Social Impact Heroes: Why & How Kristen J. Molyneaux of ‘Lever for Change’ Is Helping To Change Our World
Let go of perfection. It’s okay to fail. If you want to be a disruptor or a social impact hero, you have to let go of the idea of perfection. When you’re trying to solve some of the most intractable problems in the world, it’s going to get messy and be imperfect. You have to be willing to take chances, and that means it’s likely you’ll fail — at least sometimes. That’s how you learn and keep moving forward. Mistakes aren’t anything to fear, as long as you reflect on them, learn from them, and grow. For so long, I would allow mistakes or the fear of making mistakes to guide my decisions and how I would approach life. Once I let go of that fear and recognized that they are a part of life, I was able to find more productive and meaningful ways to move forward.
As part of my series about “individuals and organizations making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kristen J. Molyneaux.
Kristen J. Molyneaux, PhD is the President and a co-founder of Lever for Change, a nonprofit affiliate of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Lever for Change emboldens donors and problem solvers to think big and leverage investments in effective solutions to accelerate social change. Kristen oversees operations of the organization, driving its mission to unlock significant philanthropic resources and accelerate social change globally. Since its founding in 2019, Lever for Change has influenced $2.5 billion in grants and provided support to more than 500 organizations.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I was working at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation when they decided, in 2015, that they wanted to try something audacious and transformational in philanthropy. That led to the creation of the first 100&Change challenge, an open and transparent competition for a $100 million award. The goal was to fund a single idea that promised real and measurable progress in solving a critical problem of our time. It was a big deviation from traditional philanthropy, which I found tremendously exciting, but I was also a little uncertain. At the time, the average grant size across the U.S. was about $50,000.
The first 100&Change award recipient was a joint effort between Sesame Workshop and the International Rescue Committee. The project focused on creating a TV show named Ahlan Simsim (“Welcome Sesame”, in Arabic) to educate young children displaced by conflict and persecution, particularly in the region affected by the Syrian conflict.
The MacArthur Foundation’s bold move created excitement within the predictable world of philanthropy, and before we knew it, a colleague of mine from the LEGO Foundation called to ask if they could match the $100 million award to Sesame. That was way beyond anything we expected to happen when we launched the competition. LEGO Foundation ended up making an additional grant to Sesame Workshop, and doubled MacArthur’s investment, expanding the program to also support the displaced Rohingya population in Bangladesh.
The success of 100&Change prompted the Foundation to create Lever for Change in 2019 to run similar large-scale competitions for other donors and catalyze philanthropy at scale. Since those early days, we’ve designed and managed 16 open calls and challenges. To date, Lever for Change has influenced over $2.5 billion in funding to and provided support to more than 500 organizations. Our goal is to influence $10 billion in funding by 2030.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?
That first 100&Change award was extremely interesting, because it was an experiment of sorts and the effort was an enormous success. Ultimately, Ahlan Simsim reached more than 27 million children across the Middle East and North Africa, with a particular impact in countries like Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria — where it was estimated that 1 in 3 children were watching the show. Research found the show had huge positive results on those children’s language, number knowledge, social-emotional skills and more. By virtue of these two awards (100&Change and the LEGO grant), a spotlight shone on a highly underfunded area — support for displaced children under 5 years of age.
100&Change is also a fascinating example because of what followed. The experiment went beyond our wildest imaginations, by turning traditional philanthropy on its head. Instead of telling nonprofits to fit our strategy, we encouraged them to tell us how they thought the problem could be solved. It was pretty revolutionary at the time, but we couldn’t stop there — we felt like we’d caught lightning in a bottle. We received over 1,000 global applications and had calls with funders all over the world wondering if we had any proposals in their strategic areas or geographies of interest that they might be able to fund. We started sharing proposals and introducing funders to nonprofits beyond their existing networks.
What resonated with both funders and applicants was the ability for organizations to put forward their vision for the impact they hoped to achieve and the pathway they planned to take to get there. For many organizations it was the first time a funder allowed them to pitch their big idea, rather than being told they needed to fit their work into the funder’s strategy in order to receive funding. Giving organizations the opportunity to tell us how they planned to achieve their goals opened up new ways of thinking for everyone involved. The teams could use their proposals to pitch existing and new funders and engage with them in new ways. The process of organizations reinvigorating their own plans for a bold impact agenda and our brokering of connections to funders within the field is what allowed Lever for Change to grow organically out of that experience.
We created a model using transparent open call competitions to help catalyze large-scale funding and build a pipeline of problem solvers to help donors find investment opportunities. To date, the first round of 100&Change alone has leveraged an additional $511 million in funding with gifts ranging in size from $16 thousand to $100 million! Those gifts did not just go to Sesame Workshop, but went to organizations around the world working on issues from clean oceans to supporting newborn health. To this day, we still hear from organizations that tell us how transformative the process was for them, in terms of their own reimagined strategies and ability to catalyze funding from public and private sources. This is what inspires us to continue — imagine the change we would see in the world if we unlocked $500 million for every open call that we ran?
Cecilia Conrad, our CEO, and I are two of the co-founders. It’s been a wild and wonderful adventure since the beginning.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Before transitioning to the world of philanthropy I was an elementary school teacher. And you certainly don’t know failure until you have stood in front of a room full of 8-year-olds and watched them fall to pieces out of boredom or confusion because your lesson didn’t work. While training for that job, it was all about experimentation. As a teacher, there are no playbooks. Each day is a new adventure, and your best-prepared lessons can go south because one kid had a bad morning at home or fought with a friend before school. With teaching, you are constantly reading the room, pivoting, failing, and learning. You get up and teach something and then assess: did the lesson work for the class? If it did…great. If not, try something different. All of my experiences in teaching, from being a second-grade teacher through lecturing graduate school courses, were built around trial-and-error and asking myself: What worked well? What went wrong? What did I learn? And what lessons can I take forward to the next day?
To me, mistakes aren’t a big deal, because I see them as inevitable. What’s more important is learning from those mistakes, picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and doing better the next time around. That was a critically important lesson for me as a teacher and a value that I have always helped my students embrace. It doesn’t have to be a big deal when things don’t work out. Focus on a new solution and pivot. Those are lessons I’ve also brought into my career in philanthropy — both for myself and my team, but also for the nonprofits and the funders that we support. I work hard to make sure we’re not afraid to make mistakes. We’re working hard to disrupt philanthropy and if you’re trying to shake things up, you have to be willing to make mistakes. Even more importantly, you have to let your team take risks and make mistakes. Learning from failure is how you grow and how you become a stronger leader.
Can you describe how you or your organization is making a significant social impact?
Lever for Change is a nonprofit that helps reduce the burden and barriers to giving by supporting donors in reaching their philanthropic goals. Many donors find giving away money effectively to be difficult. As a result, America’s billionaires have accumulated $6 trillion in funding that has yet to be deployed to the sector. Although individual wealth has increased, donations have dropped sharply (by 60%) since the height of the pandemic, when people’s needs were clear. Today, we face a different set of challenges and a growing sense of urgency. But, typically, philanthropy tends to focus on a small number of institutions. We’re enabling donors to discover and invest in more outstanding organizations.
Through our inclusive open call approach, we invite organizations of all sizes from around the world to showcase their big ideas and receive donor funding and resources to make it happen. To date, we have influenced over $2.5 billion in grants and worked with more than 500 organizations worldwide. Our transparent and expert-led review process ensures that every participant benefits, and every donor discovers new potential.
Combining our broad network with our rigorous review process, we find, vet and present nonprofits so that donors can invest in them with confidence. Our unique approach is additive to every type of donor portfolio and provides all donors with new partnerships that grow and flourish over the long term.
All finalists from our challenges become members of our Bold Solutions Network and this Network helps members secure additional funding and have more impact. Currently, we have more than 500 members in our network, ready to act; they just need funding and we’re working to help them find that.
So far, Lever for Change has influenced more than $2.5 billion in funding from our donors and partners, including MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving, Pivotal Ventures, Reid Hoffman, the LEGO Foundation and more. Currently we have a $50M Gulf Futures Challenge running for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the third round of MacArthur Foundation’s $100M 100&Change, the $250M Action for Women’s Health Open Call with Pivotal (a Melinda French Gates organization) and Reid Hoffman’s $10M Trust in American Institutions Challenge.
Can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
For me, it is difficult to name a single individual. What has impacted and inspired me the most are stories of resilience and hope in the face of adversity. The desire of parents the world over to give their children a safe, loving, and joyful childhood is universal. The stories of families impacted by Ahlan Simsim always motivate me to continue the work that I do. There’s the story of Mohammad Al-Ahmad, a Syrian father (he is profiled in a video about Ahlan Simsim) explaining why he credits the program with helping improve his children’s emotional health. Another powerful story is Nowar’s. He was separated from his family during the Syrian war but was able to reconnect with them as the puppeteer for one of the show’s characters, Jad.
Often, in philanthropy, you are far removed from the day-to-day work of the many organizations that you support, particularly when you’re working at the scale of Lever for Change. You read proposals and budgets and think about the impact on the lives of thousands of people more than any one single person. But these individual stories stay with me and they remind me that, while the work is never easy, I do what I do in order to support the resilience of all of these families and individuals, and to play a small role in trying to build a better future for generations to come. I am both humbled and honored to have played a small part in supporting the lives of people and communities around the globe.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
At Lever for Change, we’re focused on creating access in the world of philanthropy, enabling donors to discover and invest in organizations with transformative potential. In order to do that, we have to think creatively about ways to make it easier for donors to give and for problem solvers to receive funds.
Here are three big ideas that could drive transformative change:
- Think about philanthropy more like business: Donors have often succeeded in business by taking risks and maintaining a diversified portfolio of investments. However, these ideas are less common when it comes to their philanthropic giving, where decision paralysis, uncertainty about the field, or fears about making mistakes can come into play. I think donors should think less about giving to one organization and instead embrace the idea of a philanthropic portfolio of organizations working on a topic of importance. Not only would this help them give to more groups; I believe it would help de-risk their investments and move away from the fear of not getting it right. Some ideas will succeed, some may fail — that’s part of the process of building something new and driving innovation and change — just like in the world of business and venture capital. This is something Lever for Change can help funders do. We make it easy to give.
- Go wide with your philanthropy: There are a lot of people out there with great ideas to change the world who are in need of funding and there are a lot of donors who have funds to invest. Unfortunately, these two groups rarely connect. Open call challenges are a great solution to widen a donor’s perspective to include more ideas and expose them to all sorts of groups in need of funds. It’s also really useful when donors set wide parameters with these kinds of open calls. Instead of saying, “I’d like you to spend the money this way,” we find the most transformative change comes when donors go wider with their intention, define a high-level goal, and then let people on the ground and closest to the issues do the problem solving. That’s when solutions seem to be the most impactful and sustainable.
- Unlock your DAF’s potential. Donor Advised Funds (or DAFs) are philanthropic investment vehicles that are set up for the sole purpose of making it easy for an individual or a family to support the charitable organizations they care about. Many people have DAFs these days, as they provide a lot of benefits for donors. DAFs simplify the process of managing charitable giving and donors get an immediate tax deduction when contributing to a DAF, even if the funds aren’t given out right away. The problem is that, as of 2023, there was approximately $251.52 billion sitting in DAFs around America waiting to be deployed! Some donors forget the money is there and will make charitable contributions with their credit card or checking account instead. Other funders just don’t know what to do with the money or are unsure how to deploy it effectively. There’s no real incentive to give it away as there is no penalty if it is never deployed. At Lever for Change, we’re making it easier for people to put the funds in these accounts to immediate good use, by lowering the risk level for investment, creating subject matter portfolios, and providing tools that can convert stock, crypto, and DAF funds into charitable gifts. Even a small percentage, like 5% of a DAF, could provide a tremendous boost to all sorts of impactful organizations tackling the critical challenges of today. We’re on a mission to move this money and reduce friction for DAF holders.
How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
For me, leadership is about providing a vision of where we are going, strategic goals to help us align on a pathway for getting there, and a set of values for how we will work together. Then getting out of the way! I strongly believe that it is critical to give talented teams the space they need to be creative and innovative. It is why you hired them in the first place. Leadership, for me, involves creating a compassionate, transparent, and supportive environment so people are comfortable taking big swings. Perhaps those big swings become huge successes or perhaps they end up not working out. Either way, we will have learned something along the way that will make our team, and organization, stronger.
Leadership is also about constant evolution and learning. I am not perfect, and my leadership style is constantly evolving. I continue to be inspired by and learn from my mentors and the many different donors we work with in the philanthropy space. What I’ve learned from watching so many great leaders is that true leadership is about fostering growth across your team, staying true to your values, and always continuing to learn and grow. The journey is the destination and there is no real finish line. Every day presents new opportunities to step up and be a better leader than you were the day before.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.
- Let go of perfection. It’s okay to fail. If you want to be a disruptor or a social impact hero, you have to let go of the idea of perfection. When you’re trying to solve some of the most intractable problems in the world, it’s going to get messy and be imperfect. You have to be willing to take chances, and that means it’s likely you’ll fail — at least sometimes. That’s how you learn and keep moving forward. Mistakes aren’t anything to fear, as long as you reflect on them, learn from them, and grow. For so long, I would allow mistakes or the fear of making mistakes to guide my decisions and how I would approach life. Once I let go of that fear and recognized that they are a part of life, I was able to find more productive and meaningful ways to move forward.
- Say yes. The program I originally worked on at the MacArthur Foundation was winding down when I was asked if I wanted to be part of 100&Change. It was a totally new approach to philanthropy at the time. We were swinging big, and we didn’t know if it would be a wild success or a huge failure. It was a little scary to try something totally new at that point in my career, but I’m so grateful I did. When I look back, I find that it would have been completely impossible to map out my trajectory from the start. The only way I’ve been able to experience new and incredible opportunities is by saying yes to things — even if they felt out of the box or not aligned with where I thought I was going. Saying yes has led me to places I could never have envisioned or imagined.
- Have a North Star. You don’t have to know exactly where you’re going, but it is helpful if you can identify your North Star — that big thing that inspires you and drives you. Mine is making a positive difference in the world. Keeping that in mind helps me pick different paths when they are presented. It whittles down opportunities and makes decision-making easier.
- There is always more to learn. When you’re focused on climbing the ladders of success, it can be tempting to focus on the goals you haven’t yet achieved, rather than focusing on how you can continue to grow and learn where you are in the moment. Whenever I felt I was stagnating, I would stop and ask myself how I could stretch more, what else I could learn that would better position me for future opportunities or roles. That approach has helped me remain positive and focused on my own growth rather than external factors outside my control.
- Have hobbies & enjoy life! You only get one chance to live life, so don’t spend all of your time behind your computer responding to emails. Find things that bring you joy — pets, music, travel, friends, yoga. Whatever it is, allow yourself to maintain a well-roundedness about you. The work we do is hard and can be all-consuming. You have to practice self-care so you can take care of others.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
It would be finding a way to get money out of the DAFs that I mentioned earlier. Philanthropy is changing. People aren’t really starting foundations anymore, which makes it harder for nonprofits to know where to find the critical funds they need to do their work. I know that many funders want to put their money to good use, but they just aren’t sure how. I want to find a way to help get those funds out of DAF accounts and into the hands of problem solvers, so that funders feel inspired and excited by the impact their charitable dollars can have.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“The journey is the destination” — Dan Eldon. That quote has always resonated with me. It reminds me to slow down and not be so focused on tomorrow. Rather, pause and enjoy what is happening right now! My friends, my family, my pets, my home projects…savor the little things and stop being in a hurry to get to the finish line. And where is the finish line anyway? Some of the best people I have met, or best experiences I have had, were ones that were not mapped out. They were the diversions you might find on a road trip if you’d only take a minute to stop and look around.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
There are so many interesting people but, if I had to pick one, I’d say Mark Cuban. I so admire the way he disrupts with energy, transparency, clear communication, and a focus on making things better for as many people as possible. I think he would be a tremendous thought partner in trying to figure out innovative and compelling ways to mobilize the capital sitting in these Donor Advised Funds.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Visit LeverforChange.org and follow us on LinkedIn (LeverforChange) and Instagram (@Lever4Change).
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success in your great work! Thank you!
Social Impact Heroes: Why & How Kristen J Molyneaux of ‘Lever for Change’ Is Helping To Change Our was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.