SPEAKER_03 0:37

Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, Rodri Davis, and this week we are talking about risk success and failure in the context of international development and charities working globally. And I'm joined by three guests. I'm joined by Sarah Jeffrey, who is from the VTOL Foundation, where she is in charge of their health portfolio. And she's also the chairperson of a thing called the Risk Pool Fund, which you'll hear plenty more about in this episode of the program. I'm also joined by Victoria Taylor, who is the executive director of the Risk Pool Fund, and by Lonnie Hackett, who is the founder and CEO of Healthy Learners, a not-for-profit organization based in Zambia, which trains teachers to have the expertise to act as health workers, so to bring that expertise into the school environment. And Healthy Learners is a recipient of funding from the Risk Ball fund, as you'll hear. So bringing the perspective of a grantee organization. So we've got kind of both sides of things, which I think is really interesting. And I sat down with Sarah and Victoria and Lonnie about a month or so ago. We had a really interesting, wide-ranging conversation. So we talked about what the Risk Ball fund is, because obviously that's a thing that they've all got in common. And about why it adopted an insurance model and what the sort of what the problem is that it's trying to solve and why, and why that insurance model was felt to be the best way of doing things. And we covered things like whether it's you know the speed of response and the fact that they're able to get money out quicker, perhaps, than an individual funder might be in similar circumstances, or whether it's more about the dynamics of the relationship between funders and grantees, where grantees may be quite reluctant to say that something had unexpectedly gone wrong for fear of uh kind of disappointing their funder or imperiling future funding that they might have. And that took us on to, I think, a really interesting conversation about a wider understanding of what the relationship between risk and failure and success is in the context of international development, but I think also sort of more broadly in the context of philanthropy and nonprofits, and where there actually, you know, there are distinctions to be made between potentially sort of good types of failure, so failures that come from taking necessary risks in order to try new things or to innovate, and then bad failures that um might be ones that you know can and should have been foreseen and come from sort of organizational or individual error. And then, of course, there are the sort of unforeseen external uh circumstances that maybe we can never do away with entirely, and so there's always going to be a need to deal with those. Um, we also talked about some of the specifics of the model the risk pool fund uh adopts, um, particularly the external review panel that it operates, where organizations that are kind of grand uh potential grantees or are operating on the ground uh NGOs are given a role in sort of anonymously making the decisions about whether or not um uh monies are paid out through the the risk pool fund. So there's a kind of participatory element to some extent. Um we then talked about what the the aim is longer term. Is the aim just to kind of highlight this issue and therefore get behaviour amongst funders to change so that you know essentially this something like the risk pool fund is not uh actually necessary in future, or is it to expand the model itself or to get others to potentially replicate it elsewhere? Um and then we talked a bit about the particular impact that the recent um dismantling of uh USAID and the sort of knock-on effects that that has had on organizations on the ground, but also the kind of follow-on that we've seen from other governments who are kind of reducing aid uh spending commitments, what impact that might have on international uh development organizations and NGOs operating in various places around the world, but also on the whole question of sort of risk within that context. So without further ado, let's get into the conversation. Um I really enjoyed this one, so I'm hoping uh that you very much will too. Uh and then I will be back at the end for the usual little bit of housekeeping. Okay, great. Well, I'm here with Sarah Jeffrey from VTOL Foundation, uh, Victoria Taylor from the Risk Pool Fund, and Lonnie Hackett from Healthy Learners. Hi to all of you. Hi. Hey everyone. Hi, great to have you on the podcast. Um, so yeah, really interested to talk about this. It's a really interesting model, I think, what the Risk Pool Fund does. Maybe the best place to start, Sarah, is if you're able to say a bit about what the Risk Bull Fund actually is, how it came about and sort of how it works.

SPEAKER_04 5:28

Um, sure. So the Risk Pool Fund essentially was an idea that was crafted in 2018 and was a collaboration between four kind of funding organizations, Elena Crook Foundation, CRI Foundation, Open Road Alliance, and Beetle Foundation. And we wanted to use the flexibility that we had as funders to test an approach to kind of mitigating unexpected challenges that we knew our partners were facing with implementation and that we knew would threaten the impact of the original projects. Um, and so we kind of came together and developed the RISP pool. Originally, it was focused on supporting maternal child health and nutrition programs in sub-Saharan Africa and has since grown sort of seven years later in 2025 to supporting multi-kind of sector programming across uh low and middle income countries globally. We we established it because we wanted to um we wanted to demonstrate and communicate better that even proven implement oh sorry, we wanted to um demonstrate that even proven interventions can encounter unforeseen challenges. It's no one's fault, it happens, these programs operate in really difficult, unpredictable contexts, but the burden of mitigating the risk and the burden of addressing these challenges is always kind of sat at the feet of the implementers, and funders don't take as much responsibility as they could to support implementing partners to address the obstacles as they happen. I think what we all collectively realize is that we hear about the challenges our partners face in a written report six months later or nine months later, we rarely hear about these challenges our partners face in real time when there's an opportunity to help them address them and kind of pivot away from the challenge and protect the impact of the program that we're supporting. So we developed an insurance model and we wanted to test the hypothesis that if we pulled the risk and if we developed a fast, flexible, non-judgmental way to support partners to access funding to address discreetly unexpected challenges that met specific criteria that we would be able to protect impact. Um, and and in 2023, after five years of working, we tested our original hypothesis. So, our original hypothesis was based on research that Open Road Alliance did in 2018, which said we've interviewed over a hundred implementers and funders, uh, and we can confidently say that one in five projects will experience an unexpected challenge during implementation. But many of them won't tell their funders. And they won't tell their funders because they fear reputational risk, they fear it jeopardizes future funding opportunities, and so they will try to address the challenge internally and kind of suffer the consequences of that. Uh in so in 2025, when we did the research again, we wanted to check that that hypothesis held true, you know, the world was different, COVID had happened, um uh the decolonization of AIDS conversation had kind of really progressed. Might that mean that organizations were able to have conversations differently with funders? Uh, and it turns out the answer is no. Uh, it turns out that that kind of one in five hypothesis was holding true with the um partners that we interviewed. It turns out that funders still had a different perception of risk to the partners that they worked with, and there were different perceptions about how comfortable implementers felt talking to funders about it and kind of getting some support. So I think when we first started out, you know, we uh the first the first year we did it, we were supporting 20 organizations and 20 nominated projects across four funders, and now we're supporting in 2025 120 projects who are on the roster. So I think we are increasingly competent that we've got more and more data points. Um yeah, and I think that I think as a participating funder uh in the risk pool, you kind of play a crucial role in supporting and protecting your investment. So it's one part very much about supporting implementers to be able to do the job that they want to do and to not feel that they can't communicate when challenges are happening, but also really we invested in it because we wanted to protect impact. Like we fund the projects we fund because we care about the community that's being served, and we care about supporting the partners who are doing that difficult work to do it as best they can, and this was a way of doing that. Um the way it works is that participating funders you contribute fifteen thousand dollars per year for each nominated project and through the mechanism of the risk pool fund, those projects can apply discreetly, confidentially, which is critical, to um Vicky, who I'm sitting with, the executive director of the Risk Pool Fund, to explore whether the discrete and unexpected challenge that they're experiencing kind of meets the criteria of the risk pool fund. Um and they can be awarded up to $50,000 either in a grant or in a kind of uh interest-free bridging loan.

SPEAKER_03 11:09

Yeah, really interesting. And I I want to come to Lonnie in a second to get the perspective of um someone leading an organization on the grantee side, but just wanted to check, Victoria, if there's anything you wanted to add that you thought was kind of particularly important about the model itself.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

Yeah, I think what's really interesting about the model is the speed in which we can provide that loan or that grant. So we aim to, from the moment we get contacted to when the money hits the account, to do it in two weeks, but we have had money out the door in as little as 28 hours in emergency situations. And the reason we can do that is that all of these organizations are pre-vetted by the nominating funder, they've been through, for example, Vittle, CRI's due diligence process. So my role and the role of my independent panel that assess each application is not to establish whether the original project or the original program is good, bad, or whatever. It's to say is the problem that they are currently experiencing unexpected? And can the solution that they are proposing completely resolve the problem for less than $50,000? Because our maximum amount is $50,000. Once those criteria have been met, then it's just a case of awarding the grant and getting the money out the door. And I think that's fairly unique because with all the best will in the world, most funders can't, they work within their own organizational guardrails and they can't move that quickly. And I think another unique and really interesting part of the fund is that it is completely separate from the funders that nominate organizations. They don't know, Sarah won't know if one of her organizations has applied and received a grant. It's kept entirely confidential. And the award itself is made by an external review panel. So we have a pool of 60 external reviewers. These are all individuals with experience in low and middle income countries, in the sectors we work. 50% of them are actually based in the geographies we serve, and they make a judgment. So three will sit and look at every single application and they will say, does it meet the criteria? Is the solution you know going to work? Can it be done within within the time frame? And ultimately it's it's their guidance that we follow. So it's that speed with which they work, but also that separation from the original funder, which I think is fairly unique.

SPEAKER_03 13:48

Yeah, that's really helpful. And there's a few things I think in there it'd be good to sort of come back to and unpick a little bit. But Lonnie, I'd really love to hear from you from the perspective you've got of, as I say, as a grantee organization that has been part of the Risk Pool Fund. How did that come about in your case and sort of how have you found the process and you know why has this particular structure been useful to you in terms of the work that you do?

SPEAKER_01 14:09

Yeah, thank you. And Sarah and Vicky was really great learning a little bit more about the context and kind of the history behind the risk pool fund. Sarah, I must say I'm a little bit surprised that the study found only one in five organizations experience some type of uh unexpected event. Just from, I think, our experience at Healthy Learners, just with how dynamic maybe this is just over the past several years. Um, but it's certainly post-COVID, you know, it just feels like it's hard to imagine 12 months going by without some sort of kind of external shock that can disrupt a project. Um, I know speaking for ourselves, we've been fortunate to be able to partner with the Risk Pool Fund on multiple occasions over the last five years in a variety of circumstances. And, you know, again, just speaking to kind of how dynamic uh all of our work can be. We had a once in a hundred year drought, and that resulted in us not having electricity for up to 20 hours a day, sometimes multiple days in a row. That can be really disruptive for any organization or program. Um for us in particular, I think the first priority is all of our partner schools who run a school health program rely on tablets and clinical decision support system to be able to assess and provide care to students. We wanted to make sure that those didn't go offline because that could significantly disrupt the impact that we have. And the Risk Pool Fund was we were able to work with Vicky and the team and within, I believe, a week, week and a half, receive a grant to begin uh uh outfitting our health rooms at the schools with uh mini solar uh solar powered systems. Um, we also in the process realized that was more efficient than connecting them to the grid, and that has since become the core part of our model. Um, so it also kind of facing that challenge spurred some innovation on our side as well. Um, with experienced challenges with public health emergencies, Zambia had one of its worst cholera outbreaks a year and a half ago that it's had in the last 10, 20 years. Um, and that creates a lot of fear of our partners who are working in the health sector. Um, so to be able to provide orientations, training, extra equipment, um, not just to respond to the cholera outbreak per se, but to make sure the partners who are providing a variety of services are able to continue to do that and to make sure that our partners on the ground feel like they're being supported by us and by our government partners. And um, you know, our government partners oftentimes have the best of will, but big government agencies and bureaucracies take time. And in an emergency, time is what you don't have. And so that's where I feel like organizations with the support of groups like the Risk Pool Fund can really step in and help with. And then most recently was USAID, uh, where uh we as health learners uh had an award terminated that was for a randomized control trial, which is also a very rigid, time-bound process that you really don't want to, as best you can, have your data collection activities disrupted. And we found ourselves in this place where we had unexpectedly lost our grant from USAID, um, you know, as many organizations have experienced over the past couple of months. Um, another grant that we had received from the UK Medical Research Council, um, which was going towards midline and endline, but could have potentially been repurposed to at least been a stopgap, likely those funds won't be received for three or four months. And within a week, the RISP pool fund was able to help provide uh support so that we were able to continue with uh kind of core data collection activities without disruption. And so all three of those examples are very different. Um, one's public health crisis, one's a you know result of kind of climate change and uh extreme weather, and the third is around external funder disruptions. Um, but all three of those are really important for our team to be able to respond. And what I guess I'd just add as well, and I think this can kind of dovetail into broader discussions too, is kind of the conversations around grantees and funders sharing um risks or concerns or threats. And I think trust is fundamental. But even beyond trust, I think many organizations sometimes it's kind of making the implicit explicit. I think implicitly funders want to know early when there's a challenge. But I think to a lot of grantees, they want to be able to show how they've solved the challenge. And I know oftentimes, you know, for us, like the minimum is if if there's a challenge that we feel is going to disrupt our impact, as soon as we're confident that's gonna impact our ability to deliver, we want to make sure all of our funders are aware of that. But in that first, you know, phase when you're trying to solve it and you still have the confidence you're going to be able to, I think you're really focused internally and how you can do that. And you don't necessarily want to cause concerns with your partners if you still feel that this is something you could do internally. And I think what's really great about the Riscool Fund is they're like, hey, we might actually be able to help increase the probability that you can solve that challenge before it actually disrupts your ability to deliver on the impact to your project. I think making that explicit to partners is is is uh yeah, is is you know really kind of strengthens that trust-based relationship, but also, you know, I don't think necessarily always is kind of broadly understood by by grantees.

SPEAKER_03 19:11

Yeah, it's really interesting. I was going to ask um uh Sarah and Vicky on that because I think one of the things that struck me looking at the model of the risk pool fund is that there's all kinds of different aspects. And you mentioned there, Lonnie, the the speed of it is a really important one. But that point about being actually having to highlight and be explicit about what some of the risks are, you can understand why there is reticence from the point of view of a grantee sometimes to do that in their individual relationship with a funder. In the the research that you've done looking at the the fund, have you found that that is something that you sort of consistently see being highlighted? That actually this can't always happen on an individual funder grantee basis because there is that that kind of reticence about you know opening up about some of these risks ahead of time or once they've happened, because they want to kind of deal with them and not damage that relationship?

SPEAKER_04 19:58

Um, I think from from my perspective, yes. Um I think it's really difficult to create a laundry list of things that could go wrong possibly over a three-year period. And the longer your list gets, the more you risk looking like you're unable to deliver the program, I think. And the more you risk being caught out if there's an eventuality that wasn't on a really long, kind of detailed list. And given the world is unpredictable, that's really unfair, right? So I think there are kind of two reasons for why it just doesn't work. For uh to expect that implementing partners can can share, can identify everything that could possibly go wrong if we accept that the world is unpredictable, nor should they kind of share all of the things that go wrong when we know that there's biases that are held by funders where there's kind of a, you know, I think a fairly clear judgment on an organization's ability to deliver, kind of based on how they have communicated all the things that could go wrong, because it gives an impression that you can't manage. So I think it's um you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 21:14

And I think that really came through in the research that we did at the end of 2023, 2020, beginning of 2024. You know, there are different types of risks. There are internal and external, if you like. And I think external risks tend to be global, and your your funder often knows about them. So, for example, the current situation with USAID or COVID in the past, and they tend to be more open to discussions around those things because they know about them. Um, and they perceive those to be completely out of your control. You can't affect a global pandemic. Internal risks are overwhelmingly reported by those that we did the research with. Being creating a greater impact on their on their program. But those are the things that they are less likely to tell their funder about because there is this perception that they will be seen as not doing their jobs properly or not having thought of something. But also they're from a funder's perspective, they're less likely to know about those. They are less likely to hear when a piece of equipment, you know, key piece of equipment breaks or is held up by a supplier or something like that. They're less likely to know when a finance director passes away in the middle of a massive financial um restructuring, which is an actual example, and they needed to bring in a consultant while they while they hired a new finance director to keep the ship afloat. You know, your funder is less likely to know about that in the moment. They, as Sarah said at the beginning, they might know about it in nine months' time at the reporting cycle. And so I think there is definitely a difference between internal and external. And I think funders and implementers view the degree of impact as different of those two. And there's definitely a mismatch there.

SPEAKER_03 23:08

And is that one of the places where the sort of the collectivization of the risk by having that pool model really helps? Because it sort of strikes me that for an individual grantee organization to list a big, you know, long list of things that might potentially go wrong inevitably probably does look quite bad and will give you know produce uncertainty in the funder. Whereas if you're generalizing that across a larger pool of organizations, it probably doesn't seem quite as alarming. You know, if there's a long list of things that might go wrong across a large group of organizations, it's probably easier for funders to say, yes, that seems reasonable and we're kind of happy to accept that those are the sorts of risks that might happen. Is that sort of part of the theory behind the pooling approach?

SPEAKER_04 23:47

Uh yeah, no, I think that's fair. I think it is. I I think at the beginning when we very first started the the risk pool, we didn't know what was going to happen, right? We didn't and and we tried to, you know, we we tried to explore how we could skew the results. So one funder may have only included kind of local organizations, one funder may have included more organizations in kind of complex emergencies kind of contexts. Um one funder may have included more kind of big research programs where you know things can go wrong just because of the scale of the endeavor. And because we were very flexible, I think, and very kind of honest as a collaboration of four anchor funders, we kind of really experimented with that. And then we learn, and then that learning has been kind of reinforced the bigger the like sample size has got, that there is no skew that kind of collective, you know, uh like collectivizing the risk and pooling the risk kind of makes sense for all of our learning because we're all funding different things and different things kind of go wrong in different contexts. Some things are really common across all of the nominated projects, some things look quite different, and we originally wanted to develop the risk pool fund both to protect impact, both to kind of recognize that as individual funders we couldn't respond as quickly, even if we had a trust-based relationship that we believed held true, even if we were committed to being as flexible as we could, we still couldn't respond as quickly as we might do because the majority of us were very small teams. Um, so kind of intention versus ability to actually deliver was uh was was quite different. And we wanted to learn, really. I think we were it was a kind of a learning collaborative that was how can we test the assumptions that we have about how best we can support our partners, and so that collectivization really supported that, as well as supporting um partners to kind of to address the unforeseen challenges, to be honest. And I think now as we talk to new potential funders to consider adopting some of the practices of the RISCPO fund, doesn't mean joining the RISPL fund or the RISPL fund becoming huge. That's not really a big ambition, but just thinking about how to adopt some of the practices. It's more comfortable and it kind of de-risks it to have a group of kind of funders that you are either working with directly or kind of using the evidence they have um generated.

SPEAKER_00 26:23

And and I think also just really practically, you're pooling the back office costs, you're sharing the back office costs, which are not high. I mean, our our running costs are not high at all, but we do pay our external review panel, that's a very important principle for us. These are experts in their field and they should be, you know, remunerated for their time and their skill. And so there is a cost involved. And if you're splitting that across three funders, it it makes it more affordable for everybody, or four funders, or five funders. And to go back to Lonnie's original point that he made about being surprised that it was one in five organizations that experienced a problem. I mean, Lonnie, you sort of hit the nail on the head when we redid the research last year. We found 100% of organizations that we interviewed had at some time experienced some sort of obstacle. And our research and our experience of the last eight years show that one in four of our rusted organizations will require help in any given year. Um and that's interesting that that's changed, that that's kind of come up from our work.

SPEAKER_04 27:30

And I think that's the difference, isn't it? It's that there is everyday obstacles and challenges that everyone faces all the time, in one form or another, really, to be fair. And then there are the proportion of those obstacles that become really significant and actually kind of threaten to derail impact rather than be inconvenienced and quite stressful for a short period of time, but don't really threaten the work and the ability to deliver the quality of the work that a project was delivering before.

SPEAKER_03 28:01

And I was gonna ask Lonnie, because um, you know, there's a lot of conversation, I think, in the wider world of philanthropy at the moment about the whole idea of risk. Because I think there is this, you know, the strong argument that one of the unique values of philanthropy is that it can take risks and take risks of kinds that maybe the state and and private sector can't take. But often there's you know that there's a mismatch between that and then the understanding of what failure looks like in philanthropy and what's the difference between sort of good and bad failure and good and bad risk. When you're thinking about this and talking to funders, how do you try and make those distinctions between the sorts of risks that are are good risks in that you're doing something difficult or innovative and therefore it might not work out, and some of the those risks that maybe are less good risks in that they, you know, they could have been foreseen and perhaps kind of prevented, and then that sort of whole bunch of unforeseeable external risks that you just have to be aware of.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

No, I I think that's a great question. And and it actually, I was having a conversation with a partner a couple of weeks ago, and we were talking about the kind of optimal failure rate, which isn't zero, because if you never fail, it means you're not pushing yourselves enough. But when we think about risk, but definitely categorize it because at the end of the day, we're not producing widgets, we're providing services to real people. Um, for us, you know, helping support children have access to healthcare. And so are we talking about risk in terms of you know providing subpar services to our uh to the to the communities that we work with, um which could do significant harm. And there we feel we have you know a duty of care and a duty to do no harm first and foremost. So anytime we're talking about risk that'll be felt upon our our kind of partners in the community, we feel we have an obligation to do everything we can to minimize that to the best of our ability. And then a second risk might be around um, you know, taking on a more ambitious target, or, you know, for example, uh we work uh closely with the National Assembly, members of Parliament. Uh I think at first our our team was reticent because you know we work first and foremost with technocrats and our line ministries, and it felt risky to work with more political arms of the government. But at the end of the day, we saw that that was a critical arm to be able to get long-term funding to really institutionalize this within the government. And that risk was a risk we were taking on as an organization. It wasn't a risk that was going to be felt by the children, the schools, the communities that we serve. And so I think, you know, in general, we like to have a mantra of how can we learn quickly and how can we learn as inexpensively as possible. Um, and so taking on a healthy amount of risk to be able to do that. But first and foremost, you know, is putting that duty of care front and center and understanding that if the risk is on, you know, uh an individual beneficiary, in this case a child, our tolerance there is is you know as close to zero as we humanly possibly could could get. And so I do think it's important to kind of look at at risks in in different ways. And then in terms of um, you know, how we think as an organization around optimal risk in terms of strategy and and um and scale, I think too, it's you know, the I think that optimal failure rate to go back to that concept is going to be different for different organizations. When you're young and getting started, you're you're kind of like threshold for is probably fairly low because you're proving out your point for the first time and you're building that level of credibility. And so you may not be you know as confident in taking on more risk at that time. And you know, I think as you get larger and you've you can kind of diversify your risk in ways that you know allow you to take some bigger swings. And so, you know, for example, uh when we think about scale, whether it's in Zambia, moving to really remote rural areas where logistics are going to be challenging, where there's a lot of additional community norms, where the local government offices have less capacity, the probability of failure is higher there when we move into a partner community that's better resourced. Um, if that's the first community you're ever moving into, there's a higher chance that that failure could be more catastrophic in terms of your the organization's lifespan. As you get larger, I think it's important to push yourselves to you know really stretch to reach the communities that have the greatest need, even if it's going to be harder, it might take longer, and kind of keeping your partners and your funders along in that journey. So I think you know, we think about it from a few different angles. But I'd be curious what Sarah and Vicky, from their perspectives on the funder side, how that resonates.

SPEAKER_03 32:25

Yeah, absolutely. That whole question of sort of different types of risk and which are appropriate. Because as Lonnie says, I think it's a really good point. That idea that the optimal risk rate for philanthropic funders surely isn't zero. Otherwise, why would we all be here? So there m there must be some kind of risk taking that is inherent to the process, but it's about finding that that right balance.

SPEAKER_04 32:43

Yeah, no, I think it's a really great point to raise and a point for this discussion, to be honest. I think different funders have different risk appetites. And I think, you know, we talk about risk appetite, we talk about risk tolerance, and it's such a scale of understanding what that actually means. Um, I think we can do a better job of being clearer with our partners, but also with each other as funders. Um I think to to kind of like both of your points, I often have this conversation with with like our partners in the in the health portfolio in particular that I work on more closely with. If nothing changes in the three years that we're working on the program, something's wrong. Because there is an it's not about celebrating failure, or we can call it celebrating failure, it's just adaptation and things change and the operating environment changes in the three years that you've been working there. And so if none of if no nuance of any kind adapted with the way in which you're running the program, if I manage the health portfolio in the same way now as I did three years ago, and I use none of the learning that I've got in the last three years, I wouldn't be optimizing the way in which I might be trying to support the health portfolio in the three years moving forward. And I think that's the same for both sides of the table.

SPEAKER_00 34:01

Yeah, I would agree. I mean, I think what's interesting from the risk pool's point of view is that sometimes the volatility, the unpredictableness, the chaos that is the world we live in moves quicker than your project planning or your budgeting or your funder cycle. And so the point of the risk pool is to catch you when you fall, not because you you didn't plan, not because you aren't adapting, but because these things happen on different timelines at different speeds and and they can't be predicted. And so for us, the sort of underlying principle of everything we do is the unexpected nature of these obstacles. And I think Lani's example of the all of his examples really, but you know, for the most recent one, the RCT, you know, that grant was in place, that RCT has been running, he's told his funder, um, other funders that this is all going well. And then literally overnight things change. And you've got your midline activities due to happen at the end of the month, and you now don't have the money for them. And there is there is no world, there is no risk assessment tool or risk matrix that exists that would have allowed him and his team to predict that. And so that's when the risk pool comes in. It's not to stop people taking risks or to change the way that they do things, it's a safety net when the unpredictableness moves faster than their ability to plan and restructure.

SPEAKER_04 35:34

No, I was just gonna say, I think we've, you know, we've been talking about this internally within the risk pool collaboration for a long time now. I think um, you know, I think what the risk pool fund is trying to do fundamentally is just normalize risk, embrace risk, like recognize that it is a fact of life. If you're going to work in difficult contexts with problems that are really difficult to solve and need creative, flexible solutions, you've got to embrace the risk. Because you're then doing otherwise you're doing a disservice to the to the partners who are trying to collaborate with the communities they're working with because of everything we've already said, right? Around how kind of unpredictable the world is. And I think that is a really important component.

SPEAKER_00 36:20

It is, and I think what often happens is that funders will say to me, I don't need to buy into the risk pool because I give unrestricted funding, which we know is a small portion of the overall funding. Obviously, that is the sort of gold standard for many, that unrestricted multi-year grant. But what I say to them, and you know, and I think Lani, it'll be interesting to have your take on this, is your money can be unrestricted, it can be multi-year, it can be all that, all that good stuff. But money is still finite. And if you're given a hundred unrestricted dollars and your problem costs $150, you need to find that $50 somewhere else. It doesn't matter whether it's restricted or unrestricted, money still has boundaries. And I think um, if you're like a get out of jail free card for funders, is I give unrestricted funding. Um, unrestricted funding isn't a magic money tree. You still, it's still finite. And I, Lonnie, I wonder, you know, if if that resonates at all with you.

SPEAKER_01 37:22

Yeah, that definitely resonates. I'm still flushing out this thought, but I also feel like you know, there's there's still an opportunity cost, even if the money is unrestricted. That's money that in your budget was earmarked to go somewhere. I don't know a single organization that's like, I have the next three years for a scale-in plan fully funded. So you're creating a gap somewhere else. But I think what that also means is that you know, you can have these really big risks and challenges, and then you try to, you know, solve them as efficiently as you can, which is important, but perhaps a more robust approach would have minimized risk even more. And I think that's where the risk pool fund also comes in, is you have these really important kind of juncture points when um, you know, instead of us trying to do a kind of haphazard baseline data collection for the RCT, this allowed us to continue to proceed with the same level of rigor. And um, you know, that's something that I think would have been a uh like a uh it wouldn't have been a great trade-off. And I think the risk pool allows organizations kind of the ability to make those decisions to you know fully address situations without feeling kind of the weight of the trade-off of, well, that's a community that we're not going to be able to necessarily move into now, or we're now just not as confident that we're gonna be able to deliver on the commitments we had made.

SPEAKER_04 38:34

I think that also um touches on an aspect of the risk pool funds that we worked hard intentionally around, but we weren't quite sure if it was as useful to the nominated projects as we'd hoped. And again, the kind of slightly more richer research helped us identify that and be confident around that, which was the light touch approach. Like we were really intentional that the way in which a nominated project could apply to the risk pool fund was easy. It was low effort, it required less than an hour in order to kind of complete the paperwork. We had all the due diligence and compliance requirements covered because they were already funded by the uh by the kind of nominating funder. And the hypothesis was if we want to encourage rostered projects to access and apply to the risk pool, and if those rostered projects kind of trust the process and the confidentiality, and that's taken time, right? Because I think at the beginning, not every project really believed it was confidential, and the longer you're on the roster, the more you're like, oh, Vittel really have no idea that happened. Okay, like it's it does kind of hold true. If you're in the middle of a significant obstacle that is threatening impact, you are time poor. You are trying to address it. So having an onerous application process to support you finding a quick solution is counterintuitive. And when we asked and evaluated the actual kind of like functionality of the risk pool itself versus um speaking to kind of funders and implementers in the space more kind of widely as a different part of that 2023 research, we wanted to know what was working well and what we could improve on in terms of the kind of the risk pool uh operations. And I think time and time again, it was speed, absolutely, but it was also light touch. It was those two kind of magic components that made it really accessible and made it a resource that was helping rather than adding additional pressure.

SPEAKER_01 40:43

Yeah, I that definitely resonates with me. And I it was something I was thinking about earlier as we as we were chatting, just uh when you're in an emergency, what you don't have is a lot of time to write grants and work on applications. Because your first priority is how do we solve this challenge that's in front of us? And so a question I had from if this is something you looked at your research, I imagine kind of the ability, because again, when you're faced with an unexpected challenge, probably first is let's solve this, and second, let's communicate to our partners. And for smaller organizations, you don't have large communications team or you know, partnership teams, development teams who can necessarily have those two things run concurrently. And that creates a challenge as well. So I guess I'd be curious if in your research you've seen different responses from big versus small organizations and kind of alongside that local versus more global organizations. And also just for that to kind of reiterate how important it's you know, it's it's a process that once you have a clear understanding of what the solution is, within a few hours, you're able to have that application put together. And Vicky, I think you're part of that special sauce too, because I know our team has really appreciated working with you. And I think as well, being able to run by like, hey, we have this challenge, we think it might be a fit for the risk pool. What do you think? Is extremely helpful as well, having that open dialogue before we even start fully working on that application. And I think the more organizations have experience, because for the first two years the risk pool fund was open, I don't think healthy learners had applied. But then once we had gone through the process once, we realize like, oh wow, like all these pain points we experience, you know, many of these would be fits for this. I think that also and the just the kind of familiarity, the trust, and kind of understanding the process was quite helpful too. So I'd be curious if that's something you've experienced as well, that once organizations have more exposure to the risk pool fund, that that changes their level of engagement as well.

SPEAKER_04 42:30

I would just say, and I'll kind of defer to Vicki as well, but in the first two years of the Risk Pool Fund, we didn't have a uh we didn't have a kind of executive director and we didn't have an expert review panel, which is why I was kind of saying earlier, right? Like it was a real learning process for everybody who was involved in it to explore some of the assumptions we went into it with and just how to make it a bit more ship-shaped and fit for purpose. Um, and so yeah, like in the first two years, we didn't have that many applications. I think we had 18 applications in total and issued nine grant. It was really low. And part of the reason for that, I think, was that it was the funders who were judging the applications and making the kind of funding decision. Um, that was one thing. And I think that's really changed with the expert review panel and that just sort of separation. Uh, and I think that separation is is more formalized now than it's ever been because in January of this year, the kind of risk poll alliance was registered as a community impact organization. So now there's complete separation of kind of investor and um kind of governance. Um, but I also think that a strategy was kind of put into place from 2020 that was to really remind registered projects that the risk pool existed, right? Because it was an unusual, I think, concept and an unusual resource. And really understandably, when partners were in a pickle and were addressing or exploring how to address. An unexpected challenge, the RISC pool fund was not on their list of resources to kind of explore. And so, like, Vicky started um a system of like nudging every six weeks to try and remind folks that it was the opportunity was there to begin with.

SPEAKER_00 44:16

Yeah, um, I think there was this idea that if we build it, they will come. And that just didn't work because RISCPOL wasn't the first phone call that people made when they had a problem. And so I needed to find a way to make it be the top of the list. And what I was finding was when people were coming, there was often several weeks or even months between when the problem happened and when they they came. So from 2020 onwards, like like Sarah said, we every year in January, you get told you're on you're on the risk pool, you've been nominated, this is how it works. If you're new and you've not been nominated before, you have a conversation with me and the idea gets introduced. And then every six to eight weeks after that, you get a nudge email saying, remember, we're here, these are the types of things that you can apply for. And like Lonnie says, once you've been through it the first time and you've realized it's not onerous and and we will try and help you, and this is how the process works, it it moves up your list of, you know, who do I phone in a crisis? So it's no longer number 30, maybe it's number three now. And I think that's been really important. The separation's really important. Um, Lonnie, you asked a question about is there a difference between big organizations and small organizations? In the original sort of three years, we looked at this and we we couldn't find any difference. But the last couple of years, I've started to keep track of how long it takes people to come to the risk pool when they have a problem. And overwhelmingly, there are two factors that make you come sooner. If you've had funding before, you will come sooner. But the other factor is small organizations come quicker than big organizations. And I think, and this is just a theory that needs to be tested, but I think that's about their internal systems. You know, if we use your team as an example, Lani, you know, someone on your team can pop me an email and say, we've got this problem. And I can very quickly say, Yep, that that's it, go for it. I think if you're working in a big development team or big comms team, there's a lot of internal ranking, and that often takes longer. So that's the difference I've seen.

SPEAKER_03 46:36

And I'd just really like to pick up on um something about the the role of the expert review panel, because you mentioned it here a few times, but just to sort of be clear about who those people are, how the panel's been pulled together and what role they play. Are they representatives from organizations that are grantees within the Risk Ball Fund, or are they organizations that are representative of some of the different geographies and cause areas that you work in, but not necessarily organizations that themselves would ever be kind of applicants to the fund?

SPEAKER_00 47:05

The latter. So the 60 individuals that are currently on the panel represent the sort of technical areas where we have grants at the moment or have rusted organizations, so health, humanitarian, economic empowerment, and education. They all have um experience either as funders or implementers or technical experts in those areas and in the geographies that we serve. They range in their backgrounds, they range in their skills. They don't necessarily come from the organizations that we fund, and we do have a conflicts of interest approach, so they declare if they have any conflicts of interest. They are sourced quite widely from our network, as well as at the moment we're going through a recruitment process to get in even more experts. We have a really good way of covering all the languages, so we we can do applications in English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Portuguese. So we have found recently with some of our organizations that the application form itself is a barrier. So we now have the ability to do oral applications and have done that on a couple of occasions where it just doesn't make sense to make somebody in, for example, DRC with the M23 issues write an application. So let's have a phone call and we'll write the application for them. Um, and they they're a real interesting bunch, they're kept entirely anonymous. I know who all 60 are, and they may know who an individual is that they're reviewing an application with. But if Sarah does not know, the the board of the RISCO Alliance don't know, and Lonnie will never know anyone who reviewed his applications. But if I was to share a list, people would be surprised by the the people that are on there. It's something folk are really eager to do because it's interesting. Every application you get is different, and there's generally an excitement about being involved. They go through a training pro, like a webinar. We actually did one a couple of weeks ago where they all come together, we talk about what's expected of them, we show them an application form, um, they get an induction pack, and then they generally do probably five, but each person will do up to five applications a year. As I said before, we we pay for that as well.

SPEAKER_04 49:42

One of the um one of the things I think is quite good to hear everyone's opinion on, I guess, a bit is because often asked this question is what do we mean by an unexpected challenge, right? Like what unforeseen, unforeseen according to whom. And the longer we have worked with the wrist pool, the more grey we recognize there is in the in the kind of like challenges that the wrist pool looks to support. And again, that's where the expert review panel comes in, because we're not going to make the grey disappear. Interpreting the grey carries kind of inherent biases. Um the way in which we try to address that was to have A, that separation from the funders, um, B, to keep the expert review panel kind of confidential, both to the applicant who's having their application reviewed and to the funders, the funders, and then to have three of them. So three members of the expert review panel review every application and it's a majority vote. And so that I think there have I think there have been very few occasions, Vicki could probably speak to it better, where it has not been possible to kind of get to a resolution, and that was kind of by design. Um, I don't think it's happened.

SPEAKER_00 51:05

It's never happened. I mean, sometimes they do conditional reviews, so they'll say, um, we think overall this is a good idea, but these elements don't fit, all these costs don't make sense, or you know, this is outside of the scope, so they can they can give conditional reviews and they're doing that more and more.

SPEAKER_04 51:25

By conditional reviews, do you mean that the ELP receives an application, they review the application, and they're like, This part of the application meets the criteria, this one-third does not, therefore, we recommend that we funded.

SPEAKER_00 51:39

Yes, they can do that, and they certainly do that, and they will also sometimes say, we will fund this, but we think other information is required. Or, for example, they might say, We're happy to give this loan, but we want proof that this funding is coming in, so, or we want to wait to see if X or Y happens before the grant goes out, so they can do both of those things, and they do.

SPEAKER_05 52:04

I could imagine. Um, if I just asked, can I ask Vicky a quick question?

SPEAKER_04 52:10

I could imagine uh that with the USA funding cuts, that some of the ELP members have really struggled with what is a discrete solution and what just really is not.

SPEAKER_00 52:22

No, it's a great question. And I think it's fair to say that because everything has been changing and moving and altering so much, we made the decision with the board very early on, probably on the 29th of January or something like that, that we weren't going to change the criteria for the risk pool. That the risk pool would remain exactly as it has always been, there to address unexpected obstacles with a discrete and lasting solution. Um, and that has meant that applications have been deemed ineligible because someone has applied because their USAID funding has been paused, which was the initial issue, with the understanding that their funding would come back on. Well, the the panel would say, we we don't know, we don't have a guarantee that that funding's gonna come back on, so that's not a discrete solution. Or they've had their funding cut, and the 50,000 that we're giving them isn't gonna bridge the one million gap of the USAID funding. So, you know, that there is more ineligibility, if you like, at the moment than we've ever had before. And sometimes that's happened within a few days. An application's been approved because they had a stop work order, then they had a waiver, um, and then their contract was cancelled, so everything's been reversed. So it's been um a movable feast.

SPEAKER_03 53:45

That's really interesting. So I mean slightly do my job for me there, which is very nice. I know benefit. But um I did I very much wanted to ask because obviously the context at the moment around the cuts to USAID, I think, is you know, clearly the question of risk in the context of philanthropy, and particularly sort of philanthropy and international development, is is suddenly just changed. You know, so many things are up in the air. And I'd just be really interested to hear Lonnie's um perspective as well. Because I know you mentioned that some of your work had been affected by those cuts to USAID, but just in terms of what you're seeing and what your sense is of how it's going to affect you know, you and organizations like you going forward in terms of those questions of risk and the challenges it's gonna pose.

SPEAKER_01 54:25

Yeah, and and I wish I had all the answers to that question. I certainly don't, but can kind of share where you know our where the conversation, the some of the conversations we're having internally with our partners in in terms of what we're seeing on the ground. You know, we operated in Zambia, our entire team, sounds two, three people are based here in Zambia. We're you know a Zambian organization, and the NGO sector here has really been hit extraordinarily hard by this. Um, there are a lot of big international NGOs that operate, and PEPFAR funding, so USAID funding, CDC funding, made up the vast majority of support to those organizations. And so I think you know, we have many peers and friends that were directly impacted far more significantly than we were. And I think what we're trying to wrap our head around is what does this mean for kind of the international development sector more broadly? Um, because I think this growing consensus that aid towards these groups, bilateral aid, multilateral aid, is going to look different going forward than I think we would have anticipated a few months ago. And how that plays out, I don't think anyone knows exactly but I think there's a general expectation that that kind of the amount of support coming directly from bilateral funders is likely to reduce significantly. And I think, you know, as as one of uh, as Vicky, you you uh put it in one of our calls, is there's there's really two waves that we're anticipating. And this the first one is the direct impact this is having on NGOs. The second one is going to be the fact that governments rely on this funding for large portions of, uh, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, large portions of their health budgets, uh, you know, anywhere from 10, 20% up to 40, 50% of health budgets, ministry of health budgets come from uh, you know, groups like USAID. And so what does this mean for the systems and the structures that organizations are supporting, are strengthening that the work that we're doing is building upon. And it's it's hard to anticipate that. I think you know it's gonna vary country to country, and depending on the resources that are available, the governance and priorities that that country is able to, or that that country makes. And what I would say the general sense that we have is there's just much more uncertainty, not just like on direct funding for us as an organization. I think there we have more clarity, but more around what this is gonna mean for the sectors that we're operating within for us, that's health and and education. And so it means when we make projections in terms of costs that we were very confident the government were gonna take, you know, our 95% confidence interval became a little bit wider because you know, there's there's there's more uncertainty there. And so um, I think we're just kind of pricing in in terms of like our budgets and whatnot, uh, more uncertainty that we may need to step into some areas that perhaps we weren't anticipating before and things that um we were anticipating to be able to kind of transition away from. We might have to hold on for a little bit longer. And you know, I would say two, as an organization, like uh we're you know, in the midst of a national scale up in Zambia, our goal is to scale from one million to two and a half to three million over the next three and a half years. And I think the fact that we're rooted in Zambia means that there's not as much like we can see through the fog a lot better here in terms of how we anticipate this is going to happen, just because of the relationships, the communication channels that we have. But as we think further down the road in terms of what replication into other countries might look like in supporting other governments, for us, like all the research we had done over the last couple of years, big question marks on all of that, and we don't have the same source of information too. So I even think that level of uncertainty, I think kind of for proximal local organizations, you know, you can you still have you know access to pretty good information and you can predict, I think, better, even though not as well as we could have a couple of months ago. Whereas, you know, as you you know, for organizations that are thinking about moving into kind of new markets, new countries, and those sorts of things, it just feels like the risk of that is is that much greater now. But I'd be curious what Sarah, you and Vicky, what your kind of what your crystal ball is telling you guys.

SPEAKER_03 58:25

Yeah, I was gonna ask, you know, what you're seeing both in terms of those kind of direct short-term impacts, but also your, you know, it's very early days, as Lonnie says, an enormous amount of uncertainty, but what sense you're getting of the impact that some of these decisions might have on other funders and on and on governments?

SPEAKER_04 58:42

I'm happy to kind of have a stab at that. Small question. It's a big one. But uh also I think just just just ahead of that as well, Lonnie. Interestingly, I was having a conversation with an organization that we we kind of collaborate with on a on a mental health space through a network that we don't fund directly, as it were, who are South African organization last week. And they also had an interesting perspective on this, which I hadn't really thought about, I have to confess, which is for those organizations like this one in South Africa who aren't funded by USAID or PEPA and aren't um supported through kind of government and therefore thinking about those kind of cuts that are coming in the in the system that they were hoping to become more entwined with from a cost-sharing like perspective, they were like, in three years' time, it's going to be really hard for us to kind of get funding because of how many pivots and adaptations are about to happen amongst funded who would have been supporting us as we're trying to kind of develop the evidence base for a model that we're kind of passionate about, but not enough people have bought into yet. So even if you're not directly in that kind of um like line of sight right now, and that kind of laser beam of the kind of USAID impact, like other partners outside of that circle of influence are really worried about three to five years from now. And I thought that was a really it was a it was a very timely and just interesting thing to think about because I wasn't thinking about that enough because I was more thinking about the partners that we work with seem to be decimated by this. Uh I think from our uh I think from our like perspective, I mean, like Vicky obviously like is more in the weeds with the RISC pool fund itself and what she's hearing. I think we're seeing and a hearing, to be honest, from from quite a few partners, whether they be sort of multilaterals or kind of like philanthropy, that aren't stopping funding, but they're sitting and waiting, and they're waiting to see who's going under. Uh, and they will kind of restart funding or restart conversations that would have renewed funding, like they're not walking away from commitments, but they want to make sure who they're going to fund again uh and and and renew those kind of conversations aren't going to go under in 24 months. And so it's just called, you know, it's just kind of causing this kind of pausing period that's really unsettling.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:07

Yeah, we we've had our first grant from an organization for what we call a funder-created obstacle, where they haven't had their USAID funding cut, you know, but they've had funding from another funder delayed because that funder has taken a pause while they wait and see what happens. So they have a funding agreement that was due to start in May, and that funder has deferred it to October because they want to see what happens in the landscape. So we've just done a loan to bridge them to October. Um, we're also, I mean, obviously, an increase in applications where USAID funding has been cut, but we've also had an application for a grant which was awarded where the individual organization didn't directly have its funding cut by USAID, but the supply chain was disrupted by USAID cuts, and so they've had to seek an alternative supply chain, and that is costing more because they're now going to the open market rather than the subsidized market. So, yeah, we're seeing those three things, and we're only what, I don't know, eight weeks into this. So, what this will look like in in eight months, uh, you know, I have no idea.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:25

But I think, I mean, if if if you ask me to think about a crystal ball parapet for the risk pool fund being like one step removed, and is is we're going to end up giving more loans. Yeah, I find it very hard to imagine that that's not going to be an uptick.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:39

We're definitely giving more loans already.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:42

It brings me to the the sort of the last question. I mean, I could talk about this for ages, but I think we'll probably need to round things off. But I wanted to ask just about what the the how you see the the kind of the long-term uh goals of the of the risk pool fund itself. You mentioned certainly at one point that you know the aim is not just to grow and scale this particular risk pool itself and to make it bigger and bigger and bigger. But is part of the aim then to to influence others to think about adopting a similar model themselves and to set up other risk pools? Or is it also partly to do with some of that stuff we were talking about about getting individual funders to think differently about risk and change their own behaviors, perhaps so that you know in the future you wouldn't necessarily need a model like the risk pool? How do you how do you kind of think about those long-term goals?

SPEAKER_04 1:03:25

Can am I am I allowed to say all of the above? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:28

Oh, of course, yeah. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:31

Because I I I genuinely think it's a combination of all of these things. Funders of different shapes and sizes have their own kind of internal challenges that they are up against. And we have to be understanding of that. And there are some kind of funders where they know it's a long takes a long time to kind of make a change, and they are kind of slowly kind of collecting an evidence base to support that case, but it's not going to happen in three months, right? It's not gonna happen in six months. Um, it might happen at the next strategic period, which could be in three years' time, depending on what their like strategy review process looks like. Do we want the funds to become huge? No, not really. Are we always kind of keen and happy and prepared to share any of the tools and the learnings and the frameworks that we've kind of developed and adapted along the way with other groups of funders who want to explore setting up a version of RISC pool? Like, absolutely. Do we think that perhaps some of the easiest solutions in some ways is just to advocate that people uh approve contingency budget lines? Right? I mean, we've had our own conversations about this kind of internally. There's there's there's challenges around this, and the risk pool fund was a was a way of us getting around that challenge. Um I think like fundamentally it just comes back to inviting kind of colleagues in the funder space to normalize risk and to embrace risk and to respect it actually, and to respect the challenges that will happen if you're working with partners who are doing the difficult work, to be honest. I yeah, and I think I do think that's kind of the bottom line from our perspective, and I think that would be the uh the measure of success, would be we repeat the research in three years' time, and there's a slightly closer kind of meeting of perceptions of risk between the implementer and the funder community that the original open road alliance research, and then our kind of follow-up research in 2023 showed it still poles apart.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:43

And and I wondered, Lonnie, whether just um you had any final thoughts on that, you know, from your point of view, not necessarily particularly about the the risk bull fund as it is now, but in terms of that question of you know what would ideally happen in terms of discussions about and thinking about risk in the the funder space, what would be most helpful to an Organization like yours.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:01

No, Sarah, I really appreciate your vision and what you've outlined for the risk pool fund. You know, I do think it, you know, is it's a like contingent contingency funds are a great thing to build into budgets. The one thing though that I just want to highlight that I think the risk pool goes, you know, beyond that is that most funders, at least that we have, are funding towards our operating budget or towards like projects that are kind of part of a bigger scale up. And so it's not like they're funded, it's not like uh, you know, we got an RFP, a request for a proposal from USA to do this like one big project and that's standalone. And then there's contingency funds built in above and beyond what we anticipate we would need to be able to do that. But oftentimes I'm willing to bet a lot of organizations would immediately earmark, you know, maybe not explicitly, but in their mind, like, okay, this contingency can fund like, you know, this bit of our work because we still have a gap. We there's still a gap in our budget. It's not like we have a fully funded project. And I think what is great about risk pool is it's not in our budget. But then something comes up that wasn't in our expense line, it's like, oh, we have this resource now to help us overcome this as well. And I think kind of the way that contingencies might get internalized by organizations may manifest differently than how the risk pool is able to step in and truly address those kind of unexpected uh events. And so I think a lot of that would be how it's structured. But I'd also just like to say, like, you know, express for myself and from healthy learners our gratitude uh to both of you and to the risk pool fund more largely, you know, as a group that's benefited uh across multiple kind of emergencies over the years. It also just means a lot in terms of partnership. Um, when you know you are in kind of a crisis situation, something unexpected has happened, have a partner there that you can reach out to, talk to, kind of also get feedback on the solution you're proposing, I think is is is really helpful and just deepens that that trust base as well. Um, so I'd I'd be remiss if I also just didn't express our our thanks to to both of you and all of your colleagues.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:00

Thanks, Loni. I I just wanted to add one thing as well, actually, on reflection there, if that's okay, which is I also think it's important to just to say we haven't cracked it, right? And uh and we're not in any way assuming or thinking that we have cracked it. And if anyone is listening to the podcast that is involved or knows or other ways of supporting these kind of challenges, of come up with other solutions, other kind of like creative funding mechanisms, um, we want to hear about it. We and we want to kind of like learn about it because it's a small community that we found, but that's just what we found so far. So a real conscious request for any anyone who has any kind of ideas or experience looking at different ways to support kind of risk mitigation and embrace risk among partners, then we're all ear, we're all ears.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:54

And yeah, a great call to leave. And I'll put links in the show notes to places where people can find information where they can get in touch with you if they do have thoughts, and I'm sure people will, because I do think this question of risk uh and philanthropy at the moment is is such a massive one, and as we say, the context has made it even more acute. Um, just remains to say thanks ever so much to all three of you, to Sarah, Telonny, and to Vicky for coming on the podcast. It's been really fascinating conversation. Um, I've really enjoyed it. I'm sure people listening will as well. And I wish you all the best with the work in the future.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:21

Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:22

Thank you. I'll put links in the show notes to places where you can get some uh relevant reading uh about things that we discussed in um the show and where you can find out more about things like the Risk Ball Fund. If you're interested more broadly in issues around philanthropy and civil society, do check out my uh website at uh whyphilanthropymatters.com. You can find all the back episodes of this particular podcast. You can also find lots of long form articles and shorter guides and various bits and pieces about all things to do with philanthropy and civil society. You can also follow me on social media, primarily on LinkedIn, where you can find me fairly easily, but also I'm there on Blue Sky, although not making too much of it at the moment. So you know, come and encourage me to do more with that. Uh if you've got ideas for people that I could talk to on the podcast or topics that you'd like to see us cover, I'm certainly keen to do a few more kind of deep dive explorations uh on my own and fit those in around the interview. So any ideas people have for those would be great. But just drop me a line, you can find the contact details at the website. Otherwise, uh like, subscribe, follow the podcast. Um, if you've got time to leave us a nice review, wherever it is that you get your podcasts, that would be really great because it all helps in terms of uh boosting us up uh the algorithm. And I will see you next time. Bye.