High-Impact Growth

When Save the Children needed a monitoring system for a new school meals and literacy program in Guatemala, it adapted one built by Global Communities, an organization it competes with for funding. Marc Valentin of Global Communities and Salvador Baldizon of Save the Children join Jonathan Jackson and guest co-host Erin Quinn to talk about how that handoff worked. Global Communities built the system on CommCare for UNIDOS, a USDA McGovern-Dole school feeding program that reached 450 schools in Guatemala's Western Highlands. Save the Children then adapted it for SABES, its own McGovern-Dole program, while the UNIDOS team was still in place to train its staff. They talk about why the timing mattered, how the people using the system came to see the data as theirs, and what Salvador found when one local partner kept reporting months late. Salvador explains why counting activities isn't enough, and Marc makes the case that competition between organizations should end once the program is won. A practical conversation for anyone who runs monitoring and evaluation, or wants a digital system to outlast a single grant.

Related Resources:

McGovern-Dole Food for Education Program (USDA): https://www.fas.usda.gov/programs/mcgovern-dole-food-education-program

Global Communities in Guatemala: https://globalcommunities.org/country/guatemala/

Save the Children in Guatemala: https://www.savethechildren.org/us/where-we-work/guatemala

CommCare: https://commcare.dimagi.com/

Related High-Impact Growth episodes:

EP 9, Out-collaborating vs Out-competing, with Gillian Javetski: https://dimagi.com/podcast/ep9-out-collaborating-vs-out-competing-the-secret-to-making-progress-on-complex-international-development-challenges/

EP 4, Prioritizing Platforms Over Projects: https://dimagi.com/podcast/ep4-prioritizing-platforms-over-projects/

EP 25, Creating a Digital Ecosystem for Humanitarian Impact (Mercy Corps): https://dimagi.com/podcast/ep25-creating-a-digital-ecosystem-to-improve-frontline-humanitarian-impact-mercy-corps-approach-to-monitoring-evaluation-and-learning/

EP 47, Ethiopia's Digitization Journey: Path to Paperless: https://dimagi.com/podcast/ep47-ethiopias-digitization-journey-the-path-to-paperless/

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Hosts: ⁠Jonathan Jackson⁠ and ⁠Amie Vaccaro

Billions of dollars in new philanthropic funding are expected to come online in the next few years, and Coefficient Giving wants the ecosystem ready to absorb it. Nic Lyon, Program Officer for Global Health and Wellbeing at Coefficient Giving, joins Jonathan Jackson and Amie Vaccaro to explain Launchpad, a new effort to seed and scale outcome-oriented funds, each led by a single accountable general manager. Nic walks through why funds can make the work legible to new donors and simpler to back than dozens of separate projects, why Coefficient Giving is betting on individuals rather than institutions, and why every fund should have an off-ramp once its goal is met. He also shares what reviewing the proposals has been like: applications about 20% stronger than expected, where AI helped and where it showed, and why a credible pathway to $100 million or more mattered. Drawing on his early fieldwork at IDinsight and a PhD in political science at Stanford, Nic also talks about evidence generation and when a cause area needs more evidence before it is ready to fund.

Related Resources:

Request for Proposals: Launchpad Funds, Coefficient Giving's call for new and scaled outcome-oriented funds: https://coefficientgiving.org/funds/global-health-wellbeing-opportunities/request-for-proposals-launchpad-funds/

We're Scaling Our Global Health & Wellbeing Giving and We Want the Field to Scale With Us, the context for Launchpad: https://coefficientgiving.org/research/were-scaling-our-global-health-wellbeing-giving-and-we-want-the-field-to-scale-with-us/

Coefficient Giving's Largest Grant Ever: $276 million, co-funded with GiveWell, to the Against Malaria Foundation for bed net campaigns in the DRC: https://coefficientgiving.org/research/coefficient-givings-largest-grant-ever-276-million-co-funded-with-givewell-to-the-against-malaria-foundation/

Announcing the Health Aid Transition Fund: https://coefficientgiving.org/research/announcing-the-health-aid-transition-fund/

Related High-Impact Growth episodes: Grow the Pie: GiveDirectly's CEO on Absorbing the Third Wave (Nick Allardice): https://dimagi.com/podcast/absorption-problem-philanthropy/ and Joey Savoie: Why Grantmaking, Not Money, Is the Bottleneck: https://dimagi.com/podcast/grantmaking-bottleneck-philanthropy/

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Hosts: ⁠Jonathan Jackson⁠ and ⁠Amie Vaccaro

Kangaroo Mother Care, prolonged skin-to-skin contact between a caregiver and a small or premature baby, is one of the most effective ways to prevent newborn deaths, and one of the hardest to deliver well. Supriya Bansal, co-founder and CEO of Ansh, joins Jonathan Jackson to share how her team is bringing it into government hospitals in India, growing from two pilot hospitals to 15 district hospitals in Rajasthan, with Madhya Pradesh next. Supriya explains why Kangaroo Care is really a behavior change intervention, why Ansh's nurses ask new mothers to try it for just one day, and why she designed her pilots to look like scale from the start. She also talks about keeping quality high as delivery shifts toward government, pairing accountability with a weekly call where nurses share what keeps them going, and adding care for critically ill newborns and follow-up at home on top of the hospital model. She closes with advice for anyone looking to have more impact: keep an open mind, and get your hands dirty.

Related Resources:

Ansh — Kangaroo Care Scaling Grant, Rajasthan, India (GiveWell): https://www.givewell.org/research/grants/ansh-kangaroo-care-scaling-grant-rajasthan-india-december-2024 

Kangaroo Mother Care (GiveWell's review of the evidence): https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/kangaroo-mother-care 

Immediate "Kangaroo Mother Care" and Survival of Infants with Low Birth Weight (WHO study, New England Journal of Medicine, 2021): https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2026486 

Introducing Ansh (Supriya on the EA Forum): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hTEaKau8D4Ah3NPcu/introducing-ansh-a-charity-entrepreneurship-incubated 

Ambitious Impact's charity directory: https://www.ambitiousimpact.com/our-charities 

Ansh: https://www.ansh.health/

Related High-Impact Growth episodes: 

Joey Savoie: Why Grantmaking, Not Money, Is the Bottleneck: https://dimagi.com/podcast/grantmaking-bottleneck-philanthropy/ 

Grow the Pie with Nick Allardice: https://dimagi.com/podcast/absorption-problem-philanthropy/

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Hosts: ⁠Jonathan Jackson⁠ and ⁠Amie Vaccaro

What does it actually take to deploy AI chatbots safely in humanitarian response? Liz Devine, Head of the Program Technical Team at GOAL Global, joins Amie Vaccaro, Jonathan Jackson, and Dimagi's Erin Quinn to share hard-won lessons from building a multichannel chatbot during an mpox outbreak in Sierra Leone — and adapting it for cholera response in South Sudan. With over a decade in the humanitarian sector, from South Sudan to the Syria and Ukraine responses, Liz brings a rare ground-level perspective on innovating with vulnerable populations. She explains why an emergency is the worst time to build new tech, why keeping a human in the loop at key decision points is non-negotiable, and how referral pathways and safeguards keep sensitive cases from slipping through the cracks. She also offers practical advice on securing donor funding for experimental pilots despite shrinking budgets — starting with clearly defining the problem you're solving. As Liz puts it, AI can do the recommending, but people must make the decisions. A candid, practical conversation for anyone wanting to cut through the AI hype.

Related Resources:

GOAL Global – Irish humanitarian organization working in 13+ countries on health, nutrition, food security, and climate resilience.

Twilio – Communications API used to relay and anonymize chatbot messages in GOAL's deployment.

monday.com for Nonprofits – Work platform GOAL uses (via free humanitarian licenses) for reporting and analysis of chatbot data.

WhatsApp Business Platform – The community-facing channel for GOAL's multichannel chatbot, supporting text, voice, and images.

CommCare by Dimagi – Dimagi's leading open-source platform for frontline workers, and a tool GOAL uses.

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Hosts: ⁠Jonathan Jackson⁠ and ⁠Amie Vaccaro

Effective grantmaking is now the real bottleneck in philanthropy, says Joey Savoie, founder of Elevate Philanthropy and co-founder of Ambitious Impact, the charity incubator behind more than 65 new organizations. After years of scarcity, a wave of new tech wealth has flipped the question for many NGOs from surviving budget cuts to what they would do with double. In this one-on-one conversation with Dimagi CEO Jonathan Jackson, Joey explains why the hardest part isn't the money, but finding people who know how to give it away well. He shares why the most honest charities often get penalized for their honesty, why your fundraising ability is your comms skill multiplied by how good your organization actually is, and why, when a whole field of NGOs starts behaving strangely, you should look at the funders. Joey also makes the case for more philanthropic funds alongside foundations, a clearer path for training the next generation of grant makers, and smarter grant application processes that cut redundant work. Whether you're writing grant applications or deciding where a suddenly bigger budget should go, this episode offers practical advice from both sides of the table.

Related Resources:

Elevate Philanthropy: Joey's organization, which trains funders and grantmakers to deploy capital more effectively.

Ambitious Impact (AIM): the charity incubator Joey co-founded, formerly Charity Entrepreneurship, which has launched 65+ high-impact charities.

Top New Philanthropic Funds – Measured Life: Joey's list of 10 philanthropic funds he thinks should exis.

Increasing Our 2026 Allocation to GiveWell's Recommendations to $1 Billion – Coefficient Giving: the $1B announcement discussed in the episode.

Scaling Our Impact, with Support from a $1 Billion Commitment – GiveWell: GiveWell's side of the announcement.

GiveWell Opens RFI for Malaria Pilots and Research: the malaria request for information Jonathan describes, which let applicants opt in to having their application shared with other funders.

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Hosts: ⁠Jonathan Jackson⁠ and ⁠Amie Vaccaro

Justin Steele gave away nearly $700 million leading Google.org’s philanthropy across the Americas, and he watched funding flow to the nonprofits closest to power rather than those closest to the problem. Now the founder of Kindora, a public benefit corporation using AI to help nonprofits find funders who’d actually say yes, he calls this the legibility trap. In conversation with Dimagi CEO Jonathan Jackson, Justin takes listeners inside a grant maker’s head: how a seven-person team ran a $150 million annual budget, why portfolios so often follow personal networks, and why honest feedback is so rare. They debate whether an LLM tuned on community wisdom could read a grant application more fairly than a program officer, why AI works best as a “junior staff member’s first read,” and why “not a fit” and “not competitive” are very different no’s. Justin also shares his bet on democratizing ownership of Kindora itself through a community crowd raise. Whether you’re fundraising, grant making, or building something mission-driven, you’ll come away with a sharper sense of how capital actually moves, and how it could move better.

Related Resources:

Kindora: Justin’s public benefit corporation. It uses AI to help nonprofits find high-fit funders, map warm connections and draft grant applications

Kindora’s Wefunder Campaign: Support Kindora’s active fundraising campaign and learn more about the opportunity to invest in its mission.

The Legibility Trap (EA Forum): Justin’s article on how “fund the most rigorous thinkers” can quietly favor the wrong organizations.

Outdoorithm Collective: the nonprofit Justin and his wife co-founded to take urban families out into nature. Kindora began as their own fundraising tool.

Incorruptible by Eric Ries: Ries’s new book on why good companies go bad, which Justin and Jon discuss.

The Steve Fund: a nonprofit focused on the mental health of young people of color, and one of the grantees in the Google.org teen mental health portfolio Justin describes.

Decolonizing Wealth Project: founded by Edgar Villanueva, whose “money as medicine” idea Justin cites.

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Hosts: ⁠Jonathan Jackson⁠ and ⁠Amie Vaccaro

What happens when AI philanthropy actually arrives? Jack Lewars advises donors giving up to nine figures a year — and he argues the wave of wealth expected from AI company IPOs is more locked in than skeptics think, with potentially $130 billion or more committed to charity even in conservative scenarios. In this conversation with hosts Amie Vaccaro and Jonathan Jackson, Jack explains why concentration is the real risk ("two big funders beat one twice the size"), why the bottleneck to scaling global health organizations isn't money but managing directors and chiefs of staff, and why he has no patience for scaling plans that end in “…government adoption." Drawing on his experience running One for the World and building a mid-stage global health fund — the "Series A" of the sector — Jack lays out exactly what implementing organizations should do now to position themselves: be cost-effective, be evidence-backed, be visible to intermediaries like GiveWell and Coefficient Giving. And whatever you do, don't send a cold email.

Jack Lewars is the founder of Ultra Philanthropy, an independent advisory that helps major donors give for maximum impact. He advises donors giving up to nine figures a year, and is Chair of Trustees at High Impact Athletes. He writes the Funding Anthropalypse newsletter, commenting on the expected wave of AI philanthropy in 2027 and beyond.

He is also the Fund Manager of the Ultra Philanthropy Mid-stage Global Health Fund, which makes strategic grants and offers hands-on technical and management assistance to bring high impact global health projects to scale.

Ultra Philanthropy – Jack Lewars's independent advisory helping major donors give for maximum impact, home of the mid-stage global health fund.

Jack Lewars's Substack – His newsletter on AI wealth and philanthropy, referenced throughout the episode. 

GiveWell – Charity evaluator that recently received a $1 billion commitment from Coefficient Giving and made its largest-ever grant to the Against Malaria Foundation.

Coefficient Giving – Major effective-giving funder discussed as a key intermediary for AI wealth. 

One for the World – Nonprofit Jack led as executive director, encouraging graduates to pledge 1% of income to cost-effective global health charities.

"What's Your Endgame?" – Stanford Social Innovation Review – The decade-old article on nonprofit endgames Jack references as the (only) canonical piece on scaling. 

Dimagi Connect – Dimagi's verified service delivery platform, discussed by Jonathan as a way to make performance matter through fast feedback loops.

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Hosts: ⁠Jonathan Jackson⁠ and ⁠Amie Vaccaro

Disability inclusion in global development starts with a question most teams never ask: who is your technology quietly leaving out? Dr. Victor Santiago Pineda, executive director of Berkeley's Center for Independent Living, president of the global inclusion nonprofit World Enabled, and one of the youngest delegates to help draft the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, joins Amie Vaccaro and guest co-host Erin Quinn for a conversation that moves from a Caracas classroom, where his mother was told her son could never be educated, to the floor of the United Nations, to the frontier of artificial intelligence. Dr. Pineda explains why the assistive technology of today becomes the mainstream technology of tomorrow, why AI trained on averages risks erasing the people at the edges of the bell curve, and what implementers and funders can do differently starting tomorrow: hire disabled technologists, build to WCAG AA, optimize for screen readers, demand accessibility through procurement. Underneath it all is his central claim — we already have enough knowledge to unlock human potential. What's missing isn't know-how. It's the collective decision to use it.

Related Resources:

Podcast hosted by Dr. Victor Pineda: The Independent: Meeting the Moment for Disability Justice available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube

The Center for Independent Living (CIL), Berkeley – The world's first independent living center, founded in 1972 and now led by Dr. Pineda; the origin point for many principles later written into the UN CRPD.

Pineda Foundation / World Enabled – Dr. Pineda's global nonprofit advancing inclusive urban development, digital equity, and disability rights worldwide.

UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) – The treaty Dr. Pineda helped draft, setting out the rights and dignity of over a billion people with disabilities.

Being Heumann (Apple Original Films) – Siân Heder's film of Judy Heumann's memoir and the 26-day 1977 Section 504 sit-in; TIFF opening night, in theaters November 6 and on Apple TV November 13, 2026.

Protect Section 504 (DREDF) – Tracks the multi-state lawsuit challenging Section 504 regulations that Dr. Pineda references, with advocacy tools.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) – The W3C standard Dr. Pineda urges teams to build to at Level AA or higher.

Positive AI Labs – Nonprofit building open datasets and evaluations to steer frontier AI toward pluralistic knowledge of human flourishing, cited by Dr. Pineda as an example of getting wisdom traditions into models before the training loop closes.

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Hosts: ⁠Jonathan Jackson⁠ and ⁠Amie Vaccaro

Five years ago, they were mid-level software engineers. Today, they hold giving accounts larger than major foundations — and the sector they want to fund may not be ready to absorb the money. Nick Allardice, CEO of GiveDirectly and former CEO of Change.org, joins Amie and Jonathan to unpack his widely discussed article "The Absorption Problem" and what the "third wave" of philanthropy means for global development. Nick explains why the biggest risk isn't money going to the wrong place, but money sitting on the sidelines for lack of credible places to put it — and why he regularly refers major donors to other organizations to "grow the pie, not divide it." The conversation digs into the voltage drop (research suggests 50–90% of programs lose substantial impact as they scale), why nonprofits rarely ask what their total addressable market is, and how GiveDirectly is winding down complexity to prepare to move much larger sums. Nick closes with candid advice for the newly wealthy: give away 10% of your net wealth in year one, learn by doing, and don't disconnect from the joy of giving.

Related Resources:

The Absorption Problem by Nick Allardice

The Overlooked Absorptive Capacity of Locally-Led Organizations by Jonathan Jackson and Neal Lesh

The Third Wave of American Philanthropy by Nan Ransohoff

Increasing Our 2026 Allocation to GiveWell's Recommendations to $1 Billion by Coefficient Giving

The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale by John A. List

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Hosts: ⁠Jonathan Jackson⁠ and ⁠Amie Vaccaro

Could a funder deploy $100 million in global health tomorrow and know where every single dollar went? Dimagi CEO and co-founder Jonathan Jackson believes verified service delivery finally makes the answer yes. In this candid mid-2026 check-in, Jon joins co-host Amie Vaccaro, VP of CommCare Growth and Strategy, to unpack a year of profound change including why Dimagi retired its longtime value "embrace complexity for impact" in favor of "solving the right problems for impact," and what that shift reveals about affordability in a post-USAID funding landscape. Jon walks step-by-step through a single Connect-enabled home visit, from opt-in push notification to real-time payment, and shares the numbers behind the platform: over 1.5 million verified visits, 200+ local organizations expressing interest, and 80 cents of every dollar reaching frontline workers, local organizations, and commodities. The conversation also explores how AI is putting program design directly into the hands of local organizations, automating roles, not people. As Jon puts it: "When you do a better job today, the system knows it and can offer you even more work tomorrow."

Related Resources:

Dimagi Connect – Dimagi's verified service delivery platform connecting funders with local organizations and frontline workers.

CommCare by Dimagi – The open-source platform for frontline workers that Connect is built on, with a quarter million active users worldwide.

GiveWell – The evidence-based charity evaluator whose request for information on post-market malaria rapid diagnostic test surveillance inspired Dimagi's AI-built Connect pilot.

Steel Foundation for Hope – An early flagship funder that Amie credits with seeing Connect's potential.

Kevin Starr episode of High-Impact Growth – https://dimagi.com/podcast/funders-power-to-change-the-system/ 

Eric Ries episode of High-Impact Growth – https://dimagi.com/podcast/podcast-eric-ries-good-companies-go-bad/ 

Kikapu Gardens field visit video – https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MLGVhiA0YCt_NpjuF4Gveu1s3kwygD7-/view 

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Hosts: ⁠Jonathan Jackson⁠ and ⁠Amie Vaccaro