BREAKING: Dr. Larry Brilliant to Head New Skoll Urgent Threats Fund

by Nathaniel Whittemore

Published April 14, 2009 @ 05:30PM PT

Dr. Larry Brilliant, former head of Google.org, has just been announced as the leader of the new Skoll Urgent Threats Fund, a $100 million dollar fund chaired by the Skoll Foundation and designed to combat immediate, pressing, and cross-cutting issues including climate change, nuclear proliferation, water scarcity, pandemics and more. From what it sounds like, the fund could be named the "Bring the Whole Damn Party to Get it Done" fund.

The new organization was announced by Jeff Skoll today:

“Over the last few years, it has become increasingly apparent that humanity’s failure to address critical issues like climate change and nuclear proliferation aren’t just making these challenges more difficult; they’re putting life on the planet at risk,” said Skoll. “This new organization is designed to make serious headway on these issues by identifying and supporting the most innovative initiatives and solutions out there. I can’t think of anyone better prepared to shape and lead this effort than Larry Brilliant.”

It seems as like the idea is to leverage the growing pool of social entrepreneurs that the Skoll Foundation has supported in the last few years, the media acumen developed by Skoll's work at Participant Productions, the movie studio behind An Inconvenient Truth and more, and the investment savvy from his Capricorn Investments to take a multi-pronged approach to combating vital challenges.

The devil will be in the details, and it will be interesting to see whether there's some real innovation here, but at first glance this is exciting stuff. I think that separately, the work that Jeff Skoll's various projects have been doing are great, but connected they could be leveraged in a dramatically more powerful way.

I'd love to see the new Urgent Threats Fund play the role of super-charger in a few ways:

• make it easier to hear ground-level voices, harness community-level assets, and diffuse innovations horizontally from community to community without the guiding hand of an international organization
• look to fund collaborations where different actors clearly have different assets that are more powerful combined than apart, in order to reward systemic thinking
• break silos and find mechanisms to convene actors that don't normally talk to one another in order to help make it easier for people doing complimentary work to find one another; please no "social networks" or plenary sessions
• pump university students (not necessarily researchers), particularly undergraduates who are already building movements (and there are a lot of them), and graduate students who are frustrated by disciplinary constraints but feel the immense pressure to silo themselves for future job opportunities

Congrats to Dr. Brilliant for this immense opportunity and Jeff Skoll for his exciting and expansive vision. We'll be following it closely!

To read more, check out the official press release and see the New York Times article by Stephanie Strom. Thanks to the heads up from Jill Finlayson of Social Edge.