The Future Is Not Something We Predict: Venture Philanthropy and Systems Change in a Global Realignment with Shruti Sehra
Shruti Sehra leads New Profit, a national venture philanthropy, through what she calls the largest global realignment of our lifetimes, driven by rapid innovation and an unprecedented intergenerational transfer of wealth. She is clear that nobody can predict how it ends.
In this episode of The Stronger Podcast, Mike Montoya sits down with Shruti Sehra, CEO of New Profit, the national nonprofit that has spent nearly three decades putting unrestricted capital and capacity building support behind social entrepreneurs working in education, economic mobility, and democracy.
Shruti just marked twenty years at New Profit, and she stepped into the CEO role at the end of a strategic plan cycle rather than the start of one. Her read on this moment is historical. Every eighty to a hundred years the world reorganizes itself, and the pattern arrives with gilded age levels of inequality, a $124 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer, enormous innovation, and collapsing trust in institutions. History can tell us where we are. What it cannot tell us is the outcome, because the outcome depends on what we do.
She also tells Mike about growing up as one of four Indian families in a town outside Indianapolis, about mispronouncing her own name until her early forties so she would not disrupt anyone&'s roll call, and about the mother she calls a closet social justice warrior who signed her up at nine to volunteer at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis, so she would work for a Black supervisor and see power look different than it did in her town.
Listen in for the tension Shruti says every leader is being called to hold right now: the fierce urgency of now alongside the long arc and why she believes that tension, held well, is exactly how we get to write what comes next.
In this episode of The Stronger Podcast, Mike Montoya sits down with Shruti Sehra, CEO of New Profit, the national nonprofit that has spent nearly three decades putting unrestricted capital and capacity building support behind social entrepreneurs working in education, economic mobility, and democracy.
Shruti just marked twenty years at New Profit, and she stepped into the CEO role at the end of a strategic plan cycle rather than the start of one. Her read on this moment is historical. Every eighty to a hundred years the world reorganizes itself, and the pattern arrives with gilded age levels of inequality, a $124 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer, enormous innovation, and collapsing trust in institutions. History can tell us where we are. What it cannot tell us is the outcome, because the outcome depends on what we do.
She also tells Mike about growing up as one of four Indian families in a town outside Indianapolis, about mispronouncing her own name until her early forties so she would not disrupt anyone&'s roll call, and about the mother she calls a closet social justice warrior who signed her up at nine to volunteer at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis, so she would work for a Black supervisor and see power look different than it did in her town.
Listen in for the tension Shruti says every leader is being called to hold right now: the fierce urgency of now alongside the long arc and why she believes that tension, held well, is exactly how we get to write what comes next.
Chapters:
๐ 01:30 Shruti Sehra's story of paradoxes: arriving in the U.S.
โช 05:54 Growing up Indian in small town Indiana
๐๏ธ 11:22 Formative volunteer experience at The Children's Museum
๐ 15:06 Going to school in Connecticut
๐งญ 18:11 The immigrant experience and the importance of community
๐ก 26:05 Shrutiโs leadership at New Profit and the power of unrestricted capital for social entrepreneurs
โณ 28:45 Navigating the current moment
๐ฎ 30:40 History cannot tell us the outcome, because we create the future
๐บ 37:19 The triangle of tension: impact, culture, and sustainability in hard decisions
๐ค 40:58 Systems change never happens in isolation, and interdependence is the point
Links:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/shruti-sehra
New Profit on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/new-profit-inc-
Website: newprofit.org
Follow Shruti and New Profit to see where the strategy lands as they think through what the next decade of venture philanthropy asks of the field.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/shruti-sehra
New Profit on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/new-profit-inc-
Website: newprofit.org
Follow Shruti and New Profit to see where the strategy lands as they think through what the next decade of venture philanthropy asks of the field.
Connect with Mike: www.linkedin.com/in/mmsc
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