Adam Torres and John Schellhase discuss philanthropy.
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Show Notes:
What role is philanthropy supposed to play when it comes to such a massive issue as climate change, which requires trillions annually to address? In this episode, Adam Torres interviews John Schellhase, Director, Environmental & Social Impact Philanthropy at Milken Institute, explore the Milken Institute and philanthropy.
About John Schellhase
John Schellhase is a director on the Environmental and Social Innovation team at Milken Institute Strategic Philanthropy, where his work focuses on social impact philanthropy. As part of his work, Schellhase contributes to and manages projects related to strengthening corporate philanthropy and operating innovation competitions to advance the Sustainable Development Goals. Prior to his current role, he led projects related to capital market development in emerging and frontier market countries as part of the Milken Institute’s financial markets work. He has also worked as an international development consultant whose clients included the World Bank, the government of Rwanda’s Capital Markets Authority, and Financial Sector Deepening Africa. He holds a Master of Science in global affairs from New York University, where he focused his coursework on issues in international economic development with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa.
About Milken Institute
The Milken Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank focused on accelerating measurable progress on the path to a meaningful life. With a focus on financial, physical, mental, and environmental health, they bring together the best ideas and resourcing to develop blueprints for tackling some of their most critical global issues.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today we have a very special episode. We’re bringing John Shalais on the line and he is with the Milken Institute.
He is the, director of environmental and social. Impact philanthropy. And today we’re going to be discussing a report that came out of study that came out by the Milken Institute called priorities for strategic climate and environmental philanthropy. So first thing first, John, welcome to the show.
Thanks Adam. It’s nice to be a guest. Alright, so we got a lot to talk about, so I of course want to get into new report that came out, but just to get us kicked off, maybe just a little bit of a primer for my long term listeners, they probably know I follow the Milken Institute pretty closely, including, I already have it, John, on my schedule in May, the global conference in Beverly Hills, I already know I got Chad sent me the email.
I’m like, I’m coming, Chad. We got some interviews to do. And I’ve had the privilege of interviewing many from the Institute, including Emily and a whole lot of others. So just to get us kicked off again for the newer listeners that aren’t quite as aware, maybe give a little bit of an overview of Milken Institute in general and the work being done there.
Yeah, sure. So the Milken Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank. Our headquarters is in Santa Monica, California. And we also have a large office in Washington, D. C. as well as teams in London and Singapore. We are driven by a mission of building prosperous societies where individuals can lead meaningful lives.
And so for us, that means working on issues related to access to capital working on improving health outcomes, and also thinking about the strategic deployment of philanthropic capital, which is what my team does. Amazing. And in terms of your team, let’s go a little bit further there. As Director of Environmental and Social Impact Philanthropy, like, talk a little bit more about what your team does.
Yeah, so the Strategic Philanthropy team of the Milken Institute does three main things. One, we do landscaping research that informs philanthropic giving. Two, we sometimes put that research into practice by partnering with an organization to implement a project. And I can give some examples of that perhaps in a moment.
And then three, we also convene philanthropists to build community so that people can share lessons learned, mistakes made strategic and tactical insights, and to improve their, philanthropy by having a community of people that can turn to. Mm. Amazing. So as we kind of get into this report, so priorities for strategic climate and environmental philanthropy, I’m always curious because there’s so many different things that you can, create.
And I mean, a lot of intelligent people, obviously, that are working on this. How did you come up with this topic? what was the seed of this idea to create this report? Yeah. So as part of that community building where we bring philanthropists together to, engage on the issues that they care about.
A lot of the people in our network were saying they’d like to do more in climate and environmental philanthropy. That oftentimes didn’t know how to get started or didn’t know where the areas of greatest need were. And so we decided to, to help uh, inform that space. There are others who have put reports out that are similar, but we thought we could had a kind of unique angle coming from the Milken Institute where we see the intersections of business and government, the health side as well, and, also the finance side.
In terms of addressing issues. And so we spent number of months doing about 50 stakeholders, you know key expert in interviews to inform the report. we synthesize all the input here. And our main goals were to, one, give best practices for those who are either starting their giving journey within climate and environmental philanthropy, or those who wanted to expand it.
And then to identify some key issue areas where. Basically your dollar could be more than a dollar where the return on philanthropic impact investment was, was potentially quite high. Mm. Now when you go into creating a report and you’re, you’re kind of digging and as you mentioned, you have the 50 or so stakeholders , that you’re interviewing to get the, content for it.
I’m curious on the other end of this, did anything kind of surprise you on that journey or on the way? I think one of the things that’s the right word, by the way, it might not be surprised, but anything that was just, you know, Whoa, I wasn’t expecting that. Oftentimes if you’re, if you’re talking to 50 people, you might get 50 totally different answers.
Yeah. Yeah. The amount of consensus was on some of the key, recommendations was fairly surprising for myself and my co author on this. Dr. Sarah Al Shafi, who works on our team. We, found that there was no leading the witness, but people did come to say that there was similar issues came up in a lot of our conversations.
And so the, synthesis process, which can be kind of the challenge as a, writer and a researcher, actually somewhat more straightforward than I anticipated going into the project. amazing, amazing. I’m always curious about that. You’re like, did I expect that? No, wait, hold on. Speaking high level here, what role, I mean, just in general, is philanthropy, just to kind of get deeper into the report, what role is philanthropy supposed to play when it comes to like a massive issue?
And when you think about climate change, trillions of dollars to address, right? what role is philanthropy supposed to play? Yeah. So that’s a key question that we were trying to, tease out here. And let me just give some numbers to inform So the estimates vary, but, the standard number is that about 5 trillion and investment is needed annually to address Both the mitigation and adaptation side of responding to climate change on a global level. Total global philanthropy is 885 billion, so much, much less than that 5 trillion number. And within that less than 2 percent estimates vary, but it’s anywhere between 9 billion and 16 billion in philanthropic giving go to climate mitigation.
These data are from the Climate Works Foundation. And then even less goes to climate adaptation giving. So the role of philanthropy is not to solve these issues. They will need government and private sector engagement to address them. The role of philanthropy in my mind because philanthropy has different incentive structures than government or market players, philanthropy has some more dexterity.
It can be more nimble. It can also take more risks and play the long game in ways that other players can’t. And what this means is philanthropy can Do I think of it as doing 2 main things when it comes to climate environmental issues. 1 is catalyze. Innovations are pilot ideas that other people aren’t taking a risk on that could then be scaled by the public or private sectors.
And the other thing that philanthropy can do is to protect and preserve those things that are being ignored whether that’s a species or habitat and keep those things steward those, those resources and those Global assets while other people are working on, while the gears are grinding forward and other Yeah.
Institutions to solve these issues. and thank you for that. And speaking a little, getting a little bit deeper into the report itself, and just for everybody listening just to preface this part of the discussion, we’ll definitely be putting a link in the show notes so you can actually get the full report.
We’re not gonna go into the full report. there were many recommendations that were given, I think about 10, that were given and broken. down and we’ll get into a couple of them and we’re going to get a little bit into how the organization of the report was, but I definitely want everybody to go it’s on the Milken Institute website , but we’ll have the link in the show notes so that you can download the report and, correct me if I’m wrong, John, I mean, it’s completely free to just download.
No big deal, right? I think it was right. Publicly available resource, you know, as, as part of , our mission as a nonprofit, we, put all our work out publicly. Wonderful. So broadly speaking, I understand there were some key areas that the that the report was broken down into, whether it’s, you mentioned deforestation maybe oceans.
Give us a little bit of feel for how the report’s broken down. Definitely. So the report has two Major sections 1 is kind of best practices. If you’re if you’re just getting into climate philanthropy, or if you want to expand your environmental and climate giving there’s 10 recommendations for that.
And then there’s 4 giving areas. We identify. That you know, this is not us you know, John, coming up with these ideas. This is our, this, those 50 people, which plus a consensus view of, what they emphasize to us. These are, either experts or key players in the climate philanthropy ecosystem or an impact investing and those issue areas were you mentioned deforestation as one of our interviewees told us deforestation is the number one environmental issue on the planet.
I’m going to read his quote, stopping deforestation is the best emergency break. We can use. That was John fully from project drawdown. Told us that and that’s a key area that we have emphasized. The others are food systems, which includes anything from food manufacturing to food waste altogether contributes about a third of global greenhouse gas emissions oceans plastics and oceans does get a lot of attention, but things that are kind of.
under focused on within the oceans category or making fisheries more sustainable addressing cargo ship emissions and then restoring or preserving coastal habitats as well. And then the final category here is communication and public engagement and outreach without building consensus about these issues where you’re never going to have the.
public sector government engagement that’s really required to scale some of the solutions that philanthropy might be able to, identify, but just doesn’t have the resources to scale on its own. Amazing. And so those are the four broad giving areas. And then we won’t go into all 10 recommendations, but maybe just give one or two just to give a, flavor for of the meat of the report.
Yeah. So our call for more philanthropy in this space. It’s not just a call for throwing more money at the problem. We really do believe in this idea of strategic philanthropy, having a deliberate, data driven thoughtful approach to how you give. And so our recommendations here are to help kind of inform that kind of giving.
and they kind of fall into three main categories. One is setting a strategy. Which is what, you know, half of those 10 recommendations are about two is operating an ecosystem and three is engaging stakeholders. And maybe I can just give one example from each of those three and we can dive into any beyond that.
If you like, or if we have time, on the first of setting a strategy one thing that you know, kind of runs counter to a lot of the other reports that are out here in the space that, but that came out as, part of our process is don’t try to check too many boxes.
Climate philanthropy advice about being intersectional and trying to be an ally and on multiple issues with your climate giving and actually our recommendation is that while that things are interrelated and that there are energies across certain issues. It is actually better to try to stay focused in and target your resources towards specific key outcomes instead of trying to be ally to every issue.
So maybe that’s just, one thing that is a little unique to our report compared to others that are out there. Within the operating an ecosystem, I’ll emphasize our recommendation number six, which is combined and amplify Current philanthropic efforts, whenever possible, there is an impulse within philanthropy to launch your own initiative and there’s, there’s something about that and also you get more control and things like that, but oftentimes it means that your, that resources are scattered.
And so by combining efforts there’s an opportunity to take on bigger challenges to get it for the longterm and to have greater impact. And I would say, all of our report, this report was written before the new administration came in. But I’d stand by everything that’s in it still, even with the current changes.
This one I think takes on more significance a little bit in the new environment because so much federal funding has been pulled back from these issues. That certainly those who are active in a lot of these spaces are looking for new partners, new resources. And and so it definitely an opportunity for philanthropists to amplify what’s already going on especially in this environment.
On. Engaging stakeholders. I will say there’s a couple of interesting ones here. Maybe I’ll do two on this one. Come on, give me the good matters, man. I want it. The first would be don’t assume ask. Um, so, One of the tropes, I guess, and also one of the common pitfalls, maybe is a better word for is that it seeks to improve the lives of people without really engaging with those people.
And so oftentimes philanthropists are going out trying to solve a problem. Without taking the time to really engage with the communities. They’re already well, whose lives are impacted by that problem. And so a key recommendation is to engage with those potential partners, think about them as co creators of solutions and, and try to figure out if there are already things happening on the ground.
Go back to that prior point that the philanthropy can amplify. And then our last recommendation on this, this list of 10 is to balance perspectives and idea here is that a lot of people in climate, environmental activism or philanthropy oftentimes are really talking to themselves, hyping themselves up.
And there’s, it can be great value and having a sense of community there, but The opportunity for philanthropic impact is maybe exhausted. If you’re just talking to the same people all the time. And so our recommendation is to look for opportunities to engage with people who might be climate skeptics on the current kind of known operators in the space.
The usual suspects. And actually by engaging with people who might care more about workforce development or jobs sometimes those partnerships and relationships can have a greater return on investment than just staying with preaching to the choir. So, John, last question here today, and I’ll preface it with this other than reading this report, because I want everybody to read the report, I want everybody to download it, especially philanthropists that are considering giving, but you’ve been in this space for a long time, so you have a different vantage point.
So for, again, other than this report, for philanthropists who want to start, giving in our, climate change, either curious or just getting into that space, if you will what kind of things would you tell them to do? What should they research? What should they be looking at? How should they be thinking?
Well, there are a number of people who are in this space and who have lessons learned and, insights to share. The report has a list of institutions we spoke to that might be a good place to start for people who are just trying to figure out the ecosystem.
And then I would also say reach out to us at the Milken Institute. We’re happy. We’d love to help inform a giving strategy. That’s a key part of what we do. And we care about these issues and, are definitely building out an advisory practice at the Institute to, inform more giving in this space.
Amazing. And John, if people do want to follow up and start and continue that conversation how do they do that? Well, they can reach out to me. My name is John Schellhas, the email is J S C H E L L H A S E. And you can also Google priorities for strategic climate and environmental philanthropy to find the report.
And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put some links to the report in the show notes. So you can just click on it and head right on over so we won’t make you search too far for that one. Absolutely. , and on the website, of course, it’ll be in the blog post. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration that can help you along the way on your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And John, again, thank you so much for all you’re doing. Thank you for coming on the show.
Thanks, Adam. I really appreciate it.
