The Luminos Fund: Caitlin Baron on How Capacity Building and Respect Help Ventures Succeed

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Carolyn Robinson: Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your venture, when it was founded, and your approach?

Caitlin Baron: I’m Caitlin Baron. I’m the CEO of the Luminos Fund, and we work to deliver a second chance to children around the world who’ve been denied school by conflict or poverty. Still today, one in five children in Africa never get to go to school. When they miss the chance to start school when they should, they can wind up forever lost to the world of education. My team works in partnership with African-led nonprofits across the continent to deliver rich, holistic ‘five senses’ catch-up education that enables children to cover three years’ worth of learning in one intensive year. That sets them up to enter mainstream school with children their own age.

Carolyn Robinson: Is there anything distinctive about your approach that other people might find surprising?

Caitlin Baron: Our approaches are a careful balance of the latest and greatest in global reading science, together with traditional pedagogies and approaches that celebrate the local culture and context where we work. Around the world, children learn to read very much the same way everywhere, cognitively, however they do so in completely unique linguistic and historical contexts. What’s breakthrough about our model is marrying global reading science with an authentic celebration of the communities our children come from.

Carolyn Robinson: What communities do you serve?

Caitlin Baron: We work across the African continent in Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, and The Gambia. In most countries where we work, there’s still several million children who miss the chance to go to school every day. Sometimes that’s because of conflict, as we saw in Northern Ethiopia in the last few years. Sometimes it’s because of climate-based displacement, or just simple poverty. We develop language-specific curricula that essentially cover Grades 1, 2, and 3 learning in different languages of instruction in the different geographies where we work. Then we support and train African-led organizations to deliver those catch-up education classes, so children are able to mainstream into either 3rd or 4th grade, which puts them more or less back on track.

Carolyn Robinson: Could you share an example that illustrates the impact of your work? How do you know it’s effective?

Caitlin Baron: Our classes are held far beyond the reach of electricity or a cell phone signal. The child experiences tactile traditional learning materials in a very simple setting, relying on resources right around them, in a range of different teaching and learning materials. Behind the scenes, quite a lot of technology and data is driving the program. Teaching is an action sport, you can’t just learn these skills in classes and then run on autopilot. Teachers in our program are brand new, and this is one of their first experiences. We have coaches in the classroom every single week to support these new teachers the first time they teach double-digit addition. If the coach sees children struggling to carry numbers from the ones to the tens, they’re right there, asking, “Have you tried this? Let’s look at it more closely.” These coaches are feeding key parameters on program delivery into our central database. They’re assessing five students in the classroom each week, on a sample basis. 

The central dashboard tells us which teachers and classrooms need extra support, as well as the ones where they’re flying [through the material] so we can let them go on their way. Operational data is a very big part of what we do. It’s often a missed opportunity, especially in education, but it’s fundamental to have someone external to the organization assess students at the beginning and end of the program. Often they look for impact in the progress of these students against comparable students who are not in the program. For example, a recent Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) of our Liberia program showed that students in that program in just one year are learning 90% of what the average Liberian learns in their entire lifetime, an incredible finding that’s a huge tribute to both our teachers and students. It’s also a very sober reminder of exactly how learning-starved a lot of people are in the countries where we work.

Carolyn Robinson: You have a holistic approach with teachers, parents and government. Are there specific examples that surprised you about the impact of your work across different countries?

Caitlin Baron: If you’re working with children who are not in school, one might be tempted to wonder whether their parents actually care about education, or if they are prioritizing this for their kids. Over and over again in every community where we work, I cannot tell you the number of mothers who’ve come up to me overwhelmed with gratitude for the program and say, “I used to promise my son he can go to school next year when we have money.” You realize in those moments that so many forces for good are coming together in these communities which just need a leg up for those opportunities to be unlocked. Parents are a big part of our model. Most of the students in our program are first-generation readers, i.e. the first in their family to learn to read. 

School can be an intimidating environment both for those kids and their parents, so we invite parents into the classroom. Children are learning an enormous amount in a short period of time, so they go from not knowing all the letters in the alphabet to being able to read short story books by the end of the 10-month program. Parents who themselves don’t know how to read can see that their child is reading. It’s been a powerful game changer for us, and it transforms the child’s self-concept – what he or she believes she’s capable of – as well as the parent’s sense of the child’s potential to go further in life. 90% of the children who start the program transition to mainstream school, and three-quarters of those go the [full] distance over the long term. We’ve had a remarkably strong success rate, not just here-and-now, but longer-term as well, and that longer-term success rate is due to those parents.

Carolyn Robinson: When was your venture founded?

Caitlin Baron: I began with Luminos Fund on January 1, 2016. The program started as a pilot project in rural Ethiopia housed within the private foundation that helped launch us, working with Ethiopian-led organizations, and the University of Sussex as an evaluation partner. This pilot project had been running for about four or five years when the team contacted me. They were seeing amazing results with students, and one donor said, “I can keep funding this at exactly the level I am right now, but it feels like this idea is bigger than we alone can take forward. Could you come on board to help us think through how to turn this program into a standalone organization?” Since then, we’ve expanded to four other countries. A lot of ingredients from the first pilot have become fundamental parts of our philosophy, for example, a belief in the power of community-based organizations to transform their environments; flexible long-term philanthropic funding to drive experimentation and iteration; and data and evidence to understand the impact of what we’re doing. 

Carolyn Robinson: Could you describe something you tried that didn’t work, and how you learned from that?

Caitlin Baron: So many things. One of the more interesting ones is the idea that sometimes, when something doesn’t work the first time, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, it just means it didn’t work that time and you have to come back to it. For example, Liberia has one of the lowest levels of human development indicators in the world. When we launched the Liberia program, one thing we learned early on was that children entering the program were coming with such a high level of overall hunger that if we didn’t provide a midday meal, it would be very difficult for them to learn effectively, and cruel to teach hungry children. Nobody wants to find themselves in that role. We knew a school lunch or midday meal was vital. We also knew we’re an education NGO, not a food services NGO, and those logistics could be tricky. A school meals NGO was already working in Liberia, so we wanted to partner with them. We set up our classes in close proximity to where they operate, so we could do the education and they would do the meals. This was a lovely idea, but for five or six different reasons, it just didn’t work out. They had major budget cuts with Brexit, for example, and they were only authorized to give meals to children in government schools, not outside. Despite the best of intentions, it just didn’t work. Eventually, we threw in the towel and decided we couldn’t compromise, because every child needs to have a hot meal every day, so we decided to do this ourselves. 

We built a capability to do school meals, which was not what we thought we were signing up for as an education nonprofit. As the years went on, we got pretty good at it, but it was always logistically a heavy lift. Picking food and teaching kids to read are two different jobs. Five years later, that same school meals NGO was in better circumstances, and [also] we knew more about where and how we operated. [We fit] perfectly the second time, and we set up a beautiful MOU [memorandum of understanding]. Now we don’t do meals anymore, they do. It was absolutely the right thing to put that idea aside the first time. It was a good idea but it didn’t work, and we needed to close the book on it and move on. 

There’s a risk of a false lesson drawn from that, i.e. that collaboration doesn’t work, or that we always have to do everything ourselves. The lesson was, this collaboration at that moment was not working, but the idea of collaboration [was sound]. Especially in the early days, you’re learning at such a rapid pace, trying to do, evaluate, take decisions, and move on. It’s very easy, in that moment, to draw hard and fast conclusions based on a first or second attempt at something which may be true at that moment, but might not be the case forever. The lovely thing is that as your organization grows and scales, you have new colleagues who inevitably ask if perhaps we should try that lunch partnership again, and old guards such as myself are always going to be tempted to say, no, we already tried that and it doesn’t work. It’s [better] to build a culture that remembers those early lessons, but doesn’t overinvest in their permanence. Don’t fall prey to the idea that you only learn once, when in fact, you learn all the time.

Carolyn Robinson: What’s been surprising about the support you’ve received to grow and operate sustainably, and what evidence do you have that it’s working?

Caitlin Baron: We’ve had a fairly high proportion of unrestricted funding from the earliest days, with the gift of an anchor donor at inception who came from the private investing field. Nowadays, there’s quite a lot of focus on unrestricted funding from a social justice standpoint, which is a completely valid perspective. Our anchor donor came to [this unrestricted approach] saying, “We make equity investments in companies. We don’t tell those companies how to use that money. We just hold them to account for their results, so why wouldn’t we use that same investment philosophy with nonprofit organizations?” It’s a good reminder that there’s more than one intellectual path to the same outcome. Whether you’re focused on funding innovation, a drive for results, or empowering frontline organizations, one way or the other, unrestricted funding is a powerful part of that. 

Our work is anchored in iterative design. Because all of us in the developed world have had the privilege of learning to read, it’s easy to think that learning to read is simple, but it’s actually quite complex, cognitively speaking. The human brain is built for conversation and dialogue, but not for reading. It is something that has to be learned quite explicitly. There are all sorts of big and small things you have to get right for children to learn to read in a language they don’t speak at home, especially for those who might be the first in their family to do this. It’s very important to be skillful in your design, to change, iterate, evaluate, iterate, evaluate, iterate, evaluate. Chasing breakthrough impact is very hard to do with project finance funding that looks [narrowly] at how we can’t do [something] because, say, we only have money for 10 books, not 20 or whatever the case may be. My colleagues and I are very cognizant of how fortunate we’ve been to walk that hard iterative path to get the highest quality results.

Carolyn Robinson: What kind of funding do you have, foundations, grants, private sectors or governments? What is the role of trust with these funders?

Caitlin Baron: The vast majority of our funding is still predominately private philanthropy and high net-worth individuals. I came from the foundation world with the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation for ten years before starting Luminos, so that’s where we started. We’ve been gifted with foundation partners who’ve been happy to go the distance with us through multiple grant cycles. The risk with foundation funding is that they can be fickle and get drawn to the next shiny object. We had a powerful breakthrough in raising bilateral and multilateral money in the last two years, although a reasonable amount of that no longer exists, thanks to the demise of USAID. That’s definitely a hit for our team. The overwhelming majority of our budget is philanthropic, and it’s never been a better time than now to be funded by foundations.

Carolyn Robinson: How can funders cultivate trust with organizations? Just by continuing to support them, or constant communication, or anything else? 

Caitlin Baron: It’s a great question. I would almost turn it on its head, that is, how can NGO leaders do a good job building relationships of trust with donors? First, just by recognizing that each funder has a need for different levels of information, or wants to be engaged at different levels and run on different channels. A grant report twice a year is not going to be enough communication for almost any funder. The question is, what happens in between that? A quick phone call? An amazing WhatsApp message of a photo from a classroom? A more fixed cadence? We have a number of funders on our board, and I see them four times a year in meetings, but I have at least 6 to 12 individual calls a year with other funders. 

We want to make sure our funding partners are hearing bad news from us first if something difficult has happened, even if that means sharing that we’re still getting the lay of the land and don’t know our full response, but here’s what we know at this stage, and we’ll keep you apprised. External evaluation is also a key part of the process, making sure our partners are not getting data just from us, but also from independent entities. 

When possible, [building trust can mean giving] thoughtful feedback to funders when they overstep. That is more delicate terrain than one might imagine because the reality is funders don’t receive a lot of feedback. For example, we had an experience last year where we were hosting a prospective funder in the field for one of our country programs. In their appetite for more information, which was totally valid, they were pecking at our government counterparts who didn’t expect to be spoken to in that way, certainly by folks they didn’t know, and certainly not by foreigners from overseas. It was a very delicate moment. I would’ve jumped in and shut it down if I was there, but I wasn’t. It [fell to] mid-level folks in our organization, not even the most senior ones. One of them gently asked the funder to step aside, and told them we want to get you all the information you need, but you must understand we have a different relationship of respect with our government partners, and that’s not how to talk with them. It was one of my proudest moments as an organization because that took a lot of gumption for a junior team member who knew we really wanted this money and wanted this partnership to work. 

We have been investing in government partnerships for nine years now, and that has to come first. It is one of our core fundamental values to show up in communities from a place of respect. This funder did not intend to be disrespectful, but it was clear to our local team that it was perceived as disrespect. You have to play your cards, because you can’t give your funders too much feedback [like that]. At critical moments where we’ve had to step in like that, if you do it right, it can deepen the relationship. It also shows we respect them, and know they don’t intend to cause harm, but if we see it happening, let’s talk about it.

Carolyn Robinson: Are bold shifts in funding strategies needed to strengthen the voices of those closest to the problems you’re working on?

Caitlin Baron: The biggest shift I’d love to see is more [private] American philanthropy funding for overseas causes. It’s still a tiny proportion of American foundations and high net-worth individuals who give internationally. We’re a US headquartered foundation, but most of our funding partners are in Europe. That’s bizarre when you think about the robust philanthropic tradition in the US. There are extraordinary opportunities as a philanthropist to make huge game-changing differences in people’s lives for not that much money. 

Carolyn Robinson: Any ideas on how to do that?

Caitlin Baron: I wish I had a secret formula. It’s some combination of head and heart, to tell stories of the potentially transformative impact in people’s lives, and what an extraordinary privilege that is, and also for us to share the joy of the work we do in communities. If we bring anyone to a Luminos classroom, we know we’ll have them as a funding partner for life, because they’re surrounded by a magical moment of transformative learning. There’s all sorts of other ways for folks to connect with the truly extraordinary work happening not just in education, but also in global health, economic development and elsewhere. 

It’s always important to tell the story of need, and the communities we work in are extraordinarily high-need communities, but it’s so much more exciting to tell the story of potential. The communities we work in are wells of untapped potential. For us in education, it’s always [enlightening] to bring Americans to a classroom in Africa because the students are incredibly well-behaved, with eyes locked on the board and hungry for learning, the antithesis of a typical American classroom. As a philanthropist, when you see how ready children and their families are to suck up everything on offer and make the most of it, you can’t help but be excited about the potential to be part of that solution.

Carolyn Robinson: Rippleworks has given you not just project support, but also the Leaders Studio, the Talent Grant, and the Expert Office Hours. Is their process of deciding what kind of capacity-building support to provide different from what you’ve experienced in the past? How did this impact your work?

Caitlin Baron: This has been in every way possible a truly unique funding partnership unlike anything else. There are certainly funders who want to make some form of capacity building available, but typically the quality is uneven, and it might or might not be helpful. Everyone on my team who’s been a part of the Leader Studio or the other online coursework has been blown away by the quality of the training. None of it is dumbed down. It comes from a place of real respect. You can tell that Rippleworks believes their grantees have the same right to best-in-class capacity building and human development that any top-tier corporation in the world would have. It reflects the level of respect that Rippleworks has for their grantees in so many different ways. It’s very easy for capacity building to be paternalistic, but the Rippleworks team never falls prey to that. They’re the polar opposite with their approach of making amazing resources available, and then trust that grantees are going to reach for what they need.

Carolyn Robinson: What specifically about this support impacted your work?

Caitlin Baron: We had a deep consulting engagement on performance management, and our staffing review and compensation process at Luminos, which was amazing. We had a coach who was head of HR at Coinbase which was an absolutely perfect background. You might think that someone providing advice to an international non-governmental organization [INGO] must come from an INGO background, but somebody from a tech startup was very well placed to tell us, you’re bootstrapping this organization, moving quickly and rapidly, and since you are still a relatively small team, don’t overload your HR [processes] with too much bureaucracy and too much structure, it needs to be nimble and grow alongside you. That was powerful advice. 

Our coach through that process, Emma Dawson, continues to be a valued advisor to us. She comes in every year before we do performance reviews and gives folks a reminder training on how to give and receive feedback well. Emma got the company that made the 360-degree review system we built together with her to donate it to us, and it is still running to this day. We’ve just completed annual reviews through that same process we set up years ago. When we started that work, we were 15 people or so, and we’re currently a team of 60 spread across eight different countries, so there’s a lot of operational complexity. It’s carried us through a time of profound growth. Emma and the whole Rippleworks team supported us to build a system that was just right for us.

Carolyn Robinson: Any gaps or shortcomings in this kind of funding model?

Caitlin Baron: It’s been an amazing partnership. We received a generous gift from Rippleworks for our emergency response work in Tigray in Northern Ethiopia, which enabled us to move very quickly on the back end of the conflict to be one of the first organizations on the ground responding and helping kids get back to school. We’re about halfway through that now. We’d love to do a million other things with Rippleworks. I’m not sure what the next chapter might look like, but we’ve gotten to know so many extraordinary folks on the team. There’s always been a pitch-perfect balance of rigor and heart on the part of every single member of the RippleWorks team we’ve worked with. We’re eager to find whatever way is most appropriate to continue that relationship.

Carolyn Robinson: Is there anything that funders don’t understand that they should know about capacity building?

Caitlin Baron: We are in two different funding cycles with a donor who funds a cohort of NGOs, and there is a certain amount of capacity building that goes along with it. One cycle is five-year funding, and the other is one-year. That means every year, somebody is getting cut. There are pros and cons with both systems, but the authentic, deep, engaged, honest discourse and dialogue that comes with the five-year cycle as opposed to the one-year cycle is like night and day.

Carolyn Robinson: How did the Leaders Studio work? Did you gain any knowledge that you could apply right away? Anything you would change? 

Caitlin Baron:  I’d be happy to survey them and get their specific action items, but I know that everyone on my team who’s gone to Leaders Studio has fallen in love with it. We are very careful and thoughtful about who we select, and very clear to tell each employee it’s a privilege to have this chance, and we want you ready to take action on what you learn. Anything that hits that emerging people manager tier is a huge gift for us because, in the nonprofit world, you have a ton of really passionate folks who get into this work purely from the heart, and who succeed in the initial part of their career simply by working incredibly hard for a cause that they care about. Then they find themselves in a people management role and have to deal with the fact that different people have different motivations and different lived realities. 

How do you manage a team who’s there for a diversity of reasons? I’ve been especially grateful when we’ve been able to send those emerging people managers [to trainings] because people are not getting MBAs in our world. There’s not as many opportunities to train for that skill set in an intentional way. We mostly do it through mentorship, but we’re not [always] able to. We don’t have a people manager 101 training internally, and I wish we did. I’ve always been grateful when we’ve relied on the Rippleworks team to do that.

Carolyn Robinson: Any impact from the Talent Grant or Expert Office Hours?

Caitlin Baron: We hired our amazing director of HR from the tech sector. She’d worked in global organizations, but this was her first time working in a nonprofit organization. She has used the Expert Office Hours in a community of practice among other HR heads, which she found absolutely invaluable, especially because she’s not from our sector. It’s given her an instant network where she can ask things like how to do employee handbooks in different countries. 

A lot of funders want to facilitate CEO-to-CEO exchanges. Those are lovely, but I feel the sector is over-investing in my capacity and not investing enough in my second line’s capacity.

Carolyn Robinson: What were the biggest challenges with the different kinds of support you’ve received, and what might have better supported you?

Caitlin Baron: One lovely thing about Rippleworks is that they were very intentional [when we scheduled] the scoping exercise. Something came up [on our end] and they asked, “Is this the right time?” Realistically, it was better to do it six months later, because a staff member was on maternity leave. I’ve been hugely grateful for the degree to which the Rippleworks team has been happy to flex timing at certain points. We’re also pretty selective in how the team is engaged. Every organizational leader has had the experience of sending someone on their team off to a training where you don’t really know much about what they’re going to learn, and they come back with a bunch of ideas that just don’t fit your organization, which is disappointing and frustrating for everyone. We aim to be thoughtful about what kind of advice is helpful for which person and when. 

Rippleworks offerings come around regularly, and sometimes we take it, sometimes we don’t, which has been a gift. When you’re locked into a predefined or mandatory sequence of classes, it’s harder for us to engage, and Rippleworks has never done this. I have another funder who invited CEOs onsite for two weeks. It was a one-year funding that was maybe going to turn into more, so obviously, I had to go, but quite honestly, that’s not a time commitment I can [comfortably] make, because my organization needs me. Rippleworks has been great about fitting in around the work, and not mandating some big elaborate step out of your routine. For CEO trainings, I can do three days, but two weeks is hard. I’ve had more than one funder ask for very large blocks of my time. I don’t subscribe to the great man theory of nonprofit management. It’s a problem when we invest too much energy and focus on the executive director. Our work is amazing because every single person in our organization is amazing, not because I’m great. I love when funders recognize and celebrate that.

Carolyn Robinson: Any other advice for funders to help social ventures be successful? 

Caitlin Baron: Sharing back office guidance is such an easy win, but no funders want to do it because it doesn’t sound sexy. Everybody wants to advise CEOs on strategy, but nobody wants to hook up finance managers so we can all figure out how to implement Sage Intacct together. Organizations can run further and faster when they are not slowed down by these operational things. 

It’s very easy for NGOs to share back office tips and tricks, such as how to do severance in your organization. Those are very low-stakes items to share, with very high impact. What’s hard for nonprofits to share is information about your strategy and your funders. There’s a huge untapped potential to connect NGOs around different [operational] functions. Another organization I’m in just launched one on finance and compliance. We’re all engaging our own lawyers, incurring our own legal fees, et cetera. Often, the path of least resistance is to ask others to share their child protection policy, for example, and we’ll build our own, but doing this together is an accelerator for everyone’s work. It would be great if more funders let go of wanting to be involved in strategy, and are willing to make low-investment, high-impact plays to enable operations to learn from each other.

Carolyn Robinson: Others have said that government relations is something that nonprofits working in various countries could use more support to develop. 

Caitlin Baron: It’s a really good point. We have a couple of government relations rock stars on the team. If any of them left, we would really be on a back foot. That’s not a gap that you can snap your fingers and fill overnight. We have an amazing individual in Ethiopia, an amazing individual in Liberia. Ultimately, however, that’s not enough. We need to be growing that next generation. So much of the government relations work is a slow learning process. It’s about relationships and understanding when to lean in and when to step back. We’ve been really lucky with a handful of hires, but we have no succession plan [yet].

Carolyn Robinson: What are the three main things you need to grow and sustain your work? Do you need more staffing, funding, training, or anything else?

Caitlin Baron: We’ve been growing about 20% a year in this planning cycle, and as time goes on, it becomes a bigger and bigger number. It’s been an exciting time of rapid growth for the organization, to see the work and team take shape in new, different, fantastic ways.

This is not the most exciting answer, but most of our programs could be twice as big tomorrow if we had more money, without compromising on quality. I know this because, for example, after Covid, we got a big bold grant to double the size of one of our programs. We did, and saw learning gains improve in the same year that we doubled the size. We’re 10 years into the journey now, and there are some amazing funders who have helped us build an incredible second line and third line. What that means is there’s [now] quite a lot of leadership capacity in the organization. Our ability to scale is quite significant. 

We’ve done reasonably well with hiring. We are about to hire a data scientist, which is always a hard position to fill as a nonprofit. We have a hard time hiring curriculum designers as well, because we have a very particular way of doing it. In an ideal world, we would train and shape our own people, because it’s quite hard to hire somebody ready-made from the outside. Data and curriculum are two specialist positions we struggle to hire. We have a wonderful board who are incredibly supportive of us, and they’ve continued to add one new board member a year. As CEO, I’m wondering what the Luminos board should look like in five years. For example, I don’t have any board members who help me fundraise, and typically in a nonprofit, that’s one of the core functions of the board. That’s what I’m thinking about, more so than [hiring] staff. 

The lovely thing about not being brand new anymore is we’re quite known in the field. When we list a position, a lot of people want to join the team. On the HR front, everything is moving quickly because we’ve had to change the hiring process quite a lot with AI. It’s been really helpful – we’re ditching cover letters, for example, because they just don’t mean a lot anymore. We’re often listing roles that are geography agnostic, and wind up with 500 applications. What’s a smart, thoughtful way to parse through all of that? The HR collab that we’re a part of at Rippleworks has been super helpful in helping work through all that.

Carolyn Robinson: Anything else about your relationships with funders?

Caitlin Baron: It surprises me how meaningful and important it is to have funders who have walked the full journey with us. I was a foundation person for many years, and I don’t know that I necessarily fully appreciated actually how much it means to have funding partners walk the journey with you. We had an anchor donor, but it was a long time before we had a second, third, or fourth donor. Those folks came to the table and took a bet on us when we were far less proven than we are now, and who’ve now been a part of that journey of growth and development. I don’t know how important it is to the organization, but for me personally, it means the world.

Carolyn Robinson: Thank you so much for your time.

 Carolyn Robinson led Solutions Journalism Network’s broadcast initiatives for many years. She is an experienced television producer/reporter for global news media such as CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera. As an international media development consultant, she has trained local journalists and directed media programs in two dozen countries around the world.

**This conversation has been edited and condensed.

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