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20: A Model for Building True Win-Win Partnerships in the International Development Sector with Philippa White

20. A Model for Building True Win-Win Partnerships in the International Development Sector with Phillipa White

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“It’s not the private sector coming to save the NGO sector. It is a win-win and everyone needs to work together because there are so many benefits to doing that. And everyone comes out stronger as a result.” 

– Philippa White

Episode #20

Overview

In this episode of What the Fundraising Podcast…

I talk to Philippa White, Founder, and CEO of The International Exchange and a true believer in the power of business and leadership to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Inside the podcast she shares her 15-year experience building successful relationships with the international development sector. 

The International Exchange (TIE) is a personal and professional leadership development program that uses global social challenges to bring out the best in people. By connecting the social world with the commercial environment they create a catalyst for change.

“The quality of our output is influenced by the inspiration we seek”. And there is only so much inspiration in our comfort zones. We need to open up to different people, unfamiliar environments, and leave our silos behind in order to actually make a change. 

20. A Model for Building True Win-Win Partnerships in the International Development Sector with Phillipa White
20. A Model for Building True Win-Win Partnerships in the International Development Sector with Phillipa White

We have to admit that the mutual benefit that comes from companies and nonprofits working together is huge and that a win-win dynamic is possible. In this episode, Philippa shares some of her experiences with partnerships through TIE and how for 15 years they’ve made successful collaboration between sectors possible.  

Join in and listen to this expert’s experience changing things up and challenging the sectors to be better and bolder!

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I teach nonprofit fundraisers to bring in more gifts from the RIGHT donors… so they can stop hounding people for money. Fundraising doesn’t have to be uncomfortable.

MALLORY ERICKSON

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20. A Model for Building True Win-Win Partnerships in the International Development Sector with Philippa White

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episode transcript

Mallory: All right. Welcome everyone, thank you for joining us today. I’m so thrilled to be here with Philippa White for you to get to know her and her work. It has been such a pleasure getting to know you over these last few months, and I would love to just have you share a little bit about who you are, your background and what it is that you are doing right now.

Philippa: Oh I am so thrilled to be here. Thank you so much for having me. It is an honor, and I’ve also loved following you and your stories and what you’re up to. I get your emails and I see you on social media. Equally as in all with what you’re doing. So thank you for having me. It’s a huge honor. 

So yeah, my name is Philippa White, I’m the founder and CEO of The International Exchange or otherwise known as TIE. I grew up in Canada, so my accent is Canadian, but I was not born there. I was born in South Africa and I left there when I was about three, but grew up in Canada. I studied business in London, Ontario, at a business school there. I finished my degree in Bangko and then I went and worked in advertising in London, England, having the experience to work for some really big agencies with some extraordinary people who I’m still very much in contact with now. So I worked at Leo Burnett and then I worked at BBH and it was on that journey of working in the private sector that I had this epiphany for what I now do. 

My whole family comes from “the helping-people industries”, is how I like to call it. Doctors, environmental engineers, social workers, my uncle was Nelson Mandela’s doctor when he came out of prison and started negotiations with the Apartheid government.

I grew up in Winnipeg, which is right in the middle of Canada, so literally in the middle of nowhere and it was an extraordinary place to grow up. What’s actually really funny in Canada is wherever the province that you’re from, there’s a line that sums up that province. So there’s “Beautiful British Columbia”. Alberta is “Wild Rose Country” and Manitoba, which is the province where I grew up in is “Friendly Manitoba”. And it really is. It’s just a wonderful place to bring up children. So my dad met my mom in England. He was a doctor. They moved to Canada and it was just this really safe, wonderful, easy place to grow up.

when I would go to South Africa and talk to my family there, there were real challenges that for people there were basic, like poverty, racial segregation and apartheid. Obviously when I would go there, Apartheid wasn’t happening anymore, but social apartheid, as and many of your listeners know is still very real, as well as discrimination. 

The conversations that we would have growing up, the challenges that people face in South Africa from that point of view, and also just from the humanity point of view of my dad working in the hospital system and giving his everything to fight against the system of these heroic doctors who want to be on calls six days a week, because “look how much money I’m making and look how much I’m working in”, but you are a detriment to the system, because he was the president of the patient safety committee and the quality of care board and it was all about quality of care. He stopped with this heroic mentality, challenging the system and all about humanity. There was just a lot of passion…My dad was an incredibly passionate person. I just felt so inspired.

When I worked in the private sector, I have to say, I felt like there was something missing. It just felt like I loved what I did. I loved the people I was surrounded by. I loved the energy. I knew that my skills fit with what I did, but again, there was something missing. I wanted to feel like what I know has some grander purpose in the whole scheme of things.

And so I guess what I’m doing now has been born out of that. It was that feeling that surely working in the commercial world, there had to be an end-end. I had to know that what I know had some grander purpose, but I also knew that the private sector truly had the power to be a driver of change from that feeling of wanting to feel some kind of purpose. I’m aware that your listeners, many people are actually working in the area that you’re working in because you were one of those people that was like “I’m going to follow my purpose”. So you’re one of the lucky ones. 

I’m aware that the grass is always greener, so obviously the people who go into the commercial world are probably making more money, not necessarily, but there’s more money available to different dynamics. But definitely the people in the private sector really have that feeling of “I just want to know that I can make a tangible difference with the skills that I have”, but then again, looking at the private sector, it has the power to make a huge difference.

As we all know, working in the development world, there are huge limitations, and the potential that you guys have to make an even better difference usually comes down to funds. And obviously that’s what Mallory does, but that also means that you can’t necessarily hire as many people as you want. It means that you can’t hire the types of people that you want.

There isn’t as much money to go around. And as a result, there’s huge limitations on the difference that can be made. Whereas the private sector has access to some of the most extraordinary people, they can pay for them. It has more funds available, and can make decisions much quicker because they have access to more money. They have many times a bigger following. The power to be able to make change is very much there.

We also know that people within the private sector like me, and like many of the people that get involved with my program, want to work in a place that they feel proud to work in. They want to work in a place where they feel they’re able to realize their purpose, that is actually not out there ruining the environment and that embraces diversity. 

So when I set up TIE in 2004 when I started developing it, I was already aware of these dynamics. There was talk of sustainability. It was more of a corporate social responsibility at the time, but again, it was that feeling of “we know that we can make a difference”, but then we also knew at the time, obviously it’s just getting more apparent, that customers, if there’s price parity, if there’s an opportunity to buy something for one price and for the same price I can buy something that’s not ruining the environment or it’s making the world a better place or it’s coming from a company that has values and purpose beyond just making a whole lot of money, then of course, customers are going to be buying that. 

We know that the direction that the private sector needs to go in is one of shared value, of purpose, of being environmentally conscious and embracing diversity. So we know that’s the direction that the private sector is going in, but then my question was “Okay, so how do we get there?”.

How do we get there? Because we need leaders within these companies that are capable of meaningful change, that are able to challenge the status quo. All these business schools that we go to, they’re just churning out more cogs in the wheel. They’re not getting us to think differently and they’re not getting us to challenge the system.

The thing is, we need to be challenging the system and actually these companies want people who can think differently, but it doesn’t come from traditional textbook courses and learning. We know that it comes from pushing ourselves out of our silos. It comes from expanding our personal circles, working with people who are so totally different to ourselves, learning how to get people who are different to us, to trust us and for us to hire them, it gets us understanding the dynamics in other parts of the world and seeing how a decision here can impact someone in a completely different place around the world.

The older we get, the more siloed we get and the more stuck. I was aware of all of these dynamics and they knew that if we need the private sector to change, it can only change by having the leaders change it. But the only way that those leaders can change it is by shaking things up.

The quality of our output is influenced by the inspiration we seek. There’s only so much inspiration you get from going to print emoji everyday at lunchtime, or staying in your living room all day. Wwe need to shake things up. We need to step out of our comfort zones and see the world in a different way, develop the confidence and the knowledge and the insights and then challenge it. That’s what I do.

So basically TIE is a personal and professional development growth program that uses global social challenges to bring out the best in people. We use this connection of the social world with the commercial world to create that catalyst for change.

By being embedded in unfamiliar environments, out of your silo, out of your comfort zone, without that normal structure, without those normal support networks, the normal human and financial resources that you have accessible to you, we create that transformational change and create huge impact at the same time.

We’ve been doing that since 2007, we set up our first ever project and that was with Leo Burnett in London and with an organization that works with HIV and AIDS in Brazil, and we physically sent this professional called Chris Jackson to Brazil. He was embedded in the local culture for 30 days and he had to crack a challenge using exactly what he knew to help this organization do what they needed to do.

That was our first ever project and since then we now work in 21 countries around the world. Until last year we only worked with corporates and we only sent people. So we would send people to Malawi, or we would send people to Myannmar, Senegal, Brazil, Guatemala, and they would use what they know in the area of finance or the area of communications strategy, business development.They would work with organizations like many of the people who are listening here, who obviously struggle from a human resource point of view or resource point of view and we would have these super high level professionals come in and work together. 

This is by no means “I’m coming in, I know more than you” at all.

So we talk a lot about “don’t do to an organization”, work with them. Active listening, you need to be on the same level completely and come up with a solution. The impact has been incredible. We’ve made huge, amazing things happen, but then when COVID hit, as you can imagine, borders shut down and the corporates were unable to get involved because they were just trying to stay afloat.

So we saw our business model just completely crumble and we’ve been doing this since 2006. We had so many organizations that we worked with and we just started to get this flood of emails from Nepal, from Laos, from my Inmar, from India, saying Philippa, TIE, we need help to pivot. We don’t know how to respond to what’s going on.

How do you educate kids in the slums, in India in a COVID situation? Our funding has gone out the door, whatever the challenge is. So we need help. Are you still able to do that? And I’m like “Holy shit”. But then we were also so aware of the real desire that professionals in this world have to be able to make a tangible difference with what they know they’re feeling. They’ve made it to a level of their professional career. They’re looking at the state of the world and they’re thinking “Oh my God, I really, I think there’s more to this. I don’t want to quit my job, but I need to feel inspired. I need to grow in new ways. I need to expand my horizons. I need to see things in a new way. I just need to feel excited. I’m just feeling in that slump”. So we knew that those dynamics were happening. We knew that there was a real need to continue to bring these worlds together so we created our virtual programs, which have really taken off, which is super, super exciting. 

We work with individuals to our TIE accelerator program, and I’m sure at some point I’ll tell you about that. We work with corporates and we’ve actually just finished a fantastic, really emotional project with Leo Burnett in London. That’s what we do. And I hope that makes sense.

Mallory: It does and I think something I really want to highlight as one of the reasons why I was interested in having this conversation, is that there are so many assumptions that we make about what nonprofits have and their value and what companies have and their value. And the sense I really got from our first conversation is that this is really about recognizing mutual benefit and finding win-win opportunities. Of course, Power dynamics are real things and they are at play in interactions like this, particularly with companies interacting with communities in the global south, not to negate any of that, but to help the organizations recognize their tremendous value in incorporating these thought leaders, these professionals, the way that is ultimately going to support the company’s culture and development and creativity and innovation. 

There’s an opportunity for these professionals to be coming in and working alongside them. Partnering is really about coming together and saying “Look, this is a problem we both want to see solved and we have different skill sets and lived experiences here. What’s possible when we come together and share that knowledge and share that opportunity?”.

I really value that inclusion of what the company is gaining, because I sometimes feel like the way that CSR programs or corporate programs are structured it’s like the company knows on the HR side that those programs are good for their bottom line, that they’re good for retention, engagement and culture. They know that there’s a real bottom line benefit, but the way they talk to their nonprofit partners is as if they’re doing them a favor. I see a lot of pressure put on nonprofits from companies about setting up volunteer days and doing all of these different things, frankly, exploiting the nonprofit as a whole: the community that the nonprofit is serving and the recipients of the services. There’s no transparent acknowledgement about the way in which that interaction is even serving the company. They’re like two separate conversations.

Philippa: Totally. This is the thing. There’s two very big things on this, one is volunteer tourism. It’s real and I’ve tried as hard as I possibly can to be as distant from that as possible. 

It has to be a win-win. From the point of view of corporates, if there’s a pro bono client, why do you think the advertising agencies are probably doing it? In a normal agency, pro bono NGO arrangement, it would be awards. So it would be “We are going to be able to get a Cannes Lion or a D&AD award”. If you get a Cannes Lion in, that increases your share value. So if you suddenly get a number of 10 lines, the question often would be, was that really what the organization needed?

Do people even understand the dynamic of working in the international development world? Are they taught to listen actively? Do they emphasize? Do they talk to the beneficiaries? So I would say probably not, just because that’s not the system. 

So just even with this recent project, which we just finished with Leo Burnett within a six week program, there was this group of six people from this agency in London that came together. They had never probably worked together before they knew of each other. A couple of them were creative, so there’s a two-creative team. A design director and a strategist came together as a team that had never worked together before, and they had six weeks to be able to understand this organization in India. Understand how they currently position themselves, how they want to position themselves, how they should position themselves based on what they do, how they separate themselves from the rest. 

Actually, it’s interesting. The organization’s called Save The Children India, but they’re not Save the Children International. And the thing is they have really struggled, since 1996 when they started up, to be able to differentiate themselves from Save The Children International, they’ve lost tons of funding. They haven’t been able to position themselves. How are they different from other children’s organizations? So it’s a huge challenge that they’ve been facing forever. This group of people came together and in six weeks, they truly understood what separated them from other organizations. They’re all about early intervention.

They worked with children who are disabled. There’s so many things that make them so different from the other big players out there. So they won, they got that. They put together the most extraordinary brand key and this unbelievable one minute film that they can use to then show to potential funders, et cetera.

So they had over the course, with the TIE program, this international development training. We talk a lot about, again, not doing “to” an organization, but working with them. So asking questions and listening to the answers, how to unpick insights, ensure that the organization is involved all the way through, talk to the beneficiaries if they can, if at the end one stakeholder in the whole equation isn’t happy, then you haven’t done what you needed to do. The way that you talk stigma discrimination, think about how messages are portrayed and how you’re talking about potential people who are on the other end of it at the end of this presentation.

We had the CEO of Leo Burnett London, we had the managing director, we had the head of planning. We had the CEO of the organization in India. We had another two individuals from India and this group of six people presented. The CEO of the organization cried. I cried. The executive committee at Leo Burnett were so in awe and the person at the organization in India said “I don’t know how you guys, in six weeks, I’ve managed to do this, but you listened. You asked us, you worked with us the whole time and you managed to pull together something that’s ready to go. The team said “We worked in such a different way, I’ve learned to listen properly. I really was forced to empathize and understand the reality on the ground where it is that these people work”.

It was a huge opportunity for that win-win. The team got so much out of it and it is to your point, it is positioned as a leadership program. It’s a leadership program for corporates. It’s a growth opportunity for the corporates. It’s leadership. And it’s very clear talent is involved. They want their leaders to be able to work in a more volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous world.

And they need their leaders to be able to be flexible and be able to work better. And they get that working in an environment as an NGO. But it is definitely very clear, from the outset, it’s a win-win for everyone and it really is. It always has been. I’m super proud to say that because it’s not about exploitation at all.

Mallory: So can I push you and me maybe for a second here to think about something? So I am thinking a lot about that. The value we place in society on money and about that being the primary value system, perhaps in certain Western cultures in particular. And the way that that communication about money and the way we feel about money impacts the way we talk about the forprofit sector and the nonprofit sector. And what’s interesting to me about your model is the way you’ve built this is really around win-win. When you were first sharing about how nonprofits don’t have the same money or the same access to people or the same resources, this is language we hear over and over again. I’m starting to feel sensitive to the impact that language has on the nonprofit sector, because of how people feel about hearing things like that. What that means in terms of the limiting beliefs that creates around a sealing of funds.

The thing I want to explore with you is what if the nonprofit sector does have less money? Why does it matter? Because what you’re demonstrating through your model is that they actually shouldn’t need the money to hire those experts because they have something actually uniquely valuable that they can trade in exchange for that expertise.

So, as a business owner, maybe I should need money to be able to go out and hire that expert to help me strategize about my business, but the nonprofit next door to me, why do we assume they should have to have the money? Because your model really demonstrates that they have something else incredibly valuable to share.

Philippa: I hear everything that you’re saying and I would say, I almost wish that TIE didn’t exist. It shouldn’t exist. We are an accelerator of change for something very specific. We just finished another project with another really small organization and they’re all volunteers. There’s literally no money. It’s an organization that’s working with the minister of Malawi and Nobel peace Laureate, so it’s all really high level individuals preparing for a UN meeting, the high energy meeting at the UN. Everyone, our volunteers and the individuals who came involved with Thai, volunteered their time to be able to help make all of this possible. 

But everyone came back to us saying we’ve been accelerated, this has forced us to think in ways that we haven’t really been able to think about. Huge win-win, but at the end of six weeks, we’re gone. And the thing is, TIE is not. In the sense that we are that continuity to then create another project, to be able to do something else again in the future.

A huge part of the process is capacity building, how to hand it over, make sure that they’re able to work with whatever has been created. So it’s left so that they can run with it. But they also don’t have communication skills. They don’t, which is a huge issue for many of the organizations that we work with.

They don’t have the communication skills, they’re experts in the area that they might work in, but communication is usually one that’s fallen by the wayside and that’s actually something that helps catapult an organization to where they need to get to. So they don’t have the communication skills. There’s PR stuff that needs to happen. There’s social media stuff that needs to happen. There’s continuing these conversations with really famous people who have shown interest to get involved, but I worry that I don’t know how much that’s actually going to be able to continue until TIE gets involved.

Again, this is not just talk, this is proper impact. We make real change in a small amount of time. It’s an accelerator. We accelerate change and real impact. The problem is that for the organizations, we then step away, there’s just not enough money, unfortunately. This is why I think what you’re doing is absolutely genius because I think that there’s a lot of people in these organizations that don’t understand the power of what they have at their fingertips. What the offer is to corporates is that there could be that exchange. There could be many projects like TIE set up in other places, and so there is that win-win. Unfortunately, we can only do it in small bits and it requires a certain element of organization and understanding as well. 

I think the other thing is developing these projects, we also need to understand what can be done in six weeks, what can the private sector do to help and what does that brief look like? They’re like 12 page briefs that go into the background of the organization. What is the objective? What does it look like? What’s going to happen? And writing these briefs as well because when you get so immersed in the day-to-day and you’re so bogged down with everything that you’re doing, it’s sometimes hard to be able to see things in an objective way and be able to understand, okay, how do we bring to life what we do? What is the objective? How do we say that in two sentences, that’s really clear as to what an individual is going to work on? Unfortunately, it’s hard to do that and coming at it from the outside, it’s almost like consultants were able to pull that together.

But I agree, unfortunately, because of the challenges that communication plays a big part of. I think more people just need to know about your approach and your pro “it’s an offer, not an ask”.

Mallory: Interesting. I wasn’t even really thinking about that when I posed that question, but you’re right. Of course, like my big thing is organizations recognizing the value that they’re offering and exchanging that value for whatever level of support they need, whether that level of support is financial support or expertise support, and not feel like they’re in the position of always needing savers from these people who have the things, the expertise and the resources. That they’re coming to the table with something really valuable, which is I think what you model and why I love this sort of in the frame. 

Philippa: Yeah, we make it very clear. So in a few of our experiences, it’s really interesting how some people come and I’ve heard this from the individuals saying “I thought I totally knew the answers. I came to the project thinking I have all these contexts. I’m the CEO of my own company. I have experience with the environment. I don’t even think I need the rest of this team to be honest”. There are many projects that we’ve done over the course of the years where people have put together a deck before they’ve even arrived being like “Look at these amazing ideas”, and the organization is just like “Yeah, that’s totally wrong”. What we do very quickly with our international development training and also the coaching is we just bring things down onto the same level and say, listen, you have to be humble. You need to listen. You cannot be arrogant. You have to take a few steps back and it’s going to take a little while until you truly understand what’s going on.

And then together, you’re going to figure out where to go from there. You can only do it together. There’s no way that you can know first. I think that’s the key. It really is a group effort and coming together. I make it very clear, it’s not the north coming to save the south. It’s not the private sector coming to save the NGO sector. It’s a win-win and everyone needs to work together because there are so many benefits to doing that. And everyone comes out stronger. 

Mallory: Yeah, and I hope I haven’t asked you about this before, but I talk about in episode zero of the podcast, how I, throughout my career, I’ve gotten a lot of comments that made it sound like I was playing small inside the nonprofit sector or I could really do so much more if only I would go and work for Google.

There’s a lot of stigma about the capabilities of the people who work for NGOs and in the nonprofit sector and just hearing you talk about how these corporate leaders are coming and being exposed to a level of uncertainty they’ve never been exposed to before, rapidly changing data, my expectation is that they also have their eyes open to fierceness and the tenacity and the brilliance of these NGO leaders, especially with the training around. I think that is so important in terms of rewriting the stigmas around these silos of people. When people even say things to me about nonprofits being inefficient in a way that indicates to me that what they’re saying is that the leadership is inefficient or the staff is inefficient, I’m like “No. The structure of a nonprofit is inherently designed in a very counter intuitive way to efficiency”, right? 

Philippa: It’s really interesting because I am one of those people that says it’s inefficient and I’m not at all talking about the leaders, I’m talking about the fact that you get the money coming in and then the only way that you can get that money coming in is if you spend that money to then get that money coming again. In the private sector, you have to be efficient and you cannot spend all the money. So I actually really liked social enterprise and many of the NGOs that we work with within them, they have social enterprises to be able to generate income. And that’s what I love because that’s where we get really excited. 

Mallory: I love that. I also really love social enterprise. I also love the fact, when I graduated from college and found myself in the nonprofit sector, it really did feel like a nonprofit was the place. I’m too scared of blood to be a doctor. The nonprofits, I liked the place where I could really make a change. Now I think there are actually all of these different avenues as we watch the rise of B Corps and different social enterprises. I think there’s so many different models. And I think it’s critical that people who are thinking about starting a nonprofit are really modeling out what they want to do and how they want to be generating income and how they want to be spending money to design their program, their organization and their company. And maybe it’s not a nonprofit. It’s so interesting when people want to join power partners. So many people tell me “I’m working on it, but I have to go get board approval”. Or sometimes people will say that they have to submit. 

Will I help them write a five page report on the projected ROI? My program is $99 a month at this point. And I think about how inefficient it is that you’re going to have your development director spend five hours convincing you to spend money that’s going to fundamentally change what you fundraise. That’s what’s inefficient to me, the approval process of money movement. These leaders, these amazing leaders and visionaries and strategic thinkers and innovators are getting burned out by all of this red tape.

Philippa: So we just finished a project. Basically there’s 2.8 billion people around the world who still don’t have access to clean cooking, so what that means is there’s 2.8 billion people who do not have access to gas and can only burn firewood. At this energy meeting that’s happening in September, it’s trying to get the poorest people in the world on the radar of policy makers, and to be able to fund really efficient, fuel efficient stoves out to these populations. 

On the team, there was a woman. She’s the CEO of her own financial institution that’s floating on the New York and London stock exchanges. Her business is full of analysts who are Ivy league graduates who have been analyzing sustainable energy and they are an incredibly successful company. She did not know and her analyst did not know about this issue and the people who are running this organization are technologists. They’re international development leaders, highly passionate educators. Knowledgeable individuals who are making a fraction of what this woman and the people who at her company are making, but they had information that nobody on this team have and they come from sustainability backgrounds.

No one on this team had this information and they, these individuals, these private sector professionals are sitting in these meetings covered in goosebumps and just completely blown away by the dedication, by the understanding, by the information of real global issues that are facing people around the world, that few people even know about. 

The problem that’s lacking is funds, actually, because if they could hire a communications person to be able to get this word out, that would be out there and to be able to fight against these huge lobby groups who do have a whole lot of money.

In every one of these projects, people are humbled and inspired by these individuals that they work with at so many of these organizations. I couldn’t agree more, but I do believe that the system is not as efficient as it could be, then I do think social enterprise as well is an interesting model even to have within an organization to be able to generate income. It can be driven back into that organization, but to find other funding models, to be able to have money come in. I am a big believer  in that.

Mallory: I don’t want folks to get the impression that I think the whole thing is broken. But I do think that there are some fundamental mindsets, standard operating procedures and “best practices” that are keeping us stuck inside a model that wasn’t built necessarily for today.

I think it’s really critical that we’re looking at those things and we’re identifying what’s working. What’s not working? What’s the roadblock? Where are we getting siloed? Where are we getting stuck and where are the trim tabs? I really liked the idea of where are the small levers that can be pushed and pulled that make massive change.

I think I feel that way about TIE. When I met you and I heard about your work, I was just excited about this idea that both does this very tangible, very real, very critical work, but also is changing mindsets and beliefs and power dynamics and structures that I think will have a ripple effect on the sector that you and I obviously both want to see.

So tell folks where they can find you where they can learn more about TIE. Let’s make sure they have all that information all included below the episode as well.

Philippa: Oh, that’s really great. If you’re listening and most likely are a social enterprise of some social initiative or an NGO, and you have offices in the global south, I would love to hear from you.

So please email at philippa@theinternationalexchange.co.uk If you are a corporate commercial world professional and keen to get involved, you can find me at apply.tieaccelerator.com and you can join our info session, or you can check out our site, tieaccelerator.com or my main website, which is theinternationalexchange.co.uk.

Mallory: I know that you work with so many different organizations. And so in light of that, I’m going to switch up our final question a little bit to just invite you, to share a little bit about an issue area that you really feel passionate about and want to encourage people to go to check, to learn more about check out some of the organizations, making a big impact and give if they can.

Philippa: Okay. So thank you for asking that question. I’ve mentioned this organization actually on this podcast already, and I feel like there’s a very real way that you can get involved with this. I think it’s an issue that’s close to all of our hearts, which is the environment. I think we all are aware of a lot of what’s going on around the world as a result of the horrendous stuff that is going on with deforestation and climate change And what is really exciting about this organization that we’ve just supported, which is CCC is now they do actually just have a bank account for the first time and they are receiving donations.

Very few people around the world are familiar with the fact that 2.8 billion people are still using firewood to cook, which means cutting down trees and a lot of smoke going into the environment and also causing death. Lower tract respiratory infections are one of the leading causes of deaths in these parts of the world because of smoke inhalation.

The more noise we make around this issue, the more people will be aware of it. We just need to be able to provide very real, tangible solutions, which are possible through these clean cooking clay stoves, which are super cheap. It’s just, we need insane distribution to get out to these 2.8 billion people around the world. That’s what I would like people to do.

Mallory: Thank you for sharing about that. I will make sure that all that information is below as well and share it on social media. So folks have an easy way to follow along and learn more about it and give if they can. So thank you so much. And thank you for joining me today and having this conversation and letting us go to some of the places that maybe most people aren’t comfortable talking about that I think are really critical to move the needle on these issues. So thank you. Thank you, 

Philippa: Mallory. It is such a pleasure. I am so excited to have you in my world. It’s an honor. I’ve absolutely adored chatting with you. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. And thank you everyone for listening and just get in touch.

20. A Model for Building True Win-Win Partnerships in the International Development Sector with Phillipa White
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