The former eBay president has put $1 billion behind a new kind of philanthropy, a brew that blends social entrepreneurship and the power of media to tackle poverty and any other problem that piques his interest
Four years ago, Jeff Skoll arrived on a small plane in the depths of the Brazilian Amazon region, just in time for the Waura people’s festival of the pique fruit, where he sipped from a bucket of its bitter, bright-yellow brew. The eBay billionaire was there to see work being spearheaded by Mark Plotkin and Liliana Madrigal, whose nonprofit, Amazon Conservation Team, was teaching the scantily-clad Waura to use a GPS to map their ancestral territory and carve out a protected area free from deforestation. “It’s the neatest thing,” says Skoll, his voice rising with enthusiasm. “It’s amazing to see these tribes that have barely been contacted, running around in war paint and living in mud huts, but with GPS they figure out how to go around on their land.”
Skoll was so pleased by the results of Plotkin and Madrigal’s efforts that last year his foundation gave $1.6 million to a project with Amazon Conservation Team and two other social enterprises that Skoll backs to use GPS and satellite mapping to create “conservation corridors” that will protect 114 million acres of the Amazon from deforestation. It’s a long-held goal for Plotkin and Madrigal, who have been working with indigenous tribes to protect the rain forest for nearly three decades. Skoll expects significant progress in three years.
There are thousands of people in the world like Plotkin and Madrigal, inspiring social entrepreneurs who dream up innovative solutions to pressing problems and then act on them. Jeff Skoll is their financier. As eBay’s first president, Skoll became a billionaire at age 33 shortly after the auction site went public in 1998. Like all good entrepreneurs, he was born with a knack for spotting the unmet need. Social entrepreneurs need money, media exposure and a network for collaboration.
The Skoll Foundation has been providing all three since the days when social entrepreneurship was just an emerging trend. Skoll has given $342 million in grants to social entrepreneurs, more than any other funder. Before the Skoll Foundation, social entrepreneurs with a bit of a track record had a hard time raising money from big foundations because of their onerous paperwork, short-term funding and inability to abide changing plans along the way. Skoll understood as a web entrepreneur that money to effect big changes needs to be patient. “I wouldn’t quite use the term ‘mezzanine financing’, but in a way it is,” says Skoll. “Our financing is the ground between seed and some sort of exit.”
In just over a decade as a full-time philanthropist, Skoll can tick off plenty of successes. Due to the efforts of Skoll-funded groups, everyone in Gambia (population 1.8 million) has access to health care; deaths from water-borne diseases have declined by 85 percent in 700 villages in Orissa; 6,000 communities in seven African countries have declared an end to female genital mutilation; and thousands of rural poor with HIV in Haiti are getting treated with antiretroviral drugs. There are at least a dozen more examples. “We’re trying to change the equilibrium,” explains Skoll.
What drives a middle-class kid from Toronto (he’s now a US citizen as well) to spend a billion dollars-plus fixing the world’s problems? It starts with a dose of anxiety, the near-death of his father and the mores of the Jewish community in which he was raised. By the time Skoll had his bar mitzvah, he had heard countless times the phrase tikkun olam, a core Jewish ideal that means “to heal the world”. “Growing up with that, it gets built into one’s psychology,” Skoll says.
The Skoll Foundation gets over 250 applications a year and makes four to six grants. Skoll and Osberg developed a rigorous application system, starting with an eligibility quiz. Applicants have to line up with one of their causes. And the timing has to be right, with requirements such as a lack of civil wars raging in your country.
(This story appears in the 07 December, 2012 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)