Day 2: Tuesday 3/25

Day two started with a more reasonable wake up time and marked our last day at Columbae on the Stanford campus. Our first visit of the day was with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation in Palo Alto. The Kaiser Foundation focuses on health care policy research, communications and education. It serves as a non-partisan source of information on health care for the press, policy makers, and the public. Our visit with Kaiser included an overview of their programs, a review of some of their most interesting research/survey work, as well as talks with several people from the foundation itself (including a number of Stanford alums). Among the more interesting programs that Kaiser has been involved with, is an international public awareness campaign for HIV/AIDS, called the Global Media AIDS Initiative. Started in 2004, the program has brought together over 200 different media organizations in regional coalitions to help raise HIV/AIDS awareness in countries around the world. Our visit with Kaiser also included a chat with its President and CEO, Drew Altman, who discussed, among other things, the role of metrics and measurement in nonprofit organizations. Taking the contrarian position of opposing increased oversight and accountability, particularly of private foundations, Dr. Altman touched on the need for "strategic flexibility" in decision making for a foundation like Kaiser.

Our next meeting also took place at the Kaiser office with the awesome women at the Draper Richards Foundation. The talk mainly centered around the process of due diligence that Draper Richards goes through when selecting a nonprofit organization for funding. The standards that they set for choosing people and selecting nonprofits is amazingly high. The quality of thought, the depth of understanding, and the desire for measurable results that Draper Richards demands comes largely out the venture capital background of its senior leadership team. Some key takeaways from the meeting:

-Scalability in nonprofits is important
-Measure, measure, and remeasure results
-Quality people matter more than any other single factor
-Having and knowing how to leverage social networks is super important for a nonprofit founder
-Self-learning capacity and high intellectual bandwidth are also key traits in founders

After our visit with Draper Richards we headed off to San Francisco to meet with Upwardly Global, an organization that helps highly skilled immigrants rebuild their careers in the United States. We arrived in San Francisco nearly two hours early -- and then spent the next two hours searching for a place to park our huge over-sized vans. (Lesson Learned: Parking sucks in the city). After a series of parking mishaps (pictured below), we finally found a place and set off on foot - only to walk to the opposite end of the city from where we were supposed to be. After a somewhat frantic search for a cab, we finally managed to make it to Upwardly Global. The founder of the organization, although not available to speak with us, was kind enough to record a video sharing her experiences of what it was like to run the organization. The highlight of the visit however was when we got to see Upwardly Global in action, during one of their training sessions for immigrants. Seeing all of the individuals benefiting from Upwardly Global's work was deeply inspiring and one of the highlights of a terrific day.