Using Data to Save Lives: Inside a Smarter Approach to Philanthropy
In a time of crisis for global health, The Life You Can Save and Founders Pledge have joined forces to launch the Rapid Response Fund, addressing urgent funding gaps left by sweeping USAID cuts.
On a recent Business of Giving episode, host Denver Frederick sat down with Jessica LaMesa, Co-CEO of The Life You Can Save, and David Goldberg, Co-Founder and CEO of Founders Pledge, to explore this impactful collaboration.
Jessica shared how The Life You Can Save, inspired by Peter Singer’s philosophy, has directed over $120 million to high-impact charities since 2013, focusing on alleviating extreme poverty. David highlighted Founders Pledge’s work rallying nearly 2,000 entrepreneurs to pledge $11 billion, using data to guide giving.
Together, their fund has raised over $3 million and granted $1.3 million, supporting programs like GOAL 3’s vital sign monitors in Malawi, the Iodine Global Network’s nutrition initiatives, and Sanku’s fortified flour expansion in Ethiopia.
The discussion revealed the challenges of donor hesitation and the ripple effects of slashed budgets, with nonprofits facing severe cutbacks. Yet, Jessica and David emphasized the power of evidence-based, collective philanthropy to deliver swift, life-saving aid. This partnership not only fills immediate needs but also sets a model for future giving.
Transcript
Denver: Welcome to The Business of Giving, Jessica and David.
David: Thanks for having us.
Jessica: Thank you so much.
Denver: Yeah. Let’s begin by having each of you tell listeners a little bit about your organization. I’m going to start with you, David. Founders Pledge, boy, you have rallied nearly 2,000 entrepreneurs to pledge $10 billion for impactful causes.
What’s the driving force behind the organization, and how have you inspired that level of commitment?
David: Yeah. Thanks for the question. Thanks for having me. So Founders Pledge starts from a really simple idea that the people who do the best in society should also be the ones who support it in the most substantive way with that success.
I found that entrepreneurs and founders are building the engines that power the economy. And as they do so, they sometimes amass great fortunes. And when they do, they are privileged enough to use those fortunes to make the world a better place.
I sold a business some years ago now, and I found that when I wanted to give back some of that success, because I got extremely lucky, there wasn’t really much support for someone like me. I didn’t make a billion dollars.
And there’s lots of organizations that support people who give in the billions, but very few that actually, back when I started 11 years ago, were supporting people below that level.
So the basic idea is to help the people who have these nice outcomes use data to make better decisions about how to allocate resources to make the world a better place as they see fit.
So today we have about 2,050 members, just shy of $11 billion committed, and we’ve helped our members to donate one and a half billion dollars. So the idea that when founders have these outcomes should give back, is actually materializing in a meaningful way.
Denver: Is there an underlying philosophy to your approach that you think has attracted so many of these entrepreneurs and these successful people?
David: Yeah. I think a big part of our success is that we take a really objective and rational approach to evaluating and understanding what are the best giving opportunities in the world, and presenting that information in a really clear and first principles driven way so that when someone joins Founders Pledge, they know they’re going to get objective, impact-first advice about how they should think about their giving.
And we’ve built a nice sort of engine around the community where you can’t go to our website and sign up. You have to be referred by someone who’s already a member. So we have this nice sort of flywheel where the people who join are also our biggest advocates.
They introduce us to their friends and colleagues and network.
So we really grow really organically and while maintaining the values that we think are most important for the people of this sort.
Denver: Very cool. No agenda. Remain neutral. Let the facts speak. That’s exactly the way it is.
David: Exactly.
Denver: And yeah, The Life You Can Save has driven, I don’t know, a hundred million dollars… more than that probably, to high impact charity since, I think it was 2013. And that was inspired by Peter Singer, who was a former guest on the program a number of years ago.
What’s at the heart of your mission, and how are you working to expand the reach of effective altruism, or effective giving?
Jessica: Well, the heart of our mission is really just to inspire people to give, to help the most in need. We’re an organization that does research to find the most impactful ways to give, to lift people out of extreme poverty.
So we’re focused on the absolute most in need, and we then go out and fundraise and market on behalf of those organizations or those nonprofits delivering those interventions to our target beneficiaries.
And so, yes, in about 11 years of existence, we’ve moved over a hundred million. So approaching $120 million now. And yeah, we’re founded based on Peter Singer’s philosophy and the book, The Life You Can Save.
And it’s really about just helping people understand that giving to help the most in need actually benefits all of us. And in making the world a better place, it makes us better people.
Denver: So Jessica, the Rapid Response Fund, this is a major collaboration between your two organizations to tackle urgent funding gaps. How in the world did this come together?
Jessica: Yeah, so I think because of the situation, we were inspired to take action, and we believed that we weren’t the only ones who were seeking ways to take action and help save some of these incredibly impactful programs that exist within the recommendations that we both offer our donor bases.
And so doing it together is really important because coordination in a moment like this is really important in ensuring that the impact is broad and highly effective.
And so coming together and pooling our research resources and our knowledge bases in determining how to best fund, where to best fund, and really how to best message this and reach a broader audience was really important and has been incredibly impactful.
Denver: I can see how you guys are aligned, but what would you say are the complementary strengths each of you bring to the partnership?
Jessica: I think we both have research teams that are based on identifying the highest impact-giving opportunities… so looking at research and basing our funding decisions on evidence that they are really delivering the outcomes that we are seeking.
And so pooling that knowledge base really allows us to allocate funding and really provide the confidence to our donors that they’re having the impact that they are seeking.
Denver: Cool. So Jessica, what organizations has the fund been supporting, and how do you choose which ones to pick and where the money goes?
Jessica: Yeah. So right now we’re really focused on getting money out the door quickly. We want to try to save existing programs whenever possible.
We are tilting towards the most cost-effective giving opportunities, and we’d like to fund as many programs as possible to signal to our donors that all of these programs are worth saving and that they should also be funding alongside us. And of course, we’re trying to maintain flexibility.
So far, we’ve made four grants. So our first grant of $300k was to GOAL 3, the IMPALA project to save 150 vital sign monitors, which will prevent 450 to 750 deaths that may have occurred in pediatric wards in Malawi.
We’ve funded $50k to the Iodine Global Network to cover the needs of their suspended UNICEF program in Madagascar and some other activities. We have granted $100k to the International Rescue Committee, focused on their acute child malnutrition program, which is closing 5% of their $2 million funding gap, which provides life-saving treatment for 800 children.
And our most recent grant of $250k to Sanku is helping them save their expansion program into Ethiopia, which was primarily funded by USAID, enabling children in Ethiopia to receive fortified flours. So really focusing again on child malnutrition.
Denver: Four blue chippers. You know, David seeing the dramatic cuts, these federal funding cuts, how that can ripple through high impact programs, globally.
From your vantage point, what’s been the most striking effect of these shifts, and how are you adapting to keep these vital initiatives afloat? I mean, I know there’s money, but I also know there’s probably deeper thinking than that as well.
David: Yeah, I mean, it’s a really complex landscape at present because USAID was such a significant funder, and since they’ve essentially been slashed, we’ve seen really serious cutbacks across the organizations that are impacted.
We’re seeing some nonprofits having to lay off 40% of their workforce, and it really is preventing what has been sort of a cornerstone of US foreign policy, just sort of evaporating overnight.
And so, one of the theses of the fund is that we should be supporting the organizations that we’ve already identified as having a really high impact, rather than casting a super wide net and saying, What are all of the organizations that are affected?
We’re really focusing on just the existing charities that we’ve identified as being exceptional and sort of backfilling their funding needs so that their vital work can continue.
And we’ve seen as a result of these cuts, other really significant donors who have worked across different issue areas like climate change divert their funding out of the climate ecosystem and sort of double down on the global health and wellbeing work because it is so short term necessary for preventing real death, real suffering, and improving the quality of life of some of the poorest of the poor.
So, the effects are widespread. We’re not actually sure how deep the changes are going to go because it’s still extremely early days. I mean, it feels like a lifetime ago, but it’s been what, six weeks, seven weeks?
Denver: It’s hard to believe it’s been that short a period of time.
David: Yeah.
Denver: It seems that. And I guess the real question is that when systems like this unravel, like USAID, you really just can’t put them back together again like that. It’s sort of like people have gone home, people moved on, and you can’t stop something in midstream like that. So I don’t know if anybody’s doing any thinking along those lines or whether you guys are.
Right now, what you’re doing is you’re trying to fill that vital gap for the moment, and hopefully it will buy some time to have others sort it out. Would that be a fair assessment?
David: I think so.
Denver: Yeah.
Jessica: Yeah. And I also think we’ll have to adapt, like at the end of the year, we’ll have to think about and adapt our funding strategies based on the new landscape, right?
There’s so much we don’t know yet about the loss of infrastructure that USAID provided. So we’ll just have to continue to evaluate the ongoing knock-on effects.
Denver: You guys do great work in picking the most effective, cost-effective organizations. Let’s take a look at Founders Pledge for a minute. And David, you use the ITN framework to identify high impact opportunities. Explain to listeners what that is.
David: Yeah, so the ITN framework is one of several that we use. It primarily focused on our global health and wellbeing work. And the basic premise is that cause areas, interventions, and charities should sort of fall under a set of necessary conditions that suggest that they are sort of the most worthy of funding.
So, ITN stands for Importance, Tractability, Neglectedness. Importance is basically the size and scale of the issue. In Founder talk, this is the total addressable market. So we really want to focus on issue areas that have a really large population that’s affected by them.
Tractability is how well a thing works. Is the intervention, is the cause area susceptible to being affected in a positive way? So it has to be large enough in scale and size. It has to be something that we can affect in a meaningful way.
And then crucially, the final condition is: it should be neglected. So this sort of looks at how much resource is being deployed into this space at any point in time. And the cause areas that have the most resources being put into them are, on the face of it, going to be less neglected than those that have less resources put into them.
So all three of them are necessary conditions. And when we find an issue area that is both important, tractable and neglected, then it allows us to dig deeper and say, okay, this is worthy of investigation.
Let’s dig into the interventions that we think are going to actually be most cost-effective and move the needle the farthest for the least amount of money in a truly counterfactual and outcomes-driven way.
And this, basically, allows us to say: What does the landscape look like in the world? What are the other funders, development banks, institutional philanthropists, and foundations putting resources into?
And we don’t want to overfill a pot that already is like at the brim. So we want to try to find these cause areas that are big, that we can affect, and that are otherwise going without the necessary funds that they need to change.
Denver: Yeah. And you do it in a very orderly and systematic way. And David, you’ve likened philanthropy to investing, where data should drive decisions just the way it does with financial returns.
Tell us a little bit about that. And have there been any surprising lessons– when you’ve tried to transfer that thinking from financial markets to philanthropic markets– that has surprised you?
David: Yeah, that’s how we think about it. And deploying capital across any type of spectrum feels to me like an investment decision. So when you invest in the stock market, or in mutual funds, or in private companies, you’re looking to see a return on that investment that’s going to be, hopefully, several multiples of what you put into it.
And this is an extremely rational way to think about allocating money to create more money. But often, what happens in the philanthropic space is we sort of throw all of our common sense out the window and really act from our heart. And this makes sense, intuitively.
You’re like: I want to help people. I want to help people that seem like me, that I can relate to. But really, the heart shouldn’t really decide how we give. It should bring us to give, but the head should be the one that helps us to figure out what to give to.
And so when we think about investing philanthropically, the stakes are even larger because you’re not getting money back, you’re saving lives. We’re not saving lives. And so the investment decisions you make in a philanthropic sense are, I would suggest, even more important than the investment decisions you make from a personal wealth sense.
And the interesting or surprising thing that I’ve seen over the 11 years that I’ve been working on Founders Pledge, is that really sane, rational, sober-headed people who’ve built incredibly successful businesses… taking a sort of a data-centric and iterative lens to how they run those businesses, how they make decisions… move into the next spheres of their life– to being philanthropists–and suddenly forget about all of the sort of the mental models, the frameworks, the heuristics that allow them to achieve the success to begin with and take a really emotional approach.
And so often, we start by trying to reeducate people about how to think about philanthropy differently. And sometimes, you can lead a horse to water, right?
But you can’t force it to drink. And the surprising bit has been how really smart, rational, sober-minded people just can’t really wrap their head around that philanthropy should be an exercise in data.
Denver: Yeah.
David: But it really is.
Denver: Yeah. I’ve heard the same commentary from a lot of my colleagues about business people who are on nonprofit boards, and they walk into the boardroom and you say, Did they check their brains at the door? Or something like that. They don’t behave in the same way, for whatever reason, that they do with their businesses.
So, Jessica, do you see the Rapid Response Fund as the start of a broader movement? I’m talking about organizations teaming up to boost their effectiveness. And how might this collaboration that you two guys, your two organizations have forged, maybe pave the way for others to work together more impactfully?
Jessica: I mean, I definitely think that collective funding is becoming more and more common within the philanthropic ecosystem. You see large foundations partnering together to co-fund big opportunities.
So for us, we definitely see partnering as being very critical in giving going forward, like how we’re partnering with Founders Pledge to share information on the highest impact giving opportunities.
We’ve actually started to develop a really incredible network at The Life You Can Save of impact-minded private foundations, other intermediary organizations and academics to help inform our strategy.
So instead of spending time recreating the wheel or recreating research… really leveraging everything that exists out there to help inform donors and pool money into strategies that we know are highly effective and outcome based.
And so we hope that funds, for example, like the Rapid Response Fund or the Maximize Your Impact Fund at The Life You Can Save become a more common strategy for donors, because what you do is you allow a research team, who are experts in this space, to really allocate your capital on your behalf to the most impactful opportunities.
And not only does that benefit you as a donor by ensuring that you are having a major impact return, but it also benefits the beneficiaries, right? Because we can seek additionality where you might not; we might not have found it before, and we can save more lives, or we can educate more children, or we can help more people create businesses.
And so yeah, absolutely. I hope that collective funding continues to be one of the main trends and outcomes of the situation.
Denver: Yeah, I find it to be a brilliant idea in really responding to the crisis that we’re in. We have to do things a little bit differently.
So, Jessica, how’s the Rapid Response Fund doing? How much money have you raised to date, and what are your plans going forward in terms of raising more?
Jessica: Yeah. So we are approaching $ 3 million, which in a short amount of time we think is really great. We think that there’s still a lot of opportunity out there. We do think that maybe some donors were waiting to see what is happening and the situation. “Is aid coming back?” That was the big question. “Should I give now? What if aid comes back?”
What I would say is: There’s a real need right now. As you were saying before, it’s going to take a long time. Even if tomorrow, the situation changed and they said, “Okay, we’re bringing USAID completely back the way it was before,” that’s going to take a lot of time.
And there are real lives at stake at this moment. And so I would say the worst outcome, even if they turned AID back on tomorrow and you gave to the fund, would be that you funded something incredibly impactful that even before USAID was cut, had room for funding, could absorb more funding to expand and scale.
So there really is no bad outcome in funding the Rapid Response Fund. And the likelihood is that it’s going to be a very long time before government funding returns.
And so we do have immense opportunities as donors to have incredible impact, save lives, save cost-effective programs, and really help organizations continue to do this incredibly important work.
Denver: Yeah. Well, I hope in the midst of this crisis, sort of like COVID, we may come out with some different ways and solutions of doing things, which might be about the only silver lining that we can possibly see.
Looking ahead, David, where do you see the fund heading, and what new strategies or tools might you and Jessica explore to enhance its impact?
David: Yeah. Good question. I think in the short term, we’re going to stick to the plan that we’ve laid out. We’re really trying to focus on where those highest leverage opportunities are to deploy capital to save lives. And as it progresses, and as new information comes to our desks, we’ll adapt based on that information.
So I wouldn’t expect to see the Rapid Response Fund sort of existing in its same form into 2026. If it’s necessary to exist into 2026, then it’s no longer really a Rapid Response Fund, but some other form of funding mechanism. And so we’re really trying to take a short-term, as-needs-must approach here.
But I could see a vehicle like this existing for sort of time-sensitive, high-leverage opportunities that present themselves in the future. So we’re not closing the door to this continuing to exist in some form, but the focus on backfilling USAID cuts I think is pretty limited to 2025.
Is that right, Jessica?
Jessica: Yeah. Yeah, that we have to, like we said, we have to evaluate, going into 2026– what the landscape looks like and what our funding strategies are.
Denver: But in any event, you’ve created a template or a model that can be used in other situations, and a lot of learnings that have come from that.
David: Definitely.
Denver: Finally, for each of you, and I’m going to start with you, Jessica, working with David on the fund, this must have brought some surprises along the way. It had to bring some surprises along the way. What’s been one unexpected challenge that you faced together and maybe a pleasant surprise that has come out of this partnership?
Jessica: Well, I’ll start with a pleasant surprise. So, I mean, the pleasant surprise is that it’s been even more incredible than we expected working with Founders Pledge. I mean, David has built something absolutely incredible. The team is amazing.
And so there’s just a lot of general learning, like when you get great minds in a room and you’re cross sharing on what you think about: Should we fund option A or option B because we’re trying to move quickly, and we have limited capital to start.
And so really those shared learnings and thinking through perspectives and ideology in making grants, that has been really a pleasant sort of surprise. I think we would’ve anticipated potentially having a little bit more traction on the funding side, and so we’ve been a bit surprised at some hesitations from donors, considering the urgency of the situation.
But also, as David was saying, if you’re thinking about your giving as an investment, the opportunity for an impact return right now is so big that it was a bit surprising that there is still this hesitation.
And like I said, now with the most recent news, we’re hoping that people realize that capital really needs to come off the sidelines. Like this is a longer-term issue than we maybe could have originally anticipated, and so we’re hoping to start to see even more traction on the funding side going forward.
Denver: Yeah, I’ve always believed that branding precedes fundraising, and you guys have had to take a little bit of time to get your brand out there about this new fund. Has there been any confusion, Jessica, with this fund, with your existing organization and donors saying, Whoa, what’s going on here, and which one should I give to?
Jessica: No, I think from our perspective, we’ve actually been telling donors like we really believe this is the most impactful thing you can be funding right now.
So while we still see people choosing from our best charities list and funding individual organizations based on their preferences, because obviously the reality is donors have preferences, and like we were saying before, they often give with their heart and so they may be pulled in a certain direction.
But I think most of our donor base really understands that this is the highest impact opportunity, the most important fund to fund. And we have seen incremental capital, new capital, and even lapsed donors come back and give to this because they know the urgency and the impact.
Denver: Great. David, unexpected challenge, pleasant surprise.
David: I’m going to be really boring and say that it’s been… you know, my… it’s not even an unexpected surprise, but it’s just been a delight to work with Jessica and her team.
They’re exemplary, as expected. I mean, I’ve known Jessica and her husband for a long time now as members of Founders Pledge, since before they took over Life You Can Save to run it like a tech company.
So it’s been a real joy to work with them. And I guess maybe the surprise is we’ve not had, as far as I can see, any challenges. Maybe they’ve existed and they’ve just not made it to me. And if that’s the case, then they haven’t really been very big challenges.
But it’s been a real joy to work with Jessica. I’d echo her sentiment that, given the networks of people that we interact with and the amount of capital that we deploy in a normal year, it’s a little surprising to see the reticence to pool funds. It’s an individual… especially extremely wealthy individuals, who really rate their ability to make decisions about what to do with money.
And I think there’s a failure mode here that because you’ve done it in your private life, you can also do it in your philanthropic life. I think this is a failure mode that we really need to try to dissuade people from continuing to pursue.
Because I’m a believer in that these pooled funds, these thematic funds really are sort of and should be the cornerstone of any good philanthropist strategy because they just require …and they have so much more collective wisdom behind them. And it allows for better coordination, quicker action, sort of more durable and strategic flows of capital.
And we can also do active grant making through them. It’s not something that we’re doing yet necessarily with the RRF, but Founders Pledge has four thematic funds, and it’s far and away our preferred modality for philanthropists to utilize just because it is just more effective.
Otherwise, it’s like corralling a set of cats into a pen and being like, okay, we’re all going to make this decision together now. And sometimes, they don’t really want to. So I guess, I’d echo that sentiment and say that funds are the future.
Denver: Yeah, I can’t agree more. We’re dealing with the most intractable problems in the world and society, and the average grant is something like $35,000. And it’s almost laughable when you think about how we’re going to solve that.
And I can see why you guys wouldn’t have had any challenges when there’s a camaraderie and trust that exists that I can feel and see, those challenges really never amount to very much. You just address them and deal with them and they go away.
Jessica, for listeners who might be so inclined to financially support this effort, $3 million on our way to $4 million, tell them about your website and what they can find there.
Jessica: Yeah. There at thelifeyoucansave.org, there’s a page for the fund. Also, I mean, I know Founders Pledge has a page as well. It links to the every.org funding page. Or if you want to give any way you want to give, we can figure it out.
You can go online and give any amount. You can shoot one of us an email, and we can help you sort out larger donations if you want to have a conversation with one of us. Feel free to reach out. We’re happy to facilitate donations in any way we possibly can.
David: Absolutely.
Denver: Well, what you two guys are doing– and your organizations– is both smart and inspiring. And I want to thank you, Jessica and David, for being here today. It was a great pleasure to have you on the program.
David: Thanks, Denver.
Jessica: Thank you so much.
