“You know, I've always believed that many of the political and policy arguments we have are about ‘the how’ and not about ‘the what'. I think it is possible to arrive at an agreement on what we want. We want a better Jacksonville, we want a more prosperous Jacksonville. And it's not just about financial wealth, it's about creative wealth, it's about social wealth, it's about our relationships with each other.”
You know that feeling you get when someone is looking at you? You tend to look around to see if your Spidey sense is right. Imagine then if you’re the person doing the looking, but the people you’re observing don’t bother to look up - because they exist in the Communist state of East Germany and are too defeated to return the avid gaze of the high schoolers watching them from the West German side of The Wall. This real encounter in the early 1980s changed Mari Kuraishi’s life trajectory, evoking in her such curiosity that she became a Harvard-trained Sovietologist who later returned to help rebuild the Soviet block after its political dissolution in the early 1990s. Now, Mari is the president of the Jessie Ball duPont Fund and is concentrating her considerable talents to ensure Jacksonville’s people, families and communities are always seen - and served.
Transforming how giving gets done
The concept of crowdsourcing ideas and funding for social impact isn’t new today, thanks in no small part to the roles Mari played both at the World Bank and later at GlobalGiving, the organization she co-founded and presided over for 17 years until her move to the Jessie Ball duPont Fund. In the late 1990s, Mari lead the small Innovation and Corporate Strategy team at the World Bank, and revolutionized how the Bank funded smaller-scale projects with the Development Marketplace. The Marketplace was so successful, it was featured in Harvard Business Review.
Inspired by the impact she could have inside an institution the size of the Bank, in 2002 Mari helped to launch GlobalGiving which tapped into an even larger entity: the internet. Here, Mari empowered people to design the solutions to their own economic problems which GlobalGiving vetted and then featured on their platform for anyone to support financially. This philanthropy model was the first of its kind, and under Mari’s guidance, saw 20,000 projects supported worldwide by over 800,000 donors. It is not surprising that Mari was named in 2011 one of Foreign Policy's top 100 Global Thinkers for "crowdsourcing worldsaving.”
Now as president of the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, Mari will continue to advance entrepreneurship for social good that will change lives not just in Jacksonville, but other geographies that were important to the Fund’s namesake.
The Innovate Jax podcast will introduce you to the Jacksonville change-makers who are propelling our city into a new realm of sophistication. Our goal is to connect you to the people who are leaving their mark on our city today, in hopes that they inspire you to leave your mark tomorrow. Subscribe today and you’ll have fresh new episodes delivered to you each month. And feel free to recommend a guest by dropping us a note at innovatejax@forcura.com.
