How Non-Profits Navigate Uncertainty: Guidance from Save the Children U.S.

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0:42Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Yanti, welcome. Thank you for having me, Adi. Great to have you. So, Yanti, let me ask, Save the Children was founded in the wake of World War I. A century has passed. We still are moving from crisis to crisis, viral outbreaks, military conflicts, climate-related natural disasters. I have to ask, on the ground, does it feel more challenging, more fast-paced than ever?

1:23Janti Soeripto:Look, I always think it's good. We were founded in 1919. I think it's always good to keep in mind this great quote from Max Rosen who runs our world in data, which essentially says, you know, the world is awful. The world is so much better and the world could still be so much better. So, yes, of course, we've seen an increase in conflict. We've seen during the pandemic in particular that a lot of the progress made in terms of health and vaccination rates, et cetera, that we saw a rollback and we still see unequal progress across the world, across many countries and groups of people. At the same time, we should not forget that over the last sort of 20 to 50 years, we've seen a halving of under five mortality.

2:08Janti Soeripto:So children dying before the age of five of completely preventable causes like diarrhea and malaria and pneumonia. We've seen huge improvements in maternal mortality, women dying in childbirth. We've seen a huge reduction in people living in poverty. I think in 1975, 60 % of the world, 60%, more than half of the world's population was living in poverty, and now that number is below 10%. Yeah, that's great to hear, because I think there are moments when we feel things are very dire, and it's helpful to get some of the big picture data like that. I'm interested in how your organization adapts itself in order to be agile and responsive, again, with all of the things that are coming at you from various causes.

2:56Janti Soeripto:Yeah, and I'm not going to lie, it's been an intense few months and arguably a very intense five years, actually. You know, when I started this role, I had, as always, you have a plan until life kicks it in the teeth. we had a pandemic, we've had conflict breaking out in a number of regions and now of course we've also had to deal with real shocks to the foreign assistance system. Look the good thing is if you're around for 105 years you take some comfort and confidence from that because you have weathered really storms before from world wars literally to huge periods of upheaval of huge famine, of immense human suffering.

3:41Janti Soeripto:And we've always found ways to be helpful and to be contributing to make sure that children's rights are of help and that children survive and thrive. So it gives you that. On the other hand, of course, if you are 105 years old, you also have to be careful that you don't become complacent and you're too stuck in your ways and that you don't innovate and all the rest of it, especially when you're a large organization like ours. So the fact that we're also doing a lot of emergency response, so half of our work is really working in, you know, real intense crisis settings, manmade as well as natural disasters, that makes you incredibly agile.

4:21Janti Soeripto:So that culture, that ethos of responding to a crisis is very ingrained in our DNA. So, okay, so some of it is crisis response, but I'm also interested, you know, you, like a private company, you know, you have your supply chains, you have your kind of logistical processes. How do you build those to be resilient when, you know, if there is a problem in one area of the world, it doesn't affect your ability to deliver elsewhere? Yeah, and I think here, this particular sector of development and humanitarian assistance can really learn from actually the private sector. And we have done so in... This episode is brought to you by Palmolive.

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6:00Janti Soeripto:Save children for sure. We now have, I think, a supply chain that can hold its own against, you know, large fast moving consumer goods companies. We have incredibly capable expert professionals who procure at scale, who make sure our logistics are in line to make sure that we have good warehouse management, that we have forecasting of what we think we're going to need. So we've really improved that over the last sort of, I would say, decade or so. at the same time because we are working in very fragile settings think Sudan, Gaza, the Democratic Republic of the Congo you will always run up against situations that you can't control at all from natural disasters to an outbreak of war and then all of a sudden you know where you thought you were working you have to suspend you have to withdraw because it's literally too unsafe for your staff to work there and then you have to figure out what do you do with your warehouses?

7:00Janti Soeripto:Where do you then get your supplies from? So the level of creativity that I've seen from our supply chain professionals is well beyond and above what I've seen, what we needed when I worked in the private sector. But we now have coupled it with processes and systems, procurement system, a warehouse management system that gives you that sense of discipline and process. So okay, so now we've seen big cuts in foreign aid, in funding from the US government and some other governments. What impact is that having so far and how do you think about that going forward? Look, the impacts even today are disastrous.

7:44Janti Soeripto:I'm not going to sugarcoat that at all and we are incredibly concerned about overall where you know official development assistance seems to be going which essentially is in the best case flatlining in a more likely case certainly declining and there seems to be less sort of political support for essentially investing in in people less fortunate than we are which I think is a is a problem for humanity because I don't actually think people have become less empathetic or less generous. When we talk to our individual supporters, we don't see that at all. But there's certainly been wind blowing against that.

8:28Janti Soeripto:Look, we're currently, we are working with over 100 ,000 children, trying to help them overcome malnutrition, acute malnutrition. We're talking about very young children, infants, up until two years old who are literally almost starving because they don't have enough food. It will kill young children within a few weeks, even if you think they're okay within a few weeks. If you don't get them the right treatment, they can die. Or even if they survive, it can impact their physical and cognitive abilities forever. Because once you've lost that window, then you can't get that back no matter how well you treat them.

9:08Janti Soeripto:We're working with over 100 ,000 children today to help them overcome malnutrition. And we are now at risk of having to stop some of those interventions in a number of countries. And for the cost of all of$67 for a six weeks course, we're talking about fortified peanut butter, simple to administer, children like it, they recover miraculously. So we have figured out how to treat some of these most common causes of particularly young children dying. And what we need is some consistency and, yes, commitment in investing in that. And that, in the end, will give us an enormous, will give the world an enormous return on investment.

9:54Yeah, so I think you put your finger on a challenge that a lot of people in the private sector feel now, which is... This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners. sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com.

10:31When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. You know, how do you even think about long-term strategy or even short-term and medium-term strategy when politics plays such a big role in your ability to actually execute?

11:11Janti Soeripto:Yeah. I think, look, you always have to keep your knees bent. As I said, if you make a plan, you have to be sort of cognizant that the next day you have to sort of out the window. but you do have to stick, I think, to your mission, which is easier, I think, for an organization like Save the Children than it is sometimes for certain private sector companies. Our mission is very clear. We never have to have a conversation in Save the Children about why are we here? Does our brand have any purpose? What's our purpose? What is our mission? So we know that. So that is there. Then in a very volatile environment that we are in today, you really try to hone in on what can we control and how and let's not get too concerned about all the things that we cannot control and rumors and noise flying around you really you got to try to shut it out and say what can we control what do we need to focus on even if it means delaying the things that we wanted to do we thought were good to do you have to tighten your focus then and then build back from there.

12:15Janti Soeripto:And if at some point you're coming into slightly calmer waters, you can maybe add another thing of that list that you liked so much, but you couldn't do in the immediate term. Yeah. So I want to, this is a question that's coming from the audience from someone named Char, who asks, how do you, you know, prevent a culture that you have, we're ready to respond to a crisis from sliding into a kind of panic or sense of, you know, a kind of overwhelmed mindset because, you know, you are just going from crisis to crisis and they get worse and funding gets harder to find. How do you manage that? I think humanitarians tend to be quite calm in the face of crisis more generally because if you don't, you know, I think it's really hard to work in the sector.

13:02So I do think we tend to be,

13:06Janti Soeripto:constitutionally quite calm. And again, you do have to remind then your teams, your colleagues, A, that you're in it together, B, that we have a mission to fulfill for children. So let's focus on them. And how do we make sure we keep the most crucial things working for them, whatever it takes. And if that means looking for new funding streams, if it means more advocacy for good and cost-effective policies, if it means making sure the communities support us in doing that, and usually it's a combination of all those three things, that's what you're there to do. I think what is nice about why it's a privilege, I would say, to work in the sector is that I can sit in front of the TV screen and scream at it all day long, but at the end of the day, we still know what we're here to do.

14:00Janti Soeripto:And our job is to make sure that all children have rights and that their rights are of health. And that makes for a very powerful reason to get out of bed in the morning. Yeah. So I love the clarity of mission. I'm curious though, do you also, like in the private sector, do you have measures of success? Do you have KPIs? And what would some of them be? Yeah. And that was, I have to say, when I joined this organization over a decade ago. That was a little counter-cultural sometimes, right? So when I said KPIs, everybody was like, what? Now we have them. It is very much the language of this organization, key performance indicators get reported every month.

14:40Janti Soeripto:Some of them are very operational, right? Have we delivered XYZ? Is our budget in line with what we thought it would be? Are the quality measures in green, amber or red? Do we run deficits in some countries, etc.? So there's a couple that are very operational. And then... This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean.

15:21And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.

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16:00Janti Soeripto:Ones that were a little harder to measure on a monthly basis, I would say, are really about outcomes for children. Did we get and keep more girls into school or more children large into school? Did we make sure that the quality of that education was up to par? Did we make sure that teacher attendance was going up? Did we make sure that we vaccinated all the children that we said we would vaccinate? So there are a couple of different levels that we measure success. We measure cost effectiveness of our most prevalent interventions much more clearly now than we used to do. Although I would also still say there is really room for improvement there.

16:42I want to remind the audience if you have questions for Yanti, particularly how she is running an organization that is responding to challenges like this, please put them in the box. I'll try to get to them later. I'm interested, sort of building on what we're talking about, what is, well, I guess this is sort of a two-part question. To what extent do you think nonprofits, including your own, need to learn from the private sector beyond sort of applying kind of goals and measurements? You know, are there other things that maybe you've adopted, maybe you haven't yet, that you think would be beneficial for nonprofits?

17:20Janti Soeripto:I think what I really liked, well, a couple of things from the private sector, that the private sector absolutely does better than this sector does, and there are some reasons for it too. But I think the attention for leadership development and really sound global mobility talent development that I've benefited from in the private sector was amazing. And in this sector, for budgetary reasons, for just research-constrained reasons, that was less developed. So that's one. Secondly, that single-minded focus that you can have in the private sector to chase down a particular goal. It could be brand equity.

18:02Janti Soeripto:It can be the launch of an innovation, profit and revenue growth, entry of a new market. That single-minded sort of focus of we're going to do this and we're going to go after it. That, I think, in the private sector has been something that this sector can still really learn from and adopt and not get too distracted. Sometimes in the sector we get too distracted and we're overthinking. we make things a little bit more complicated than they need to be. So that drive for simplification and focus, I think, is fantastic from the private sector that I'd like to see more of in this sector. So then let me flip the question and ask, you know, what are what are approaches or lessons that the private sector can and should adopt from, you know, what people are trying to do well in the public sector?

18:56Janti Soeripto:Yeah, look, I often say this to my colleagues who are still in the private sector that I worked with when they asked, you know, like, look, to be a country director in Save the Children or in any NGO, nonprofit, anywhere is one of the most amazing jobs you can do, but also one of the hardest jobs for a leader. You have, this sector is really good at working with much more diverse stakeholder slates. You know, in the private sector, as long as you stay within the law, you can basically do what you want in any particular country if you have a license to operate. For us, we have to deal with people being kidnapped.

19:39Janti Soeripto:We have to deal with being thrown out of the police because the government doesn't necessarily want us there. we have to make sure that we stay within all of the sanctions and compliance frameworks that all of the donors that we have across the world put on this sector for obvious and good reasons but working through that compliance. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments it's weeknight dinners sitting around the table everyone talking all at once so when the plates are empty and the sink is full use Palmolive Ultra Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean.

20:21And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.

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21:01Janti Soeripto:The framework is really hard to do, particularly when you work in fragile states. Most of your work is in fragile states like ours. bringing different points of view together when I joined the sector I noticed how much more diverse even the the workforce was it runs the gamut from you know community organizers to ex-bankers and and CIOs and and finance directors everything in between whereas in the private sector I always felt that it was a more homogenous in that sense population so creating alignment between a diverse group of stakeholders is something this sector really is very good at. So I want to go to a couple more audience questions.

21:45This is from Nicolaus. And the question is, as you're navigating crises, how do you decide when to rely on instinct versus when do you rely on data? As the question goes on, where uncertainty clouds both, what inner compass or discipline helps you? I mean, it's a triage question maybe to make the right choices or to choose one path versus another.

22:09Janti Soeripto:Yeah, it's a great question. And it's very much a triage question, right? We always operate on imperfect information. So let's be clear. I don't know which area of which country is going to fall apart at any given moment. You make some assessments. We have good intelligence gathering, all of it. But in the end, you have to sometimes make a call. Do you respond to this, don't you respond. So I do think it's both. I think we've gotten a lot better over these past couple of years to actually do more of the data part without completely ignoring instinct and this inherent, I think, ethos or knee jerk reaction of we have to be there, we have to help, which is fantastic, but sometimes it can also get in the way.

22:55Janti Soeripto:But we do. We We literally have a whole schematic, ideally, essentially, or a rubric of saying, okay, which countries do we work in? What's the available funding? How big is our footprint? How fragile are those countries with a particular measurement? And therefore, what are the gaps or where do we add value the most and how do we then, because if you have a scarce pot of money and a scarce pot of talent that can lead that work, you do have to make some choices, right? And you have to try to do that on a combination of the data, but also you can't be too emotionally wedded to one particular country, let's say, or one particular region, or just respond to the last crisis du jour that is coming across your desk.

23:40Janti Soeripto:So it is really trying to do both. David Plylariou There are moments when sort of the politics get tricky and let's say, you know, governments stop funding something they don't want to fund. And, you know, the private sector steps up. It actually ends up being a rallying cry for, you know, individual donations. Are you seeing that? Is it too soon to see that? I mean, you know, where, you know, can you make up for what you're losing in kind of government assistance if individuals step up? Look, I think on a macro level, there's absolutely enough private wealth in the world to make up for what is taken out in terms of government funding, not just in the United States, but everywhere else.

24:34I mean, absolutely.

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