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

James Cowan, CEO of the HALO Trust, joins Alberto Lidji on the Do One Better Podcast to explore what happens when the fighting stops, but the dangers of war remain.

The HALO Trust has been working since 1988 to save lives and restore livelihoods in communities affected by conflict. Today, it operates across 32 countries with around 10,000 staff, clearing landmines and other explosive remnants of war, while also tackling small arms and light weapons.

James shares his perspective on the lasting impact of conflict and why landmines can continue to threaten civilians, often children, decades after a war has ended. He explains how HALO is using new technologies, including AI, satellite imagery, drones, robotics, ground penetrating radar, and magnetic resonance, to make clearance faster and safer.

The conversation also looks at the people behind the work, the importance of employing and empowering local communities, and the role of governments and philanthropy in addressing the enormous scale of the challenge.

They discuss mine risk education, the changing nature of conflict, the growing use of drones, and how humanitarian action can contribute not only to saving lives, but also to restoring livelihoods and helping countries move towards greater stability.

And despite the sobering realities of today's conflicts, James leaves listeners with a powerful message: there is hope.

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

Aunnie Patton Power, Founder of the Innovative Finance Initiative, joins Alberto Lidji on the Do One Better Podcast as she shares her views on how finance can be redesigned to better serve people, communities, and the planet.

The Innovative Finance Initiative brings together more than 2,000 funders, intermediaries, and changemakers exploring what is possible beyond traditional approaches to finance. Aunnie explains why she believes the goal should not simply be to shift the existing system, but to build credible alternatives to it.

The conversation explores some fundamental questions. What does it really mean to invest for impact? Who should decide where capital goes? Does “market rate” actually mean what we think it means? And how should asset owners think about their responsibilities to the communities and people ultimately affected by their investments?

Aunnie also shares examples of alternative approaches to fund design, governance, ownership, and capital allocation, while challenging some of the assumptions that have come to underpin modern impact investing.

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

Dr. Doris Macharia, President of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (EGPAF), joins Alberto Lidji on the Do One Better Podcast for a conversation about the global effort to end pediatric HIV and the challenge of reaching the children and families who remain underserved.

EGPAF has been working for more than three decades to improve outcomes for children and mothers affected by HIV. Today, its work spans 12 countries in Africa, working alongside governments and communities to strengthen HIV prevention, testing, treatment, and care.

In this conversation, Dr. Macharia explains what she means by reaching the “last mile” and why the final stretch toward ending pediatric HIV can be among the most difficult. Alberto and Doris explore the barriers that continue to stand in the way, from poverty, stigma, and conflict to gaps in healthcare systems, diagnostics, treatment access, and follow-up.

They also discuss how African health systems can become more resilient and sustainable, why reducing families’ out-of-pocket healthcare costs matters, and how philanthropy can help sustain hard-won progress.

In this episode:

Why children continue to lag behind adults in knowing their HIV status

What it really means to reach the “last mile”

The importance of strong primary healthcare systems

How diagnostics, treatment, and community-based care can improve outcomes

The challenges created by poverty, stigma, conflict, and limited resources

Why sustaining progress may be as important as achieving it

The distinctive role philanthropy can play in addressing complex global health challenges

Visit our Knowledge Hub at Lidji.org for information on 350+ case studies and interviews with remarkable leaders 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.