Amy Marks Dornbusch has form when it comes to philanthropy: she was born to it.

The Marks Family Foundation has a long tradition of endowing medical research and broadly humanitarian pursuits.

The family’s entrepreneurial credentials are equally broad and long-standing, ranging from technology and venture investing to motorsport and hospitality.

Amy is a director of the Marks Family Foundation (as well as sitting on the board of her brother’s NASCAR race team).

She sits on the board on other foundations too, but our conversation focused on her latest venture: AtlasDaughters.

In Greek mythology, Atlas held the sky above the Earth on his shoulders. Today, we use the word atlas to describe the collective maps of our planet.

In so much as AtlasDaughters is a social enterprise focused on how women philanthropists can improve the lot of women and girl-led initiatives around the globe, its name is spot-on.

AtlasDaughter’s reason for being is based on Amy’s firm belief that non-traditional, more flexible philanthropic entities can go a long way to bridging the gaps left by public funding pullback.

At its core, AtlasDaughters is a philanthropic travel organisation that brings intergenerational cohorts of mothers and their children on immersive journeys to communities where women-led NGOs are doing transformational work.

Through their proprietary curriculum, the journeys give children “a seat at the philanthropy table.” Based on the premise that global citizenship isn’t taught, but rather “caught,” these immersive experiences teach from the macro to the micro – covering everything from big picture principles of global impact to practical applications of pursuing purpose with all of your assets, all while building relationships via unprecedented access to critical solutions for both human and planetary health.

“We are not trying to fill the gap in public funding; rather, we seek to identify needs and deploy funds directly. By removing the layers of traditional funding infrastructures and facilitating a proximity-led approach, our philanthropic cohorts can move catalytic capital and sustain programs that are working efficiently and effectively.”

BBeyond: What is the central idea behind AtlasDaughters?

Amy Marks Dornbusch: The idea is to give the next generation a seat at the philanthropy table, not in theory, but in the field. Children learn differently when they can see the work, meet the people doing it and understand the problem in human terms. We are building direct relationships between families and women or women-led initiatives, so that the giving is informed by proximity and relationships as opposed to traditional reporting and facilitation.

BBeyond: So this is not simply about taking families on philanthropic trips?

Amy Marks Dornbusch: No. Our immersive experiences are designed to be supportive not substitutive to due diligence. The purpose is education, relationship-building and smarter deployment of philanthropic capital.  Proximity is an efficiency argument, not an emotional one. Stripping out intermediary layers dramatically reduces the cost of trust-building and builds relationships that are a necessary part of philanthropic infrastructure. Each experience is a critical departure point for building relationships with our partner NGOs and our objective ultimately is to form cohorts of collective funders that will fund the specific project they come to learn about intimately.

Deep rather than wide

The phrase returns often in conversation: deep rather than wide. It is an attractive formulation because it resists the modern philanthropic tendency to speak in vast, flattening categories – climate, gender, health, education – while leaving the donor at a safe altitude above them. Dornbusch is more interested in the granular.

“Donors are culturally and historically conditioned to donate to established charities.

Public funding cuts across the globe have given us an insider’s view into the inefficiencies that can exist in large NGOs. There is also an enormous amount (in the billions of dollars) of funds earmarked for philanthropic capital that are sitting idle in donor advised funds.

We do things differently. The notion that in many cases we do not need more money, we need to be smarter with its deployment. We identify projects, many of them locally-led, that are building solutions that are ripe for investment and prepared to scale.  We go “deep rather than wide”.

We organise one to two trips a year, using a framework of due diligence, identifying how and where we can solve some of the greatest human and planetary challenges our children will inherit.”

AtlasDaughters has achieved some remarkable results applying this concept of “collaborative, collectively moving philanthropic capital”. One million dollars of smart money can go a very long way, as Amy points out.

It has brought solar energy to birthing clinics in Zimbabwe, where it had identified 300 000 maternal deaths due to lack of electricity. This particular solar solution has brought the cost down to a mere $4000 per unit, making it one of the most cost-effective philanthropic deployments in Africa.

Other projects include the extraction and relocation of 1100 at-risk female leaders out of Afghanistan, grassroot-led water conservation educational projects, micro-finance, and the funding of a proof-of- concept plastics elimination project in the South Pacific.

The latter wouldn’t qualify for funding from the green bonds industry as it circumvents the use of plastic altogether. Instead, this small but mighty NGO has developed a patented 100% compostable diaper, along with an entire circular economic system to support it. Once scaled, it could very well become one of the most cost effective plastic elimination programs on the planet.

BBeyond: What does efficient giving mean to you?

Amy Marks Dornbusch: It means removing unnecessary layers where we can, without removing diligence. It means knowing who is actually doing the work and understanding what they need next. Sometimes the most powerful thing is not a vast programme. It is one precise intervention at the right time, with the right people around the table. It can also be sustaining programs that we know are working, but that may have experienced critically damaging cuts to their budgets from public sources.

BBeyond: And the children?

Amy Marks Dornbusch: They arrive without cynicism. That is the extraordinary thing. Adults often come with opinions, assumptions and philanthropic habits. Children come with open eyes. They ask direct questions. They notice details. For them, it can be deeply formative – and, for the adults, deeply cathartic.

The next map

Amy has leveraged her background in entrepreneurship and philanthropy to build AtlasDaughters.

A native of the Bay Area, she spent her early career consulting for Fortune 500 companies, building and operating restaurants, running the family Napa Valley winery, as well as venture funds for her family office. She helped structure the family foundation and raised $50M over 5 years for cancer research.

A creative and dynamic spirit, she is not resting on her laurels, though.

Her ambition is to take the model global, with chapters and cohorts in different countries. That, too, carries both promise and risk. The intimacy of the concept is its strength; scale can dilute intimacy. But if anyone is likely to understand the tension between experience and infrastructure, it is Amy Marks Dornbusch, whose career has moved between precisely those two poles.

www.atlasdaughters.com