Echoing Green: Turning Bold Ideas into Real-World Social Impact | Cheryl Dorsey

In Episode 2 of the Do Good on Purpose Podcast, Dorothy Stuehmke speaks with Cheryl Dorsey, CEO of Echoing Green, about how bold ideas can become real-world solutions to today’s most pressing social challenges. Drawing on her experience as an Echoing Green Fellow and decades of leadership in social innovation, Cheryl reflects on the importance of identifying and investing in leaders closest to the issues, and the role sustained support plays in moving from idea to impact. Together, they explore how Echoing Green supports early-stage social innovators at critical moments, helping transform promising ideas into lasting change. This episode also connects to the Do Good on Purpose Giving Circle, offering listeners a direct way to support Echoing Green’s social innovation efforts.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Change rarely happens by accident. It happens when people decide to do good on purpose. Welcome to the Do Good on Purpose podcast, a place to step back from the noise, hear thoughtful conversations about the defining challenges of our time, and discover how you can be part of the solutions. Each episode connects to the show's giving circle, where listeners can choose to support the work we discuss. I'm your host, Dorothy Stumkey. Some people build companies, others build movements, and some people build the people behind the ideas that change the world. That's the work Cheryl Dorsey has spent decades doing. As president of Echoing Green, Cheryl has helped identify and support social entrepreneurs whose ideas have reshaped how we think about justice, education, economic opportunity, and community leadership. Echoing Green's fellowship has produced incredible leaders like Michelle Obama, Van Jones of CNN, and Cheryl Dorsey herself. They all received early support for ideas that would go on to change millions of lives. And behind the work of Echoing Green is Cheryl herself, a Harvard-trained physician who is remarkably down to earth, a champion of bold ideas, and someone who has spent years investing in people with the courage to challenge the status quo. So today on the Do Good on Purpose podcast, Cheryl and I talk about what it takes to recognize the next generation of social entrepreneurs and the experiences in Cheryl's own life that shaped her commitment to doing good in the world. Cheryl Dorsey joins us now. Cheryl, thank you so much for being with me here today on the Do Good Podcast. I'm just thrilled to be able to have an hour with you and spend some time getting into the weeds on who you are as a leader in the social entrepreneurship space and your leadership of Echo and Green over the past couple of decades.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Dorothy, thank you so much. It really is an honor and pleasure to be with you. So I'm super excited about our conversation in time today.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Fantastic. So I want to start with grounding the conversation in an understanding of what social entrepreneurship is exactly. How do you define social entrepreneurship?

SPEAKER_01 2:36

Yeah, so I would say it is a bit of a Rorschach test, right? So I would say if you asked eight different people, you know, this field that is still relatively new, maybe 40, 45 years old, you get six different definitions. So I'll give you a couple just to sort of ground your audience into how various acolytes of the space think about it. So there are some people that identify a particular type of transformational leader, the social entrepreneur, the social innovator, as a pragmatic visionary, someone who's got a transformative vision for how the world should work, where equity is first and foremost, and people have full opportunity to thrive. So that focuses on the type of transformational leader that is envisioning and using innovation to drive transformational progress. There are then some who think more about social innovation and how it weaves together a variety of uh actors who will say that social innovation is the blurring of sectoral boundaries where the state, civil society, and the market come together in a way that creates new shared public value. So it's a form of alliance that crosses sector identity approaches to create something new and special and different. And then, you know, I have maybe my own personal view where I think at the end of the day, it's a very human-centered or people-centered approach to change, where I look at social innovators and see how they are laser focused on unlocking constrained human potential in a way that will lead to sustainable and vibrant communities that open up access to opportunity for all. So it's about really putting people at the center of these solutions and these approaches to driving change in community.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

Excellent. Thank you for sharing those different perspectives, those different types of definitions, because social entrepreneurship has been around for a couple of decades, but not everybody really fully understands what it actually means. So you're talking about small businesses, essentially, led by leaders who are solving major challenges that the world is facing at a hyper-local level or at a global level. So you're talking about businesses, you're talking about nonprofits, you're talking about people who maybe even have government solutions too.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Yes. It's all of the above. It's all of the above, um, which makes it sort of difficult to wrap your arms around, right? But I'm glad you sort of use the language of business, because you know, not all businesses are generating profit. And even nonprofits can generate profit as long as you pour it back into the enterprise, right? But it is about enterprises that are strongly focused on driving social impact, whether it's locally or globally, but there's that intentionality around the primacy of the return on social investment. And you can do that through a variety of corporate forms, through a variety of different methodologies and approaches, but it is all about significant social innovation that resets the equilibrium in a particular setting or sector. And what I really like about social innovation is that it calls all sectors, all voices in. And whether you're a government entrepreneur who's trying to tap into innovative practices to make that sector function differently, or businesses that are thinking about a double bottom line, triple bottom line approach, tackling not only financial return on investment, but also social and environmental returns on investment. So I really like the breadth and expanse of uh the vision and aspiration of social innovation. These problems are so urgent and we've got so much work to do that using innovation as a tool to leapfrog current constraints has certainly been very appealing to me.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

So we're gonna get into some examples in a little bit, but first I want to know how did you get into this space? I mean, you have this incredible story. Tell us a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_01 6:54

Sure. And it's uh it goes back, you know, many, many decades. So I'm proud um to call myself a 1992 Echoing Green Fellow. So when I was starting um a nonprofit in Boston called the Family Van, it was very much focused on racial health disparities because in the late 80s, um, black babies were dying at three times the rate of white babies, which is horrible and inequitable enough. But the fact that it was happening in the shadow of some of the world's best medical facilities, and at the time I was at Harvard Medical School, it just seemed unconscionable to me. And it was just something that I and my co-founder, Dr. Nancy Oriol, couldn't turn away from. So, you know, I I think both Nancy and I sort of came to this work as African-American women of a particular age, having grown up in the shadow of the civil rights movement, trying to navigate our country, you know, as an intersectional person, a woman, uh, an African-American, um, and came to this idea that, you know, we had a role and responsibility in reducing some of these structural inequities. So it was sort of a pretty traditional and passionate social justice response. But um, Echoing Green was founded in 1987, and so it was a fairly new fellowship program when I learned about it in graduate school. So Nancy and I had been working on this idea for a mobile health unit that would bridge sort of communities into existing healthcare services. But we were newbies in terms of working to found a new nonprofit organization. And I heard about this new Fangled Fellowship program. So I said, Oh, I better go to this informational session because I'm looking for funding for this. And they were offering free lunch, and I was a poor grad student. So I was like, this is a win-win. I'll get the free fellowship program. And it was, you know, through the application process and being selected as an Echo and Green Fellow that I learned about this new framing called social innovation. And I think what attracted me to it, Dorothy, was its alliance-based model that was appealing to many different audiences. And for a whole host of reasons, I don't think it makes sense to go into them now. You know, those of us who are strong sort of social justice advocates and activists, you know, I would often be in rooms sort of passionately talking about these racial health disparities and what we could and should do about them. And I could also I could often see people across the table reformulating my remarks, and you could sort of the wheels turning. And what they heard was, for you to win, I have to lose. It was sort of a zero-sum formulation of these problems. But what I liked about social innovation was that it was an invitation in for all sorts of strange bedfellows. And then the notion was I don't have to lose for you to win. There is a win-win value proposition here that I think opened up a space for people to come together across difference that I hadn't seen. And it just really kind of blew my mind. And I was like, wow, there's something here about working together across difference, bringing new sorts of allies and resources to the table that was really attractive to me and that's sort of kept me in this space for the last 30 years or so.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

That's fascinating. I love that summary. And you said a couple of things that I want to unpack a little bit more. You talked a bit about lived experience and being in this moment after the civil rights movement, seeing your community struggle. You decided to leave med school in order to do this, right? So you really, really believed in this opportunity to join this movement of social entrepreneurship. And I mean, the past three decades, wow, what you've done. But my question is around lived experience and philanthropy and the importance of bringing lived experience into supporting leaders and organizations that have that perspective. Can you talk a little bit about that and what you're seeing in that space and how important that has been to the work that you do?

SPEAKER_01 11:06

Absolutely. And I appreciate you bringing it up. And I will often sort of use live experience and proximity interchangeably, right? And you know, there's so many reasons that I'm grateful of the great Brian Stevenson's leadership, but you know, he really is sort of considered sort of the author of this concept of proximity, right? You've got to get proximate to these problems to generate solutions that make sense. And I think him using his reputation, using his brilliance to pour currency and pedigree into the notion of lived experience or proximity was really game-changing. Because I think before, you know, where a lot of philanthropy was sort of tilting to sort of the technocratic, completely quantitatively driven uh approaches to thinking about impact, sort of lost the power and the promise of this really important form of data, which is lived experience and proximity, is sort of rebalancing that type of expertise and data. I mean input, I think was a really transformative moment for the field. And it's been nice to see, I would see, in the last decade, where that concept is much more mainstream, much more socialized, still has a way to go because the power dynamics in philanthropy are so stark that we haven't made as much progress as we need to. And whether it's, you know, trust-based philanthropy or lots of different initiatives to open up networks to those who have been excluded from them to move away from, you know, this homophily of, you know, like, invest, and like, you know, there are lots of studies that show, you know, investors are much more likely to invest in someone who went to their same school or lives in their same neighborhood or goes to their same religious institution or something like that. That cuts out a whole swath of folks. And we know from the capital disparities that it is still an incredibly difficult problem. So I think, you know, we have made some progress. We've sort of rolled the boulder up uh partway uh the hill, but we've got a ways to go for sure.

SPEAKER_00 13:11

Thank you for sharing that. I want to now go a little bit further back into your origin story, peel back the layers a little bit more, understand from your perspective what it means to do good, right? So there's an article in Harvard Kennedy School's website that talks about you as a values investor. I love that term because when I think about philanthropy and being in the social impact space, I think about risk capital and investing in bold and exciting ideas that are gonna just shift the narrative and make a breakthrough. And the terminology that they used to describe you and how you describe yourself, I think, too, as a values investor, is so on point. I'd love for you to talk about that a little bit more and what that means in your work.

SPEAKER_01 14:02

Yes. So um, yeah, I know again, with the road traveled, um, you know, and our lived experiences really sort of pours into us our framework, our way of understanding the world. And like you said, Dorothy, it's our values. And look, I mean, again, I'm uh the last year of the baby boomer. So again, I grew up in the shadow of the civil rights movement, where, you know, my dad was the first person in his family to go to go to college, my mom was the second person in her family to go to college. So, you know, number one, this recognition that opportunities were opening up for African Americans. And not only did you have to take advantage of it, but you were standing on the shoulders of so many generations of African Americans who sacrificed everything for you to have that opportunity. And so, you know, I feel like I enter every room surrounded by, you know, all of the ancestors I'll never know, you know, their sacrifices were priceless. So, you know, to whom much is given, much is owed. And I carry that with me every day. And I just think about, you know, because of an accident of birth, who my parents were, who my family was, where, you know, I was able to grow up, you know, Baltimore, my hometown, um, which I still claim lovingly, is known for a lot of things, but um has a long, painful history of significant housing segregation. So um, you know, my childhood home, the place where I grew up from four to, you know, my mid-20s was um the largely Jewish neighborhood that was one of the first that allowed or was welcoming to African American families. So to sort of grow up in a world where you were welcomed and surrounded by Jewish families, by other white families who made you a part of the community was a wonderful, wonderful loving environment in which to grow up, that you can have friendships and relationships across differences, and that there's a beauty and extraordinary opportunity for learning in that. And so I think I took sort of this legacy commitment to my culture and my ethnicity and my history, along with sort of this unique experience of growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, um, that really did shape who I was and really believed in the power of a diverse, inclusive community to really make a difference. And then I think, you know, the last thing is how painful it was to me, you know, as the kid of two public school teachers who devoted their lives to educating black and brown children, to see that so many of them would never have the opportunities that I had. Um, that was really unsettling to me, right? And it was sort of like, what's your obsession? And this notion that we know, and you said it, you know, talent is equally distributed, opportunity is not like wow, what could the world look like if that talent everywhere, um, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, place of birth, couldn't constrain your ability to make a dent in the world. So I just think it it has become, you know, my defining North Star of how do you make that, how do you make that world possible, or how do we sort of move the dial um towards that day more possible? So it continues to really motivate me.

SPEAKER_00 17:24

That's great. And so just kind of going back to this values investor concept, you have a very specific set of criteria that you look for in your fellows, and we're gonna get into that in a bit. But just wondering when you started out in your career, was there someone who took a chance on you in a specific way? And how has that informed your work?

SPEAKER_01 17:47

Oh, I love that question, um, Dorothy. And I would say that I feel so very lucky. My mentor, who I mentioned was the co-founder of my Echoing Green funded fellowship, Dr. Nancy Oriol, who, you know, I just can't imagine where I'd be without my Nancy. So Dr. Oriol, African-American obstetric anesthesiologist, Harvard professor, um, became um dean of students um at the Harvard Medical School, and um just is the most important mentor to this day in my life, and not only a mentor, but now one of my dearest friends and and my family. And, you know, for years, you know, Nancy um always reminds me that, you know, I was so in awe of her as this amazing, amazing, brilliant iconoclass that I, you know, for the first six months or so, I could never call her Nancy. It was Dr. Oriole, Dr. Oriole. And she literally threatened me one day. She's like, If you call me Dr. Oriole one more time. Um, so that was a shift. And then it would became Nancy, my colleague, my friend, in addition to being my mentor. But she said something to me once that I so appreciated and made me want to be better and retire, where she said, you know, Cheryl, you keep thinking of me as your mentor, but you don't understand how bi-directional this is and how much you've enriched me and how much you've changed my life. So that was such validation for me, where I looked at her in such awe and still do, that we could have this incredible bi-directional relationship that shared learning, shared love, shared commitment that was really life-changing, right? I was fortunate to have so much support from my family, but to have something akin to that deep belief and sort of ride or die commitment from someone like my mentor, Nancy, just game-changing. And I so wish that for everyone. But again, I'm super grateful every single day that, you know, I found my way to Nancy. And even though I'm not a practicing physician, I'm completely convinced that the universe sent me to Harvard Medical School to meet Nancy. And it it was, it was meant to be, and it was a circuitous journey, but I I was meant to meet her. She was meant to be in my life, and we were meant to do this work together. So I'm just so grateful for that relationship and that opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 20:09

That's amazing. Thank you for sharing that. So let's talk about Echoing Green now. I want our listeners to really understand what it is that Echoing Green does. You have a fellowship program, you have all sorts of support for the fellows as they take on this fellowship, but then afterwards for many, many years too. Can you explain your model?

SPEAKER_01 20:32

Absolutely. Um, I'm very proud of the work that Echoing Green has done. We were founded almost 40 years ago by the senior leadership of a private equity firm called General Atlantic. And if people have heard of General Atlantic, a very successful private equity firm, but a really interesting origin story where the initial capital for General Atlantic came from the renowned philanthropist Chuck Feeney. We all know him from Atlantic Philanthropies. If you've read his biography, The Billionaire Who Wasn't, Chuck, um, after uh making his fortune through the duty free empire, dedicated himself to spending down his $8 billion fortune and captured a lot of attention. Bill Gates will say in public that it was Chuck's example that led him to found the Giving Pledge. And so many business leaders looked to Chuck for his model of not only business leadership, but philanthropic leadership. And I would say that the General Atlantic guys felt the same way. And they were very proud of their affiliation with Mr. Feeney and their ability to learn from him and to work with him and really model their own civic action against Mr. Feeney's really high bar. But in looking around for something to do philanthropically as a company, they stumbled upon this wonderful concept called social entrepreneurship and social innovation. And it made sense to these investment professionals because it was like meeting like. So in the way that they were investing in Entrepreneurs to drive change and to drive financial return on investment. They said, Oh, we can sort of um, you know, transfer some of that approach to the social sector where you're finding amazing leaders, entrepreneurial leaders that are trying to drive social return on investment. So it made sense on a lot of levels, pattern recognition, what they were already doing, for them to really double and triple down on social innovation. So through their vision and their work, Echoing Green has become, I would say, the leading angel investor in social um entrepreneurs around the world. And we are best known for our fellowship program that every year takes in 4,000, 4,500 submissions from 160 countries around the world. And through a really rigorous due diligence process, winnow down that huge pool of applicants and talent from everywhere to anywhere from 20 to 40 investments in new social innovation founders and wrap around them our approach to capital capacity building and community to help them go farther faster. So through qualitative and quantitative studies, we look very much like a best in class incubator and accelerator. But what I think sets Echo and Green apart from many others is how we walk alongside our community. And I do think, you know, it is true for us when we say once a fellow, always a fellow. And we are a very sticky, tight network that allows alumni from my generation to still be in community and to still support, you know, the 2024 and 2025 classes of Echoing Green Fellows. There's a loyalty, there's a belief, there's a pay it forward ethos that really has kept me part of this community for, you know, 30 plus years now. And I will say when you walk alongside your alumni, it becomes clear from listening to your main stakeholder group that this fellowship, which was an amazing inflection point for all of us, was necessary but not sufficient to continue to propel their leadership journey. There's so many headwinds that these leaders face that we recognize that to do our jobs well, that we were going to have to grow alongside our alums. So over the past 30 years, we have begun to offer new programming, whether it's a secular chaplaincy program or a blended capital opportunity for our fellows and alums whose businesses are growing, all of those things that are part of being part of the investment stack of these leaders that you believe in. So I'm really proud of the work that Echo and Green continues to do with our family, with our community of leaders.

SPEAKER_00 24:55

So for our listeners who want to really understand as a fellow what support you're giving them, you mentioned capital, you mentioned capacity building, and then community. Put that into context for our listeners.

SPEAKER_01 25:08

Sure. You know, we really describe our capital as high risk capital. So, you know, when you're starting something, having unconstrained capital really matters. So, you know, for a lot of folks, it's the first salary they are able to take, or they're able to use it for general op dollars, um, unlike other project-based funding. Um, so it is an important infusion of capital in a just-in-time manner that allows the entrepreneur to deploy it in the best way she sees possible. So that matters. So, especially for a lot of young people, they're able to quit their job and stop doing this off the side of their desk. They're going to take the plunge and see if they can make this enterprise work. Our capacity takes all forms from the very informal, you know, WhatsApp channel, where someone says, Hey, I'm struggling with this issue. And potentially, you know, a fellow in Brooklyn will hear from a fellow in Uganda who said, Yep, I went through that same thing. Do not reinvent the wheel. Let me share with you what I've done. Those sorts of informal peer-to-peer learnings, which are stunningly invaluable all the way to structured partnerships with fundraising consultants or PR or comms professionals that help these leaders develop themselves and their organizations. But I would say if you pulled the a thousand echoing green fellows, the capital and capacity mattered. Sure it did, but the community matters most of all. So we're all set to convene in about, you know, three weeks or so in Mexico City for one of our annual fellow gatherings. And you talk about a family reunion, Dorothy, there's nothing like it. I can't describe the magic. It's alchemy, it's indescribable, but I can tell you how many of our fellows and alums have said, I need this. My soul needs this, my brain needs this, my body needs this. And just something about being in community with like-minded folks, especially now in a time where some of their enterprises are retrenching, are shutting down, are facing such difficult headwinds, having that safe space to pry, to ponder, to brainstorm. It's just it's priceless. So I do think sort of this community capital that we build and continue to build is probably the most important thing that we offer.

SPEAKER_00 27:27

I wish I could go to this gathering. This sounds amazing.

SPEAKER_01 27:30

But it'd be great. Next explosive, here we come.

SPEAKER_00 27:34

So my next question is around you giving us a sense of who are these fellows? Who have they gone on to become? What have they gone on to lead? Give us an example of. I know there's you uh as an Echoing Green fellow from 92, Michelle Obama, Van Jones. There's some really big names who have come out of Echoing Green's training. Tell us about who these people are, who they've gone on to become, what they're leading, the challenges that they're looking to solve, the enterprises they've launched and are sustaining and scaling. Give us give us the context here.

SPEAKER_01 28:12

Sure. And I'm always so proud and honored to talk about this incredible group of leaders. Um, and what I like about Echoing Green's model, which is really leader first, is that there's unlimited potential in terms of what happens to these leaders over the course of their career. So they may start off building an enterprise and they may stay with it. You know, I look like I look at an incredible alum like Wendy Kopp, who founded Teach for America after she graduated from college with funding from Echoing Green and others, who's built this, you know, amazing movement around education as a civil rights issue that a lot of young people have um have become so passionate about and have become TFA teachers and core members. Um, but she continues to do her work now with her global efforts around Teach for All, about how do we make educational equity a priority for so many children around the world. I think that's a wonderful example of someone who has um really created the space that she's now leading. Um but then I also look at leaders like Kennedy and Jess Odede, two fellows from 2010, who, when we met them, were at Wesleyan working on a community called Shining Hope for Communities in Kibera, one of Africa's largest slums. And they were very committed to initially increasing the value and safety of girls in the slums. So they started Kabara's first tuition-free school for girls. And now Shining Hope for Communities is the largest community and economic development organization in Kenya. I mean, it serves over two plus million people. It has a footprint, not in just in Kibera, but now 35 of 47 counties across the country of Kenya. It has innovated so many different programs, including this amazing aerial water piping system to bring clean water to Kibera in this phenomenally interesting way. And it's changing lives at scale. Also, name, you know, two incredible women, Vanessa Garrison and Morgan Dixon, the founders of Girl Trek, which is near and dear to my heart as an African American woman. African American women have high rates of obesity, probably 59-60%, leading to all sorts of chronic conditions and reduced um longevity. And they looked at the science and the psychology around the power of walking and started Girl Trek, which is now the largest public health organization for Black women in this country. They've gotten a million women to walk, to build community that has led to not only positive health outcomes, but incredible civic outcomes. So, you know, it is amazing to watch both these leaders progress and build these amazing organizations, but they will go on to do other things because, you know, both the founders of Shafco, Shining Hope for Communities, and Girl Trek are young leaders. But I think about one of our echoing green alums from my generation or a few years after me, Mark Levine, who started the first credit union in Washington Heights, you know, 30-some years ago called Credit Where Credit is due, working mostly with Dominican uh residents. If you're a New York City resident, I believe he is now New York City's controller after having been on um New York City Council, Manhattan Borough president. So it's been fascinating to watch these leaders take different pathways, but still driving impact in a variety of different ways.

SPEAKER_00 31:50

That's incredible. And I love all of those stories. And it's just the breadth of it is so impressive, right? And the longevity, right?

SPEAKER_01 31:58

Yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 31:59

So let's talk a little bit about what gives you hope now. I mean, I think there's so much inspiration in the work that you're leading because you see these innovative solutions and you see them come to life and have legs and grow and and transform and evolve and produce some phenomenal leaders. So tell us a little bit about what gives you hope in this moment because we are, as a nation, as a community, no matter where you sit on the political spectrum, there's a lot of pain, there's a lot of polarization. What gives you hope in this moment in the work that you do and in philanthropy in general?

SPEAKER_01 32:36

Yeah, and I will say that I feel so fortunate, Dorothy, that I live in a hope bubble, right? So I've I'm surrounded by these innovators every day who get up deeply and truly believing that better days are ahead of us and that we are going to figure out some of these really thorny, difficult issues. And they work hard, but they bring joy and passion and belief to the work. So I feel very fortunate that I am bathed in that um that very hopeful atmosphere. But you know, you talked about polarization, and I think you're right that sort of the the powers that be pay a lot of attention to this truth of, you know, we're in this moment of democratic backsliding. We see a real rise of populism on both the right and the left. And it is worrisome in some degree because these populist moments um sort of spring up because people distrust their government. It is not working for them. They feel disconnected from civic space. Um, and I do see that, but I um am increasingly convinced that we all are missing the bigger story. That yes, we are in a populist movement, but the biggest pool of populism is not left-wing populism or right-wing populism. It's what I call civic populism, which is when citizens also are looking around saying the current way of doing things and living and being, it's not working for any of us. So people are fond of saying, oh, you know, you look at 60% of young people or Gen Zs who have checked out of the political process, but they haven't checked out civically. They have just reallocated their energies to driving change locally around issues that they care deeply about. So our framework is so wrong. We're missing all of this activity and action and good works that I see all day, every day, um, because it's not in the traditional 20th century political framework that most of us are used to, you know, evaluating things through that lens. But it's out there, it's out there, but we've got to name it and we've got to sort of build the civic infrastructure around them to make it more impactful and more visible. So I see it. It's just there under the surface. And if we just invested a little bit more in it, boy, would we be on our way. I know it, I know it, and I'm just completely convinced of it.

SPEAKER_00 35:02

So let's talk about that then. Folks, folks who are listening to this podcast who want to contribute to Echoing Green through the giving circle, what will their contributions support?

SPEAKER_01 35:17

Yes, absolutely. So I think the the lovely thing about the work of social innovation is I think you can come in at any level that makes sense to you and that really feeds your soul. You know, innovation is an incredibly powerful story to drive change. You know, there are innovations happening across women and girls, uh, criminal justice reform, tech for good, education reform. So depending on the thing you're passionate about, there are lots of organizations like Echo and Green who are finding those innovators. So there's a way to support that innovation and innovator. That's easy enough to do. But then there is also the opportunity to play at the systems change level because social innovation is a growing global social movement, but its infrastructure is still undeveloped. So for those who are thinking at a systems change level, there's work we need to do around building fundraising infrastructure, communications infrastructure, collaborative networks, all the things that have to go into building movements. That's work that is still fairly nascent. So I just think, wow, there are so many entry points to the work of social innovation that you will, and you and your listeners will have no lack of choices and options if you're committed to doing this work. So I think it's a really exciting time to raise your hand and get involved in social innovation.

SPEAKER_00 36:42

Cheryl, thank you so much for spending some time with me today. This has been so informative. I've learned a lot. I mean, I know you guys for so many years, but I love just getting in the weeds about Echo and Green, but also to learn more about you as a leader and what you've accomplished and the organization that you've grown and led for the past couple of decades. So thank you so much for spending time with me today.

SPEAKER_01 37:06

Well, Dorothy, thank you for doing this podcast and creating this platform. And I um am really honored and grateful that you invited me to participate. So thank you.

SPEAKER_00 37:18

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode on the Do Good on Purpose podcast. And if today's conversation inspired you, please consider supporting the work through the Do Good on Purpose Giving Circle, which is linked in the show notes. And if you really enjoyed this episode, please subscribe. Share it with someone who believes in building a better world because change rarely happens by accident. It happens when people decide to do good on purpose.