Making Good Famous: Carolina García Jayaram on Why Visibility Is Capital for Social Entrepreneurs

Aparna Hegde packed a bathing suit for her first trip to Miami with the Elevate Prize Foundation. She had never been in the ocean.

Aparna runs ARMMAN, an organization in India that was already reaching hundreds of thousands of women and babies when she won the Elevate Prize. She worked around the clock, seven days a week. Over several days in Miami, the Elevate team kept encouraging her to get in the water, and eventually she did. She now swims regularly at home in India.

The Elevate Prize Foundation treats visibility as capital for social entrepreneurs, and it funds the leader as a whole person. Every winner receives $250,000 for their organization and another $50,000 directly for their personal well-being, along with a serious investment in storytelling.

In this episode of Missions to Movements, part of our in-person CEO series filmed in Atlanta, Georgia, I sat down with Carolina García Jayaram, founding CEO of the Elevate Prize Foundation. I have wanted her in the seat next to me for a long time. We talked about why “making good famous” works, how the foundation funds the whole leader, and what it will take for philanthropy to act with more courage.

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Who Is Carolina García Jayaram?

Carolina García Jayaram has led national organizations for more than two decades. She started in the nonprofit sector many years ago, when, as she put it, “most foundations didn’t really want to get to know you.” The relationship between funder and grantee felt formal and distant.

Today she is the founding CEO of the Elevate Prize Foundation, which was built on the idea of making good famous. Each year the foundation finds social entrepreneurs around the world working on hard problems, in every issue area, and funds both their work and their well-being. Carolina and the foundation’s founder, Joe Deitch, both brought personal practices of reflection and inner work into how the foundation was designed.

Carolina also writes publicly about where philanthropy falls short. Her recent piece in TIME, co-written with Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Abigail Disney, challenged foundations to give with more courage. She is active on LinkedIn and Instagram, where she shares stories from Elevate Prize winners.

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Why Visibility Is Capital for Social Entrepreneurs

Most nonprofit leaders know the problem well: restricted funding leaves almost nothing for marketing and PR. That gap comes from habit. “We’re in a sector that keeps doing things the same traditional way,” she told me. Those habits formed when strategic visibility had far less reach than it does today, and the way funders measure efficiency and ROI hasn’t caught up.

Visibility is a type of funding in its own right. “It’s a value that needs to be not just layered on top of funding, but is actually a type of funding,” she said. Once an organization tries to grow past the founder’s personal network and home community, it has to be seen by people who don’t know it yet. Seven years of Elevate Prize winners have shown her how much faster that growth happens with dedicated investment behind it.

Fame means something different for every organization. Because the Elevate Prize Foundation funds across all issue areas and around the world, the team works out what kind of visibility will move the needle for each winner. For some, that has meant the TIME100 list or People magazine. For others, it means coverage in the biggest newspaper in New Delhi, so the government pays attention. “They don’t need the American people necessarily to know who they are,” Carolina said.

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How Elevate Studios Turns Storytelling Into Results

Elevate Studios launched officially about two years ago at the Sundance Film Festival. Carolina describes it as a formal name for work the foundation had already been doing for five years, with one important change in how it was presented. “We didn’t want to walk in every room as a foundation; we wanted to walk in as a studio,” she said. Showing up as a studio changed how partners responded, and it showed winners that the foundation was making a serious investment in their stories.

The clearest proof so far is Nevertheless, a YouTube series profiling four women leaders who have won the Elevate Prize. It was a relatively small financial investment. In its first year, it drew more than three million views, brought in over 100,000 new YouTube subscribers, and won Telly Awards and Webby Awards.

The most important result was the effect on the four leaders. Each now has a well-told story of her leadership and her organization to use as she grows. The second season, launching soon, focuses on democracy defenders. If your organization has ever debated whether video is worth the budget, Nevertheless gives you a concrete benchmark to bring to that conversation.

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Funding the Whole Leader With $50,000 for Personal Well-Being

Every Elevate Prize winner receives $300,000 in total: $250,000 for the organization and $50,000 for personal well-being. The well-being funds have been part of the foundation’s ethos from day one. Carolina doesn’t love the word “unrestricted,” and she prefers “relationship-based philanthropy” to “trust-based.” “Trust is built by saying, here’s $300,000 with no limits on it,” she said. “And it sends a signal of trust. But that’s not enough.”

The rest of the relationship is built over time. The Elevate team travels with winners, asks about their goals, and gets to know them as people. The foundation tracks friendship as a measure of impact. Carolina is open about the power dynamic between a funder and a grantee, and she finds it easier to address when the funder honors the grantee as a whole person.

Part of that is treating hard seasons as normal. Carolina wants leaders to know that periods of fog, transition, or struggle are nothing to hide from funders, donors, or boards. “We’ve been taught, unfortunately, to hide a lot of that suffering,” she said, “when in fact you can see from any really creative person in the world that that is the fuel.” The whole leader approach asks winners to keep returning to the beginner’s mindset that produced their idea in the first place.

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How Nonprofit Leaders Can Break Out of Burnout Culture

When Carolina first used the name “whole leader,” she meant it as a placeholder. It stuck because winners, journalists, and other funders connected with it right away. She describes the reaction as a kind of permission, as people realized they could talk about the parts of themselves they had been keeping out of their work. The foundation’s first Whole Leader retreat, held this October, filled up as soon as sign-up opened.

That reaction made sense to me. Lisa, the executive director at my first nonprofit job back in 2011, told me on this podcast that in 14 years she had never taken a retreat for herself as a leader. She felt selfish even considering it. Peers finally convinced her to go, and afterward she realized both she and her team needed this every year.

Carolina has seen that ripple effect inside Elevate too. Every staff retreat includes yoga and meditation, though each person has to find their own way of quieting the mind. “You’re closing off so much of your brain to what’s possible when you’re in that fight-or-flight state,” she said. Much of Western work culture treats seven straight days and a 17th cup of coffee as signs of success, and leaders change that by modeling something different.

Aparna Hegde, the ARMMAN founder who got in the ocean in Miami, signed up for the October retreat. For someone who used to work around the clock, taking a full week off is a big step, and Carolina took it as a sign the approach has worked for her. Other winners have brought yoga or breath work to their teams. One winner in Rwanda helped open a ketamine clinic in her hometown to address suffering she saw in her community, a decision she reached on her own.

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Why Philanthropy Needs More Courage and Unrestricted Funding

Carolina co-wrote a piece in TIME with Abigail Disney that called out self-preserving philanthropy, and I loved it the moment I found it on LinkedIn. One line has stayed with me: “The question before us is not whether we have the resources, it’s whether we have the courage to use them and the humility to change how we lead.” The piece pointed out that foundations sit on more than a trillion dollars in assets while barely clearing the legal 5% giving minimum. It called for unrestricted, trust-based funding to become the baseline.

When I asked what stands in the way, Carolina named tradition first, then something more human. Many funders, especially individual donors and families, don’t want to look like they made a mistake or came unprepared. So they take fewer risks than they could. The Elevate Prize Foundation does extensive due diligence on every winner, which gives partners a way to invest in social entrepreneurs without building their own teams to find them.

The response to the article confirmed what Carolina suspected. Many people in philanthropy already wanted to have this conversation. “I’m betting a lot more people feel this way than they don’t, but they’re afraid for whatever number of reasons,” she said. She is also seeing large foundations start to give well above the minimum.

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Advice for New Foundation Leaders Who Want to Change How Things Are Done

I asked Carolina what she would tell someone stepping into a traditional foundation role who has been handed the folder of how things have always been done. Her first piece of advice was to find allies inside the organization. Her second was to find leaders at similar foundations who are already doing things differently, because the head of your foundation may listen to them more readily than to you.

From there, change inside a foundation works like a campaign. Social entrepreneurs often underestimate how much repetition it takes to sell an idea or raise money, and the same is true inside a foundation. You will say the same thing many times, and you need the stamina to keep going. Carolina credited her coach, Creative Kurt, with advice she now passes on: “If you’re disrupting, people are going to feel disrupted.”

For people pleasers, which she says includes many women of her generation, that is hard to accept. “So the advice is get comfortable with the uncomfortable,” she said. She also urged leaders to find peers who will keep them in the fight. “Don’t try to do it alone. It’s not possible.”

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What This Means for Your Organization Right Now

Start with how you talk about your storytelling budget. Restricted grants rarely cover marketing and PR, so make the case for them directly. Carolina’s case for visibility as capital for social entrepreneurs, backed by the Nevertheless results, gives you a concrete example to bring into your next funder conversation. Before you spend anything, decide who actually needs to know about your work: a national audience, a local newspaper, or one government office.

Then look at how your organization treats its leaders. If you’re an executive director, put your own rest on the calendar and let your team see you take it. If you’re a funder or board member, make it clear that a hard season is something your grantees and staff can talk about openly. As Carolina put it, “This is what you’re placing value on; it’s what they’re going to place value on.”

You can follow the Elevate Prize Foundation at elevateprize.org, subscribe to its newsletter, and nominate a grassroots organization for the monthly $25,000 Get Loud award through the foundation’s Instagram. You can connect with Carolina García Jayaram on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Until next time, keep turning your mission into a movement.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Elevate Prize Foundation?

The Elevate Prize Foundation is a philanthropic organization built on the mission of “making good famous.” Led by founding CEO Carolina García Jayaram, it identifies social entrepreneurs around the world working in every issue area. Each Elevate Prize winner receives $250,000 for their organization and $50,000 for personal well-being, for a total of $300,000. The foundation also invests in each winner’s visibility through Elevate Studios, its storytelling arm launched at the Sundance Film Festival.

Why is visibility considered capital for social entrepreneurs?

Carolina García Jayaram, founding CEO of the Elevate Prize Foundation, describes visibility as capital for social entrepreneurs because organizations cannot grow beyond their founder’s immediate network without it. Traditional restricted funding leaves little room for marketing and PR, a practice that formed before strategic visibility had the reach it has today. The Elevate Prize Foundation treats visibility as a type of funding in its own right. What that looks like varies by organization, from the TIME100 list and People magazine to the largest newspaper in New Delhi.

What is the whole leader approach at the Elevate Prize Foundation?

The whole leader approach is the Elevate Prize Foundation’s practice of supporting a social entrepreneur’s personal well-being alongside their organization. Every winner receives $50,000 specifically for personal well-being, separate from organizational funding. Carolina García Jayaram calls the model relationship-based philanthropy, and the foundation tracks friendship with winners as a measure of impact. The foundation held its first Whole Leader retreat in October, and sign-ups filled immediately.

What results did the Elevate Studios series Nevertheless achieve?

Nevertheless is a YouTube series from Elevate Studios that profiles four women leaders who have won the Elevate Prize. In its first year, the series drew more than three million views and brought in over 100,000 new YouTube subscribers. It also won Telly Awards and Webby Awards. A second season focused on democracy defenders is launching next.

What did Carolina García Jayaram and Abigail Disney write about philanthropy?

Carolina García Jayaram co-wrote a piece in TIME with Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Abigail Disney about self-preserving philanthropy. The piece noted that foundations hold more than a trillion dollars in assets while barely clearing the legal 5% giving minimum. It called for unrestricted, trust-based funding to become the baseline. Carolina says the piece led to a wave of outreach from people in philanthropy who wanted to have the same conversation.

What is the Elevate Prize Get Loud award?

The Get Loud award is a monthly $25,000 grant from the Elevate Prize Foundation to a grassroots organization somewhere in the world. Nominations come from the foundation’s followers on Instagram. Carolina García Jayaram describes it as a way to engage the public and help small organizations in the same issue area find each other. Updates are shared through the Elevate Prize Foundation newsletter and social channels.