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.

From the person who co-founded the first nonprofit software company to tackle social problems at scale, Jim Fruchterman returns to share insights from his new book “𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗱: 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗡𝗼𝗻𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗶𝘁 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗔𝗿𝗲 𝗨𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗦𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝘁𝗼 𝗦𝗼𝗹𝘃𝗲 𝗢𝘂𝗿 𝗠𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗦𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺𝘀.”

In this conversation, Jim explains why boring plumbing saves more lives than sexy AI moonshots, and introduces the Better Deal for Data - a new framework launching in 2026 to prevent data colonialism in vulnerable communities. He also makes the case that the current tech recession presents the biggest opportunity in years to recruit disillusioned engineers into meaningful work, and shares his vision that by 2050, technology will finally deliver universal access to quality mental health services globally.

It’s Jim Fruchterman on The Business of Giving.

Bob Chapman didn’t set out to write a leadership manual when he transformed Barry-Wehmiller from a traditional manufacturing company into what a world peace negotiator would call “the answer to world peace.” He simply started caring for his 12,000 team members the way he’d want his own children cared for if they worked somewhere else.

Ten years after publishing “Everybody Matters,” Chapman has added 90 pages to the expanded anniversary edition, not because the original message changed, but because the evidence became overwhelming. Ninety-five percent of feedback from people learning Truly Human Leadership wasn’t about business metrics - it was about how the skills transformed their marriages, their relationships with their children, and their capacity to care for others at home.

In this conversation, Chapman explains why listening without judgment is the greatest of all skills, how the Chapman Foundation has taught human skills to 20,000 people across hospitals, police departments, and school districts, and why he believes education must blend academic skills with human skills if we want to heal the brokenness in our society.

It’s Bob Chapman on The Business of Giving.