Accelerating Disaster Response with GiveDirectly's Nick Allardice - Ep. 287

Welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm Noah Kravitz. Our guest is Nick Allardyce. Nick is president and CEO of GiveDirectly, a global platform that enables donors to send money directly to people who need it most. He's also the former CEO of change.org, the online civic action platform used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Nick's here to talk about his work at the intersection of global poverty, technology, and philanthropy, and how GiveDirectly is using AI and disaster relief and other humanitarian efforts. Nick, welcome to the pod. Thanks so much for taking the time to join. Thanks for having me. So maybe we could start with a little bit of background, for listeners who might not be familiar with GiveDirectly about the organization. I'd love to also ask you about your journey through working with technology and platforms and social movements and and all of the intersection points along that path. So I'll leave it to you if you wanna start with Give directly or if you wanna start with your own background and and work into it. Yeah. Happy to start with a little bit of my own background. Both my parents were social workers. I think that's a bit where I got my values from. Right. And I think I really had this sense of just extraordinary luck, you know, that because of just the accident of where I was born, I had access to education, to health care, to security, to opportunity, and I just was always just incredibly grateful for that. And so because of my parents, I think I had this sense of of service that I wanted to give back. And I started volunteering at nonprofits, and I I wanted to work on the biggest, most urgent problems that humanity faced. Sure. And I found a couple of things when I started doing that. I was definitely inspired by the passion, the care, the dedication that I found from people who were working in those spaces, but I also honestly was a little bit, like, frustrated and disappointed. I found all these, like, small piecemeal solutions that did good, yes, but didn't have, like, a meaningful pathway to scale. Mhmm. I found a lot of bureaucratic inertia that meant many weren't moving with the urgency that I certainly felt that these kind of problems deserved. And I found a lot of top down, I think sometimes pretty paternalistic solutions that were kind of based on feelings and feeling good about what we were doing rather than data about what was actually working. Okay. And so because of all of that, I I found my way into tech, like, building software that empowered people to solve their own problems and then scaling that to hundreds of millions of users. And I kind of became convinced that we could make extraordinary progress on the most important problems in the world simply by equipping people with the resources and technology they needed to …