Opening the Aperture to Create Possibility Through Education

Keri Larkin, a partner at Bain & Company and a member of the Greater Share Education Committee, discusses her involvement with the organization and the challenges they faced in the early days. She highlights the importance of unlocking capital generation and driving systemic change in education through sustainable and scalable funding. She also talks about  her excitement for the innovative and experimental nature of Greater Share and the need for philanthropy to evolve and try new approaches to make progress.

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You're a founding member of Greater Share, acting as interim CEO, COO, and a team advisor during the earliest part of our startup period. Can you talk a little bit about how you became involved in Greater Share?

As part of my work within Bain's education practice, this came about through Graham Elton and Paul Fletcher and Jason Glover, our founding team, looking for how to explore this idea and move it from concept to execution, so I got involved on the ground floor with how do we test if there’s a market for this. And if there are general private equity partners (GPs) interested in backing this, how do we look at its sustainability and project forward how the model might work.  How do we build enthusiasm and energy for it to bring people on board in ways that are additive to what we're trying to do? We have a lot of great examples of the community building and teaming that enabled Greater Share to get off the ground.

I was lucky. I was at the right place at the right time when this was an idea, and I was able to be a part of it at that very early conceptual stage.

 Is there an example that you want to share that might be exciting or fun to hear about?

The Education Fund is one idea within the Greater Share model and so we needed to name the organization. We went through a branding process and a naming process which was a lot of fun and helped us honed what Greater Share really stands for, our unique value proposition. Then, we sourced so much incredible talent from individuals looking to do something really meaningful and to be involved and to contribute in meaningful ways. We were really fortunate a lot of our critical business functions and areas of expertise, including strategy, operations, legal, marketing, communications, branding, web design, investor relations, PR and more initially were all done pro bono from a variety of organizations and individuals who wanted to be involved and who were also excited about this idea. All of that community building and bringing people together was really exciting and inspiring.

What challenges did you face in those early days? It sounds like you were having conversations about not just the education fund as a core endeavor, but as a way to think about a bigger way to push the Greater Share model forward. What were people excited about?

What people were really excited about, and I'm really excited about, is how this can unlock capital generation, and drive strategic priorities and systemic change through sustainable scale funding. Right now, I see so many clients and so many organizations that are going around year after year fundraising in small increments. They spend a large portion of time doing this. It's very hard to make really sizable, meaningful investments that require you to ensure you'll be able to cover costs three years out, four years out, five years out. It might be talent, it might be infrastructure, it might be technology — things that will enable organizations to have ambitious strategies, and to execute and scale those strategies, are really hamstrung and constrained by the annual fundraising model.

Greater Share basically turns this on its head. It creates a stream of scale funding for these organizations to rely upon and to make the investments that they need in order to really drive the type of impact that they're capable of.

Let's talk a little bit about your work on the Education Committee. We've said a lot about the rigor of selecting our NGOs. And with so many great organizations out there doing so much amazing work, what was the pivotal criteria in your review for coming together on our current cohort of education NGOs?

We wanted organizations that are really committed to marginalized, underserved children and communities. They can be anywhere around the world and we wanted to make sure that they were over-indexing on underserved communities and children and families. Then we wanted there to be rigorous evidence of impact. We felt like this was important because we're coupling the NGOs and the Education Committee with the Investment Committee and the GPs. So there is a foundation and culture of rigorous measurement and impact and evidence of impact within Greater Share. 

We recognized that when requiring evidence of impact, you're favoring organizations that probably are a little more mature, a little further along, and in some cases resourced, versus earlier stage organizations where it's harder for them to have evidence of impact. And that's where we looked at various models to make sure we were being inclusive of those organizations within Greater Share in a different way.

We also wanted organizations that had an ambition to drive truly systemic change — that were looking to provide a direct service for a community or for a population, and had ambitions, and were actively looking for ways to have impact beyond direct service. It was really important to us to make sure everyone was grounded in the idea that we need larger change, and we need to work together to achieve that.

So the criteria was equity, systemic change, and then being able to measure direct and larger impacts. Is there an NGO or two amongst our cohort that particularly inspires you? And where does that inspiration live?

These were really hard decisions, and the eight are phenomenal organizations. I'll say my heart really lies with early childhood. So on one hand, aeioTU and LEYF are two that I personally feel a connection with because I really value early childhood work. 

Professionally, I spend a lot of time working on career connected learning and student outcomes, so NISS, the National Institute of Student Success, is also an organization that I know well and deeply admire. I'm really excited about their work and evidence and what they're doing in closing the equity gap and closing the graduation gap for college students.

If I have to pick, those are some places where I feel especially deeply connected.  I hope everyone feels this way about the portfolio.  They are an incredible set of organizations and there are certain sectors, solutions, models, or geographies that will really speak to an investor, but the power is the collective.  There’s no one single solution to education, we have to address it through a variety of thoughtful approaches and over the continuum from cradle to career.

Greater Share has a student-centered theory of change that's really focused on equity of education, and you already spoke to some of that. Can you talk a little bit more about this idea of what it means to be student-centered?

Unfortunately, there's no silver bullet. It's not just more professional learning for teachers, or more classroom instruction, or if we change the curriculum, or if we better prepare parents, etc. — none of these alone is going to be the complete solve in a given community. What we know though is that the children need a network of individuals.  They need individuals who can wrap around them and who can spark curiosity and provide learning, security, confidence, guidance - everything that they need to really thrive.

Greater Share is built on this principle of how can we broaden, versus narrow, the solutions. So that's where you see each individual organization is putting the child at the center, and then collectively they're wrapping around in different ways. Some focus more on the classroom. Some focus more on things outside the classroom or individuals outside classroom. But together they're all thinking about the child or student first. And that was really important to us.

The portfolio of Greater Share organizations also collectively span cradle to career, which was important to us as well, to create a lot of learning and cross-functional learning.

And they are global, which was very deliberate. We really wanted to make sure that we were building learning and community across the whole world, versus being concentrated in any one geography, in any one solution.

And so broader has always been sort of part of the cornerstone of what we were thinking of in terms of building this community.

Outside of your work with us at Greater Share, you have a significant education background, both in your career, and in your volunteer work. What attracts you to education personally? And what do you think we should be focused more broadly on as we look at the future for kids?

What attracts me to education is it's the foundation to solving a lot of other problems around the world. If we have an educated population, we’re better able to tackle the challenges that we're facing together as a country and as the world. Also, to me, it is at the fiber or the root of inequity and empowerment comes with equal access to quality education and to ensure that that education spans all the way to an individual's very early years. It ensures financial stability for families, and we know has huge ripple effects in society.

I spend time thinking about how do we shift our society to really value early childhood education, and also adapt education in middle school, high school, and post-secondary to think about the outcomes the students want and need?  I spend a lot of time with students, and they often feel lost or confused or don't know what career options are for them beyond the jobs they see in their own household. And it's our job as a society to open the aperture for them to create possibility, and then to give them access to the set of skills and experiences that will enable them to achieve their goals and reach their potential.

Anything  else that's top of mind for you?

Current philanthropic models are very important, and they've gotten us to where we are. But if we don't innovate, if we don't try new things and don't take advantage of other systems or models that work and figure out how to integrate them or how to think about them differently, we'll never go beyond where we are today.  We’ll struggle to overcome today’s constraints. 

That's why I love Greater Share because it's experimenting. It's trying something new and different and innovative.  It’s asking how do we bring together GPs and NGOs that normally do not coexist in this way and leverage each other's power and have everyone win. And to me, that's so compelling and exciting. We need to think about innovations like this if we want to break beyond where we are today.

Thank you, Keri.

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