Dr. Cecilia Conrad: Philanthropy Redefined

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is Cecilia Conrad. She is the visionary CEO of Lever for Change, an organization that is challenging the traditional dynamics of giving and amplifies unheard voices in philanthropy. This is what Lever for Change does, quote, "We help donors find and fund bold solutions to the world's biggest problems, including issues like racial inequity, gender inequality, access to economic opportunity, and climate change." End of quote.
She and her organization serves as the bridge between illustrious donors such as Melinda French Gates and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and a tapestry of creative thinkers around the globe. She has received accolades including the prestigious Women of Power Award from the National Urban League and the esteemed Samuel Z. Westerfield Award from the National Economic Association.
One more thing about Cecilia's remarkable background. She used to run the MacArthur Fellows Award Program. Holy cow. Is that cool or what? Cecilia shines as an extraordinary force of transformation. She blends innovation, compassion, and unyielding dedication. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. Now, here is the remarkable Cecilia Conrad.
First, I have to tell you my philanthropic story. A few weeks ago, out of the blue, this organization that I support here in Santa Cruz, they start reaching out and they start telling me, "Guy, we got to get on the phone. I have this great news." Finally, I connect with them and I say, "So, what's the great news?" He says, "Guess what, MacKenzie Scott's organization is going to give us a huge contribution." And I said, "What?" Yeah. He says, "Yeah."
And I said, "What was the application process like? That must be really rigorous." It was like, "Thousands of organizations are trying to get money from her." And they said, "There was no application process. One day, they called up and they said, 'We like what you're doing. Can we partner with you?'" And I have never heard of anything like that. So, my first question is, is this how philanthropy should work? Is this philanthropy 2.0? Or is this just a miracle and never going to happen again?
Cecilia Conrad:
There is a parallel to how Ms. Scott has been giving out her initial set of grants. And the MacArthur Fellows Program that I used to be the director of, the MacArthur Fellows Program does not require an application from the people that we name as fellows, but there is a lot of research and work that goes on behind the scenes. We go out and we ask people to nominate and then we go out and we ask other people, "What do you think of this nomination?" So, there is quite a bit of work that is done without the organization really being aware that they're being researched.
That has an exciting aspect to it. When we call the MacArthur Fellows, they're just thrilled, because it looks like it's manna from heaven that this money just arrived on their front door. But we then point out to them that it really is a statement from their colleagues from the field that they work in, that they see them as exceptionally creative. I think that having received one of those calls from the Scott's people, I felt just the way I did when I do, I imagined what it was, what it's like when the Fellows get our phone call, I immediately broke into tears.
The drawback of that, of course, is that it doesn't necessarily create a pathway for organizations that are somehow not part of a circuit that they're tapping into. For the Fellows Program, we're constantly trying to expand the numbers of people that we ask and who we ask and where they are and where they sit. One of the reasons why we're doing this Yield Giving Open Call on behalf of Scott is to create a pathway for organizations who may not already be in the circuit where they can do the kind of research they do for the call that your organization in Santa Cruz got. So, we're excited about creating this other pathway.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think more organizations are going to work like this?
Cecilia Conrad:
I think there is a couple of things that are happening, at least in some segments. One segment, one piece of it is that there is more interest in giving organizations more control over how their grants are going to be spent, and to give them enough funding so that they can really focus on doing the work as opposed to going out every year and asking for more funds.
So, I think Scott has set a new standard for that, but I'm seeing the same thing, I'm seeing uptake in other areas, where you're seeing larger multi-year grants with fewer strings attached. I think that's a really positive move in philanthropy. It's transferring agency to the organizations who are on the ground, in the field, and who understand what it takes to actually move the needle on some of the problems we face. So, that's one kind of tendency.
Then I'm also seeing a second pattern, and that's a pattern that recognizes that expertise may lie outside of the donor's staff or office, or the individual donor as being much more consultative in finding projects. So, you see the kind of due diligence or what the Fellows do when we go out and nominate. I also think that's a good thing because I think it opens the door a little wider in philanthropy. Then the third is this idea that we can actually focus on big ideas and solving problems rather than just maintenance, I'll call it maintenance or monitoring problems.
Guy Kawasaki:
Are you at all concerned about the downside that no strings attached means spent inefficiently or improperly? That's bound to happen at some point, right?
Cecilia Conrad:
It's likely going to happen at some point. It happens under the other ways that we did philanthropy as well. And philanthropy is supposed to be society's risk capital, right? That's the saying. That means if you're taking some risks, sometimes they're not going to pay off. I always worry a little bit if everything seems like it's going great, because it means maybe we haven't taken some of the risks that we're supposed to take to test out some idea that may not pan out, to test out some new model or some organization that we think looks like it could do great things, but we've not worked with them before, we haven't dealt with them before. So, I think that we need a little space for that. Truly creative solutions frequently emerge from a series of failures ahead of time.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow. We just had a professor, Amy Edmondson, and she talked all about failure. So, we have an episode coming out about intelligent failure, systemic failure, and just dumbass failure.
Cecilia Conrad:
It's one of the things that I worry a bit about. I worry about it within my organization. I worry about it in the world at large. That we create enough space for people to make mistakes and have it not go well to fail, and yet be able to get back up and continue. There's so much that we have created in society where one mistake and you're out. That's not a way to encourage creative thinking.
Guy Kawasaki:
Right. So, we got sidetracked, because of my opening question, but what needs to be changed in philanthropy as it currently works?
Cecilia Conrad:
I would point to some of the things I've said before, so I may overlap just a little bit. We've built a philanthropic enterprise that is heavily centralized into a group of people who are smart and who are passionate and who want to change the world, but have a lot of control over what the strategies are and how work will be done, how organizations have to work.
Those organizations are then in a position of trying to guess what the program officer wants or to change whatever their plan is in order to adapt. What I like to see, and this is something I do think is a move that's happening in philanthropy, is to change that dynamic a bit, to put more of the opportunity to describe what the work should be and how the problem should be solved on the doers, on the mission-driven organizations that have the kind of expertise from the experience they've had and also the more academic expertise, to have them propose what needs to be done and then to have philanthropy a little bit more in a responsive mode.
So, rather than having the foundation propose and the organizations react, I'd like to see more opportunity for organizations to propose what needs to be done, and for philanthropy to then be the reactor and the responder.
In a broad sense, that's I think a direction we've been moving both by having some interest, small, it's still not dominant, but a growing interest in unrestricted grants to organizations for general operating support. It's the direction we're moving with some of the move towards participatory grant making where we invite, and when I'm saying we here, I'm now using the foundation, more and more foundations are adopting a practice of engaging people in the field, other organizations working in the field, targeted beneficiaries, in decisions about how grants should be made.
I think that's also helping to shift that dynamic. So, I think that's a first step is to recognize that philanthropic dollars have been set aside, they've been taken out of the public coffer, because could have had taxes paid on them, and that there is a kind of responsibility to have the decision making about how the money should be spent, engage more voices.
Guy Kawasaki:
What if these foundations or these billionaires say, "You know what? It's my money. I should have a say in how it's spent." First of all, is that kind of attitude common? If it is, maybe that says a lot about the money, but anyways. Or if I'm a philanthropist, should I be thinking, "You know what, I either believe in them or I don't. It's not like I'm giving them an allowance and if they don't take out the trash this week, they're not going to get the allowance." So, what should the philanthropist attitude be?
Cecilia Conrad:
First of all, I'll just say that I get a sense of hope from some of the donors I've talked to because most of them are particularly interested, if they have a strong interest, it's in a particular issue area or problem. It's a problem that really bothers them, and they want to do some work on that specific problem. For the most part, they're very open to how to solve that problem.
The conversation is really about if you want to get the solution that's going to be the most effective, the most efficient, and the most equitable, here are some other methods you can use that might help you get there other than just picking from the ones that your friends already know about. Most of the donors that I talk to see the value in creating a more open pathway for great ideas to come to the fore.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, let me ask an extreme version of this question. I take it you're not dealing with people like the Koch brothers, right? They're not calling you up and saying, "I want to give you a billion dollars, but it's got to be towards these kinds of things." Let's just say that call happens, miracle. Do you just say, "Thank you, but no thank you"?
Cecilia Conrad:
I typically would then have a little bit further conversation about what exactly they think the problem is they want to solve and how open they are to a range of problems. So, there have been donors who have called us, not the Koch brothers, but there have been donors who have called us, who have already made up their mind that, "Here is how I'm going to solve the problem of youth engagement. I'm going to create a youth leadership training program." Youth leadership training programs could be great. But my first question is, what problem are you trying to solve? What is it that you're seeing that you think is an issue for society that we need to address? And try to push them up a little bit to an higher level and meta level of thinking about what the problem is.
Is it that they think too many youth are in juvenile detention? Do they think too few are finishing school? So, you try to get a sense of that. Then really push to open the spigot to see how broadly can we find, how broadly are you open to kinds of solutions? If you're not, and in this case, the donor really wasn't, then what we do at Lever for Change, which are these big open calls, is really not appropriate for that donor. We've said that, we've turned donors down and said, "I don't think this is going to work." That is sometimes the hardest part. When donors choose to not work with us, it really is usually about not wanting to give up control. That goes back to what you were saying earlier.
Guy Kawasaki:
I got all these paranoid scenarios in my brain. Okay. Now, let's say that you're working with MacKenzie Scott, and an organization gets her money, and this organization, let's say, because I saw some very interesting programs on your list about feminist issues, and voter issues, and Black issues, and stuff like that. Let's say that happens. So, you support these causes and all of a sudden maybe a random governor in Florida says, "This is a woke cause and it's taking woke money and it's from Amazon money, which is enslaving people in warehouses, causing global warming with other airplanes, and trucks and blah, blah, blah, and they're trying to make this philanthropic effort into a woke thing." What happens then?
Cecilia Conrad:
There is an answer that is nothing. When we work with donors, the donors have usually negotiated a grant agreement with the organizations and most of the funding that we have supported, the examples that you have, we have facilitated, because none of it's our money, it all belongs to the donors. There have been project grants and the organizations have said, "This is what we're going to do." It's not like the donor is surprised.
We have an application process that's pretty rigorous, and the organization submit their applications, and they then get reviewed by a group of judges and evaluators we put together, and then they get sometimes interviewed by the donor. So, the donor really knows what the organization is planning to do. In that grant agreement, typically, the organization will specify, "Here are some milestones that we are going to reach over the time that this grant is happening."
So, it's unlikely that anything a governor, hypothetical governor from some state would say would come as a surprise to the donor. It's just this is the world we live in. My father used to have a saying, and that was that, "If people weren't talking about you and being a little critical, it probably means you're not doing anything."
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Now, let us also point out for historical reasons that your father was appointed to the State Board of Education in Texas, right?
Cecilia Conrad:
Yes, he was. He also was the first Black elected to a citywide office in Dallas. He was elected to the school board. That was before he got appointed to the State Board of Education. He had his share of criticism. We had a full page ad in a newspaper that said, when he was in a runoff, that said, "Let's not let these fuzzy-haired liberals take over our schools." And we got threatening phone calls.
Guy Kawasaki:
Your father said that?
Cecilia Conrad:
No, my father didn't say that. I said someone put an ad in the local newspaper that said, "Don't let these fuzzy head liberals." And there were three candidates. One was a Anglo white woman, the other one was a Jewish man, who was definitely left of center, and then there was my dad. So, the fuzzy-haired was capturing two groups at once in this ad. We received phone calls, threatening phone calls at the house.
But my father's attitude was, "We have a responsibility." He felt that we had a certain amount of privilege, because he was a physician and he had income that really wasn't dependent on the power structure in the community. So, it was his responsibility, our responsibility, collectively, to take stands and to speak truth.
Guy Kawasaki:
Right now, in the state of Texas, that board is now ten-to-five Republicans to Democrats. You think your father would be appointed now or have we gone backwards?
Cecilia Conrad:
He would not have been appointed by the current governor. I'm fairly certain. When he was first appointed, then it became an elected board. I'm actually not sure if it's elected or appointed right now. I haven't noticed lately. I'll have to look.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's probably elected.
Cecilia Conrad:
So, he was appointed initially and then it became elected and he was elected. Now, I've actually been a little behind on that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Are you impressed that I knew that much about your father?
Cecilia Conrad:
I am impressed.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'll give you another impressive fact. Okay?
Cecilia Conrad:
Okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
I want to know what you feel about affirmative action seeing as how you got in an affirmative action program at Bell Labs.
Cecilia Conrad:
Yes. Yes. I will self-identify as an affirmative action baby. First of all, I graduated from high school in 1972. Colleges and universities were really making, probably, in fact, really one of their biggest diversity pushes, as quiet as it said, many schools peaked in their numbers at that moment. My class at Wellesley was one of the largest classes of African American women, and we were an amazing bunch of people. If you talk to any of our classmates, we've got judges, and people who are in leadership at the ACLU, and physicians, and an amazing group of women with whom I stay very close.
But I particularly will point to the affirmative action baby, because I was looking for a summer job, and I saw a little postcard outside a bulletin board, outside of Career Services Office at Wellesley, and it announced a summer program for minority students or women who had an interest in economic, statistics, math, and those were my things. I ended up applying and it was at Bell Laboratories.
Then I began to learn that this particular program came out of one of the first big agreements, consent decrees, between the Equal Opportunity Commission, EOC, and AT&T. So, for those who were younger, in the old days, AT&T had a very sex type, you could see this, occupational structure. If you wanted to be an operator, you pretty much needed to be a woman, and if you wanted to be a repair man, you were going to be a man.
If you walked into their offices, you got handed a separate brochure depending on what the job was. They also did not have a great track record with respect to hiring African Americans, I think, at the time, I'm not sure there was a lot of focus on other groups, on Latinos, or Asian Americans, or Natives. But they reached a consent decree and part of that consent decree was that they said one of the reasons for the lack of diversity of Bell Labs is that there just aren't people in the pipeline.
So, they agreed to create a program to help stimulate this pipeline. Several programs, actually, they created a summer employment program for college students, and that's the postcard I'd seen. They created a graduate research fellowship program that focused on underrepresented minority groups. And they created a women's graduate fellowship program for the fields where they did research at Bell Laboratories. They had a very active economics research group. So, I went and spent a summer there as an undergrad, and then I applied for and received their research fellowship, which funded my graduate study.
So, it's hard to say if that path would've been as clear to me had it not been for that program, for that effort. I'm a direct beneficiary of those programs. Really, if you sit down, there's been a little bit of follow-up on that particular program, but at some point I could name, particularly in the sciences and physics and so on, how many of the faculty that now sit at different universities of Black faculty came through that particular initiative. It's an initiative that really worked. Then Bell Labs and AT&T was broken up and it disappeared.
I'm also, of course, interested in this issue, because I've written on this as an economist. I did some work early on the UC system and first the SP, the resolution that eliminated race as a factor in admissions, and then of course the Prop 209. I have always taken a really different perspective on this, partly because of my economics training. My question is if I'm going to allocate public resources, I want to ask the question, where is the additive impact of going to a particular campus or university? Where are we going to see the biggest additive impact of that?
That's a sort of allocation decision. Economics talks about marginal benefit equals marginal cost as one of the allocation rules. So, I want to ask that question, where is the marginal benefit relative to the cost going to be the highest? What that points to is really being conscious of how the opportunities at being at more selective campuses and universities, and what that means in terms of the network that you create, and what that means in terms of the credibility that you provide. It's clear to me that having gone to Wellesley and Stanford opens doors for me that might not have been open otherwise. That is for somebody who grew up, as I said, within the Black community in a somewhat privileged status, imagine what it does for others.
Guy Kawasaki:
Bottom line, you think Supreme Court made a mistake?
Cecilia Conrad:
Yes. But I go way back on my mistake. I think the decision that Powell made in the Bakke case, which was focused very much on this notion that diversity was of educational benefit, I do believe diversity is of an educational benefit, but I think that the argument for affirmative action is really an argument about redress. Part of that argument about redress is to create the space for those who've been excluded to benefit from all of the advantages of being in selective environments.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't even know if I should admit this, but people have asked me what do I think? Because one of the causes of this legal issue is that Asian Americans are suing, because they're saying it's harder for an Asian American to get into Harvard or Stanford, so it's reverse discrimination. Now, I got into Stanford in 1972. There's no doubt in my mind I got into Stanford because I don't know about because of affirmative action, but because I was, quote, unquote, "a minority."
I don't think I could get into Stanford today. But my attitude is, listen, back then, yes, it was a penalty to be Asian American. 2023, no longer penalty. I think that we should pass this special conditions for getting into these schools to other groups who don't have our current status and advantage. So, we benefited. Thank you very much. Now, let the next group of people have it. Let's just say, that's not popular among Asian Americans.
Cecilia Conrad:
Is there really a kind of monolithic view? By the way, we would've been classmates at Stanford.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, what years did you go?
Cecilia Conrad:
I didn't go. I went for graduate school, but I applied there as an undergraduate in '72, but I went to Wellesley instead.
Guy Kawasaki:
Here I was going to say you look familiar.
Cecilia Conrad:
I did have a cousin who went, so maybe you saw her.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't know how the hell we got from philanthropy to your father being on the State Board of Education, and Clarence Thomas, the affirmative action baby. But anyway, now, back to philanthropy.
Cecilia Conrad:
Okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. From the recipient side, what's the gist of the application process?
Cecilia Conrad:
For one of our Lever for Change challenges?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes.
Cecilia Conrad:
Yes. So, the application process, we have not an insubstantial, but an application that has been calibrated to provide the information that a donor needs to make a choice. So, usually, you have to describe your organization, you have to describe the project that you want to work on, as most of our challenges have been, a project-based challenge. You are also asked to talk about what are the threats for whether you'll succeed or not, and also how you've engaged authentically with the communities who are interested in this project. We want to make sure there's not a top-down kind of approach happening. That application is done online. You can see it ahead of time. We tell you how long we think it's going to take.
We also have a self-assessment tool that we've created. And we created this because the first time we did one of these open calls, which was MacArthur's 100&Change, we received a number of applications that were disqualified almost right away, because they didn't meet the basic eligibility, because they didn't do certain things. We created this other tool to help organizations make sure that they're a good fit before they invest the time. So, there is a time invested in that initial application.
That application then goes in through an evaluation process, and if the organization rises to become a finalist, then we have a second stage. In the second stage, we bring on extra help. We bring coaches on to help the organizations take the feedback that they got from the evaluation stage and really build out their application to have a robust proposal and plan, we call it a prospectus. We also help them with just the messaging so that it can be exciting, because we see our job as making the donor's decision really hard.
The donor then looks at those finalists and decides which one they're going to give their big grant to. Our minimum grant size in our signature challenges is ten million dollars. But we have usually then four or five other great ideas. So, we take those, because we've invested in making those really strong applications proposals, and we get those in front of other donors. The goal is to get as much of the other projects, as many as the other projects, and as much of those projects funded as we can. Sometimes, it takes us a couple years to do that, but we're making some headway.
Guy Kawasaki:
How many questions are in this initial application?
Cecilia Conrad:
Oh, that's a good question. I'm not sure I have a precise number. I think it's between fifteen and twenty.
Guy Kawasaki:
And how long this takes?
Cecilia Conrad:
It takes about twenty hours.
Guy Kawasaki:
So, if you look at this as a sales funnel, how many people enter the top of the funnel and how many drop out at the bottom with ten million or some other significant investment?
Cecilia Conrad:
In a typical challenge, where there's a topic and a single ten million dollar grant, I'd say probably about around eighty to 100 enter, and about five end up with some award at the end directly from the challenge. Then, we also hear from other organizations, and I can't give a precise number on the number, that the fact that we give feedback, which is unusual in philanthropy, that every one of our organizations gets feedback from the five or six judges who read their projects, that they have taken that and incorporated it and actually gotten money from other funders. So, that number, I don't have a precise number.
Guy Kawasaki:
I used to be a venture capitalist, and I'd say we probably fund one out of 1,000. You fund five out of 100 or something. But we never would give feedback, because whenever you give feedback, the entrepreneur would then argue why either we were wrong or they actually fulfill what we say they don't fulfill. So, don't you encounter that problem? Don't they want to prove you are wrong, so you should really take me and give me the ten million?
Cecilia Conrad:
Oh, yes. But you have to remember that my earlier career was as a college professor, and every grade could be subject to the same kind of, "No, you've made a mistake in not giving me an A." Why I think it's valuable to give feedback is that every one of the applicants, and I'm going to say this and I'm sure probably somewhere there's one that maybe it's not true, but in general, I feel that every one of the applicants to one of our challenges has a good idea, has a strong commitment to really making a difference in the world, and sometimes get so passionate in arguing with us.
It's because they think that we're just what stands between their good idea and solving a problem in the world. When you review a person from that perspective, you can tolerate some of the criticism. The goal is to listen and to repeat what they heard in the application. The thing that has surprised me, what a small number actually do critic jump on us or argue that we're wrong. It's not a big number at all.
Guy Kawasaki:
You mean, they just give up with their tails between their legs?
Cecilia Conrad:
No, no, no. What they do is they take the feedback and they revise their proposal or their project, and sometimes they'll even contact me afterwards to talk to me about what they're doing and the feedback, and then they take it to other funders. What they have reported back to us is that participating in our process has a value add in that they've been making a stronger case for funding. So, sometimes someone will go back to a funder who's been giving them a couple $100,000 a year for five years and say, "Hey, I've got this really big idea, but to execute on this big idea, I need a commitment over multiple years that's going to total more than the $100,000 a year." And donors have said yes when they see a great idea.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow, that's great. You're the Tony Robbins of philanthropy. Okay. Arguably, you're one of the most qualified people in the world to answer this question, which is based on all this data you've collected, what are your tips for raising money?
Cecilia Conrad:
I have tips for the organizations, but there's another part of this that falls on the philanthropist, where we talked a little bit about the change. So, for the organizations, I think one of the most common problems that I've seen in applications is that they start with a problem that is very lofty and big. I'm going to pretend I'm Miss America for a moment and say, let's say, it's world peace.
Guy Kawasaki:
You look like Sandra Bullock.
Cecilia Conrad:
Then, they proposed work that might be, "We're going to have a program in our neighborhood that will provide afterschool activities for youth." They don't draw any kind of connection between the world peace and the program on this block. I'm exaggerating here, but that tends to be the biggest problem we see, that people will get very excited because they've been told, "You've got to have a compelling problem." And they'll spend a lot of time telling us about how compelling the problem is. That's important.
From reading some of our applications, it's where I first realized what a significant number of children die from drowning every year in the world. I hadn't really realized that until I read this in one of their proposals. But it's just as important to talk about how your solution is making a dent in that big problem, and to give some real concrete data or stories or examples that helps to illustrate that. That's one of the common problems that I sometimes see in proposals.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, before you go to the second.
Cecilia Conrad:
Oh, go ahead. Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Let's say I am this person applying from the Bronx, and I do want to help with afterschool care, nutrition, whatever, for kids in the Bronx. What do I describe as the problem, if not world peace?
Cecilia Conrad:
You describe the problem that you're actually solving. That is that there are young people who are suffering, and perhaps it may be that their academic achievement is lower, because they're not getting fed, in the case of a nutrition program. It could be that they're having more encounters with the police because they don't have enough activities that are keeping them in safe environments.
You can define a problem that may seem small, but it is compelling. And people, a funder will recognize that, yes, eventually this is going to be important for world peace. But the first step is really solving this very specific problem that you're working on, and showing that you're making headway on that specific problem is what will get a funder excited.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. In the venture capital business, the pitches that start, "The internet is going to be big," or "AI is going to be big." “Thank you very much. Let me write that down. I didn't realize that until you pitched.” Yeah. Okay. Now, you were going on with more tips.
Cecilia Conrad:
My second one is actually about the fact that many of the organizations, let's take your organization from the Bronx, that apply, have not ever had the opportunity to think this big before. They have told us this, that this is liberating, that usually they're thinking in terms of, "How am I going to get the $100,000 from this company?" Or something like that. They don't have necessarily the space to do it.
The other piece of advice I have is to look for assistance in putting together the case for funding. There are opportunities. There are people who will do pro bono support. As I'm saying this to you, I have every year gone and talked to people at colleges and universities, my old haunt, about how their proposals tend to be too theoretical, because they don't have any experience doing the work, and that maybe they should partner more with the organization in the Bronx that's doing the work.
So, I think there's opportunities to draw from those resources that are around you to help with putting the time in to put together a proposal that is documented with evidence and research. I would see proposals where one of the questions has to do, "What's the evidence that you will work?" And I will know that there is evidence, because I'm an economist and I've seen some of the studies. But the organization doesn't necessarily have access to those studies. But they could get access if they could connect with some of those people who are doing the research. So, think about how to make those connections tap into the resources that are available at universities and colleges, who might be able to help you beef up that part of the project proposal.
Guy Kawasaki:
Is there a third tip? Because I believe in tricolons.
Cecilia Conrad:
I always start with three as well, and I'm sitting here for a moment. My third tip actually goes back now. The third tip I think is a known entity, and that is that there's this storytelling aspect of applying for funding. Think about a bit of making sure you have a consistent narrative. That's a version of what I said in the beginning that you've attached A to B. But as thinking about that narrative is also being about how you will keep the work on track into the future. Because one of the things that many funders are concerned about is that, "We'll put money in a project and the project ends, and then what happens?"
For example, in our applications, most of them, many of them have a question about how is this work going to be sustained? Or how is the impact going to be sustained beyond the specific grant period? That's something else that it's important to be attentive to when you're putting together a proposal.
Sometimes, that might be that it's what I call the magic pill, that once we do this, we won't have to do it again. Sometimes, it may be that you have identified market-based sources of revenue or public sources of revenue that would become available if only you could get these pieces in place that the grant will allow you to do. Sometimes, it may be that once you've been able to demonstrate that your solution works, that you anticipate being able to bring on other philanthropists.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, when you say storytelling, from your perspective, is it more important to use numbers and facts, like what percentage of kids in the Bronx graduate high school? What percentage go to college? Or is it more important to say, "There was this kid named Jonathan, crack addict parents, ten schools in two years, but somehow he went to State University of New York, and he graduated because of all the help that he got, and that's what we want to make happen"? So, is it numbers or is it stories?
Cecilia Conrad:
That is a toughie. I would say that donors have different personalities in this regard. So, if you're applying to a specific funder, it would be good to get some insights into their personality. I have donors who are only interested in the numbers, and then I have donors who want the story, who want to be able to hear directly from beneficiaries about how their lives have been affected. I personally like the projects that sort of interweave the two, that tell a story like, "10 percent”. Let me get a bigger figure than that to make it more impressive. "80 percent of the young people who come through our program went on to college, and this includes people like Chad, who overcame all these obstacles to graduate from state," or something like that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Now, I have to ask, we've been discussing this optimization of this application process and all this, but we started this conversation with the example of MacKenzie, who doesn't have an application process. So, how do I wrap my mind around the fact that there's this no application from MacKenzie Scott? And then there's this fifteen-question, big application process from Cecilia Conrad.
Cecilia Conrad:
I think there's space in philanthropy for many different tools and approaches to identifying the projects you want to fund. As I said at the beginning, my other job, the program I led until recently, and I was doing it at the same time as I was doing this other thing, is a MacArthur Fellows Program, where there's no application, where we do a lot of research.
But I recognize that when you don't have an application, when you are basically choosing projects based on the diligence that you are doing yourself, that you're relying on the networks, you try to reach out and find out who's doing what that's exciting, that there's a certain selectivity bias there. That these are, you're more likely to see organizations or people from New York City nominated, or from LA nominated, and you're missing the middle part of the country, or the rural area where maybe there's not an existing funder who's doing work. You want to make sure that we have open processes available, but an open process requires an application, because the statement I made earlier, people don't know you, so you need to introduce yourself.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Now, how about some tips if a philanthropist is listening to this and say, "Help me give my money away more effectively."
Cecilia Conrad:
I'm tempted to say call me. So, I'll put that on the list of tips.
Guy Kawasaki:
I respect you for saying that.
Cecilia Conrad:
But there are lots of resources besides Lever for Change, particularly, sometimes when I've talked to philanthropists, they'll say, "I want to do more. Right now I'm giving to my kids' school and my alma mater, and I want to do more, but it's so overwhelming. There's so much out there." They have some of the fears that you described earlier, that they're going to make a mistake and give to an organization and they can't tell where the money went or how it was spent, or did it make a difference?
But there are lots of tools. There are philanthropic advisors, there are collaborative funds. For example, there's a group called Blue Meridian that's focused on addressing child poverty in the US. There's a group called Co-Impact that just launched a big gender fund that's working in the global south. There's The END Fund, that's working on neglected tropical diseases.
There are a lot of opportunities out there to identify a group of funders with whom you may be simpatico to put your money in and to understand and learn a field by co-funding with those others. That's another opportunity. There are other platforms besides Lever for Change. We have a platform that has the finalist from every one of our challenges for donors to think about funding. But there are other platforms that have attempted to apply criteria and pre-vet ideas and projects and make them available to donors who want to fund them in different topic areas.
There are lots of ways to get information to make it less overwhelming. I think the important thing is to really just take that first step because what you find is I think that the fear that people are going to squander your wealth is really overrated. You hear about these big cases of people doing things. By and large, this is a sector filled with wonderful organizations doing good work, who could do even more if they didn't have to struggle constantly for resources.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Now, you mentioned this several times and I was holding myself back from going deep into this question, but I am so curious about the MacArthur Award.
Cecilia Conrad:
Yes, the MacArthur Fellows.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm waiting for my phone to ring, but what's the gist of the nomination process?
Cecilia Conrad:
So, each month, we go out and we try to identify people who are at the nodes of networks, people in positions where they can spot what the most creative work is happening. This is across all domains. People aren't limited to nominating in their domain. We invite them to nominate people for the Fellows Program. We might invite somebody in science, and they nominate a jazz person, or we might invite a high school teacher who nominates an astronomer.
We can never really tell where those nominations are going to come from. But we try to refresh that pool every month, paying attention to all metrics of diversity, geography and so on, and in search of these exceptionally creative individuals, where our fellowship could liberate them a bit to be able to take even more risk and be more creative. That's the first step is the nominations.
Nominations come into the Fellows Program staff, and everyone is read by at least two of us. We identify the ones that seem ready for development, and then we go out and we start to do research, quietly. We read papers. We might sneak in to hear someone give a talk or see a performance. We also reach out to people who are immediately in their field and people in adjacent fields and further away who might be impacted by the individual's work, and we ask for those opinions. Those then come in to a selection committee. It's an independent selection committee. It's not MacArthur staff. We present the case for each one of the potential fellows to that committee, and it's ultimately that committee that makes recommendations to the MacArthur board.
Guy Kawasaki:
And how does one become a nominator?
Cecilia Conrad:
The nominations are also, we do this, we go out and we research and find people. So, it should be an exciting invitation to get, almost as exciting as getting the phone call that you're a MacArthur Fellow, should be, "Oh, we want to invite you to nominate."
Guy Kawasaki:
And is it a secret society?
Cecilia Conrad:
We ask for everyone to keep this in confidence. One of probably the things that I'm most impressed by is it's rare when we call someone and tell them they've been named a MacArthur Fellow. It's very rare that they knew we were looking at them. People keep the secret. I think it's because it's almost cruel, right? Because we name twenty to twenty-five every year. The other thing about the program is that once a nomination has been made, that candidate is still a candidate for years after the original nomination. We keep an eye on them, track them. Nowadays, we put Google alerts just to see what they're doing. So, you don't know when we're going to actually name someone that you nominated three or four years ago.
Guy Kawasaki:
Why US only?
Cecilia Conrad:
Well, it's interesting because we've asked ourselves this question several times. And I think what we feel is that the work that we do and this method that we do does require that we have a network, a well-developed network. We would be really excited if someone wanted to do the same thing in another country. In fact, we've talked to some people about that. It might be down the road in the future. But I think developing the network that you need to be able to get great nominations to do the due diligence work we do would be difficult on a global scale.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, do you have to be poor?
Cecilia Conrad:
No.
Guy Kawasaki:
Conceivably, could there be a millionaire, who's creative, doing great things, sustainable, blah, blah, blah, and he gets, or she gets a MacArthur Fellowship?
Cecilia Conrad:
Yes, we don't have poverty as a criteria. We do have an enabling criteria, but we define enabling both in terms of dollars. So, sometimes, the enabling is raising the visibility of a fellow's work or giving some credibility to someone who may be a little bit outside the mainstream of the discipline or the field that they're working in. But there's the potential there for really being transformative. The notion of enabling is a pretty big pot of possibilities.
But you'll see scientists who are named MacArthur Fellows, who have probably a pretty solid amount of funding in the science research that they're doing. But it could be that funding is tied to particular applications, and they would really like the chance to experiment with a different kind of wild and crazy idea that may not be related to health, where there's a lot of rich funding, but related to something else. And this fellowship can give them the opportunity to do that.
Guy Kawasaki:
So, we have had two MacArthur Fellows on my podcast, Angela Duckworth and Stephen Wolfram, and both are extremely mind-expanding episodes. Do you have any pattern recognition tips that you can offer, being the mother of MacArthur Fellows, you can say, "This is what we notice." Liberal arts, Ivy League, broken home, adopted, I don't know, whatever, right-handed, left-handed, use a Macintosh.
Cecilia Conrad:
I could put a couple in that I've observed. Now, the first one, when I first came to the program ten years ago, I want to frame this, because you might argue that I'm a biased researcher. I don't think so, but I want to be clear that I came to this program after spending my entire career at small liberal arts colleges. I noticed a pattern that small liberal arts colleges are overrepresented among MacArthur Fellows as origins of undergraduate degrees.
But I don't think it's small liberal arts colleges. I've tried to dig into that a little bit. I think what we've seen is more of a pattern is that people who are sometimes operating at the interstices of different disciplines, who've been exposed to one discipline and then changed to another, but who have the ability to make connections across fields that are sometimes just unexpected. Like, "I got this idea from over here and I translated it to this other sector, and it turns out it worked." That seems to be a bit of a common thread.
So, we have a neuroscientist who was a dancer, those kinds of things. That's one of the spaces. And they are people who would have frequently, we're going back to a conversation we had earlier, have had experience of failure and then moved on from that failure to see some other opportunities to take that idea and apply it elsewhere.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Basically truffles can grow in liberal arts.
Cecilia Conrad:
Yeah. I urge people to sample different fields, to sample different spaces. I am going to make an assertion here, this is more of my belief, so I'm not going to argue that I've done research on this. But I think some of what has been a competitive advantage for the US in the global economy has largely been about creativity and work that requires new ideas, creative thinking. We've done really well in that space and continue to do well.
Part of that I do think is that we are on a scale more likely than most other systems, educational systems, to let people explore for a long time before they lock themselves in to a particular path or particular career. Liberal arts colleges are just one example of that. But if you look at even our universities that are not liberal arts, people can move from engineering to history, or history to engineering, during the years of college. I think that is one of the ways in which great ideas emerge.
Guy Kawasaki:
Somebody should tell San Luis Obispo this, but I digress. If you're familiar with how they like, "In your kindergarten year, you have to declare your major for San Luis Obispo." But anyway. I'm friends with Tom Peters and there's been follow-up studies about the companies in search of excellence. So, has there been follow-up studies of, "We're tracking MacArthur Fellows and this is what they went on to do. They're still at the leading edge," et cetera?
Cecilia Conrad:
Yeah. We did a review of the program about ten years ago. It was right before I arrived. That was probably 2012, 2013. You can see a summary of it on our website. That asked what people did with the money, and it asked for the fellows to assess what the impact was. It also asked influentials what they thought of the people that we had identified as fellows. It's interesting, it's basically based on survey evidence in different populations.
The challenge for the MacArthur Fellows Program, and this is a challenge I think going back to any grant making where it's no strings attached, is that it's no strings attached. We're saying to the fellows, "We trust that whatever you decide to do is going to be creativity enhancing and lead to great things." So, it's very hard to do any kind of traditional evaluation study because they take this fellowship in different directions.
Some become more public intellectuals and even assume positions in the national government or even one was former head of the World Bank, some continue along that path of research that they started with and end up, in a recent case, we've had two of our women's scientists who've become Nobel Prize winners. Others start to branch into different kinds of disciplines that they might not have taken or taken some risk. So, it's hard to look at any one outcome and say, "This is great." Because that's what we said, we said, "Take this money and run with it."
We're in the process of doing another one of these reviews, and one of the things that the internet has allowed us to do is that we can do more tracking, because they don't have to report to us. So, we may see some more specking out of what fellows have done over time. Some fellows take the money, going back to your hypothetical wealthy fellow, and they have used it, they've given it away themselves. They have set up their own programs. In one case, there was a program to give scholarships to Latino students who were interested in public policy, and in another case, there was a fellow who set up a project to give caregivers sabbaticals.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think you're going to find this very interesting. So, I went to Bard and I went to ChatGPT and I asked, "Who should be 2023 MacArthur Fellows?"
Cecilia Conrad:
Oh, that's a great idea. I hadn't tried that.
Guy Kawasaki:
So, first of all, ChatGPT says, "I'm a large language model, blah, blah, blah. I can't answer." But Bard answered and it gave me six or seven names of people. When you do the research, they sound exactly like what you're looking for. So, go to Bard and ask, "Who should be 2023 MacArthur Fellows?" And you will be fascinated with who they come up with. It's really interesting.
Cecilia Conrad:
Okay, I'm typing it in.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, if this is how MacArthur Fellows are picked in the future, I want acknowledgement. Okay?
Cecilia Conrad:
I'll give you acknowledgement if this is what happens. I am in the wrong spot in Bard. I'll have to wait until I get in the right spot. But I am going to try that. I asked it to write a short bio of me. I asked Chat, and it made up amazing things. So, I hope you hadn't seen that, you hadn't done that in order to decide to invite me to be on your program, because I really have not done all the things it thinks I have.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't know about you, but it makes me feel good that Cecilia Conrad and people like her are driving bold change to the big problems in the world. Her visionary leadership continues to inspire and ignite a brighter future for generations to come. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. My thanks to MERGE4 for sponsoring this episode. MERGE4 is the creator of the world's coolest socks. Remember to use the promo code “friendofguy” to get a 30 percent discount. Next, I want to thank Jeff Sieh and Shannon Hernandez, the incredible sound engineering team. Also, Luis Magaña, Alexis Nishimura, Fallon Yates, and the dynamic duo, Madisun and Tessa Nuismer. This is the Remarkable People team. Until next week, mahalo and aloha.