Ellie Bertani: Driving Social Impact & ROI in Philanthropy

Ellie Bertani, President and CEO of GitLab Foundation, discusses the foundation’s unique approach to philanthropy that prioritizes ROI, risk-taking, and speed to support economic mobility initiatives. Drawing from her cross-sectoral experience in nonprofit, public, and private sectors, Bertani explains how the foundation measures impact by tracking how every dollar invested aims to generate at least $100 in additional lifetime earnings for people living below a living wage. She shares success stories from a portfolio of over 120 grants across Colombia, Kenya, and the United States, highlighting investments in areas like green jobs, short-form credentials, and technology infrastructure. Bertani also discusses their Learning for Action Fund, which helps grantees build monitoring and evaluation capacity, and offers practical advice for nonprofits on becoming more outcomes-focused through agile, data-driven approaches to program design and implementation.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning. 

Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Work Forces is supported by Lumina Foundation. Lumina is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Let's dive in.

Julian Alssid: On the workforces podcast. We feature a range of companies and organizations offering various programs, products, and initiatives that live at the nexus of work and learning. Some are funded through public dollars, other through private investments, and we don't always dive into those details in our conversations. However, today we're taking a slightly different approach and speaking directly with the leader of a foundation that's focused on supporting a range of innovative organizations seeking to solve significant challenges.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Yes, Julian, we're looking forward to this conversation. The mission of the GitLab Foundation is to improve lifetime earnings through access to opportunities by supporting organizations in a number of different focus areas. The Foundation seeks to have impact in three different geographic regions, Colombia, Kenya and the United States. The foundation's focus on ROI is particularly distinct. They pay close attention to how their dollars contribute to the total lifetime earnings for low income families. 

Julian Alssid: Yes, and at a time in which we're navigating significant change in the world of work and learning from policy shifts, economic uncertainty, the rapid advancement of AI, we're looking to dive deep into a conversation with the President and CEO of GitLab Foundation, Ellie Bertani. We'll discuss how they monitor and measure impact and ensure that every dollar spent drives true and lasting change.

Kaitlin LeMoine: With a background in the nonprofit, public and private sectors, Ellie brings a shared value cross-sectoral approach to drive sustainable impact. Prior to joining the GitLab Foundation, Ellie spent 10 years in the private sector with roles at Wells, Fargo and Walmart, and much of her work focused on frontline worker economic stability and mobility. Earlier in her career, Ellie spent nearly 10 years in the nonprofit and public sector, including positions with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the US, State Department, Third Sector Capital Partners and Rotary International. Ellie, thanks so much for joining us for today's conversation. We're so excited to have you with us. 

Ellie Bertani: Oh, I'm so grateful for the invitation. It's great to be here.

Julian Alssid: Yes, Ellie, thank you so much. And if you would tell us about your background and what led you to GitLab Foundation.

Ellie Bertani: As you can tell, my background is a mix of 10 years in the nonprofit and philanthropic space early in my career, and then 10 years in the private sector, and I've really tried to combine perspectives of what makes each of those sectors impactful and what can contribute to drive social change into GitLab Foundation, as we have launched it and founded it two and a half years ago. I think in particular, we're trying to say, what are the most important factors that drive great investment in the private sector, some approaches from venture capital in particular, that we think, when translated into a philanthropic setting, can really help us make evidence based smart decisions, help us move really quickly as an organization, and help us find these really sort of diamonds in the rough jewels of projects or organizations that have great new ideas that can really help people who need economic mobility get money into their pockets and move up the ladder.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So you're starting to take us in this direction, Ellie, but can you provide, I know we said a little bit about the GitLab Foundation, but can you know you provide more of a background on on an overview of the foundation, and really what makes your investment strategy unique? 

Ellie Bertani: We are a global, independent, private foundation, as you said, working in three markets today. We have a mission to improve lifetime earnings through access to opportunities. And we really think about economic mobility pretty broadly. We think there are tremendous number of factors that can help support an individual to grow their earnings over time. Some of those supports may be skills development and workforce training programs. Some of those supports may be things like early education and earlier in their lives, their access to great opportunities at younger ages, and some of those may be access to technology solutions that can help them navigate or find new opportunities as they're working through their lives. But we really take I think there are three different things that make our investment approach a bit unique in philanthropy, first is our focus on ROI. Here we estimate and track the impact of every investment that we make using a unique what we call North Star return on investment methodology. That means for every dollar that we invest, we seek to drive at least $100 in additional lifetime earnings for people who live below a living wage. We seek out solutions that lead people to pathways to prosperity, and we recognize that it's really important to have financial stability as a foundation to drive economic mobility. The second thing that is a bit unique about us is we have a pretty high risk tolerance. We believe that philanthropy is in a unique position to take risk and test out new social innovations in a way that others, for example, the public sector, really can't, since they're using taxpayer dollars. And so building on that unique capability, we are willing to bet on unproven ideas and also to invest in our grantees' ability to build evidence of whether their ideas work, and also to learn through iteration how their ideas can be improved. And I think this, this ability to seek out risky projects, is something that we would encourage other philanthropies to do as well. And then the third thing that we do that is a bit different is we really move with speed. We believe in getting capital as quickly as possible to organizations who are driving change. That's why we've designed our processes to be as grantee friendly as possible, asking for just enough information to help inform our decision making and make some good bets. And this, I think, is demonstrated by the fact that over our first two years, we've made over 120 grants and moved almost $35 million quickly to high potential ideas. So that's what really, I think makes this difference.

Julian Alssid: Well, so Ellie picking up on that. So you have this, you've developed rapidly, then pretty big portfolio. Well, how do you develop maybe a little bit more on that? And how do you then monitor this portfolio that is in different focus areas and has different kind of time and impacts horizons? 

Ellie Bertani: How we develop the portfolio is very much sort of a building upon the scientific method. We lay out a series of hypotheses of what we think is important, what is driving the labor market? For example, in the United States, where do we see opportunity and growth, and where can we make bets in that space? So for example, last year, we made a lot of bets in the green jobs space, as you might imagine, when there was significant industrial policy and investments in the CHIP and IRA acts that were really fueling growth in the energy sector and other sectors. So where we think we can make a good bet and also see the potential maybe to leverage other dollars, government dollars or other foundation dollars, we think we'll get a higher return on investment, that's one example. We're also making a pretty big bet in the short form credential market, college degrees aren't for everyone. Lots of people are turning towards shorter form training programs, as you all know quite well, but there's not yet a lot of evidence for which of those programs are the best, which deliver skills that employers are really seeking, which will really drive increased income for people. And so we're actually investing in helping make that market have a clear signal of value. That is to identify which programs are actually the best. And we've made some big investments in in that work. But that's all built on this hypothesis that if we can solve that problem, it will really drive earnings for potentially millions of people here in the United States. So that's a little bit about how we develop our portfolio around certain hypotheses that we will learn over time if they're working or not. In terms of monitoring our portfolio of projects, I think again, what makes us a little bit unique is, first, we work directly with grantees to tailor grant requirements, because we see economic mobility as having lots of inputs, lots of ways to drive improvements. Some programs maybe one year long, and we'll be able to build something quickly and see results quickly. Often, technology projects are like this, you can really see quickly if they're working or not. Sun like skills training programs take multiple years to understand if they're working or not. And so we we adjust the time periods, the amounts given, etc, and try to be very flexible with our grantees, allowing them also to adjust mid project if they need to go in a new direction, and then for monitoring and evaluation. You know, most funders don't support their grantees in efforts to measure their impact. We understand that those investments are important, that it can be complex, costly and high effort to conduct robust impact measurement. And so we actually. Have a fund supporting grantees to do just this. We launched it last year. It's called our Learning for Action Fund, and in its first iteration, and invested in 12 grantees from our portfolio to build their monitoring and evaluation capacity to both improve their own program designs by capturing feedback from their participants and allowing them to iterate their programs and to build evidence for what's working. And we are hopeful that as grantees, are able to build that evidence and prove what's working that will inspire other funders beyond us also to invest in some of this great work.

Kaitlin LeMoine: You know, I'm struck by how responsive the foundation is, it sounds like to the needs and kind of priorities of the different organizations that you invest in. I mean, both from, like, the tailoring of, like you said, some of, I guess, how people even, like apply for these, these funds, but also, and like, the kind of things they're looking to achieve once they've obtained the funds. But also this, this focus on monitoring impact, right? Because I think, like in this space, that can be really challenging and doesn't always have a short time horizon associated with it, depending on the initiative or the program. So I mean, I'm curious, Ellie, can can you share a couple of examples of grantees that are demonstrating impact, and then maybe we can dive into some of the challenges and learnings you're seeing as well.

Ellie Bertani: Two organizations that I wanted to highlight that I think are great examples of really interesting, unique, high ROI projects that we're excited about. So the first is an organization you may know called Upwardly Global. Upwardly Global is an organization here in the United States that helps immigrants translate their skills from prior jobs or careers from their home countries to to re credential them and allow them to employ those skills here in the United States, as you probably recognize, there are a lot of barriers when someone is immigrating, and often, many immigrants end up in rather low wage jobs like house cleaner jobs or Uber drivers or things they can quickly get to sustain their families, but aren't harnessing everything they have brought with them from their prior life and upwardly global really helps people go through the process of re credentialing, demonstrating those skills, pointing them towards the right programs that will allow them to then join the workforce in a much more productive way. So they're already doing great work. Upwardly global came to us saying, we really have this vision of expanding our work to serve more and more refugee serving agencies across the United States. What we want to do is kind of some what I would call unsexy infrastructure work. We want to build a learning management system so that we can codify all the work we do and train other organizations to do it, which would dramatically expand our reach across the United States to serve more and more people. And other funders hadn't been willing to make this investment, but we saw, based on how we model and analyze grant potential return on investment, that this was going to be a really high leverage investment and really drive many more people to have higher income. So we made the bet. They implemented the system. We have seen great results as of this work continuing, we've estimated that this will contribute to increasing annual income per person of the program by about $19,000 so really high returns for the investment we made. The second one I would call out is one of our grantees in Colombia called Kuepa EduTech. So cuepa has recognized that in Colombia there's a growing demand for hospitality and services because of the growing ecotourism and tourist industry, and we invested in a pilot program to help low income students be trained in these programs, to provide personalized coaching and to iterate a program so that other funders would come along and grow it over time, we've seen great success In this program, showing that, in some cases, the graduates are now doubling their earnings from below living wage there to over $6,000 a year per person, which is significantly above living wage in Columbia. And so, you know, we estimate that for only about $1,000 we will drive more than double increases to their lifetime earnings over time. So really, again, a really high return on investment now in terms of learnings, right? So I'll give one example of a grantee that you know, we invest in risky things. So many things don't work out. We see about two thirds of our prod. Projects, if we're doing a really good job or panning out as we had hoped, about 1/3 may not be, and that's to be expected. What we really look for, though, is these grantees who are learning and iterating as they go. So we invest in generation Kenya. Generation is a multi national organization that focuses on increasing skills, country by country across the world, and in Kenya, they launched this, really at the time, very innovative project, to help Kenyans, particularly in urban areas, gain skills, to be to have technical skills, and become freelance, digital freelancers in the open marketplace, the theory being, if they could then be employed by Americans, for example, their earnings would be significantly higher than if they were working for local and local jobs that are relatively poor paying with the continuing push into AI and the rapid changes the technology space, what originally seemed like a really exciting, high potential program over the first year ran into some significant challenges with the second and third cohorts gaining employment. The first cohort did great. The second and third really faced some significant challenges, and so they were forced. The grantee came to us and said, we think we should stop the program. We think we should save the funds and reallocate them to some higher potential initiatives. And we said, Thank you. Thank you for coming to us. Thank you for raising this as an issue. Thank you for recognizing this challenge. We were happy to see them pivot the strategy and repurpose the funds quickly and recognize the challenges they were facing. So, so all this to say, you know, this is a normal course of things. When you're making a high risk investments. What we really look for is the learnings and the ability of flex and pivot.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I would say that, you know, I appreciate like, Thank you for sharing that that set of lessons learned. And I think you know having some of that story is is on your website as well. And I think it's really valuable to put that out to the community, right to say, like, here's what happens. Like, it's not always like a linear path to success. Sometimes it's actually about yes, let's repurpose or let yes, we're learning along the way, and what can we do differently? And I think showing models of how that work happens is really important, because I think, as you're saying, right, more many times, that's what occurs, especially with a lot of these social impact initiatives. It's not a linear path to success, and it's and there are so many external factors impacting these projects along the way, absolutely. I mean, just in the last few months, we can see how external factors can change all sorts of dynamics for nonprofits and philanthropies trying to make bets. So as long as the leadership team is one that is recognizing learning, we're willing to continue investing and betting on those teams. 

Julian Alssid: So Ellie, even in less tumultuous times, I'd say that the field has been littered with good ideas that have come and gone with grants. And I'm really interested in hearing a bit about how, how do you work with your grantees to, you know, to ensure that they're to try to give the best chance of life beyond this grant like, how do you leverage these investments in that respect?

Ellie Bertani: Although we're young, we recognize that we would like to go beyond the check in terms of support to our grantees. And so with two of our three funds, currently, we have started implementing grantee cohorts and grantee support to those cohorts. So I'll give two examples of what that looks like today. We have an AI for Economic Opportunity Fund. We were one of the first foundations to invest in this space. And I say that not to toot our horn, but because we have learned a lot along the way since we started over two years ago, about what helps a grantee be successful when they're building a new technology, particularly a technology that it is itself evolving so quickly through our first cohort and our first fund, we were very fortunate to form early on a partnership with open AI, and that has really matured in the second cohort, to them offering engineering support for all of the grantees going through our second cohort, we host monthly meetings, bring all of the grantees together focused on a specific topic, each time, from topics ranging from ethical use of AI and building ethical frameworks for building and implementing AI in your own organization, all the way to highly technical conversations on, you know, rag and how do you set guard rails around your llms and, you know, things that I can't talk about even as intelligently as the rest of my team? Yeah. But and we use grant the grantees come in and bring a use case, a problem they're trying to solve, the engineers will help coach them in real time so everyone can learn collectively from that conversation. So we're seeing where we can bring in expertise to really support a cohort of grantees, and where they can learn collectively from each other, if you can build in those supports, it really goes a long way to making those projects as effective as possible. The second thing we're doing in that cohort and in others, is setting up demo days. Demo days work great for technical projects. They also work great for non technical projects, but allow it really bringing in other funders at the sort of capstone event at the end of a cohort, so be it six months or a year long, bringing in, you know, in some cases, 40 to 50 different funders to come and hear from the grantees about what is working, what may not be working, what have they learned, and what's the evidence? Can really get other funders excited and investing further in these programs, which we think is a huge benefit for the work, for impact and for these grantees. So those are a couple of ways we're thinking about it. You heard a little bit already about a Learning for Action Fund. We continue to believe it's critical to help grantees build their evidence base and build their M&E capabilities, because that itself allows them to communicate their work with such more data and detail that we think it really enhances their ability to thrive. 

Julian Alssid: It's convening a lot of different conversations and resources, really, that's what we hope to do. So Ellie, what? This is a question we like to ask all our guests, what practical steps can our audience take to become forces in designing programs and solutions that demonstrate ROI and positively shape the future of work and learning? 

Ellie Bertani: We at GitLab Foundation are on a mission to demonstrate that philanthropy and the nonprofit sector as a whole can be as outcomes based and accountable as private sector investors, we feel for that reason, we hope the sector can be clear on the outcomes in general that we all seek to achieve, not just focused on inputs, like how much dollars We grant out, which is often what we talk about, or on just the outputs, like how many people we touch and support, but really on the outcomes, have we moved the needle on improving how much money people are earning over their lifetimes? And that's not easy. We recognize it's complicated, but it's, we think incredibly valuable to stay focused on the end game. And in fact, we actually offer advisory services to other foundations, to individual philanthropists and to nonprofits that are seeking to become more outcomes oriented and ROI focus. So if any of your listeners want to learn about that, they can reach out to us, but we think that's just imperative for improving impact as a whole in the sector. In terms of specific strategies that we've seen often have a high ROI after our two years and then 120 plus grants, we do encourage funders to pay attention to some of those things I referenced before, these unsexy infrastructure grants, technologies that can help organizations become more cost efficient, more they extend their reach. Sometimes data systems, right? We live in an environment where being able to harness data and technology more and more is really what helps ideas scale, and that can often help a nonprofit supercharge its reach and growth. For nonprofits, hearkening back to some of my earlier comments, we just really advocate for agility and a learning approach. That's what we look for first and foremost, in a team that we're ready to grant to that includes sort of the mindset that the leadership team brings. Are they constantly collecting data? Do they have fast feedback loops from their clients that help them improve program design? Are they a test and learn organization that can do rapid prototypes right and put things out there. Those tend to be the most successful. We recognize some projects just failed. Failure is fine, as long as there's the ability to learn and adapt. But that's a mindset that just doesn't exist on every team, and it's something we we just think nonprofits really be be looking for in the talent that they recruit as well.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you, Ellie, for those very...I think they are very practical steps as far as how our audience can become forces in this area. So as we wind down our conversation today, how can our listeners learn more about your work and the GitLab Foundation and continue. You to follow your efforts. 

Ellie Bertani: Well, you can follow us on LinkedIn. You can look us up at GitLabfoundation.org. We actually have a newly launched newsletter on LinkedIn called Powering Progress. So if you can go to get lab foundation on LinkedIn, you can sign up for our newsletter. And then if you're interested in learning more about our modeling and measurement advisory services. You can reach us at measurement@GitLab foundation.org.

Julian Alssid: Well, thank you so much. Ellie for for this conversation. It's it was. It was very grounded. I'm sure you're going to get lots and lots of visitors to your site, and hopefully lots and lots of more nimble, iterative-inclined nonprofits.

Ellie Bertani: Well, I appreciate it. I want to say thank you to all your listeners. Thanks for you too, and for inviting me to come and be here today. I'm a big fan of Work Forces podcast, and it's just great to play a role. So thanks so much. 

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thanks so much for joining us. Ellie, it was a great conversation. That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Work Forces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our sponsor, Lumina Foundation. We're also grateful to our wonderful producer, Dustin Ramsdell. You can listen to future episodes at workforces dot info or on Apple, Amazon and Spotify, please subscribe, like and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends.