King Philanthropies Featured in New Case Study at the Stanford Graduate School of Business

Earlier this year, the Stanford Graduate School of Business published a new case study featuring King Philanthropies. As a grantmaking organization focused on alleviating extreme poverty, the team at King Philanthropies utilizes principles from Engine of Impact to inform its decision on whether to expand King Essentials to India. The case is intended to shed light on the myriad trade-offs facing foundations who make funding decisions that impact the lives of millions of people.

Excerpt from the GSB study:

King Philanthropies (KP) was a grant-making organization that employed a highly intentional and carefully targeted approach to philanthropy. It was guided by relentless pursuit of its mission: to alleviate extreme poverty by magnifying the impact of high-performing leaders and organizations.

In early 2018, the KP board had expressed enthusiasm for creating a grants initiative in India. However, as KP Portfolio Director Cindy Chen and her team started doing diligence on organizations in India, they found a number of challenges when it came to the pipeline of potential grantees. Indeed, the vast majority of organizations were small, working in only a few communities across just one or two of India’s 29 states and 7 union territories.

Equally problematic, few of the organizations they looked at in India had a demonstrated capacity to scale across the country, or even interventions that were scalable. This mattered because KP, for reasons both practical and philosophical, focused on organizations that could scale their impact.

Learn more and access the case study here.