Why can’t more philanthropists think like MacKenzie Scott? - R Sriram and Venessa D'Souza

Why can’t more philanthropists think like MacKenzie Scott? – R Sriram and Venessa D’Souza

(R Sriram and Venessa D’Souza are on the trustee board and CEO of SNEHA respectively. This column which was originally published in India Development Review and was published in Times of India on July 20, 2021)

  • On June 16, 2021, we woke up to a host of congratulatory messages. Our organisation, Society for Nutrition, Education & Health Action (SNEHA), was one of the 286 nonprofits to have been selected globally for an unrestricted grant by MacKenzie Scott. Since SNEHA’s inception in 1999, we’ve very rarely encountered unrestricted grants for nonprofits. And when we have come across them, we’ve found the size of these grants to be a fraction of what for-profit enterprises routinely receive. The scale and complexity of many social problems are at such an order of magnitude that nonprofits need innovative and game-changing approaches to attract the best talent. They also need sufficient risk capital to rapidly develop and execute working solutions at scale, as much as celebrated commercial start-ups do…

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