5 things I heard at the Skoll World Forum

Last week, I hopped on a train from my home a little north of London and headed up to Oxford for four days at the annual Skoll World Forum, a melting pot for the nonprofit and social enterprise sectors that sprawls out of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, where it’s officially held, and into the surrounding pubs and conference rooms. Skoll is not a conference about the established world order in development. I didn’t encounter any delegates from any of the big bilateral funders such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.K.’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. I met only one delegate from any U.N. agency and only one from any of the large established international nongovernmental organizations. This was a conference for the people trying to change the order — those closer to the community than the system. The 1,500 official delegates are outnumbered by those who have come without tickets to chat to one another on the edges of the conference. Events inside the main hall were outnumbered by the official side events, and those events in turn are outnumbered by the unofficial side events. It’s fueled by philanthropy, and many of the most in-demand delegates are donors. But it’s not the big foundations which dominate, so much as small, smart, innovative donors — first-generation wealthy, family foundations, or venture philanthropists finding different ways to give. But most of the attendees are what the forum terms “doers,” a loose term that captures a whole range of people doing different things, but most commonly means nonprofit leaders and founders. More than anything, the forum is about networking. Everyone is there because everyone else is there; they’ve come to build alliances, make connections, and share ideas. Raising money is certainly a big part of, as is strengthening connections with existing funders, but many said they just wanted to be in the presence of their peers. So what was everyone chatting about? Everyone has a different Skoll, but here are five things that I personally heard. 1. MacKenzie Scott is setting a trend According to an unscientific sample of social leaders I spoke to, there are three things that they want to see change in the funding infrastructure: less money and time wasted on applications and reporting; longer term grants; and more unrestricted money. It’s a well-researched fact that nonprofits will take a small amount of unrestricted money over a larger sum of restricted cash, but I was surprised when one leader told me he’d hand back anything less than $1 million to get $100,000 of unrestricted funds. He told me he was fed up with what he called “bad money” — money which tells you what to do, which requires so much from you in compliance and reporting that it’s not really worth taking. Some of this cash was so arduous, he said, that he had started to turn it down. Nor was he alone. Another nonprofit leader spoke up in a session about how, for the first time in her life, she and her colleagues had gotten so fed up with a donor’s requirements that they had actually given the money back. The strange thing is that after everyone knowing for a decade what good funding looked like, and almost no one doing it, many funders at Skoll seemed to be actually shifting gears — unrestricting funding, moving to a trust-based model. And it was surprising how many of them said they’d been shaken into action by MacKenzie Scott. One other thing seems to be driving this trend, as well — the rise of the philanthropic adviser. Scott famously relied on the Bridgespan Group to find her grantees. More than one funder I chatted with said that they no longer took applications and were increasingly reliant on expert partners to bring them the right organizations to fund, while a philanthropic adviser told me that her business had grown even in the last few years. I was also told that we’re seeing a shift away from starting new foundations and toward donor advised funds. More to come on that. 2. The social sector speaks its own language Skoll is full of shibboleths — terms that everyone at the conference understands, but which are totally incomprehensible to the majority of the population. And that would be fine if we were only talking to each other. Delegates could get on with elevating and centering and systems changing to their hearts’ content. But what about when this language gets in the way when talking to the wider world — the public, the press, politicians? That was the premise of a discussion I had with a group convened by Jeroo Billimoria of Catalyst 2030, a movement for social entrepreneurs that has formed links between the nonprofit sector and a number of governments. Billimoria is working on ways to stop these parties talking past each other. 3. Co-creation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be Co-creation — where donors work with local entities to build solutions that communities want — is all the rage with funders right now. In theory, it sounds like a good idea for big agencies to work with local groups to inform funding decisions. But the local groups aren’t necessarily all that keen. One delegate described to me the difficulties of engaging with large funders: She had to take time away from the day to day for the process, and it was a struggle to get public officials from another country to understand what local people wanted and how to deliver it. Too frequently, she said, that time-consuming process ended with the funder eventually opting to do exactly what they had planned to do all along. Plus, she said, co-creation, by its nature, involved making something new — something jointly designed by the funder and the community — when most of the time, nonprofits already knew what they wanted and were hoping to just get the money to do it. Sometimes though funders do listen. Another delegate told me a story about when he’d been working in Africa and a funder offered to build the local villages a church. But in this case, he was able to go back and say that the locals would prefer to build something slightly less sacred. In this case, the funder listened and the villagers got what they wanted: a soccer pitch. 4. Land rights are a big deal One item that repeatedly crossed my path was the ownership of land. In rural Africa, and in many other places around the world, it’s rare to have the title deed for the land you and your community own. And this has all sorts of implications. First, it prevents communities from borrowing money because farmers can’t prove they own the asset that they’d like to borrow against. That severely limits access to capital for small landholders, which prevents them from making the most of the assets they have. Second, it makes it easy for the government to take land away — an issue which recently gripped Madagascar, as chronicled by the International Land Coalition. That particularly threatens the rights of Indigenous people, whose land is often craved by those looking to exploit its natural resources, which has its own implications for the battle against climate change. 5. The women’s rights movement has a new symbol George Clooney — yes, the movie star — was the star attraction of the final day of Skoll. Tired delegates, completely networked out, filed into the New Theatre 10 minutes down the road from the Saïd, to listen to the Oscar-winner and his wife Amal, a star human rights lawyer, talk about their Clooney Foundation for Social Justice. “My wife’s a badass,” the movie star told an audience Friday afternoon. “She puts Isis on trial.” Another badass to take the stage was Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland: gentle, amused, and clearly someone you would never, ever want to pick a fight with. It was Robinson who led the way in publicizing a symbol that was everywhere at Skoll: the dandelion. It’s a symbol of women’s rights, she said, because it takes root everywhere, it’s hard to get rid of, and it spreads on the wind. It certainly spread — and took root — at Skoll, with dandelion brooches appearing on lapels with increasing frequency as the conference progressed. Robinson had a less floral message for the conference too, which was that the United Nations, and the global governance structure, are not doing well. Many speakers talked about the threat posed to democracy around the world by the gradual closing of civil space. And much was made of the fact that there are more violent conflicts across the world than at any time since World War II. Increasingly, aid work is now directed at victims of man-made conflict, when a quarter of a century ago it would likely have been mostly directed at victims of natural disasters. The United Nations has become a vast humanitarian relief organization – something it was not intended to be. Robinson, who is also a former U.N. high commissioner for human rights, shared a stage with Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, who held the same job almost two decades later. One of their biggest shared grievances was with the U.N. Security Council and with the amount of power concentrated in the hands of its permanent members, who are largely not talking to each other at the moment. Robinson called it a weak and devious institution, while Al Hussein called it morally inconsistent. Too many countries, said Robinson — obviously with an eye to the United States and the big nations of Northern Europe — are espousing one set of values while displaying different ones. But she refrained from being downhearted. A few key changes in a few governments, she said, and everything could change.