The Business of Giving

Hosted by Denver Frederick

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632

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Oct 2026

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About the show

Denver Frederick is the Host of The Business of Giving. The program is the only show of its kind that focuses on solutions to today's complex social problems. What's working? Who are the changemakers? How is it all being financed? The program addresses issues such as global poverty, affordable housing, clean drinking water, medical breakthroughs, and matters related to education.

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October 6, 202638 min

Andrew Wolk: What Changes When We Start with Outcomes

For more than two decades, Andrew Wolk helped social sector organizations build better strategies, measure their work, and strengthen their impact. But one question kept nagging at him: If so many organizations were reporting success, why weren’t more people’s lives getting better? Across the communities he studied, progress on outcomes like education and housing remained stubbornly slow, and in some places, things were getting worse. Which led him to ask: What if we’ve been optimizing for the wrong things? His answer starts with changing where we begin. Today, through Finding Common Purpose , Andrew is putting that idea into practice, helping communities focus on what would actually make life better for the people who live and work there. It’s Andrew Wolk on The Business of Giving.

October 5, 202640 min

The Broken Matchmaking System Between Funders and Nonprofits

Most tech founders don't have to convince anyone that software is a good idea. My guest had to build hers for a sector she describes as twenty years behind everyone else. It did not always go smoothly. Maya Kuppermann co-founded Temelio , the platform that now moves more than a billion dollars a year in grants between foundations and the nonprofits they fund. But in the early days, one of her very first clients had a very different verdict. That client is still with Temelio today, one of a hundred and fifty. We talk about what it took to get there, why the matchmaking between funders and nonprofits is broken, what a bad grant application actually costs a nonprofit in wasted hours, and the "useless" feature she refuses to take out of her own software. It’s Maya Kupperman on The Business of Giving

October 5, 202641 min

Democracy Starts in the Hallway: Students Bringing Students to the Ballot Box

Every year, four million students graduate from high school in this country. Most are old enough to vote, but too few get the encouragement and support to take that first step. My next guest set out to change that by enlisting students to help their classmates register to vote and have a voice in the decisions that shape their future. Jahnavi Rao founded New Voters while still in high school. It now runs student-led, nonpartisan voter registration drives in 1,300 high schools across 42 states. We talk about the near-peer organizing playbook that got 85 percent of her own senior class registered to vote in three days, the research network she built to study a question almost nobody studies, and why spending her days with teenagers is what keeps her hopeful about the country. It’s Jahnavi Rao on The Business of Giving.

September 29, 202635 min

What If Philanthropy Funded Capability Instead of Reputation?

For decades, philanthropy has chased the illusion of certainty, funding polished proposals while starving the quiet, trusted organizations actually doing the work on the ground. My next guest has spent a career trying to rewrite those rules. David Bonbright pioneered Constituent Voice—putting the people closest to a problem directly into the decisions of how to solve it. Now, through Keystone Accountability and DeepFathom , he is proposing something even more radical: shifting the social sector away from claimed outcomes and towards demonstrated capabilities. He even imagines a fictional city called "Humanville," where famous legacy institutions get passed over, and the small, hyper-trusted local groups finally get funded. We talk about the empirical mirror that changes behavior the moment people see their own data, why every honest measure eventually gets gamed, and a hard lesson David learned when he was declared persona non grata by the apartheid government in South Africa decades ago. It’s David Bonbright on The Business of Giving

September 29, 202655 min

Why Ultra-Wealthy Giving Lags Behind Ambition

Most philanthropists want to do more good, faster, than they actually do. My next guest has spent twenty-five years inside that gap, watching enormous wealth sit still even as donors say they want it moving. Jeffrey Bradach co-founded The Bridgespan Group and recently wrote an essay called Slow Philanthropy , Why giving by the ultra-wealthy often lags behind their ambitions—and what could help move money faster. What he found were small frictions, quiet allergies to failure and waste, and a strange kind of self-deception running through the whole system. We talk about what a dollar sitting in a bank account actually costs the world, why the ten-year mark brings a reckoning for so many donors, and what MacKenzie Scott understands that almost no one else does. It’s Jeff Bradach of the Bridgespan Group on The Business of Giving.

September 21, 202630 min

The Secret Sauce is Love

Most mentoring programs ask for a year, maybe two, and rely on volunteers who come and go. My next guest built something almost radical by comparison: a paid, professional mentor for every child, for at least twelve years, no matter what. Terri Sorensen leads Friends of the Children , which selects some of the most vulnerable four- to six-year-olds in the country—kids facing foster care, homelessness, and deep poverty—and pairs each one with a mentor who stays for their entire childhood, tested now by a twenty-year randomized controlled trial. But ask her what actually makes it work, and she doesn't lead with the data. We talk about keeping that promise for over a decade, scaling from one city to nearly fifty, and the young man who just graduated law school with his Friend still by his side. It’s Terri Sorensen , CEO of Friends of the Children , on the Business of Giving.

September 21, 202634 min

Who Gets to Build What’s Next?

Many companies that survive their first year have something working quietly in the background: an early check from a parent or a well-off friend. My guest today leads an organization for founders who never had that check.. Shawna Young is the CEO of Camelback Ventures , a New Orleans accelerator that puts fifty thousand dollars, and a community, behind early-stage founders whom traditional capital routinely overlooks. A chemist by training and a former science teacher, she thinks hard about who gets seen, who gets funded, and why the gap between the two is so wide. And sometimes, the best way to understand who gets overlooked is to look at who had the idea first. It’s Shawna Young , CEO of Camelback Ventures , on The Business of Giving.

September 16, 202630 min

The Cancer Treatments Hiding in Plain Sight

There is a strange injustice sitting on pharmacy shelves. Some of the drugs there, already approved, already cheap, may hold real power against cancer. Not after another decade of trials. Now. The evidence often already exists. What doesn’t exist is anyone with a financial reason to bring it forward. My guest built her organization to close that gap. ⁠Dr. Laura Kleiman⁠ ran a data science center at Dana-Farber when her own mother was diagnosed with cancer there, and kept finding promising research on existing drugs that no company had any incentive to pursue. It’s ⁠Dr. Laura Kleiman⁠ , Founder and CEO of ⁠Reboot Rx⁠ , on The Business of Giving.

September 10, 202638 min

Beyond Survival: Helping Displaced People Rebuild Full Lives

Every night the news shows us floods, fires, and wars that force people from their homes. Then the story moves on. But for the people who have been displaced, that is when another story begins: Where do they go, and how do they rebuild their lives? For nearly 50 years, Alight has been working on that question. And its CEO, Jocelyn Wyatt , believes the humanitarian system too often succeeds at keeping people alive without creating a path for them to move forward. Jocelyn came to humanitarian work through design rather than the traditional aid world, and that perspective has shaped how she leads. The people Alight serves aren’t beneficiaries waiting for help. They’re customers with skills, ambitions, families, and futures of their own. We talk about what happens after the emergency, why humanitarian aid can measure the wrong things, and what it really means to give power to the people closest to the problem. It’s Jocelyn Wyatt, CEO of Alight, on The Business of Giving.

September 8, 202634 min

How the Buildings Around Us Shape Our Brains, Bodies, and Health

We spend almost our entire lives indoors, and we rarely ask what all that time is doing to us. My guest has spent the past year building the case that the rooms we live and work in quietly shape our stress, our focus, even our brain activity, and that philanthropy has a rare chance to act on it. Ishita Das, a molecular biologist , is part of the Milken Institute ’s science-philanthropy team, where she helps funders decide where their money can move science fastest. Her year-long investigation gave a scattered field a name: neurospatial design. We talk about the evidence that a room can change your body, why the field stayed invisible so long, and how a donor turns scattered work into something that lasts. It’s Ishita Das on The Business of Giving.