Feeding the rat- what can happen when you make philanthropy accountable: Kevin Starr at TEDxBYU
in 1994 three friends and I set out for the unclimbed North Face of trango tower which is um in the north of Pakistan near K2 and it's kind of like if you took y's ELC Capitan and you stuck it on top of the helps and just getting to the base of that wall was like climbing a mountain in of itself and once we got to the wall we inched up day after day just getting higher and higher and we lived suspended on the wall in these little bat tents and we melted every all the water we drank we sat out these storms in our little tents and went up and down on increasingly frayed ropes sometimes sometimes climbing at night and after 18 days on the wall we emerged on the top and then it took us 3 days going down the same way uh to get back to base camp and uh this is what it looks like when you take two weeks worth of food on a 3-we climb so I love still love to Alpine climb I love to Surf big waves and over caffeinated media often refers to these things as extreme sports and the people who do them as Adrenaline Junkies and whatever the I don't actually like to be scared it usually means I'm doing something stupid and the reason I did these things is better captured by the words of a British climber Mo Antoine who called what he did feeding the rat what he meant was he had an intense C craving for deep experiences with an uncertain outcome and he called that craving the rat and when he went off to climb in the Himalaya he called it feeding the rat that's what I was doing I was feeding the rat now this talk was supposed to be about the intersection of the personal and the uh professional and I'm sure it's obvious to you by this time it's a talk on philanthropy right um anyway it was about the same time my own life took a turn I was a newly mted physician and working in the mountains of Bolivia with a beloved Mentor rer arnhold we walked through these these Mountain Trails walking together one day when suddenly Riner fell dead of a major an enormous stroke and in the aftermath that I got to know his family and they'd been in banking literally for 300 years they were very good at it and they wanted to set up a foundation to carry on his work in some way and they asked me to help and so I set out to some of the places that Riner loved trying to figure out what works what can we do to carry on riner's Legacy um he worked in many humanitarian settings trying to figure out ultimately how to make the world a better place for its children but he loved places like Tibet he loved places like Afghanistan so I traveled in those places trying to figure out what worked and I saw some I met some remarkable people I saw some compelling projects I learned about some really great ideas but nobody seemed to be really figuring out what worked and it felt somehow uncomplete unfulfilling because I wasn't really figuring out what worked and I got I felt a little lost like I was actually supposed to to be doing something else and then I met this brilliant guy named Martin fiser and Martin was making these manual irrigation pumps that allowed small holder Farmers to go from one crappy rainfed crop a year to more high value crops a couple of times a year using these irrigation pumps and what's more he had really good data he had data showing that the people who bought and used these pumps were increasing their income by a factor of 10 and I was mind blown I'd never really seen anything like this and it's really resonated with me and shortly after in talking with the bankers who were on my board I realized that we could start thinking about impact is the analog of profit and we could be thinking about the cost of impact as the analog of return on investment and that started to change everything and I realized I had a way to feed the rat and that way was to make myself accountable for impact to myself to the world to my board to try to squeeze the most impact in the world out of the philanthropic money I'd been entrusted with and then being accountable for impact actually turned the job that can just be sifting through endless piles of proposals to a real treasure hunt really and what what do we mean by impact anyway so what what we the way that we do it is we start with something we call the 12 the eight-word mission statement what we want to know first to try to understand an organization's impact is to think about how would you describe what you do in eight words or less that includes a verb a Target population and an outcome that implies something to measure then the second question is if you could only measure one thing to know if you were pulling off that mission what would it be so let me go through a few to show how you get to your eight-word mission statement and you're just one thing so one acre fund bundles together what Farmers need to make a decent living off a 1 acre plot of land their mission get African Farmers out of extreme poverty they one thing to measure income from crops Living Goods Avon ladylike network of women selling Health Products door Todo and doing health education at the same time they're out there to save African kids' lives they're just one thing is child mortality that's what the that's what's going to make us know if they're good at what they do offgrid electric and these are all from the malago portfolio by the way offgrid Electric in in Tanzania takes a better solar energy system than you could ever afford and puts it on your roof and then charges you for the power for a good lighting system and um mobile charger Etc and they sell you the power for less than you were spending on kerosene previously their mission high quality light very poor people we like the specificity of that and and what they measure really is the houses that go from essentially Darkness to being well lit now when you get serious about impact there's this thing that looms over you you've got your eight-word mission statement dialed and you know what to measure you actually measure and get some good numbers that show a change over time you still got to deal with this thing the counterfactual is a textual technical term for what would have happened without you cuz your impact is the difference between what happened with you minus what would have happened without you anyway and it's kind of scary to confront so here's what happens when you don't look at it so Millennium Villages worked in this town in Kenya for five years at the end of that time as a way of showing demonstrating their success they said mobile phone ownership went from 10 to 40% a 400% increase wow here's the counterfactual that's what it did throughout rural Kenya it went from 20 to 50% just didn't have anything to do with their work this was happening anyway it takes guts to examine that green line another thing if you get serious about impact is scale so I was in college I read EF shu marker small is beautiful I really dug it it it meant a lot to me and when I first started this work what I thought was really great was little jewel boxes of projects that were finished and Polished and as you get hungry for impact your whole aesthetic changes and you start feeling more like this that scale is beautiful and just like a physicist who sees Einstein's equation for general relativity they understand it in a way that it's makes it beautiful to them it's a beautiful equation here's my beautiful equation so a scalable solution meaning lasting impact meaning it costs it's inexpensive enough that it could actually be done at scale it's replicable meaning that it's simple systematic broadly adaptable enough that it could be done at scale and it knows where it's going it knows it's designed to either scale out via the government via the market or via other organizations and an organization that deliver a kick-ass organization that has leaders who know how to Pivot has the right people in the right positions with the right Talent has the right systems knows how to raise money that equals big impact is that sexy or what and so you end up with this which means you got to deal with some of this we talk about risk and philanthropy but it's not really serious like most of us are spending somebody else's money number one and having been in this game for a while I can tell you nobody ever gets fired for lack of impact but when you make yourself truly accountable for impact there is risk because if you're trying to squeeze the Maximum Impact you can out of the money that's been entrusted to you you need to take some risks you need to go for where the impact jackpot might be and figure out if you can go there without being foolish and be willing to risk your money on something that might fail you don't want to be stupid but you want to be brave a great example is our friend Alex Petro he's a he's a crazy and I mean that in the most complimentary best sense guy from um Maine he's a Relentless autodidact and he had this idea that One Acre Farms are never going to get anybody out of poverty in Africa and what we need is a new model for a family farm that is 10 acres has oxen and can use sophisticated agricultural techniques to squeeze some serious money out of the land now this is a super important idea because most of Africa's poor are rural Farmers by default and Africa is never going to emerge into Prosperity till we figure out how to have prosperous rural economies this could be the impact jackpot Alex went to Uganda to do it but it was kind of boring it was a little too stable for him so he went down to South kevu in the in the uh Democratic Republic of the Congo which if any of you have been listening to the news ke was always always always in trouble and in the middle of a war he started a teaching Farm to teach people the kind of methods that would allow them to do this kind of farming and he took on a partner fiston Malaga and fiston was a member of the aristocracy really but he had a real burden to smell help small holder farmers and the two of them made an incredible team an inspiring team and it was they took some serious risks a number of times fistone had to actually hide from assassination squads because he backed the wrong political horse now the cool thing about this is Alex and fistone are partners fistone and me are Partners now we talk about Partners a lot in philanthropy too it's another another thing we do that's kind of kind of nonsense because really it's rarely a partner relationship it's they need the money we got the money it's an asymmetric power relationship when you're seriously accountable for impact though I need Fone more than fistone needs me because impact is harder to find than money that's the truth you find when you're really out there hunting impact it's harder to find than money we are real partners we sink or swim together so to finish up I'll tell you feed the rat whether you're a doer a donor a cheerleader in the whole social sector feed the rat be accountable for impact if we really do that we might end up with a social sector that functions like a real market for impact that can get resources efficiently to those that are best at creating change and if we can do that we're going to make a big tent in the world's problems and I promise you if we do it that way we're gonna have more fun doing it thank [Applause] you