Paradigm Found | Anne Firth Murray | Talks at Google

Hi, welcome and I'd like to welcome you to the Authors at Google and the Professional Development series Talk. By Anne Firth Murray Anne Firth Murray is a New Zealander who is educated at the University of California and NYU in economics, political science, and public administration, with a focus on international health policy and women's reproductive health. She has worked at the United nations as a writer, taught in Hong Kong and Singapore, and spent several years as an editor with Oxford, Stanford, and Yale University presses. For the past 25 years, she has worked in the field of philanthropy, serving as a consultant to many foundations. From 1978 to the end of 1987, she directed the environment and international population programs of the Hewlett foundation in California. She is the founding president of the Global Fund for Women, which provides funds internationally to seed, strengthen, and link groups committed to women's well being. Currently, she is a scholar activist at the Union Institute and consulting professor in Human Biology at Stanford University. Please welcome annferth Murray.

Okay, now, I think I'm in the right place here. I'm told I'm not supposed to move very far. Thank you so much for inviting me to come. I'm very happy to be here. I always like to begin by saying a little bit about myself, but I also like to go around the room and have you introduce yourselves. Maybe we can't take the time for that. What do you think? No? Okay. It's iffy. But I have met some of you in the past and it's something that I think is a good thing to do at the beginning of a meeting. So maybe you'll introduce yourselves to each other briefly at some point along the way. I. I consider myself a very, very lucky person. I thought of this, and I knew that I wanted to say this at the very beginning of speaking with you today, but then I saw the young woman downstairs with a Google T shirt, and when she turned around and walked out, I saw in the back, I feel lucky today. And though I use Google all the time, I had not really thought of that I feel lucky thing until I saw the T shirt and I thought, well, isn't that funny? I want to begin by saying that I'm a lucky person in the world. I'm somebody for whom things work, and I have felt particularly lucky because I was a person who had a dream of an international organization that would provide help to women's groups around the world in their own terms. An organization that was based on a vision for real change through the support of women and based on a set of principles about the way we would work. And that dream started from nothing really, just my own drive and the help of a good number of people. Very soon, very early on, ended up being the Global Fund for Women, which is a thriving organization, still continues. I retired from the Global Fund a few years ago, but it continues in a very healthy manner and has now. We started out giving small grants to women's groups around, around the world of about $5,000, 500 to 5,000 and we raised it to 10,000. It's now been raised to about 15 or 20, but the organization has now given away $50 million to women's groups around the world, which is a lot of money in the non profit world. Now I realize that I'm speaking here to a lot of people who probably feel themselves very lucky being here at Google, working in an organization that I think is also based on, on a set of principles and a dream, a vision for an open, transparent way of doing business. And that's really what the Global Fund was all about. I think that I'm here really not to talk about the Global Fund, although inevitably that will happen. I'm here to talk about the book Paradigm Found. The title probably explains itself. Paradigm Leading and Managing for Positive Change, a book about creating an organization in the nonprofit world that was working, as I say, on vision and principles and operating in a way that I thought might in itself be transforming. And I really didn't want to align myself too much with Google, but it's kind of inevitable because I was saying earlier over lunch that I googled Google to find these 10 the philosophy of 10 things Google has found to be true. And I was just really amazed when I read these because it could have been not exactly the chapters in my book where I'm not talking about a multi million billion dollar corporation, but a multi thousand dollar corporation or nonprofit organization. The ten points could very easily have fitted with the ten chapters of my book. Starting out with the focus on the user and everything else will follow. The Global Fund for Women. Our users were women's groups, women overseas working at the grassroots to try to change their societies. And one of our basic principles that was published in an early annual report was to focus and learn from women closest to the problems. The users, the women's groups around the world. And I, in one of my annual reports when I was writing about this way of operating and our way of interacting with our potential grantees with women overseas was I spoke about these women's groups as the heart of our work, as the, you know, the money may be the Lifeblood or something. But the heart of our work was the work of the women's groups internationally. And at the time, I remember quoting an Irish poet, James Stevens, in my essay in the annual report, saying, what I have learned is that the heart knows today what the head will know tomorrow. And we always felt this way about the women's groups internationally that they knew and we needed to learn from them in order to do our work well. And I thought it fitted very well with the focus on the user and all else will follow. It's best to do one thing really, really well. This is another thing that was listed here under Google, under these 10 points. And one of the chapters that I talk about emerged from a conversation that I had early on as I was creating the Global Fund for Women with Bill Hewlett. And I wanted money from Bill Hewlett. I was trying to raise money from him at the time. We started out with nothing, and we were raising our money. I wanted money, but I also wanted advice. And I remember when I had an opportunity to meet with him, and I'd known him through my work at the Hewlett Foundation, I said, I'd love you to be a supporter of the Global Fund for Women, but I'd also like your advice about how to put together an international organization. And he gave me some. He said, one thing I would say to you is, don't take on too much. Do what you do well. Focus. Decide on what your role is, what your goal is, what your vision is, and focus on it, and don't be distracted from it. Do it very well. And he said, organizations, like people, die from overeating rather than by staying lean. Now, that was interesting because the Global Fund, like many organizations, has grown. I mean, it's become, quote, successful. It's giving away more money, has more people involved with it, just like Google. I was speaking with Josh, who told me that he came here first when there were 600 people here, and now there's almost 7,000 people here. Does the culture of the organization change? Is it possible to continue to have that kind of lean, gorilla like operation and still grow in terms of finances and so on? So that was another point from the 10 points. Fast is better than slow. Yes. We tried to do our work very quickly and not keep people waiting. Democracy. And finally, I'm jumping over. You can make money without doing evil. And at the Global Fund for Women, I had hoped that we could raise money and give it away, raise money from people who had it to give it to people who didn't. Have it without disempowering the people who didn't have it. And that to me, people would often say, what do you do at the Global Fund? I say, well, we're in the business of money. We raise money, we give it away. And our challenge is, how do you move money from people who have it and therefore seem to appear to be in a position of power to people who don't have it without disempowering those people? Especially if your major goal is, in fact, to empower those people. I have a lot I could talk about with regard to the Global Fund for Women. The reason I wrote the book was because women from Nepal, from Zimbabwe, from various parts of the world who had become involved with the Global Fund were always asking me, how did you create the Global Fund? How did you do it? And after a while, they would say, please write it down. We want to know how it happened. The book is not a history of the Global Fund for Women. It's more of a memoir and a kind of learning from. From the early years of the Global Fund. I wouldn't even call it a memoir. How to do It. Lessons Learned from the Early Years of the Global Fund. It's not strictly a history, but I did it primarily for women's groups overseas who seem to be very, very interested in actually the mechanics of creating the organization. And I might note that although I'm finding that people in this country are very interested in. In what this book has to say about leading and managing for positive change, that is having a dream and giving it reality, which is why I think I'm a lucky person. Not many people have a dream and are able to give it reality. And people in this country are very interested in that, But I'm very interested in getting it into the hands of people overseas. And so if any of you end up reading the book, and I observe that you're supplied with a book, and I hope you will, I would be very interested in your reactions about who you think could benefit by these ideas. Hundreds of, probably now, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have been touched not just by what the Global Fund for Women did, what this organization did, but the way that it was done. And I think that this is very similar with Google. And I think that in a sense, we involved in these organizations that are doing things differently. We're creating entities in which people treat each other well, in which people care about the other person that they're dealing with, whether it's a user of the service or whether it's a women's group overseas or whether it's a staff person or whether it's a board person attempting to create organizational structures that have at their core not just what they do and doing that well, but that the way they do it will transform the world. And I really believe that I am no longer directly in the management of the Global Fund for Women by any means. I teach at Stanford, but I and play with my grandchildren and do a bunch of other things. But I really believe that the way we do our work, the way we live our lives is far more important than what we do. And I think it can be transforming. So I would be very interested to know, as you read the book, if you found it useful and whether you think it would be useful for particular groups of people or particular kinds of people. Because I would like to try to get it out to them. It's a message that I think. I think we're in a time in the world that is both very dangerous in terms of ways people are treating each other and on the other hand, very, very hopeful in the development of organizations like the Global Fund for Women, like Google and not many others. I mean there aren't. This is not the model yet. The model of people treating each other well, that is not the model and we need to make it the model, I think both in the non profit world and I hope that will happen. No doubt it will through google.org but also out in the corporate world in general. I would like to stop and try to find out what your interest is in even being here today and have a kind of an interchange, if that's possible. There are a couple of people here who have known the Global Fund for quite a long time. They can probably participate as they wish. But I'd like to just sort of respond to your interest while we're able to do that.

Yes, Well, I came because I heard about the Global Funds, but I didn't really know what it was. So apparently I came to find out what it was.

Okay.

We've got lots of talks about micro finance and things like that. I'm wondering what your perspective is on that. How it relates to the kind of work you do to sound like you're.

Giving money in the process.

Do you see positives or negatives in either approach?

Okay, the question. I'm supposed to repeat the question for this video. The question has to do with micro finance, international lending, small grants lending, small lending programs as opposed to, or maybe in conjunction with grants programs. The Global Fund for Women began with the idea that we would be there for women who were working on controversial or difficult issues around the world. And we knew that the kinds of organizations that were developing around these issues, female human rights issues like violence, legal literacy and so on, many, many others, were not easily funded. They were not easily supported by loans. They couldn't produce income producing activities. So we decided we would do a grants program. About five years in, I thought that we should begin a parallel program and put in place not only our superb model of grant making, which was very good and highly organized and different from much of philanthropy, but also a loan program that would be a model. We decided not to do it because I thought of Bill Hewlett and thought, no, I shouldn't take on something new right now. The feedback that we had from African women in general about small loans was that they were always too small, that they were directed toward women and they were tiny. They were thinking, women will just get more money and they'll be able to do more of what they do. They were never quite large enough, nor was the training involved to transform the situation. So I'm not putting down those small grants programs. I think that they provide help to people to, let's say, send their sons to school, but they don't necessarily provide help to people who would like to transform their situations, see a possibility for all of their children and send their sons and daughters to school. It doesn't transform them. There's not enough training, there's not enough gender sensitivity around those loan programs, for the most part from my liking. But they've done a huge amount of good in many different countries. To pull people out of abject poverty is just not particularly transformative to the next level. And that's what we were in the business of doing at the Global Fund for Women. We were trying to transform structures. So it takes a little more money and it takes some other things. It takes commitment, it takes connections, it takes networking and a lot and training. So a lot of other things. Any other thoughts? Yes.

Speak a little bit about what we found to be critical approaches.

In terms.

Of moving money from those who have money to those without money, without demoralizing them, and instead empowering to help themselves? Because I think by nature just giving the less fortunate money doesn't necessarily empower them.

Yeah. The question was, were there techniques or things that we could do to empower people as you're providing funds to them rather than to disempower because of, of this power difference between people who have money and people who don't have money? I think the simple ideas that come to mind. And some of these I mentioned in the book are we received proposals in any language, in any form. So we put it on ourselves to translate those proposals. They didn't have to come into English and they didn't have to come in typed or they didn't have to come by email. Ultimately, we would receive them by email. As we moved into that use of technology and as women's groups did around the world as well. So that was one simple thing. We'd receive it in any language. So we are immediately meeting people in their place. Another possibility, another way of dealing was to provide always general support, not project specific support. So that people would come, they would describe their organizations, they wanted money to do something, and sometimes they were so used to getting only project specific support, that is, please, could we have money to buy a van? Or please, could we have money to do some very specific and narrow thing? We always said, look, we realize you've asked for that, but we are in the business of supporting your entire effort. So we wish to give this money in a freer way, a much more flexible way. We felt that by giving money in a flexible way, operating in a way saying this money can be used for what you think is most important. And they would say, you mean we can pay the rent with it, or do you mean we could pay somebody's salary? Yes, whatever you think is most important, then this is what we want the money to be used for. And we would then learn more about the organization in general and always provide general support. I think it's a very freeing, empowering, and respectful way of dealing with people. And most people, whether they know it or not, because they're so used to donors insisting on narrow projects, they don't even ask for it. So that's another technique. Another technique to, I think empower groups was something that I felt very strongly about, and that is that I hired a lot of young people I was speaking to about this over lunch. I hired young people on the staff. I came out of a different generation, but I wanted people who would be really amazed and impressed by, by what women's groups were doing with so little. So they would receive a proposal. And I can tell you story after story of these young staff members who'd come into my office and say, ann, listen to this, listen to what this group is doing, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it was. Now, these young people were graduates, you know, very immediate graduates from universities or something, and they had maybe traveled, but they hadn't spent 50 years in international development, which I Had. And I'm not. I consider myself a very young person, a very young person, because I have a very great curiosity about how people live who are very different from myself. But to a great extent, I mean, even I would have to hold myself back for thinking, gee, I've seen a million of those. You know, I've seen that before. I wonder, maybe they should be doing something different. You know, one would hold oneself back. But these young people did not react that way. So I think I was accused of trying to maintain power by hiring a lot of young people, but my purpose in hiring the young people was maintaining a sense of learning and curiosity, energy, and then the sense that we can do this, this is something we can do. Not. We've tried that a million times and it never worked. Not that attitude. No, because the women were writing with their ideas, and we wanted that more important than what they were doing was a sense of, I quote, Thich Nhat Hanh, Dear one, we are here for you. That was more important than what they're doing to me. And so that was another technique. Just a few. There are others. Yes.

I have a request for you to mention one of the others.

The rebranding, regranting. What do you mean?

When you gave.

To celebrate your anniversary. Okay. Yeah. Thanks, Ellen. Ellen Spurtis was a supporter and a colleague with us early on in the Global Fund. Yes. We came to our fifth anniversary. The organization was created in 1987, and when we came to the fifth anniversary, we thought, what are we going to do for our fifth anniversary? We need to celebrate it in some way. We were still a relatively small operation, you know, raising money from foundations, raising money from corporations, raising money from individuals, that sort of thing. What should we do? Should we have a party? Well, yes, we probably definitely want to have a party with some music and dancing and that sort of thing. We came up with, are we going to do something? Are we going to have an award or whatever? We concluded, and it was a very good idea that was offered by one of the other co founders of the Global Fund for Women. Why don't we do more of what we already do? Why don't we give away more money? Why don't we give. It's the fifth anniversary. Why don't we give away $50,000? So we decided we give away $55,000 and we would choose 10 groups each of. Oh, no, sorry. I guess it was five groups. I'm not going to remember. Each of whom. Each of which got $10,000 from us. And they were empowered to give it away to smaller groups. So we chose the groups that we thought had good networks in their regions, and we put it together around the world so that we had a bunch of these sort of celebratory anniversary grants, each of these groups receiving, let's say, $10,000, I could be wrong, $10,000 plus $1,000 for its administrative costs, and give away the $10,000 to smaller groups in their region. Now, out of that, over time, came something that had always been a dream of mine, and that is the development of little women's Funds here and there around the world. And there are many women's Funds in this country. There are some, I don't know, there must be 50 or more, 70 by now, I think, in this country. The San Francisco Women's Fund, the California Women's Fund, New York Women's Fund, and so on. But around the world there hadn't been. But out of that regranting program came the idea. In fact, the idea had gotten out there a little bit earlier in Mexico and in Nepal. But several of the groups that we gave money to set themselves up as the sort of fund. The Women's Fund of Mongolia, for example, the Women's Fund of India, of Bangalore. Then there was one in Mexico, there was one in Nepal. And these are small. I don't want to call them mini women's funds, mini global funds, but they were like the Global Fund for Women, but operated in their own country or region. And some of them even went beyond the Global Fund. I think particularly of the group in Nepal, the name of which is tewa, which means support. That group went beyond the Global Fund in terms of its clear articulation of its vision and principles and is really. I won't say it's thriving because Nepal is a very, very hard environment in which to work, but it is doing very well, has been able to raise money not only from international sources, but more important from local sources in Nepal, which is quite an amazing accomplishment. And giving away money to small groups, small rural women's groups that could never be reached by something like the Global Fund for Women further and further out in Nepal. Any other thoughts? Yes. Did you notice an effect of any of your recipients becoming dependent on. The question is, did you notice any of the recipients becoming dependent on this financial support? Yes. You know, I mean, if you are a group in Latin America working on access to abortion, for example, working on reproductive rights issues, you have a very hard time raising money. Now, I don't mean to say that they became dependent on the Global Fund. One of the things we tried to do was to give a group a Good Housekeeping Seal of approval. Maybe you're too young to know that. The Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, that is, if they got a grant from the Global Fund for Women, then they might be able to get a grant from another foundation, a larger one, and maybe Ford foundation even, or Rockefeller or larger foundations that were working internationally. And increasingly over the last 20 years, more and more private foundations are working internationally. So there was a little more money available. And I would say that the Global Fund had a very big influence on having organizations, foundations in this country feel comfortable taking a risk. I didn't think it was much of a risk funding these women's groups overseas, but there were some groups working on maybe lesbian issues, working on issues of violence, particular kinds of violence, working on reproductive health issues, as I mentioned, that really have a tremendously difficult time raising money from anywhere from their sources. Some of those groups did receive multi year support from the Global Fund. We almost never supported 100% of their budgets, but we would go as far as to fund maybe 50% of budgets, 25%, 50% of budgets of some of these organizations. I was just reading about an organization the other day that would fit this category. And this is an organization that was working in the area of trafficking in women. Really an almost intractable kind of a problem. Very, very hard problem to address. And yet a very, very widespread human rights and health abrogation around the world. And there are several organizations that developed as networks to work across countries in regions. For example, there's one in Eastern Europe working on the issue of trafficking and women, and another in Southeast Asia trying to network with smaller women's groups in the region to get a handle on this problem, to affect legislation, to somehow begin to reduce this issue of trafficking, primarily sex trafficking of women and girls. Those groups received significant support from the Global Fund for Women. And they continue to. Whether we say they're dependent? Well, maybe, probably. My experience with many of these groups, particularly groups that are working on those kinds of compelling issues, where people who become involved are just utterly committed to their work. In many, many cases you find that those people are going to do the work anyway. They are so committed, they're so driven, the money helps. And so, yes, one might say there are some that have become dependent, I think, particularly around the difficulty, whether the issues are particularly controversial or hard to fund. Yes.

Did you try to measure how well the groups that you funded did with their cost?

Read my book. I did talk about that. It's Very difficult. I mean, at the beginning, how can I quickly answer the question? Quick answer is yes. But we did not set in place an ongoing evaluation program where Americans were flying around the world to measure things. Not at all. We had an international advisory council, of course, when a group received a grant a year or so later, they had to send us a report. Since many of these groups were not used to writing proposals or writing reports, they had not had that much experience working with donors. We laid those out. Here's how you write a proposal, and here's how you write a report. These are the kinds of questions that we will ask. And we refined those questions, especially with regard to the final reports over time, because we started out with a little bit of a bottom line approach. That is, you got the money, what did you spend it for, what happened? Kind of thing. But we weren't getting thoughtful reports. And so we refined that and asked them in their final reports to provide us with much more sort of qualitative response. What do you think made a difference? What was your greatest challenge? Did you fail? Did you succeed? But still, it was difficult until we began to have a body of organizations that we had funded. And we then were able to go to our donors and people like you who said, you know, how do you measure success? We were able to say, here are the stories, Here are the stories. And I hark back to somebody said to me once, what's truer than the truth? What's truer than the truth is the story. So one tries to tell the stories of the women's groups. And ultimately it seemed to add up after you'd had a thousand groups, with groups growing in stature in their own countries, beginning to create networks, beginning to be donors themselves, beginning to be linking with government, with whatever. I mean, again and again we saw examples of growth and change, but we did indeed, we were given some money by a large foundation to do a kind of evaluation, an evaluation looking particularly at some health issues. And we thought, it's time we need to do some sort of formal evaluation. Although I'll step back and say that I've done evaluations for large donor agencies. And such activities are just filled with flaws and problems, it seems to me. But anyway, we took the money and we gave it to a women's research entity. And they did an evaluation of about 40 groups in eight different countries. And what they came out with was very interesting. Among other things, they learned that the groups themselves, anyway, thought that the most effective aspect of the work of the Global Fund for Women was the fact that we communicated trust. They called their document trust. When they finally ended, wrote the final report, that trust itself was empowering. What they were trying to find out was did these grants empower? Okay, difficult question to answer. Okay, people are going to have to answer it in their own terms. In some countries there wasn't even a word for empowerment. But what they came out with, yes, the grants did. The money was important. But what was more important was the connection, the sense of community and the trust and respect. And I will read, if my book were a poetry book, I might read from it. But I don't think that it makes sense to read from such a book. But I would like to read one little thing because when I left the Global Fund for Women, a lot of people wrote to me and wished me well and all of that. And one woman wrote to us from Botswana and she said this touched me particularly. It came from Unity Dao. She's a well known person in Botswana, Unity Dow and the staff and board of Methel Cili Women's Information center in Botswana. And she said this. Sitting here in Botswana, a semi desert, looking through the window and hoping for rain, I cannot think of a better farewell salute to you than the traditional go with rain. We at Methezile, which means the time has come. Wish you all the best, hope you will not move far away. We will always remember that the Global Fund for Women was the first donor to believe in us and trusted us enough to give us funds when all we had was a dream. After that it became easier to convince other donors that we meant business. We, we thank you for this trust. If you're ever in this part of the world, look us up. So the point is that there was a tremendous ripple effect from these small grants and we learned it through the stories. And if you go to the web and look up, you'll find them there thriving. And we were the first grant, first $5,000 grant. Now somebody over there had a talk.

A little bit about structure of your organization. Can you speak to how that structure has evolved as you go over time? What's made you most effective and most importantly for a nascent organization like google.org, what pitfalls to be aware of and avoid?

Big question. Wow, huge question. Sometime if you're involved with google.org, i like to sit around and talk about that. First of all, I, I started the Global Fund in 1987 and by the time I left in 1996 we had grown to only about, I think it was about 12 or 13 staff members always following Bill Hewlett's idea. Stay lean, stay small. I had this concept of a kind of guerrilla operation. The organization has grown, and as I say, it's thrived. It's now up to 35 or 40 people on the staff and has given away a lot of money over time, just as we have. The organization kept doubling over time, doubling in size in various ways over time. And in fact, I speak in my book about how we managed growth. But to try to get to your question about structure, everybody did everything at the beginning. I mean, we were three people, four people every year. We went on six people, 10 people, so on over the years, the early years, and we kind of did everything, a little bit of everything in the office. But fairly soon on, even with that small staff, by the time I left, around 12 or 13 people, we had teams. We had, you know, three teams, fundraising team, grant making team, administrative and financial team. And those teams were very independent. I worked for them. In other words, they led the teams, and I was sort of the head of the whole team, but I answered to them. It was like a network. It was very much like a network. And internationally, when we were interacting with our advisors and our grantees, very much a network, there wasn't a kind of hierarchy in this organization. And somehow things worked. Leadership emerged from different parts of the organization. And that was my concept at the beginning, I think that we made a mistake. And in the sense that when we created the 501, when we first started, we created a board, traditionally there were only three people, and then there were six, and then there were eight on our board. But we started out with a little bit of a traditional view of a board, of the board being kind of in charge of the organization up here and us all down. That was the one part in the structure of the organization that never quite fitted. All of the other parts, we seemed to be interacting in an extremely transparent and easy, even handed way. But the interaction with the board was not always terrible. I don't mean to say that, but there were times when it kind of grated, when we felt the board members were sort of throwing their weight around or something and we didn't like it. And we started out with that wrong idea of where the board fitted, rather than in the network taking on its own responsibilities. No, up here somewhere. And we had to fix it. And we dealt with it in various ways, mostly by very much open, transparent process of trying to bring in board members who understood what we were trying to do and retire board members who were uncomfortable with a more open kind of network system. So I can't easily answer your question about what has happened over time, although I'm in close touch with the Global Fund, I'm an advisor, I'm a donor and so on, and going up there next week for a meeting and you know, that happens. But the organization has grown and I think even, you know, I wonder how Google has grown and maintained its open structure as well. I do not believe that an organization needs to become more bureaucratic and more hierarchical as it grows, but I didn't stay around long enough to figure that out. But I do believe that the key component in maintaining an even handed, open, transparent and giving, generous, caring, trusting, respectful, loving organization lies entirely with leadership. People who will continually maintain the principles and the vision. And those people are not always necessarily the people quote at the top. That leadership can emerge. If you have clearly stated principles and a clearly stated vision, then anybody can raise the issues saying, hey, we seem to be getting off track here. You know, we're getting more secretive, we're not sharing, you know, people are able to raise those questions if you set your organization up clearly based on a set of principles and vision. I believe that was my experience. Anyway, our audience seems to be dwindling here, but that's all right. We have some people who are very interested. More comments or questions?

Yes, I just had a question about your book. In fact, it's a wonderful book, but it focuses a lot on leadership and management, which isn't necessarily a unique topic. What makes it really extraordinary though, is looking at it from the perspective of starting a major nonprofit. Are there any lessons you really highlight, Lessons that you really only learned in the nonprofit or worth sharing with the group?

See, I think in the nonprofit world, where we're rather lucky, I think the nonprofit world is incredibly important at this time. In our world development, we think of the three sectors, the government sector, corporate sector, and the nonprofit sector. At the international level or at the national level, we've got government, we've got corporations, and we've got the nonprofit sector. Generally, it's in the nonprofit sector that people can express and see, give reality to their very noble ideals, their dreams, their visions for change. And therefore, I think the sector is tremendously this nonprofit, third sector, independent sector, civil society, There are different terms for it is extremely important in this time of change. Extremely important because we need vision and change. See, one of the things that has bothered me about the growth of the nonprofit world is its huge dependence on money and the role of donors who come sometimes from the government sector or the private sector. The role of donors to basically drive the agendas of nonprofits. And I think that's very dangerous. We need to keep a very open and flexible process of philanthropy and so on in order to have these dreams and visions that emerge from the nonprofit world come to the surface. We don't want them closed off. I will come back to your question. A lot of people in the nonprofit world, particularly smaller groups, women's groups, will sometimes come to me and, you know, ask for advice about various things and they'll say things like, well, you know, the Kellogg foundation is giving money for such and such right now. Maybe we should be doing this. And, and I'm saying, stop. Get your dream clear. What is it that you're trying to do? What problems are you trying to solve? What change do you want to have? What vision for the world do you have? Stick with it. Do not allow the agendas of donors to tell you what to do. They need you more than you need them. They need your ideas for change and vision. So I believe the nonprofit civil society sector is extremely important in making sure that we don't forget that we need to think in new and different ways and we need to interact with each other in different ways. I think it's an opportunity in the nonprofit sector to model for others. But I mean, I come to Google and maybe I have too wonderful a view of Google, but here in the corporate world, you find an organization that is acting like a non profit in a way, putting its users rather than itself, shareholders first, like putting the women's groups first before the interests of the donors. Not trying to sort of skew your program in order to make more money, but continuing to do what you really want to do. I mean, maybe it'll fall apart as Google grows, I don't know. But at the moment, one has the idea that here is one of the very few corporations that has clearly thought, let's put the user first and put the shareholder second. If you have to make a choice in the nonprofit world, we should be doing that all the time as a model. Our program, our vision for change, our desire to make the world a better place needs to be right out front. And in that way we can remind people, you know, you can do things differently. We can save the world, women can become empowered. I don't know if that answers your question about the role of the nonprofit world. I see that as the role of the nonprofit world to maintain our noble ideals and have a place for them. Where does a person go who wants to deal with some very, very difficult questions that one might find at. On the schoolyard or in your local community observing something that just is upsetting them. They want it to be different. How do we do it? The environmental field is a perfect example of it, where corporations have not felt that they could afford to do some of these things, but the non profit world has been able to introduce some of these things, and ultimately, maybe it will have an effect on the other sectors. We have to work in tandem in the three sectors. I'm not looking at the time very clearly. Okay. We still have a little more time. Yes. Right. Read my book. Okay. I mean, I don't. I hate to say that, but. Because. But it's true. I mean, I did talk a little bit about. About what happens when something comes to mind at a time in your life when it just fits. It was both personal and professional. I was working at the Hewlett foundation, running the population and the environment programs at the Hewlett Foundation. And I'd been there for about eight or nine years at that point. And I had observed international development and funding in the international world, and I had observed some good behavior and some bad behavior in the foundation world internationally. And however, I had come to some conclusions, like Bill Easterly. I think Bill Easterly spoke here not too long ago. I'd come to some conclusions about the inadequacy of the way international development was being done, the kinds of organizations that were receiving money, the amounts of organizations that were receiving money, and the inability of large organizations, even a good foundation like the Hewlett foundation, the inability to get money out to people who are actually making changes at the grassroots, you might say, or at lower levels than these intermediary organizations that we had to work with because we were giving away large amounts of money at the Hewlett foundation, the World bank, other agencies like this. Bill Easterly observed it at the World bank and is now writing about other ways of doing things. Well, women had been writing about these other ways of doing things way back in 1985 when we knew that money really had to get out further and further out to people, women, marginalized people. The largest percentage of marginalized people, we would say, are women and are the poorest of the poor, and even though many men are poor, too. But we knew that things had to be done in a different way. And that was becoming more and more obvious to me when I was working at the Hewlett Foundation. I traveled fairly widely with the Hewlett foundation. And I remember once being in a small Town in Nigeria where I was speaking, a group of women asked to speak with me. I was there on an evaluation trip, as a matter of fact, for a large donor agency. And I was. These women asked to meet with me and these three or four women came and they said, we're trying to start an organization to work with street women. They need clinics, they need medical care, and we are. These were middle class women and they were hoping that they could link with these other women and get something done, but they needed a little bit of money to do it and can you help us? They knew I was a woman in a foundation working internationally. Well, I couldn't think of a place they could go. Where could they get $5,000? There were. The YWCA had a small grants program. Somebody else did. But I kept seeing this when I'd meet people here and there, that there was a need for small strategic grants given quickly, relatively freely and flexibly to help people move on, to help people get on with it in their communities. So I was seeing it professionally. I was also seeing the interrelationships between family planning activities, environmental and women's activities. And people weren't connecting them in their programs, whereas at the grassroots people were. So I was observing this. I was also a woman who had been divorced and I found myself divorced and stupid little examples. I give more of them in the book. I couldn't get a credit card in my own name. I was being paid less than the men on the staff, even though I was smarter and better than they were at the work. I thought, not that men are not competent, but you know, why, why was I. I didn't even know about it until somebody outside was checking the 1090s or something on our. On the Hewlett Foundation. And this guy called me, said, ann, why aren't you being paid as much as X? I said, oh, aren't I? You know, I had not figured it out, I hadn't asked, I hadn't known. And literally this was a long time ago. Literally when I raised it in my annual review, which I did with trepidation because I needed the job, I was told that I was making a good salary for a woman now. That person could be sued now, but not then. It was a long time ago. And so what am I saying to you both professionally and personally? And I think I say this in the book. I wanted to change the world for women like the women that I met in Nigeria who wanted to do good for people who just didn't have a chance, who were working at poverty levels. I wanted to change the world for those people. And I wanted to change the world for me too. For people like me too. And it needed transformation in the ways that we are treating each other in this world, I believe. Anyway, quick answer to the question. The personal story is included to some degree in the book. Any other thoughts or comments before we close? Thank you.