As I discussed with three distinguished leaders at Alloy 2024 who are doing amazing philanthropic work at their organizations, the most effective public-private partnerships have the ability to:

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• Greatly improve the quality of life for communities, especially underserved ones 
• Accelerate economic growth in hard-hit areas, like those with high unemployment
• Offer easier access to capital for both aspiring entrepreneurs and small businesses
• Provide a number of additional benefits that positively impact society at large

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I had the pleasure of speaking with Schmidt Futures VP of Partnerships Kumar Garg, The Same House CEO Rodney Bullard, and Heartland Forward CEO Ross DeVol in Atlanta about how well-crafted policies and convenings create strong private-public partnerships that lead to meaningful community initiatives that can accelerate local, regional or national solutions.

Key Takeaways

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• Kumar noted that, having worked on economic development programs at the White House and Schmidt Futures, it’s clear many startup founders don’t know foundations and philanthropies can cut them a check for pre-seed financing. It’s vital that entrepreneurs understand the funding options available to them through both government and non-profits. All you need is a clearly defined and compelling business pitch that outlines the specific social issue(s) your venture aims to address and an action plan for how you’d use the capital provided to launch and grow your company.

• Rodney said tackling two issues at the same time — systemic poverty and corporations’ need for frontline workers — enables his organization and others like it to positively impact disadvantaged communities. Economic mobility boils down to education, employment, and entrepreneurship. The private and public sector working side by side can help give more people in low-income areas living wages and stable jobs, in turn leading to social and economic improvements in those regions.

• Ross explained how progress with economic development only occurs when a broad array of job opportunities are available to a region’s workforce. That’s been a big challenge in the U.S. heartland in recent years. Organizations small and large can’t only be hiring those with four-year degrees. We need programs that trains, upskills, and reskills workers across the Midwest and gives them the resources (e.g., broadband access) needed to take on a variety of jobs, regardless of their education level.

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Watch the entire Alloy 2024 session to hear more about the transformative projects and tangible results Kumar, Rodney, and Ross have realized by initiating and engaging in public-private partnerships.

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Sign up for our Wavelength newsletter to access additional Alloy 2024 content, including recaps of our other sessions and keynotes.

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Transcript

Lesa Mitchell: My name is Lesa Mitchell. I'm a general manager here at High Alpha Innovation with the team putting on the conference, focused predominantly on go-to-market. But my panel here is going to take a little bit of a different tact.

You've heard all day about solving hard problems, and there's lots of different ways to start to solve hard problems through the military, through big companies, different strategies, and through startups.

And here, I have people working on philanthropy — two of whom I've known for a really long time, and one that I've just recently met.

To my left here is Kumar Garg. I had the opportunity to work with Kumar when he was in the Office of Science, Technology, and Policy in the Obama White House doing massively crazy things.

Since that time, he's moved on as the Managing Director of the Schmidt Futures with Eric Schmidt. And since then, he has launched something called Renaissance Philanthropy that I'll let him talk to you about.

Next to him is Ross DeVol. Ross is famous to most people because he's written almost all regional economic reports going back many, many years.

Ross worked with Mike Milken as the Chief Research Officer for the Milken Institute, and then was talked into moving to Bentonville, Arkansas, by some people who own a lot of real estate in Bentonville and has, through the Walton family and other philanthropists, built something called Heartland Forward that he'll talk about. That is a multi-state initiative.

And Rodney is the first Head of Corporate Social Responsibility and Philanthropy at Chick-fil-A. We'll talk about some things that they have done there and most recently has started something called The Same House, and he needs to tell you why it is called The Same House and actually I'm going to start there.

Why is it called The Same House? 

Rodney Bullard: Thank you, Lesa. It's a pleasure to be here with you all. Welcome to Atlanta, my hometown. So when I was at Chick-fil-A, started Chick-fil-A foundation, which became Chick-fil-A Corporate Social Responsibility.

If you're a child born into poverty in Atlanta, you only have a 4.3% chance of getting out of poverty. Despite the fact we have Home Depot, UPS, Chick-fil-A, Coca Cola, Delta, and the list goes on of corporate headquarters in this town.

Pound for pound, we have the largest number of corporate headquarters in America. And we want to do something, and we hosted a large event called the Beloved Benefit.

Dr. King had a theory that he espoused called the beloved community, where people came together to take care of one another. And so we have all of these resources.

So we hosted this event with Congressman John Lewis at his last public event. He was diagnosed with cancer and announced it. About a week later, he said, we're one people, one family, we all belong to the same house, the house of Atlanta.

And so that really encapsulates why we're doing this, doing good together, coming together to do good together, to take care of our problems, to lead together.

Lesa Mitchell: And so you'll see a common thread. I think across all three speakers, which is obviously The Same House is trying to solve hard problems of economic mobility. And I think you're trying to solve some problems of science and technology. Ross is trying to solve problems in a geographic region in the middle of the country.

So Ross, can you start by telling us why you moved from Santa Monica to Bentonville, and why the heartland is important to focus on? 

Ross DeVol: The real question is why or what allowed it, which is my wife's parents were high school sweethearts from Little Rock, Arkansas.

So when I came home one day and said, ‘Honey, I had a call from Jim Walton today. And there might be an opportunity in Arkansas,’ it wasn't shut down immediately. Her response was, ‘So when are we moving?’ Now if I had married a young woman who was born and raised in coastal California, that would not have happened, right?

So that means I have an understanding wife. I grew up in a small community called Lancaster, Ohio, about 20 miles Southeast of Columbus.

So I consider myself to be from the heartland, but I spent most of my career on the east coast and west coast. So Philadelphia, Baltimore, I was in Jacksonville, Florida, for a while. And then 20 years in Los Angeles, where I worked for the Milken Institute.

And when members of the family, the Walton family first had this idea to start something that became the Heartland Summit. This was in late 2016. It was the fallout from the presidential election, fissures between the coast and the heartland.

And while I was at the Milken Institute, we did a lot of work on regional economic development, technology transfer, commercialization at universities in the heartland. And I had done some work at the university of Arkansas and helped several governors in Arkansas develop some venture funds over the years.

So I thought it was a compelling idea. They approached me. And first, they wanted to know if it made sense to think about doing it. Did it make sense to develop a think and do tank that focused on the center of the country? And if you looked around, there really wasn't anyone who was advocatingpolicies, looking at the domain research and applied research.

And thinking about the heartland as a whole, there were commonalities between it, differences between the Northern and Southern parts of the heartland, but I just thought it was very compelling and there's four main pillars. And I think that helps explain some of the conversation that will come. One is innovation and entrepreneurship.

Why we're here today, tech transfer, commercialization, starting and scaling companies and knowledge based economy. The other is workforce and human capital.

You want to have, do you want to be able to develop a workforce that not only has four-year degrees and advanced degrees, but can go work in advanced manufacturing? So you need two-year associate degrees and apprenticeships as part of that whole continuum.

Also, what we refer to as regional competitiveness, which are connecting the heartland falls under, which also includes a business climate and tax rates and ease of doing business.

And then the last one was a bit of a stretch when I first suggested it to the Walton family was health and wellness, because you cannot develop workforce and human capital or innovation or anything else if you do not have a healthy workforce. And that's one of the big challenges in many of the states in the heartland.

So there really was an organization that was looking at it as if it were a country in many respects, understanding differences in regional areas.

But that's really what motivated me to make the move And some people, well, first of all, I discovered that I lost 30 points in my IQ having moved from L.A. to Arkansas, people from the coast. I mean, really that's the way I was treated. Like we thought you were a smart person. ‘Why the hell would you move from Santa Monica to Bentonville?’

And I said, ‘Well, you ever heard of Walmart? Have you ever heard of the Walton family and the things that they're doing and the resources that can be generated? The partnerships?’ So that's what I found compelling. I did not want to look back and think what could have been if I would just answered the call. So I took the call. 

Lesa Mitchell: That's great. And, and can you start off, because remember the conference is about tangible innovation. And so tell me one thing at a base layer that you have done since you've been there that you think helps you impactfully build upon it, 

Ross DeVol: The answer would be connecting the heartland, which is under our regional competitiveness banner.

It's really about connecting the heartland to high speed internet access. and we've worked with the current administration as they're rolling out the EBB program. We're advising them and members of the family feel very strongly about this. Not just rural areas, but urban as well, but rural is the biggest challenge.

And when they were getting ready to roll out the EBB program, they were going to try and reach people who might be able to sign up by, you guessed it, only advertising on the internet.

All right, so that didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. So we actually, you know, this is in the early days of COVID.

We bought radio ads, we bought television segments, we put billboards up in Chicago in mass transitand so we really advertised the EBB program, and even by using conservative estimates, we believe that about 200,000 people signed up who had access, but previously were not able to access it, enrolled in a program they could afford. And so that was an immediate impact.

And we're also involved in the ACP program as well. And, I mean, the impact of that is really interconnected because it led to the work that we ended up doing in health, in telehealth, in rural areas, because you can't have access to a physician that's highly specialized, unless you have high speed internet access.

Lesa Mitchell: That's exactly right. Kumar, you had the opportunity. Well first, can you give people a two-second ‘What is OSTP?’ Because I think you need to know that to understand the rest. 

Kumar Garg: So OSTP was easily thought of as like the president's science advisor. It's the people in the White House who are kind of science and tech nerds who try to think about what is the way the U.S. is going to win over, not just the new cycle, but over the next decade or two decades.

And so that's investing in the next generation technologies, building a good business climate, and also thinking ahead onwhat things the R&D ecosystem needs to be doing so that we don't have things that have happened, for example, in the chips industry where, you know, 80% of chips are being, you know, built miles off the coast of China. 

I've interacted with startups a lot, both in the White House and in government and government. When I worked for Eric Schmidt, and then now kind of wearing the philanthropic hat, the private sector hat, if there's any takeaway to take is it is worth understanding how government operates in your industry and the way philanthropy operates because.

If there's anything else you take away, it's the phrase ‘non-dilutive financing.’ Which is that most of the time, and I still encounter startups who don't realize that a foundation and a philanthropist can write you a check into your startup.

This happens every day in America. The foundations are writing checks into startups into your startup. So figuring out whether what you are doing could actually be doing a broader public task, whether it's signing people up for broadband, whether it's increasing some social benefits.

So that's one thing as to why I think it's really important to think about how are you investing in Atlanta in your region or towards the national priority, because that could unlock. How you could go after both government funding, but then also be able to pitch a potential philanthropist that can write you a check where they're not asking for a piece of your company.

It's a really important sort of like takeaway if there's anything. And if you've never had a sitting meeting with your team where you've said, ‘Have we explored non-dilutive financing?’ And nobody knows what that is. You know, Lesa can help you, but like, it is an important way that you can build what you're building.

So that's, I think one, which is we just, Tell people, and especially the startup community care. And the second thing is that I actually think the venture capital community and startup community are often like canaries in the coal mine for when the system isn't working.

So, for example, one of the things that we did in the White House was we spent a lot of time thinking about high skill immigration. The reason we did is, if you actually look under the hood, a lot of startups are actually powered by talent that comes from somewhere else and studies here, and it's trying to figure out how to stay. Sometimes the government creates programs that aren't well designed for that profile.

So I remember this great story where the immigration service and the government said, ‘Oh, we're going to create this sort of startup visa for folks who want to stay, who are building a startup,’ but, you know, it's like they wrote it in an old-school way.

So they said, ‘Here's the form. Show us your physical address of where you keep all your assets.’ So we can go check that you're not a made up company. And they're like, ‘We are a digital company. Our assets are not in a physical space. It's like, there's a thing called the cloud.’

And so we actually embedded entrepreneurs into that office. And then they updated the rules. So one of the things that I always impress is the general sort of like, you know, you listen to some podcast or something, and they'll say, well, you know, these bureaucrats, they just don't get it, right?

They're just like, you know, and my view is the way people get it is you explain to them what they don't get. It's just like a basic way that we're going to figure this out as a country. And so we sort of, our big philosophy, both when I was in the government and after, like it's a team sport. 

The way the U.S. wins is we have to bring the university system, the startup system, government, the R&D ecosystem, the capital system all together. And they have to be actually saying, where does it work? Where does it not?

So, you know, some of the investments we made in big data and in early stages of AI ended up fueling the AI revolution. Some of the early investments we made, whether it's like, you know, genomic sequencing and everything else. Chips is, I think, an example where, you know, I think there were lots of early concerns that weren't listened to as to whether we were falling behind until it became a crisis.

So I think the, you know, one of, I was talking to somebody yesterday that was telling me about, oh, like, isn't it great that we are leading in space, right? But space is like a really good example. 

I come into the White House in 2009. The big debate is, ‘Are we going to let this small company called SpaceX compete for a contract with NASA?’ And guess what? Everybody was against it. We had hearings where our commercial space plan was getting played by everybody. People are going to die. We should not expand who gets to play.

So when we talk about procurement reform, it's going to require everyone to actually say we are going to tolerate new people coming into the system.

They're not going to figure it out. So what NASA created was a milestone based system so that SpaceX could show one step at a time that it could perform. Now they represent, you know, more than 70% of all launches, but that did not happen overnight.

So the second thing I would just leave is that to the extent that you think government doesn't get it or other folks in the sector, you have to engage them because they can do better, but they're not going to figure it out without your engagement.

Ross DeVol: Also, Gwynne Shotwell, who was behind SpaceX, right? Elon Musk is out in the public eye. I knew. Gwen interacted with her for decades. She has a lot of history in the aerospace industry and she provided the guidance, the oversight, the operating knowledge. To make SpaceX work, right? She's an innovative thinker. She was an innovator, but without that human capital, SpaceX would not be where it is today.

So there's that now in the, in the policy domain. I can't say we've been successful yet. We've got one of the early-stage metrics, but one of those is what we've been referring to as a heartland visa.

This was introduced in the House of Representatives, co-sponsored by a Republican and a Democrat, right, to allow any foreign student that graduated with a degree in STEM education from a heartland state.

To immediately have a green card stapled to their diploma. Now, that is outside-the-box thinking. Are we there yet? Probably not. But, I know that people have been talking to both parties and both presidential campaigns about it. It seems like maybe that's one that might happen. Maybe some bipartisanship 

Lesa Mitchell: And great advice for the SSBCI people that are in the room, to adopt that. And you just mentioned talent. And so I'd love to hear from all three of you, Rodney.

I know this has been a great focus for you is how do we improve talent? I mean, we're only going to win the war games if we're smarter. you've been focusing on talent in a different way.

I think both from your Chick-fil-A days, as well as now, can you talk to us about not only the focus, but how did you get that to scale? Because talent in a little way is one thing, but doing it at scale is another thing. 

Rodney Bullard: Absolutely. Kumar, to answer your question, Lesa, and also to kind of piggyback on Kumar. It's interesting. I got a chance to work at NASA and also at Chick-fil-A, and I've seen That you can get money from large organizations, but sometimes I used to call it trying to grow a rock in the middle of a rock because it's hard to get an organization, even though they may have resource to see that there's something new andbut that you have to find that that pain point.

And so for us at Chick-fil-A, one of our pain points was at any given point, we need 60,000 people. And we need more frontline employees. And so how can we go out and get those? And we also realize that there are a host of communities where unemployment is significant. And so creating this bridge between the two and making sure that every child that grows up has an opportunity.

If you think 4.3% chance of getting out of poverty, that means there are a whole host of children that are left behind. And so one of the programs that we scaled here in Atlanta was a program that now is 3DE Academy Junior Achievement. We started an effort called the Discovery Center about a stone's throw from here where children could come in and we partnered with the local school systems and then we also partnered with all the corporations of Atlanta, and you would come into a space like this, but there was a Front for Wells Fargo, a front for Delta, and the children would learn about macroeconomics via a very tactile experience.

And we then said, ‘Can we take that and scale that to other places? Because we, we can get DeKalb County or Fulton County or Cobb County to agree with us and bring all of their eighth and 10th graders through, but how can we scale this larger?’ And so we then took it into other schools as a magnet program.

And that is scaled to now hundreds of schools going towards thousands of schools. We also had a program called. leader Academy where we scaled that into over 3,000 schools from one school here.

And the important part for us, particularly coming from Chick-fil-A was we want to first figure out, could we get it right, get the DNA right in one spot and then scale it from there and not scale it too quickly because scaling bad DNA was the worst thing we want to do or the last thing we want to do.

Ross DeVol: We have something we call our talent pipeline, which includes both entrepreneurship and workforce development because if we're going to have any hope of closing the wealth gap that exists in this country, entrepreneurship has to be a big component of it. We need the workforce development, no question about that.

But in our efforts under connecting the heartland and members of the Walton family gave us some of the seed funding.

To start this program, not only just the advertising about the EBB, but actually working with communities in writing grants to the FCC competitive grants to get additional funding, what we determined in speaking to people have been operating the broadband space previously, either at the state office, the federal level was, let's just say the communications between the federal government and state governments where it's not seamless.

A lot of those funds were not put to very good use. So we focused in that space trying to make sure that those funds well, first of all, that the state officials understood what federal FCC wanted and so they coordinate better and to develop, we advocated to, so there would be state broadband plans and worked in several states and help create them so that the funds would be deployed as quickly as possible and as efficiently as possible.

And then as we were peeling that onion back, what we heard from broadband offices in most of the states that have them is.

You know, we don't have enough workers that can put in the infrastructure for broadband. We need workforce development and upskilling. And so we developed a jobs board that we just rolled out in Arkansas and Louisiana, which connects either students or young adults that want to go into have some training.

They want to be upskilled. Or allows employers to go look for people who have these skills locally. So  it's still in the early stages. We know that several, I won't mention the names of the companies already hired through this program. and now they're developing their own academies to upskill them.

So that's just an example of how these are all related. And then telehealth back to the connecting heartland. So we also are dealing with the health and wellness issue and the mental health crisis that's occurring in this country, especially in rural communities, much of it driven by COVID and related in activity.

So you cannot obtain access to a specialist, either psychiatrist or paraprofessional if you don't have access to broadband. And so this was a common issue we found in some cases, the quick fix was to bring them to the public schools or if there was a hospital to bring them in there.

But we really focused on that and reducing the amount of throughput that you needed to have what was considered high speed internet access to make it more efficient.

And so that's really led to the work that we've been doing in the mental health space because it is an economic crisis. Think about labor force participation. You look in states around the heartland, you start going county by county. And you see this relationship between poor mental health status, poor social determinants of health.

But we also have another related issue, which is a maternal health crisis in America. We just completed a study on that and are rolling out, actually Governor Sanders in Arkansas just released that last Friday, a plan to address maternal mortality and childhood issues as well.

We have a third world status in maternal health in this country. Much of it is in the black community, even in Hispanic and even the white community in these rural areas. And it's, it's just pathetic. 

Rodney Bullard: Well, whilst Georgia is last — 50th in maternal health and highs in maternal mortality rate. And so, and that is pointedly in the black community.

And you said something that I think is important, that all of this really accretes to economic mobility. That, for me, economic mobility is three things. It's education. It's employment. It's entrepreneurship.

And the reason why you want to take care of the reason why all of this is important to any governor, to any municipality is because I've never seen a community of poverty. Fail to have issues that weigh on the social services of that state or that city or that county is education shortfall?

There's a shortfall and or there's a crime spike or their health outcomes that are unfortunate. But communities of poverty have those but communities of wealth don't, and so, if you can in fact bridge this gap, there is a need there is a desire for that and workforces is critical

And, at the end of the day, this isn't philanthropy because oftentimes we make this philanthropy and we say it's pithy, and we think it's less than. No, this is leadership.

Lesa Mitchell: Yeah, in some cases there's actual companies trying to get into those spaces and solve the problems. We have a couple here. 

Ross DeVol: One of the things we try to do at least is we're looking for co-investors So members of Walton family would typically put in some seed funds as a 501(c)(3). We need to obtain roughly 40% of our funding from outside sources.

It's a little bit less than that, but I try and round up to make sure we never get down to the real number, which is 33-and-a-third. So 40%, I like that. Never get below 40%. You don't have to lose any sleep. But this is where I'm encouraged by philanthropy.

My former boss, Mike Milken used to say, the easiest thing I can do is write you a check. My time is highly valuable. If I will give you my time, that can go a long way. Well, at this point, we needed some C capital with some follow on funding. Well, I don't know if it was an A round or what. I'm going to call it an A round. But the Ford Foundation, Darren Walker was willing to go all in with this.

When we had a program that we called Connected, well, it was tied to connecting the heartland. We delivered it through that platform, but it really was with builders and backers.

We call it the community growth program and toolkit, very early-stage entrepreneurship, and we had rolled it out. Donna Harris at Builders + Backers, it's her program, but we scaled it.

We got the funding behind it and introduced it and we piloted it in Tulsa, right? Think of what happened in Tulsa a little over a hundred years ago, and also in Oxford, Mississippi. And we had a portal, you go to apply for it, your background, you know, a series of questions. I think we asked five questions.

We didn't look at anyone. We just saw what they filled out and we found not only just the pilot program, but subsequently in 10 other locations around the heartland where we rolled it out in the early stages, 70% were BIPOC, with the majority being black female, that applied for the entrepreneurship early stage program with the idea accelerator.

And I think, it just has to say to the lack of connectivity in many of those communities, they didn't have access to a mentor. They didn't know someone who had started a company before and understand the process. So Darren, being from originally Louisiana and then Texas, he got his law degree at University of Texas, Austin. He was willing to co-invest with us at an early stage.

So we got some funding, we're able to scale that up. We've had 845 builders, we call them. Not all of them are going to be companies. Some are social entrepreneurs, probably close to half of them are potentially scalable businesses. and so it's been a very successful program, mostly delivered remotely.

There's two sessions that are in person. But we then developed a program with Donna Harris as well, that was, what's the next step? So you get a 5,000 Pebble grant in the Idea Accelerator, you get to test your idea, is it scalable? Nobody's going to come and invest, no bank's going to give you $5,000 to do that.

And then you go through that program and graduate, and then we evaluate whether or not it's potentially scalable business, and we have a Stepping Stones program that gives a $25,000 grant to those and running through another program. And then they get access to early-stage risk capital.

But it's that process of running through that when, when you see, especially some of the black women who've gone through it and have gone on to win awards in these pitch competitions that have went through it subsequently, it's just really rewarding. If we're ever going to close the wealth gap in this country, people in this room have a role to play.

We're just about done with a study done with the NASDAQ entrepreneurial center funded by JPMorgan foundation. It shows that early-stage investors do not invest in BIPOC companies that have similar business plans. And it's something we need to address. 

Lesa Mitchell: We have people in this room that know that that is a fact.

I want to end with you, Kumar. You, we've talked about talent. You guys have focused a lot on science and engineering talent. And you've accomplished a lot. You're doing some new things, I think, in the UK.

Do you want to give us a highlight of what it is that Renaissance Philanthropy thinks about talent and how it needs to be organized in order to fight some of the DARPA-like problems in the world?

Kumar Garg: Yeah. So, yeah, started it four months ago. The idea was, ‘How do we sort of bet big?’ And we've been thinking about in two ways, which I think are relevant to the talent story.

One is, are there ideas emerging in science and tech that could have a big impact on the talent story? So one big area that we're thinking about is, what is the intersection between human improvement and AI?

So how do we build? This is a big idea, but like, how do we actually build programs that actually allow you to say it's not AI replacing the human. It's actually the AI allowing you to accelerate your own learning process so you can learn faster, whether it's a student in middle school or whether it's an adult.

So we're doing a ton of active work with teams who are both sometimes companies and sometimes academic teams on how quickly we can actually use these tools to accelerate the pace of going from novice to expert. So I think that's one area.

And the second one is, and especially on the UK side, one of the things that I think a community like this is doing is, how do you build communities of talent?

It's actually really hard to do where you're catching people who are high schoolers, you're catching people who are in college and in graduate school, you're catching people who are rolling off one company and trying to figure out what to do. How do you build that ecosystem where you figure out your next teammate way faster?

And so Britain is going through this. So we're, we're one of their partners now where You know, they're trying to figure out, ‘How do we build that?’

And one of our views is just that we can build this as a global community where you have these tech hats, hotspots popping up all over the world. How are they in a shared talent economy together?

Lesa Mitchell: Well, I want to thank the three of you. You're all obviously addressing issues of economic mobility. You're addressing issues of economic growth.

You're addressing issues of, ‘Do we have the science and technology for the future?’ You're all doing it in a way that you are partnering with philanthropists, partnering with corporations, and in some cases, partnering with the government.

We have a lot of people in this room. We have some university folks in this room that I think could learn a lot from some of the things that Kumar and his group have funded previously.