Foundations’ Approaches to Scaling

Table of Contents

This webinar will provide a peek behind the curtain at the internal practices of three major private funders as they seek to use their assistance to support sustainable outcomes at scale. Drawing on recent case studies of all three funders – part of a series of studies published by the Scaling Community of Practice – senior officials from the Gates Foundation, Co-Impact, and Echidna Giving will share candid reflections on their organizations’ internal strategies for supporting systemic change through their operational practices, partnership decisions, and funding priorities.

Abe Grindle

Director, Programs

Co-Impact

As a Director on Co-Impact’s Programs team, Abe helps to oversee the sourcing, vetting, structuring, and support of philanthropic systems change grants.

Prior to joining the Co-Impact team in 2017, Abe spent almost a decade with the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit spinoff of Bain & Company. At Bridgespan, Abe directed teams advising leading philanthropists and NGOs operating in Africa, the Caribbean, India, and North America, helping them develop strategies to significantly scale their impact and improve their effectiveness, and to secure or deploy tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in philanthropy. He also co-founded and managed Bridgespan’s multi-year research initiative focused on the challenge of systems change, i.e., creating enduring solutions to social problems at the scale of need. As part of this effort, he authored and co-authored numerous publications, including Audacious Philanthropy: Lessons from 15 World-Changing Initiatives in the Harvard Business Review, among others.

Prior to Bridgespan, Abe worked in technology innovation and policy, spending time at the White House Office of Management and Budget, NASA, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also spent a year in rural Montana working with Native American youth of the Crow and Northern Cheyenne nations.

Abe received a M.S. in Technology and Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also completed an M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics. Abe graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Saint Louis University. Since 2016, he has served on the Board of Directors of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, a global nonprofit service program.

Dana Schmidt

Program Director

Echidna Giving

Dana is the Program Director for Echidna Giving, a private funder supporting the best ways to educate girls in lower-income countries so they can create a positive ripple effect in their families, communities, and nations. Before joining Echidna as its first full-time employee in 2016, Dana was a program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where she helped to develop and run a ten-year, $125 million grantmaking initiative to improve the quality of education that children receive in historically low- and middle-income countries.

Simon Winter

VP, Reimagining Humanitarian Nutrition Security

RF Catalytic Capital

Simon started with RF Catalytic Capital (a public charity supported by Rockefeller Foundation) in August 2025 to lead a new initiative that looks to develop next generation integrated models to deliver resilient food and nutrition security in fragile regions. At the end of 2024, he founded Sustainable Agriculture Foundations’ International Association, to support the legacy Asia and African country organizations spun out of the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture (SFSA). He was SFSA Executive Director from 2017 to 2024, during which time SFSA saw a 5-fold increase in pre-commercial smallholder farmers supported. He joined from TechnoServe, where he had been SVP, Development, and led operations in sub-Saharan Africa. From 2015-2017, Simon was a Senior Fellow of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center at the Harvard Kennedy School. He serves on a range of boards including chair of the Dalberg Trust, the Scaling Community of Practice, and Griffith Foods Sustainability Advisory Council and is an Associate Director of Morphosis (an organization boosting investment in climate adaptation). His earlier career included positions at McKinsey & Co, a Ministry in Botswana, and Barclays Bank. A UK and German citizen, Simon holds a PhD in Economics from SOAS, London.

Matthew Eldridge

Climate and Development Finance Advisor

The Gates Foundation

Matthew Eldridge is a climate and development finance advisor at the Gates Foundation, where he helps build financing partnerships with multilateral development banks and development finance institutions to scale investment in climate-resilient food system solutions. He previously led a portfolio at Gates focused on climate finance policy and macroeconomics. Before joining the foundation, Matt worked at the nonprofit Urban Institute, where he led research on topics related to public financial management, impact investing, and results-based financing. Earlier in his career, he consulted on US banking and asset management regulation and held roles at the World Bank focused on aid effectiveness and the Bank’s Central Asia portfolio. He lives in New York City and holds degrees from Virginia Tech and the London School of Economics.

Larry Cooley

Co-Founder & Co-Chair

The Scaling Community of Practice

Larry Cooley is Founder and President Emeritus of Management Systems International and a specialist in managing large system change. He currently serves as Chair of the Governing Council of the Society for International Development and is the author of widely used methodologies for managing policy change, scaling innovation, entrepreneurship development, and results-based management. Larry is an elected Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Public Administration and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; a Trustee of Elma Philanthropies; founder and co-curator of the Global Community of Practice on Scaling Development Outcomes, and Co-Chair of its Working Group on Monitoring and Evaluation.

 

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