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Ep 40. Ella Gudwin, CEO VisionSpring: Enabling a billion people to see
49 Plays1 year ago
“Creating One VisionSpring is anchored in what we do, so our mission and our social enterprise models, and its anchored in how we do it, and that is in the values that are at the heart of our teamwork… I cant emphasise enough how much values are critical to our success.”
There are over a billion people in the world who don’t have the eye-glasses they need.
VisionSpring is a non-profit that provides affordable eyeglasses to people in need. The organisation aims to improve the lives of people, particularly in low income settings, by increasing access to eyeglasses.
With partnerships in over 43 countries they are on a mission to make the wonder of clear vision possible for everyone.
My guest today is Ella Gudwin, CEO of VisionSpring. Under Ella’s leadership, VisionSpring has tripled its impact, selling over 10 million affordable eyeglasses in emerging and frontier markets.
Ella talks about how eyeglasses improve daily functioning, productivity and earning potential, creating a greater likelihood of a pathway out of poverty. We discuss hybrid business models, Board dynamics, mentoring and developing organisational values. Ella shares her insights on taking over from a Founder and what it means to have received a transformational $15m gift from Mackenzie Scott.
Recorded February 2022.
Guest Biography
Ella Gudwin is CEO of the social enterprise VisionSpring, which accelerates the uptake of eyeglasses among people who live on less than $4 a day. Under Ella's leadership, VisionSpring will correct the vision of 10 million low-income adults and children, unlocking $2.16 billion in income earning potential at the household level.
Ella is a global health strategist with more than 20 years of experience. Her passions for social justice and economic development took root while living and working in Indonesia during the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the ensuing people power revolution.
Prior to joining VisionSpring, Ella served as senior vice president of strategy and programme development at the global health and emergency response organization, AmeriCares. Ella has also led humanitarian operations as vice president of emergency response, and managed access to medicine and other health interventions in ten countries as director of Asia and Eurasia partnerships. Previously, Ella served as the head of foreign government and board relations at the Population Council, focused on reproductive health, youth, and poverty.
Ella regularly speaks about hybrid business models that blend earned revenue with philanthropy; growing a purpose-driven business; and measuring social impact. She has shared views with audiences of NPR/PRI, Forbes, The Guardian, Fortune, Skoll World Forum, SoCap, Duke, MIT, Stanford, Princeton and Yale universities, and the Clinton Global Initiative among others.
Ella earned a Masters degree in Emerging Market Economics and Southeast Asia studies from SAIS, Johns Hopkins University, and a Bachelors from Vassar College. Ella is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Ella and her daughter enjoy getting out of the city for walks in the woods.
Links
https://visionspring.org/
https://www.unlockherpotential.com
https://www.thegirlsnetwork.org.uk/
There are over a billion people in the world who don’t have the eye-glasses they need.
VisionSpring is a non-profit that provides affordable eyeglasses to people in need. The organisation aims to improve the lives of people, particularly in low income settings, by increasing access to eyeglasses.
With partnerships in over 43 countries they are on a mission to make the wonder of clear vision possible for everyone.
My guest today is Ella Gudwin, CEO of VisionSpring. Under Ella’s leadership, VisionSpring has tripled its impact, selling over 10 million affordable eyeglasses in emerging and frontier markets.
Ella talks about how eyeglasses improve daily functioning, productivity and earning potential, creating a greater likelihood of a pathway out of poverty. We discuss hybrid business models, Board dynamics, mentoring and developing organisational values. Ella shares her insights on taking over from a Founder and what it means to have received a transformational $15m gift from Mackenzie Scott.
Recorded February 2022.
Guest Biography
Ella Gudwin is CEO of the social enterprise VisionSpring, which accelerates the uptake of eyeglasses among people who live on less than $4 a day. Under Ella's leadership, VisionSpring will correct the vision of 10 million low-income adults and children, unlocking $2.16 billion in income earning potential at the household level.
Ella is a global health strategist with more than 20 years of experience. Her passions for social justice and economic development took root while living and working in Indonesia during the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the ensuing people power revolution.
Prior to joining VisionSpring, Ella served as senior vice president of strategy and programme development at the global health and emergency response organization, AmeriCares. Ella has also led humanitarian operations as vice president of emergency response, and managed access to medicine and other health interventions in ten countries as director of Asia and Eurasia partnerships. Previously, Ella served as the head of foreign government and board relations at the Population Council, focused on reproductive health, youth, and poverty.
Ella regularly speaks about hybrid business models that blend earned revenue with philanthropy; growing a purpose-driven business; and measuring social impact. She has shared views with audiences of NPR/PRI, Forbes, The Guardian, Fortune, Skoll World Forum, SoCap, Duke, MIT, Stanford, Princeton and Yale universities, and the Clinton Global Initiative among others.
Ella earned a Masters degree in Emerging Market Economics and Southeast Asia studies from SAIS, Johns Hopkins University, and a Bachelors from Vassar College. Ella is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Ella and her daughter enjoy getting out of the city for walks in the woods.
Links
https://visionspring.org/
https://www.unlockherpotential.com
https://www.thegirlsnetwork.org.uk/
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Transcript
Eyeglasses Access Disparity
00:00:00
Speaker
There's a huge amount that has to do with how eyeglasses have been positioned in the world, how they have been priced in the world, and how they've been perceived and understood as a medical item. In the United States and Europe and other high-income countries, you can get reading glasses in a pharmacy or a bookshop or a train station. In low-income countries, they are literally stuck in the four walls of a hospital or a clinic.
Podcast Introduction
00:00:30
Speaker
Welcome to Season 4 of the Charity CEO podcast, the podcast for charity leaders by charity leaders, bringing you inspirational and meaningful conversations with leaders who are driving change in the nonprofit space. I'm truly delighted and humbled that the show has been named in the Charity Times top 10 charity podcasts for 2022. Thank you all for that incredible endorsement. I'm Divya O'Connor, and here's the show.
00:00:59
Speaker
There are
VisionSpring's Impact Under Ella Goodwin
00:01:00
Speaker
over a billion people in the world who don't have the eyeglasses they need. VisionSpring is a non-profit that provides affordable eyeglasses to people in need. The organisation aims to improve the lives of people, particularly in low-income settings, by increasing access to eyeglasses. With partnerships in over 43 countries, they are on a mission to make the wonder of clear vision possible for everyone.
00:01:22
Speaker
My guest today is Ella Goodwin, CEO of VisionSpring. Under Ella's leadership, VisionSpring has tripled its impact, selling over 10 million affordable eyeglasses in emerging and frontier markets. Ella talks about how eyeglasses improve daily functioning, productivity and earning potential, creating a greater likelihood of a pathway out of poverty.
Board Dynamics and $15M Gift Discussion
00:01:43
Speaker
We discuss hybrid business models, board dynamics and developing organisational values.
00:01:49
Speaker
Ella shares her insights on taking over from a founder and what it means to have received that transformational 15 million gift from Mackenzie Scott. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Hi,
Career Reflections and Aspirations
00:02:05
Speaker
Ella. Welcome to the Charity CEO podcast. Great to have you on the show with us today and all the way from New York.
00:02:11
Speaker
Thanks for having me. Lovely to be here. So I always start by asking my guests five icebreaker questions. And if you are ready, we can dive straight in. Yeah, go for it.
00:02:21
Speaker
So question one, what was your first job? Oh, blowing up balloons for a party company that was in my neighborhood when I was growing up. Oh, brilliant. Question two, as a child, what did you dream of becoming when you grew up? And I wonder if it is a party organizer from the balloon experience. My very first aspiration for a job was to be a horseback riding teacher.
00:02:48
Speaker
Fantastic. Next question, what would you say is your professional superpower?
00:02:54
Speaker
Strategy. Care to expand on that? Oh, just seeing patterns and being able to synthesize information and then create a vision for where we're going to go. Oh, I love that. And question four. So as women, we wear many different hats. You and I are both CEOs. We're both moms. Of all the hats that you wear, which is your most favorite hat and which is your least favorite hat? Well, depends on the day, I think.
00:03:25
Speaker
I know what you mean. Some days I love being a mom. Some days I love being a daughter. Some days I love being a friend. Some days I love being a CEO. Some days I love being a peer and a colleague. Some days I love being an explorer. Other days I love being a couch potato. I think it just depends on the day. I love that. A beautifully diplomatic answer.
00:03:53
Speaker
And the final icebreaker question, if you had the opportunity to interview anyone in the world, dead or alive, who would it be and what one question would you like to ask them?
Historical Curiosity About Family
00:04:05
Speaker
Just because I've had family on my mind lately, I would be very, very interested in interviewing my great, great grandfather because he had a rather perilous and adventurous life that also had him in India in the early 1900s studying malaria. And he was part of the British Raj, and there was a whole complicated history associated with that.
00:04:32
Speaker
But he went on to become a leader in the British military in World War II that was responsible for the medical corps and saving lives all through World War II. And so I would just love to hear more from him personally.
00:04:49
Speaker
Wow, that sounds fascinating indeed. So, Ella, you
VisionSpring's Founding Motivation
00:04:53
Speaker
are the CEO of VisionSpring. Tell us the origin story of VisionSpring and its vision and mission. VisionSpring was founded by Jordan Casselow, who is a optometrist and global health specialist. He had insights over the course of about a decade leading up to 2001 when VisionSpring was originally established.
00:05:15
Speaker
One of the first insights was that eyeglasses were being distributed in mostly mission kinds of contexts, that they were often donated glasses and it seemed inefficient and unsustainable and not durable as a solution, and certainly not adequate for the science of the problem, which is a billion people don't have the eyeglasses they need.
00:05:39
Speaker
The other was that people care about style and what's on their face everywhere. You can't just be handing out black glasses and expect people to wear them. And donated glasses are an inefficient solution. They're inefficient for multiple purposes, but part of it being the choice. The customer doesn't have the choice of what they're going to wear. And then the
00:06:01
Speaker
Third kind of key insight was that community health workers had been deployed in a lot of different ways. He happened to be part of the mass treatment programs that are associated with onchoceriasis or river blindness. And if community health workers could be working on that kind of initiative, why not eyeglasses? With the understanding that half the world just needs a simple pair of reading glasses. Reading glasses are magnifiers. They're an over-the-counter product.
00:06:30
Speaker
You don't need an optometrist for reading glasses. Why not attempt to solve half of the problem with the simplest solution with lay people anywhere and everywhere? Wow, one billion people don't have the eyeglasses they
Eyeglasses as Luxury Perception
00:06:45
Speaker
need. I mean, that really gives you a sense of the scale of the problem globally. And, Ella, this seems like such a straightforward solution to a really widespread problem. One wonders why reading glasses are not more readily available. I mean, do you have a view on that?
00:07:00
Speaker
Yeah, there are a couple reasons for that. So, if you look at the supply side, for a long time, classes were a luxury item. They were considered an item for the learned and the elite, and they have been marketed as a luxury good. They have been marketed and understood for people who are literate.
00:07:21
Speaker
We have overlooked the fact that people need it to take stones out of the rice and weave and thread their needle and identify pests when they're farming. And then, of course, there is a whole world of literacy. It starts with mobile phones. People need to be able to read their text messages or do mobile banking, read the Koran and the Bible and all the other holy texts and engage with their spiritual life. So I think
00:07:46
Speaker
There's a huge amount that has to do with how eyeglasses have been positioned in the world, how they have been priced in the world, and how they've been perceived and understood as a medical item. In the United States and Europe and other high-income countries, you can get reading glasses in a pharmacy or a bookshop or a train station.
00:08:03
Speaker
In low-income countries, they are literally stuck in the four walls of a hospital or a clinic. When it comes to other kinds of issues on the supply side, the supply side glasses have gotten really affordable. From a manufacturing point of view, we can produce glasses for less than a dollar.
00:08:20
Speaker
we have created some really innovative solutions for pop-in glasses, for prescription glasses, where you can snap in the lenses into a ready-made frame for the most common prescription glasses.
Social Enterprise Model of VisionSpring
00:08:32
Speaker
So there are a lot of ways that glasses now can be radically affordable if we can sort out the supply chain and getting them into lower-income settings and into more peri-urban and rural areas.
00:08:46
Speaker
Yes, indeed, and referencing those inefficiencies that you spoke about at the beginning. So I know that VisionSpring is a social enterprise, you're also a 501c3 nonprofit, you're a foundation, you're also a limited company. Talk to us about this hybrid business model, how it works and how it helps address some of the inefficiencies that you see in the system.
00:09:08
Speaker
Yeah. So Jordan founded VisionSpring as a social enterprise. So one of his key insights was we should be able to sell the products. So giving glasses away is not going to solve the problem. Glasses can be radically affordable. We should be able to sell the glasses to people who are earning less than $4 a day.
00:09:29
Speaker
And we know that people will pay one to two days wages for glasses. Now, that might not always cover the full delivery cost in terms of what it takes to get the vision screening happening and handle the whole supply chain, but we should be able to recuperate some of the cost of the glasses from the end consumer.
00:09:48
Speaker
or other kinds of what we think of as payers at scale. So this could be governments. It could be the intermediaries that are hospitals and vision centers. It could be NGOs. And there are many payers in a system. It could be an employer who wants to make sure their factory workers can see clearly. So when we think about the end consumer payers at scale, and then we can fill the gap in terms of what else is needed with philanthropy. So we blend all these revenues together.
00:10:16
Speaker
And we borrow from all the forms, as you described, legal entities that we can need and use. And we borrow best practices, so from both the for-profit side and the nonprofit side. So we are intensely focused on sales and revenue and margins and thinking about all of those kinds of targets. We pay our
00:10:38
Speaker
team's commissions and merit awards, and we borrow from the nonprofit sector. So we have a theory of change and we have rigorous monitoring and evaluation, and we have supportive supervision to make sure we're delivering quality services. So we really live in a wonderful blended middle space between the for-profit and nonprofit sectors.
00:11:00
Speaker
And talking about that gap that needs to be filled with philanthropic dollars, how much is that for one pair of glasses and for the organization as a whole? Yeah, so VisionSpring,
Philanthropy's Role in VisionSpring
00:11:12
Speaker
it takes about $5 of philanthropy to get one pair of glasses on faces, as we like to say.
00:11:19
Speaker
Some of our business models are much more efficient than that. So we have a B2B business model where we are supplying eyeglasses to mission aligned hospitals, clinics, vision centers, government agencies, who are also working to solve the problem of uncorrected refractive error for low income communities. And in that context, our philanthropic investment pair can be below a dollar.
00:11:42
Speaker
But when we're looking at a new venture, for example, let's say we're opening up a channel, we're going to take a model, for example, from Bangladesh, where we
00:11:52
Speaker
have community health workers screening people in their communities, selling reading glasses. We're going to take the model to Uganda. When you first start in Uganda, it might cost $17 a pair for the first year as you're putting in the infrastructure and doing the training, et cetera. But then we target a philanthropic investment per pair that might be $3.50. So the idea is as we scale up,
00:12:15
Speaker
as we get that volume of the sales volume to be spread over our fixed costs, we target an efficiency number, for example, in that model in that country of $3.50. But on average, across all of our models with all the different levels of maturity, we average out at about $5. Brilliant. I know that you have vision entrepreneurs, as they're called, as part of the delivery system. Tell us a bit more about them and their role.
00:12:41
Speaker
Yeah. Sorry. One of the other things I should add just to that last question was in terms of what that $5 gets you. So the $5 of philanthropic investment per pair unlocks $216.
00:12:53
Speaker
worth of income earning potential. So if you think about every pair of glasses unlocks more than $200 of income earning potential for the consumer, that is over the two-year lifespan of a pair of glasses and assuming the person is earning about $2.50 a day. So it's an extraordinary return on investment.
00:13:16
Speaker
We've done one randomized control trial in the tea gardens of Assam, which show that eyeglasses will increase productivity by 22 to 32 percent. And we are getting ready to release another randomized trial, which is specifically on income across a wide variety of occupations, farmers, animal husbandry, teachers, tailors, that kind of thing.
00:13:40
Speaker
and the income returns are very similar. So I'll be excited to tell you the exact number when the study's published, but it's comparable and we're really thrilled. Brilliant. And just so I've got that right, so for every $5 of investment, you're actually unlocking over $200 of income for the end consumer. And I think this may be why Vision Spring has the fairly unique accolade of being called an impact unicorn, as I've heard.
00:14:07
Speaker
Tell us about that. Yeah, well, one of the things we're so excited about was 2022 marked our 20th anniversary year. And as we got to the end of the year, we were doing our numbers in December and we had crossed the milestone of serving our 10 millionth customer. That means that we have unlocked more than $2 billion worth of income earning potential for low income households. And so it's a really exciting moment for us.
00:14:36
Speaker
Wow, that is truly incredible and congratulations on that. And I'd like to actually come back to your theory of change and how the organization has achieved what is truly a phenomenal outcome for the people that you serve. So I know that your theory of change makes the distinction between site correction and site protection. What is the difference between the two in the context of what you do? Just talk us through that.
00:15:03
Speaker
Oh, good distinction. Okay, so at the very top of our theory of change, we exist because we want to be part of helping people chart a path out of poverty. It would be bordering on ridiculous to think that eyeglasses could be uniquely responsible for that. But we do know that at the next level down at the direct impact that we can have eyeglasses will improve functioning, productivity and income and we can hold ourselves accountable
00:15:33
Speaker
those outcomes. We can hold them whether we're looking at income earners, truck drivers for road safety, children who are getting the benefit of eyeglasses to achieve in school. To your point about the kinds of glasses, so there are eyeglasses that are correcting vision, what we call them corrective pairs, right? So they're correcting myopia, stigmatism,
00:15:56
Speaker
presbyopia, which is that blurry near vision we get when we age. And then there are protective glasses, which could be sunglasses, they could be post-operative glasses for cataract. Those kinds of things are really important. Sunglasses prevent cataract. We do have those kinds of glasses in our catalog. And because we serve vision centers and eye hospitals, they can purchase post-operative glasses from us. But our theory of change is aligned to income earning potential.
00:16:25
Speaker
and that productivity. So we really focus on what we call corrective glasses. And talking about the income earning potential, it feels like there's a real community focus. And I know you have recently launched or about to launch a livelihoods in focus program. And of course, you had McKinsey Scott's transformative gift that helped launch that program. Tell us about that.
00:16:49
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. So first
VisionSpring's Screening Goal
00:16:51
Speaker
of all, the gift was super exciting. I bet.
00:16:56
Speaker
As somebody who's been fundraising for a very long time, that was definitely the largest single gift that I've ever been a part of securing. So it was just a thrill. It was also not only a big endorsement of Vision Springs work and approach and our track record and our team, but it was the largest gift to our issue area. So it was the largest single gift ever to the issue of uncorrected refractive error.
00:17:21
Speaker
and really understanding that as poverty intervention and looking at it through a health equity lens. So we were really excited not only for ourselves, but also for the sector and for the issue and that her gift could shine some light on the area of work.
00:17:36
Speaker
What it helped us push forward into was a vision that we had had previously. We really focus on the nexus of eyeglasses and income earning. And we have spent a lot of time working in agricultural communities as well as artisan clusters. And when you look at where they overlap, we developed this initiative called Livelihoods in Focus, which is to screen the vision of more than 12 million people so that we can get about
00:18:04
Speaker
seven to eight million into eyeglasses, which would be, you know, it's a big initiative. It would cost us about $70 million to do it, given the geographies that we're working in. But the idea is that if a billion people need eyeglasses, we can't just spread eyeglasses all around the world like fairy dust because otherwise we never normalize eyeglasses and we never get the concentration and you never kind of get up that adopter curve, right from the early adopters into
00:18:32
Speaker
the latent adopters and get over that tipping point so then there's a question of how do we concentrate and where do we choose where to focus so livelihoods in focus for us is.
00:18:42
Speaker
looking at the through line of tea, coffee, and cocoa workers, because those are all uniquely visually intensive. And people always think that farmers don't need glasses, but I'm here to tell you that they do. And the tea pickers, they need to pick two leaf, one bud, two leaf, one bud. And they're picking at arm's length and they are an older workforce and they're principally women. Coffee, again, it requires a lot of manual dexterity and the sorting process for coffee beans and looking for quality is still intensely manual.
00:19:12
Speaker
And when it comes to cocoa, you have to hand pollinate the cocoa flower with tweezers to get 110% yield of your cocoa tree. And so there's a direct link between these very visually intensive tasks
00:19:27
Speaker
and people's productivity in agriculture, regardless of things like literacy rates. And then if you look at that as tea coffee and cocoa as the first customer segment, well, who else is there? If we show up in that district, who else is in that district? The second customer that's really important to us is the artisan and the micro entrepreneur. So the Weaver, the Taylor, the Hanloom, the Hanloom Weaver, for example.
00:19:53
Speaker
the beekeeper and the micro entrepreneur who might be a shopkeeper or who might be a skilled trades person. And so the idea is for livelihoods in focus is to look at tea, coffee and cocoa growing areas of the world to do a huge campaign where we are also focusing on the artisans and the micro entrepreneurs and to really get vision corrected in these key and strategic customer segments.
00:20:21
Speaker
And this is a five to seven year program, is that right? It's a five to seven year program that would take us out to 2030, which is the date for the Sustainable Development Goals.
00:20:30
Speaker
Indeed. And I'd like to come back to McKinsey Scott, if I may, because we sometimes hear about how funders can make grantees jump through lots of hoops in order to secure funding, and sometimes the transaction cost of that process actually eats into the grant itself. But from everything that I have heard about McKinsey Scott, her approach to philanthropy seems very different. Tell us about your experience engaging with her and her team.
00:20:58
Speaker
Yeah, so our experience was it seems like perhaps the giving pattern has evolved a little bit. I know at the early days, some people just kind of got a phone call. We didn't just get a phone call. We did go through a diligence process. It was spread out over the course of about six months. And, you know, I think it was the kind of thing like you're either ready for it or you're not like you either have your documents and you have your strategy and you have your M&E and you have your data and you have your
00:21:22
Speaker
systems and your people and your plan or you don't. So you're ready to start that process or you're kind of not. And we just felt really good that we were ready. And so for us, the process just built on who we are and what we had to share.
00:21:38
Speaker
Brilliant. And you mentioned that her gift was the first single donation of that size to your particular sector with a focus on health equity.
Global Advancements in Vision Care
00:21:49
Speaker
How is the vision sector developing? Where do you see things going over the next few years?
00:21:54
Speaker
It's been a really exciting, I would say maybe the last five years in particular. So we've had a couple really important wins as a sector. So just to set the context, the vision sector used to be slightly divided. So you had a lot of people focusing on
00:22:10
Speaker
the tertiary level system, so cataract and other eye diseases, some people focusing on neglected tropical diseases like river blindness and trachoma, and then some folks, a smaller segment focused on refractive error and those who needed eyeglasses. So what's so wonderful is we now all have come together, we're looking at eye health comprehensively and as a sector, the sector is more united than ever
00:22:35
Speaker
And then as a sector looking at people-centered comprehensive iHealth, we've had a really wonderful win in 2021. There was the first ever resolution on iHealth at the United Nations where all of the member states unanimously voted on a resolution that said, yes, iHealth is a driver of multiple sustainable development goals. So one for poverty, three for health, under three, 3.6 for road safety,
00:23:01
Speaker
four for education five for gender because fifty five percent of the people who need vision correction are women women are under corrected relative to men and importantly sustainable development goal number eight especially when you look at the sub goals on mobile banking and financial inclusion.
00:23:19
Speaker
So there's been this broad recognition, this new consensus. The World Health Organization came out with the first ever report on iHealth and now has put forward goals that are goals for governments that can be supported by the sector, which is that we should see an increase. Governments should work towards an increase in eyeglasses coverage rates of 40%. That means if a community has 20% at time one, how can we get them up to 60% on time two?
00:23:49
Speaker
and for cataracts to see an increase in cataract coverage of 30%. So we've got this really important global consensus. We have high level movement within the World Health Organization. And then within the members of the International Association for the Prevention of Blindness, many of us have come together to
00:24:10
Speaker
help develop the agenda and specifically when it comes to eyelashes are forming a systems approach for how do we unlock the barriers to scaling up access to vision correction together. I love hearing about that because Ella, I think you're so right that some of the global problems are so huge that no one organization, no one country even can solve them alone. So it's great to hear that your sector is coming together to collaborate much more in this fashion.
00:24:39
Speaker
It's fun too. I mean, the people in our sector and the people who are doing this work.
00:24:43
Speaker
They're good, fun people to work with as well. And so it's also delightful to be on this journey together. And we are organizations, but we are people and leaders and together just wrestling with these hard topics. And how do we do it? And how do we do it together? And there's a real commitment in our sector to take this moment and this opportunity where there's goodwill and trust and a lot of know-how that has been built up over the decades.
00:25:10
Speaker
to really catapult ourselves forward. Absolutely. And talking about journeys, Ella, I would love to hear more about your own personal leadership journey.
Ella's Motivation for Global Good
00:25:21
Speaker
Take us through your story arc and how you ended up where you are today.
00:25:25
Speaker
I was a kid who, like a lot of kids, I wanted to be part of something that was bigger than myself. I wanted to do good in the world. I didn't know what that meant. I had a couple of opportunities in high school that were interesting for me. Then when I got to college, I was really focused on reproductive health. I went to Indonesia in my junior year.
00:25:48
Speaker
had the opportunity to do research on family planning and women's transition from the informal sector to the formal sector. And two things kind of happened out of that moment. One was it was 1995. It happened to be when the Beijing conference was happening. That's the moment where Hillary Clinton famously challenged the world to see women's rights as human rights. By the way, it was actually Madeleine Albright who was behind her on that. Madeleine Albright was the one who encouraged her to say that.
00:26:15
Speaker
Brilliant. I, at the time, didn't have internet and didn't have very much access to media because I was living in a village. So I didn't know that that was happening, but I was sort of in the zeitgeist moment where the other thing that was happening was there was a real focus on the shift in the reproductive health space from just kind of building clinics and expecting women to show up to quality of care. And so what did it mean to center women's voices? What was their experience with family planning and to become a mother and to be able to manage and space families and have control over their reproductive decisions?
00:26:45
Speaker
That shift to becoming less technocratic and more focused on the individual experience and the other thing is that experience in Indonesia brought me back to Indonesia again after university and I was teaching there but it happened to be when the Asian financial crisis happened and I was
00:27:02
Speaker
In a student town and there was a people power revolution, I saw everybody marching into the streets. It brought down Suharto, who was a dictator for 32 years. 38 million people were pushed into poverty as a result of the financial crisis. And I was sort of there as this young person having this formative experience and not really knowing what it all meant except that it was huge and complex and I wanted to understand more. So two things happened. One is just
00:27:32
Speaker
that individual experience has been a through line. So if I think about VisionSpring, we're very much customer-centric. We're really focused on the dignity of choice for the individual. We come to the consumer with a value proposition because they're not a beneficiary. They are a customer. They actually have the power to choose to have their vision screened, to decide that they want to wear glasses, and so we need to come with a value proposition.
00:28:01
Speaker
Beneficiary is actually a bad word in the vision spring lexicon consumer because that how you refer to them consumer or customer but then also just like these big macroeconomic systems right that we're all operating in as individuals and being aware of kind of that macroeconomic journey that countries are going through and what that means for communities and households.
00:28:24
Speaker
I'm always fascinated to hear stories of how people have gotten to where they are today. Your story is absolutely fascinating, I must say, Ella. And I know we were chatting earlier, and you said that VisionSpring is actually your first chief executive role.
Leadership Transition at VisionSpring
00:28:44
Speaker
And you came into the organization as a second generation leader, taking over, as you mentioned, from the founder, Jordan Casselow.
00:28:51
Speaker
It would be great to hear any practical insights or learning or advice that you can share with respect to that leadership transition that could be of benefit to other nonprofit leaders. There have been a lot of organizations that are going through founder transitions in the last years because in the social enterprise space, a lot of social enterprises were born in the early 2000s. So naturally, there are founder transitions happening. So I was part of that.
00:29:20
Speaker
And obviously, every organization is going to be different. And a lot of it has to do with the interpersonal dynamics that most of it has to do with interpersonal dynamics. Let's be honest. So I would say two things just speaking out of my own experience. One is I came into VisionSpring with a stupendous board of directors. So the board is a real working board. There are unique superpowers of our individual board members. We have a
00:29:50
Speaker
We have no assholes policy on our board, so our board is uniquely nice and kind and productive. There's not a lot of ego on our board. So coming into the organization, I felt like
00:30:04
Speaker
Cause I have also seen board dynamics that are not very healthy and I felt confident that that dynamic was going to be good. And then the other was Jordan himself. So Jordan was going to step onto the board as a vice chairman. He was always going to be involved in the organization as our senior technical leader when it comes to eye health, right? So as an optometrist and a PhD and an eye health specialist, we turned to him for everything technical that's needed.
00:30:34
Speaker
And he is forever an ambassador and a uniquely good fundraiser for the organization. And so when Jordan and I first were interviewing, before I had been offered the position, we talked about roles and role clarity and the kind of unique contribution that he could make and then where I was complementary to that. And we actually talked about what a transition might look like over a two to three year period where
00:30:59
Speaker
I would, particularly when it came to the fundraising part and some of those key relationships where I would take on more of those and he would be more in a kind of facilitating space. So I think, you know, what can I say? Communication, communication, communication. Jordan and I and our board chair, when I first started in the first year, we spoke every week to make sure that everything felt close and everybody felt informed.
00:31:28
Speaker
that cadence obviously has spread out over time. I'm a huge believer in keeping the board close. Our board still gets a weekly update. It used to be, I used to send an email once a week. We now have an internal vision spring newsletter that goes to our team members who are spread out across nine countries. But that way when we get into board meetings, we don't have a what's been going on kind of catch up session, but people feel the energy and the kind of what the organization's been up to.
00:31:56
Speaker
And then, you know, I think the most important thing in the transition is as a new leader, you're taking over somebody's baby, so to speak, right? I mean, somebody has poured their life's energy and passion and expertise into creating this vehicle and this organization.
00:32:14
Speaker
So i think two things one is there's you have to have a little bit of reverence for that i think that of jordan is having created vision spring and it's created a vehicle and a vessel for all of us in vision spring all the team members. To be able to do our life's work together in this ship so to speak and so that i don't think can be taken for granted.
00:32:37
Speaker
And then the other is the duty to then be true to the mission of the organization, but as the CEO to have been granted basically a completely clean slate to say, how do we want to do it? I will say the board when I went to the leadership transition.
00:32:56
Speaker
They encouraged me to reimagine and recreate the theory of change. We disrupted ourselves with some of our business models. And I was given a lot of latitude for how to take the organization forward.
00:33:08
Speaker
Wow. And Ella, did you have the opportunity to have some of those conversations with Jordan before you joined the organization? Because coming back to board dynamics, I love that you say you have a no-assholes policy. I think that's brilliant. But how do you know before you joined an organization whether or not there
00:33:29
Speaker
Well, so I had a lot of interviews. I mean, I think I probably met, if our board was 10 people at the time, I think I must have spoken with at least seven of them over the course of the interview process. I didn't speak to Jordan until much later in the process. So Jordan was not an early gatekeeper to the process. He was actually only reviewing part of the final candidate rounds or the late candidate rounds. In any case,
00:33:54
Speaker
But then we did, when we started talking, we were having this very sort of expansive conversation. It was, at that point, it wasn't so much of an interview. I mean, it was, of course, but it felt more like a discovery and a fit conversation and a, can we imagine, like, what's the symbiosis and the sort of the simpatico? And we talked about these subjects before I joined, yeah. I mean, we worked it out in practicality once I joined, but we definitely had that conversation before I joined.
00:34:22
Speaker
Excellent. And it sounds amazing that the board gave you the latitude to really reimagine how to take the organization forward. I just want to acknowledge that some CEOs kind of get handed a strategy that says like, go make this happen. I got handed a blank piece of paper that said, how do we get to 10 million people? I got given a flag on the hill that said, can we get to 10 million people? And let's figure out how to do that.
00:34:46
Speaker
And I think both have their challenges, whether you give them a blank sheet or a ready-baked proposal. But I want to really come on to talk to values and culture, because I really see values as the golden thread that binds an organization and its people together with its purpose.
Shaping VisionSpring's Values
00:35:04
Speaker
And as the new CEO coming in, particularly following in the footsteps of a founder,
00:35:09
Speaker
How did you go about developing organization values and creating a culture to support the vision that you wanted to take forward? So in other words, how did you start putting down building blocks on that blank sheet of paper?
00:35:24
Speaker
When I first came in, what I could feel was that the organization had distinct values. They kept kind of cropping up when we would have a difficult conversation, or they would show up in stories that we would tell about the history. And those had insights, or they were prescient in some kind of way. And so you could feel the values, but they actually weren't written on a piece of paper. They weren't on a wall.
00:35:49
Speaker
What I ended up doing is rather than kind of having a workshop where everybody comes together and just writes the values out in a day.
00:35:57
Speaker
I ended up accumulating moments over the course of maybe three to four months. So a story that I would hear in the organization and why was that valuable or a pain point and or a decision maybe that the board had made that was really difficult and why did that carry significance. Insights that predate the founding of the organization that Jordan had around things like
00:36:21
Speaker
dignity of choice or being able to focus on task shifting and de-medicalizing access to glasses and the fact that VisionSpring was female-centered from the start. We always had a gender equity lens in the founding of the health entrepreneur model from day one. So I kind of went on this listening tour and was accumulating stories and myths and symbols and taboos and all that stuff. And then I
00:36:45
Speaker
put them up on a wall. Literally, I wrote them out and I stuck them up on a wall and encouraged team members to add to them and said, you know, as you're hearing, what are the ones that resonate for you? And then we did have a workshop and then we crystallized and distilled and came up with the five organizational values, which are help others to do well, advance equity, constantly adapt and relentlessly improve, default to transparency and reveal hard truths and learn together.
00:37:14
Speaker
And then how do you live the values, right? So it's easier to live the values if they're authentic to the organization, first of all, because they're real. The values actually do guide decisions and choices and behavior. So and then I think it becomes really important when as an organization that is growing. So when I first joined, we were 90 people. We're now more than 300. We were in two countries. We're now in nine countries.
00:37:38
Speaker
30% of our organization comes from the nonprofit sector. 60% comes from the for-profit, which means everyone's coming with different vocabulary and different lenses and frameworks and operating models in their minds. And we're across languages and cultures and all the things. So creating one vision spring.
00:37:59
Speaker
is anchored in what we do, so our mission and our social enterprise models, and it's anchored in how we do it. And that is in the values that are at the heart of our teamwork. And so I just can't emphasize enough how much values are critical to our success. And to what extent were your board involved or not involved in that value development process?
00:38:26
Speaker
They were involved towards the end. So it was a bottom-up process among the team members. And then we shared it with the board and invited their input, of course. But it was team driven. Excellent. Really pleased to hear that. And looking back now to when you joined the organization in 2015, is there any particular advice that you would give to yourself on day one of becoming the CEO of VisionSpring? Oh, yeah.
00:38:54
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, multiple things. I think one is...
00:39:01
Speaker
there are a couple of roles I would have hired for faster and earlier. So I think just because you're good at something doesn't mean you should hold on to it, right? So the first thing I did was hire for the things that we really needed and that were not things that they were complimentary to me. So my first two hires, I think were technology and a global sales leader. I literally hadn't sold anything except Jolly Ranchers in the back of the bus when I was in fifth grade.
00:39:26
Speaker
But I would say I held on to fundraising too long. I should not have been in the fundraising leadership role for as long as I was. Just because I could do it doesn't mean that I should have held on to it for that long. I would have been more leveraged if I had brought in fundraising leadership earlier. And I think as a first time CEO, one of the kind of biggest parts of my personal journey was a lot of people come and say, well, Ella, what do you think? And over time, I have learned that my job is not to answer that question.
00:39:56
Speaker
My first job is to say what do you think and what's your recommendation and how would you like to solve it because
00:40:05
Speaker
Really my job should be to have decision making as close to the customer and as close to our team as possible and throughout the team and to be able to support and encourage other people to trust their instincts and their ideas. And so if I can help build on somebody's idea, that's great. And if I can endorse and approve somebody's idea, that's even better. And so my job now is to make as few decisions as possible.
00:40:33
Speaker
I love that being the CEO who makes as few decisions as possible because you have essentially empowered and delegated the team to be coming to you to make recommendations. Working on it. The reason I say working on that is because we work across countries and cultures that are very hierarchical and are rooted in patriarchy.
00:41:03
Speaker
and you have to be super conscious to undo the predilection to default to sort of your quote unquote your senior or your boss or your manager because people have been educated that way and through their prior work experiences are often coming up through quite authoritative hierarchical and patriarchal
00:41:28
Speaker
organizations, companies and educational environments. And so the reason why I say it's a work in progress is because we're being very conscious to try to flatten that out. And how do you then sort of marry that with the perspective of the CEO as a mentor?
Mentorship's Mutual Benefits
00:41:48
Speaker
Oh, well, they're beautiful that way, because if I can be a coach and a mentor, then I can support people in the choices and the direction that they want to go in, as opposed to tell people where to go.
00:41:57
Speaker
I love that. And as the interim CEO of a youth mentoring charity called the Girls Network, I feel it would be a little bit remiss if I didn't talk to you about mentoring because I know from when we were speaking earlier that you sit on the advisory board of an organization called Unlock Her Potential. Tell us a little bit about that.
00:42:20
Speaker
So unlock her potential is the brainchild and the organization created by Sophia Chang. And Sophia started it during COVID.
00:42:33
Speaker
and it is a mentorship program for women of color. And I just thought that what she was doing was so exciting. And so we know each other from a former life and I had reached out to say, can I help and support in some way? So I have become involved as a mentor this year in 2023 and over the last year have been part of the advisory group. And it's just really started exciting, right? So Unlock Her Potential has this extraordinary mission which is
00:43:02
Speaker
to create mentorship opportunities for women of color at any stage in their life. So we believe very much that mentorship is needed at all stages of our professional and personal journeys, so women 18 and older in the United States and Puerto Rico.
00:43:18
Speaker
And the idea is that we're really hoping that with mentorship women can rise faster into seats of decision making power authority and in their communities in their companies in their organizations.
00:43:36
Speaker
and that we can have more representative leadership everywhere, right? Absolutely. And I think, Ella, often when we talk about the impact of such mentoring programs, the focus is on how it has helped the young person or the young woman really develop their potential and their confidence and really nurture their ambitions and set them up.
00:43:56
Speaker
for future leadership and future career paths. But I'm curious to hear how you feel as a mentor, it has actually benefited you or how your perspective has changed.
00:44:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's just something that Sophia and I have talked quite a bit about, which is the idea that mentorship is a two way relationship, right? So it's often assumed that the mentor is the one who is providing value to the mentee. But the reality is if we have our ears open and we are attuned to the individual's experience, then we are getting educated and informed as well. And so.
00:44:32
Speaker
One of the obligations, I think, as a mentor is, especially as a cisgender white woman who's leading a nonprofit, my responsibility is to take and integrate the learnings that I have and the perspective that I benefit from through these relationships
00:44:54
Speaker
to carry that into my own organization. And I think Unlock Her Potential really encourages all the mentors. A lot of mentors are, of course, people of color themselves majority, in fact, but all of us are in a position in our own organizations to champion diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and making sure that we are doing the work ourselves.
00:45:16
Speaker
Thank you Ella, I must admit I had a bit of an ulterior motive in asking you that question because at the Girls Network we are always looking to enhance the diversity of our mentoring community and therefore I was really curious to see how we could attract more mentors to our programs.
00:45:34
Speaker
Mentorship is an amazing experience for folks on both sides of the relationship. Well, Ella, it has been so inspiring speaking with you today. And I always end the show by asking my guests, what is one thing you would like listeners to take away from this conversation? Give us one final thought or reflection.
00:45:52
Speaker
Oh, I think the world is so complicated and hard right now. There's so many things that when we just had the giant earthquake in Syria and Turkey and, you know, you've got Ukraine in the background and climate change and there's so many difficult, hard things. The one thing I would say is that eyeglasses are simple and easy and solvable and there are many intractable problems in the world. And this is not one of them. So there is extraordinarily good things that come. And we like to say that
00:46:20
Speaker
Together, we can create the wonder of clear vision for everybody. Really. So sometimes the best solution is the simplest solution. Yeah. It's a 700 year old technology. I mean, we can do this one. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Ella. Thank you for being a guest on the show. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
00:46:45
Speaker
I was so inspired by my conversation with Ella Goodwin, CEO of VisionSpring. I agree with Ella's philosophy that sometimes the best ideas are the simplest. I love the concept of the hybrid business model, and I'm impressed with VisionSpring's strategy of leveraging different models of social enterprise, nonprofit and commercial trade in different contexts in order to deliver their mission.
00:47:07
Speaker
As an impact unicorn that has now generated over two billion of income for their end consumer, VisionSpring has a very clear pathway towards achieving the sustainable development goals using the simple tool of eyeglasses. And to
The Girls Network's Mentorship Efforts
00:47:21
Speaker
all of you fabulous women out there who might be interested in mentoring a young girl aged 14 to 19 across England and help her gain confidence, nurture ambition, or to just be a friend, please sign up to become a mentor with the Girls Network.
00:47:34
Speaker
Check out our website www.thegirlsnetwork.org.uk. As Ella described, mentoring is definitely worth it. And that brings us to the end of our remarkable Season 4 of the Charity CEO podcast. Season 5 is currently in production and will launch later in 2023.
00:47:55
Speaker
I hope you enjoyed this latest episode of the Charity CEO podcast. A show that, thanks to you, our listeners, has repeatedly reached the number one spot in Apple's nonprofit podcast category. If you found this conversation valuable, please share or tag us on Twitter or LinkedIn or Instagram, and make sure you subscribe to the show by clicking the subscribe button on your podcast app.
00:48:17
Speaker
If you are feeling inspired or uplifted by what you have just heard, please share the joy and leave us a five-star review. Visit our website, thecharityceo.com, for full show details, information on previous season episodes, and to submit ideas for future guests. In order to balance my personal and professional commitments, the show will now come to you once a month instead of fortnightly. But I assure you it will be worth the wait. Thank you for listening.