‘It Takes Intention, Time, and Trust’: Rebecca Eastmond on the Power of Strategic Philanthropy
By Stacey Lindsay
A hard reality of the social sector is that our intentions don’t always match our impact. We can have the greatest desire to make a difference, but if we can’t effectively execute on it, our mission will not see its full potential. This is a reality that Rebecca Eastmond has faced. Having worked in and around philanthropy throughout her career, as a lawyer and founder in the non-profit sector and a managing director at JP Morgan Chase, Eastmond has seen how the demands of life and work can often stymie one’s ability to create the change they want in the world. “There comes a level where you just can’t keep up,” she says.
In this gap between desire and capacity, Eastmond unlocked a potential. She wondered: What if there were a way to provide support to those people and foundations to ensure their philanthropic efforts make the greatest impact? The answer exists today in Greenwood Place, a London-based philanthropy accelerator that propels positive intentions past the restraints of the present.
The compelling clarity of Greenwood Place, which is that social and environmental philanthropy requires an entrepreneurial business approach to successfully function, has been hugely influential in its momentum. Since its founding in 2016, Eastmond, her co-founder Louisa Brassey, and their team of six full time staff members (plus seven freelancers) have helped individuals, families and charitable foundations across the globe deploy many millions of dollars and make substantial impact. (Greenwood Place also received its B Corporation certification earlier this year.)
We spoke with Eastmond this week about the philosophy of Greenwood Place and her honest take on the role philanthropy can play in our world. In our conversation, the reality of doing good becomes strikingly clear: Great impact is made when we listen—really listen—and provide each other support. As Eastmond says, “it takes intention, time, and trust.”
A Conversation with Rebecca Eastmond
What was that spark that initially fueled you and Louisa to start Greenwood Place?
When I was at JP Morgan, we could advise people on their giving. You can help people on their strategy, which is always a really wonderful thing to do and people would feel inspired about what they cared about. And then they would go away and I would see them six months later, when they came back to see their banker, and they wouldn’t have gotten very far. That is because it is really hard to do execution. That’s the problem. That’s what Greenwood Place does.
In 2016, I got quite involved in thinking about the refugee crisis in Europe, just thinking about how to make a difference in that. It was impossible for me to do within the confines of my job. At the same time, Louisa was trying to set up a foundation for her family. The execution was going to be very hard for her, as well. We were talking, and what came from that was: Let’s set up something that can provide long-term, strategic support, analysis, research, due diligence, portfolio management, support for NGOs, helping people achieve what they want to achieve—and to do that for a handful of entrepreneurial clients that want to make a difference.
What is the philosophy of Greenwood Place?
The philosophy behind it is really entrepreneurial. We’re entrepreneurs. Our clients are, almost without exception, people who are happy to take risks. The level at which our community of clients are giving, and that ability to take risk, to try and innovate, to see where you can find a gap and if you try something it might just scale and be extraordinary, that’s where we try to be.
We try to support really great organizations with really great management teams and who are trying to have significant impact. Sometimes, if we do something right, we can watch something scale and scale and scale and have a deeper and deeper impact. That is a win for us.
There are two sides of business that you offer: There are your philanthropist clients and there are the organizations to which your clients give money. What are the ways that you provide support for each?
For clients, our basic thing is that we run your foundation. You might say, ‘what makes me angry is that there are young people in a broken care system whose life is failing. What can I do about that?’ Starting with that one thing you care about, we would then help you build a way to get involved in that. That might mean that you are supporting organizations that are repurposing houses that are helping people to renovate them and then get the keys so they don’t become homeless. Or it could mean helping young people with developing their own resilience, strength, and self-confidence. Once you have six or seven organizations that you’re working with, you can then start to make connections between them. If you’re lucky you can start to influence policy a bit and those organizations can learn from each other. Those clients basically have a business that is trying to sort something out. You can’t do that quickly. It takes intention, time, and trust.
On the organization side, we’re trying to create non-hierarchical relationships across the whole ecosystem of social change. From the people that have money to the young people who might benefit from a program supported by them. Dignity and equality are critical to real change. We do whatever we can to make that happen. We often advise organizations who are going through change. We help organizations think through governance, think through staffing, and also scaling, how might they get their ideas out and share with other people. We help people listen better and smarter. It really varies.
And then the core of it is that we provide money, which is really important. So it’s financial and it’s other resources. It’s about doing what’s useful in order to support social change.
You’ve stated that philanthropy “does not exist just to fix existing problems, to bandage the wounded and feed the hungry” but that it also plays a bigger role, one that innovates ideas that can grow into systemic solutions. Will you talk more about this?
There is a hugely important role to play in doing those basic humanitarian things, particularly during COVID. For instance, we work with one organization in India called Foundation for Ecological Security (FES). They work in partnership with rural communities to support the conservation of nature and natural resources in India. Their work is highly systemic and seeks to achieve lasting impact act scale. However, they pivoted during COVID to support migrant workers who were walking home. They provided food parcels and medical support to a huge amount of people, and they helped create an IT system that tracked where people were and what they needed. It was an incredible thing and not what they do as their day job. But it was needed right then.
But if you think about systemic issues, that doesn’t fix them. That is a need that you need to deal with right now, but there are deeper things. A great friend of mine started an organization called Safe Lives, which works in domestic violence in the UK. This was a long time ago; it takes a long time to change a system and Safe Lives is still working and innovating. They realized early on that a number of people talk to you if you have a problem. The social services might come. The school might see you. You might go to hospital with bruises. The police might come to your home. But these things are not joined up. They don’t talk to each other. Each different service might have a little pinpoint of light into somebody’s problem, but actually, how do you join these things up and understand where there are problems? They [Safe Lives] created something called the MARAC, which was a gathering point for services to get together with an independent advisor every few weeks and talk about the families facing problems in their neighborhood. That way you started to have the beginnings of a story and you can start to intervene. That was scaled up in every region in the UK and now it’s happening as a matter of course, regularly in policy. And that saves lives. But it’s slow, it takes years, for something like that to happen.
Systemic change is hard. Sometimes you have to be not just working in the area for a long time, but also working in the area, seeing the opportunities, and then jumping on them.
Considering how divided our world is right now because of various reasons—financial inequality, racism, global warming—it feels as though philanthropy might also be able to serve as a unifier and a way to boost morale. What are your thoughts on this?
In a very small way, Greenwood Place is a community. We bring people together who normally wouldn’t speak to each other. We bring together the hedge fund manager and the woman who works with street prostitutes and provides therapy. We do that; that’s the nature of the work. And that, in itself, is really interesting because you’re bringing people together across different worlds. You have different languages and different outlooks on life. Those things, in themselves, are really good.
I don't think philanthropy is in and of itself a great unifier. Philanthropy is traditionally very top down. I can sit here in my house and dispense bits of money, time, or good things to people very far away who I don’t know. That can damage the dignity of the people who are on the receiving end and it creates a hierarchy based on wealth, which is a very difficult and divisive thing. We live in a world of massive inequality. Trying to use philanthropy to do something different is not obvious, actually. I do think one of the keys to our success is our ability to listen and to enable those who are giving to listen hard, ultimately, to the customers of the organizations that they are supporting. And I do think that blended finance is a really good tool in doing that.
Would you speak more on blended finance? It can be an important ingredient in bringing socially and environmentally focused endeavors to fruition. What is your insight?
Almost all of the organizations that we support have a range of revenue streams. If you can create a business to do something, you should. However, it is very difficult when you are working in really broken markets to do something that is profitable.
If you can create a business that doesn’t need subsidy, that’s amazing. It gives it its own engine, it goes, and you don’t have to think about it anymore. But some things will always require subsidy. An agricultural business in Sierra Leone may be able to sell to Whole Foods [for instance]. But off the back of that, there might be some support for gender equity that is necessary but doesn’t fit into your revenue generating model. It will stop the business from being profitable. So you need to build a creche to enable women to easily work. The creche is the philanthropy and the business takes care of the rest.
A lot of the work we do is like that. We work with a tutoring organization that’s providing tutoring for low income families. They have a range of revenue streams. They’re paid for by schools and they’re paid for by philanthropy. So, the thing is to look at the problem you’re trying to solve and then see how you can solve that as sustainably as you can—rather than just starting with the finance.
What are you most proud of and excited about in your work right now?
There is so much to do. What makes me excited is the team we put together. Being able to work with these smart and motivated people to try and make the world a little better is a dream come true. I do think we’re doing an important job at an important time. We’re doing something that needs to be done right now, and if I think about that too much I get a little scared. I think: Can I get this done? I don’t think there’s been a time, since I’ve been alive, that has felt more important to be in social change.
To learn more about Rebecca Eastmond and Greenwood Place, visit greenwood.place.
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