When the boys were growing up P might well have stood for Privilege and W for Wealth, but the letter that really mattered was S. Because S meant Senegal and Switzerland, both home, both adventure playgrounds, one as exciting and different from the other as it was possible to be. The most important S was the one that created this enchanted world: Sugar.
The boys’ father, Jean-Claude, owned sugar plantations and had reaped the benefits of a successful agricultural-industrial family business. As for their mother, Debra, she simply possessed a passion, a positive energy, a joie de vivre, that was infectious. Have you been the best you can be today, she would say to them. Life could not have been sweeter for Nachson, Ben and Arieh.
Until one day in Patagonia in 2013 when it wasn’t any more. On that day, in a single moment, their mother’s life ended in a horse-riding accident. Debra was 54, the boys in their early twenties. By that time Nachson, the eldest, had set a goal of making his own fortune by investing in tech start-ups; had set a goal but was missing it. His first start-up had failed when his mother died.
The only thing to do, as Nachson saw it, was to go ‘trekking and soul-searching’ because life wasn’t delivering what he had grown up to expect. If the whole world of someone as privileged and wealthy as he was, could be turned upside down so quickly, what about the people displaced, disrupted, defeated by poverty, by war, by climate change. Even more fundamental questions arose for Nachson as he thought and travelled and talked with his brother, Arieh, as together, they were inspired and informed by the beauty and serenity of countries like Bhutan in addition to lively conversations with environmental activists and investors in social change.
The brothers felt a building sense of urgency, their mother never out of mind. Have you been the best you can be today? Today. That was the thing. They started to think that philanthropy shouldn’t be for tomorrow. Nor should it be put in a box of humanitarian trips here and there, giving now and then, saving the planet every so often. Philanthropy shouldn’t be brought out occasionally, put on show only when the next climate change deadline loomed, or refugee crisis spread, or natural disaster struck. It shouldn’t be set apart from, or atonement for, wanting to make money or having fun in life.
Nachson and Arieh resolved to prove that philanthropy wasn’t a trade-off. It wasn’t a separate box. It could be embedded into everything they did. They converted their resolution into a mechanism with three functions: Venture, Fund and Create. The To:Foundation they created in 2015 would first take a long-term venture capital approach investing in the most creative and adventurous young companies building or using technology to tackle the biggest challenges facing society and the environment.
Secondly, with returns from the venture fund, the Foundation would donate to, as Nachson put it, ’grassroot organisations in refugee camps and slums that do not have the capacity to create 200-page impact reports to satisfy donors.’ The third function, the Create bit, would be about leveraging networks and collaborations with activists, artists, scientists and campaigners to achieve greater impact. Among other collaborations in the last five and more years, it has meant working with the #TOGETHERFUND campaign to raise funds for the likes of Médecins Sans Frontières and the World Health Organization. It has meant getting behind the Love Army campaign in Bangladesh for Rohingya refugees, funding jobs, homes, a hospital and boreholes for clean water.
The To:Foundation Venture, Fund and Create model has also led to planting trees in the Sahel, reducing plastic pollution in the oceans, and employing refugees with mattress-making skills in one Ugandan camp, to make 800 mattresses for refugees in the neighbouring camp who had been sleeping on the ground. And to do so in only three weeks!
Nachson and Arieh Mimran of Senegalese and Swiss and Sugar heritage, young men in their thirties, treat philanthropy the same as start-ups. They do not see people and communities as beneficiaries, but as clients whom they serve in what they call ‘the decade that matters.’
The brothers assert that now, this moment, it’s possible for the first time in human history for people to come together collectively, collaboratively, on a global scale to change the possibilities of philanthropy, to change the outcome of global crises. The brothers are committed to driving the change. It’s the best they can be today.