I spent the last three days in New York City attending the Social Impact Exchange’s inaugural conference on scaling. The theme was “Taking social innovation to scale” and boasted an impressive line-up of speakers and participants, including Robert Steel, Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, Judith Rodin, Nancy Roob, and David Gergen. Over the next few days, I’ll be jotting down my impressions from the conference, specifically as they relate to scaling innovation in global health. Let me start here: the initial panel of the conference opened with Melissa Berman of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors stating that our philanthropic infrastructure is “built for individual rather than collective action.” She asserted that we will need to “tear up the system as it is” in order to create the collaboration necessary to achieve scale.
I found it a timely remark, given that Gates and Buffet were busy working on Day #2 of their billionaire pledge drive. Is this truly the 2nd “Golden Age” of philanthropy, as many at this conference were proclaiming?
