Craig Silverstein and Mary Obelnicki
Leveraging their voices to advance girls’ education
Craig Silverstein and Mary Obelnicki have long had a clear focus for their philanthropy: Advancing girls’ education in countries with limited resources and modest education budgets. In 2006 they established Echidna Giving, which helps educate girls so they can contribute to the social, economic, and political advancement of their communities. Craig and Mary were less clear they wanted to go public about their giving. But over time they realized that joining the Giving Pledge and using their voices to advocate for girls’ education in developing countries was a way to find allies and advance the movement.
Transcript
I really had to think through the motivation that I had to do what I wanted to do and I think that really strengthened the effort going forward to be able to illustrate kind of the potential of the area that I chose to focus in, which is girls’ education and the developing world and the potential that has to make huge differences in the communities.
Meeting Craig totally changed my relationship with the philanthropic community.
I was the same person, but just because I have access to wealth, my opinion mattered in a very different way and I think that a lot of people who came into their wealth slowly don’t appreciate how influential the fact that they have the money is.
One of the biggest choices for us is to be strategic as opposed to reactive.
So like reactive is like people ask you for money and you say yes.
Strategic is you have a strategy in mind of who you’re trying to give to and you go looking for those organizations.
The issue area that we focus on primarily is girls education in the development world. Education, it’s a one-way path to improving the lives of people in communities.
And educating girls is particularly powerful because studies show that it’s the moms who pass on the value of education to their children.
CAMFED’s a great example, which is fundamentally a scholarship program so girls can finish secondary school.
They have a great participatory grant making where community members decide who needs the scholarships within a community.
The potential is just so amazing and the benefit is just going to be remarkable.
I was very conscious of my privacy and so I was very comfortable giving to these regranting organizations because I could do it.
I felt more quietly and one thing I learned over time is that there’s a value to being out there.
The fact that I’m public as being in support of girls’ education in the developing world is a benefit to that movement.
It feels good to be in a community that’s working towards those goals together and just sort of recognizes the challenges it takes to get there.
What I like to see is changes at the macro level, and that is where I feel has been the most gratifying to us.
You can look at governments where their education ministry is newly empowered and suddenly has the funds to open up pre-K like in various states.
In India for instance, we can go back five years later and see that hundreds of thousands of kids are enrolled now that weren’t enrolled before.
And to me, even though the numbers look very dry, you can imagine all the faces behind it, more faces than you could fit into your view.
And those are all people whose lives that you’ve changed.
