When the 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck in NTT, the Minister of Health tapped Dr. Basra, a Black Licorice Fellow, to organize recovery efforts & lead the push to recruit volunteer doctors & distribute essentials to the hardest hit areas. Because of the connective tissue of Black Licorice, Basra & Mustika, a fellow who finds & fixes abandoned government water programs using solar powered pumps, partnered to move fast & distribute 678 portable solar lamps to some of the most remote & hard hit areas.

With Basra leading the efforts, they could move the solar powered lamps through government channels without incurring transportation fees or costs.

Four months of building trust as a cohort meant that when the earthquake struck, the Black Licorice Fellows didn't hesitate to lean on each other for recovery & relief.

But the road to recovery is long & sometimes the most impactful work happens long after the photojournalists have gone home.

Farizal, the founder of Arc Institute, is meeting with donors looking to invest longterm in the rebuild of NTT. Arc works with district level health offices, helping them build better, more effective budgets. When you learn that the average per person spend on health in districts in NTT is $37-$55 USD per year, you want that budget at the district level to do everything it can.

This is precisely why the smartest recovery investments don't stop at rebuilding hospitals & homes. They rebuild the systems that decide how every rupiah gets spent. When the some districts in Indonesia operate on as little as $10 to $37 per person for primary care, there is no margin for waste. A district health office that can craft a rigorous, evidence-based budget—one that prioritizes maternal health & children under 2, tracks outcomes against spending & closes leaks in procurement & disbursement—can stretch that same budget to cover what a poorly planned budget would burn through twice as fast.

Arc Institute's work training civil servants in technical budgeting isn't a nice-to-have alongside the rebuild—it's the difference between a district that can make $25 act like $250 & one that lets even a well-funded recovery quietly erode into the same chronic underinvestment that made this earthquake's health toll so severe in the first place.

We’re proud of the 5 fellows & their organizations. Here’s why:

1. Solar Chapter—60% of government water projects are abandoned after 2 years. Solar Chapter rebuilds these water systems with the community. They have 34 projects running across NTT now. When you think water in NTT. Think Solar Chapter.

2. Arc Institute—Arc works with district level health offices, helping them build better, more effective budgets. When you learn that the average per person spend on health in Indonesia is $147 per person per year—in parts of NTT it’s as little as $25 USD—you want that budget at the district level to do everything it can.

3. Portkesmas—Basra & his team are tackling vaccine hesitancy at its root: trust. Rather than pitching parents directly, the audience most saturated with misinformation & most defensive against outside messaging, they organize community health workers & doctors to go into elementary schools & talk to kids about vaccines, demystifying the science in language children actually understand. Those same kids then go home & become the messengers themselves, explaining to their own parents what they learned. This child-to-parent channel sidesteps the defensiveness health workers often hit when speaking to adults directly, using a trusted, low-stakes relationship, a parent's own child, to carry the information instead. The result: households reached through this model have seen a 60% increase in vaccine uptake, evidence that reframing who delivers the message can be as powerful as the message itself.

4. Yuni is the CEO of Summit Institute for Development (SID), she leads an organization with 25 years of community-based research in Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara, one of Indonesia’s most underserved regions for maternal health. Her latest work, uses AI to digitize Indonesia's handwritten Maternal and Child Health Handbook and predict pregnancy risk in real time, since 90% of pregnancy complications are preventable if caught early. What distinguishes Yuni's model is its refusal to treat digital health as a substitute for the community health worker relationship. Her tools make community health workers more effective, turning routine handwritten data into an early-warning system without disrupting the trust between health workers and mothers. With WHO, UNICEF, and the Gates Foundation already engaged as partners, SID's opportunity is to prove this AI-augmented, worker-centered model can be the connective layer that finally makes Indonesia's fragmented maternal health data usable, at the moment mothers and clinicians need it most.

5. KantiHealth delivers TB care to the Orang Rimba, an Indigenous community in Jambi that Indonesia's health system structurally cannot reach. Their insight: don't send outsiders in, train Orang Rimba community members as the health workers themselves. Trust already exists inside the community; KantiHealth just builds the clinical scaffolding around it. That model was recognized at the 2024 Union World Conference on Lung Health as a promising practice worth replicating. Now, as a Harvard Medical School Jeffrey Richardson Fellow, KantiHealth is running a head-to-head field test of three TB screening methods, portable chest X-ray, sputum GeneXpert, and tongue swab, to find out which one actually works when the patient lives three hours from the nearest road, not which one works in a hospital. That's the right question for a population TB programs keep failing to reach. KantiHealth is a year old, small, and testing its own assumptions before asking anyone to scale them.
   

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Nobody said that. But that was the goal. The goal was to laser-focus on the boring stuff—governance, budgets, boards, strategy and KPIs.

Because the boring stuff matters. When you have three donors drop in Q2 and you have no idea how you’re going to make payroll in December, you’ll be grateful for the boring stuff.

All too often fellowships and retreats are about feelings. Selfies and occasional case studies. You do yoga.

And then the founder or CEO leaves and two weeks later three donors drop and they have no idea what to do.

That’s why Black Licorice focuses on the boring stuff. Because it matters. Because donors drop. Things go sideways. And if you don’t have the boards, budgets, strategy, governance and KPIs in place, you fold. Good organizations fold all the time. Bright and determined individuals are forced to play it safe and take a job with the World Bank or UNICEF because no one ever gave them the tools and confidence to bet on themselves.

That’s why we do the boring stuff. So that organizations survive—some will even thrive.

For 72 hours we debated strategy. We dug deep and dissected governance. We pored over budgets. We were vulnerable. We asked the hard questions.

Members of the Global Advisory Board traveled from around the world. Donors flew in and sat with fellows, allowing them to ask hard questions—letting them be vulnerable.

By design Black Licorice is meant to ensure that fellows have the tools and confidence to seek out and secure unrestricted funding. The development space in Indonesia has long been dominated by international NGOs, it’s rare for anyone to bet on themselves and start their own NGO. The popular path is to work at the World Bank or Save the Children. The safe bet is to spend 20 years in the system, eventually becoming the Country Director.

But not Black Licorice Fellows.

The results of the retreat were astounding and the momentum is unmistakable. So much so that I am fast-tracking the next cohort in the hopes of creating more peer-learning and overlap between the two cohorts. The hope is to have 10 fellows at the November retreat and I need your help to make that happen. I’m fundraising $50,000 USD over the next 3 weeks to bring in five new fellows.

We are looking for check sizes of either $10K or $20K. Please reach out and let me know if you would be interested in backing the next generation founders proving what’s possible, but still too often going unseen, unheard and underfunded?

Everyone is talking about how the wave of wealth coming out of Anthropic and OpenAI has the potential to reshape philanthropy.

Let’s hope so, because right now the sector is stuck. We’ve worn out words like scale and innovation. The rewards system has been hijacked. Organizations are now winning the Audacious Prize for a second time. The current system is comfortable re-granting tens of millions of dollars to organizations that received tens of millions a decade ago on the promise of scale. Going from being a $5 million USD organization to a $50 million USD organization isn’t scale, it’s growth. And that growth has made some organizations simply too big to fail.

Now with the news of the AI engineers and executives cashing in, the regrantors that trade in hedge fund language that makes deeply speculative judgements regarding insanely complex issues sound precise and evidence-based, are lining up to offer their services. They promise clean, optimized answers to problems that are, by design, messy and human. These aren’t solutions. They’re distractions.

I offer a simple alternative: endowments.

Boring, I know. But boring is often what actually solves problems. We want to believe expertise and clever new math and models will save us, but as people like Paul Farmer often pointed out, in a world of sexy, shiny tools and expertise, long-term institution building is what’s really required.

Why not back organizations that have already been vetted—winners of Audacious, Pivotal, or Zayed, where the due diligence is done and dusted—and pair each one with an asset management firm willing to waive its fees. Put a $5 million or $10 million endowment on the table—the goal being to create a $10M endowment generating 5% . Tell the CEOs and founders to lock in their operating costs for the next 5 years. Give them back their time. Tell them their core costs are covered and they don’t need to keep raising money to justify their existence. See what happens.

The simple answer to development’s most complex questions is to invest in people— founders and the CEOs. And let them off the leash. Stop making them justify their existence all day every day. Stop making them fly to Geneva, Oxford and New York fives times a year to sing for their supper.

Imagine a world where CEOs and founders didn’t have to fundraise all day every day. Imagine the impact that would have on the communities they serve.

We love to talk about mental health and burnout. Donors commission studies on it, convene panels, and publish thoughtful essays. But what no one does is trace it to its origin: the relentless, compounding, impossible economics of keeping a serious organization funded in a system designed to make funding perpetually insecure.

Nobody talks about the toll fundraising takes on a founder. The Fundraising Tax is not so much about the time and the money as it’s about the price a founder has to be willing to pay—what they are willing to give up in exchange for the money.

The Expertise That Never Gets Offered

Last week I had coffee with a donor in Bali, right before he had to hop a flight back to London. He met me for coffee, suitcase in tow. He represents an asset management firm and has spent the last decade underwriting global health organizations. He was without a doubt one of the sharpest funders I’ve ever met. He asked all the right questions. I simply didn’t have the right answers.

Our conversation was awkward. I caught him looking at his watch. He noted the time and how he needed to find a taxi. I listened to a plane fly overhead.

“Before I go,” he said. “One last question: what is it that you think foundations like ours could be offering organizations—what could we be doing that we’re not?”

Endowments, I told him.

He shook her head as if I didn’t understand the question. Another awkward pause. He offered back-office support instead—and then asked how I felt about fundraising consultants.

Most people in philanthropy made their money by understanding risk and managing capital at scale. That is a rare and valuable skill. And yet when these same people sit across from a founder or a CEO, that expertise is somehow off limits. They want to discuss cost-per-beneficiary, government adoption, the latest RCT. Meanwhile, in the next room over, their analysts are generating returns using the exact expertise that could permanently stabilize the organization sitting across the table.

Never once have I had a donor open a meeting by asking, “How much time do you spend fundraising? Would you say more than 60%? What would happen if you didn’t have to fundraise? What would you do with that time?”

Or “Congratulations, I saw you just secured a $1 million USD grant, what’s your board telling you to do with it? What investment options are on the table?”

The question I can’t stop coming back to is this: if someone built their fortune by understanding capital, why is the most valuable thing they offer organizations consultants who focus on fundraising.

There is a version of this argument that gets very uncomfortable very fast. The intermediaries who sit between large philanthropic capital and the organizations doing the work—the capacity builders and re-grantors, the organizations that exist to help grassroots organizations become better—are they themselves, almost without exception, sitting on a financial instrument or an endowment. Their operating costs are covered. Their staff aren’t on contracts contingent on winning the next big grant. Their CEOs aren’t on planes to Geneva, London and New York three times a year to justify their existence.

I want to make sure I’m crystal clear, because there are serious organizations out there doing serious work. This is not an accusation. It’s a question: if permanent capital makes an institution more effective, why is that the one asset that never gets extended to the organizations it exists to support?

The generous read here is that nobody has thought it through. The less generous read is that the intermediary’s business model depends, in part, on the dependency of the organizations it serves. A founder with an endowment doesn’t need a fundraising consultant. A founder with permanently funded operations doesn’t need an intermediary to carry their case to an investment committee.

The 60/40 Flip

If your budget is around $500,000, the founder spends roughly 60% of their time in the field or on strategy, 30% on fundraising, and 10% on administration. That’s a sound allocation of time for any well-run organization.

At $500,000, donors fly out to see you. They want to see the work.

Past $2 million and the work stops being the job. Fundraising becomes the job.

Cross the $2 million threshold, and the ratio starts to flip. By $5 million, it’s inverted. The founder is now spending close to 80% of their time fundraising—not because their commitment to the work has wavered, but because the economics of running a $5 million organization simply demand it. A dinner in Singapore. A panel in Oxford. An impact report rewritten personally for a donor at midnight. A gala where a founder on autopilot repeats the same pitch about her “vision for scale” to a dozen donors.

Start going beyond $10 million, and fundraising is the CEOs entire job. At that point you are no longer a founder. You are a fundraiser who founded something a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

In a world where we worship innovation—AI, drones, Apps—sometimes true innovation is just showing up. Time and time again, just showing up is what yields the best results, not some sexy innovation or expertise.

Let’s Talk About Zombies

I know the other side of the argument, so let’s get it out of the way.

There are organizations—you and I both know a dozen off the top of our head—that have run on the same budget for decades and will keep running indefinitely, because no one out there has the discipline to wind them down or pull the plug. The concern I hear often is that an endowment would simply create more zombies. That’s fair, and I don’t have a bulletproof rebuttal. But consider this: those zombie organizations already exist today, funded year after year by donors who know exactly what they are and write the check anyway. The failure there is not structural. It’s a failure of governance.

Testing the Argument

In Singapore, the topic came up with a potential donor who sipped matcha and wore sunglasses inside. Sometimes it feels like all I do is have awkward conversations.

“Zack,” he said, “you have specialized knowledge with regard to malnutrition and Indonesia—you’re not, however, an expert with money or a financial steward. Those are different skill sets.”

He’s not wrong. Ask my wife.

But the argument assumes the solution is for donors to keep managing the capital while founders and CEOs keep chasing it, indefinitely—until the sun runs out of hydrogen. That is not stewardship. That is control. He doesn’t want to support the work, he wants to control the founder. The leash. The ledger.

“I don’t want my capital to just sit there when it could be having immediate impact,” he said.

Finally, the one thing we could agree on.

“You’re right,” I said. “So why not just give all the money away today?”

He scoffed. I watched him angrily finish his matcha. He looked over at me as he swallowed the chalky sludge as if to prove a point.

When MacKenzie Scott puts $40 million into an HBCU’s endowment, no one bats an eye. But if a public health organization in Indonesia floats the idea of an endowment donors far and wide clutch their pearls. Both are pursuing equity of outcomes. The only difference is that one is treated as an institution and the other as a program—and that distinction is worth discussing.

I can’t believe we’re not discussing this. I can’t believe more organizations aren’t stepping up and demanding the conversation happen.

Intermediaries now fundraise alongside individual organizations, essentially crowding them out. They promise 100x impact returns to a donor’s investment. No small NGO can compete with that. Meanwhile, donors join forces in the name of catalytic funding, but what they don’t realize is that they’re competing with the organizations actually doing the work, cutting them off at the knees, all in the name of impact.

At the end of the day, if you want to move the needle, you have to have something no one else has, you have to have something you can’t find in a spreadsheet, something that burns. Some of the best humanitarians—Edward Abbey, Rosa Parks, Jane Goodall & Paul Farmer—were rooted in evidence and rigor, but fueled by righteous indignation.

Because if you get into development for the right reasons, this is about acts of service. This is about knowing the name of the dog that sleeps in the shade outside the primary health care center two islands over. This is about the two-prop planes and the winding roads. And learning the hard way that you’re out of dramamine. It’s about being homesick. It’s about kissing your kids goodbye and then fighting on behalf of someone else’s kids, making sure they get the same vaccines your kids get—the same trained and confident community health workers, the same access to care we would want for our mother or our brothers.

It’s not about conferences and panels in Singapore, Oxford or Geneva or New York.

The only people who are going to do anything remotely close to fixing these problems are the ones who never get invited to the conferences—the activists who keep banging on closed doors, who pick people up when they fall, who keep buying plane tickets back to the same damn island to fight the long defeat.

So back them. Believe in them.

Find individuals and organizations the outside world might view as slightly insane—people obsessed with and fanatical about fixing failed markets. Help build an elite corps of driven idealists. Because the solutions to the world’s thorniest problems can’t be found at some Oxford cocktail hour or on a panel in Geneva. The answers are in the hearts of the people who saw a problem and couldn’t look away—the people who threw their lives away in service of others.

Three years ago I had coffee in Singapore with a former tech bro who was convinced he could use drones to deliver vaccines to neighboring islands in Indonesia. A philanthropist in Singapore was backing him. He’d heard I worked in Komodo and thought, “Hey, islands are islands, right?”

“Why drones?” I asked.

“Because community health workers living out on the islands don’t have refrigerators,” he says. “They can’t store vaccines properly.”

“Then why not give them refrigerators?”

This obsession with the idea that sexy spreadsheets, shiny solutions and disruption innovation hold the answers to the world’s most complex problems has robbed global development of its soul.

These aren’t solutions. They’re distractions.

The people, it turns out, who think that complicated problems can be solved by disruption, science and rigor, are very good at describing problems, very sophisticated when it comes to explaining why something went wrong or why something can’t get fixed—but their expertise ends there. Even worse, at the end of the day, these people don’t care about whether or not the problem gets solved so long as they can virtue signal that they are supporting the “most impactful thing.”

Rarely do you find them in the field. Rarely do you find them at an abandoned roadside restaurant in rural West Africa or Indonesia.

You’re far more likely to bump into them in London, Geneva or Oxford, reaching across you to grab the last stale almond croissant. They are consultants masquerading as humanitarians.

Their way of working, dishing out pre-packaged ideas and opinions—pointing out problems, crying about how all the money in global development is drying up—seems to be an endless supply of…

…but the people who get in the arena…the people who dare greatly. They can’t compete with the consultants. Because they are themselves romantics. They’re idealists. And it turns out development is an art, not a science.

These people are fueled by something different. They see problems and they can’t look away. The consultants of the world see a pile of cash and they can’t look away.

The artists and the dreamers are the ones who quit cush jobs and throw their lives away. They are obsessed.

Those who solve problems via hedge fund language that makes deeply speculative judgements regarding insanely complex issues sound precise and evidence-based are in it for the money.

We’ve been convinced that weighing vexing, overconfident hypotheticals, against intellectually slippery assumptions is somehow the same thing as rigor.

These people are tourists in the lives of the poor.

Art doesn’t come easy and neither should the solutions to these complex problems—these market failures—we’ve taken it upon ourselves to solve.

At the end of the day, all good things come by grace, and grace comes by art, and art doesn’t come easy. Art comes from pain, suffering, and empathy. A whirlwind of emotions. A cocktail of feelings you have to grapple with long after the work is done.

Conflict. Pleasure. Joy. Dissonance. These are things of art. These things occur in art. They make us human. Without them, what’s the point?

I quote Paul Farmer a lot, and for good reason. Paul always warned against drinking the Kool-Aid of being “saved by expertise” or worshipping purely technical solutions and “disruption.” He would tell anyone who would listen that a lot of disruptive ideas fail because they are designed from a “controlled distance” without visiting the actual communities they’re meant to serve. They’re designed in Oxford or just south of Silicon Valley and then shoved down the throat of people in poor countries.

Reminds me of my favorite line from “Anchorman” when Brian Fontana famously explains the success rate of sex panther as such: “Sixty percent of the time it works all the time...” I think Brian interned at GiveWell.

These problems are hard in the way families are hard, or talking to your parents about politics is hard, or how grief is hard. These are systems built by human beings, with bizarre incentives and a bafflingly long and sordid history of screwing over the poorest people.

All the math in the world isn’t going to solve these problems. These problems can only be solved by dedicated people obsessed with making the world resemble the one they want to live in. The reality is that solving these problems is ugly and expensive, and doesn’t fit nicely in the 31st tab of a spreadsheet.

Moving the needle on malaria, malnutrition and maternal mortality happens when a barrage of boring, overlapping, un-sexy interventions are undertaken by activists obsessed with knocking on closed doors and building systems that don’t collapse.

Because if you get into development for the right reasons this is about acts of service. This is about knowing the name of the dog that sleeps in the shade outside the primary health care center three islands over. This is about two-prop planes and traveling mountainous roads with hairpin turns. It’s about learning the hard way that you’re out of dramamine. It’s about being homesick. It’s about kissing your kids goodbye and then fighting on behalf of someone else’s kids, making sure they get the same vaccines your kid gets—trained and confident community health workers, the same access to care we would demand for our mothers or our brothers.

Ultimately, if you want to move the needle, you have to have something no one else has, you have to have something you can’t find in a spreadsheet. A powerful cocktail of moral ambition and righteous indignation. The idealism of an activist, and the ambition of an entrepreneur.

Art fetches astronomical amounts of money. When we talk about art we say it’s priceless. But when we talk about public health we talk about cost effectiveness.

We can’t afford to keep waiting around to be saved by expertise. As people like Paul Farmer pointed out long ago, all the science, expertise and "disruptive" ideas fail because they’re designed from a "controlled distance" without visiting the actual communities they are meant to serve.

Keep your drones and your disruptive ideas. Give me the boring stuff—the staff, the space, the systems—to move the needle. Throw in a few idealistic activists at heart and we have the makings of a work of art.

The first cohort of Black Licorice Fellows will pack their bags and head to Ubud this month for an intense 4-day retreat laser focused on budgets, boards, strategy, governance and KPIs—the tools that give you the confidence to seek out and secure unrestricted funding.

Fundraising is of course top-of-mind for the fellows and one question I get all the time is: “How do you navigate the power dynamic?”

Power dynamic? What power dynamic?

There’s this tired and uninspired rhetoric in development about the “power dynamic,” basically saying that because a donor has all the money, they hold all the power. This is garbage.

If you think about it the reverse is actually true. If you’re a rock star, doing rock star stuff, you hold the power. You’re headed toward greatness, you have all the right tools, and so any donor would be over-the-moon excited to hitch a ride on your star.

More importantly, in a world where few people have the moral ambition to do something beyond using their talents to get people to click on ads, you’ve chosen to do something of service—be a voice for the voiceless. Donors should be clawing at the chance to talk with you.

And if they’re not, maybe you need to look in the mirror.

When I hear founders and CEOs bemoan the power dynamic I immediately ask myself if they’re in this for the right reasons. There’s a lot of people in development, in fact, that probably shouldn’t be in development, consultants masquerading as humanitarians. Some people see a problem and they can’t look away, other people see a pile of cash and they can’t look away.

It’s your job as a founder to make sure donors know that for you this is about compassion and service—you’re not some spoiled rich kid slumming it in development.

Your goal in conversations with donors is to catch their attention—you’re a rare bird—and convince them with evidence.

If you go into these conversations defeated, dead-set that the power dynamic leaves you at a disadvantage you’re wasting everyone’s time.

If you start to feel yourself tracking toward complaining about the power dynamic, convinced that because donors have the money they have the power, try to think about how important it is for them to impress their boss. Don’t blame the system. Just be better.

Kick open that door.

It’s important to fail. It’s important to feel challenged.

Ultimately, you have to ask yourself, “What are you willing to fight for? What pain do you want in your life? Is this path you’ve chosen worth struggling for?”

And if all you have are excuses, about the power dynamic or other things, you’re not here to fight the long defeat on behalf of others, you’re here for yourself.

You have to be willing to have tough conversations and face rejection. You have to be willing to admit that real success and fulfillment requires pain, rejection, failure and struggle, not excuses.

In about 10 minutes, the Black Licorice board is going to sit down & decide whether the thesis is worth backing. Whether backing five founders & giving them $20,000 in unrestricted cash, alongside the tools & confidence to build the budgets, boards, strategy, KPIs & governance needed to seek out & secure unrestricted multiyear funding is going to have a ripple effect across Indonesia. Whether a fixed budget of $225,000—split cleanly between money to founders & money for salaries, retreats & fundraising—is discipline or delusion.

And underneath all of it, the real question. The one that every nonprofit board eventually has to answer & almost none of them do honestly:

“What keeps you up at night?”

A week ago the read ahead was sent out—a 15-page packet that included the Q2 CEO Letter, 5 Clear Asks, 2026-2030 Strategy, KPIs & Budget—laid out alongside a tight 60-minute agenda.

The Q2 meeting had four asks:

• Approve the strategy & confirm the core thesis: Black Licorice is an early-stage donor (unrestricted $20,000 USD) & capacity-builder helping high-potential maternal health & malnutrition founders become fundable, governable, & ready for unrestricted, multi-year capital.

• Approve the 2026 budget of $225,000, including the disciplined split between founder support, program delivery, & core operations.

• Approve the KPIs that will govern how we measure success.

• Big Asks & Small Favors: Help close the remaining $67,500 needed to complete this year’s funding round, ideally by bringing in 3 additional donors. The current funding model is built around 10 donors taking a 10% stake, or $22,500 annually.

The Thesis on the Table

The immediate priority is to finish this year well. That means board alignment on the strategy, budget, & KPIs—& concrete help filling the last $67,500. The cleanest path is for this board to help bring in two more donors who believe in the model & are willing to fund a 10% stake. The broader priority is to behave like the kind of board we want our fellows to build: clear on the mission, aligned on the numbers, useful on fundraising, & willing to back a good bet early.

Black Licorice is making early bets on five Indonesian founders the global health world hasn’t noticed yet. That’s exactly the point.

The broader priority is to behave like the kind of board we want our fellows to build: clear on the mission, aligned on the numbers, useful on fundraising, & willing to back a good bet early.

We’re betting that a $20,000 unrestricted grant, two week-long retreats, monthly check-ins & access to a Global Advisory Board that includes leaders from Noora Health, Partners In Health & GAVI can close that gap—and that closing it for 25 founders by 2030 will unlock more than $10 million in cumulative unrestricted funding that currently has nowhere to go.

Donors gravitate toward growth & scale. Black Licorice is the early-stage regrantor & capacity-builder that helps identify, de-risk, & professionalize the most promising hyperlocal nonprofits.

Black Licorice is about building a pipeline: seeding Indonesia’s next 25 serious maternal health NGOs—not just in NTT, but across the country, including Sumatra, Kalimantan & West Papua.

Most local NGOs are underpowered: The sector is full of underfunded, poorly governed groups—Black Licorice bets on those with grit & promise, teaching them what “great” looks like (budgets where you know the price of soap, real governance, not just box-checking).

Black Licorice’s core argument is simple: high-potential, locally rooted founders in maternal health & malnutrition are being systematically overlooked — not because they lack talent or traction, but because they reach institutional readiness later than most funders are willing to engage. The fellowship fills that gap. Five founders a year, $20,000 each in unrestricted capital, two week-long retreats, monthly check-ins, & access to a Global Advisory Board with leaders from Noora Health, Partners In Health & GAVI.

The Quiet Fire

The relationship between a chair & CEO is one of the most consequential in any organization. When it works, it is a force multiplier — two people with different vantage points, pulling in the same direction. When it does not, the organization pays the price. We all need practical tools for communication, for naming expectations before they become resentments & for rebuilding trust after it cracks. This requires two people willing to be honest about what they need from each other. The chair-executive director relationship is mission-critical. Get the tools right & you build something stable. Get them wrong & the whole organization feels it.

Your board members want to contribute. They have networks, credibility & genuine belief in the mission. What they lack is clarity—on what is expected of them, how to start a conversation & what to do when it gets uncomfortable. The result is a CEO carrying the fundraising load alone, a board that feels guilty but stuck & a donor base that never grows beyond the founder’s personal network.

This is what keeps us up at night. How do you create the quiet fire? How do you give them a clear enough picture of what they are actually supposed to do, how to talk about the organization & what to do when a conversation gets awkward.

The Thing About Fundraising Nobody Says Out Loud

Fundraising feels gross to most people because they’ve been taught to think of it as extraction—taking money from people who have it & giving it to people who don’t.

That framing is wrong.

The real frame: you’re inviting someone into work that matters. You’re offering them the chance to be part of something they’d be proud of. You’re not taking anything. You’re opening a door to meaning.

When a board member calls a friend & says “I want to tell you about something I’ve been involved with that I think you’d care about,” they’re not asking for a favor. They’re doing a favor. They’re bringing someone they love into a community of people who are trying to fix something real.

That reframe changes everything. Not the ask—the internal experience of making it. And the internal experience is what determines whether your board member makes the ask with confidence or spends three weeks “thinking about the right time to reach out.”

There’s no right time. There’s only doing it & not doing it.

I’m not blaming Instagram.

I love to ask people what their favorite book is…more importantly, I love to ask them what book they “gift” most often…what book do you buy and give to a friend?

But lately, no one’s been able to answer me. Or they’ve given these bizarre half-answers that make me regret even asking.

…We no longer talk to each other…we entertain each other…we don’t exchange ideas…we exchange emojis…we don’t argue or debate…we entertain ourselves by sharing cat videos.

Whenever we go out in the field with someone—a donor, a volunteer, a med student, a journalist—we invariably go to dinner. Sometimes grilled fish. Sometimes pizza. Never Happy Banana. Never.

And at the dinner table we love to sit and ask each other good questions

1) Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck, or 100 duck-sized horses?

2) What’s your favorite poem? Can you remember your favorite line?

3) What’s your go-to karaoke jam? (Mine is Sarah McLachlan’s “Building a Mystery”) Yeah…I said it…

4) What are your top three movies of all time?

This actually started…or it became our default setting when we took a super famous YouTuber to the field…one night we were out at dinner and he just kept asking the team all kinds of intriguing personal questions…a modern day Proust Questionnaire.

When I asked him about why he loved peppering the team with questions he pointed to the table behind us and we all turned to see 10 people…all out to dinner together staring at their phones. Wild.

It’s true, you just sit there scrolling. You can’t look anyone in the eye when you talk. You don’t know how to have or hold conversations. It’s bizarre. I’m not saying books—novels, biographies, anthologies—hold the keys to being able to have a conversation, but they definitely help.

People do what is easy, not what is right. We see this in the work we do in maternal health and malnutrition.

Traditional markets are a thing of the past in the villages where we work. They’ve been replaced by tiny shops run out of everyone’s house selling ultraprocessed food. Moms used to walk to the traditional market every other day and buy fruit, vegetables, rice, oil and meat. But now they spend their days giving their kids cash so they can scurry off and buy snacks. It’s cheap. Each time they just have to give the kid Rp 4,000. But it turns out they have 4 kids, and they do this 8 times a day. But at least they don’t have to cook a meal now.

It’s a slippery slope.

And the same happens with reading. We don’t read anymore because we are busy asking ChatGPT about our mental health and scrolling videos of people making matcha lattes.

We’re addicted to our phones. We need to admit that. The book I am reading right now, “Moral Ambition” has a great quote which haunts me…it’s from someone who worked at Facebook. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click on adds.”

Below is a stack of books I am reading or have just read. Reach out and tell me what you think about them, or tell me what you’re reading.

Back in 2019, I quit the World Bank and started working on four islands inside Komodo National Park. It means so much to me to be able to come back to these islands and see the gains we’re making. When we started out mothers were dying from eclampsia and kids were dying from diarrhea. But we don’t see that anymore. Those are all in the past. Hopefully one day we talk about maternal malnutrition and stunting in the same way…as a thing of the past.

Dafa is running and playing football. Remember Dafa, the 2-year-old who was so malnourished he couldn’t walk? Well, now he’s 3 & he’s running & laughing & playing.

These days, when we land in Flores, the first thing we do is drive straight to Warloka to see Dafa. When we first met Dafa 8 months ago, we were shattered. We’d come to Warloka for a routine spot check & focus group discussion with health workers & midwives. We thought we’d be talking about soft skills & communication, walking through clinical vignettes, practicing how to plot a child’s growth on an X/Y axis.

Instead, they took us to see Dafa.

His growth had been faltering for six months. He couldn’t walk. We were afraid he had TB, afraid that no matter what we did, his neuroplasticity wouldn’t catch up. He was severely malnourished & it felt like we were too late. But it’s never too late.

We called in every favor we had. We found an extraordinary donor who didn’t hesitate to write a check and insisted that no expense be spared. The team moved fast. Together, step by step, we got Dafa back on track.
Now, we watch him run & play.

That’s why we do this work. That’s why we get on the planes. That’s why we kiss our wives & kids goodbye & go back again & again.

Because the work matters. The people matter. Dafa matters. The communities we serve matter.

What would it look like to give cash to pregnant moms in Komodo?

There’s tons of evidence out there that says this is a great idea. And the best part is we’re not doing this because we think it will scale or because we think the government will adopt it. We just want to bring a group of like-minded people together & commit to helping pregnant mothers in these 3 villages. On average there are 60 pregnant mothers across the 3 villages at any given time. We’re reaching out to 60 friends & asking them to pledge $150 USD. We’re calling it the Week 15 Club, because we will give the cash to moms who get their first formal health facility visit on or before Week 15.

• We expect to see antenatal visits jump 2x

• Mothers getting ultrasounds earlier on in the pregnancy.

• We expect to see better overall maternal mental health

• Lower incidences of maternal malnutrition

• Higher uptake of maternal & child health services (ANC visits, growth monitoring, immunization)

The goal is not to scale the program or fight the government to adopt it but rather gather a small group of individuals committed to changing the lives of these women and children.

It’s basically that M Mead quote, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

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Sometimes it feels like too much..like the world’s on fire. But we can all make a difference. Tend to the part of the garden you can touch. Be the change you want to see in the world. Let us know if you want to get involved.

In Flores, we’re trying something simple & slightly radical: enlist guys—barbers & tattoo artists—who spend their days talking to dads.

The people with scissors, needles, and the ear of dads. We’re giving them a way to talk with fathers about the first 1,000 days—that quiet, decisive stretch when nutrition helps set the course for a child’s whole life. The idea is not to lecture dads, but to meet them where they already are & trust that a good conversation, delivered by a trusted voice, can move a dad’s heart & help him make better decisions consistently.

What makes it compelling is the humility of it. No grand platform, no diplomatic narrative, just the recognition that influence is often hiding in plain sight—sitting in the chair in front of you, in the pauses between jokes, right there in a tattoo shop. If we do this well, we make malnutrition less of a “women’s issue” and more of a shared responsibility, carried by the men who are already shaping the room

Pop Up Posyandu in Bali: Standing with Mothers, Supporting Children

For families from NTT, the search for work has often meant leaving behind the support systems they need most. Now, 1000 Days Fund is bringing a pop-up village health post to meet pregnant mothers and young children where they are — offering counseling, care, and hope for healthier beginnings. That is why 1000 Days Fund is stepping up with a pop-up village health post — a safe, welcoming place where mothers can access guidance, support & care during the most critical days of a child’s life. Because every mother deserves support & every child deserves a healthy start.

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I’m tired of seeing headlines where AI & so-called digital breakthroughs are celebrated for their “reach.”

AI should be about amplifying voices & bridging equity gaps, instead it’s about chasing better cost-per-beneficiary numbers.

We’re doing AI ass-backwards.

We’re shoving solutions no one asked for down the throats of people who are unseen, unheard & overworked in the first place. We’re pointing it in the wrong direction, then acting surprised when it spits out answers nobody asked for, to problems nobody named, in places nobody bothered to visit.

Just because you use AI rewrite emails in the style & tone of Brené Brown, or confirm your blinding bias about a year’s-long fight with your mother-in-law, doesn’t mean the communities we serve see the world the way you do.

We keep talking about “AI for development” as though the main challenge is building clever models. It isn’t. The real problem is that almost every system in this sector has been built from the top down. A funder or foundation writes the strategy. We write the sycophantic proposals. Consultants circle like vultures. Only at the very end do we remember there are “beneficiaries” somewhere & fire off a Kobo survey to validate what we already decided.

Here in Indonesia, multiple micronutrient supplements (MMS) are a hot topic. Are they getting to the pregnant mothers who need them most? Can they open the child-proof caps? What are the barriers & behaviors?

With MMS, WhatsApp voice notes & AI give us a way to turn MMS from a distribution metric into a listening system. Instead of asking women to tick boxes on a survey months after the fact, we can invite them to send short WhatsApp voice messages, so we can listen to them & amplify their voices We can better understand the barriers & attitudes: whether they took yesterday’s pill & why, how the pills make them feel, what scares them, who in the household supports or discourages them & what they think the pills are even for. AI’s job here is not to “optimize adherence;” it’s to do the grunt work humans don’t have time for at scale—transcribing messy audio in local dialects, translating it & clustering those messages into themes.

Instead of a shiny dashboard that says “bottles shipped” & “bottles received,” you get something much more uncomfortable & useful: a weekly picture of the friction between distribution & “doing,” broken down by district & trimester.

Insane, right?

Insanely good.

Counseling changes can be made if women keep saying the pills make them nauseated if they take them on an empty stomach, or because half the village believes MMS is a form of family planning; packaging changes because enough women complain that they can’t open the bottle; community engagement changes because the voice notes make it obvious that mothers-in-law, not midwives, are the ones who really decide what gets swallowed in late pregnancy. Crucially, if you close the loop—telling women, “You said the caps were hard to open; we changed them,” or “You said the side effects scared you; we changed how we explain the pills”—you start to chip away at the deep, justified suspicion that speaking up never changes anything.

AI will not make MMS adherence perfect. But it can lower the cost of listening so far that we lose our last excuse for not knowing, week by week, long after the press conference in the capital city, when a bottle of pills that looked perfect in a press release is still sitting untouched on someone’s kitchen shelf.

If you wanted to design AI in the most backward way possible, you would do exactly what we are doing now: use it to optimize solutions we’ve already locked in, rather than using it to listen to the people those solutions are supposedly for.

Because the real power of AI here is both boring & radical: we can suddenly listen to thousands of people, in their own words, on their own phones, without making them sit in hotel conference rooms or pretend to understand a Likert scale.

Think about how we respond to emergencies.

Floods hit Sumatra. People need clean water. Money is donated. Photos show volunteers handing out water filters.

But is anyone actually using the filters?

You can’t see anything from a qualitative report. But maybe WhatsApp & AI can give you a glimpse of what’s going on on the ground. You find out because a woman standing in knee‑deep water leaves a voice note saying, “The filter is too slow. I use it for my baby’s drinking water, but for everything else I still use the river.” Or a farmer says, “The filter clogged, there’s no replacement parts, now it just sits in the corner.” Or a midwife says, “Families bring buckets to the clinic & we filter there, but the clinic closes at 4pm.”

If you collect WhatsApp numbers at the point of distribution & actually follow up, you can ask:

• How much water are you filtering each day?

• Who is drinking that water?

• What are you using it for—drinking, cooking, washing?

• What stops you from using it more?

AI’s job is not to swoop in with a “smart” WASH model. Its job is to chew through hundreds of messy, overlapping voice notes in local dialects & return something painfully simple: here is why your polished intervention works on paper & fails in mud.

The same logic applies to the slow crises no camera crew ever visits.

We are doing AI backwards because we still think the job is to make our solutions smarter, not to make our listening deeper.

Flip the assumption & the questions change. Before launching the next initiative, you ask: what do midwives, farmers, teachers, community health workers & pregnant mothers say they want right now, in their own words? Before lamenting the end of a grant, you ask: do people on the receiving end feel abandoned, relieved, indifferent, something else entirely? Before rewriting a strategy, you admit you don’t know—& use the tools you already have to find out quickly.

AI will not fix development. But it can remove our last excuse for not listening. The bandwidth is there. The models are there. The phones are already in people’s hands.

If we keep using all that power to prop up the same old answers instead of amplifying the voices we’ve ignored for decades, that isn’t a tech problem. It’s a choice.

Gita Ruum contains multitudes. On one hand she’s a sister and a daughter. And on the other, she’s Black Licorice’s energetic grants & operations manager, the woman who loves waking up every day and working alongside fellows—giving them the tools and confidence to go after unrestricted, multiyear funding.

In honor of Stephen Colbert, we dive deep into the psyche of Gita & after these 15 questions we promise you will know her fully.

…Let’s get into it…

What would you rather do, fight one horse-sized duck, or 100 duck-sized horses?
Of course fight one horse-sized duck. One-on-one is my style.

Apples or Oranges?
Oranges. They’re juicy & sweet. Who doesn’t love a good orange?

What’s the best action movie?
“Kill Bill.” It’s a beautiful combination of samurai & kung-fu. It doesn’t hurt that the main character is a woman.

Who is someone you are jealous of? Name someone you’re jealous of.
Taylor Swift. She’s simply stunning on stage. And she puts in the work. It’s not just her voice, or her dancing, or even her charisma & presence, it’s the whole package.

What’s the scariest animal?
Ants. I don’t get it. They live in colonies. There’s so many of them. When I see them I’m just…I’m petrified. There’s nothing that scares me more than the idea of an ant crawling on my body. Just talking about it makes me anxious.

Is there an instrument you wish you could play, but can’t?
The Viola. It just looks so elegant.

You’re throwing a dinner party & 10 people are coming over, what do you cook?
Nasi Goreng, lah.

…That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.
OK. Pancakes. Pancakes & ice cream

OK. Forget what I just said, pancakes is the saddest answer of all time.
[Gita furrows her brow, equal parts annoyance & confusion]

What book do you recommend, or gift to others most often?
“Totto-Chan.” It’s just great slice of life. It portrays the life of this little girl in Japan & how she sees the world around her. It’s actually a children’s book…it’s meant for children but plenty of adults read it.

You like to hike here in Bali, if you fell into a volcano tomorrow, what do you wish your legacy would be?
I would die doing what I love, which I like. I hope people would remember me as a wanderer, always exploring new places. That’s a good way to die.

Cats or dogs?
Dogs.

Give me a good dog name.
Beau. It’s the name of my host-parents dog in Hawaii. He’s just so cute.

Gita, what do you think happens when we die?
I know that the ones who love us will miss us.

Pluto isn’t a planet.

We thought it was. Really smart teachers told us it was. We all scratched our heads, but played along. And then one day we woke up and were told we had been wrong all these years. RCTs are a lot like Pluto. We grew up being told they were the gold standard—the thing serious people did when they wanted to prove something. We drank the Kool-Aid.

But the world has changed it’s mind. See, science is a liar sometimes. Aristotle thought the earth was the center of the universe and Sir Isacc Newton died eating mercury.

We now live in a world of shrinking global health budgets and rapidly improving AI. The money that used to underwrite $4 million‑dollar trials is gone. USAID has gone the way of the dodo. The question we should be asking isn’t “How do we get our RCT funded?” It’s “Are classic RCTs still the best way to help the communities we serve?”

The old formula—pilot, R&D, growth, RCT, scale—never matched how change actually happens on the ground anyway. You build, you learn, you tweak. Say it again for those in the back, “You build, you learn, you tweak.” The goal is not to prove the model, but to improve the model. Every. Damn. Day. That’s what delivers. Not locking the model in a box for 36 months to be studied under artificial conditions. By the time the paper comes out, the thing you tested doesn’t exist anymore. You find out mothers don’t know how to open the child-proof caps of multiple micronutrient supplements, your growth chart is unreadable in low light, your “perfect” training ignores the fact that most CHWs have about a 4th grade education—36 months after the fact.

Sure we want rigor. Sure we want to know the cost to serve. But if we’re being honest, the problems we’re trying to solve—the communities we serve—don’t have four years to wait for the results of an RCT. They need iteration and solutions now.

More importantly, if I were fundraising with the results of an RCT from 2016…in 2026…wouldn’t the first question out of a donor’s mouth be, “So what’s changed with your model since 2016?”

The answer should be, “everything.”

If we’re honest, this work has always been about service — to the unheard, unseen, silenced, and neglected. But for decades, the main beneficiaries of RCT culture have been tenured academics. Frontline organizations raise millions to run trials designed in Boston or Berkeley, implemented by enumerators walking through villages their PIs can’t pronounce. The incentives are clear: tenure, a stack of publications, a tidy portfolio of “impact” papers. The cost is also clear: years of time and piles of money that could have gone into actually fixing problems.

Here’s the part nobody likes to say out loud. Ask a founder or CEO if they want to run an RCT and the answer is almost always: “If a donor will pay for it.” That’s not genuine conviction. That’s someone doing the math on a hostage situation. They know their model is evolving every quarter. The idea of freezing it for three years to chase a p‑value feels insane—but the sector has trained them to smile and nod anyway.

Meanwhile, the randomista moment has passed. RCTs brought badly needed rigor into a the field of development. Some of those studies changed minds and budgets. But we’ve now had 20 years of narrow trials under narrow conditions, with weak policy translation and way too many overhyped findings. We’ve built an industry that spends enormous resources proving things frontline teams already know in their bones.

Smart organizations are quietly moving on. Their core question is no longer, “Did we have impact?” It’s, “What did we change this month because of what we saw?” That’s a wildly different discipline. Monitoring stops being about proving and starts being about improving. If you’re watching without changing, you’re not learning — you’re bookkeeping.

AI is what makes this level of iteration possible at the speed the moment demands. Five years ago, you might have argued that only a big, slow trial could give you signal. Now you can:

• Pull daily qualitative and quantitative data from the field.

• Spot patterns around growth faltering, CHW performance, and local myths in near real time.

• Run 30 or 90-day OKR sprints testing messaging, visit frequency, or supervision formats and know within weeks what’s worth keeping or tweaking.

Or you can spend $4 million and four years on an RCT to “prove” that trained, paid CHWs matter—something every mother in Indonesia and every CHW across the world’s largest archipelago could have told you for free.

This is not an argument against rigor. It’s an argument about where we point it. Rigor deployed to prove something once, in one place, under one set of conditions, is now a luxury the sector can’t afford. Rigor deployed to make the work better every day…every month is a necessity.

Our job is not to own scale. Scale, in a country of 17,000 islands, belongs to the state. Our job is to build the most effective possible intervention for the people who need it most, and to make it better, relentlessly. That means holding ourselves to one simple standard: if outcomes arent’ improving, we are failing someone—a pregnant mother, a child under 2— who can ill afford it.

RCTs made sense in a world where money was easier, computation was slower, and the main question was, “Does this do anything at all?” That’s not the world we’re in. Budgets are tightening. Time is short. AI has blown up the excuse that learning has to be slow and expensive. The hair‑on‑fire reality is that Indonesian kids don’t have three years for us to run the perfect trial. They have one pregnancy, one birth, and a 1000 days that go by whether we’re ready or not.

So yes: the RCT, as the centerpiece of how we think about evidence, is dead. The organizations that will matter in the next decade are the ones that treat evaluation not as an event but as a way of working—always asking, always testing, always iterating.

The people we serve don’t have 36 months. Neither do we. It’s time to iterate like our hair is on fire.

I cried three times at Skoll this year. Not because there were mornings when I looked around Oxford and realized I was naive to believe everyone working for an NGO did so out of service to others, but because there were times when I felt genuinely moved to tears. They were rare. But they happened.

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The first time was when I was lucky enough to be invited to an intimate conversation with Francis Collins. The second time my tear ducts were tested was during a conversation with a member of the Black Licorice Global Advisory Board about equity of access vs. equity of outcomes. The third time was with a mentor, talking about how empty and draining Skoll felt this year.

Underneath it all, I’m disappointed. Disappointed because I feel duped. Disappointed because every year I meet a dozen people who put on a performance: they promise to follow-up, to email, to make an introduction, to share a one-pager, to connect you with a donor. It’s not that people are busy and forget. This isn’t absentmindedness. It’s pageantry. Skoll is about putting on a show—providing false hope.

Most mornings I’d walk into Society Café or Black Sheep, listen to a few mid-pitch conversation hanging in the air, and find myself mesmerized by all the amount of bullshit you could fit in just one room.

When I left the World Bank to start the 1000 Days Fund in 2019, it was because I saw a problem and couldn’t look away. Walking the streets of Oxford, watching the lanyards sway, I feel like I’m looking out at a sea of people who simply saw an opportunity to make quick money and couldn’t look away.

I’ve said this before: the echo chamber of “RCTs, AI, government adoption, scale” baffles me. All but three of the Sidebar and Marmalade talks had one of those words in the headline. Skoll simply feels less like inquiry and more like incantation.

I’m honestly torn. On one hand, Oxford gives me the chance to see people I admire, to challenge the way I think about things, and to sit down with friends, Board members, and donors I rarely see in person and grapple with real challenges. On the other hand, the grifters and sycophants you have to put up with alongside the herd mentality leave me exhausted.

Granted, some of that is on me.

I walked into this field assuming most people chose development for the right reasons. I was wrong. I was naive. I’m from Iowa. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mauritania. There’s a whole category of people, however, who return to Oxford year after year to spout hyperbole and prey on those who made the mistake of dedicating their lives to service.

Still, it wasn’t all bullshit. I had some phenomenal conversations.

My crying always surprises people. I can see the shock in their faces. They’re baffled. In most rooms I come off as angry. If you asked around, a lot of people would describe me as angry, flippant, possibly even unhinged.

I don’t think anger is a primary emotion. It’s a result, a reaction. Anger is what surfaces when the mix underneath—resentment, confusion, righteous indignation—finally boils over.

Ask my wife. I cry easily.

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She’ll show me a moving video on Instagram just to see how long it takes for me to shed a tear. I get choked up when my 2-year-old, Emmylou, sings the theme song to “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” A few weeks ago I watched “Hamnet” for the first time and cried for an hour straight. On the flight to London I watched it again, over the shoulder of the woman in front of me, and the flight attendant caught me quietly sobbing.

Personally, I don’t mind. It’s who I am. And I like who I am. I care deeply about these things. I wish I cared as much about money as I do about malnutrition and equity of outcomes. Or about “Hamnet.”

A few years back, a board member arranged a dinner with a wealthy individual in Singapore. Just the three of us. Before we picked up our salad forks I could tell he didn’t like me. He thought I was cocky. About the same time he polished off his first bottle of wine, I started talking about Komodo and Papagarang, about how, when we collected endline data in 2019, two of the children from our baseline had died. I had done those baseline interviews with the mothers. In their homes. Both children died from diarrhea. In 2019. On islands a short boat ride from a Starbucks.

You could get a pumpkin spice latte, but you couldn’t get a trained and confident community health worker.

After dinner we said our goodbyes. As soon as we stepped outside the board member grabbed me by the arm.

“What the hell was that?”

“What was what?”

“The crying. Were you faking that? Was it acting?”

“Acting? No. The only acting was me acting like that guy’s story about his daughter’s YouTube video, the one where she ranks her favorite chips, wasn’t the saddest thing I’d ever heard in my life.”

“It got a million views.”

“Well, then I guess she should be teaching me about scale.”

If we met at Skoll this year and I didn’t cry, I’m sorry. There’s always next year!

Black Licorice Fellows announced. The 5 fellows are at very different stages, but all are poised for outsized impact. Yuni Setiyawati, CEO of the Summit Institute, leads a $1.5 million organization with 90 staff, while Basra Amru is building a lean 15-person team working through sub-district health facilities in Sumatra to eliminate HPV. Two fellows hold master’s degrees from Harvard’s Global Health Delivery program, and Mustika Wijaya—who is expanding access to clean water across Timor and Flores—is both an Obama Scholar & a Rockefeller Fellow.

Fellows have been onboarded. Now we begin planning & prep for the July/August fellowship retreat on Bali. The focus remains building the boards, budgets, governance, strategy & KPIs required to entice multiyear unrestricted funding from international donors.

The first step, as part of the due diligence process, is a governance & finance self assessment. All Black Licorice donors receive due diligence reports on the five fellows.

Sometimes the safest thing you can do is take a risk. Publishing this piece in SSIR scared the hell out of me. But it made for a quite memorable Skoll. People stopped me on the street to tell me what they thought.

Two new donors sign on to take a 10% stake in Black Licorice’s 2026 budget, $225,000

Outlook

For Q2 we expect:

• Secure an additional $67,500 USD in funding

• Meet the Board of Trustees & Advisors in Jakarta in June

• Distribute the first tranche of unrestricted funding to Black Licorice Fellows

• Global Advisory Board Members Jen Goh, Joanne Yoong & Nan Chen to Bali for July retreat alongside special guests Wen Yi, Director for Program Delivery & Impact in Asia Pacific for Global Health Equity at Johnson & Johnson; and Amit Anthony Alex, from Dovetail Foundation.

• Review Board Charters as part of Due Diligence reporting on Fellows

For Full Year 2026:

• We expect to surpass $225,000 USD blue sky budget raise, with 10 donors taking a 10% stake in the overall budget

• We expect to distribute $100,000 USD to five fellows, paving the way for more unrestricted funding to flow to Indonesian founders and organizations.

• Global Advisory Board members return to Bali in November for the 2nd retreat.

• Global Advisory Board members join due diligence site visits & fundraising meetings with fellows in Singapore in December 2026

• Donors who take a 10% stake in Black Licorice receive due diligence reports on all five Black Licorice Fellows.

Founder’s Letter

Zack Petersen’s quarterly letter is available through Black Licorice’s website: https://www.blacklicorice.org/blog/black-licorice-q1-2026-letter-to-donors-fellows-friends

Dream big and go for the ask. Get 5 meetings with donors on your Top Ten Dream Donor List. Don’t have a list, make one today. Right now.

How do I get that meeting? Be unique. Ask for 20 minutes. Don’t waste people’s time. Email them. You’re a grown-up.

Whatever you do don’t bore them. It’s simple, answer this question, “You want who to do what?” If you can’t answer that question, don’t ask someone for 20 minutes of their time.

Here’s how I would talk about Black Licorice. We want to give founders and CEOs the tools and confidence to build the boards, budgets, strategies, governance and KPIs to entice unrestricted funding.

If I can see on someone’s face that they’re not interested, I need to be OK with that. I mean, after all, it’s called Black Licorice. It’s not for everyone. It’s literally in the name.

The goal is to be precise, the words you want to hear are, “tell me more…”

If they look like they’re wondering where baby ants go to school, they’re bored.

Don’t bore them, and please don’t treat them like prey.

And don’t use the word “empower.” USAID is dead, we don’t have to use jargon anymore. We don’t have to talk like that anymore. If you want to end night blindness in cats, say it. Loud and proud. You run a donkey sanctuary? Say that. Don’t say… “We synergize backward overflow in an effort to advance sustainable, inclusive, and resilient equine welfare systems, through an integrated, multisectoral approach, strengthening local capacity for humane animal husbandry, promoting evidence-based health and nutrition services, and institutionalizing best practices in shelter management and trauma-informed care.”

Boring. Boring AF.

Still don’t understand? Read this. Send them a one-pager in advance. Tell them what you accomplished last year. Tell them what you are solving for. People want to help back rare birds, not save wounded birds.

Next, please, please, please, whatever you do, don’t be the person who looks at someone’s badge and then looks over their shoulder for someone more important…someone with money. Don’t be that person.

Don’t know what to say? Don’t know how to start a conversation? Two compliment someone’s shoes. Ask them if they know the only state in the US to end in “K.” Or my personal favorite, “How much does a polar bear weigh?”

”Enough to break the ice…”

And don’t forget, if you’re looking for a donor partnership, make no mistake, it takes at least a year to cultivate a relationship. Sometimes two years. In fact my favorite donor, it took me three years to get her out to the field…three years before the money came. Worth it. She’s the best.

Finally, just ask people to come out and see the work. Tell them what you’re solving for and then ask them to come out and see the work.

If they’re not interested in flying to India or Indonesia, they’re probably not interested in funding you. And if they don’t have time to come to Komodo, but believe in you and the work, that’s just fine too.

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Rather than butcher a bold take, I wanted to share the screenshot, with the link. Want to hear something hilarious, the folks that started the DIV Fund, the next iteration of USAID, all came from Evidence Action. Ironic, don’t ya think…(Cue Alanis Morissette)
Here’s the link to the weakest mea culpa of all time, from the head of Evidence Action.

"I use it every week.”

"I have it all tabbed up and sitting on my desk, where I am sure it will stay for many years."

And my own endorsement, "I recommend & reference it at least 3x a week"

Out of all the 5-star ratings and 5,000 copies sold so far, these types of reviews speak for themselves. Kevin worked hard to make the book as practical as possible (not just another "idea book" with theory only!), featuring dozens of action step exercises plus 33 illustrations, including tools and templates for you to use.

Buy 5 copies and give them to people you believe in.

Tanya penned a masterpiece from the donor perspective. Definitely worth your time.

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https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stanford-social-innovation-review_scale-is-a-myth-embrace-the-long-defeat-activity-7444815236416573441-c-7l?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAi37r0BxOFryWT44VrLBqxUf-0CI_7DkOk

• The best way to shape the future is to invest in people. When you see something special in someone, mentor them. That’s how change begins.

• Learn how to be empathetic. Memorize these words: “I don’t know what to say, man. I’m just glad you told me”

• Recommend a book. Honestly, it’s the most thoughtful, beautiful thing you can do, call or write to someone and say, “Hey, this book made me think of you…” It’s the ultimate compliment

• Speaking of books, anger is a gift. Don’t believe me? Read “The Courage to Be Disliked”

• The next time you’re worried about what people think about you, just remember that the Eiffel Tower has over 10,000 one-star reviews

• Call your mom. If your mom isn’t around any more, call someone & tell them they remind you of your mom

A Mentor is Someone Who Allows You to See the Hope Inside Yourself

Mentors make the world go round. They make you feel seen. They are there when you’re freaking out and have nowhere to turn. They have decades of experience and they’re willing to share that with you. They put wind in your sails. They give you a level of confidence you never knew you had.

We’ve all had amazing mentors in our lives. Someone saw something in us. Think hard today about how you can pay it forward, how you might lend someone you know some insight and inspiration. Think hard about who’s out there that you see something in…someone who you could give your time and effort.

Want to mentor but don’t know where to start? Shoot me an email.

Looking for a mentor? Shoot me an email. Let me help connect good people.

Memorize These Words: “I Don’t Know What to Say. I’m Just Glad You Told Me”

A lot of the time when someone shares bad news, we say something stupid to make ourselves feel better.

“I lost my job.”

“My dad died.”

“My wife just asked me for a divorce.”

Our response? “I’m so sorry…”

You don’t have to be sorry. You just have to be there for the other person. So show up. Drive to their house and make them dinner. Clean their kitchen. Show up.

Whatever you do, try not to say “If there’s anything you need, just let me know.” That person is in the eye of the storm, they don’t know what they need. So just do something concrete for them. Show up at their house and take their kids out for a movie. Show up and make enchiladas.

Next time you don’t know what to say, try this instead: “I don’t know what to say. I’m just glad you told me.”

Trust me. It works.

Still reading? Stop. Call your mom. She loves you.

Hear Me Out, Profit Maximization is a Good Thing…for Good NGOs

I’m conservative about somethings and liberal about others. One of those conservative feelings is that shareholder primacy theory and Milton Friedman got it right.

My take is this: Make as much money as you want and then do whatever you want with that money to make the world a better place. You want to give it to the church? Do it. You want to start a donkey sanctuary? Do it. You want to find a cure to night blindness in cats? Be my guest.

The market should dictate which NGOs live and die. The people with the money should make those decisions. They vote with their wallet. Every time they cut a check, they’re casting a vote for the kind of world they want to live in.

On the NGO side, I’m applying the same instinct: if people care, they’ll fund it; if they don’t, it should die. In that frame, philanthropy, or development for that matter, is just another market—money is the signal, and ineffective or unconvincing orgs get culled.

I’m pro‑Friedman in the streets, long‑defeat in the Google Sheets.

Stop Chasing the Money, It’s Doesn’t Make You a Better Organization

Black Licorice’s 10% Model is brutally simple: do the math, keep your annual budget under $2 million, and then find 10 individual or institutional donors willing to underwrite 10%, unrestricted, for three years at a time so you can actually do the work instead of endlessly fundraising for it. Instead of chasing ever-bigger numbers and revenue to impress donors at Davos or UNGA, you build a real three‑year budget, a focused strategy, and a handful of sharp KPIs, then walk into donor meetings with a straight ask: “Here’s what it costs to deliver; do you want to own 10% of this?” You’re not promising mythical “scale” or a fairy‑tale handover to government; you’re committing to show up for a specific place, like East Nusa Tenggara, where $2 million a year is enough to move stunting, breastfeeding, and vaccination rates in the right direction if you stay long enough and measure what matters. The 10% Model is an invitation to step off the hamster wheel, stop pretending “cost per beneficiary” is the point, and start treating donors like shareholders in a long defeat worth fighting—10 people with skin in the game instead of filling out 200 grant applications a year.

Everyone who knows me rolls their eyes when I talk about “Mountains Beyond Mountains” or accompaniment. But this shit is important.

And I think we’ve lost sight of why do the work. This is about acts of service. There’s a video somewhere on YouTube of a third-year grad school student grabbing the mic and asking Paul Farmer during the Q&A of a talk,

“How is your work sustainable?”

His response? He looks the kid dead-in-the-eye and responds with

“How are you sustainable?”

The point is that none of this is sustainable. You just have to get up every day and bang on closed doors. The work of making this world resemble one that you would prefer to live is a lunchpail job. Day in and day out. You have to be committed, clever and dedicated. Your job is pick up those that have fallen and grind away on issues until you get a positive result. And even then you stay on to make sure that result holds. That’s the Capital T truth. And if you see things differently, you’re probably delusional, a liar, or in the wrong line of work.

“I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I'm not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory. … You know, people from our background—like you, like most PIH-ers, like me—we’re used to being on a victory team, and actually what we’re really trying to do in PIH is to make common cause with the losers. Those are two very different things. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.”—Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder Partners in Health

A longtime friend and mentor, Fred Carden pointed out a great line in the piece in Vanity Fair on Paul Farmer, “optimism itself is a moral choice.” Not optimism rooted in wishful thinking, but optimism continuously grounded in evidence, partnership, and a bias toward action.

If you have not read Mountains Beyond Mountains, please stop reading this and start reading that. It’s one of the greatest books ever written. It’s in my top 5 for sure.

What’s Black Licorice?

Black Licorice exists to fix the quiet failure of the system around Indonesia’s best maternal health and malnutrition founders: they’re doing high‑impact work in the hardest places, but they are structurally locked out of the boards, governance, financial literacy, and storytelling needed to attract long‑term, unrestricted capital. The problem is not a lack of ideas or grit; it’s a funding and capacity architecture that keeps Indonesian NGOs small, project‑bound, and forever reporting upwards to intermediaries instead of building the muscles to sit directly at the table with major funders. Black Licorice is designed to attack that gap: taking a handful of high‑leverage founders each year and giving them the money, mentorship, and operating discipline to become fundable, findable, and durable in a space that is unseen, unheard, and underfunded.

Black Licorice is Mulago meets CHIC.

Every year we invite 5 founders to the Black Licorice fellowship, a year-long journey with two retreats here in Bali. Fellows are given a $20K unrestricted grant and access to some of the best and brightest minds in the industry. Together we build the boards, budgets, strategies, governance & KPIs needed to find multiyear unrestricted funding.

Because the maternal health & malnutrition space are unseen, unheard & underfunded, Black Licorice gives founders & CEOs the tools & confidence to build the boards, budgets, strategy, governance & KPIs needed to seek out & entice multiyear unrestricted funding.

The mission of Black Licorice is to raise the tide of Indonesian NGOs. The way we do that is to find founders with high-impact solutions & the commitment & capacity to drive those solutions toward their full potential.

Where Does the Name Come From?

A donor at Skoll once told me: “Zack, I gotta tell you this…you know…you’re a lot like black licorice. Not a lot of people like black licorice…but the people who do… really like it.”

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One-Sentence Theory of Change

Kevin Brown’s one‑sentence theory of change is a gift to founders because it forces brutal clarity: in a single line, you have to say why the problem matters, where you work, who you serve, what you do, how you do it, and by when you plan to move the needle. It’s the opposite of a 14‑box logframe; it’s a discipline tool that makes you choose, makes you prioritize, and makes your story legible to a tired donor reading emails on their phone. At Black Licorice, that’s exactly the muscle we’re going to build with founders and CEOs: by the time you leave, you won’t just have a nicer pitch deck—you’ll have a one‑sentence theory of change you can write at the top of a blank page and use to drive strategy, hiring, fundraising, and focus.

What are you doing on March 25th? We have one seat left on the boat.

Join us on Papagarang to launch a 90‑day, in‑the‑field sprint to strength‑test the 1000 Days Fund’s “6 Plus 6” model in one of Indonesia’s most remote communities, where every home visit and boat ride is a live question about what it really takes to reach mothers and babies beyond the end of the road. In just three months, we’ll use sharp, time‑bound OKRs to see whether we can identify and train island‑based kader, enroll the vast majority of pregnant women and children under two, and run enough quality home visits and referrals to know if this model is truly feasible and wanted here—not in theory, but in practice. Together with a small cadre of CHWs, we’ll train, shadow, and refine what a truly quality home visit looks like—six formal antenatal visits plus six in‑home screenings—while mapping real‑world barriers like weather, transport, weak referral links, and household trust, and turning them into an “Island Implementation Playbook” that can travel across the archipelago. This is an invitation to join us and learn how quickly capability and confidence can grow against 90‑day OKRs, and help decide whether Papagarang becomes the proof point that Indonesia’s most isolated mothers and children don’t have to be left off the map.

We now live in a world of shrinking global health budgets and rapidly improving AI. The money that used to underwrite four‑million‑dollar trials is gone. USAID has gone the way of the dodo. The question we should be asking isn’t “How do we get our RCT funded?” It’s “What kind of RCT actually helps the communities we serve?”

The old formula—pilot, R&D, growth, RCT, scale—never matched how change actually happens on the ground. You build, you learn, you tweak. Say it again for those in the back: you build, you learn, you tweak. The goal is not to prove the model once and put it in a museum; the goal is to improve the model. Every. Damn. Day.

Sure we want rigor. Sure we want to know the cost to serve. But if we’re being honest, the problems we’re trying to solve—the communities we serve—don’t have four years to wait for the results of a classic RCT. They need iteration and solutions now.

White Man’s Burden. Don’t Read the Book, Read This

Searchers are the people willing to admit they don’t know, go to the village, get mud on their shoes, and figure it out one cheap experiment at a time; planners are the people in air‑conditioned rooms who write the PowerPoint, set the targets, and move on before anyone asks whether anything actually worked. The searcher starts with “How do I get this family clean water by next month?”; the planner starts with “How do we ensure universal access to safe water by 2030?” and then spends the next decade updating a logframe instead of changing course. Easterly’s whole point in The White Man’s Burden is that development is built by searchers—people who own their mistakes, adapt to local reality, and are accountable for results—while the industry is still dominated by planners who are great at raising expectations and terrible at taking responsibility when their big plans flop.

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So…What Problem Are We Actually Trying to Solve?

Because Indonesia is home to some of the highest rates of maternal malnutrition & stunting anywhere in the world, the 1000 Days Fund trains & equips community health workers with the tools & confidence needed to eliminate stunting. In a world where donors & NGOs in Indonesia want to give away food as a way to end malnutrition, the 1000 Days is fighting to ensure that community health workers are supervised, salaried, skilled, supplied & sustained— only way to end malnutrition.

Different beats better every time.

A lot of the time founders & CEOs choose to pitch their orgs in a safe & blanket fashion. But you have to realize that donors are getting pitched all day every day. You have to stand out. You have to stand for something.

“The Changing DNA of 1000 Days” Dr. Riri at the Helm.

As a physician, public health scholar, & the CEO of 1000 Days, Riri sits at the intersection of three worlds that rarely talk to each other: frontline community health, national policy & global evidence. Her leadership is already sharpening to focus on what matters most in Indonesia’s fight against stunting: community health workers who are trained, paid & integrated into the health system, not treated as an afterthought.

Riri’s work builds on a growing body of evidence calling for serious investment in CHWs as the backbone of stunting eradication in Indonesia. At 1000 Days Fund, that means doubling down on high-quality training, measurement, & government partnerships so that the 1.5 million kader across the country can actually do the job the system expects of them.

With Riri leading, our DNA is shifting—from “good project” to “system partner,” from “promising NGO” to “reference point” for what a CHW-centered approach can look like at scale. And we’re just getting started.

This week we delivered our first batch of donor-dedicated benches, a small gift to those whose generosity means the world to us & the communities we serve.

But this isn’t just any bench.

These benches—four in all—sit outside the houses of our favorite & most trusted community health workers. They are the backbone of maternal & child health in their villages, quietly taking on the work others shy away from. On average, each CHW looks after 28 pregnant women & children under 5, making sure each mother completes 6 formal health facility visits and each child receives 6 in‑home visits before their 2nd birthday. After that, they keep going—walking families through routine vaccinations and regular check‑ups.

Because of this kind of steady, meticulous work, villages & moms are seeing real change: dramatic drops in low‑birth‑weight babies & significant reductions in stunting.

These benches are where pregnant mothers come to rest their feet, to ask questions, & to feel heard. It is where hard conversations happen, & where simple, loving advice can mean the difference between fear & confidence, between risk & safety.

On these benches, women learn how to care for themselves & their babies. They hear words that can prevent complications, protect newborns, & set their children on a path to healthier, happier lives. The names of our donors are there on the bench as a quiet reminder that someone far away believed they—& their children—were worth investing in.

Ask us About AI

The 1000 Days Fund is in the midst of an ambitious experiment. As you read this, our team is in the field testing how AI can upend the way we collect & use data. The aim is straightforward but demanding: to build monitoring & evaluation tools that are not only more rigorous, but—wherever reality allows—at least twice as efficient as the systems we rely on today.

For NGOs like 1000 Days Fund, it means three big shifts.

First, monitoring stops being a backward‑looking reporting exercise & becomes a real‑time management tool. AI can clean, organize & analyze field data far faster than humans, flagging gaps in CHW home visits, missed vaccines, or faltering growth patterns while there’s still time to act, not six months later in a PDF.

Second, staff time moves from data wrangling to problem‑solving. When AI tools handle repetitive tasks—form checks, basic analysis, automated dashboards—program teams & CHWs can focus more on coaching, follow‑up & actually fixing what the data reveals. For a lean NGO, that’s the difference between “compliance MEL” & learning that improves outcomes.

Third, the bar for accountability goes up. Better, faster data makes it harder to hide behind anecdotes or vanity metrics; it forces clearer answers to questions like “Which district is off‑track & what are we doing about it this quarter?” But it also raises new responsibilities around data privacy, bias & not over‑automating decisions that should stay close to communities & CHWs.

In short, if we get it right, AI doesn’t replace the work of accompaniment it helps us see sooner & more clearly, where accompaniment is changing lives.