How Nonprofits Can Navigate Uncertainty
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This month, we're highlighting some of the best conversations from the 2025 HBR Leadership Summit held in April. In today's episode, we hear from Yonti Saripto, President and CEO of Save the Children U.S. As a global organization, Save the Children has 24,000 staff members working across 115 countries to provide health, education, protection, emergency response, and advocacy services.

In this conversation with HBR editor-at-large Adi Ignatius, Saripto draws on her experience in both the private and nonprofit sectors. She offers hard-won lessons on leading with clarity, measuring impact in volatile environments, and remaining agile while never losing sight of mission. From addressing child malnutrition to innovating supply chains in conflict zones, she explains how Save the Children stays resilient and why optimism and data must coexist.

Whether you're in philanthropy, business, or leadership of any kind, this episode will leave you thinking differently about what it takes to lead with both urgency and hope. Here it is. So, Yanti, let me ask. Save the Children was founded in the wake of World War I. A century has passed. We still are moving from crisis to crisis, viral outbreaks, military conflicts, climate-related natural disasters. I have to ask, on the ground, does it feel more challenging, more fast-paced than ever?

Look, I always think it's good. We were founded in 1919. I think it's always good to keep in mind this great quote from Max Rosen, who runs our world in data, which essentially says, you know, the world is awful. The world is so much better and the world could still be so much better. So, yes, of course, we've seen an increase in conflict. We've seen during the pandemic in particular that a lot of the progress made in terms of health and

vaccination rates, etc., that we saw a rollback and we still see unequal progress across the world, across many countries and groups of people. At the same time, we should not forget that over the last sort of 20 to 50 years, we've seen a halving of under five mortality, so children dying before the age of five of completely preventable causes like diarrhea, malaria and pneumonia.

We've seen huge improvements in maternal mortality, women dying in childbirth. We've seen a huge reduction in people living in poverty. I think in 1975, 60%, more than half of the world's population was living in poverty. And now that number is below 10%. Yeah, that's great to hear because I think there are moments when we feel things are very dire and it's helpful to get some of the big picture data like that.

I'm interested in how your organization adapts itself in order to be agile and responsive, again, with all of the things that are coming at you from various causes.

Yeah, and I'm not going to lie, it's been an intense few months and arguably a very intense five years, actually. You know, when I started this role, I had, as always, you have a plan until life kicks it in the teeth. We had a pandemic, we've had conflict breaking out in a number of regions. And now, of course, we've also had to deal with real shocks to the foreign assistance system. Look, the good thing is it

If you're around for 105 years, you take some comfort and confidence from that because you have weathered really storms before, from world wars literally to huge periods of upheaval, of huge famine, of immense human suffering. And we've always found ways to be helpful and to be contributing to make sure that children's rights are held and that children survive and thrive.

So it gives you that. On the other hand, of course, if you are 105 years old, you also have to be careful that you don't become complacent and you're too stuck in your ways and that you don't innovate and all the rest of it, especially when you're a large organization like ours. So the fact that we're also doing a lot of emergency response, so half of our work is really working in real intense crisis settings, man-made as well as natural disasters,

that makes you incredibly agile. That culture, that ethos of responding to a crisis is very ingrained in our DNA.

So, okay, so some of it is crisis response, but I'm also interested, you know, you like a private company, you know, you have your supply chains, you have your kind of logistical processes. How do you build those to be resilient when, you know, if there is a problem in one area of the world, it doesn't affect your ability to deliver elsewhere?

Yeah, and I think here this particular sector of development and humanitarian assistance can really learn from actually the private sector. And we have done so in safe disorder for sure.

We now have, I think, a supply chain that can hold its own against large, fast-moving consumer goods companies. We have incredibly capable expert professionals who procure at scale, who make sure our logistics are in line, to make sure that we have good warehouse management, that we have forecasting of what we think we're going to need.

We haven't really improved that over the last sort of, I would say, decade or so. At the same time, because we are working in very fragile settings, think social

Sudan, Gaza, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, you will always run up against situations that you can't control at all, from natural disasters to an outbreak of war. And then all of a sudden, you know, where you thought you were working, you have to suspend, you have to withdraw because it's literally too unsafe for your staff to work there. And then you have to figure out what do you do with your warehouses? Where do you then get your supplies from? So there's a level of

creativity that I've seen from our supply chain professionals is well beyond and above what we needed when I worked in the private sector. But we now have coupled it with processes and systems, a procurement system, a warehouse management system that gives you that sense of discipline and process.

So okay, so now we've seen big cuts in foreign aid, in funding from the US government and some other governments. You know, what impact is that having so far and you know, how do you think about that going forward? Look, the impacts even today are disastrous. That's, you know, I'm not going to sugarcoat that at all. And we are incredibly concerned about

overall where official development assistance seems to be going, which essentially is in the best case flatlining, in a more likely case, certainly declining. And there seems to be less sort of political support for essentially investing in people less fortunate than we are, which I think is a problem for humanity, because I don't actually think people have become less

empathetic or less generous when we talk to our individual supporters. We don't see that at all, but there's certainly been wind blowing against that. Look, we're currently, we are working with over 100,000 children trying to help them overcome malnutrition, acute malnutrition. We're talking about very young children, infants up until two years old, who are literally almost at

starving because they don't have enough food. It will kill young children within a few weeks, even if you think they're okay within a few weeks, if you don't get them the right treatment, they can die. Or even if they survive, it can impact their physical and cognitive abilities forever. Because once you've lost that window, then you can't get that back no matter how well you treat them.

We're working with over 100,000 children today to help them overcome malnutrition and we are now at risk of having to stop some of those interventions in a number of countries. So and for the cost of all of $67 for a six weeks course, we're talking about fortified peanut butter, simple to administer,

Children like it, they recover miraculously. So we have figured out how to treat some of these most common causes of particularly young children dying. And what we need is some consistency and yes, commitment in investing in that. And that in the end will give us an enormous, will give the world an enormous return on investment.

Yeah, so I think you've put your finger on a challenge that a lot of people in the private sector feel now, which is, you know, how do you even think about long-term strategy or even short-term and medium-term strategy when politics plays such a big role in your ability to actually execute? Yeah. I think...

Look, you always have to keep your knees bent. As I said, if you make a plan, you have to be sort of cognizant that the next day you have to sort of out the window. But you do have to stick, I think, to your mission, which is easier, I think, for an organization like Save the Children than it is for sometimes for certain private sector companies. Our mission is very clear. We never have to have a conversation in Save the Children about,

Why are we here? Does our brand have any purpose? What's our purpose? What is our mission? So we know that. So that is there. Then in a very volatile environment that we are in today, you really try to hone in on what can we control?

and let's not get too concerned about all the things that we cannot control and rumors and noise flying around. You got to try to shut it out and say, what can we control? What do we need to focus on? Even if it means delaying the things that we wanted to do, we thought were good to do, you have to tighten your focus

and then build back from there. And if at some point you're coming into slightly calmer waters, you can maybe add another thing of that list that you liked so much, but you couldn't do in the immediate term.

Yeah, so I want to, this is a question that's coming from the audience from someone named Char who asks, how do you prevent a culture that you have of we're ready to respond to crisis from sliding into a kind of panic or sense of, you know, a kind of overwhelmed mindset because, you know, you are just going from crisis to crisis and they get worse and funding gets harder to find. How do you, you know, how do you manage that?

I think humanitarians tend to be quite calm in the face of crises more generally, because if you don't, you know, I think it's really hard to work in the sector. So I do think we tend to be, you know, constitutionally quite calm. And again, you do have to remind then your teams, your colleagues, A, that you're in it together, B, that we have a mission to fulfill for children. So let's focus on them. And how do we make sure we keep

the most crucial things working for them, whatever it takes. And if that means looking for new funding streams, if it means more advocacy for good and cost-effective policies, if it means making sure the communities support us in doing that, and usually it's a combination of all those three things, that's what you're there to do. I think

What is nice about why it's a privilege, I would say, to work in the sector is that I can sit in front of the TV screen and scream at it all day long. But at the end of the day, we still know what we're here to do. And our job is to make sure that all children have rights and that their rights are of health. And that makes for a very powerful reason to get out of bed in the morning. Yeah. So I love the.

I love the clarity of mission. I'm curious though, do you also, like in the private sector, do you have measures of success? Do you have KPIs and what would some of them be? Yeah, and that was, I have to say, when I joined this organization over a decade ago, that was a little countercultural sometimes, right? So when I said KPIs, everybody went like, what? Now we have them. It is very much a language of this organization, key performance indicators, they're reported every month.

some of them are very operational, right? Have we delivered xyz? Is our budget in line with what we thought it would be? Are the quality measures, you know, in green, amber or red? Do we run deficits in some countries, etc.? So there's a couple that are very operational. And then

that were a little harder to measure on a monthly basis, I would say, are really about outcomes for children. Did we get and keep more girls into school or more children, large, into school? Did we make sure that the quality of that education was up to par? Did we make sure that teacher attendance

was going up? Did we make sure that we vaccinated all the children that we said we would vaccinate? So there are a couple of different levels that we measure success. We measure cost effectiveness of our most prevalent interventions much more clearly now than we used to do. Although I would also say, still say there is really room for improvement there.

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If you're ready to unlock your full potential, visit strawberry.me slash hbr for a $50 credit. That's strawberry.me slash hbr. To what extent do you think nonprofits, including your own, need to learn from the private sector beyond sort of applying kind of goals and measurements? You know, are there other things that maybe you've adopted, maybe you haven't yet, that you think would be beneficial for nonprofits?

I think what I really liked, well, a couple of things from the private sector, the private sector absolutely does better than this sector does. And there are some reasons for it too. But I think the attention for leadership development and really sound global mobility talent development that I've benefited from in the private sector was amazing. And in this sector,

look for budgetary reasons, for you know just resources constrained reasons, that was less developed. So that's one. Secondly, that single-minded focus that you can have in the private sector to chase down a particular goal. It could be brand equity, it can be the launch of an innovation, profit and revenue growth, entry of a new market.

That single-minded sort of focus of we're going to do this and we're going to go after it, that I think in the private sector is something that this sector can still really learn from and adopt and not get too distracted. Sometimes in the sector we get too distracted and we're overthinking. We make things a little bit more complicated than they need to be.

So that drive for simplification and focus, I think is fantastic from the private sector that I'd like to see more of in this sector. So then let me flip the question and ask, what are approaches or lessons that the private sector can and should adopt from what people are trying to do well in the public sector? Yeah, look, I often say this to my

colleagues who were still in the private sector that I worked with when they asked, you know, like, look, to be a country director in Save the Children or in any NGO, non-profit, anywhere, is one of the

most amazing jobs you can do, but also one of the hardest jobs for a leader. You have this sector is really good at working with much more diverse stakeholders. You know, in the private sector, as long as you stay within the law, you can basically do what you want in any particular country. You have a license to operate.

For us, we have to deal with people being kidnapped. We have to deal with being thrown out of police because the government doesn't necessarily want us there.

We have to make sure that we stay within all of the sanctions and compliance frameworks that all of the donors that we have across the world put on this sector for obvious and good reasons. But working through that compliance framework is really hard to do, particularly when you work in fragile states, or most of you work in fragile states like ours.

bringing different points of view together. When I joined the sector, I noticed how much more diverse even the workforce was. It runs the gamut from community organizers to ex-bankers and CIOs and finance directors, everything in between. Whereas in the private sector, I always felt that it was a more homogenous, in that sense, population. So creating alignment between a diverse group of stakeholders

is something this sector really is very good at. So I want to go to a couple more audience questions. This is from Nikolaus.

And the question is, as you're navigating crises, how do you decide when to rely on instinct versus when do you rely on data? As the question goes on, where uncertainty clouds both, what inner compass or discipline helps you? I mean, it's a triage question maybe to make the right choices or to choose one path versus another.

Yeah, it's a great question and it's very much a triage question, right? We always operate on imperfect information. So let's be clear. I don't know which area of which country is going to fall apart at a given moment. You have to make some assessments. We have good intelligence gathering. All

all of it. But in the end, you have to sometimes make a call. Do you respond to this? Don't you respond? So I do think it's both. I think we've gotten a lot better over these past couple of years to actually do more of the data part without completely ignoring instinct and, you know, this inherent fear

I think ethos or knee jerk reaction of we have to be there, we have to help, which is fantastic, but sometimes it can also get in the way. But we do, we have a whole, we literally have a whole schematic, ideally, essentially, or a rubric of saying, okay, which countries do we work in? What's the available funding? How big is our footprint?

how fragile are those countries with a particular measurement? And therefore, what are the gaps or where do we add value the most? And how do we then... Because if you have a scarce pot of money and a scarce pot of talent that can lead that work, you do have to make some choices, right? And you have to try to do that on a combination of the data, but also you can't be too emotionally wedded to one particular country, let's say, or one particular region, or just...

respond to the last crisis du jour that is coming across your desk. So it is really trying to do both.

There are moments when sort of the politics get tricky and let's say, you know, governments stop funding something they don't want to fund and, you know, the private sector steps up. It actually ends up being a rallying cry for, you know, individual donations. Are you seeing that? Is it too soon to see that? I mean, you know,

Where, you know, can you make up for what you're losing in kind of government assistance if individuals step up? Look, I think...

On a macro level, there's absolutely enough private wealth in the world to make up for what is taken out in terms of government funding, not just in the United States, but everywhere else. I mean, absolutely. There is enough money, science and knowledge in this world to make sure that

that children don't have to die from preventable causes before the age of five, right? This is really a tragedy of choice that we're talking. It's not a tragedy of, you know, resources and scarcity. That was the case maybe for the, you know, the generation of my grandparents, but we no longer have that excuse. So that's one. Secondly,

I do think having government support is important, not just for the scale of the resources, but it's also about the influence and the seat at the table and the idea that countries across the world have this sense of solidarity and humanity that is broader than our self-interest. The self-interest is important because that's also there, but it is also about a higher level of solidarity.

we have seen a good response from our private donors, individuals as well as corporates and other multilaterals, as we say. Now, because some of the drops have been so sudden and so extreme, you're not going to backfill that in the short term. But I think we have absolutely the story and the mission

to get back to the levels where we were to make sure that we actually have that impact. Now, again, it's also an opportunity to really work with national governments in the countries where we do most of this work, by the way, including in the United States, to say, okay, where do we think

humanitarian assistance is the relevant funding stream or intervention. Where do we think these international funding flows actually help and where is it really the commitment and the responsibility of national governments to make sure that their budgets reflect the right outcomes and the right policies for children?

So here's a follow-up question. This is from someone named Kenny. You know, more specifically then, where are you seeing the biggest drop-off in generosity? And, you know, at the same time, where are you seeing the most resilience in generosity? And what do you think is driving each? Look, we've seen the most sudden and pronounced drop-off in U.S. government funding.

And that for safety tunnel was significant. It was 30% of our overall global spend. So we had to adapt to that particular moment in time, which we have done over these past number of weeks.

But we have seen a reduction in certainly traditional government assistance also in a number of countries in Europe, across the world. And if it's not a complete drop off, we have seen certainly a stagnation, which then in real terms means also a reduction.

So we've seen it across the world. We haven't seen a loss of generosity and commitment and loyalty in terms of our individual supporters the world over, I would say, not just in the United States. I'm interested, you know, a lot of companies, private sector companies that are spread around the world are not very good at sharing the kind of data and insights that they have. It tends to

end up siloed. I'm curious, do you have a process for, I guess, sharing experience, sharing learning from one part of the world with the organization more broadly? Yes, I think, and you're right, even in my previous private sector life, that was always sometimes best practice adoption, knowledge management, et cetera. I think...

And we suffer from those same ills, right? A lot of knowledge resides in people's heads. So it's very much a network organization. If I want to know something, do I call XYZ in that country and then I get an answer. And there's essentially that is also a great strength that that network feeling. Many of our colleagues have worked for this organization for many, many years.

So there is a lot of that sort of innate knowledge residing in people. Again, you do have to then also combine that with a little bit more structure and formality and systems. So we do have, like the private sector has done, we do have global products,

that we have essentially codified as such to say if you do a literacy program in a particular country, these are the standard things that always have to be in place. Now, does it look different from a particular region in Ethiopia to...

Afghanistan or Bangladesh or the Congo, yes, of course, different communities, different needs, but some things are always the same. And if you would walk into a classroom, a Save the Children Run classroom right now, anywhere in the world, you would see things that are very recognizable that you would expect to always see there in order to make sure you have a certain amount of quality and impact.

So that is essential learning and knowledge management that we really try to drive home. And we do it also on fundraising best practices. How do you build a brand? How do you attract more supporters to your mission across all these various markets in the world? So that's there. And I do think what I like about this sector, that there's much more sharing also with other organizations, which in the private sector, of course, is always hard, competitive,

Pressures are absolutely there. In this sector, there is much more tendency to say, look, if we have a great literacy program or if somebody else has a great literacy program, quite often our things are the combination of a lot of best practice within the sector, not just save the children's smart ideas.

Now you're competing for your talent with the private sector and you obviously have a private sector pedigree of your own. What advice would you give to other nonprofit leaders about how to attract top-notch talent into the public sector? I think, and I see a lot of, you know,

I mean, I get a lot of questions from people in the private sector that ask me, how do I get in? You know, I'd like to do something which is more mission driven, et cetera. And it is, as always, any new industry is hard to come into if you don't, if you're not in it, right? Because

you don't know exactly how entry works, you don't know the people, you don't know exactly which organizations, you have to do some homework. If you want to attract them, and we do still are very much open to attracting them, and we always look for, for most

senior leadership or middle management roles, we look across sectors. So you do have to open yourself for business very publicly to say we want people with different backgrounds. So that's one. Then once you attract them, you do have to make sure that they also then understand what they don't understand, right? So there has to be some explicit learning and development so that people

people don't come in with certain expectations that are really difficult to meet or they fail for unnecessary reasons. So talent attraction,

talent development, coaching, mentoring, et cetera. When I joined SAFE, what is it, 13 years ago, I was really lucky to have just a couple of long-time professionals around me that really helped me. And I could ask them all the dumb questions that I had. And they just steered me to the right interventions, to the right resources. They gave me the answers. They were patient.

So you do have to be very consciously building that around people who come from a very different industry. - Yep, so we probably only have time for one more question and this is from Dola and it's about staff morale and motivation. How do you keep morale and motivation going when people are dealing with crises but they're also not really sure what's coming and sometimes you're just trying to stay afloat. How do you manage that?

Yeah, again, if people have worked particularly in humanitarian assistance, they are...

They are used to that volatility and unpredictability, I would say. So we're a little more resilient in that sense. And we get to work with amazing communities, children, first and foremost, young people, parents, community leaders, everybody. You see the best of humanity in our world. Yes, you see also the worst of humanity, but you see the best. So that is a massive...

morale booster because it does remind you every day that even if you have your own problems, they pale in comparison to some of the problems that the communities have that we work with. And you're inspired by their creativity, resilience and everything else. So that helps massively. At the same time, we do also the same things that we do in the private sector, I assume, is making sure people have access

Good support. We have invested now in great HR professionals. We have invested in learning programs, in mentorship programs. We've set up a whole roster of mentorship programs for young junior staff out there at country level to help them understand what a career path would look like so that people see that there's a real future for them and a career path of growing and learning and working with some amazing people.

So, Yanti, you know, I really appreciate the work that you're doing in the world. I want to thank you for making the time to talk with us today. Thank you for having me, Adi. That was Save the Children U.S. CEO Yanti Saripto in conversation with Adi Ignatius at the 2025 HBR Leadership Summit. We'll be back next Wednesday with another handpicked conversation about leadership from Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. While you're there, be sure to leave us a review.

And when you're ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books, and videos with the world's top business and management experts, find it all at hbr.org. This episode was produced by Dave DiIulio, Ellie Honan, Kurt Nickish, and me. Music by Coma Media. Special thanks to Julia Butler, Scott LaPierre, Simonos Barain, Maureen Hoke, Amy Povtack, Alex Kephart, Rob Eckhart, Erica Truxler, Ramzi Kabaz, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew, and you, our listener.

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