Eyes on the Prize: A Two-Time Winner’s Insights on Navigating Prize Philanthropy

Kaushik Kappagantulu

By and large, philanthropy has tended to start by identifying problems and then finding partners to execute potential solutions. But the reverse approach — rewarding proven success as a path to problem-solving — seems to be on the rise.

Shining a light on achievement is nothing new, dating back to big-name awards and prizes from the turn of the century, like Nobel and Pulitzer. More recently, though, there’s been a notable proliferation of philanthropic prizes that elevate changemakers and measurable results. This has coincided with the rise of similar competitive grant competitions, or challenges, which often present a particular problem and invite people with solutions to compete for funding.

The jury is still out on whether the approach is a net positive for social change writ large. For the changemakers themselves, winning offers huge upsides like game-changing funding, personalized coaching, opened doors and relationship-building. But even as the funders behind them work to improve the model, applying can involve obstacles like months-long vetting processes that can challenge organizational capacity, and end in nothing.

So is it all worth it? Just how profound is the impact of a win on an organization’s work? And what, exactly, goes into to landing one of these trophies? If anyone would know, it’s Kaushik Kappagantulu.

Kappagantulu is cofounder and CEO of Kheyti, a nonprofit that created scalable solutions for India’s smallholder farmers. Kappagantulu received an Elevate Prize in 2021, which comes with a minimum prize of $300,000. Kheyti also won an Earthshot Prize in 2022, which delivers a prize of more than $1 million to winning organizations. The two-time winner shared his insights on the process and payoff with IP.

A growing number

The number of significant philanthropic awards is growing. The Skoll Awards for Social Innovation, for example, were created in 2005. One of the heftiest prizes, it currently awards organizations $2 million in unrestricted funding over three years. Six years ago, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation created a Goalkeepers Global Goals Award to showcase models of progress toward meeting the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. And in 2019, the MacArthur Foundation, which has long employed prizes as a tactic, helped create Lever for Change, a nonprofit affiliate that hosts open competitions funded and conceived by outside donors like MacKenzie Scott and Reid Hoffman.

That same year, philanthropist Joseph Deitch founded The Elevate Prize Foundation, a partnership with MIT Solve to create the “first-ever fanbase for good” by drawing attention to social development stars who often work under the radar. A year later, when Prince William and his Royal Foundation decided to apply “urgent optimism” to advancing climate action, it was through an Earthshot Prize program that sought “trailblazing” solutions to repairing the planet by 2030.

Getting close to the ground

Fifteen years ago, fresh out of ITT Kharagpur and Columbia Business School, Kappagantulu considered himself a “naive idealist” who knew one thing: he didn’t want to go into consulting. Instead, he read a lot, and independently considered the ways that social impact work was helping the world’s most vulnerable populations.

Kappagantulu then took a proximate approach to finding solutions, by “apprenticing with the problems.” For 25 days a month over the next five years, he traveled rural India, meeting upward of 10,000 farmers. Those relationships helped him understand how to connect big ideas like climate change to the day-to-day weather that impacts their work.

In late 2015, he and three others founded Kheyti, a word that roughly translates to “farm.”

It’s easy to see how Kheyti rose to win two prestigious awards. It provides a local solution to a global problem, and delivers measurable and sustainable benefits on both counts.

Eight in 10 of the world’s farmers are smallholders who bear the brunt of climate risk and climate change for little reward. Nearly 80% of their farms cover less ground than five football fields, yet combined, they produce a third of the world’s food.

Kheyti’s solution was the development of a “Greenhouse-in-a-Box,” a low-cost greenhouse bundled with end-to-end services that produces seven times more food using 90% less water. They come with essentials like seeds, fertilizer, insect netting and shading cloth, and employ design insights developed through years of reaching farmers “door to door” and by “word of mouth,” as well as working with collectives on a group level.

Khetyi helps with installation, then supports the farmers with trained field officers and mobile-based advising, an approach that uses technology to share insights on things like market intelligence, while honoring the importance of in-person visits. For farmers left at the mercy of climate vagaries that impact yield and revenue, Kheyti creates a “seamless path” toward increased, dependable incomes.  

There are an estimated 100 million smallholder farmers in India, one of the most climate-impacted places in the world. Kheyti has enrolled 1,500 of them, and currently works with 1,000 farmers across six states of India. The goal now is to reach 50,000 by 2027. But the project’s capacity for scalability may one day dwarf those numbers.

Kappagantulu’s first experience with prizes was as an academic. While still at Columbia, he won seed grants from school competitions and model development, like the Nathan Gantcher Prize for Social Enterprise and a Tamer Grant for Social Ventures. Kappagantulu said the support came at the “education and R&D phase” of finding solutions.

When Kheyti hit its growth phase, it was time to reach for bigger rewards — funding to improve farmers’ lives at scale. The main focus then was on affordability, bringing the cost of the greenhouse entry point down, and offsetting microfinancing.

One of 10: The Elevate Prize

The first major prize Kappagantulu took home was the Elevate Prize, which is awarded by a foundation that believes in “making good famous,” and the idea that amplifying the work of social entrepreneurs and activists will amplify their impact.

It awards each winner an unrestricted grant of $300,000 and wraps it in supportive services to help them effectively tell their story, reach a wider audience and inspire others. Options includes an individually tailored package of strategic communications counseling, social media coaching and leadership development that meets them “where they are” on a human level.

Kappagantulu learned about the award through the foundation’s partner, MIT Solve, the social entrepreneur initiative based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that partners with Elevate on prize structure, application, selection and vetting.

He described the first round of the process as “quite quick.” It was followed by due diligence follow-up, like an interview that he characterized as “in depth, but with a light touch.”

Elevate judges include changemakers in business, academia and philanthropy. The panel this year, for example, included Malala Yousafzai, cofounder of the Malala Fund and an Elevate Catalyst Award winner; Sheila Roche, co-founder of Hive; and Stephanie Cornell, venture partner of the Richards Kaplan Foundation.

Kaushik Kappagantulu was named one of 10 winners in 2021, part of a cohort that included Uzoma Orchingwa of Ameelio, which helps the incarcerated stay connected with loved ones, and Alexander Roque of the Ali Forney Center, which helps create career paths for homeless LGBTQ and transgender youth.  

Kappagantulu reports that both forms of reward have paid big dividends. Kheyti used the grant to fund greenhouse product design innovations that brought the cost down from $2,000 to $600 over time. And he found the ancillary support particularly unique and valuable. The three months of training in public relations, social media, branding and marketing he tapped into are all things that “no one else invests in,” growth areas that he now considers a requirement to preparing for “what’s next.”

One of 5: The Earthshot Prize

The following year, Kappagantulu secured a new prize that’s garnering a lot of attention.

An independent charity founded by Prince William and the Royal Foundation in 2020, the Earthshot Prize was inspired by JFK’s 1962 moonshot drive to put a man on the moon within a decade, a goal he beat by three years. First awarded in 2021, the prize is designed to incentivize global optimism and actions to repair the planet by applying the same level of urgency and ambition to climate action that was brought to bear on the space race.

There are five winners each year, one in each of five categories: protecting and restoring nature, cleaning the world’s air, reviving the world’s oceans, building a waste-free world, and fixing the world’s climate.

The process winnows candidates down as follows: Its global network of nominators puts forward a wide group of individuals across sectors, numbering in the thousands. Kheyti was nominated by an early supporter, the social investing organization ACUMEN, where Kappagantulu had long ago been a fellow. An expert advisory panel then reduces the number of prospects to 150, then to 15 finalists.

Kappagantulu found the nomination process similar to Elevate’s. It wasn’t onerous, he said, and most of his engagement came at “the back end,” after the nominators, experts and consultants had independently finished their vetting and financial assessment.

He provided “a couple of rounds of information” through the finalists stage, and had no role in pitching Kheyti’s work to the prize council that selected the final five Earthshot winners. Council members this year included the naturalist Sir David Attenborough, Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma, and environmental activist Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim.

Kheyti was named the 2022 winner in the category of protecting and restoring nature, among a class that included Mukuru Clean Stoves, which was nominated by Echoing Green for its work improving air quality in Kenya. Each winner was awarded a $1.2 million prize at high-profile ceremonies in host cities around the world that have so far included London, Boston and Singapore.

For Kheyti, the real engagement began after the prize was awarded. To help winners bring their projects to scale at speed, all 15 of the finalists receive a year of “acceleration” via a nine-month fellowship that features the dedicated engagement of Earthshot’s Global Alliance of partners from the worlds of philanthropy, nonprofits, governments, investors and businesses. Collaborations with partners like the Bezos Earth Fund, the Aga Kahn Development Network and Bloomberg Philanthropies are meant to unlock financial, networking and partnership opportunities — and importantly, help build a community.

Kappagantulu explained that each finalist is first assigned a team contact to help create a three-page list of needs, then a “connector” who identifies the partners who can help and shepherds the solutions to a close within a few weeks.

Here again, both aspects of award have been significant, he said. Kheyti invested the $1.2 million in future growth, scaling services in India from “about 1,000 to 3,000.”

Equally important is the prize’s ability to raise brand awareness and to “open doors to help connect with funders and potential partnerships at the global level.” So far, the Aga Khan Foundation in India has become both an operating and funding partner, subsidizing a pilot project that hopes eventually to reach millions with a $50,000 initial investment. On an in-kind level, Kheyti is also working with the global sustainable design “super expert” ARUP to bring down the construction cost of greenhouses.

The intangibles

Clearly the windfall and the explicit support services have given a huge boost to Kheyti. But prizes offer three benefits that are less tangible.

First, incentivizing optimism, urgency and excellence in philanthropy can lift the sector writ large as a place of progress and positivity. And the prizes put a public face on both the critical work that’s being done — and stories that widely focus on problems instead of solutions.

Another is expanding atypical skill sets for practitioners. Kappagantulu says the Elevate Prize armed him with the ability to tell Kheyti’s story effectively across platforms, and understanding the ways it pays dividends. He said that though colleagues “for a while must focus on solving the problem on the ground,” it’s important to learn to “wear both hats.”

The third benefit is the way prizes expand everyday ecosystems to build a wider community. Both prizes include all of their winners in subsequent events and activities, presenting a chance network with a new family of peers and share ideas and best practices.

That outcome is intentional. Carolina Garcia Jayaram, CEO of the Elevate Prize Foundation, said each new prize announcement welcomes new “members of the family” into “the amazing community we’ve formed with our winners, one that provides ways to “continue to learn from and evolve with one another.”