Former Obama Administration Official to Lead Skoll Foundation

Donald Gips, the former U.S. Ambassador to South Africa, will take over as president of the Skoll Foundation, with a mandate to use its more than half-a-billion-dollar endowment to support social entrepreneurs who look for ways to address social problems at their root.

Gips says the grant maker’s founder, former eBay President Jeff Skoll, told him his job was to “magnify the impact” of the $24 million in grants the foundation makes annually.

“Take this great platform that already exists, and make it bigger and better,” he said. “That was his message to me.”

Gips will take over on April 9, at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford, England. He succeeds Sally Osberg, who announced in 2017 that she would step down, after 16 years as the foundation’s only chief executive since Skoll himself.

Since February 2018, Richard Fahey has served as the foundation’s interim leader. Upon Gips’s arrival, Fahey will return to his previous position as the foundation’s chief operating officer.

From 2009 to 2013, Gips served as U.S. Ambassador to South Africa. He was succeeded by another Obama appointee, Patrick Gaspard, who also moved into philanthropy. In 2017, Gaspard became president of the Open Society Foundations, the network of grant making institutions founded by financier George Soros.

Obama, Clinton Pedigrees

Gips joins a number of Obama appointees who have taken leadership roles at nonprofits and social causes, including former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who now runs the Chicago office of Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective, and Rajiv Shah, the former USAID administrator who is president of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Another prominent foundation leader also served as U.S. Ambassador to South Africa. James Joseph was appointed to the position by Bill Clinton after serving as president of the Council on Foundations for more than a decade.

Gips said working as a U.S. ambassador provides a good background for foundation leadership. He managed large multilateral grant programs and a large staff in Pretoria. Some of the challenges he faced involved going up against entrenched social systems. That was the case, he said, when as ambassador he worked with the South African government to incorporate U.S. HIV/AIDS assistance into that country’s health care system.

Reflecting on the preference shown by the Trump administration to forge an “America First” foreign policy rather than deepening ties with other nations through membership in international institutions, Gips said the world’s problems are “significant and growing.”

He is confident that attitudes will swing back to “an equilibrium around multilateralism,” and in the meantime, “philanthropy can play a role in both identifying solutions for why people feel left out and helping to find answers to create a more inclusive society.”

Creating Partnerships

Shah, the Rockefeller Foundation president, credited Gips with playing a major role in bringing power companies, investors, and governments together to create Power Africa, a public-private partnership that works to increase energy distribution throughout the continent.

“Working with him hand in glove in that context showed me this is someone who has values, a deep commitment to doing the right thing, who will not be deterred by organizational inertia or any other barrier,” Shah said.

Gips described himself as a big believer in the ability of individuals to drive change, the driving force behind the Skoll Foundation’s Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship, which are $1.5 million gifts to nonprofits that have developed innovative approaches. (Jeff Skoll’s philanthropy also advances its mission of helping entrepreneurs through the Skoll Fund, which is based at Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The Skoll Foundation and Skoll Fund share grantmaking, program and administrative resources and have a total of $1.1 billion in assets.)

Before his posting in South Africa, he served as a consultant to Fortune 500 companies with McKinsey and Company and was director of presidential personnel in the Obama White House. He also served in a variety of roles in the Clinton administration and took part in designing what became AmeriCorps, the government program that promotes community service.

Gips said social entrepreneurs often devise revolutionary social changes that seem at odds with existing government programs.

“An added value I can bring to the foundation is figuring out how you then connect them to government,” he said. “There’s great potential to both increase the impact and sustainability by figuring out how to make those connections and helping social entrepreneurs around the world realize their vision by either working with government or by helping to change how government thinks about a problem.”

Correction: A previous version of this article said the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship were $1.25 million; we have updated that to note they are worth $1.5 million apiece. We have also added more detail about how Jeff Skoll’s philanthropy works and its scale: The Skoll Fund works with the Skoll Foundation and altogether they hold $1.1 billion in assets.