Episodes

  • Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: The Heart of a Stranger

    Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: The Heart of a Stranger
    May 21 2026

    In this episode of Capital for Good, we speak with Angela Buchdahl, the senior rabbi of Central Synagogue in New York City and the first woman to lead that congregation in its 185-year history. Born in Korea to a Jewish American father and a Korean Buddhist mother, Buchdahl is the first Asian American to be ordained as a cantor or rabbi in North America. She is also well known for her innovations in leading worship, reaching millions across 100 countries via livestream and cable broadcast. Her New York Times best-selling memoir, Heart of a Stranger, roots her unlikely story and experience as an outsider and boundary crosser in both ancient Jewish traditions and in the universal longing for belonging.

    Heart of a Stranger, Buchdahl explains, is both a particular and shared narrative. She tells us that, as a child, she often felt she was an outsider: Korean in America, American when she returned to Korea, and an unusual mixed-race family in the Jewish community. She connects this experience to her family's — starting with her mother who was born in Japan, where her family had been displaced, before returning to Korea and eventually immigrating to the United States — and to ancient Jewish narratives, from the biblical story of Abraham, a stranger in a foreign land, to millennia as diaspora outsiders around the world. Buchdahl also speaks of crossing boundaries to find home. "Home is where your people are," her mother told her, and then demonstrated how welcoming others (as an ESL teacher in Tacoma, Washington and a founder of an organization to assist new immigrants to the US — in Buchdahl's words, a "serial welcomer") could be transformative for everyone, creating community in the place of strangeness. This too, Buchdahl reminds us — the act of welcoming, with compassion and empathy — has roots in Abrahamic and other spiritual traditions and can be a powerful antidote to the isolation and polarization dividing us today.

    Agency and intentionality are central themes of the book, and of our conversation. We discuss what this means in the Jewish context — Buchdahl's decision and acts to define her own identity and path –— and its more universal applications: the spiritual imperative we all have to be boundary crossers. For Buchdahl, much of her early calling and connection to faith came through music, what she calls "my natural spiritual language." We explore how music has shaped her identity, her roles as cantor and rabbi, and the way she leads the congregation at Central Synagogue. Music is about beauty, she notes, but even more so about the "energy and electricity that comes when we're making it together." Buchdahl believes that much of her responsibility is to feel and modulate that energy.

    We end with a broader discussion of leadership and what it means to have the "appropriate" amount of humility (in Hebrew, "anavah") to lead. Sometimes, Buchdahl says, even if it is uncomfortable, "you have to step in to fill that space," and all the more so in moments of destabilization. "You have to speak to people's fear, to then move forward and beyond." While there is no shortage of challenges — Buchdahl cites anti-Semitism, climate and technological change, isolation and polarization, to name a few — she also believes "there are ways to mine each crisis for the opportunity it provides us." We conclude with a return to agency — and exhortation. "Every day," Buchdahl says, "we can take one step towards building the world we want to live in."

    Mentioned in this episode:

    Heart of a Stranger: An Unlikely Rabbi's Story of Faith, Identity and Belonging, (Angela Buchdahl, 2025)
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    28 mins
  • Marla Blow, President and CEO of the Skoll Foundation: Transformation and Renewal

    Marla Blow, President and CEO of the Skoll Foundation: Transformation and Renewal
    May 14 2026
    In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Marla Blow, the president and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, the leading philanthropy focused on social entrepreneurship and innovation around the world. Over the course of this conversation, we learn how Blow's career in finance and financial inclusion, across the private and public sectors, would prepare her to lead a dynamic institution and community of innovators in this era of extraordinary change — and resilience. We begin with important elements of Blow's origin story, including her childhood outside of Atlanta, a city (then) on the precipice of rapid growth, where she was drawn to the idea of helping people translate opportunity into long-term financial security. "I thought I could help people make better decisions," she said. That instinct would carry her to Wharton, Wall Street, an MBA at Stanford, and to Capital One, where she learned the discipline of applied behavioral economics and consumer lending. In the Obama Administration, Blow joined the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where she began to see more clearly the full landscape of American consumers — including those who were not well served by the traditional financial system or many of its products. That realization led her to found FS Card Inc to provide fairly priced credit to underserved consumers, an experience Blow describes as a "crash course" in entrepreneurship and the capital markets. Following the successful sale of FS Card, Blow helped lead Mastercard's Center for Inclusive Growth, where she was able to pursue financial inclusion at scale. Blow speaks candidly about the extraordinary moment in which she assumed the CEO role at Skoll in 2025. The dismantling of USAID and broader cutbacks of support to and from multilateral finance institutions sent seismic shocks through the social entrepreneurship ecosystem that Skoll has supported since 1999. "I don't think any of us could have predicted that things would shift in this magnitude, or that they would shift this quickly," she says. And yet, Blow also describes with great admiration the resilience of individuals and organizations "that have been able to figure out how to pivot," efforts the foundation supported with a $25 million "pivot fund." Blow draws on the analogy of a forest of seemingly freestanding trees that are deeply interconnected beneath the surface. "It's the roots that enable them to transmit nutrients, to transmit information, to rebuild and regrow after absorbing and experiencing a shock," she says. We also discuss a signature dimension of Skoll's work: the role of catalytic capital in driving impact. Today, approximately 80 percent of Skoll's endowment, managed in partnership with the Capricorn Investment Group, is aligned with the foundation's impact objectives in climate change mitigation and resilience, economic opportunity, health care, and responsible stewardship. Blow explains that these kinds of investments are not concessionary — their "financial returns continue to meet or exceed the performance of comparable asset classes" — and are exemplified by social enterprises like Apis & Heritage Capital Partners, a 2025 Skoll Award recipient that transitions small businesses to employee ownership – and has enabled main street workers to increase their net worth by a factor of ten. We close with Blow's sources of optimism. They begin, she explains, with community — the cross-ideological partnership emerging across philanthropy, the private sector's increased engagement, the deep networks built over more than two decades of convening social entrepreneurs at the Skoll World Forum. "We are going through something, it's going to take a toll," she says. "And there is a light on the other side of it. We can continue working toward that light." Mentioned in this episode: The Skoll Foundation Skoll World Forum Transformation and Renewal in the Impact Ecosystem, The Skoll Foundation 2026 Annual Letter Capricorn Investment Group Evolving Philanthropy for Collective Action, (Stanford Social Innovation Review, Blow & Gips, 2024) Apis & Heritage Capital Partners Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth
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    34 mins
  • Anthony W. Marx, President and CEO, The New York Public Library: Master Class in Transformative Leadership

    Anthony W. Marx, President and CEO, The New York Public Library: Master Class in Transformative Leadership
    Apr 23 2026
    In this episode of Capital for Good, we speak with Tony Marx, the president and CEO of the New York Public Library, the nation's largest library system and the world's preeminent public research library. Marx's reimagination of this storied institution builds on his transformative leadership in higher education when he served as president of Amherst College. A distinguished scholar and political scientist, Marx's education — in the power of education — was forged by his experience in South Africa in the 1980s. We begin this wide ranging conversation with Marx's beginnings: his childhood in New York City's Inwood neighborhood, high school at Bronx Science, the intellectual care and attention he received from professors at Wesleyan and Yale, and his early passion for political science, inspired by his involvement in the anti-apartheid movements on campus and the "excitement of being involved in something bigger than myself, and thinking about social justice at scale." Marx would soon move to South Africa, where he helped create Khanya College, a free, residential liberal arts college for Black South Africans to prepare them for entry and success in the country's top universities, where they had long been excluded. Marx notes that his years in South Africa were "life changing," allowing him to live and work with "people who were living and dying for the rights of democracy that we take for granted," and teaching him how one year of high-quality education at Khanya could "undo" twelve years of a stunting K-12 system. "The power of the human mind, the power of education to feed the human mind, should never be underestimated," Marx says. These lessons would define his career and life's work. Back in New York, Marx's scholarship on Africa and questions of nationalism earned him tenure at Columbia, where he and his family spent thirteen fruitful years. Without extensive administrative experience or ties to Amherst, Marx was surprised to find himself a serious candidate in the presidential search of the country's leading liberal arts college, but soon discovered that Amherst's board was ready to lean into change from its position of strength. "When you're at the top of the game is when you should take risk," Marx believes. "It's a wild way of thinking, but it's the right way of thinking, but nobody thinks that way." With the board's support, Marx undertook a number of groundbreaking initiatives that would make Amherst an even stronger institution; he is best known for his efforts to increase significantly the economic diversity of the student body, improving the school's racial diversity, and academic standing, in the process. In 2010, the New York Public Library came calling. Marx saw in the library's unusual combination of assets — a branch system that served millions of people in person each year (the most trusted and visited civic institution in the city) and the world's most used public research library — a 130-year-old educational institution ripe for "innovation at scale." Over fifteen years, Marx and his colleagues have invested significantly in the branch libraries, transmuting them into community centers, which today are, after the schools and CUNY, the city's largest provider of educational services, all free, from early literacy and career training to English language and technology instruction. In Inwood, Marx's childhood branch, the NYPL has partnered with various public development agencies and philanthropies to build 175 units of affordable housing atop a new library and community center, a model they are pursuing at other sites across the city. In wifi "deserts," the team has worked with internet service providers to beam broadband from local libraries into the neighborhoods. Technology has also been crucial to expanding global access to the research libraries, starting with vast and copyright-respecting digitization efforts. "The notion is that every book ever written should be available to anyone on the planet for free through their library — that's the aspiration and we're building it," Marx proclaims. He has not shied away from the promise of artificial intelligence to support this work, if AI can be harnessed in ways consistent with the institution's values including "privacy, veracity, and respect." "Even more than books, trust is our greatest asset" Marx says. He therefore holds that institutions like the New York Public Library have a role to play in shaping the responsible evolution of these new technologies, and to ensure equitable access to information and knowledge. "It all goes back to the same lesson I learned in South Africa… that the world learned in the Enlightenment," he concludes. "We have to respect everyone. We have to be compassionate towards everyone. We have to understand that everyone has the capacity to learn, to create, to inspire, to inspire others, to have empathy, so that we can live in the world we want to live in." Mentioned in this Podcast Khanya ...
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    53 mins
  • John Witt and The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America

    John Witt and The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America
    Apr 9 2026

    In this episode of Capital for Good, we speak with John Fabian Witt, the Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale Law School, a professor of history at Yale, and one of the country's most distinguished legal historians. The author of numerous award-winning books, including American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19 and Lincoln's Code: The Laws of War in American History, Witt joins us to discuss his latest, The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (Simon & Schuster, 2025).

    We begin with the genesis — of the Garland Fund and Witt's interest in writing about it. He explains that most histories of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case include mention of a "funny little foundation" that gave early support to the NAACP, launching the legal campaign that would culminate in the desegregation landmark. Witt discovered, however, that Brown was "just the tip of the iceberg." The Garland Fund — named for the young idealist Charles Garland, who at twenty-one refused a million-dollar inheritance — in fact had its fingerprints on a sweeping range of progressive movements in the United States that would shape American democracy. And Witt notes, the conditions of 1920s America that shaped the fund's creation — deep economic inequality, declining labor unions, surging ethno-nationalism, immigration backlash, threats to free speech — look "astonishingly like 2020s America." The fund would come to be known officially as the American Fund for Public Service.

    We discuss the fund's three principal focus areas — labor, civil liberties, and civil rights — and the extraordinary cast assembled by inaugural director Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU, to govern it, including labor leader (and New Deal "industrial democracy" architect) Sidney Hillman; James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP; and editors from The Nation and The New Republic. We explore some of the initial tensions between the fund's labor and racial justice priorities, and the eventual fusion of the two via efforts like A. Philip Randolph's creation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the all-Black union within the Pullman Car Company. Witt suggests that this marriage of civil rights and labor organizing — "working class solidarity across racial lines" — was a central contribution of the fund and its grantees.

    We also touch on the fund's intentionally unconventional approach to philanthropy. Conceived as a kind of "anti-Rockefeller Foundation," the Garland Fund had virtually no staff and was deeply conscious of the "paradox" of "using a Wall Street fortune to attack capitalism and inequality." Many of the fund's progressive investments failed, and others would take years to come to fruition, paying dividends in the newly "plastic" political landscape of the Great Depression.

    We conclude with lessons for today from the Garland Fund's experience. Witt asks, if the industrial union was the unit "well suited to manage mass production capitalism" and therefore "responsible for a good deal of equalization of the American economy" for much of the 20th century — what is the 21st century equivalent. "What's going to connect people together and to their economic futures such that some kind of decent political coalition of people who feel the security sufficient to be good citizens can come out of it?"

    This episode of Capital for Good was recorded at a book talk hosted by the Open Society Foundations in New York.

    Mentioned in this Episode:

    • The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America, (Simon & Schuster, 2025)
    • Lincoln's Code: The Laws of War in American History, (Simon & Schuster, 2012)
    • How to Save the American Experiment, (New York Times, 2025)
    • NAACP
    • CIO
    • ACLU
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    28 mins
  • Deven Parekh, Insight Partners: Software, Startups, and Scale-ups in the Age of AI

    Deven Parekh, Insight Partners: Software, Startups, and Scale-ups in the Age of AI
    Mar 26 2026

    In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Deven Parekh, renowned technology investor, civic leader, and managing director of Insight Partners, the global software investment firm. Over the course of the wide-ranging conversation, we learn about Insight's deep expertise and differentiation in software investing, Parekh's own evolution as a business leader, and how he thinks about the current moment — as an investor, engaged nonprofit board member, and New Yorker.

    We begin with Parekh's early days. He entered college as a budding scientist, but soon "traded his early love of biochemistry for economics," and graduated from Wharton into a career in finance, first at Blackstone and then the merchant bank Berenson Minella & Company. When Parekh joined Insight Partners in 1999, it was a team of approximately ten; today Insight is a 450-person global firm, with over $90 billion in assets under management, and investing out of its thirteenth fund.

    Parekh walks us through the distinguishing elements of Insight's strategy, including a singular focus on software across the full investment continuum from early-stage venture to private equity like buyouts; a nearly 70-person strong and proactive sourcing team; and a dedicated operations group, Insight OnSite, that works in a hands-on way with portfolio companies. Having made over 140 investments over his career — across business cycles and dynamic market conditions — Parekh underscores the value of flexibility in Insight's approach. For example, "venture buyouts" — acquiring controlling interests in strong but not-yet-public software companies — initially structured in response to liquidity challenges in private markets — have become one of Insight's strongest-performing deal archetypes, with over 70 completed to date. Parekh also explains Insight's approach to artificial intelligence: as an investment opportunity, particularly in early-stage companies; as a tool to improve Insight's own operations; and as a lever for value creation across the portfolio, where the OnSite team helps incumbent software companies integrate AI into their products and business models.

    We touch on Parekh's civic commitments, including as a board member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the US International Development Finance Corporation. In this moment of market and geopolitical volatility and uncertainty, Parekh believes nonpartisan policy institutions have a particularly important role to play. Parekh is also a devoted New Yorker. He believes the city — where Insight is based, where he and his wife (and partner in all things, including philanthropy) raised their family, where he serves on several boards — is thriving in the post-Covid world. "I feel really bullish about New York," he says. Parekh's optimism is also abundant when we speak about the next generation. "Young people give me hope," he says. And his advice to them: "Have a plan, but follow your passion."

    Mentioned in this episode:

    • Insight Partners
    • Council on Foreign Relations
    • Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
    • US International Development Finance Corporation
    • The Economic Club of New York
    • NYU Langone
    • Tisch New York MS Research Center
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    36 mins
  • Mellody Hobson, Co-CEO, Ariel Investments: Everything is Possible

    Mellody Hobson, Co-CEO, Ariel Investments: Everything is Possible
    Mar 12 2026
    In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Mellody Hobson, one of the country's preeminent investors and business and civic leaders. Hobson is the co-CEO of Ariel Investments, a board director of several Fortune 500 companies and nonprofit organizations, and a nationally recognized advocate for financial literacy and economic inclusion. We begin with a discussion of the formative childhood experiences that would shape Hobson's personal and professional trajectory. Hobson recalls how, as a young girl on the South Side of Chicago who regularly experienced economic insecurity, she was driven to work very hard and "to understand money" as a path to economic security for herself and for others. "My purpose was sealed very early," she says. After graduating from Princeton in 1991, Hobson joined the Chicago-based Ariel Investments. In the thirty-five years since, she has traveled from intern to co-CEO, building a $14 billion asset management firm with a mission to "transform the lives of everyone who entrusts us with their financial futures." Hobson walks us through her evolution as a leader, and describes Ariel's signature approach to long-term investing in companies and sectors that are "misunderstood, ignored and underfollowed," where vigorous and original research allows the team to identify mispriced securities and the opportunity to outperform. According to Hobson, Ariel's success has derived from the principles and practices of active patience ("being patient is really hard, it requires great restraint, great study, great discipline"), bold teamwork, and independent thinking – the focused expertise that supports the "conviction to have a different opinion." This approach made Ariel a pioneer, first in small cap stocks, where the firm's founder John Rogers tested the long-term value investment thesis, and later in mid cap and international markets. In 2021, Hobson launched Ariel Alternatives, which included its inaugural private equity fund, Project Black, focused on building to scale minority businesses that will be tier one suppliers to Fortune 500 companies, and Project Level, a new vehicle focused on "changing the game" in women's sports. Given the seismic and secular shifts in the industry, Hobson believes women's sports are "the next big growth opportunity… the small cap of sports." Hobson speaks passionately about all she has learned as a corporate director. Today, she serves on the board of JP Morgan Chase, and was a director of Estée Lauder Companies, DreamWorks Animation, and Starbucks, which she led as chair. She is equally animated by her civic commitments, learning early on it was "part of your job to be of service to others… it was sewn into my DNA." We discuss the inspiration she finds in her work with a number of nonprofit organizations, including After School Matters, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a new cultural institution she has created with her husband and filmmaker George Lucas. Hobson is fervent about the power of storytelling, and her and Lucas's belief that "everyone's story matters." Hobson has captured part of her own story in the New York bestselling Priceless Facts about Money, an immaculately researched and illustrated children's book that makes learning about money and finance accessible — and fun. And it is in young people that Hobson sees hope, even in challenging times, as they affirm her faith in the wonder and promise of human potential. "If you believe that is true," she says, "then everything is possible. Not anything — everything." Mentioned in this episode John W. Rogers, Jr., Ariel Founder, Chairman, and Co-CEO A Random Walk Down Wall Street (Burton Malkiel, 2024) Ariel Alternatives: Project Black, Project LevelAfter School MattersBloomberg PhilanthropiesLucas Museum of Narrative Art Priceless Facts about Money (Mellody Hobson, 2024)
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    36 mins
  • Introducing Capital for Good Season Five

    Introducing Capital for Good Season Five
    Mar 10 2026

    Welcome to Capital for Good, the podcast where we hear from business and civic leaders about their visions, plans, and hard work to build a vibrant, inclusive and sustainable society. Hosted by seasoned executive and award winning author Georgia Levenson Keohane, and presented by Columbia Business School's Tamer Institute for Social Enterprise and Climate Change, Capital for Good features in-depth and candid conversations with leaders across the private, nonprofit, and public sectors exploring solutions to some of our most urgent challenges.


    Season five offers an extraordinary line up of guests including business and civic leader Mellody Hobson, the Co-CEO of Ariel Investments; Tony Marx, the President & CEO of the New York Public Library; Yale Law Professor, legal historian and award winning author John Witt; Marla Blow, the CEO of the Skoll Foundation; Technology investor and Managing Director of Insight Partners, Deven Parekh; Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the renown religious leader and author of the new bestselling book, Heart of a Stranger; Bob Steel, whose storied career in finance and government service now finds him as Vice Chairman of Perella Weinberg; and impact investing pioneer Antony Bugg Levine.


    Learn more and subscribe today at The Tamer Institute for Social Enterprise and Climate Change at Columbia Business School – or wherever you get your podcasts.
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    1 min
  • Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa: We Need to Take Responsibility for the World We Want

    Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa: We Need to Take Responsibility for the World We Want
    Jul 24 2025

    In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Maria Ressa, the globally celebrated free speech champion, journalist, entrepreneur, dissident, and winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her work "to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace." Ressa is a co-founder of Rappler, one of the most influential media platforms in the Philippines. For her reporting on the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte, Ressa was threatened, arrested, tried, and convicted of cyberlibel, facing over one hundred years imprisonment. Today Duterte has been arrested by the International Criminal Court and awaits trial in the Hague, Ressa has been cleared of nearly all charges, and her work as a journalist and activist continues as she warns of the very real world challenges of online disinformation.

    We begin with Ressa's earliest days in the United States, when her family immigrated in 1973 after martial law had been declared in the Philippines. We discuss the importance of her education in those years, in elementary, high school, and at Princeton, and the support of those who "taught her to keep learning," lessons that would inform her pursuit of journalism when she returned to the Philippines. "I fell into journalism," Ressa says, as she found it to be critical "connective tissue between government and the people," and a way to "hold power to account." She and three fellow journalists launched Rappler in 2012; by 2016, when Duterte was elected President, Ressa found herself persecuted by the government — threatened, arrested, tried and sentenced to over one hundred years in prison — for reporting on its corrupt and increasingly authoritarian practices. We discuss Ressa's fight for her rights "as a journalist and a citizen" and her realization that technology could accelerate misinformation, distort truth, and blur the boundaries between the virtual and real world. "A lie told a million times becomes a fact," she says. Ressa chronicles these experiences in her 2022 memoir and call-to-arms How to Stand up to a Dictator: The Fight for our Future.

    Ressa cautions about the dangers of and linkages between the weaponization of algorithmically driven disinformation — and illiberalism worldwide. "Without facts you can't have truth, and without truth you can't have trust. The only government that exists without trust is a dictatorship: you can't have journalism or democracy." In her own work, she and Rappler are building upon the Matrix protocol, a secure, open-source decentralized platform that has the potential to become a global independent news distribution outlet.

    Although she is deeply concerned — "I feel like Cassandra and Sisyphus combined," she says – Ressa also maintains her faith in the power of people to come together for change. "It's all about community," she explains. "We are standing on the rubble of the world that was; we need to take responsibility for the world we want. We can build a world that is more just, more equitable, more sustainable; we can do this if we decide to come together, to demand better."

    Thanks for Listening!

    Subscribe to Capital for Good on Apple, Amazon, Google, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at socialenterprise@gsb.columbia.edu.

    Mentioned in this podcast:

    • Maria Ressa Nobel Prize Lecture, (2021)
    • How to Stand up to a Dictator: The Fight for our Future, (Harper Collins, 2022)
    • A Thousand Cuts, (Frontline, 2021)
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    44 mins