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The Power of Yes
Photo by Tracy Powell
Sasha Dichter (MBA/MPA 2002) became an easy mark after word got out about his “generosity experiment.” For 30 days he would say yes to everyone who asked him for money—from people on the street to nonprofits. There would be no question of whether doing so was the smartest or best way to put his money to good use: Dichter would simply open his wallet.
At the time, Dichter was director of business development at Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global venture fund that invests in early-stage companies to solve issues stemming from poverty. (“Using the tools of business to create large-scale social change,” he summarizes.) Charged with overseeing a $100 million capital fund drive, Dichter wanted to explore the impulses behind people’s giving—or not giving. He wanted to dig deeper into what he saw as a conflict between the dominant, purely analytical approach to philanthropy (in other words, the “smartest” and most cost-effective cause—in all likelihood not a panhandler on the street) and the spirit of service and giving that he considered an equally vital aspect of his work. “It was a personal exploration that became more public through my blog,” says Dichter, who also gave a TED talk on the topic.
“I didn’t feel like I had developed that muscle of saying ‘yes’ enough,” he explains by phone from Acumen’s New York office. “One of the things I learned is how expressive and personal philanthropy is, and that no matter how smart or analytical a donor may be, ultimately, the decision to give is rooted very strongly in the act of giving. To be successful in this field, you really need to tap into your head and your heart.”
Now serving as Acumen’s chief innovation officer, Dichter oversees the organization’s leadership programs as well as its efforts to distill and disseminate best practices by understanding the true social impact of investing in early-stage companies that serve low-income customers in India, Pakistan, East and West Africa, and Latin America. These companies provide affordable access to agricultural inputs, high-quality education, clean energy, health care, housing, and safe drinking water. (One investment example includes d.light design, a company that provides solar lighting solutions to replace kerosene lanterns, which are more costly, dangerous, and unhealthy.) “Understanding the full scope of impact that these companies are having is a challenge,” says Dichter, “but we know that if we can truly capture and quantify this, it could be revolutionary, and not just for the impact investing sector—it could change how we understand the role of business in society.”
Before coming to Acumen, Dichter worked to expand financial offerings to underserved communities globally at GE Money; at IBM he helped to develop the company’s corporate citizenship strategy and launched a leadership program for school administrators in partnership with HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter.
“I’ve always been interested in exploring the nexus between business, philanthropy, and social change,” he says. “Impact investing is a new field where all the rules haven’t been written, and that’s what makes it such an exciting, challenging space. A big part of my job is to listen. In terms of innovation, the question is how can we distill the things we’re seeing and learning and share them with the world to inform new ways of attacking these perennial problems.”
Dichter’s paternal grandparents escaped the Holocaust by fleeing from Poland to Shanghai and then to the United States; his father was born in Shanghai, his mother in Rio de Janeiro. Childhood visits to Rio gave him an early awareness of the stark economic discrepancies between residents living in luxury high-rises just a few hundred feet from those surviving in slums. “The statistical unlikelihood of my parents meeting, along with those visits to Brazil, somehow combined to create the sense that there was a lot of possibility in the world but also so many people who had been left out,” says Dichter, who cites the need for more talent in the field of impact investing: “We need people with technical skills as well as the guts, courage, and conviction to take real risks.” In other words, more people who will just say yes.
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