Inside Philanthropy recently published an in-depth look at Jeff Skoll’s longstanding commitment to pandemic prevention and preparedness and the Skoll Foundation’s COVID-19 and health system strengthening work.
It’s fair to say that most of the world was caught off guard as the pandemic began spreading around the globe in 2020, but Jeff Skoll saw it coming.
A self-described social entrepreneur, Skoll regularly ranks near the top quarter-percentile of the Forbes 400, due to wealth acquired as the first employee and later the president of eBay. His philanthropic and commercial portfolio includes a foundation that will have granted more than $1 billion to 1,000 global organizations by year-end. There’s also an investment group that helps entrepreneurs seek solutions to the world’s most pressing problems, and Participant, a media company that has married art and activism with films like “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Spotlight.”
For more than a decade, Skoll has funded with an eye toward pandemic prevention—one of five goals of a $100 million Global Threats Fund he founded in 2009. When that fund intentionally sunsetted in 2017, peace and security work was incorporated into the Skoll Foundation, while the pandemic and climate portfolios were spun off. A new standalone, Ending Pandemics, has since worked to bring about systems change and expand epidemic intelligence, with an emphasis on helping countries improve critical early detection and response.
Then there’s “Contagion,” the 2011 film Participant co-produced, which was scientifically sound enough to draw eerie parallels as COVID spread: A deadly bat-borne virus is spread by respiratory droplets, as whole swathes of the world are quarantined.
So how did all that prescience pay off in terms of Skoll’s philanthropy? So far, it has fueled a global response that includes significant work in Africa and, to lesser extent, the United States. Skoll recently upped the ante on pandemic mitigation by $100 million, a number that may collectively rise to $500 million to date across Skoll’s organizations. Here’s where that started, and where it’s going.
Read the full piece at Inside Philanthropy.
