Meet InterAction's New Board Chairman: A Social Entrepreneur with a Strong Commitment to People
Should Mercy Corps buy an Indonesian bank? Neal Keny-Guyer was uncertain at first. It was a novel – even crazy – idea that brought huge risk for the NGO he leads.
“I imagined a newspaper headline saying, ‘Mercy Corps’ Bank in Bali Fails,’” he later told BusinessWeek. “I thought of the reaction of our donors to that bit of news.”
But he took a risk, and Mercy Corps bought Bank Andara. Now, five years later, it is a model social innovation achieving scale. The fully-licensed commercial bank exclusively serves Indonesia’s microfinance sector, providing investors with capital and financial and technical services, and the concept is being expanded to the Philippines.
The story is telling of Keny-Guyer, the new chairman of InterAction’s board of directors and a self-identified social entrepreneur. Since joining Mercy Corps in 1994, he has helped propel it into a leading international charity renowned for innovative programs in the 40 countries where it now works. Foreign Policy Magazine recently took note: Keny-Guyer joined its list of the 500 most powerful people on the planet – alongside Coca-Cola CEO and Chair Muhtar Kent and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.
“At one level it feels very silly,” Keny-Guyer said, laughing, when asked what the honor felt like. “Beyond that, I’m proud that somebody thinks that the work of Mercy Corps and other relief and development organizations matters.”
Q&A with Neal Keny-Guyer
Q. Foreign Policy magazine recently named you one of the world’s 500 most powerful people. What does that feel like?
A. At one level it feels very silly, and that four dollars will still buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Beyond that, I’m proud that somebody thinks that the work of Mercy Corps and other relief and development organizations matters.
Q. Your wife, Alissa, is an Oregon State Representative. What do you two talk about at dinner?
A. Our dinner conversations really probably fall into three categories. One, and the most dominant category, is still our kids – and either smiling that we’re all still alive and mostly moving in the right direction. Secondly, around our dog. We have a golden doodle that is the most amazing dog. Third, and I would say especially right now, because the Oregon legislature is in session, and around many of the issues she’s pushing for, and for her those really center around early childhood education, early investment in children, which we all know is so critical to long-term projects.
Q. As CEO of Mercy Corps since 1994, I imagine you’ve traveled quite a bit. Where in the world haven’t you been that you’d like to visit?
A. I’ve been over almost all of Africa…I’ve never been on the North Pole or the South Pole, but I can’t tell you I have a great desire to be there either. I would love to go to base camp at Everest, which I have not done. And I love to fly fish, and I’ve been fly fishing in Russia, and Chile and all over the U.S., but I’ve never been fly fishing in Alaska, so I’ve got to do that.
Q. You’ve said before that everyone should learn about design thinking. Is there a particular resource you’d recommend?
A. There’s a documentary by filmmaker Ralph King that is coming out on PBS this summer; in fact, I just saw it screened and previewed at Stanford. It covers the extreme design class at Stanford, so it follows these students as they try to apply the concepts of design thinking to solve social problems. It shows both the potential, and how these students wrestle with these principles.
Q. Is there anything you would add?
A. I would want to thank my predecessor [on the InterAction board], who provided tremendous leadership. It’s humbling and a bit daunting to follow her.
As the new chair of InterAction’s board, Keny-Guyer is invested more than ever in the work and direction of the larger NGO community. This spring he replaced Kathy Spahn, president and CEO of Helen Keller International, who as chairwoman helped shape InterAction’s strategic partnerships including one with the 1,000 Days alliance. She also engaged member CEOs around the rapidly-changing development landscape, said InterAction President & CEO Samuel A. Worthington.
“By creating a safe space for board and CEO dialogue, Kathy encouraged members to work more closely with each other as they adapted to the challenges of running nonprofit organizations,” Worthington said. “I will miss working with her.”
Worthington is excited to partner with Keny-Guyer in his new capacity as well. “The InterAction community is undergoing fundamental changes, and Neal is the perfect chair to help InterAction and our members evolve with the times,” he said.
A Changing Landscape
Keny-Guyer steps in when the alliance and its 180-plus U.S.-based NGO members are asking hard questions about their roles in a changing relief and development ecosystem that looks very different than the one he entered some 30 years ago.
Back then the Cold War was the big geopolitical backdrop to humanitarian and development work. Now, new economic and political power centers such as Brazil, South Korea, and Turkey are emerging, bringing new players into the humanitarian and development space. Previously, the dominant investment flows were official government assistance but trade and private investment now dwarf aid, Keny-Guyer said. Technology is the third biggest change, said Keny-Guyer, who called mobile phones and the digital platform perhaps “the greatest accelerators to come along since vaccinations.”
Amid these changes, InterAction is perhaps more important than ever, he said.
“What InterAction allows is a platform for the whole international NGO community in the U.S. to come together and look at the bigger pictures,” Keny-Guyer said, “to wrestle with questions of, ‘how do we need to change?’”
The new InterAction board’s first task is to engage in an “honest conversation” on how this different landscape – with new actors and more varied investment flows – affects the effectiveness, relevance and leadership of the NGO community, Keny-Guyer said. One of the key questions facing the board is the aid effectiveness agenda and “raising the game” of every player, aspirations made more possible in this era of big data. Another is how broad the InterAction community should be: Should membership be more limited or should it be expanded to include others, such as the private sector?
A Problem-Solver with an Eye on the Future
Keny-Guyer is an excellent person to steer these conversations, his colleagues said.
“He constructs opportunities and deconstructs problems in a very unusual way,” said Paul Dudley Hart, senior vice president for global partnerships and alliances at Mercy Corps, who has known Keny-Guyer for two decades. “He just has that gift of looking into problems and potential solutions from a different point of a compass.”
Keny-Guyer helped grow Mercy Corps from a small organization into a $300 million operation that has become one of the most important in its sector, said Linda Mason, chairwoman of the Mercy Corps Board of Directors. He did this without ever losing focus on the human dimension of the work, said Mason, who has known Keny-Guyer since the two were at the Yale School of Management.
She saw his deep commitment to people firsthand more than 30 years ago, when she went with Keny-Guyer and another classmate to the Thai-Cambodia border to help with the humanitarian response. When they arrived in June of 1980 the scene was very chaotic: Thousands of refugees were fleeing to camps just being established. Ten days later the Vietnamese attacked, suspecting rebels were hiding inside.
“It was a very frightening experience, and everyone fled,” Mason remembers. “But Neal, his first instinct – I think without even thinking – was to jump into a pick-up truck and drive right into the camps in the opposite direction of the other relief workers.”
A native of Tennessee, Keny-Guyer was shaped by the civil rights era in significant ways. His mother was a person of strong values and beliefs. His other work experience, including working with Save the Children and at-risk youth in Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, influenced who he is and how he operates.
In a 2011 TedxTalk video, Keny-Guyer lays out an approach to social change that begins with listening to local people, includes identifying the change agents in every community, and recognizes the power of social innovation and technology. He was a pioneer in bridging business and public service work, opting to go to business school at a time before others were connecting those paths.
One of his gifts, Dudley Hart said, is that Keny-Guyer does not worry much about the past or spend too much time reorganizing the present. Instead, he is hugely focused on the future.
“My wife, who’s quite fond of him, once asked him, ‘How come you’re always so excited?’” Dudley Hart recalled. “And he said, ‘I just can’t wait to see what’s going to happen tomorrow.’”
Looking forward from his new seat as board chairman, Keny-Guyer sees opportunity for the development and humanitarian assistance community to do better for more people. New players, investment flows, technology and other changes make for a richer, more dynamic landscape.
“That’s a good thing,” he said, “if we can harness it for more coordinated, sustained action.”
By Erin Stock, online coordinator at InterAction
