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hello I'm Cheryl Coleman managing director of the wharton social impact initiative and we're here today to talk
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about gender lens investing with ruth shaver who is the president and founder of the Tara Health Foundation Ruth thank
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you for joining us thank you for having me so tell us a little bit about the Tara Health Foundation and your
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background my pleasure so I'm a physician I'm an ob/gyn physician and I spent my career working
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for Kaiser Permanente in California and in in addition to being a provider of general ob/gyn care I also have the
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opportunity to have many different administrative roles most significantly I had the opportunity to oversee the
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evidence-based medicine program at Kaiser Permanente can you explain what evidence-based
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medicine is I mean is a tall medicine evidence-based we hope so but what that means is how does medicine translate the
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research and the basic science and human physiology into actual care how do we go
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from understanding how a drug might work to how do we actually use it in people to have them have better outcomes
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healthier lives and that can be basic science it can be a clinical trial and it also can be what we call
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implementation research so how do you actually create programs that reliably deliver some sort of technology to
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people so that they have the benefits of that sign and so is basically you're
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developing that implementation aspect is very interesting because what you're
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saying is let's have some sort of standardization because it's based on this kind of evidence rather than each
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of us doing it our own individual ways that's exactly right and in fact we talk
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about manufacturing and other types of industries in addition to medicine as evolving from a craft into a production
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system where you end up getting the reliability and quality and standardization through the system
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systems engineering and that was what my background was at Kaiser Permanente and
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when I started my new career in philanthropy I've been very interested in bringing all of that I've learned not
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just in the content not just in how do we take good care of people and women but also
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how do we create more reliable systems in this new discipline so then how's the
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tarah health foundation doing that well we have a couple different things and our overall mission is to improve the
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lives of women and girls and we're doing that by demonstrating creative uses of
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philanthropic capital so that means that we're looking at our 500 percent of our
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assets from how we make grants how we develop the fields how we do direct and private investing and also how we use
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the largest part of our endowment in in public equities in public investing and we want to have a hundred percent
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mission alignment in our specific area of social interest which is in reproductive health we firmly believe
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that improving a woman's opportunity to control the size of her family is going
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to optimize both our economic and social aspects of her life so by looking at improving access to
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reproductive health care we can do that in many different ways we can do that by
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funding grants to improve clinic access or we can do that by investing in companies that are creating new products
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for contraceptive use or we can think about how are we using our public investing strategy to also improve the
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lives of women and girls so we're looking across all of our assets so give you a specific example of an investment
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you made or a grant you've made that could help illuminate some of these approaches well we believe that not only
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are we do we need to improve access to reproductive health technologies but we need to improve access to capital for
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those who are providing reproductive health so one example of how we're using
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capital in an integrated fashion and creatively is in how we've supported an
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organization called whole Women's Health whole Women's Health were the plaintiff
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in the recent Supreme Court case that was decided last year that was arguing against the restrictive laws in the
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state of Texas whole Women's Health has been a vibrant entrepreneurially led
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organization and thriving in its provision of women's health services and reproductive health
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and abortion care in particular but because of all of the burden of the ledges of the litigation they needed to
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open and close their clinics multiple times as a result they had a large amount of debt and the only place that
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they were able to get capital from were high interest credit card debt so when we got involved in supporting them we
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had the opportunity to refinance their debt with a very low interest rate very favorable terms for them and yet it
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still was providing an investment for Tara Health Foundation as opposed to giving them a grant we were able to to
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do this in private debt it's giving us a three percent return over five years and
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it saves your grant money for another educator in it and it's not a program related investment it's actually coming
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out of our endowment also with whole women's health they also have a non-profit arm and once the Supreme
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Court case was settled last year they had the opportunity to reopen their flagship clinic in Austin and that we
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were able to finance through a grant so in addition to the debt through as a private investment we also were able to
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provide grant money through to different parts of our portfolio and that's one of
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the things we're seeing a lot when we're talking about impact investing in the
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work we're doing at this social impact initiative is that people are seeing a
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range of capital tools that they can use to drive towards a particular end and so
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this is a kind of interesting approach or and and becoming one they were seeing more frequently because people are sort
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of saying grants aren't enough there are other things I can do with my capital
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let's just figure out those different opportunities and I know you're looking
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at that very close yes I believe that the traditional model for how social change is funded from philanthropy
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should be turned upside down if you talk to most traditional large foundations they'll say that the intimate drive
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social change is their grant making and they rely on a market-based favorable return from their investments through
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their endowments to create the income and wool will fuel their grant-making I believe that we have an opportunity to
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think about this differently is instead we think about our endowments and our investment strategy as the primary
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engine of social change and the 95 percent of the capital that sits in that space and instead start using our
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grant-making as opportunities to do their research to better understand what are the best investing strategies for
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that social change that it's going to unleash a huge amount of capital and really drive change in a way that we
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could never have dreamed and I like that you brought in the research angle as well it's clear you've got that
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evidence-based approach eating a lot of the work that you're working on at this
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stage absolutely and just like in medicine the only way that we're really going to understand the best use of
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capital is by investing in research and we can't just rely on good intentions
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and intuition but there is a lot to learn when I talk about this in medicine I'll say well for there was probably 500
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or 600 years where we really thought that bleeding people yeah was going to cure all of their diseases because it
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worked in some cases or anyone oh there was in any action but they say they don't it you had it
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they had a technology that were leeches and they were looking for our disease to
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apply to and they just said well we'll just you know try it on everybody and it
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was only through a little bit of science and rigor that they realized what you know what people are actually dying from
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this I think that if we can change our thinking a little bit and apply some discipline some standardization just
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like in medicine just like in many fields that have benefited from science that we're going to have a lot more
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opportunity for the social change we all crave and I think that part of what the
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research angle is great but also this how do we share the information how do we build the data around this there's so
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many angles to take and kind of building that evidence base around that it's
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something that we're really passionate about it this social initiative as well
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you talk about how important knowledge sharing is and dissemination in medicine there was a fascinating study that came
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out in the Journal of the American Medical Association several about 20 years ago that showed
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that the the average time between when a piece of evidence was established and how long it took for it actually to
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trickle down into everyday practice was 17 years and that's just unacceptable
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and now that we understand the importance of science and the importance of sharing what we learn I really do
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think that there are opportunities for us to be much more proactive and I think that what you're doing at Wharton is
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really a great example of how we can get information out into the public space and to the into the hands of the people
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are actually doing the work and creating the change that we want well this is a really a thought-provoking conversation
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any final thoughts on what you would tell for a philanthropist about how they can be more intentional and strategic
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about their work so what I would tell my peers and others who are interested in in the power of philanthropy is to
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create the networks start talking to people don't just stay in your silo they we have so much to
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learn from one another and to bring your heart absolutely to what you're doing
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and to follow your heart in the social change that you want to see but don't be
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scared to bring in some science and some rigor into making sure that it's not
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just your intuition that you're using that you really can learn from the many
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people who have gone before you and yeah I think this goes to the willingness to
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sort of acknowledge when something isn't working absolutely and we talked a lot about
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failing and failing often but we have to be willing to learn from our failures -
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we've been talking with dr. Ruth shaver president and founder of the Tara Health
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Foundation on evidence-based philanthropy and gender lens investing thank you thank you for more insight
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from knowledge award please visit knowledge Wharton turn you [Music]