The Philanthropy Workshop Audio Library

Despite the growing evidence that movements are fundamental for lasting social change, they are under-resourced, undervalued, and grossly underestimated. This discussion on new research from Bridgespan and the Shake the Table coalition addresses how funders can support movements to bring systemic impact.

In this conversation hosted and led by the Toronto Foundation, Andrew Chunilall and Senator Ratna Omidvar discuss some of the top trends, key areas of debate, and opportunities for progress in Canadian philanthropy in 2022.

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Biographies

Andrew Chunilall
Andrew joined Community Foundations Canada in 2013 and became CEO in 2017, following a six-year tenure as Vice-President of Finance for the London Community Foundation and his long-standing service as a finance and regulatory expert for Canada’s philanthropic milieu. Now at the head of the community foundation movement, Andrew is working closely with the Community Foundations of Canada Leadership team, Board and foundations in Canada and abroad to help the philanthropic sector transform, innovate and meet the new challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. An increasingly active public speaker, Andrew is helping raise awareness for how the philanthropic sector’s convening power, leadership and action around targets such as the Sustainable Development Goals can help Canadian communities reach their full potential.

Outside of Community Foundations of Canada, Andrew has been highly active in the nonprofit community for 15 years, serving on numerous boards including Community Living London and Art for AIDS International. In 2014, he was appointed to the Board of the Southwest Local Health Integration Network by former Minister of Health, Deb Matthews. In 2015, he was among 250 selected emerging leaders to participate in the Governor General’s Canadian Leadership Conference. He recently joined the Board of WINGS, the global network of grantmaker associations and philanthropic support organisations.

With a background in education in economics and commerce, Andrew obtained his chartered accountant designation in 2002 and began his career at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as a manager in the Assurance and Advisory Group.

Senator Ratna Omidvar
Ratna Omidvar is an internationally recognized voice on migration, diversity and inclusion. She came to Canada from Iran in 1981 and her own experiences of displacement, integration and citizen engagement have been the foundation of her work. In April 2016, Ms. Omidvar was appointed to the Senate of Canada as an independent senator representing Ontario. As a member of the Senate’s Independent Senators Group she holds a leadership position as the Liaison Officer. Senator Omidvar is also the Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology and served as Deputy Chair of the Special Senate Committee on the Charitable Sector.

Senator Omidvar is a Director at the Samara Centre for Democracy, a Director at the Century Initiative, a Council Member at the World Refugee and Migration Council and Chair Emerita at the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council.

Previously at Ryerson University, Senator Omidvar was a Distinguished Visiting Professor and founded the Global Diversity Exchange, a think-and-do tank on diversity, migration and inclusion. Prior to her appointments at Ryerson, Senator Omidvar was the President of Maytree, where she played a lead role in local, national and international efforts to promote the integration of immigrants.

Senator Omidvar is co-author of Flight and Freedom: Stories of Escape to Canada (2015), an Open Book Toronto best book of 2015 and one of the Toronto Star's top five good reads from Word on the Street. She is also a contributor to The Harper Factor (2016) and co-editor of Five Good Ideas: Practical Strategies for Non-Profit Success (2011). Senator Omidvar received a Honorary Degree, Doctor of Laws, from Ryerson University in 2018 and from York University in 2012.

Full bio available here: https://sencanada.ca/en/senators/omidvar-ratna/

In their new book, Patience Marime-Ball and Ruth Shaber share a simple but often overlooked investment strategy to earning higher returns: including women as financial decision-makers within your organization or team. Here they share why they wrote the book, why it is important, and some of key findings.

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Biographies

Patience Marime-Ball
Patience has more than two decades of investment experience across capital markets – debt and equity financing, large scale infrastructure, distressed assets, as well as venture stage opportunities. She has made major contributions to the gender lens investing field, including conceptualizing and building IFC’s Banking on Women Investment Platform (current portfolio of approx. $2.7 billion); co-development of the first ever Gender Bond issued on the Uridashi market; and co-structuring alongside Goldman Sachs of a $600M debt fund ( $1.7 billion in loans to women entrepreneurs deployed to-date). She is an early stage investor with Golden Seeds and was previously Vice President with Mizuho Bank.

Patience is a member of As You Sow’s Prison Free Funds and Racial Justice Initiative Advisory Committees. She is Vice Chair of the Board at the International Center for Research on Women, as well as an Advisor to Emerging Sun, and a Venture Partner with ATP. Patience holds a JD from the Pritzker School of Law and an MBA from Kellogg at Northwestern University.


Ruth Shaber
Ruth Shaber MD is the founder and president of the Tara Health Foundation, which promotes health, well-being and opportunity for women and girls through innovative evidence-informed programs. Her philanthropic goals include advancing the field of gender lens impact investing. 

She started her career as an Obstetrician and Gynecology at the Kaiser Permanente South San Francisco Medical Center in 1990. From 1997 to 2003, she served as chief of Obstetrics and Gynecology and from 2001 to 2007 she served as the director of Women’s Health for the Northern California division of Kaiser Permanente. She is also the founder of the Women’s Health Research Institute in Kaiser Permanente’s Northern California Region. Ruth was the Medical Director at the Kaiser Permanente Care Management Institute (CMI) from 2007 to 2012. 

She is a member of the board of directors at Jacaranda Health and on the National Medical Committee for Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Ruth received her B.A. from Yale University and her medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She served her residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of California in San Francisco.

The global refugee system needs transforming in order to meet the demands of the 21st century and to empower displaced people as humans, rather than seeing them as victims. Listen to the story of Bahati, a refugee in Kenya for 25 years and now an advocate for the innovative Labour Mobility Project, which is supported by Refuge Point as a new legal pathway to safety.

About Refuge Point
Using private funds, RefugePoint was founded in 2005 to identify refugees who fall through the cracks of humanitarian aid. Initially providing life-saving care to HIV+ refugees in Nairobi, Kenya, the agency grew quickly, adding a range of services to support those with the most urgent needs. Over time, RefugePoint developed a unique, full-service response model for assisting urban refugees and facilitating their self-reliance.

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Biographies

Bahati Ernestine
Bahati Ernestine is a Continuing Care Assistant at Glen Haven Manor (GHM) Canada working with a team of healthcare providers to care for residents. Bahati is also a Research Associate at the University of Oxford’s Refugee-Led Research Hub (RLRH). At the RLRH, Bahati supports the Academic and research pillars. Previously, Bahati has served as a UNV with the UNHCR Nairobi Branch Office as the Youth Activities Coordinator. She also worked as a nurse at Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi during the COVID 19 pandemic. Bahati has a Nursing degree from Moi University in Eldoret Kenya, a certificate in Project Management in Global Health from the University of Washington, and a certificate in the Kenyan Sign Language from the University of Nairobi. Bahati is a former Rwandan refugee currently residing in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Sasha Chanoff
Sasha Chanoff is the founder and executive director of RefugePoint, a humanitarian organization that finds lasting solutions for the world’s most at risk refugees. He co-authored a new book titled From Crisis to Calling: Finding Your Moral Center in the Toughest Decisions with a foreword by David Gergen.

Sasha is a recipient of the Charles Bronfman Humanitarian Prize, the Harvard Center for Public Leadership Gleitsman International Activist Award, and is an Obama Administration White House Champion of Change. He serves on the steering committee of New England International Donors and is an advisor to the Good Lie Fund, the philanthropic arm of the Warner Bros. film The Good Lie about the resettlement of the Sudanese Lost Boys.

Sasha has appeared on 60 Minutes and in other national media outlets, and has received social entrepreneur fellowships from the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, Ashoka, and Echoing Green. His book is about defining moral decision points in leadership, and is based on a life and death dilemma Sasha faced during a US rescue operation into the Congo to evacuate massacre survivors. The story is a featured video on the Women in the World / NYT website. Sasha has also told this story on the TEDx stage, for NPR’s Moth Radio Hour, and in other forums. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with his wife and two children.

Matthew Barzun’s book The Power of Giving Away Power explores the idea of Constellation theory as a new framework for effective leadership. In this recording, he shares what this framework is, what it means in practice, and how it can be useful for philanthropists and other social leaders.

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Biography

Matthew Barzun
Matthew Barzun has always been fascinated about how we can stand out and fit in at the same time. He helped countries do both when he served as US ambassador to the United Kingdom and to Sweden. He helped citizens do both as National Finance Chair for Barack Obama by pioneering new ways for people to have a stronger voice in politics. And he helped tech consumers do both as an entrepreneur when he helped build CNET Networks in the early 90’s. Barzun was raised on the East Coast, started his career on the West Coast, and settled in the middle in Louisville, Kentucky with his wife, Brooke, and their three children.

We live in a time of challenge and divisiveness driven by interconnected and existential threats. The war and conflict landscape is changing due to the pandemic, climate change, resource scarcity, digital technologies, disinformation as well as racial and economic injustices. We can now count more autocracies than democracies and distrust in government and institutions has eroded the basic social contract. And yet, many of us are responding to this challenging time feeling a deep sense of urgency and responsibility to act and put new resources to work. At a time when the stakes are so high, how can we sustain the gains made by the human rights movement? And as social investors, how can we collectively adopt approaches and mindsets that lead us toward peaceful, just, inclusive societies with human rights at the center?

Hosted by Article3.org and TPW, listen to an intimate conversation with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and former President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet. Speaking exactly one month before Article3.org's Human Rights Day on Peace, Security and the Future of Conflict, the High Commissioner will share her story and speak to the human rights challenges facing the world and the role philanthropy has to play in addressing them. You can read the High Commissioner's full bio here.

In a conversation examining the implications of cryptocurrency on society, explore what TPW board member Bo Shao calls “not a once in a lifetime issue, but once in a millennium."  Bo and cryptocurrency expert Jason Kam help provide a candid overview of the current landscape, challenges, and opportunities. 

Join us for a spotlight Talk with Ai-jen Poo, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and Ali Noorani, President & CEO of the National Immigration Forum. In this talk, we will learn how advocacy and community organizing bring systemic change for a population of domestic workers often overlooked or ignored by people in power.

Domestic workers, most of whom are women and many of whom have a migratory background, face severe human rights violations and systemic barriers to having their voices heard. This conversation will include clear transferrable learnings related to the question of how community engagement and grassroots activism forms part of a systems change approach. This session is relevant for any member interested in movement-building, grass-roots organizing, advocacy, gender, and racial equity.

All of us will someday face the challenges and fears associated with living with a serious illness, either for ourselves or a loved one. Palliative care is a new team-based medical specialty that focuses on providing relief from the symptoms and stress of a serious illness and improving quality of life for patients and families. This interactive session engaged leading experts to introduce palliative care and outline its benefits, and helped us examine the profound cultural obstacles to providing access this holistic approach to serious illness care.

It's been called "The Philanthropist's Dilemma" and the "Now or Forever" question: Do I spend down or form a foundation in perpetuity?

This question of course comes with many others: is this really a binary decision? How should I find my own path? How do I take into account the size of my giving, my philanthropic strategy, my co-decision makers and my life plans?

Join us in conversation with Peter Smitham, Chair of Atlantic Philanthropies, to learn how philanthropists can approach decision-making around whether to spend down or to give in perpetuity. The session will last 60 minutes.

Peter Smitham was a founder of Permira (formerly Schroder Ventures), a global private equity firm where he fulfilled different roles for 30 years until 2015, including managing partner and chairman. Previously he had worked in the electronics industry, including a successful start-up in the 1970s. In 2000 Peter decided to “go plural” and include strategic philanthropy, social impact investing and emerging market private equity to his developed market private equity career with Permira. Since then he has served on the boards of MSI Reproductive Choices (formerly Marie Stopes), New Philanthropy Capital, and Population Services International. In 2004 he joined the Board of Atlantic Philanthropies - a multibillion-dollar organisation with a limited life spend down philosophy created and funded by Chuck Feeney. Peter served as the Board Chair of Atlantic Philanthropies from 2011-2020. In 2004 Peter and wife Lynne founded their family foundation, The Kiawah Trust, which focuses on improving the lives of disadvantaged adolescent girls in India.