The Philanthropy Handbook by Tej Kohli (Chapter One - Introduction)
A Serialisation Of 'Rebuilding You: The Philanthropy Handbook' by Tej Kohli
You have become a success and you have declared your intention to become a philanthropist. You have already achieved the kind of financial capacity that gives you the latitude to be able to apportion some of your wealth toward the betterment of others. And after years of accumulating wealth, you assume that giving it away will be easy. After all, how can spending your wealth on others be harder than generating it in the first place?
Foreword
Philanthropy can seem like a very natural progression from personal success and wealth accumulation. But in becoming a philanthropist you cannot simply become a kinder and more benevolent version of yourself. You will also need to behave differently, think differently and change your outlook. The scrutiny will be greater, and the decisions will be harder.
Many of the formulas upon which you have built your success simply will not work in the ways that you would normally expect them to as you give your wealth away. And over time you will realize that if you want to succeed as a philanthropist, it is not enough to simply endeavour to rebuild other people and communities. You will have to reassess and rebuild yourself too.
This can be a hard adjustment to make. Philanthropy is a highly personal endeavour. You may choose to work through an organisational structure with its own name to create some separation, but a philanthropist is an individual, and that individual will still be you.
One thing that will not change during your journey to becoming a philanthropist is the importance of making good decisions. Good decision-making is a function of experience, and experience is quite often a function of past errors.
This handbook is based on my own journey to becoming a philanthropist, which has included plenty of both. So if you are planning your own tentative first steps into philanthropy, then this handbook is for you.
My hope is that it will help you to optimise your decisions and to leapfrog some of the challenges that only become visible through the prism of experience. By optimising your decision making, I hope that you can make a bigger impact in your own philanthropy and do it more quickly.
You will notice that this handbook is short. It has been written in the expectation that you are time poor. I have also assumed that since you have attained a level of success that is enabling you to consider becoming a philanthropist in the first place, then you can probably learn fast, and so I have not laboured my advice and I have assumed that you will also make your own analysis.
I have organised this philanthropy handbook into key decision areas. Each area will enable you to combine my experiences with your own to synthesise new ideas about how to define a brand of philanthropy that will best work for you and for those that you wish to help.
My Early Journey
My own journey into philanthropy started in 2005 when my wife and I sponsored some disabled children in Costa Rica. But my life story started many decades earlier in 1958 when I was born in Delhi to a journalist father and a diplomat mother just ten years after India became independent from Britain. My parents were not wealthy, but their careers made us part of India’s newly emerging middle class during a period of great optimism in India.
Thanks to the efforts and encouragement of my parents, in 1980 I graduated in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, which was then, and still remains, India’s most prestigious University.
Thirty-eight years later in 2018 that same university conferred its Distinguished Alumnus Award upon me for ‘serving society at large’ because of my achievements developing solutions to major global health challenges through my not-for-profit Tej Kohli Foundation.
My eponymous Foundation takes a dual approach of making direct interventions to improve lives whilst simultaneously backing innovations that can lead to accessible, affordable and scalable new solutions for the masses across a variety of unmet needs and poverty-driven treatment gaps, most notably for the elimination of corneal and cataract blindness in poor countries.
The guiding philosophy of the Tej Kohli Foundation is ‘Rebuilding You’ because I rebuilt myself into a success after enduring some major setbacks – and learning some big lessons the hard way - in my earlier life.
‘Rebuilding You’ manifests my strong personal desire to use those experiences of rebuilding myself to help rebuild others. This philosophy is not about redemption, but my deep human desire to help others. I know from my first-hand experience how difficult that it can be to find the resolve to rebuild yourself out of tough circumstances. And I also know how hard it can be to get a second chance in life – and then to find acceptance.
In 1981 my mother was posted to the United States as a Diplomat for the Indian Government. Being one of two dutiful sons, I duly moved with her. By my mid-twenties I had happened upon a prosperous commercial niche by trading in real estate. I founded a prodigious company in Beverley Hills and by 1988 at the age of 27 I was riding high with the energy and hubris of youth. I was young Indian kid doing very well for himself in 1980’s America. And so, when I made some business mistakes in 1988, the authorities pursued my downfall with great zeal.
Many would have stopped and settled for a quiet life, but I was determined not to let anyone use a single mistake in 1988 to define me or my character for the rest of my life.
In 1998 I took a holiday in Costa Rica where I met my wife Wendy, and I decided to stay. Costa Rica was already a global hub for industries such as online gaming, dating and travel services; and as the dot com boom took hold, I founded a company that specialised in the build and management of online payment gateways and related services such as anti-fraud software. Our market leading proprietary software created worldwide demand for our payment gateways within the booming high-risk sectors, and the company experienced rapid exponential growth.
We didn’t know it at the time, but we were riding the tail end of the dot com boom. Between 2000 and 2006 we bought and sold companies across a variety of online sectors and industries, transacting turnarounds and unlocking value and liquidity that moved us up the value chain. By 2006 I had built a conglomeration of enterprises and employed armies of software developers in Costa Rica and in India. My personal finances got transformed as we focused on high growth and cash conversion.
By 2006 the dot com boom was over, but the high-risk industries that my conglomeration of companies specialised in held up well regardless. Regulatory changes also created uncertainty, and so when the opportunity presented itself to sell some most the companies in a series of high value trade sales, I sold my interest entirely.
From Entrepreneur To Philanthropist
This major liquidity event was transformational for me and my family. Moreover, the earn outs from the sale of the companies meant that I had to find new ways to invest, grow and protect the constant incoming liquidity.
As is part of the course in such circumstances, I built a real estate portfolio focused on South-East Asia and the UAE. Initially this was because I wanted a simple store of wealth that I could one day easily pass on to my two children, but later it was the highly visible and predictable income from this Zibel Real Estate portfolio which underwrote my philanthropic obligations.
I had known that the sale of my companies was imminent back in 2005 and had wanted something new to put my energies into. Not knowing where to start, I had committed to providing support to a group of disabled children in Costa Rica.
They children had varying levels of disability, and my job was to make interventions that would improve their lives. Some had such severe disability that they would always need care, whilst others had latent abilities just waiting to be unlocked. One eventually attended college in the USA, which I was very proud to be part of. Years later I would return to helping disabled children through my #FutureBionics project to fund bionic limbs in the UK.
It was that first foray into philanthropy that whet my appetite for helping others and it taught me a lot about the dynamics of helping others.
That same year my wife Wendy and I launched the ‘Funda Kohli’ project by establishing a series of free canteens in Costa Rica. The canteens feed children after school every day to make sure that they get the nutrition that they need to thrive, which their impoverished parents often struggled to provide.
Every day since the launch of Funda Kohli, our kitchens in Costa Rica have ensured that children have access to the nutrition and sustenance that they need to thrive. Soon I realised that it was not just children who were coming in to eat, but their entire families too. Because of this I adopted one of the enduring precepts of my own brand of philanthropy: that we never turn anyone away.
At that time, we never sought publicity for these programmes. It seemed indecorous to promote them or to use the projects to boost the reputation of what would later evolve to become the Tej Kohli Foundation. But that was a mistake. Because I have learned since about the importance of sharing stories to surface new ideas for collaboration and new ideas for partnerships.
Had we done more to share our desire to get involved with projects that help people, we might have expanded our philanthropy more quickly in the earlier days. We had the desire and the resources to help more people, but we were unsure how-to best structure these ambitions in a way that would create lasting impact in the communities that needed help. We were also unsure about how to make a manageable and sustainable commitment that we felt would be achievable long term.
Finding My Calling
It was 2010 before a serendipitous connection meant that I was invited to fund donor corneal transplants at Niramaya Hospital in India. There is no history of blindness in my family and corneal blindness is not something that I had known much about before. Yet within a decade, my desire and attempts to eliminate poverty-driven blindness would be the thing that I was most proud of in my career and would form a key element of my legacy. When they write my obituary, my efforts to end poverty blindness will be very prominent.
My journey into ‘fully fledged’ philanthropy started that same year. I was present as the recipient of a corneal transplant that I had funded - a 50-year-old man who had been blind for decades - had his bandages removed and was able to see his wife and grown-up children for the first time. It was a life changing moment for him and also for me.
It was at that moment I knew that eliminating poverty-induced blindness should be my calling. Even though my background was technology and I had little experience in the medical and scientific field at that time, I knew that blindness would be the focus of my philanthropy. And I wanted to do an awful lot more.
One of the reasons that I wanted to do something about blindness is because it is at its heart it is a poverty driven ailment. Ninety per cent of the world’s blind live in poor communities in low-income countries, where its’ prevalence impedes the ability of entire families to flourish and become economically successful.
In vast countries such as India or Indonesia, NGOs simply cannot reach the remote and rural communities where needless blindness is at its most pervasive. The vast humanitarian need surrounding the major population centres alone is already too much for NGOs to handle.
So, in many poorer countries, communities are underserved with healthcare provision, and many people are blind only because they cannot access treatment.
For example, 75% of all corneal disease is entirely curable, but the treatment gap in poor communities is substantial. A shortage of donors, the high cost of invasive corneal transplant surgery and the cost of medications deem treatment for corneal blindness entirely inaccessible in the world’s poorest communities.
This grand canyon of a treatment gap leads to poverty blindness, the net result being that hundreds of thousands of people are living needlessly as blind. This then fuels a perpetual cycle of hardship and decline.
It has always been my view that many of the world’s seemingly intractable human problems perpetuate not due to a lack of compassion or love or good will. More often than not, treatments of solutions to these problems already exist, and the difficulty is in executing their delivery, either due to finding or logistic. Global health problems are thus often the result of failing systems and solving that problem as much a computer science challenge than it is a medical or ‘compassion’ one.
Another thing that motivated me to make efforts to combat corneal blindness was that because it is not life threatening, it attracts less attention than other global health issues. Blindness is not a cause célèbre. Yet the social and economic impact of restoring someone’s vision is immense. It changes families forever and empowers them to become economically active and to elevate themselves and their family and their community.
I was determined to make a difference. By 2015 I was funding so many corneal transplant operations at Niramaya Hospital that a bigger facility was needed.
Scaling Up
This is when my eyes were truly opened to the scope of possibilities and the very real impact that I could make with my philanthropic ambitions. My perspective was changed by an exercise of stepping back and then designing my strategy based not on my own experiences and what I could see immediately before me in my own country and community, but by taking a more objective view of the world and seeking out the best ‘return on investment’ when measured in terms of human impact for every dollar that I was prepared to spend.
The Tej Kohli Cornea Institute in Hyderabad opened in late 2015. By November 2019 it had welcomed more than 223,404 outpatients and completed more than 43,255 surgeries. The impact that I was able to have was amplified by three factors.
The first was that my spend went much further in India, where lower costs meant a corneal transplant operation could be completed for a fraction of the $20,000 that it costs in the West.
Secondly, we were able to put our support behind growing tangible eye bank infrastructure, so that transplants could rely on donor cornea, which are significantly cheaper to use than synthetic cornea.
Thirdly, the people in need in India were often living in extreme poverty and in some instances could not even afford the train fare to travel to a hospital, let alone to pay for complex treatment. I was motivated by the prospect of helping people who genuinely were economically ‘shut out’ from life changing treatment.
There is one girl who really stands out in my memory. I was visiting the Tej Kohli Cornea Institute with my family and my daughter was just ten years old. There was another girl of the same age whose vision was so poor that she was nearly blind. I was still present a couple of days later after she had received her corneal transplant. She came up to me and gave me a big hug. I couldn’t help thinking how I would feel if this was my daughter, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about how many others like her were still out there - and that I could help them.
It was this moment of epiphany that helped me to optimise and refine my objectives as a philanthropist.
As most people who accumulate wealth will know and discover, when faced with a situation that your wealth can actually help to change, then the emotions felt are about a deep-seeded duty to do more to help your fellow human beings. What becomes entirely evident is that whilst there is nothing virtuous about wealth itself, the ability to use accumulated wealth to help to rebuild other people is a very righteous human endeavour indeed.
That decade between 2010 and 2020 was when I also started to learn about the need to be able to accept failure as a philanthropist. This had not been a part of my modus operandi during my commercial career, and it took a lot of adjustment.
I had become determined to eradicate suffering from the world by ending completely needless corneal blindness from poor and underserved communities. But what became abundantly clear very quickly was the sheer magnitude of the task made this impossible.
When it comes to corneal blindness, one in seventy people who need a transplant will receive one, and most of them will be located in the rich West. Transplantation is simply too expensive, too complex and too inaccessible for the majority.
Because of this I started to make more connections in the research and scientific community and charged them with the endeavour to find a non-surgical solution to corneal blindness: an accessible, scalable and affordable solution which could be applied by nurses without the need for surgical interventions.
At first, we tried to create a more affordable synthetic cornea by synthesising new corneas from yeast and then later from peptides. We were able to create them, but the rejection rate was too high, and neither solution would have removed the need for invasive sutures and expensive surgery. These were bitter and expensive early failures that set back my mission to find a cure and threw me deeper into the world of scientific research and development than I had ever expected to find myself.
It took until 2019 before we achieved a breakthrough when we created a proprietary regenerative solution, which in theory, could be applied using a syringe and cause the cornea to ‘regenerate’ and repair itself. Subject to regulatory approvals, this ‘universal solution’ is now years rather than decades away and could be relevant to more than one third of people with corneal blindness.
In 2018 I was approached by Harvard Medical School to discuss the possibility of my Tej Kohli Foundation providing funding to their Department of Ophthalmology. In 2019 I donated $2m to support the development of innovative technologies to improve medical diagnoses and treatments of blindness, and the Tej Kohli Cornea Program was inaugurated in Boston.
Getting Ambitious
By 2019 a motif had emerged within my philanthropy. Since the sale of my companies in 2006, and beyond real estate, my commercial life had pivoted toward investing in the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics and biotech. Increasingly my longstanding interest in deep tech started to fuse with my desire to find solutions to global health problems. Microsoft-powered AI started to factor into decision making at the Tej Kohli Cornea Institute, and new opportunities started to emerge in the United Kingdom to use technology for wider human betterment.
My Foundation launched its ‘Future Bionics’ program in the UK with a fund to produce 3D printed bionic arms for young people who were living with limb difference and whose families could not afford the cost of the world’s first clinically-approved bionic arm. The is an ideal symbiosis of technology and humanity, and the #FutureBionics program evolved into an ambition to provide bionic arms to many more younger people.
Then in the Spring of 2020 a new challenge emerged when the world was plunged into a global crisis due to the Coronavirus. The pandemic caused schools and businesses to close and huge swathes of the global population to be locked down at home. It meant that once again I was left to step back and consider my responsibility as a philanthropist to contribute toward alleviating the inevitable hardships that would be caused.
I donated $100,000 of emergency funding to Harvard Medical School researchers based at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Hospital in Boston. They had developed a novel and experimental gene-based vaccine utilising technology that is unique in its ability to scale and to adapt rapidly. Its methodology utilises a harmless ‘Trojan horse’ virus as a carrier to bring a tiny piece of the DNA of SARS-CoVid-2 into a patient’s cells, building a protein that stimulates their immune system to fight future infections.
But the greater challenge was deciding how and where to provide emergency support whilst also remaining true to the values of the Tej Kohli Foundation. In haste the Foundation provided emergency funding to The Salvation Army, but it was mediated by managers working out of a shiny glass office in a prestigious location on the banks of the River Thames in London, which affirmed my belief that big charities do not usually get optimal return on investment from donations given by benefactors.
So instead, the Tej Kohli Foundation started working with small organisations who had a deep reach into their local communities all over the UK; and we also offered fresh support to the many volunteer grassroots movements that had sprung up from nowhere in response to combat hunger within their local communities, which was rising because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The challenge facing many of these grassroots groups was how to continue to serve their community when many of their volunteers had to return to their jobs and food donations started to dwindle. We decided that our role would be to fund their emergency response whilst also finding a pathway to make these local groups sustainable for the longer term. We partnered with community groups to create capacity to deliver 100,000 cooked meals each week to any charities or volunteer groups who need more free food to distribute into their local community. We also created the ‘YouCube’ box, a youth-focused food initiative that aims to ‘repackage’ food provision as an off-the-shelf initiative that existing charity and volunteer groups can adopt to combat hunger in their community.
My philanthropy journey had thus come full circle. From my earliest forays setting up free canteens for children in Costa Rica in 2005, in mid-2020 I found myself again fully engaged in combating hunger in my new home country of the United Kingdom. But the biggest difference, was that by 2020 my Foundation had found its values and its core guiding philosophy. We felt more confident. We knew who we were and what we do, and perhaps more importantly, what not to do. This also enabled a very lean structure which meant that my grassroots philanthropy could have a very real and immediate impact, whilst also building toward sustainable longer-term solutions.
Having found the confidence and solid footing that has alluded me as a philanthropist for some time, in 2021 I embarked on my most ambition project to date. At the time of writing, the Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation is just a few months old, but already we have staged high volume microsurgical outreach camps that have screened thousands of people and cured hundreds of cataract blindness in some of the world’s poorest communities.
The Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation unites my resources and experience with the unparalled skills and insights of ‘God of Sight’ Dr Sanduk Ruit, who himself has restored the sight of over 130,000 people. Together we are on track in our plans to screen one million people and to cure 300,000 to 500,000 of cataract blindness by 2026. We have started in Nepal but will quickly expand into Indonesia, India, Bhutan and sub-Saharan Africa.
As I embark on this new project at the age of sixty three, I am acutely aware that it will likely be what defines my legacy as a human being. Yet I am under no illusion that we have everything absolutely right. During my decades as a philanthropist, mistakes have certainly been made and opportunities have certainly been missed.
It took much longer than I had anticipated to work out the shape and colour of my philanthropic ambitions and how best to manifest them. I also had the luxury of time to be able to ‘find myself’ as a philanthropist.
But for someone like you, who is reading this because of your intentions to enter the world of philanthropy today, this luxury of having the time to ‘find your feet’ has greatly diminished. Today we live in a modern world of heightened risk velocity, with a social-media-driven news cycle and the interconnectivity of globalisation increasing the pace at which ‘black swan’ events can trigger the kind of contagion that disproportionately impacts those most in need all around the world. Because of this, philanthropists are needed, and their support is in demand more than ever before. You have to move fast.
The world is awash with unmet medical needs that it is simply not economic for the commercial sector to solve. Governments are largely confined to the issues most prominent with their own local voters whilst also being preoccupied with managing their indebtedness. NGOs play a major role in creating global coordination across major humanitarian issues, but even the largest NGOs cannot extend their footprint into every community that needs help and every challenge that needs a solution.
We also live in a time of opportunity, where the chain reaction of rapid technological progression is creating brand new solutions that were beyond all imagination just one generation ago. Artificial intelligence, robotics and genomics have the potential to vastly and quickly improve every aspect of our lives, and they must be stewarded such that the promise of technology does not forget to disperse its benefits to those most in need.
People like you who have the ability to affect change, must define and play a big role. And I hope that this handbook will help you to shape your thinking and accelerate your progress in making a big difference.
Gates and Milken
I am indebted in writing this handbook and in my own career as philanthropist to two individuals whose resources and achievement are vastly greater than my own, and who have been a constant source of inspiration and enlightenment to me for a great many years.
The first is Bill Gates. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s approach to philanthropy has set a high bar to which all other philanthropists can aspire. The way that Bill Gates defined very specific objectives and then intensively targeted vast resources into both grassroots activities and also major scientific innovations, has been a big source of learning for me that has continually motivated and inspired me to do even more.
Bill Gates achieved so much in business and then used that success to achieve so much for others. His example is a wake-up call for any human who has accumulated wealth to consider how they might use that wealth for the betterment of their fellow human beings.
The second philanthropist that I am indebted to us Michael Milken. His story resonates strongly with me because Milken got tripped up by his prodigious early success, but then made a colossal comeback and focused on using his success to help others.
Today Milken is one of the biggest funders of research into prostate cancer, and the results are incredible. In 2004 Fortune Magazine called Milken ‘The Man Who Changed Medicine’. Milken shows that it is possible to move on from past mistakes and rebuild yourself for the betterment of other people.
I hope that this handbook will lead you to similar philanthropic successes.