In Conversation With Peter Brach

Hello and welcome to the Philanthropy Impact Podcast. Listen on for insights into philanthropy, impact investing and sustainability. Well, hello everyone. I'm really pleased to be in conversation with Peter Barack, who is founder of Propel Philanthropy and many other things. So, Peter, thank you for being here. It's my pleasure, John. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, that's good.

I I thought I'd start off by talking uh or asking a question about your journey. So talk about who you are, what's your been your journey to where you are now as a uh philanthropist. Um And um what's influenced your life to uh move you to where you are? Sure. I'm happy to start out with that. I my journey started when I was 14 years old and we did a um a a garage sale for Bangladesh. And I knew very little about, you know, world hunger at that time, but that really influenced me.

to understanding that there was real suffering going on in the world. And you know, I lived in a very sheltered suburban s uh environment. And this was really my the beginning of me wanting to get involved. But it certainly evolved. A lot since then toward wanting to find real solutions to solving s some of the most, you know, serious problems that we face.

So what was it about that at 14 years? Because I mean a lot of fourteen year olds sort of are thinking about other stuff and maybe if you're going to sell stuff you might uh set it up just to make a few um Pen or sense and stuff, but what what what was there that sort of made you attracted to uh what was happening in different parts of the world?

I, you know, to this day it's an enigma. I don't quite know. I think I was looking for my identity, but it just so happened that I looked in the right place. And that was the start of my long journey toward wanting to to find solutions and to and to participate in improving the world. So can you give me a sense of that journey then so people can understand what uh motivates you?

Sure. Well, you know, it began with just really having a practical sense of that and then learning that there are a lot of other problems that were happening. And eventually I had a, you know, one of my most memorable Incidences was a was a uh Christmas Eve conversation with my father when he started talking about systemic change.

And then from that I began a a a long journey into what does systemic change mean for me. And that turned into a journey toward trying to find really efficient solutions, things that could be we call cross-cutting. Strategic approaches to bringing about change, which is a Hard concept for people to gather because mostly we think about one cause or the other, but we rarely think about what are those things we can do that can actually improve a lot of conditions and pretty much at the same time.

So the emotive drive behind what you were doing was not as strong as the rational logical. Um, I think that the I think that the law what became the rational logical Is is very much a drive for me. I mean, I I'm very much involved in building the conditions that enable real change to happen. For example, increasing global giving so that there's more money to go around or increasing volunteerism.

So there's more volunteers in the world or or fellows or leaders or you know, things that things that I call regenerative resources or things that build the field.

But I but to put a human face to it, because I know that a lot of people think of infrastructure. type of thing is boring.

For me, it's not boring because what I really try underline that I'm trying to, you know, I'm thinking that there are children that are suffering, there are there are you know minorities that are being oppressed, or there is an environment and a climate change that's that needs to be addressed on same things that other people care about, but asking myself, what can we do that that can solve many of these problems and work on it as efficiently as possible?

My answer grew into building propel philanthropy because propel philanthropy works now with 60 different social impact infrastructure organizations, organizations working on the ecosystem of social change. And we now are work these I I uh serve now as a spotlight to spotlight some of the work that they do.

Before we talk about propel, um You talk about uh philanthropy, you talk about uh volunteerism. Um, where does uh impact investing come in? Because you have a spectrum of capital that can go from traditional investment through impact ESG investment right through to philanthropy. So you've been talking about one end of that spectrum, but where does the impact investing fit to all John, that's a really excellent question because what I'm doing

is is very, very broad. So we have people in our group That are doing social impact investing because when you improve, for example, confluence philanthropy works on not just Bringing people in to do social impact investing, but really they they serve as a vanguard to improve the entire field, to make it, you know. So so we uh work with all kinds of what I call social impact infrastructure organizations. And impact investing is one of them. Innovation building is another one.

Um working on platforms that as I mentioned that increase global giving or volunteerism is yet a third. And then you have organizations like the Council on Foundations who worked on many, many different aspects of improving giving, including impact investing. So it so we really work on all our I should say I spotlight organizations. that do all forms of cross-cutting solutions that solve some of today's most serious problems. Okay, so again, before we get too far into propel.

Um, there's a whole issue now about harm versus good. Um especially when you look at charities that have large endowments, you look at donor advice funds that have uh large amounts of money, and um uh you look at individuals who uh have money and stuff. So uh you can um Uh giveaway money for uh supplanthropists Uh you can invest, but if you invest

in a way that's maybe just negative screening, then uh you might be doing harm where and and the money you make you're trying to do good so the two can sort of uh counter each other. Uh are you Having any discussions with people around that whole concept? What I'm trying to do actually so so let's get to the question to another look at it from a different lens or a different perspective. So when you think about impact investing.

Do what I generally find is people start their own fund or they do something specific. But then there are the people who say to themselves, you know what, I want to improve the whole field of social impact investing. And part of that is working with organizations like G-I-I-N that are that are really thinking about that kind of screening so that so that we're not creating harm and so that we are doing good. So I don't specifically engage in it, but I encourage.

people to start thinking about how can I get involved with this and not just for just start a fund or do something like that, but but actually improve the field of social impact investing so that it so that so we cause more cause less harm and produce more good. So you have a tonic. Um and the wealthy people who are trying to shift or who are shifting away from traditional investment to uh impact investing. Uh have you had any involvement with them at all?

Actually Tonic is not one of the organizations uh that I've been involved with. but uh they're one of the organizations I certainly respect and I you know I I pr and the with the kind of work that I do is I spotlight organizations. So for example, somebody might come to me and say, you know, I really want to engage in impact investing and I may say, you know, you should look into the work that Tonica's doing or the work that J I I N is doing.

or the work that Confluence Philanthropy is doing, which works on field building. Okay. And um uh it's interesting there's uh uh there's a group that in the US is now starting to um uh operate here in the UK called the Patriotic Millionaire. So they take a different approach to this whole area.

No, I I didn't have anything to say. Go on. Okay. So they basically come at it from a tax perspective and societal responsibility to support through taxation and stuff like that. So it's another mechanism, another means.

Okay, so um propel, what is it? What's it do? What's its purpose? What's behind it? What's behind it? I I think just to give you a little bit of a history, Propel was partially an outcome of me working as a funder and finding, you know, I finding out I started out providing these very simple grants to different organizations that were doing having far-reaching effect.

And I realized that there's a tremendous power to this, that you can you can sometimes support an organization like Wings, you know, as I had in a time during the COVID-19 crisis. And I was able to help them hire one additional person that enabled them to to secure a grant for something over a million dollars from the United um from the European Union, which was the largest in their history. And I had continuously experiences where I could work with Oregon. Now Wings, let me back up a second.

is an organization that that is positioning itself to work with governments around the world that have billions and billions of dollars to spend every year, but could use help with partners to be able to make that money go a lot further. So I got involved in a lot of organizations that were really Helping to move things a lot further. And this was before I started Propel Philanthropy. And then when I started it, it was actually a group of us.

That did it. In fact, I didn't even come up with the name. I voted against the name Propel Philanthropy, but we as a group became propel philanthropy. We we were a group of what I call social impact infrastructure organizations, organizations working directly to improve the so social sector.

And we stuck together and we were now about sixty in our in our mailing list. And what we basically do, as I mentioned earlier, is we spotlight this approach to supporting cross-cutting solutions that that can do more in some ways than than you can do just by focusing on a singular issue. And we have um since then done quite a lot of different things. Our our major

focus, I think, in the last years, last summer, we worked with Alliance magazine. We put out a pen part series on leaders of social impact infrastructure organizations. And we really got a deep dive into the work that they're doing and what it's like to the challenges they face, the aspirations they have, the the um things they have accomplished. And really to understand what's inside their world and really understand what this world is about. And we got about 100,000 views from that.

And now we're really working on a collaborative media campaign to with now our next direction will be to work with funders and find out why funders support some of these organizations. So we're really trying to increase awareness and in essence our our mission is to increase support and appreciation. for what social impact infrastructure organizations do, or what the power of cross-cutting solutions can achieve.

So Propel is not a funder then. It's a organization of 60 plus organizations that work together who sub and they're all infrastructure support groups of different kinds. Would that be is that correct? Yeah, that is correct, although I am myself a fundamental. And I've been funding since, you know, I think 2014. So I do fund, but that is not what we do as an organization. We are really a spotlight to to show some of the very tremendous

things that some of these organizations achieved. And I'll just give you start you just with just one that was in one of the earliest ones in nineteen fifty six. That was foundation center. Foundation center uh Um, we cannot imagine where the world would be today without an organization like that. I remember in the 1980s, my mother had a nonprofit.

And the book that she used to to get all of her grants to support this nonprofit was called the Foundation Directory. And not only did she use that, but she's probably I was be fair to say almost all of the nonprofits at the time across the United States were looking at this one book so that they could get their grants. And a lot of the funders across the United States were using that same book to find nonprofits.

And that's just one example of a social impact infrastructure organization, a cross-cutting solution that unlocked an un Estimable amount of money to help them move the sector. So, so we really spotlight some of these organizations. So people can really see that if I were to consider investing in some of this kind of work, what could I actually achieve? And I believe that the accomplishments are tremendous. Okay, so propel then is uh an association of associations uh in the broadest sense.

And um you're uh uh y and you work together uh to uh let funders and others know um that um uh infrastructure support group uh not only need funding but they have a major impact. And so the Alliance magazine stuff was all around trying to impress funders with the kinds of leadership and things that are going on within that sector.

Um it's not a fair summary. And then you mentioned you mentioned earlier that you were also a funder. Um but uh so Propel does not fund. Uh so the funding you do on your own then, and you do with other people as well.

You know, in a sense, yes, I have. One of the one of the things that a funder can do when they do this kind of work is they can join a gripping circle or work with other people. There's a couple of mechanisms. One is you is is a giving circle where you come together And you find out which of the organizations you really want to fund and how can you do it in a way where you can see direct impact.

you know, where you gave the money and there was a goal and you achieved the goal and you can measure it. And that is still doable, even though measuring is difficult in my field. And another mechanism that that that I've used is I've told organizations, you know, I can put up maybe 50% of this, but you have to find somebody else. put put up that. So there's matching funds and a third mechanism is is is meeting a uh a challenge so that sometimes you don't have to do it alone.

Okay, so what have been uh some of the lessons learned um uh in your journey uh uh uh towards and in Propel and in your personal uh philanthropy? Oh, there's probably been oh gosh, there's probably been many jer many lessons. But one of the things we still have ten ten or fifteen minutes, so Okay, I can share. I think the I think the the biggest lesson that I've I learned or one of the biggest ones.

is that you really have to name the problem and you have to talk about in a way that that that funders can understand it's this is something that that what I'm doing is something that's Not easily understood because mostly what we do is we fund specific causes rather than cross cutting solutions. So for example, let's just assume there's a there's a funder who wants to build the the education system throughout New York City. And I come to him and say, you know what?

I have an opportunity in Nigeria that has a hundred million people or whatever the number is. And we can really dramatically increase uh giving across this country. And if I came to that person and I were to say to them, You know, and the if what I had to say was let's just say hypothetically was actually true, this was a great solution. The amount of money you'd have to put in was relatively small.

The risk level was really small and it was pretty much proven out. And the person had plenty of money to do it, they wouldn't do it. They wouldn't do it because their interest has nothing to do with how they can achieve the most impact across the board. Their interest isn't how can they do it in New York City with the schools. And this problem. What I've learned is you have to name it. Because when you name it.

What happens is the person on the other side may decide that yes, I really want to venture a little bit of my money in this direction and try out these cross-cutting solutions. Or in fact, no, I don't. I'd rather just fund It's the school system in New York City, but at least they have a conscious choice. They know what the, you know, but this is something that goes on unconsciously. People don't think about.

But now you can say yes, I'm willing to expand beyond what I do or no, I'm not. So that was one of the big lessons for me is learning to name name the problem as it is.

And a second thing that I've learned is that people are not ready necessarily to make big commitments. So one of the things I say say is if this is something you want to explore, start small. You know, I found that modest grants can have can drive big change. You can start with a small ground or you can set up what I say is just a small portfolio outside of what you ordinarily do that's really thinking about us as a family of social sh impact.

actors and how you can support this bigger ecosystem. My gosh, there's probably probably a hundred, but one of them, you have to really listen deeply to what people want. You really have to have You really have to be able to let people know what kind of impact they can achieve. And because a lot of what they do, when we talk about words like social impact infrastructure, it's boring.

But when you talk about something like, for example, I worked with TechSoup and I helped them raise eleven point five million dollars and that eleven point five million dollars helped them to work with hundreds of thousands of nonprofits of all kinds. across 236 countries and when and and when you put a fa face to it, which is also another lesson, and you say, you know, I'm not just doing social impact infrastructure, I'm helping children.

I'm helping children that are living in some of those egregious conditions. I'm helping homelessness. I'm helping the elderly. I'm helping the environment because of the organizations that TechSoup is dealing with. It crosses the entire spectrum. And when people can understand though that they can do things that help real people, help real environments. And that it's not just a um theoretical concept. It's building new approaches that amplify

that that convene people, that connect people, that create new opportunities for impact that affect real lives, that can make a difference. So how did you help raise the 11 million? We that was a really interesting situation. So this is this organization had spent three years trying to raise money and then they hit COVID nineteen somewhere in the process.

They had a dead they had a deadline for September of 2021 where they had to raise the full amount. I helped them by hiring just all I did was we hired an assistant to one of those. senior development people and throughout the summer went very slowly. And by the time they were like one day before, they were$400,000 short. And I said to myself, they're not going to make it.

But on the day that they had to make it, based on a security and exchange commission deadline, they made it. They crossed that finish line. And it showed me that that this really worked, that my giving that person that that amount of time enabled them to do the work they needed to do to raise that full amount of money. So a lot of the funding and work that you do is around catalytic funding. Yes, absolutely. I talk about catal uh you know, I we need champions of catalytics. Um change.

that that can that can move big am big amounts of money, big amounts of progress large amounts of progress. And sometimes it's it's exactly that. Or it's last mile. it could fit in the category of last mile funding, which I really encourage people to think very carefully about. Because I mean just this is a hypothetical, but I'm just gonna throw it out. It's an it's a good example. You know, you you you have a uh a big foundation spends ten million dollars to build this.

state of the art cardiac wing in a hospital. And then the hospital finds out that although they have the wing, a lot of people can't access it because they have limited parking. So somebody comes along and says, gee, you know what if I were to spend twenty thousand dollars to help expand their parking.

so that many more people could use the wing as somebody else spent ten million dollars building. That's an example of last mile funding where you take the hard work that other people are doing and you do that one simple thing that's missing. to enable real progress to happen. So it doesn't take a lot of money then to uh uh to achieve catalytic ends. No, it sometimes

You know, this there's no hard, fast rule. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't, but there are definitely there are circumstances where relatively small, modest grants can have huge impact. And that was just an example. I did a grant to Um, Sam Vagar, the executive director for the Millennium Campus Network, that was$17,000. Sam works is interfaces with hundreds of universities around the globe, providing a sustainable development. goal um curriculum for students.

And this grant freed up a lot of his time. He said that he had an 140% increase. in graduation. They have graduated over ten thousand students now. that have that have worked all and many of them take careers in social impact. And this this pr program has been incredibly effective. And the cost of the grant that year was 17,000. The next year was about the same amount, the same year following was about the same amount, just to hire that one assistant has really moved his program forward.

There's a there's a trend now, uh not a fast-moving trend, but a beginning trend around uh organizations or funders giving unrestricted funds. Um, is that something you support and um and do or is your stuff more focused? So let me go back up by saying so propel philanthropy is a spotlight for a lot of organizations. So for example

If an organization was working on that, in fact, we work with the Center for Effective Philanthropy. That's is a is a is a good example. They had come up with a um Really, a groundbreaking report on showing that the Mackenzie Scott funding two years later has had a very remarkably positive impact. on on on social impact infrastructure organizations and other organizations.

So last year we are at the beginning of this year, we got that report disseminated. So a lot of more people, we had about thirty-five people share that report on LinkedIn. So in that instance, we're really just spotlighting something. That that could be very effective, that other people can read to understand the power of unrestricted funding. But we don't we're

somewhat cause agnostic and we really just support the organizations in our network. In this case it was supporting s the Center for Effective Philanthropy, which got out that report. So okay, so propel uh philanthropy basically is a Its focus is on s uh involving infrastructure support groups and uh supporting them um uh around a key a number of key issues, including funding and stuff. Um why is it so difficult? or infrastructure support groups to get funding compared to other societal issues.

That's such a such a great question and I'm so glad you asked. Let's start with the Philanthropy Support Organization. One of the big challenges they face is that they are, they have a transactional relationship with people. So here you are basically people are paying a membership fee so you can provide them with support.

It becomes a conflict of interest and a almost a moving away from what your job is to ask for funding for what you need. You may have the most powerful Catalytic opportunity in the world to be able to bring about change, but it's very difficult to ask your funders for money. A second challenge is what I r alluded to a moment ago, which is that person in New York City. Oh, I'll use Need Global as an example, because I was, you know, I was thinking recently, Karen and Tsara from Need Global.

What she does, what she her vision is, is setting up nodes around the country so that so that people who want to engage in international development have a place to go to ask questions to get support. But if you're a Need Global member, chances are you're thinking about how can I drill those Wills wells in the Niger or how can I You know, how can I build the school system in Senegal?

You know, you're not you're not thinking about how can I improve the whole field. You're not thinking about how can we improve the field of international development. And this problem applies across the board. Funders are s are almost completely focused on one thing they want to do. They're not focused generally on how can we improve the fields, how can we improve best practices, how can we build regenerative resources like global giving or volunteerism.

And because of that, these organizations have a lot of difficulty. Raising money. And a second challenge that they have is measuring impact. And one of the ways that I've gotten around that. is by focusing on situations where there really can be a direct result. Like for example, I mean you go back to the Sam Vagar situation. I gave Sam a$17,000 grant. He hired

an assistant they raised, you know, increased graduation rate by 140%. I look specifically for opportunities to be catalytic on a specific cause. I just don't give out money generally.

And sh and kind of hope that it will land and and and bring about, you know, the kind of results that we're looking for. So we're just about there. Um All this stuff is really difficult to do and uh what you're doing is uh very impactful. I mean to get the Alliance magazine to do all those articles, to act as a catalyst, to get um the 60 plus organizations together to talk about

uh key issues and mutual solutions and stuff is already good. Um but the other side of it is it fun for Are you having fun? I would say I am having fun sometimes. Um it's it's because truthfully this is really hard work. I have, you know, we're fine what what I'm finding is I will have talked to funders. And I will think they understand. And then, you know, you have a couple more conversations and one day they come up to me and go,

Hey, you know what? I think I'm finally figuring out what you're talking about. So it's you know the challenge of of making sure that I communicate the message. The challenge of talking to a lot of people so that one out of many people will say, you know what, I really want to try something different. I would like to be able to

to to go beyond what I do as my normal thing and and be able to to do something where I can have cross cutting solutions is a challenge. But at the same time I love talking to people. I love the idea of building something that wasn't there before.

We've raised a dialogue on a topic that wasn't being discussed. We're going to be doing another series coming out where we're going to be asking funders why they support this sort this stuff. And I'm going to be trying to show some of the tremendous impact that some of these funders have had and by supporting organizations like like um Candid like Foundation Center, like Charity Navigator, like Giving Tuesday, like Volunteer Match.

um, like TechSoup and be able to the idea of being able to show that some of this work has had immense impact and has really been transformative. You know, that's exciting. Oh good. Lanthroe Impact is a member of Propel. We're we're heavily involved and strongly supportive because um running an infrastructure support organization, we feel it every day how difficult it is.

to um raise funds and to achieve what we have to achieve. So uh it's really good to be part of Propel and and uh thank you for your support around that. So we have only a minute or two left.

So I'm going to ask you a question. And are there any questions that you think I should have asked? And could you ask that question? Gosh, that's the questions that I think you should have asked. Um I think that basically What do funders really need to do to take steps forward is is is a really important question. And the answer that I've come up with is there's really just a couple of things. One is, you know, obviously I'm presenting a

a situation that's different from what you're they're they're accustomed to hearing about. And they have to say, well, is this something that I'd even want to consider exploring? Not explore, consider exploring. And then if they are, then they have to ask themselves, would I think about putting together a separate portfolio? No matter how small it is starting out.

To try out some of these things and to see whether, you know, go beyond what I call being an opportunity center funder, where you're where this is outside of everything else I do. This is just looking for an opportunity to be. c catalytic and take an organization that's reaching really far and give them that one or two things that they need that could really make that big difference, whether it's building a new data upgrade in their technology, whether it's

hiring a development person or what or a volunteer coordinator. And the last thing I would say that they can do if you are a funder is to reach out to me because we do have, I have started a funder to funder group. to really talk about this other way of being able to achieve impact. Great. Uh Peter, this has been brilliant. Thank you very much. It's been quite inspiring and uh thank you for all of your