Why Philanthropists Should Shoot for the Moon

Philanthropists may well be the catalyst to solving the world’s most pressing issues. But to succeed, those who dedicate their time and capital to addressing those challenges should do three things: embrace failure, be prepared to take risks and focus on a single goal.

These elements underpin what I call moonshot philanthropy: a model of audacious leadership calling on high-net-worth individuals to invest capital, time and expertise into high-risk, early-stage ideas to achieve disruptive impact.

Moonshot philanthropy is inspired by John F. Kennedy’s 1962 commitment to put people on the moon within a decade: a vision that was both high-risk and high-reward, fraught with potential for failure, but outweighed by the opportunity to deliver a lasting legacy.

Embracing failure to generate results

Most entrepreneurs say that it took them nine failures before finding success with their 10th. Like any business venture, successful social innovations and impact involve an inevitable element of failure. It is learning from those failures that matters the most.

Any institution making efforts to generate social impact, such as governments, companies and charities, answers to its stakeholders, whether that is voters, taxpayers, shareholders or board members and the like. That can limit its ability to make those vital, high-risk bets. Failure under such conditions is not always viewed as a motivation to try again, but as a signal to stop.

Philanthropists occupy a unique position: They’re able to take on the reputational and financial risks associated with testing unconventional, out-of-the-box ideas. It gives them freedom to try bold ideas, accept the consequences of setbacks, improve approaches and try again. It is how truly impactful initiatives are realized.

By taking on risks, philanthropists have the opportunity to act as catalysts in generating change. The past century’s world-changing philanthropic initiatives have one thing in common — donors making “big bets” of $10 million or more. Those audacious initiatives have enabled some of history’s greatest social innovations, including 911 emergency services, public libraries and polio eradication.

In short, philanthropists’ risk capital allows them to privatize failure and socialize success for the betterment of society.

Focus is key to impact

As the parable goes, “Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.” The same principle applies to philanthropy. While a single donation is a pious act, it is difficult to translate that into systemic change. Concerted efforts, where philanthropists devote their time and capital to an issue close to their heart, are more impactful.

By focusing their efforts on a single issue, philanthropists can work closely with local experts and academics, trialing ideas until the issues at hand are solved, during which time they can develop specialist knowledge and learn from past mistakes.

One standout example of that kind of expertise-building is Bill and Melinda French Gates’ actions to eradicate malaria, resulting in a 96% increase in vaccine research, ultimately saving 10.6 million lives.

Philanthropists like Bill Gates have successfully built global enterprises and understand the importance of taking on calculated risks and outsourcing to experts to see maximized ROI. The list of failures over Gates’ entrepreneurial career is long — including his short-lived company Traf-O-Data. Yet the failures have been essential for Microsoft’s later successes. Applying the same approach to philanthropic ventures, if not an even bolder one, is a good recipe for large-scale impact. As Bill Gates rightly put it, “Philanthropy should be taking much bigger risks than business.’’

A contrasting example is MacKenzie Scott, who has given approximately $14 billion over the past three years to 1,600 nonprofits. Her actions are praiseworthy, no doubt. But are they the best use of $14 billion? If the same money was invested in a single cause, just think of the impact it could have made. To put this into perspective, the cost of ending famines has been estimated by the World Food Programme at $7 billion.

Both approaches are valid, and I admire the quantum speed of Scott’s donations. In my opinion, however, her approach has made a big, temporary splash, where the ripples of impact fade, whereas a moonshot effort has the power to change the tide.

Moonshot philanthropy in vision correction

My own journey in moonshot philanthropy began with my father, who felt that charity was about tackling issues with a committed, hands-on approach — something he did by building schools and hospitals in his hometown of Qidong, China.

It was his philanthropy that influenced mine. I was standing in a dimly lit library in a school financed by my father and realized that this was not what he would have wanted. A library should be a place that excites students to read. I was motivated to take on the challenge of improving literacy and reading culture in greater China.

And then, my own lightbulb moment: Delivering childhood literacy is one thing, but one of the greatest barriers to this went beyond learning resources — 2.2 billion people worldwide are living with poor vision.

Early on, development experts told me that since it is costly to adjust glasses to each individual’s visual impairment, mass vision correction was impossible in low-resource countries. Indeed, initial efforts were marked by stumbles.

Despite this, I set up the NGO Vision For a Nation (VFAN), partnering with the Rwandan Ministry of Health. We provided affordable vision screening to 2 million people in the country, training 2,700 nurses operating in 15,000 rural villages. The result made Rwanda the first low-income country in the world to provide universal access to vision correction.

While VFAN was a successful project, its country-specific nature meant it was not a scalable model, and external support from global policymakers was not forthcoming. Therefore, I founded my second NGO, Clearly, to influence intergovernmental organizations.

We managed to move the dial: The U.N. has since adopted its first-ever resolution on vision, raising awareness of vision impairment as a key development goal and a golden thread to the SDGs.

The idea of putting a man on the moon was once considered absurd. Ending world hunger, eradicating fatal diseases, halting climate change and providing universal vision correction are similarly extraordinary challenges. But as the original moonshot showed, it is possible to surmount those challenges with focus on a single clear goal, the fearlessness of risk, and the embrace of failure. I encourage any ultra-high-net-worth individual dedicated to change to adopt this moonshot approach in their philanthropic ventures.

James Chen is a Hong Kong-based philanthropist. He is a key proponent of “moonshot philanthropy,” a model of audacious leadership which calls upon high-net-worth individuals to invest capital, time and expertise into high-risk, early-stage innovations to achieve global impact.

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