Capital for Good Tamer Institute for Social Enterprise and Climate Change

In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with three inspiring leaders in women’s health, Erika Seth Davies, Jade Kearney, and Flory Wilson, each pioneering advances in reproductive and maternal health, and each using business, investment, engagement, and advocacy as levers for social change.


Davies is the CEO of Rhia Ventures, a nonprofit that advances reproductive and maternal health equity by leveraging capital to focus on the needs, experiences, and perspectives of historically marginalized people in decision making. Rhia ventures activities include venture capital investing (via RH Capital), ecosystem building, corporate engagement and advocacy, and narrative change.


Wilson is the founder and CEO of Reproductive & Maternal Health Compass (RMH) Compass, a nonprofit focused on the role employers play in access to reproductive and maternal health, and on providing companies with the tools, resources, support, and recognition necessary to offer best in class RMH benefits for all workers.


Kearney is the co-founder and CEO of She Matters, a digital health platform designed to improve maternal morbidity through cultural competency and technology. Focused in particular on improving health outcomes for Black women, and on the epidemic of Black maternal morbidity, She Matters is a B2B company that offers health providers a culturally competent certification program tailored to the specific nuances and challenges facing Black women in the US health care system.


Over the course of this conversation, we touch on the personal and professional experiences that have informed each of these leaders’ work in health equity and access. We also explore how current headwinds and retrenchment — on reproductive and maternal health, on racial equity and inclusion, and on corporate activism — motivate them and have shaped their innovative business models.


“If anyone says entrepreneurship is easy,” Kearney says, “point them in my direction. Social entrepreneurship is sometimes gut wrenching because you’re so close to the problem. But change is also soul feeding because you’re so close to the problem.”


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Mentioned in this Episode
Rhia Ventures Reproductive and Maternal Health Compass She Matters

In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Lise Strickler ’86 and Mark Gallogly ’86, the co-founders of Three Cairns Group, a mission driven investment and philanthropic firm focused on the climate crisis.
In the years since Columbia Business School, where they met in 1986, Mark has worked in investing, philanthropy, and public policy; as co-founder of Centerbridge Partners, an investment firm with over $30 billion of assets under management; and before at The Blackstone Group. Mark’s work in public service has included two stints under President Obama, and most recently at the US State Department as an Expert Senior Advisor to Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry. Lise has extensive experience in the climate advocacy sector and has spent the last 20 years working with local, state, and national organizations to advance public policy and build momentum for scalable solutions to the world’s climate crisis, including as a board member of the Environmental Defense Fund and co-chair of their 501(c)4 political advocacy partner, EDF Action; on the leadership council of the Yale School of the Environment; and on the advisory boards of Environmental Advocates NY, the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy, Columbia University’s Climate School, the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School, and the Adirondack Trail Improvement Society. 
In this wide-ranging conversation, we cover a number of the challenges — and promising solutions — to the climate crisis. We begin with their respective “climate journeys,” including for both formative childhood experiences in nature and the outdoors. Lise credits her parents for “passing on the values of hard work, conservation, and leaving the world better than you found it,” and recalls how the environmental activism of the 1970s, including the passage of important legislation like the Clean Air and Water Acts, shaped her understanding of environmental issues and the potential to address them.
We discuss the genesis of the Three Cairns Group, and some of its first major initiatives, each focused, in different ways, on developing ideas and climate solutions that are potentially scalable, and then working with partners across sectors and across the world to implement. For example, Three Cairns has recently launched Allied Climate Partners (ACP), a platform that has aggregated capital from philanthropy, governments, development finance institutions and the private sector to support early-stage climate projects and businesses in emerging markets, including in Southeast Asia, the Caribbean and Central America, Africa, and India. We also explore why Mark and Lise believe that universities, as centers of learning, “creators of new knowledge that advance civilization,” and places that produce the leaders for tomorrow are natural partners for their work on climate. We touch on various efforts they are involved in at Columbia and Yale. 
Finally, Lise and Mark remind us that, while the challenges of the climate crisis are many, there are number of breakthroughs that motivate them to keep moving forward: some technological, like MethaneSat, a new $100 million methane tracking satellite, or the falling costs of renewables; some policy related, like the passage of the federal Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, that are driving trillions of dollars into climate, or more locally the promise of congestion pricing in places like New York City that will reduce emissions and elevate the importance of public transportation as a climate and equity issue. Lise and Mark note that communicating these gains, and framing climate challenges as ones we have solutions to – and agency in – is critical to the tackling the crisis, particularly for young people “who want things to be better, and want to make them better.”
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In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Shaun Donovan, one of the country’s most important leaders — and lifelong advocates — for housing, economic development, and shared prosperity. Donovan has worked at the highest levels of government — as Secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Obama and as Commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development in New York City — overseeing large scale public-private partnerships. Today he approaches that work from Enterprise, where he leads the nation’s only nonprofit that brings together in one place housing solutions, capital, and community development.
We begin with some of Donovan’s formative personal and professional experiences that motivated his lifelong commitment to housing. Growing up in New York City during a time of crises, with high levels of street homelessness and neighborhoods across the city severely challenged, Donovan was drawn to work at community-based organizations focused on homelessness, rebuilding communities, and financing community revitalization. 
We discuss how these experiences would inform his years in government, and his understanding of the role of the public sector. “I am a deep believer in the power of government and the need for a strong government role in the service of the public good,” Donovan says. He notes that, in particular, government can make foundational investments in things like infrastructure or basic scientific research that lay the groundwork for much broader economic prosperity, and can set the “rules of the road,” for commercial market players. He also underscores the importance of cross sector partnerships: Government can scale innovations tested by the nonprofit and private sectors or shape policy that responds to community-based movement building.
Donovan’s forty-year commitment to housing is rooted in the sector’s “unique” role in people’s lives — where people live and their quality of housing — affects larger opportunities and well-being: schooling, health, safety, and employment. Housing has also become the most expensive thing in most people’s lives: more than half of US renters spend over 30 percent of income on rent, closer to 50 percent for lower income Americans. We discuss how today’s affordability crisis has led to record levels of street homelessness, overcrowding, evictions, and instability in communities across the United States — the worst Donovan has seen in his lifetime. The high cost of housing also prevents individuals and families from moving to higher paying jobs; limited economic mobility in turn exacerbates economic and political segregation and polarization.
Despite these challenges, Donovan is encouraged by important developments at the national, state, and local level. We discuss what he calls the “New New Deal:” the trillions of dollars the federal government has deployed to infrastructure and climate (via the Inflation Reduction Act), political momentum at the state level to increase the supply of affordable housing, and a wellspring of housing innovation in communities across the US. At Enterprise, Donovan and colleagues take on all of these issues, with a particular focus on racial equity and building resilience and upward mobility. Founded forty years ago, Enterprise today invests approximately $10 billion a year into communities ($64 billion cumulatively to build or preserve 950,000 homes), owns and manages 13,000 affordable homes, and is the country’s largest housing policy and advocacy organization. All of these activities involve partnerships. For example, Enterprise has recently joined forces with LISC, Habitat for Humanity, the United Way, and Rewiring America to apply for $9.5 billion from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund to work with 156 communities across the country to decarbonize affordable housing, invest in resilience,

In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Dr. Fei-Fei Li, the Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford and the Denning Co-Director of Stanford’s Human Centered AI-Institute. Dr. Li has been called the godmother of artificial intelligence and has emerged as one of the country’s leading scientists — and humanists. She is also the author of the new book, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI. 
We begin by discussing how and why Li employs a “double helix” structure in her book to tell two interlacing stories: the evolution of a new field of science and her own coming of age as a scientist. Together, they form an homage to the intellectual foundations of her work, and to the teachers, mentors, and family members whose sacrifices made her work possible. We explore how the very act of writing the book serves to introduce an underrepresented voice — that of a woman, an immigrant, a person of color — into the world of artificial intelligence and science more broadly. Li believes strongly that “progress and discovery come from every corner,” and throughout her career has worked towards “lifting all walks of life.”
In explaining just what she means by “human centered AI,” Li explains that there is “nothing artificial about artificial intelligence.” As a “tool made by and for people,” she argues AI should be used to make people’s lives work better. Li describes any number of extraordinary and beneficial applications of AI, including those in neuroscience, the social and political sciences, business, education, climate change, and health care, from research drug discovery to diagnosis, treatment, and delivery. We also touch on some of the major risks of AI. While Li believes it is important to examine the longer term and potentially existential threats of AI — the current and popular pre-occupation with sentience and machine overlords – she is more concerned with the technology’s urgent (and potentially catastrophic) social risks: significant biases in data and algorithms, issues of privacy, the problems of misinformation and disinformation, and the profound and uneven economic disruptions that the technology can bring about. “AI can grow the global pie of productivity,” Li says, “but there is a difference between increased productivity and shared prosperity.”
Li also warns of severe levels of underinvestment by the public sector in AI. She has worked closely with the state of California, the federal government, and the UN to encourage more of a “moonshot” mentality when it comes to resources for blue sky innovation, and for the development of governance and guardrails essential for public safety and trust.
Li concludes by encouraging others to follow their own North Stars. “My North Star hasn’t changed, it is still AI, but it is the science with an expanded aperture: the greater North Star of doing good that is human centered.” 
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Subscribe to Capital for Good on Apple, Amazon, Google, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at socialenterprise@gsb.columbia.edu. 
Mentioned in this Episode
The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI Stanford University Human Centered AI Institute AI4All

In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive officer of PEN America, and one of the country’s most prominent experts and voices on free speech, free expression, and human rights. Nossel has held leadership roles in government, the nonprofit and private sectors, and is the author of the award-winning book Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All.
 
We begin with some of Nossel’s formative personal and professional experiences that shaped her passion for human rights, including participating as a young person in the movement to free Soviet Jews in the 1980s, and her years after college in South Africa during the country’s early transition from Apartheid to democracy. Both influenced what would become a throughline throughout her career — “an impulse to advocate for people who take great risks, who assert themselves, who challenge authority,” whether that was leading important initiatives at the State Department under President Obama, at the UN under President Clinton, or at civil society organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and now PEN America.
 
Nossel walks us through a kind of “free speech and free expression” 101. She explains that while much of the important conversation about free speech centers on the First Amendment, and therefore on protections against government infringement on speech, more broadly free speech is also the foundational right for all other rights in a free and democratic society, the “catalyst for a range of social goods.” Nossel reminds us that the open exchange of ideas allows for deliberation, persuasion, debate, accountability, the ability to make better policies, choose better leaders, and advance scientific progress artistic creativity; freedom of expression is “an underwriter of so many other movements, the ability to advocate for… women's rights, climate justice, racial justice.” She worries about a rising generation becoming alienated from the principle of free speech, seeing free speech at odds with commitments to diversity, inclusion, and pluralism — when in fact they are mutually supportive and reinforcing.
 
We discuss many of the ways Nossel and her PEN America colleagues aim to serve as “guarantors of free speech and open discourse” through work to “celebrate and defend freedom of expression worldwide.” Some of this takes the form of enabling and amplifying lesser heard voices like Dreamers or incarcerated writers; some through awards, festivals, and public programming celebrating a “big tent” of writers and voices that in turn supports PEN’s free expression and advocacy work, including the defense of persecuted writers around the world, litigation, i.e., the recent federal lawsuit in Escambia County, Florida challenging book bans, or warnings on the dangers of education gag orders. For years, PEN America has also worked on issues of campus free speech, a topic we explore in light of the recent protests and crises of university leadership. Nossel hopes that today’s campus convulsions have brought about a recognition that universities need to put in place deliberate, intentional training and inculcation of a culture of free speech, open discourse, and academic freedom to support the diversity of experience, opinion, and perspective that makes universities “catalysts for understanding and growth.”
 
We also touch on the large and “messy” issues of online speech, the ways it can be weaponized, the challenges of disinformation, of businesses built on algorithms that prioritize inflammatory content — that are not governed as public entities or liable for most posted speech, and of the lag in appropriate regulation. “The best we can do is experiment,” Nossel says. To date, that experimentation has included important new EU regulations, and efforts from the tech companies themselves to improve content moderation. Nossel herself sits on the Meta oversight b

In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Luis Miranda, one of New York, and the country’s, most dynamic cross-sector leaders, with more than four decades of experience in government, business, politics and advocacy, community development, and the arts. Miranda is the founding partner of the MirRam Group, founding president of the Hispanic Federation, and board chair of the Latino Victory Fund, the Public Theater, and the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance. In the words of his son Lin-Manuel, Miranda is relentless.
 
We begin with Miranda’s childhood and formative years in Vega Alta, a small town in Puerto Rico where he was born and raised before leaving for New York to pursue a PhD in clinical psychology at NYU. Although he left Puerto Rico as a very young man, the place has remained central to his identity and family — and, as beautifully told in the award-winning HBO documentary Siempre, Luis, a place he returns to regularly, including to lead much of the rebuilding effort after hurricanes Irma and Maria.
 
Once settled in New York, Miranda discovered that work as a clinical psychologist didn’t suit him, but the city “fit like a glove.” Inspired by his parents, who were deeply engaged in public service, Miranda became a community activist, first via nonprofit organizations, then in government when he “came to understand the role that politics can play in changing lives, making communities better.” Miranda would go on to serve in three Mayoral administrations — Koch, Dinkins and Giuliani — and became increasingly involved in local, state, and national politics, helping to elect officials to the New York City Council, the New York State Assembly, and all of New York’s recent representatives in the US Senate: Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton, Charles Schumer, and Kirsten Gillibrand. Miranda also chairs Latino Victory, focused on building power in the Latino community by electing more Latinos to office.
 
We end with a discussion of the arts — and the ways in which Miranda’s commitment to the arts, politics, community activism, and inclusion all come together. His many recent and large-scale arts projects include bringing Hamilton to Puerto Rico as part of the hurricane recovery effort, leading the restoration of the United Palace theater in Washington Heights, and chairing the board of The Public Theater, where he is leading its Fund for Free Theater campaign. “The arts feed the soul; they bring people together,” Miranda says. “We have to ensure they are accessible.”
 
Thanks for listening!
Subscribe to Capital for Good on Apple, Amazon, Google, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at socialenterprise@gsb.columbia.edu. 
Mentioned in this episode
Siempre, Luis Relentless (Luis Miranda) Latino Victory The Public Theater