← Nonprofit Nation with Julia Campbell
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- [00:00]
Julia Campbell
What if we named things for what they're not? We'd give teachers non oranges and fly non cars. That sounds ridiculous, right? So why is your world changing organization called a nonprofit? The truth is you are for purpose and the more you raise, recruit and retain, the more good you can do. That's where Bloomerang comes in. Bloomerang's giving platform is built for purpose with easy to use tools and powerful insights that will help you understand your donors better than ever and unleash even more generosity. Imagine spending less time on admin tasks and more time on what matters your mission. Bloomerang customers raise an average of 26% more. Are you ready to join them? Then just visit jcsocialmarketing.com forward/bloomerang to learn more and start making an even bigger impact. That's jcsocialmarketing.com B L O O M E R A N G let's get to the episode.
- [01:16]
Hello and welcome to Nonprofit Nation. I'm your host, Julia Campbell, and I'm going to sit down with nonprofit industry experts, fundraisers, and everyone in between to get real and discuss what it takes to build that movement that you've been dreaming of. I created the Nonprofit Nation podcast to share practical wisdom and strategies to help you confidently find your voice, definitively grow your audience, and effectively build your movement. If you're a nonprofit newbie or an experienced professional who's looking to get more visibility, reach more people, and create even more impact, then you're in the right place. Let's get started.
- [02:05]
Hello. Hi everyone. This is your host of Nonprofit Nation, Julia Campbell. Welcome to the podcast. If it's your very first time or welcome back. Today we're talking about philanthropy and different models of philanthropy and the future of philanthropy and all sorts of different topics. My guest today is Alex Amouyel. Alex is the president and CEO of Newman's Own foundation and the author of the Answer is you, A Guidebook to Creating a Life Full of Impact. She leads the foundation's efforts to continue its commitment to use 100% of profits from the sale of Newman's Own food and beverage products to nourish and transform the lives of children who face adversity. Alex is also the outgoing founding Executive Director of solve, an initiative of the mit, which is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And previously, Alex was the Director of program for the Clinton Global Initiative. She's also worked for Save the Children International in London and across Asia, the Middle east and Haiti. So much nonprofit experience. Alex, welcome to the podcast.
- [03:22]
Alex Amouyel
Thank you so Much for having me. Delighted to be here.
- [03:25]
Julia Campbell
So I mentioned that you've worked at, you know, Clinton Global Initiative, Save the Children International. I'm actually a donor to Save the Children International. Love the work that they do. And you founded your own nonprofit, solve, so can share a little bit about your journey, how you got into this work.
- [03:45]
Alex Amouyel
Well, I would say I didn't found solve. Just a quick clarification. It's not its own nonprofit. It's an initiative of mit, and so they founded it. But I was brought on board as, you know, the first executive director to really get it off the ground and recruit all the staff, you know, turn the vision that they had into, you know, build all the systems and processes like that. So just.
- [04:12]
Julia Campbell
No, I think a lot of my listeners can really respond. They really can respond to that. Doing all the things, being the person to recruit all the people, do all the things.
- [04:23]
Alex Amouyel
It's still nicer or easier to do all the things under MIT's umbrella than to do it on your own. So.
- [04:31]
Julia Campbell
Yeah, right. With the support of mit. So tell me about your sort of journey into nonprofit work.
- [04:38]
Alex Amouyel
Absolutely. So in all honesty, it started, in fact, when I was in college even, and at least when I was doing my Masters, I did work with and then end up chairing a student nonprofit charity which used to do summer camps for kids in Asia. And certainly when I was doing my master's, which is in international relations, I really wanted to work for a human rights organization or something like Save the Children. That was my dream at the time. And I got confronted during my Masters at the fact that nobody wanted to pay me any money to work in human rights, and partly because I didn't have any experience, which I'm sure is common to many people starting out. And so I had to think about that and reframe it. I ended up starting my career at the Boston Consulting Group in London as a strategy consultant. But luckily for me, apart from a number of very useful transferable skills, I also gained from the fact that BCG had a pro bono partnership with Save the Children. And after quite a lot of pleading with the staffing people, I managed to get staffed on a Save the Children project for a few months. And through that, I met the team that ultimately hired me full time, and that was a team within Save the Children, what was at the time the international secretariat of the alliance, and then became Save the Children International, which was to work across all the country, offices and then member offices, and essentially help act as an internal consultant to merge all of the programs Into. Into one body. Because at the time, Save the Children, there were nine different Save the Children's operating in Ethiopia, for example, Save the Children us, Save the Children uk, Save the Children Sweden. And so it's an interesting start because it was more this corporate background, sort of internal, internal consultant type role. That was the point. I was using the skill had acquired through BCG to then apply these into a nonprofit setting. And that's what started my career. You know, I moved from Save the Children to New York to work for the Clinton foundation, partly because after a while, you know, was doing a lot of finance, hr, legal stuff with Save the Children, and I was like, oh, it would be nice to do something more programmatic and more about content and things like that. So that was the move I made at the Clinton Foundation. And then from the Clinton Foundation, I got offered the position to, you know, really be the first and founding executive director of MIT solve. And we can talk more about those.
- [07:26]
Julia Campbell
Yes. What does MIT SOLVE do?
- [07:29]
Alex Amouyel
So it's an initiative of mit, and its mission is all about driving innovation to solve world challenges. And it does that by launching these different challenges in ed tech, health tech, climate tech, et cetera, and asking innovators all around the world, whether they're nonprofits for profits or hybrids, to submit their solutions. And then it supports them with funding and resources and connections with corporations, foundations, MIT academics. But really, I think the original vision of concept is around being a marketplace for social impact innovation and really opening up the doors of mit, similar to how there was this whole open education, you know, these massive online open courses of saying anyone can be an innovator and MIT is there to help.
- [08:27]
Julia Campbell
I agree. Oh, I love that. So I think I want to start with the foundation, Newman's own foundation, and its unique model for philanthropy, and then talk more about just philanthropy trends in general. Because there's just. I mean, there's so many reports out there, there's so many findings, there's so many statistics, there's so much data, whether we think it's declining or not declining. But I really want to talk about the foundation and its unique model. So we know that Paul Newman had a bold vision, and maybe you could share sort of the story of how the foundation was created and sort of how it's evolved since its creation.
- [09:12]
Alex Amouyel
Well, absolutely. The story starts before the foundation ever existed, in the sense that Paul and his longtime friend, a Hotchner that everybody used to call Hodge, decided to make salad dressing and gave it out to their friends over Christmas. And at least the mythology story Sort of goes that by February. This is some interviews of Paul from back in the day. Says by February they were knocking on the door asking for more. The two friends decided they should turn it into business. You know, this, this salad dressing business. And so they, you know, found a butler, they got Stu Leonard which is in Connecticut to you know, sell the product and it took off. They. They invested $40,000 of their own money and after a year had turned a profit of about $300,000 which is pretty good for a startup, right? Any in any industry and. But also in this time.
- [10:17]
Julia Campbell
Yes.
- [10:17]
Alex Amouyel
And then it just grew exponentially from there and from the very beginning Paul said and it sort of also related with the idea of putting his face on the bottle that something he was told he needed to do to. For this to get traction. But he sort of decided to give all the profits away that were made at the beginning. As far as I can tell that was pretty simple. It was like at the end of the. There wasn't the foundation didn't in fact exist back in 1982. It was at the end of the year how whatever profit was made he would then take out his checkbook and write some checks basically. And that's how it worked for Wall. And then as this venture grew and grew and grew and became more profitable. Then he created a foundation. And then when he died in 2008 he did something else which was pretty unique which is he gifted the food company to the foundation. And that was not fully legal at the time. Foundations owning for profit businesses outright subject them to a number of taxes and the number of.
- [11:34]
Julia Campbell
It was regulations.
- [11:36]
Alex Amouyel
Yeah. So we got a special dispensation for. For the IRS to be able to continue operations and then worked with legislators to pass what's called the Philanthropic Enterprise Act 2017 that actually allows foundations to own for profit businesses in the right circumstances with you know, a number of things that indeed 100% of the profits need to go to to good causes. So pretty innovative from the beginning to the end.
- [12:09]
Julia Campbell
So that leads me to ask about the 100% for purpose project. And if you go to the number 100 f o r purpose.org you can learn more about it. What is this projects and you know, how can organizations get involved? I love like the thinking of paying it forward and showing more businesses and organizations how they can participate.
- [12:36]
Alex Amouyel
Yes, absolutely. So Newman Zone as a foundation slash business. Right. For both is pretty unique. Although we're not the only ones in the world. Thankfully we're probably not even fully the first. If you look broader than the U.S. there are a number of people who are doing various versions of what we do. So Patagonia is probably one of the more recent examples, but one of the most famous ones. So Yvonne Schwina ran Patagonia, founded Patagonia over 50 years ago and then in 2022 decided to build a purpose trust. And essentially all the profits of Patagonia are now going to this trust and then and sort of flow down to good court to climate change. But there's also Humanitarics, which started in Australia, which is an ticketing company. There's organizations in Bangladesh like Grameen or brac, in India like the Self Employed Women's Association. So there are a few out there. And we do get inquiries ever so often from people who either want to start businesses that are 100% for purpose or who have a business that is profitable and still private. You know, it's not full of investors and other things that they want to convert to or donate to a foundation. And so they do reach out to us. So this hundred percent for purpose club or movement is us wanting to find out, I think already who's already doing this around the world and how we can all help each other and talk about ourselves in a way, but also then to really inspire the next generation of these organizations, whether it's people, entrepreneurs who are just starting up and saying this is a way to organize yourself in a different way than the traditional business or traditional nonprofit or for people who have a company already and saying this is something you could do with your company. And if you want to hear more, we're here to help. It coincides with a TED talk that I just recorded.
- [14:57]
Julia Campbell
Yes, yes. And it's on the website. So the ted talks called 100% for purpose. If you go to 100 for purpose.org you can watch the TED talk there. So you've spoken about the importance of making philanthropy more participatory. So what does that look like in practice?
- [15:17]
Alex Amouyel
This. So there are lots of ways you can do this. But I think the fundamental idea is to get away from me as the president and CEO of a foundation or a program officer or, you know, a high net worth individual making all the decisions and saying, you know, let's say our mission is nourishing and transforming the lives of children who face adversity. And we, we do a lot of work, for example, on nutrition education and school food or indigenous food justice. And saying, me as this one person, I know what's best and we're going to fund this organization or we're going to do this program. And it's really about saying how can we decentralize the decision making and really crowd in people with lived experience and expertise on the topics that we care about to really sort of rely on their knowledge and wisdom to make decisions about, about this and also to have a different relationship with the people, the grantee partners, the people we give the organizations we give the money to, and to bring them in as well in different ways. And so that translates, at least for Newman's own foundation, in when we we just ran last year a Food justice for Kids prize, which was an open application prize for people to apply. And we got about 500 applications and we selected 12 organizations in the end to receive this prize. But we didn't, you know, we was in fact 75 reviewers who helped score, who scored these 500 applications. And then an advisory group of, I think it was 19 people in this advisory group who then reviewed these and sort of made that helped us, you know, select those 12 organizations. So that's like one example. The other example is, for example, for our monitoring and evaluation, I recruited Dr. Christina Chauvin, who's our monitoring, evaluation and learning officer. But as she was sort of designing our first iteration of our monitoring and evaluation processes and what does the report look like and what does the application look like, et cetera, et cetera. It started off not with her writing these up on this, but really hosting learning sessions and then design sessions with our current grantee partners to say what is helpful to you, what do you want to know about your impact? How can this be less burdensome so that you know, you're not surprised when this comes out and you feel this is going to take hours of your time, but this is in fact something that's helpful to you. And so that's also another way of thinking about participatory philanthropy.
- [18:29]
Julia Campbell
I think that one of the major criticisms just of larger foundations and philanthropic funding is that such a little percentage actually goes to grassroots organizations. And many foundations and corporate giving programs, they still still give money just the same, you know, large, well known charities rather than investing in maybe emerging nonprofits. So how can we like, how can we encourage more risk taking and innovation, both in the nonprofit field, but also in the fields of philanthropy?
- [19:08]
Alex Amouyel
I think you're. This is a good criticism of the sector. I think it definitely depends. There are lots of. Philanthropy is such an amorphous sector, right? It ranges from some of the largest foundations in the world with hundreds of professional staff, I. E. The Gates foundation, for example, to, you know, a high net worth individual which has a donor advice fund and who's managing it themselves. And I would also argue, you know, small donors, whether they're even giving just $10 a month to save the children, for example, or if they're organized in giving circles. Right. That's also. I'd love everyone to reclaim the word philanthropy for themselves and to say, yes, I'm a philanthropist even If I'm giving $10 or $100 or $1,000. So within that breadth, there's. Everybody is doing their own source and some people are doing it for sure better than others in different ways. I think this criticism that you raised is definitely valid for the more institutional philanthropy and foundations. And I do think the reality is that no matter how big a foundation could be or is, they're still operating, they're not operating truly at the scale that is needed for a change to happen. That happens. My certain vision is that that happens. That for real change to happen, it is like a government, you know, be it as a community state or the gun, the legislative, federal, in the case of the United. But country level needs to sort of enact policy change or needs to enact a new sort of policy, sort of budgetary policy and these types of things. Or yeah, there needs to be a market shift or behavior shift in an entire population for things to truly change. But where philanthropy, I hope at its best can play a role is indeed thinking about what are promising solutions that change the status quo. And in that sense, it is about funding innovation and emerging ideas. But I want to be careful in saying that it's not all about tech and AI and.
- [21:40]
Julia Campbell
Exactly. And it's not innovation for the sake of innovation.
- [21:43]
Alex Amouyel
Yeah. It is promising solutions that challenge, that change the status quo. And if, if philanthropy can fund those and then help the organizations who are working on the ground and who, yes, ideally are very much community based and proximate to the people that they're seeking to serve. If they can then help those organizations and individuals build the evidence of impact and then demonstrate this and help to socialize this with people who can operate at scale, then you can get somewhere. But still, too often I think we're not doing that and, or we're confusing what I would say. You know, philanthropy or this type of philanthropy that I'm talking about is not sort of charity is meant to sort of change things over the long term, not help put a band aid on things over the short term, even though we also still need band aids. Right. I don't want to discount that.
- [22:47]
Julia Campbell
Okay. The Newman's Own foundation is very focused on maybe systemic change, Is that what you're saying?
- [22:52]
Alex Amouyel
Yes, absolutely. Our focus area, for example, school food and nutrition education.
- [22:59]
Julia Campbell
Oh yes. I'm a member of a local school board and I completely, I think that's incredibly important because no education happens if children are hungry.
- [23:07]
Alex Amouyel
Yes, exactly. And the numbers are getting worse in the US at the moment. The USDA report who just which came out last year is one in five children live in food insecure households. That's up from one in six. Because actually during the pandemic a number of the benefits meant that families were getting money and they were buying food for their kids. But, and that in fact school schools were able to provide free lunches and free breakfast and these benefits started expiring. And so we saw the numbers around child food insecurity shoot back up, unfortunately. And indeed school is a place where a number of kids are getting two meals a day, breakfast and lunch, and sometimes after school snacks. So ensuring that these meals are free, that they're plant forward, that they're healthy, that they're culturally relevant, they're locally sourced. I mean you could add a number of objectives. But it is a great point of intervention because you're then reaching very quickly a huge swath of children in the United States in the case of public schools and Title 1 public schools, the most at risk for child food insecurity. And so a number of the people we fund in this space are working in various coalitions for healthy school meals for all, free universal school meals with some success. So that's, you know, FoodCorp frack community food Advocates in New York and Childhood Hunger in Connecticut, a number of others that we fund. And indeed they're going state by state for the most part in coalition to sort of help shift the policies around this. And a recent, there's definitely been some victories in Montana, in Minnesota and New Mexico, but also recently in New York, the governor, Governor Hochschule has put in to the. Hasn't, I believe it hasn't been approved yet, but she has put into the budget that free breakfast and free school meals for all New York state children, which would be 2.7 million kids.
- [25:17]
Julia Campbell
We have it in Massachusetts, so sorry.
- [25:21]
Alex Amouyel
Yeah, I haven't named all the states.
- [25:23]
Julia Campbell
No, I think it's great and I, I think it's a shame that it's not a federal law, to be honest.
- [25:29]
Alex Amouyel
Yes. And let's say we're going this, these correlations have been going state by state for a Number of years, it doesn't seem like there was much movement at the federal level, but.
- [25:41]
Julia Campbell
Exactly. And there'll be even less now as this has been recorded in late January. So I think the. Actually another question I want to ask you, just based on your experience in the sector with many different organizations, how can we get more individual donors into philanthropy? Because I hear this every giving Tuesday. I hear this at year end. I work in fundraising and I work in digital marketing and digital fundraising, which those strategies rely on individual donors. But I do hear from people that would make a donation, they oftentimes don't think like their $10 is going to make a difference. And I just try to dissuade them. So what would you say? Like, what is the future of philanthropy in terms of individual donors? How do we get more people to contribute either financially or in some other way?
- [26:39]
Alex Amouyel
I do think individual donors and people who give $10 a month or, or $10 one time even are philanthropists and that we, you know, really do need to reclaim the word philanthropy and philanthropists from, you know, yes, they think they.
- [26:57]
Julia Campbell
Have to be Bill Gates to be a philanthropist. And I mean, we gotta change their minds.
- [27:02]
Alex Amouyel
And also, and also, when you look at the numbers, actually individual donations in, you know, the smaller donations in the United States make more proportionately than sort of the larger donors. And also, people who are lower income give more of a percentage of their income sometimes, you know, 10% or so. Then the richer you get, the less you give, percentage wise, it drops quite, quite precipitously. And so I think that that's really important to remember. I think it's also undercounting what individual smaller donors might be doing, because there's a number of things that they might be, they might be giving money to family members, they might be giving, sending money, you know, from an immigrant community, sending money back to, to another country. And those don't get counted.
- [27:58]
Julia Campbell
Isn't they paying money to the school or for the teacher gift or something like that?
- [28:03]
Alex Amouyel
Or they might be paying the school fees for a cousin and, and those don't get counted. So I think you're under counting actually.
- [28:11]
Julia Campbell
I 100% agree with that of, of smaller donors.
- [28:15]
Alex Amouyel
So first I think that that's the good news and that they're doing this already. I think indeed it's like what's the recognition of that and then what's the collective impact of that or the power, the collective power that they can do. The promising pieces around that I think are around giving circles, for example, which I like and there's an organization and, in fact, a TED Talk run by Sarah Lomelin, which is called Philanthropy Together, which is all about trying to really harness the power of collective giving through giving circles. Definitely a recommendation for a future guest on your podcast. And then there's also, for example, a platform that we use for our community fund called Grapevine, which is also about bringing together giving circles. And what we did on that platform for our community fund is essentially say to people. Again, an example of participatory philanthropy is say to people first. You don't need to give anything if you don't want to, but you can be on our platform. And when we have different calls to vote for a particular, you know, highly vetted organization, we put out these calls, and people can vote for who, you know, who we should award the money to. And so we've done that a couple of times in the last two years. But then, indeed, you. If you want to make a donation, then, you know, we'll give all the money that you donate to. We'll just add it to the pot of what, you know, if we're giving out $100,000 or $10,000, we'll add to the pot what has been given to that. And it's, you know, I'd say that's an experiment in there. But we have now, I think, over a thousand members, so that's pretty good. And we've raised. We raised several thousand. I can't tell you the exact number. Several thousand dollars. It's not a lot compared to how much we give every year. But it's still. It's still like a good amount, and it's a nice movement to try and think about that for us.
- [30:26]
Julia Campbell
That's amazing. I really believe that a rising tide lifts all ships, and I think that more people need to understand what the word philanthropy means and that they can participate. And I completely agree with that. So let's just. Let's talk quickly about your book. So. So your book is called the Answer Is yous A Guidebook to Creating a Life Full of Impact. And it's all about helping people find ways to make a difference. So what inspired you to write it, and who's it for?
- [30:58]
Alex Amouyel
Two years ago, I might have said it's for everybody who wants to be a philanthropist and wants to have an impact and et cetera. And I still think that's the case. But I think that anybody who's ever tried to write or has written a book, it's also fundamentally, you write it for yourself. If I may Say so. So to some extent, it's me understanding, with the privilege of having interviewed 21 social entrepreneurs and change makers whose stories I feature in the book, it's me understanding the world of social impact, the philanth, the world of philanthropy, making sense of it for myself, and how I can have an impact in the world if I am being, you know, now very honest with some wisdom to look back on it. But, you know, the starting point for that was that, you know, people young and old who are already working in social impact or who were not at all working in social impact would often ask me, would often be saying, oh, I really want to do something impactful with my life. I want to do something purposeful. I want to switch careers, I want to volunteer somewhere, and I don't know where to start. And like, what should I do, Alex? Because you seem to be working in the sector and I didn't necessarily have a good resource to point them to, so I thought maybe I should write that resource. And then so again, I didn't want it to just be my thoughts and advice. And so I interviewed mostly, but not all people I met through MIT Solve who were from all walks of life, all countries, and, well, there's 21 of them. So not all countries, but all different geographies saying, how and why did you get started and what advice would you have for people who want to have an impact in their life? And so it's sort of organized through different chapters. And the first chapter is not about jumping into a problem and all of that, but it's sort of about revealing your superpowers and really thinking about what makes you unique and what skills and lived experience you can contribute for yourself. Which goes back a little bit to what I was talking about when I talked about Save the children and not being able to get a job initially in human rights is about I needed to acquire the skills, in this case at bcg, but it could be anywhere else. I need to acquire some skills to then be able to use those skills to contribute in the field of social impact. And it's not just about your career. I would say there's a chapter which is how to. Which is called start with 10% of your time and money. But it is really about thinking about your volunteer time, about starting some side gigs, about your giving, about your investing, about your purchasing decisions. And then fun fact, years before I wrote this, you know, initially in 2020, 2021, so years before joining Newman's Own foundation, in that chapter about purchasing, I sort of said there's a lot of greenwashing and marketing speak and all that. But one of the organizations which is doing this really well is really committed to this is Newman Zone. And so, funnily enough, I sort of wrote. I may have helped manifest my. My role.
- [34:35]
Julia Campbell
Now, I love that you wrote the book that you wanted to see, because that's what I did as well. I wrote a book on storytelling for nonprofits in the digital age and another book on social media strategies because just based on the challenges I was seeing and the questions that I was getting and.
- [34:53]
Alex Amouyel
But was it, I guess, if I may ask you a question, looking back, do you think you also wrote it for yourself, like as.
- [35:00]
Julia Campbell
Oh, I wrote it so that I would not have to answer the same question a million times and to put all of my ideas into one place, but also. Absolutely. To help expand and refine and streamline my thinking around each of these topics and help make it into something that I could teach and talk about. Absolutely. It's a. Was a huge benefit for me to write the book as well. So I completely agree with that.
- [35:32]
Alex Amouyel
I think.
- [35:33]
Julia Campbell
I think that's why a lot of people do, because it's. It's sort of taking their ideas, refining them, streamlining them, asking other people their opinions and advice like you did, and putting it into something that then you have that you can hand out or give or share out into the world, but having something you can reflect back on as well. All right, well, this has been fantastic. I would love to know for my listeners, how can we learn more about Newman's own foundation? More about you, Alex, Connect with you online and your organization, you can head.
- [36:12]
Alex Amouyel
On to newmanzone.org, our website. If you're interested in hearing more about the foundation, as you mentioned earlier, if you're interested in organizations and people committed to 100% for purpose, there's this new website, 100forpurpose.org. And then my book is available anywhere you buy books digitally.
- [36:37]
Julia Campbell
Fantastic. I'll put all of those links in the show notes. Thank you so much. I know you're very busy, and I appreciate you sharing your expertise with my listeners.
- [36:46]
Alex Amouyel
Thank you. No, no, this was delightful. Thank you so much for having me.
- [36:56]
Julia Campbell
Well, hey there. I wanted to say thank you for tuning into my show and for listening all the way to the end. If you really enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast app, and you'll get new episodes downloaded as soon as they come out. I would love if you left me a rating or a review because this tells other people that my podcast is worth listening to, and then me and my guests can reach even more earbuds and create even more impact. So that's pretty much it. I'll be back soon with a brand new episode, but until then you can find me on Instagram. Juliacampbell77 Keep changing the world, you nonprofit Universe Point.