On a fundraising trip earlier this year, a donor stared listlessly out the floor-to-ceiling windows of her 17th floor office onto the Singapore skyline as we presented the results of a year-long mixed methods research evaluation. When it came time for the Q&A she muttered something about causality being our sector’s “white whale,” and spun around quickly in her chair ending the meeting.
The meeting was scheduled for an hour. She stopped us after 35 minutes and thanked us for our time. Rejection is pretty common in our line of work, so I wasn’t phased. I was more worried about how our program manager would take it, this was her first time fundraising with us in Singapore. She had fumbled two questions from donors earlier in the day about cost-per beneficiary and when we got up to leave she looked as though she’d seen a ghost.
As we entered the hallway the donor pulled me aside and let the rest of the team walk to the elevator.
“If I give you $100,000 USD will you seed fund the next generation of 1000 Days Fund organizations. You know better than I do who to back.”
I was stunned. I was shocked. I chewed my lip. I nodded my head. I never nod my head. Anyone who knows me knows I always have some witty rejoinder locked and loaded— a quick retort just waiting in my back pocket. But not this time. This time I was at a loss for words.
The next morning the donor explained over coffee that this was her version of scale. She wanted to back organizations that had been through hell and made it out the other side. But she didn’t want to cut us a check, so much as have me find the next generation of founders and CEOs, and then make sure they had the budgets, boards, strategies and KPIs to create leverage. She wanted five 1000 Days Funds operating on six different islands in Indonesia. She didn’t want to have one big organization running on $10 million USD, she offered an alternative, a half dozen maternal health and malnutrition organizations running on $2 million USD. She didn’t want scale so much as leverage. I loved it. I was sold.
We agreed that for the next 5 years we would cut unrestricted checks of $20,000 to founders and CEOs of maternal malnutrition and community health programs with the objective of having a dozen 2 million organizations by 2030.
Sneaky scale, she called it. I call it Black Licorice.
Across Indonesia, too many frontline NGOs working to solve maternal malnutrition remain overlooked—chronically underfunded, locally relevant but globally invisible, and struggling to build the governance needed for lasting impact, scale and sustainability. The talent is there: scrappy, determined founders with firsthand knowledge of their communities and an unwavering commitment to change. But in a sector too often structured around old networks and narrow definitions of “readiness,” these leaders face an uphill battle to earn the trust, funding, and mentorship they need to scale solutions.
The status quo isn’t working. Major funding rarely reaches early-stage leaders, meaning bold ideas rarely leave their hometowns, while most of Indonesia—Sumatra, Sulawesi, Papua—are left without credible, accountable organizations able to drive real progress. Systemic barriers—not a lack of vision or grit—stall Indonesia’s next generation of founders and innovators.
Australia currently spends about USD 7,000–7,500 per person per year on health when adjusted for purchasing power (PPP). That is more than ten times Indonesia’s per capita health spending in PPP terms. Do we really expect the Indonesian government to be the payer and the doer when it comes to scale? The math just never maths. What if instead of being obsessed with scale and the government as the payer and the doer, we started to look to organizations like Community Health Impact Coalition and design for leverage...tipping the scales...rather than continuing to believe the fairytale that scale will solve our problems.
What the sector needs now is a new playbook—one that intentionally bets on emerging leaders, provides them with capital, coaching, and governance tools, and connects them into a pipeline of peer organizations committed to Singapore-level standards. Only by investing early and sharing risk can we help these founders build organizations capable of charting their own course—and, in turn, shift the system to serve millions more women and children with dignity and effectiveness.
The Black Licorice Fund will spark Indonesia’s first homegrown wave of mission-driven founders. We will commit $20,000 of capital early to help bring other investors on board. This helps steer more resources to founders and funds that aren’t getting the attention and investment they deserve. We're building a world where local founders have the same scaffolding, trust, and access to donors that the global darlings take for granted.
Unlike other fellowships, we don’t push scale for the sake of scale. We are focused on growing the next generation of Indonesian founders focused on maternal malnutrition and first 1000 days.
By 2030, the Black Licorice Fund (a 1000 Days Fund venture) will have seeded 25 Indonesian-led organizations tackling maternal malnutrition and stunting and in doing so, rewrite the rules of how global development discovers and funds talented founders. The model flips the donor script: instead of waiting for permission or external validation, established nonprofits like the 1000 Days Fund will fund the future, channeling their own unrestricted budgets to back early-stage local founders long before big philanthropy can.
These founders—coached, mentored, and connected through the Black Licorice—will form Indonesia’s first tight-knit ecosystem of maternal health innovators: a peer-driven network capable of influencing national systems and donor priorities. Some will scale to Skoll or Mulago; others will remain small and insurgent by design. But their collective impact will prove something radical—that you don’t need foreign money or institutional gatekeepers to build lasting systems change. You just need the courage to bet on your own.