Last October, my academic advisor nonchalantly told me that the University of Oregon had some funding to send me to a philanthropy conference in Kuala Lumpur and asked if I wanted to go; I did not have to think long before replying with an enthusiastic “yes”. Being relatively new to the PhD world (in my first year of study), opportunities like these do not feel normal – and I hope I never lose sight of how magical it is to fly across the world to meet thousands of likeminded people.  

So, I began my journey at the AVPN Global Conference. On the first day, I honestly felt a bit conflicted: on one hand, part of me wondered what the aggregate costs in hotels, production, registration fees, flights (not to mention energy consumption) for the conference would amount to, and whether channeling those resources towards nonprofit beneficiaries would be a better way to ‘put our money where our mouth is’; and, at the same time, I also recognize that in-person convening allows for community-building in a way that is not otherwise possible. Rather than letting that cynicism taint my experience of the conference, I tried to push myself to engage deeper, seeking conversations that were concrete and substantive rather than performative. In that spirit, here are three resonant takeaways I’ll carry with me after the conference:  

1. Move beyond “grantees” to “partners”. One way to undo the giver/receiver paradigm is to move to a trust-based model of equal partnership. For example, the Resourcing Refugee Leadership Initiative (housed within the nonprofit Asylum Access) is the first global fund for refugees, by refugees. Part of Asylum Access’ mission is power-shifting, so that those who have historically had less power are architects and decision-makers in every part of a funding/program cycle. 

1. Include beneficiaries in impact measurement and management (IMM). Nicholas Khaw, Head of Research at Khazanah Nasional Berhad (and one of the panelists in the IMM session), made a salient point: If a social enterprise startup claims to make smallholder farmers more productive, but then when you talk to the farmers, it turns out none of them use the app and they all use WhatsApp instead – we see IMM to be self-aggrandizing and dishonest. We can avoid this trap by including beneficiaries in designing IMM, so that what we’re measuring is useful to them. To do this, we need to corroborate multiple standardized frameworks (IRIS+, IMP5, etc.), as well as incorporate qualitative (not just quantitative) data from end stakeholders. As stated by the session moderator, Gayle Peterson, who leads Oxford’s Impact Investing and Social Finance programs, “data begins by talking to people.”  

1. Move from a GDP-focused economy to an impact economy. Tom Hall, Global Head of Social Impact and Philanthropy Services at the UBS Optimus Foundation, made a compelling case that philanthropy–on its own–will not solve the world’s problems. To illustrate this point, the global investment market outsizes philanthropy significantly; therefore, investable pathways into social impact can make a difference. For example, the foundation is using a blended finance model to send more lower-income students to college; philanthropists assume risk so that investors come in at lower returns, providing an income-share agreement whereby 10,000 students attend university who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to (and contribute substantially to the economy over a lifetime). Hall’s other recommendations included more randomized control trials for education (with the same rigor we’d expect for other things like vaccines), and more outcomes contracts (partnerships where governments pay for impact outcomes with a high standard of evidence) – encouraging more efficient public spending.  

Joe Wheeler, Doctoral student at the University of Oregon and founding consultant at Impact First