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As CEO of Lever for Change, Cecilia Conrad has issued open calls for solutions to challenges including maternal and child health, refugee resources and early childhood education. A current challenge may be among her toughest: Restoring trust in the core institutions that form the pillars of American society.
“It’s one space where there’s very little of a partisan gap,” Conrad said in announcing the $10 million challenge with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman last month (the deadline for submissions is Feb. 19). “It’s shared across people of all political persuasions. And it’s particularly concerning, because it is most prevalent among the youngest people.”
Conrad’s thesis, across all of the challenges, is that soliciting ideas from people and organizations that may not have access to philanthropic capital can surface solutions that would otherwise be left untried. At the same time it gives donors – like Hoffman, MacKenzie Scott, Melinda French Gates and others – an efficient way to mobilize expertise and deploy capital. That addresses what Conrad calls “a market failure” in philanthropy – lots of wealth but major difficulties in giving it away.
In five years, Lever for Change has influenced grants of more than $2.2 billion to more than 500 organizations.
“The goal is to convey agency and resources to those people who have some great ideas about how to solve the problems so that they can get to work and solve them,” she told me in our closing plenary conversation at last fall’s SOCAP gathering in San Francisco. Other challenges, such as X Prize, set predefined milestones; Lever for Change asks applicants what metrics they should be judged by. “And then we fund the work to get to that solution.”
Opening doors
Conrad was the president of Pomona College in California before joining the MacArthur Foundation in 2013 to lead its fellows program, known for its so-called “genius grants.” Cold-calling artists, activists and innovators and telling them they had just been awarded $850,000 to pursue their dreams was “one of the coolest jobs in the world,” she says.
To make even bigger bets, MacArthur in 2017 launched 100&Change to deploy $100 million in a single grant to solve a critical social challenge. The first prize went to Sesame Workshop and International Rescue Committee to educate children displaced by the civil war in Syria. The second went to Community Solutions for “Built for Zero,” to help end homelessness in 75 U.S. communities in five years. A third award will be announced later this year.
Lever for Change was spun out in 2019 to make such challenges available to more donors. Through a challenge that closed this month, Pivotal, Melinda French Gates’ investment vehicle, will award $250 million to organizations improving women’s mental and physical health. For “The Trust in American Institutions Challenge,” she expects to see proposals to build social capital, improve the delivery of government services, increase accountability and restore trust in the news media, education, science – and nonprofits.
Conrad says her father, the first African American elected citywide in Dallas, and her mother, his campaign manager, helped instill her sense of community responsibility. She was born just after Brown v. Board of Education and a settlement between AT&T and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission paid for her graduate education. “So there were educational opportunities that wouldn’t have existed for people before me,” she told me.
“That conveys a certain responsibility to keep those doors open, to keep pushing them open where they’re closed,” she said. “And that keeps me energized, particularly at this moment in time where there’s an effort to close them again. So I’ve got to keep going, because I’ve got to keep those doors open.”
