technovation, we want to champion the equitable adoption of new technologies and acknowledge as an opportunity that our students must learn how to engage with ChatGPT and use it to develop solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.” Tara and I recently hosted a LinkedIn live on “AI and Leadership: A Pathway to Girls’ Empowerment and Climate Resilience,” to dive into some of these problems and how our two organizations are partnering to address them.

In addition to the transformative changemakers I work with, I also derive inspiration from reading. One book that made a unique impression on me and my work was Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin – a story that reminds us of just how important it is to find joy and fulfillment in our lives and the work we do. The second is a tract that I’ve read many, many times in my life: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. It’s an inspiring work that shapes acceptance of the many, many paths to our own internal truth.

I also feel fortunate to work in a field that contains such rich discourse from a broad range of sources. For example, Politico’s Digital Future Daily is a tech newsletter that regularly features different experts in the digital space, ranging from Microsoft’s Chief Responsible AI Officer Natasha Crampson, to DAIR’s Timnit Gebru, to the Future of Life Institute’s Mark Brakel. These are critical resources to not only inform communities about how AI and other technologies might affect their lives, but to also foster democratic dialogue around forging an equitable and rights-based approach to AI development and use.

---

To learn more about how our ESG Next honorees are shaping business as a force for social and environmental good, visit the series hub. PJMF is a NationSwell Institutional Member. To learn more about membership in NationSwell’s community of leading social impact and sustainability practitioners, visit our site.