How can we make the biggest impact?

I’m skeptical. I don’t think business is the solution to everything. I don’t think providing jobs is the one, single, best solution to help people climb out of poverty. So why do I keep coming back to one idea for a new company?

It nags me, tugging at my mind and shortening my breath as I dare to wonder--what if? On long airplane flights, I puzzle through growth models. I think about first hires while I’m driving and then scold myself to pay attention to the road. I dare to google domain registries during my son’s taekwondo class. I awkwardly laugh when I casually mention it to friends--”It’s totally crazy,” I say and shake my head. Secretly I’m terrified that it really is the right answer, and I’m just too chicken to pull it off.

Then I tell myself, “Now’s not the right time. I have kids. They’re young. I can’t go trotting off to the other side of the world. What will my husband think of me?”

But it is the right time. It is always the right time to make the world better.

Let me take a moment and explain how I arrived at this terrible precipice, also known by my father as “time to shit or get off the pot.”

I’ve said that Tom and I talk about what we should do all the time. Where should we give to charity? How much? Using what financial structure? To this end, I’ve been reading. Everything I can get my hands on that has to do with understanding global poverty and how to reduce it. The literature vacillates between focusing on poverty reduction for the benefit for and future sustainability of the global population and focusing on poverty alleviation from a human rights perspective, wherein we need to work as a global community to reduce the misery experienced by individuals and spread opportunities for health, wealth, education, and peace wider.

In addition to reading, I've been reaching out to some of the smartest folks I know around the globe and asking them for advice. Where do they think there should be investment? Where is it possible to make sustainable change? (Please email me if you're reading this and you have big ideas, and we haven't already connected.)

I’m inclined toward the line of thinking that the Gates Foundation followed: Pick one thing and do it well. I also agree with people, like Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, who encourage philanthropists to pick a topic they’re passionate about and educate themselves. I know there is a growing trend toward effective altruism, but I just can’t sustain passion for bed nets, even though I understand it to be a very important, worthy cause. I learned while running Codestarter that even if you believe in the mission 100%, if you’re not 200% living and breathing the meaning behind it, personally connected to it, you’ll never feel quite right inside. Laptops for kids was a wonderful program, but I always had the nagging feeling like I wasn’t the exact, right person to be running the company. I’m searching for that 200% passion project now.

Finding your passion

I’ve worked for a long time in the field of education, especially focused on keeping girls in school in the developing world. I’ve always clutched at two ends of the education question. First, what happens to the students after their time in school ends? True, there is great value in becoming literate and numerate, and educated girls can learn about and stand up for their human and political rights more easily. Nonetheless, if you keep educating more and more people without also creating additional jobs, then you’re just augmenting competition for the few jobs that are available.

Thinking this way, I ran down the rabbit hole of job creation. We need to invest in job training, or entrepreneurship programs, I cried. I’m still very supportive of international labor rights movements, and I agree that we need to build a system that supports our economy post-neoliberalism. I've also been investigating locally-based projects that employ the under- and unemployed masses to become ethnographers and collectors of data to be used for political change. Both fields--job creation and influencing public policy and politics feel overwhelming, but I’m learning bit by bit about the various ways to go about these enormously thorny projects.

In my work with education-focused nonprofits, I’ve seen plenty of young girls not even have the chance to decide whether or not to finish their schooling or look toward the job market because they ended up pregnant and dropped out. Not to mention the large percentage of children whose lives are largely decided before the age of five due to malnutrition, terrible living conditions, and a whole host of other unfortunate circumstances.

To this end, I briefly dove down the research rabbit hole of investing in early-childhood disease prevention and childcare support. But then I came up for air and realized that I would end up back to the job problem again. Plus, all of these measures seemed incredibly difficult to measure for true impact.

Next, I started worrying about the environment. It won’t matter how many great jobs we provide if we fuck up the planet and have nowhere to live. Perhaps Tom and I should focus intensely on investing in the development of nuclear power, I thought, and then I scrambled to learn what the field of investment in alternate energy would be.

Somewhere in all of our date night chats over beers, there was a discussion about clean water, and that led to a talk about investing in municipal and state infrastructure. If roads are shit, then how can anything be accomplished, we worried. Working with state governments, in countries that flip-flop politics and oust leaders and entire programs seemed awful though. (I recognize the irony of writing this on the Eve of the Clinton/Trump election.) Also, this type of financial investment requires such vast amounts of capital, that it is truly best left to the budgets of large donor countries, like the US.

Instead, I want to find a piece of the global puzzle that I can really understand, take on, and impact will full force.

A piece of the poverty puzzle

For awhile I was all abuzz about Nick Kristoff’s mention of Shining Hope for Communities in Kenya. They’re managing to do it all. It’s a wonder! I reasoned that what is needed for the world is someone to bring nonprofits together. Instead of myriad causes vying for limited funding and having to parade like peacocks showing off faulty impact evaluations, we should unite around local communities. We could move one by one, bringing together someone to build schools, someone to get clean water, someone to provide health care, someone to do job training, all centered around a local leader who was committed to seeing it through and making it sustainable. It’s tremendously hard to scale though.

I still think that’s a pretty good idea, but ultimately I just got more interested in one specific field that I now hope will be the elusive, magic bullet. In sum, I decided that I needed to focus on the earliest possible intervention that could be made in a person’s life to shift him or her toward a better future. I wanted to find a cause where I could impact individuals and the population as a whole. I wanted to find something that would move the needle today and in the future. I wanted to find something that affected the human population, but also benefited Planet Earth, our home for the foreseeable future.

I decided that meant investing in birth control. Getting it in the hands of people who need it so that they can give birth only to babies they want and for whom they can care well. Women would have the power to choose if, when, and how many children they wanted. They would be able to invest more in those children. At a population level, this would lessen the strain on resources.

Tom provides my counterpoint--we need to increase technology to develop better resources, he argues. We already have enough resources, I explain; they’re just divided unequally. Malthus was wrong. But the population IS growing exponentially. And what are the chances that really wealthy people are going to give up their luxuries? And if the global population keeps growing, pollution will destroy the planet, regardless of how much more food and clean water and medicine we are able to engineer into production. I’m pretty sure that people aren’t going to stop eating meat, for example. At least not until there is an acceptable meat substitute. So let’s invest in that!

Would you rather give up eating hamburgers or use a condom every time?

I don’t know, I said. I think if you asked people, “Would you rather give up hamburgers or use a condom?” I’m pretty sure people really, really love hamburgers. (That’s the folklorist in me defending the sanctity of foodways.) Then again, if you fly a lot, you’ve totally erased any positive environmental impact you’re trying to make by using public transportation or being vegetarian, so please stop traveling so much.

So now it feels like we can’t do anything anymore! :-(

But we can!

We should work from both directions, I reasoned. Let’s have fewer humans AND more research and development of better ways to live. But let’s focus on the low hanging fruit first--and that’s preventable, unwanted pregnancies.

Here’s my hypothesis: “Investment in global access for every woman to birth control as a key way to reduce global poverty.” In order to give myself the proper time and space to research, I have begun building out a project with the good and brilliant folks at the Bixby Center for Population, Health, and Sustainability at Berkeley. My goal is to determine 1) whether investment in family planning (apparently this is the PC term of the moment) is a good move for poverty alleviation, 2) what the proven programs for success are, and 3) what the gaps in funding are currently. As we gather information, we’ll begin to discern where to invest.

Finally, I want to return to that crazy idea that I referenced at the start of this blog post. The one that I’m embarrassed even to write down on paper now. I’m dubious, but here goes. Years ago, while working in Costa Rica, I found myself in a bedroom at the back of one woman’s house. She’d brought me inside, hurriedly shut the door, and I found myself staring at the faces of her female family members. “Show them!” she demanded. “What?” I asked, completely confused. “Show them that thing you use, you know, when you have your period.” She meant my rubber Keeper. For twenty minutes, women asked me questions about my contraption, how it worked, how it felt, and where they could get one. Later, a friend I was working with on my dissertation said to me, “You should really build a company with those things. Like tupperware, for periods.” That idea has stuck with me.

For a year or so now, I’ve been toying with the idea of an Avon-esque distribution system for birth control. Maybe menstrual products too. When I mention it to people, I joke and say I’m kidding. That I’m really at Berkeley in order to prove myself wrong, to find that the data shows the community health workers fail and a market-based system could never work. I don’t want to be the girl who builds a multilevel marketing company. There’s a long story there, that I’ll share one day.