Why philanthropy should embrace the idea of ‘just big enough’

Many nonprofits and NGOs are excited about the rise of big-bet philanthropy, a growing trend in which funders make multimillion-dollar investments with the goal of transforming a sector. But Kevin Starr, CEO of the Mulago Foundation, says “big-bet philanthropy is just philanthropy with more zeros.” It is only once organizations become “just big enough” and transition from doing direct delivery to recruiting and enabling others that they can achieve impact at scale. “Philanthropy, even when it’s got a lot of zeros, compared to the need, is tiny. And so when we talk about ‘just big enough,’ what that means is just big enough to be able to transform into that function of recruiter and enabler,” he said at Devex World 2024. “Just growing your on-the-ground delivery is a great way to use up all your money and blow your chance for exponential impact.” Starr joined Raj Panjabi, co-founder of Last Mile Health and former White House senior director for global health security, and Anne Marie Burgoyne, managing director of philanthropy at the Emerson Collective, the social change organization established and led by Laurene Powell Jobs, at Devex World to discuss ways that philanthropy can do a better job of achieving impact at scale, by supporting new ideas and then, once they become proven solutions, positioning them for broader adoption. Linear vs. exponential growth Starr has spent most of his career looking for high-impact responses to global poverty with the potential for not just linear but exponential change. At Devex World, he presented a basic graphic with time on the X-axis, impact on the Y-axis, and two lines showing impact over time: One straight line and one line curving upward. Because the problems are big, the time is short, and the resources are limited, Starr says he makes a grant when he thinks exponential impact is possible, and backs out if that doesn’t prove to be the case. For big-bet philanthropy to really power a transformation, he stressed that nonprofits and NGOs have to recruit and enable others to do what they do. “That’s where exponential change comes from,” Starr said. “We have this kind of clunky phrase, ‘the doer at scale.’ Scale is about recruiting and enabling the ‘doer at scale.’ In most cases, that’s governments.” Getting the attention of governments Last Mile Health’s journey from working at the grassroots level to collaborating with governments to bring health care to remote areas demonstrates what it looks like to become just big enough. The shift was enabled in part by a $50 million matching grant from the Audacious Project, a coalition of funders that included Emerson Collective, to support Last Mile Health and Living Goods to deploy thousands of digitally enabled community health workers to deliver quality care. This helped Last Mile Health reach the level of scale they needed for governments to pick these programs up, shift policy, and fund more programs like them, offering lessons for how big bets can help organizations scale their impact. “So number one is, if you do something at that unit of scale, you can get the attention of governments. It becomes relevant. Number two, there is a need to ensure, then, that policies are reformed,” Panjabi said. Last Mile Health, together with organizations such as Living Goods, Muso, and Amani Global Works, have all expanded their focus to scaling up via governments, and they’ve come together to create an organization called the Community Health Impact Coalition, or CHIC, which is helping to exchange best practices, mobilize more money, and drive policy change. Starr, who has supported Last Mile Health from its early days, said CHIC gives him hope that the sector will start to see more examples of efforts that were “powered by philanthropy, done by NGOs, but moving into completely changing” how governments deliver services. How funders can ‘pull other people along’ Burgoyne agreed with Starr that philanthropists should not be in the business of expanding NGO services, but rather helping them get to the point where they are just big enough, then work on a handoff, transitioning successful philanthropic initiatives to partners that work at a greater scale. “Simply getting larger and larger for its own sake isn’t sufficient,” she said. “It’s too hard to fund, it’s too hard to execute on, and at some point, it’s not sufficiently localized or proximate. You have people taking on work that’s not familiar enough to be effective.” Burgoyne has been with Emerson Collective for over a decade, but she’s supported Last Mile Health since her previous role at the venture philanthropy role Draper Richards Kaplan, and she believes this kind of long-term commitment from philanthropists is also essential for impact at scale. This allows philanthropists to “pull other people along,” including bilateral and multilateral donors and governments “so that everybody can play the role that they’re in a position to play.” Matching the bottom up with the top down Starr said philanthropy can power bottom-up change, developing new ideas into scalable models, proving their effectiveness, and then setting them on a path to scale. “And so what we need is top-down money, top-down policy change, meeting that bottom-up growth of great solutions,” he said. When done right, he said, big-bet philanthropy can get the sector a bit closer to connecting the bottom up and the top down, but it’s critical that the fields of philanthropy and the broader global development community, including donors, NGOs, and governments, connect. “It’s great if you make the hose bigger,” he said. “But you better pay a lot of attention to where it’s pointed, because you might think you’re watering your garden, but you’re actually soaking the living room furniture, and we really need to water the garden.”