Then & Now: Minkel on a mission to fund creative thinkers

Editor’s Note: The following story appeared in the June 19 issue of the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal. “Then & Now” is a profile of a past member of the Business Journal’s Forty Under 40 class.

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Karen Minkel lives and works in Fayetteville, but her job has a global impact.

Minkel recently started her second year as the philanthropy director for Lever for Change. Headquartered in Chicago and founded in 2019 as a nonprofit affiliate of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Lever for Change organizes open competitions financed and conceptualized by external donors. The competitions address some of the world’s biggest problems — including racial inequity, gender inequality, lack of access to economic opportunity and climate change — and offer prizes ranging between $10 million and $100 million.

Minkel began working for the organization in April 2022, developing and strengthening relationships with donors and prospects.

“My role is to connect our highly rated proposals to donors who are as excited about them as we are,” she said in a recent interview. “It has been rewarding to work with all of these highly effective teams and help connect them to funders who are invested in their work and want to support them long-term.”

Since its inception, Lever for Change has developed and managed customized challenges on behalf of a variety of funders and their advisers — from high-profile donors, including Pivotal Ventures (Melinda French Gates’ investment and incubation company) to institutional funders like the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, corporate funders such as the LEGO Foundation, as well as philanthropic advisers and new and anonymous donors.

As of June 1, Lever for Change has facilitated over $1.3 billion in grants. $2.5 billion is the goal by 2025. Minkel explained that the organization drives the funding with a new philanthropy model aimed at disrupting the world of grant giving with large-scale, customized challenges to find and fund new ideas from a wide array of creative thinkers — many of whom have been historically marginalized or underrepresented.

Lever for Change connects ultra-high-net-worth donors and institutions with these creative thinkers, facilitating large-scale grants far more significant than what’s typical in philanthropy.

“This model can appeal to many different kinds of funders,” Minkel said. “The appeal is that it’s an opportunity to openly source projects or organizations that align with your area of interest. The evaluation process is open, transparent and rigorous, and funders feel confident giving large gifts because it is such a rigorous process.”

Minkel was a member of the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal’s 2013 Forty Under 40 class. She worked for the city of Fayetteville for seven years (2005-2012), three of those as director of strategic planning.

After that, Minkel worked for the influential Walton Family Foundation for nine years (2012-2021), the final six years as the foundation’s Home Region Program director, focusing on quality-of-life initiatives in Northwest Arkansas and the Delta Region of Arkansas and Mississippi.

Minkel described the job as a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity and an incredible experience. Her departure was amicable, recognizing that she’d reached an inflection point to take a break and explore her “what’s next?”

“I call it a self-funded sabbatical,” she quipped. “And that’s what I did. I hit pause to reset, reflect and think about what [other] possibilities were out there.”

The sabbatical led Minkel and her family to live in New York’s Hudson Valley for a year. That’s where she learned about her current job with Lever for Change.

“It was the first role they advertised as a fully remote position, which piqued my interest,” she said. “I was a judge for one of their Economic Opportunity Challenge [competitions] a few years ago and was impressed by their evaluation process. And I have followed their CEO [Cecilia Conrad] for some time because she is a powerhouse.

“It felt like a wonderful opportunity to work with an organization I admired and think about work globally.”

Minkel moved back to Northwest Arkansas in July 2022. When she isn’t working from her office on Mount Sequoyah in Fayetteville, Minkel spends most of her time with her husband and their two children — a 12-year-old son and a 15-year-old daughter.

“Coming out of COVID, one of our commitments as a family was to keep doing things,” she said. “Keep going to the live events, keep traveling together. And we’ve been doing a bit of that. Our year living in New York was a pretty significant family adventure.”