Every night the news shows us floods, fires, and wars that force people from their homes. Then the story moves on. But for the people who have been displaced, that is when another story begins: Where do they go, and how do they rebuild their lives?

For nearly 50 years, Alight has been working on that question. And its CEO, Jocelyn Wyatt, believes the humanitarian system too often succeeds at keeping people alive without creating a path for them to move forward.

Jocelyn came to humanitarian work through design rather than the traditional aid world, and that perspective has shaped how she leads. The people Alight serves aren’t beneficiaries waiting for help. They’re customers with skills, ambitions, families, and futures of their own.

We talk about what happens after the emergency, why humanitarian aid can measure the wrong things, and what it really means to give power to the people closest to the problem.

It’s Jocelyn Wyatt, CEO of Alight, on The Business of Giving.

We spend almost our entire lives indoors, and we rarely ask what all that time is doing to us. My guest has spent the past year building the case that the rooms we live and work in quietly shape our stress, our focus, even our brain activity, and that philanthropy has a rare chance to act on it.

Ishita Das, a molecular biologist, is part of the Milken Institute’s science-philanthropy team, where she helps funders decide where their money can move science fastest. Her year-long investigation gave a scattered field a name: neurospatial design.

We talk about the evidence that a room can change your body, why the field stayed invisible so long, and how a donor turns scattered work into something that lasts.

It’s Ishita Das on The Business of Giving.

He never wanted to be an administrator. He wanted to be a therapist, and to work in a food pantry. Instead, J. Antonio Fernández has a job that no layman had held in more than a century.

He leads Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York. Not one organization, but 82 of them, 9,000 employees, more than 400,000 people served a year. And he still turns up at the food distributions most weeks.

Ask him what people get wrong about the work, and he doesn’t hesitate.

We talk about the federal money that has disappeared, about being a landlord in a city debating rent freezes, and about the one thing he is certain no technology will ever replace.

It’s J. Antonio Fernandez on The Business of Giving.

My guest today came to philanthropy through the lab bench, not the development office. ⁠Melissa Stevens⁠ trained as a biochemist, and for nearly two decades at the ⁠Milken Institute⁠ she has put a scientist’s question to an entire field: what does the evidence actually tell us about where a dollar of high-risk capital does the most good?

As Executive Vice President for Strategic Philanthropy, she helps families and foundations give serious money away, and give it away well. And she is watching history arrive in real time. Eighty-four trillion dollars is changing hands, the largest transfer of wealth ever, and the generation receiving it has no intention of inheriting the old model of giving.

We get into why big philanthropic dollars stall, and it is rarely for lack of money; the wealth conversation families keep dodging; the $47 trillion women are set to inherit by 2048; and the one belief about this field Melissa has thrown out for good.

A direct cash assistance program used to take months to launch. My guest today turned one on earlier this year in about four hours. The hard part of helping people was never writing the check. It was the system the check had to travel through, a system that for too many people was built to keep them out. Brittany Christenson is the CEO of AidKit, the infrastructure beneath some of the nation’s most effective aid programs. Here is how she describes the work.

When Sarah Bouchie became CEO of Helen Keller International, she led a listening process across the organization and sharpened how they told their story. That preparation proved critical. Within months, a third of the organization’s revenue disappeared. What followed: 300 layoffs, a refusal to close a single country office, and six months later, the Kristof Holiday Impact Prize that raised nearly $13 million. But the reason any of that matters comes down to what this organization actually does. For about a dollar a dose, twice a year, they can save a child’s life. That math hasn’t changed. But the funding landscape has. Here is my conversation with Sarah Bouchie, CEO of Helen Keller International.

Imagine a child,  nine years old, who has never once held a pencil or opened a book. Not because she doesn’t want to learn, but because poverty or conflict or displacement slammed the schoolhouse door before she ever reached it. Across Africa, that is the reality for 80 million children. And once they fall behind, most education systems simply move on without them.

My next guest refused to accept that.

Caitlin Baron built something most education systems never bothered to create — a way back in. One intensive year in which children cover three years of learning and walk into a classroom with kids their own age. The evidence says it works. A new book, The Luminos Method, lays out exactly how. 

It’s Caitlin Baron on The Business of Giving.

Kyle Clifford took over as CEO of amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, on January 1st of this year. Founded in 1985 and championed by Elizabeth Taylor, amfAR has invested nearly a billion dollars in the fight against HIV and is now expanding its research into cancer, neurocognitive conditions, and immune dysfunction. What makes Kyle’s leadership unlike any in the organization’s history is that he is amfAR’s first CEO who is openly living with HIV. And as he shared with me, his path to leading this organization was anything but planned.

It’s Kyle Clifford on The Business of Giving

What if the entire strategy for fixing how we produce meat has been wrong from the start?

For fifty years, advocates have tried to convince people to eat less. Yet,  consumption has broken a new global record every single year since 1961. Every. Single. Year. So Bruce Friedrich decided to stop fighting human nature and start working with it.

Bruce is the founder of The Good Food Institute, a global science think tank, and the author of a new book called Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food and Our Future. His argument is simple and a little mind-bending: the goal isn’t a world where people sacrifice. It’s a world where they can’t tell the difference.

That’s the vision. And in the conversation that follows, Bruce explains exactly how close we actually are to making it real, why companies like Tyson are essential to getting there, and why he puts the odds at 95 percent, but only if one critical thing happens.

It’s Bruce Friedrich on The Business of Giving.

Most organizations approaching their 100th anniversary would be looking back and celebrating past achievements. United Way of Rhode Island is doing the opposite. Under Cortney Nicolato’s leadership, they’re taking bigger swings than ever, from meeting a $100 million racial equity commitment ahead of schedule to becoming the go-to source of real-time community data for state policymakers.

Cortney returned to her home state after building a national career because she wanted to help the communities that helped her growing up as a latchkey kid in Pawtucket. She transformed United Way from the inside first, rebuilding the board and staff to reflect Rhode Island’s diversity, before asking anyone else to change.

And when others began backing away from equity commitments, her response was clear.

This is a conversation about what it takes to be both an emergency responder and a long-term systems builder, about earning a seat at the policy table with data instead of survey results, and about building organizational culture that will outlast any single leader.

It’s Cortney Nicolato on The Business of Giving.