(Photo by iStock/Francesco Scatena)
These are truly unimaginable times. On a daily basis, humanity is challenged in ways most of us have never experienced before by a pandemic affecting more than 180 countries simultaneously; infecting more than one million people and shutting down the global economy in four weeks with a duration that is unknown. The impact affects everyone, everywhere with particular devastation to those most vulnerable across the globe. At a moment like this, it’s easy to fall into despair.
But there are also many signs of hope. There are, of course, the unprecedented efforts of those on the front line of care and those searching 24/7 to find a treatment and ultimately a vaccine. But there are also the actions of those who are rapidly pivoting their organizations to make a difference in the lives of others right now, in ways they had never envisioned just a month ago.
Within our (Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, or DRK) portfolio of 165 organizations that we have funded over the years, we see these pivots in real time. A number of our enterprises have shifted instantly, not to weather the storm, but to adapt their business models, distribution channels, and even their own structure to respond to the ever-changing conditions on the ground.
We are seeing three different forms of this shift. We call them “pop-ups,” “pop-outs,” and “push-throughs.”
Pop-Up
Digital Bridge K-12, announced April 3 by San Francisco Mayor London Breed, is one of the best examples of a pop-up—a new initiative created rapidly to address an urgent problem. Digital Bridge K-12 grew out of EducationSuperHighway (ESH), a nonprofit that spent the last eight years bridging the digital divide by connecting 47 million K-12& students to broadband so that every student had equal access to personalized learning, compelling curricula, and great teachers. It was an incredible effort, with a singular objective, funded by $60 million.
With its mission accomplished at the beginning of this year, ESH began to wind down and was weeks away from closing when the coronavirus appeared and shuttered schools nationwide, causing teachers to deliver their curriculum online for the remainder of the school year.
Suddenly, all the work that ESH had done creating broadband access inside of schools was insufficient. So ESH immediately joined forces with the 1 Million Project to launch an initiative called Digital Bridge K-12, solely focused on providing broadband access for tens of thousands of San Francisco Bay Area low-income students who are sheltering at home and have no access to broadband, and without it can’t access the ;educational curriculum now being supplied digitally.
Digital Bridge K-12 will deploy Wi-Fi super spots in communities and on buses that had been sitting idle, with internet access donated by Sprint. This pop-up circumvented the need for creating a new infrastructure or entity. Instead, it spun out of two existing nonprofits, relieving Digital Bridge K-12 of having to incorporate as a new entity, recruit staff, and engage in conventional, and lengthy, start-up and set-up activities in order deploy quickly. It took less than 30 days from ideation to deployment, and not a penny of federal, state, or municipal dollars or resources was spent.
With a simple mission and clear execution, they were funded instantly by DRK, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and others they had partnered with in the past who had full confidence in their ability to execute the mission. Digital Bridge K-12 is planning to expand to Texas and Oregon, with other states to follow.
Another pop-up is Kinvolved, a digital technology platform that provides two-way SMS communications translated into 80 different languages via a mobile app that helps teachers and schools track chronic absenteeism and engage families. When the virus hit, Kinvolved instantly pivoted to become the principal digital communications platform between schools and students and their families at home, distributing learning materials and allowing critical engagement for all students.
In less than one week, Kinvolved went from handling an average of 3 million messages per month to more than 6 million messages in March delivered to more than 300,000 teachers, students, and parents in 150 New York City schools and 11 states. For this enhanced service, there is no additional fee for current customers and new customers are only charged at cost. Kinvolved will seek grants or partnership to expand and support new regions.
Pop-Out
A Detroit organization that is not part of our portfolio, The Marygrove Conservancy, is an example of a pop-out—repurposing available space, in the moment, for a new purpose that was never intended by the organization. The Marygrove campus is an ambitious P-20 (preschool to career) educational center in development funded by The Kresge Foundation. Kresge, in partnership with Marygrove College, facilitated the transfer of the 56-acre campus in the Liv6 district of Detroit to the newly formed Marygrove Conservancy.
This transfer prevented the campus from going dark, which would have decimated the surrounding neighborhood, while still preserving the college’s legacy and transforming the campus to a new educational use. After welcoming its first ninth grade class last fall, the school temporarily closed this spring due to a shelter at home order.
In late March, the City of Detroit reached out to Marygrove to see if its campus could serve as a COVID-19 response center for the city. Marygrove responded positively. Though still in process, Marygrove hopes to provide up to 56 dorm rooms on campus to house overflow patients infected with COVID-19 or other chronic conditions that need hospital treatment.
While the original P-20 plan remains in place, the pop-out responds to immediate needs, without sacrificing the longer-term mission. Timing? From ideation to action, 21 days. Thankfully, there are many of these pop-outs around the country, repurposing space quickly to meet the growing and urgent need for more hospital beds.
Push-Through
Perhaps most encouraging of all is what we call the push-throughs—actions taken by funders, nonprofits, government, and business to push through this crisis. Some of these actions are long overdue, but they are happening now at light speed.
Virtually overnight, funders are removing restrictions from their grants to grantees, eliminating reporting requirements and accelerating payments. Dan Gilbert’s Bedrock real estate company in Detroit is waiving rents for all of its tenants through July. Cloud computing company Twilio is reducing fees for licenses for nonprofits and we are hopeful that they will waive them altogether at this unprecedented time. If they do, others will follow suit. How long did it take to get these structural reforms—less than a week.
Every organization must now think carefully about the world that will emerge and adapt now to the radically different models and behaviors that are likely to emerge. Organizations must simultaneously build resiliency and creativity.
Sam Gill, the chief program officer at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, summarized what leadership means in today’s environment: “Every leader must give their organizations permission to do three things simultaneously—those who need to take care of themselves and their families should; those who need to drop absolutely every task that is not relevant to this moment must do so; and most importantly, those ready to innovate to the world will need permission to look ahead.”
At DRK we are doing just that with 67 of our most current portfolio organizations (organizations that we have funded in the last three years). We are leaning in to help them triage their challenges, build resiliency where they need it, understand their relevancy at this unique moment in time, and to pivot in real-time to innovate new solutions, regardless of its connection to their old model.
We are helping them refocus on their mission and understand how they can evolve to continue to serve their constituents, like ESH did. We are also redeploying our team to where we can make the most difference, even setting up our own skunkworks team to help curate, find, and support as many pop-ups as we can. We are pushing ourselves to think outside of the box. If there was ever a time for creative problem solving, it’s now.
A year from now, the answer to only one question will matter—did each of us do as much as we could to help the greatest number of people and organizations get through this crisis? That’s what is guiding us and so many others we see. At times like this, hope does spring eternal.
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Read more stories by Jim Bildner.