The Future Of Philanthropy. Delivered at Yale University
By Sally Osberg, 11.02.05

Click here to download the accompanying powerpoint presentation

My fellow idealists.

I am honored and delighted to be here with you today. It was a special pleasure to be able to accept your dean's invitation as I'm a great admirer of Joel Podolny. Joel was one of my boss Jeff Skoll's favorite professors at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and one of the first serious academics to take the business of social change seriously.

Probably most of the folks in this room are up to speed on Joel's most recently published work on status. I caught his recent NPR interview on my commute drive home a couple of weeks ago. The gist of what he had to say about his new book was that hanging out with the right crowd sends pretty powerful signals about credibility--whether you're an individual or a company. I'm already feeling smarter and a whole lot more credible hanging out with you and with Joel! Thanks again for inviting me.

The subject I was asked to address is the future of philanthropy. I told Joel that I was no oracle, but more like the Chinese sage who said that to prophesy is extremely difficult--especially about the future…

What I am clear about is the dimension of the challenges before us:

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

The prophet of doom here, of course, is Woody Allen. Black humor? Not if you're paying attention. Most trends--climate change, the growing global chasm between rich and poor, the rise of fundamentalism, the prospect of new pandemics--are not headed in the right direction. Add in hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis, and it's astonishing that any of us gets out of bed in the morning.

But get out of bed we do--because we hold in our hearts and in our heads the vision of a better world. Such vision has always been the horizon which defines philanthropy, distinguishing it from charity, which focuses on addressing immediate need. As for strategic philanthropy of the kind we have been discussing today, it's worth reminding ourselves that the term may be something of an oxymoron--strategy deriving from stratagem, a successful maneuver in war, and philanthropy meaning love of humankind.

At the Skoll Foundation, the corner of organized philanthropy I know best, we're right there--integrating the discipline and plotting of strategy with the domain of the heart. Let me tell you a bit about who we are and how we go about our work; I'll tackle some of the myths about philanthropy, highlight a couple of the more interesting trends, and close with a story.

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Click here to download the accompanying powerpoint presentation

Closing thoughts

In closing, I'd like to tell you about one of the remarkable people we're supporting. Victoria Hale's bio reads like a classic profile for a social entrepreneur. After earning her Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Victoria worked as a research scientist in the government and private sectors, establishing her expertise at the Food and Drug Administration and at Genentech, and earning her entrepreneur's stripes as Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Axiom BioMedical, Inc.

In 1998, Victoria quit her job, had her second child, and began to investigate establishing the world's first nonprofit pharmaceutical company--one that could access IP sitting latent on the shelves of all the big drug companies, IP capable of addressing neglected diseases in the developing world--and entirely incapable of generating so much as a break-even financial return. Call it what you will--a market failure, a market gap, or just market status quo-- for Victoria Hale, it was a reality she simply refused to accept.

As a scientist, Victoria is rational, disciplined, and rigorous. Over the next 18 months, she began building her business plan--establishing her case, identifying diseases for which solutions were already well-researched, and working out the financials--while juggling family and consulting assignments. In the spring of 2000, a consulting job took her to New York, where she began a conversation with a West African cab driver--who wanted to know what she did. "I'm a pharmaceutical scientist," she said, whereupon the cab driver tipped his head back, laughed, caught her eye in the mirror and said "Oh, you have all the money!"

The observation hit home. "What was I waiting for?" she asked herself. "Not only do the pharmaceutical companies have all the money, but I have everything I need. What I had to do was value who I am, what I know, get clear, and get going." Within a month, Victoria Hale had founded the Institute for OneWorld Health and was on her way to proving that she and the world were not only ready for this new model, but crying out for it.

Today, OneWorld's first drug is on track, having met regulatory approval hurdles in India, to treat hundreds of thousands of cases of visceral leishmainiasis--a disease which afflicts more than 1.5 million people, some 200,000 of whom die from it annually.. New drugs representing new hope are in OneWorld's pipeline, and Victoria is on her way--to my mind--to doing for the pharmaceutical industry what Muhammad Yunus did to banking.

The future of philanthropy is being shaped now, not by trend lines projecting ranges in the amount of wealth being transferred between generations or by tax policies, but by people like Jeff Skoll, Bill Drayton, Victoria Hale, and thousands like them--people who see beyond what's wrong to what's possible, and who get to work.

My fellow idealists, if you haven't already figured this out, the future of philanthropy is you.

It's not something to think about later, to put off or marginalize or give to with whatever's left over. Philanthropy needs your ideas more than it needs your money; it needs your creativity and your resolve. And the time to begin, despite what Woody Allen would have us believe, is now.

Thank you very much.