Do One Better with Alberto Lidji in Philanthropy, Sustainability and Social Entrepreneurship

Nearly 48 million Americans lived in food-insecure households in 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and close to a third of the food produced in the United States goes to waste. Last year alone, roughly 15,000 American farms went out of business. Farmlink exists in the gap between those numbers.

It started in April 2020, when college junior Aidan Reilly and his co-founder James Kanoff were sent home at the start of the pandemic and learned their local food bank had gone from serving 300 families a week to 1,000, almost overnight. Around the same time, they read about farmers dumping millions of gallons of milk and burying truckloads of potatoes because the contracts that normally moved their produce to schools, stadiums, and restaurants had disappeared. With no experience in farming or logistics, they started cold-calling farmers, rented a U-Haul, and made their first delivery: 60,000 eggs to a food bank. Ten days later they had 200 volunteers. Three weeks later they had moved a million pounds of food. Six years on, Farmlink is a fully remote, asset-light organization that, according to its founders, works with a network of more than 1,000 charity partners across every state.

In this conversation, Aidan and CEO Eliza Blank explain what it actually takes to move perishable food fast, at scale, with no warehouses and no trucks of their own, and why they consider themselves the last call a farmer makes, not the first. As Eliza puts it, Farmlink exists to make sure "logistics is not the reason, and cost of transportation never is the reason why people aren't getting fed."

In this episode, you'll learn:

Why two 21-year-olds with zero farming experience became the people U.S. farmers call when they have nowhere left to turn

How Farmlink moves perishable surplus into the hands of families in need within 24 to 72 hours, with no warehouses or trucks of its own

Why the organization covers both coordination and freight costs, and how that decision unlocked supply that would otherwise rot in the field

What is actually driving the wave of American farm closures, and why Farmlink wants to help farmers get paid, not just donate for free

How a growing database of charity partners is helping Farmlink understand real-time capacity across a national network

Why human relationships and trust, built over six years, remain the one thing technology cannot replace, even as data plays a bigger role

What it would take to responsibly adapt the Farmlink model beyond the United States, and why the founders insist local ownership has to come first

About the guests
Aidan Reilly is co-founder of Farmlink, which he started in 2020 as a college student to connect farm surplus with communities facing food insecurity across the United States. Eliza Blank is Chief Executive Officer of Farmlink, leading the organization's work coordinating logistics, cost, and a nationwide network of charity partners to reduce food waste and hunger.

Visit our Knowledge Hub at Lidji.org for information on 350+ case studies and interviews with remarkable leaders in philanthropy, sustainability and social entrepreneurship.

Justin Steele spent a decade as a funder at Google.org, giving away hundreds of millions of dollars before leaving at the end of 2024 to co-found Outdoorithm Collective, a nonprofit focused on connecting families with public lands and campgrounds in the United States. Finding himself on the other side of the funding table for the first time, he quickly discovered how broken and fragmented the grant-prospecting process really is. That frustration, combined with a self-taught crash course in coding with AI tools, led him to build a simple matching tool for his own nonprofit. That tool became Kindora, a public benefit corporation he co-founded with Karibu Nayaga to serve as an AI-driven fundraising intelligence layer for the nonprofit and social enterprise sector.

In this conversation, Justin explains how Kindora crawls tens of thousands of funder websites and PDFs to build a searchable, continuously updated database of open grant opportunities, funder histories, program officers, and trustees, going back three years and covering the United States, Canada, and Europe, including the United Kingdom. He describes how organizations can access this intelligence for free through a simple AI chat interface, including as a connector inside Claude, and how paid credits unlock deeper research and evaluation tools. He also shares an early data finding from Kindora's own query logs: a striking gap between how much nonprofits are searching for technology and AI-related funding and how little of that funding is actually available.

Beyond the platform itself, Justin makes the case for why proximity to a problem, paired with AI-assisted building, may matter more right now than traditional academic pedigree. He talks candidly about the environmental and bias-related tradeoffs of AI, why he believes the people closest to social problems are best positioned to solve them, and where he sees Kindora heading next, from helping organizations find collaborators for joint grant applications to eventually helping funders discover trust-based connections to potential grantees.

In this episode, you'll learn:

How Justin Steele's own fundraising struggles at a brand-new nonprofit led him to build what became Kindora

How Kindora aggregates and structures grant and funder data from over 80,000 funder websites, including PDF-based disclosures

Why open grant opportunities, not just mission-fit matching, became the platform's core early product

How organizations can access Kindora for free through an AI chat interface, including as a connector inside Claude

What Kindora's own query data reveals about the mismatch between demand for AI and technology funding and its actual availability

Why Justin believes proximity to a problem and creative "taste," rather than formal engineering or business credentials, are becoming the real differentiators in building useful technology

How data transparency around philanthropic giving varies across the United States, the United Kingdom, and the rest of Europe

Where Kindora is headed next, including efforts to help organizations find collaborators for joint applications and to surface trust-based connections between funders and grantees

Visit our Knowledge Hub at Lidji.org for information on 350+ case studies and interviews with remarkable leaders in philanthropy, sustainability and social entrepreneurship.

Peter Singer co-founded Grand Challenges Canada and served as its CEO before joining its board, where he still sits today.

Over 15 years, the organisation has backed roughly 1,700 innovations across more than 100 countries, deployed over a billion dollars in funding — more than half from the Government of Canada — and reached 85 million people, improved 28 million lives, and saved an estimated 120,000 lives.

Peter shares vivid examples: a small grant that helped seed Mylab, now a billion-dollar Indian diagnostics unicorn; an early investment that led to Ubiologics' cholera vaccine now entering the global stockpile; and Tanzania's M-Mama, an Uber-style maternal transport service now operating at national scale within government.

Peter traces his path through four distinct careers: as a physician and professor of medicine focused on end-of-life care, sparked by a formative experience with a dying patient in 1984; as co-founder of a bioethics centre; as co-founder and CEO of Grand Challenges Canada; and later at the World Health Organization under Tedros, where he worked to embed a results-driven culture through the "triple billion" targets.

He reflects candidly on what worked and what didn't — the tools for measuring outcomes and outputs were built, but institutionalising accountability within a large multilateral bureaucracy proved far harder.

The conversation covers the state of philanthropy in Canada, contrasting its concentrated, strategic style with the greater density of giving in the US. Peter also discusses integrated innovation — blending technological, social, financial, and now digital and AI-driven approaches — and makes the case for social and service-delivery innovation being undervalued relative to flashier technological bets, using a comparison between a Gates Foundation toilet technology challenge and Grand Challenges Canada's portfolio of water and sanitation social enterprises.

On the Sustainable Development Goals, Peter is blunt: progress is weak, and he argues real success would come first from intellectual honesty about where things stand, and the accountability and data work needed to understand why.

He closes with advice for young people: find a problem that genuinely bothers you and solve it, seek out the right mentors, recognise a "rocket ship" opportunity when it appears, and let character and integrity anchor everything else.

Visit our Knowledge Hub at Lidji.org for information on 350+ case studies and interviews with remarkable leaders in philanthropy, sustainability and social entrepreneurship.

It's a pleasure to welcome Michael Thatcher back onto the Do One Better Podcast. Michael is President and Chief Executive Officer of Charity Navigator, the largest independent evaluator of nonprofits in the United States, now marking its 25th year and covering roughly 245,000 charities as a free public service to donors.

Michael last joined the show in 2022, and returns with a comprehensive update on how Charity Navigator has evolved since then — including a major overhaul to its rating methodology, a new partnership bringing cost-per-outcome impact data into the platform, and candid reflections on some of the biggest structural challenges facing the charitable sector today.

In this conversation, Michael and Alberto discuss:

A 25-year milestone. How Charity Navigator evaluates nearly 245,000 charities with a team of just 35 people, largely by processing publicly available IRS tax filings.

The April 2026 ratings overhaul. A new methodology spanning 49 metrics across 10 evaluation areas — financial health, governance, leadership and impact measurement among them — plus a new partnership with True Impact to bring cost-per-outcome scoring to the platform.

How curated lists get built. Why a complete, high-quality data set and demonstrated effectiveness are required for an organisation to appear on one of Charity Navigator's roughly 50 curated lists — and how "whimsical" lists (most popular charities, celebrity-favoured causes) sit alongside more rigorously vetted ones.

Giving funds, explained. How Charity Navigator's roughly dozen thematic funds work as pooled, pass-through vehicles (not donor-advised funds), how allocations across organisations are rebalanced, and why full transparency into fund composition matters to donors.

Two unexpected donor demographics. Why younger donors are drawn to cause-based giving over brand loyalty, and why older donors are increasingly using Charity Navigator's funds as a dependable vehicle within estate and legacy planning.

The AI disintermediation challenge. How Charity Navigator's open, free data is increasingly being surfaced directly by large language models — reducing website traffic and, with it, the donation asks that fund the organisation's own operations.

A troubling giving trend. New research showing a steady, multi-year decline in the number of individual donors in the US even as total dollars given continues to rise — and why Charity Navigator's own research points to a "connection" problem rather than a trust problem.

Staying above the fray. How Charity Navigator has maintained credibility with donors across a polarised political landscape by consistently avoiding partisan positioning.

Visit our Knowledge Hub at Lidji.org for information on 350+ case studies and interviews with remarkable leaders in philanthropy, sustainability and social entrepreneurship.

Martin Burt, Founder and CEO of Fundación Paraguaya (Paraguay Development Foundation) and former Mayor of Asunción, joins Alberto Lidji to discuss a fundamentally different approach to eliminating poverty. Rather than focusing solely on income or government interventions, Burt argues that lasting change begins with families, dignity, and the entrepreneurial spirit.

The conversation explores the Poverty Stoplight, a framework now used in 62 countries that enables families to assess their own multidimensional poverty across objective measures such as housing and income, alongside subjective factors including motivation, self-esteem, and aspirations. By identifying their own priorities and connecting with practical solutions, families become active agents in their journey out of poverty.

Martin explains why empowerment matters as much as economics, why families should define what it means to be "not poor," and how this locally developed methodology from Paraguay is reshaping poverty alleviation across the Global South and the Global North. He also reflects on lessons from four decades in economic development, public service, and social innovation, offering a compelling vision for putting human flourishing at the heart of development.

Visit our Knowledge Hub at Lidji.org for information on 350+ case studies and interviews with remarkable leaders in philanthropy, sustainability and social entrepreneurship.