At The Emory in London, beneath a glass roof and in a room warm with purpose, Gina Sanders celebrated the UK launch of The Spark, a book that places nonprofit founders at the centre of a conversation the wider world rarely pauses long enough to have. The event, hosted by Tatler, brought together leading figures from British philanthropy, society and culture to hear directly from the founders whose work Sanders has spent years championing through Gina’s Collective, her purpose-driven advisory firm.
Sanders, a 29-year veteran of Condé Nast and former President and Chief Executive Officer of Fairchild Media, founded Gina’s Collective in 2018. The firm offers wide-ranging, one-to-one support to technology-driven nonprofits working on some of the world’s most intractable problems: sight loss, mental health, housing, human trafficking. The Spark: Portraits of Purpose, the book that brought the room together, distils those stories, tracing the moment of inspiration that set each founder in motion. ‘I believe the biggest gift any one of us can give or receive is the spark of inspiration,’ Sanders told the audience.
Gina Sanders The Spark and the founders behind the movement
Tatler editor Richard Dennen opened the evening before Sanders introduced six of the Collective’s founders for a panel discussion. Each brought a different problem and a different solution, but a single thread ran between them: the conviction that technology, applied with precision, can reach the people institutions have overlooked.
Jordan Shuff, executive director of Visilant and the Collective’s newest member, set the tone. ‘Our mission is to eliminate avoidable blindness,’ he said. Visilant has built technology that allows a smartphone to screen a patient for eye disease, using AI to identify problems and refer patients to treatment. The organisation has already screened over 50,000 patients across India and is on track to secure clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration by the end of the year, with the ambition of making eye care accessible anywhere.
Alexandria Lafci, a long-standing Collective member, has approached the global housing crisis from two angles. New Story, the nonprofit she co-founded 11 years ago, directly builds housing for families living below the poverty line. More recently, she launched Hometeam Ventures, a venture capital fund investing in technology startups that can help the construction industry build better, faster and more cost-effectively. ‘There are over three billion people around the world who do not have access to adequate housing,’ she said, setting out the scale of what both organisations are working against.
Manu Chopra, CEO and co-founder of Karya, described an organisation that channels the boom in AI development toward communities that have rarely benefited from it. Karya connects underprivileged communities to remote working opportunities from major AI laboratories worldwide. ‘Our communities get trained for 20 to 30 minutes on their smartphones,’ Chopra explained, ‘and we’re able to pay them 20 times the local minimum wage.’ The organisation now engages with more than 200,000 people across seven countries.
Utkarsh Saxena, CEO and co-founder of Adalat AI, described his organisation as ‘the plumbers of the court system’, building technology to reduce backlogs and eliminate paperwork in courts across the global south, with a particular focus on delivering timely justice to vulnerable populations in India. Rob Morris, co-founder of Koko, spoke about digital mental health interventions embedded directly into the platforms young people use daily. Koko has already reached over six million young people in 199 countries, with the aim of serving 300 million interventions worldwide within seven years.
Y Combinator alumni among the Collective’s world-changing founders
What the evening made vivid, and what the book makes legible on the page, is the calibre of the organisations Sanders has gathered around her. Several members of Gina’s Collective are graduates of Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley business accelerator, including AnnieCannons, Koko, and New Story, a thread of rigorous, startup-world thinking running through organisations that exist entirely to serve others.
That rigour was most plainly felt in the final story of the evening. Laura Hackney, co-founder and CEO of AnnieCannons, described an organisation that helps survivors of human trafficking in the United States retrain as software and AI engineers. At Sanders’s invitation, Hackney recalled one woman who had arrived two years ago so traumatised by online exploitation that she struggled to speak on a video call. AnnieCannons worked with her through their full programme, building her confidence alongside her technical skills. On completing the training, she was offered an apprenticeship; the company hired her directly. Within six months of graduating, she was earning six figures and had begun teaching other survivors how to navigate digital exploitation. The room fell silent.
‘These are the kinds of stories that the book tells,’ Sanders said, drawing the discussion to a close. ‘The purpose is just to inspire all of us to take one step and think about what we can do.’ One step, she had said earlier in the evening, can change lives.