Our Approach
Our mission is to scale and connect organizations to tackle social problems.
We do this in 3 ways:
Drawing from our vast network, we build coordinated movements of people—ventures, companies, foundations, governments, policy makers, funders, and more—who are all positioned to make a dent in a problem. Below, you can see hypothetical examples of how we might pull in real members of our network around different issues.
CEO of Aunt Bertha (enabling 2 million+ marginalized people to access public assistance)
Director, Green for All (helped pass the US's first Green Jobs Act)
Leading $250M fund to serve low-income children
City of Denver’s Manager of Food Systems Development
Manager at Colorado Housing & Finance Authority
Co-Founder Billions Institute (helped over 100K homeless people into housing)
CEO and Founder at Tala (giving access to credit to 330,000 people)
Founder & CEO, Coalition for Queens
President and CEO, Calvert Foundation
Senior Director at BRAC—bringing 100M out of poverty
Co-founder at Rising Tide Car Wash (making autism a competitive employment advantage)
Helped lift over 20M people out of poverty
Board of Advisors, Guild Education
Leading $250M fund to serve low-income children
Enhancing literacy training for over 850,000 kids
CEO and Co-founder at Peekapak
Providing 2 million+ Kenyan children with tutoring and materials via mobile phones
Led over $100M investments in education
Increasing math scores of 20,000 low-income kids by 2.8x
Empowering communities dealing with environmental pollution
Time Magazine's Hero of the Planet
Founder and Director, EcoPost Limited (saved 350 acres of trees)
Strategic Advisor at Eco-Cycle International (creating zero-waste cities)
Head of Sustainability for Chipotle Mexican Grill
Co-founder, Mosaic (largest home solar lender in the US)
Providing 450,000 people with iron reducing anemia by 50%
Former Strategic Planning Director at Medtronic
Provided 150,000+ people in Ethiopia with clean water after natural disasters
Cured over 2 million kids of severe acute malnutrition
Delivered clean water to over 4 million people
CEO of Possible, 500,000 patients treated in rural Nepal
Co-founder/CEO at Purpose
Escaped assassination attempts to pioneer a movement fighting honor killing in Pakistan
Founder and CEO, Evoso (trained over 1M women in self-defense)
CEO at OurSay (Mobilized over 100K citizens to connect with political leaders)
Speadheaded non-violent movement to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia
President, Change.org
Co-Founder, Thread (improving graduation rates of at-risk students from 6% to 92%)
To give you a real-life example, take our Future Cities Accelerator:
1. We identified the need to serve poor and vulnerable populations in U.S. cities, and partnered with The Rockefeller Foundation
2. We built a cohort of 10 startups taking on different sides of urban poverty, including:
- CommonLit, providing literacy training to nearly 1 million low-income children
- mRelief, enabling over 100,000 families to gain access to SNAP Benefits (food stamps)
- Coalition for Queens, improving incomes of low-income adults 4x through programming training
3. We ran a program that resourced them with an army of support, ranging from $100,000 in grant funding to nine months of support from world-class mentors, fundraising coaches, leadership coaches, financial modelers, and access to hundreds of potential funders