Humanitarian Frontiers

🎙️ Erin Reilly is Chief Social Impact Officer and SVP of Social Impact Business at Twilio, where she also runs the business unit behind Twilio.org. More than 30,000 social impact organizations build on Twilio, reaching around 800 million people last year. After six years of conversations between us, she finally came on the show. 🤝 The thread running through this one is partnership. I have long believed that private sector engagement with our sector has to be a handshake, not a handout. The bu...

For the last 70 years, the NGO playbook has remained largely unchanged, but the world around us has shifted. How do we move beyond outdated models to truly empower the people we serve? Joining me today are two pioneers pushing the envelope on that exact question: Eric Kaduru, leading digital and financial inclusion initiatives at CARE, and Darius Golkar—also known as Drew—the force behind Common Lands. In this episode, we move past the buzzwords. We aren’t just talking about ‘innovation’; w...

In Episode 7, Chris Hoffman is joined by Paula Gil Baizan (Principal, Something Meaningful) and Ben Holt (Principal, New and Useful) for a candid conversation on what the humanitarian sector needs next after a brutal 2025: is this a “reset” — or a complete redo? Paula argues we’re running on an outdated operating system built for predictable funding, stable access, and clear mandates — and those assumptions no longer hold. Ben reframes strategic foresight as a tool for action under uncertaint...

In Episode 6, Chris Hoffman is joined by Kenneth Kou (Head of Venture Lab / Crypto for Good Fund, Mercy Corps Ventures) and Simon Meldrum (Innovative Finance, IFRC; Executive Director, Humanitarian Finance Forum) to unpack what “innovative humanitarian finance” actually means—beyond the buzzwords. This is a wide-ranging, practical conversation about where capital can (and can’t) move the needle: why the sector is shifting from narrative to delivery details, what’s broken about the hype ...

In Episode 5, Chris Hoffman is joined by Fran Baker (Director of Sustainability, Social Impact, and Innovation at Arm), Shane O’Connor (Innovation Manager, Emerging Tech, UNICEF Office of Innovation), and Hovig Etyemezian (Head of Innovation, UNHCR) to unpack what makes public–private partnerships actually work in humanitarian innovation. This isn’t a “pilot story.” It’s a practical conversation about aligning incentives, building trust across sectors, and avoiding the trap of partnerships th...