Foreign Policy magazine has listed Her Royal Highness Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway, Kate Roberts and Melinda Gates among its “100 Leading Global Thinkers” of 2016. The award recognizes the Crown Princess and Kate Robert’s role in founding Maverick Collective and Melinda Gates as its co-chair.
Maverick Collective works with philanthropists who are passionate about women’s and girl’s issues and draws on their skills and experience, as well as their resources, to pilot new and innovative solutions to the challenges faced by women and girls. Engaged philanthropists, or Maverick Collective members, are integrated into PSI and help to develop new solutions that are then piloted and proven. The aim is to fail fast, learn fast, and adapt fast, so that new solutions can be proven quickly and taken to larger institutional donors to leverage their resources and scale the solution.
So far, Maverick Collective has 14 members that have leveraged over $60 million in funds and reached more than 300,000 women and girls. As an initiative of PSI, Maverick Collective has piloted many projects where the member’s initial investment has been leveraged by an institutional donor to scale its impact. Among them are a cervical cancer project in India that will now provide low-cost and low-tech screening and treatment services for 55 million women in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Also included in these successes are a gender-based violence initiative in India that more than doubled in size as a result of an investment from USAID and a human-centered design initiative in Tanzania that provided the necessary research for a new $30 million project.
PSI and Maverick Collective are extremely honored to receive this award from one of the United States’ most influential international affairs magazine. Foreign Affairs magazine awarded Maverick Collective based on its ability to “harness girl power”, a nod toward the Collective’s focus on women and girls and the fact that all the founding members are female philanthropists.
More information on the 2016 awards: https://gt.foreignpolicy.com/2016/
More information on Maverick Collective: http://pulse.psi.org/issue-5/
Photo credit: Manprit Shergill