Our guest on this episode is Patrick Stadler. Patrick is the definition of a social and charity entrepreneur. Currently, Patrick is the co-founder and the board chair of the Give-Well-incubated charity New Incentives. New Incentives is a nonprofit dedicated to conditional cash transfers. Conditional cash transfers or CCTs are small amounts of money that is given to those in need if they meet certain benchmarks related to education and health. In addition, Patrick mentors startups incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship, as well as develops the curriculum and content of their upcoming incubation program and publishes articles on starting organizations from scratch. On the side, Patrick is also working on a Swiss platform called MindfulMoney.ch, which offers free advice on how to invest responsibly. This is really a great resource for regular people in Switzerland who want to invest their money responsibly into impact related investments. Before all this, he was a political advisor for Switzerland’s economic development agency where he participated in the negotiations on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. He also worked on strategic communications in the context of peacebuilding and mediation at the United Nations Department of Political Affairs in New York. 

Patrick was not always a risk-taker and still found himself working as a charity entrepreneur. He shares how he is actually an extremely risk-averse individual:

“I'm quite risk averse personally, so I slowly got into this like a frog in boiling water...If you think about it...the risks are not that high….financial risk, you can get another job if your charity fails, you have your safety network through friends and family, you have your safety network if you're living in Switzerland by the state. There's various options that you have so you can take some justified risks. Basically you overrate it psychologically, but the actual risk is much lower.”

• Introduction [0:38]

Episode Links

• The United Nations