[Infowarrior] - New Foundation Takes Aim at Urgent Threats

[Richard Forno]

New Foundation Takes Aim at Urgent Threats

By STEPHANIE STROM

Published: April 14, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/us/15foundation.html?hp

Jeff Skoll, the first president of eBay, has donated $100 million to  
start a new foundation to address urgent threats like water shortages,  
pandemics and the Middle East conflict.

The organization, the Skoll Urgent Threats Fund, will be led by Dr.  
Larry Brilliant, the iconoclastic public health expert and technology  
entrepreneur who until February headed up Google’s philanthropic  
enterprise, google.org.

“That’s just a start,” Mr. Skoll said of the money he has committed  
from his Skoll Foundation. “I’ll be putting in more money over time.”

Mr. Skoll is fast putting his mark on the world of philanthropy by  
using a variety of approaches, nonprofit and for profit, to address  
social problems.

His profit-making film company, Participant Media, is known for  
producing movies like “An Inconvenient Truth” and “The Kite Runner,”  
which aim to bring greater public awareness to social issues, while  
his investment firm, Capricorn Investments, puts money into things  
like waterless urinals and developing sustainable seafood products.

The Skoll Foundation underwrites the work of social entrepreneurs like  
Connie K. Duckworth, who founded an organization, Arzu Inc., that  
provides health care and higher-than-market-rate compensation to  
Afghan women making rugs in exchange for their pledge to send their  
children to school and attend literacy classes themselves.

“What I’ve been aiming at all these years is to try and address these  
big social issues in the world,” Mr. Skoll said, “but in the last five  
years or so, certain issues have emerged very clearly that, if we  
don’t get ahead of them soon, all of the other things we’re trying to  
do, whether improving the lives of women or preservation of species or  
girls’ education, won’t really matter.”

Dr. Brilliant, who has given up his latest job as Google’s Chief  
Philanthropy Evangelist, said he hoped to leverage the work of the  
other organizations Mr. Skoll has supported in pursuing solutions to  
some of the most complex threats to humanity.

“They are tools in the tool kit,” he said. “We may be using the films  
and creative talent of Participant, or the social entrepreneurs whose  
lives and work can inform our work.”

Mr. Skoll said he would like to attract other financial resources to  
the Urgent Threats Fund.

The Skoll Foundation already has partnered with google.org to put $11  
million in total into the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, a  
nonprofit group that identified 40 new viruses in Africa by studying  
blood collected by hunters from the animals they kill and studying the  
blood of the hunters themselves. The grants will allow the  
organization to spread its work to other regions of the world.