Do One Better with Alberto Lidji in Philanthropy, Sustainability and Social Entrepreneurship

What if a university degree did not require stepping away from work, taking on significant debt, or leaving one’s community? What if the workplace itself became the campus? Joe Ross, President of Reach University, joins us to share his insight.

This episode explores a different model of higher education that seeks to turn jobs into degrees rather than degrees into jobs. The approach centres on apprenticeship degrees, where learners earn an accredited university qualification while working full time. Half of the learning takes place on the job, while the other half occurs through structured academic instruction designed specifically for working adults.

The result is a pathway that combines higher education, workforce development, and economic mobility.

At the heart of the model is a simple framework described as the “A, B, C” of apprenticeship degrees.

A stands for affordability. Programmes are intentionally designed so that learners do not accumulate student debt. Participants contribute a modest amount, but the cost is kept low enough that it does not become a barrier.

B stands for being based in the workplace. Learners begin with a paid job and remain employed throughout their studies. The workplace becomes the learning environment, with colleagues functioning as classmates and mentors.

C stands for credit for learning at work. On the job experience, mentorship, observation, and practical tasks form part of the academic journey and translate directly into university credit.

Despite the strong workplace component, the degrees themselves remain academic. Students earn traditional qualifications such as a Bachelor of Arts or Associate of Arts. The curriculum integrates liberal arts thinking with practical experience, encouraging critical reasoning, creativity, and intellectual curiosity within the context of real work.

This approach challenges the idea that vocational learning and higher education must exist separately. Instead, it combines both.

Early adoption has focused on fields facing severe workforce shortages. In education, for example, many schools struggle to recruit qualified teachers. At the same time, schools employ large numbers of support staff who know their communities well but lack the degrees required to advance.

By transforming their current roles into a pathway to a degree, classroom aides, library staff, or after school programme workers can train to become fully qualified teachers without leaving their jobs or communities.

The same logic is now emerging in healthcare. Patient care assistants can progress step by step into roles such as certified nursing assistants, registered nurses, and beyond. The model enables employers to build talent from within while offering employees a clear route to professional careers.

The outcomes are promising. Many graduates move directly into the roles they trained for, with a large share seeing their salaries double or even triple. Completion rates also exceed typical national averages for learners from similar economic backgrounds.

Beyond individual success stories, the ambition is broader. If workplaces become learning environments and degrees can be earned through employment, every community could effectively host its own pathway to higher education.

Finally, the discussion touches on the future of education in an age shaped by artificial intelligence. Rather than making higher education obsolete, the argument here is that AI increases the importance of human capabilities such as critical thinking, creativity, and judgement. Those qualities, long associated with the liberal arts, remain essential.

If the challenge of the future is learning how humans and intelligent machines work together, then education that develops adaptable, thoughtful, and creative people may matter more than ever.

This episode offers a glimpse of a higher education model that seeks to expand opportunity, strengthen local workforces, and make the pursuit of a degree possible for people who might otherwise never have the chance.

Visit our Knowledge Hub at Lidji.org for information on 350+ case studies and interviews with remarkable leaders in philanthropy, sustainability and social entrepreneurship.

What does it take to deliver high quality medical care in the middle of war, displacement and disaster? We gain a behind the scenes understanding from Chris Lockyear, Secretary General of Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

This conversation offers a rare look inside one of the world’s most recognised humanitarian medical organisations and the complex system that allows it to operate in some of the most dangerous and hard to reach places on earth.

With around 70,000 staff working across more than 70 countries, the organisation provides emergency medical care to millions of people affected by armed conflict, disease outbreaks and natural disasters. In the past year alone, teams carried out more than 16 million outpatient consultations, alongside trauma surgery, treatment for malaria, tuberculosis and HIV, vaccination campaigns, and mental health support.

Yet behind every clinic or hospital lies an intricate global operation that combines medicine, logistics, diplomacy and risk management.

In this episode, MSF's Secretary General explains how humanitarian medicine works in practice. Teams must negotiate access with both state and non state actors, often in highly polarised conflict environments. Medical professionals work alongside logisticians, analysts and coordinators who ensure that drugs, equipment and staff can reach remote locations safely and reliably.

The scale of the logistics alone is extraordinary. Medicines and vaccines must travel through complex supply chains while maintaining strict quality standards and often requiring temperature controlled storage. Equipment for surgery, sterilisation and treatment must arrive on time in places where infrastructure is limited or damaged. In many cases, care is delivered through mobile clinics operating from the back of a vehicle.

Security is an ever present concern. Staff operate in environments where shelling, crossfire or kidnapping are real risks. Rather than promising safety, the organisation focuses on understanding risk, training staff and ensuring informed consent about the conditions in which they work. In 2025, eleven colleagues lost their lives while carrying out humanitarian work.

The conversation also explores how knowledge gained in these extreme settings travels across the global health system. Experience with epidemic response, infection control and contact tracing developed in Ebola outbreaks later helped support hospitals and health ministries in Europe and the United States during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.

A defining feature of the organisation is its financial independence. Around 98 percent of funding comes from private donors, with more than 7.3 million donors contributing. This allows operations to be guided primarily by medical need rather than political priorities. Beyond funding, these contributions represent something deeper: a global expression of solidarity between people who will likely never meet but are connected through a shared commitment to helping others in crisis.

For listeners interested in humanitarian medicine, global health, logistics, crisis response or international cooperation, this discussion offers an inside perspective on what it really takes to bring medical care to the front lines of human suffering.

Visit our Knowledge Hub at Lidji.org for information on 350+ case studies and interviews with remarkable leaders in philanthropy, sustainability and social entrepreneurship.

This episode explores how sustained scientific ambition, backed by flexible philanthropy, has helped transform HIV from a fatal diagnosis into a manageable condition and why the search for a cure remains both urgent and achievable. At the centre of the conversation is the work of amfAR and its distinctive role in advancing research that changes lives far beyond a single disease area.

Founded in the mid-1980s, at a time when HIV and AIDS were poorly understood and highly stigmatised, the organisation emerged from the determination of clinicians, researchers and advocates who refused to wait for slow-moving systems to respond. From the outset, the mission was clear: fund innovative research quickly, support bold ideas early, and accelerate scientific discovery where it was needed most.

Since its first grants in 1985, the organisation has invested nearly one billion dollars in research and supported more than 3,900 researchers across the world. Rather than simply awarding grants, its approach has been to invest in people and ideas, often at the earliest and riskiest stages. Many of those early investments have gone on to underpin treatments now used globally, including antiretroviral therapies that allow people living with HIV to lead long, healthy lives.

The episode places this progress in today’s global context. More than 40 million people worldwide are living with HIV, with around 1.3 million new infections each year. While treatment has transformed outcomes in many countries, access remains deeply unequal. Women and girls account for over half of those living with HIV globally, and people in low-income and marginalised communities, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, continue to face life-threatening barriers to care.

Against this backdrop, the case for a cure remains compelling. Lifelong treatment depends on stable health systems, consistent access and freedom from stigma, conditions that are far from guaranteed. A cure would remove these structural vulnerabilities. Importantly, the science now points to possibility. Around ten individuals have been effectively cured of HIV, providing researchers with vital clues and a credible roadmap.

Current cure-focused research is tackling some of the most complex questions in virology. This includes understanding latent viral reservoirs, where HIV hides in the body, and finding ways to reactivate and eliminate the virus. Researchers are also studying elite controllers, people whose immune systems suppress HIV without medication, to uncover mechanisms that could inform new treatments. Alongside this, insights from cancer, ageing, autoimmune disease and other viral infections are increasingly shaping HIV research, highlighting the interconnected nature of scientific discovery.

A key theme running through the conversation is what defines a viable cure. It must be scalable, affordable and easy to administer, not a solution that only works in specialist settings. This emphasis on real-world applicability shapes funding decisions and research priorities.

The funding model itself is central to this work. Research is supported entirely through private philanthropy, from individual donors and family foundations to global fundraising events. Independence allows decisions to be driven by science rather than politics, while short funding timelines enable researchers to move quickly. Rigorous peer review ensures standards remain as high as those of major public institutions, without the inertia that can stifle innovation.

Beyond HIV, the episode highlights how this model has influenced advances in other fields. Research originally funded to understand HIV has contributed to breakthroughs in cancer immunotherapy and vaccine development, including technologies later used in mRNA vaccines. Today, the organisation is expanding its focus to areas such as cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, immunotherapy and artificial intelligence, particularly where these intersect with the needs of an ageing HIV-positive population.

Woven throughout the discussion is the human impact of research. Funding science does more than produce data and treatments; it provides hope. Knowing that researchers are actively working towards a cure can fundamentally change how people live with a diagnosis. Investment in early-stage research becomes an investment in dignity, longevity and possibility.

The episode closes with a clear message. Scientific discovery is not confined to governments or large institutions. Individuals and philanthropists can play a decisive role in advancing research that affects every household. Supporting bold ideas early is one of the most powerful ways to accelerate global health progress and, ultimately, to help make AIDS history.

Visit our Knowledge Hub at Lidji.org for information on 350+ case studies and interviews with remarkable leaders in philanthropy, sustainability and social entrepreneurship.

In this episode, Nathan Atkinson, Co-Founder of Rethink Food in the UK, shares a deeply grounded perspective on hunger, education and systemic change, shaped by a decade spent leading schools in some of England’s most disadvantaged communities.

Nathan traces the origins of Rethink Food back to a defining moment as a headteacher, when a school kitchen breakdown revealed the hidden scale of child hunger and its direct impact on behaviour, wellbeing and learning. That experience led him to a simple but powerful commitment: to remove hunger as a barrier to education.

The conversation explores how Rethink Food has evolved from grassroots action into a nationally recognised organisation working across three pillars of impact: access to healthy food, skills and stewardship, and systems change. At the centre of this work is the National School Pantry Network, a flagship programme supporting schools to become trusted, community anchored hubs where families can access healthy food without stigma, alongside wider support services.

Nathan explains why food is both the entry point and the connector. Sharing food builds trust, which then enables schools to link families to help with debt, housing, digital access, employment and education. The aim is not only to respond to crisis, but to break the cycle of food insecurity altogether.

A significant part of the discussion focuses on nutrition, dignity and choice. Nathan challenges simplistic narratives about poverty and food, highlighting structural barriers such as transport, infrastructure and access to healthy options. 

Listeners will gain insight into how the organisation operates day to day, from surplus food logistics and volunteer mobilisation to digital education programmes and cross sector partnerships with corporates, planners and policymakers. Nathan reflects on the importance of collaboration over confrontation, and why working with unlikely allies can unlock long term change.

Visit our Knowledge Hub at Lidji.org for information on 350+ case studies and interviews with remarkable leaders in philanthropy, sustainability and social entrepreneurship.

Larry Cooley joins us to explore how to achieve sustainable impact at meaningful scale.

As co-founder of the Scaling Community of Practice, Larry has spent more than two decades examining why promising innovations so often fail to reach the scale required to address global problems. Drawing on 50 years of experience, from his early work as a Peace Corps volunteer to senior roles advising governments, foundations and multilateral institutions, he offers a candid assessment of what is and is not working.

At the centre of the conversation is a shift in thinking. Larry distinguishes between transactional scaling, which focuses on expanding projects, and transformational scaling, which seeks to embed change within the systems that deliver services at scale. Projects matter, he argues, but only insofar as they serve as vehicles for systemic change. Without attention to the institutions, incentives and delivery mechanisms that sustain impact over time, even the most effective pilot will struggle to move beyond proof of concept.

A key theme is the sobering reality that most successful pilots do not scale. Estimates suggest that between 70 and 95 per cent fail to achieve broad, sustained uptake. This is rarely due to weak ideas. Rather, the barriers lie in the pathway from innovation to institutionalisation. The assumption that another actor will step in to take a proven model to scale has often proved misplaced.

Larry describes the work of the Scaling Community of Practice, now a global network of 5,000 members across more than 120 countries, convening practitioners, funders and policymakers to share lessons and develop practical guidance. The community has recently completed 28 case studies examining how different types of funders approach the question of scale.

These studies highlight eight core elements required for transformational scale and examine how internal policies, incentives and funding models either enable or hinder progress. 

Visit our Knowledge Hub at Lidji.org for information on 350+ case studies and interviews with remarkable leaders in philanthropy, sustainability and social entrepreneurship.