Briefing No. 49
What we’re reading
On the Greenwood Place Bedside Table
Every Last Girl by Safeena Husain
Safeena Husain is the founder of Educate Girls - a Greenwood Place partner since our foundation in 2017. Working in 24,000 villages in India, since inception Educate Girls have enrolled more than 2m out-of-school girls in education and improved foundational learning for 2.4m children in primary school. Safeena’s book tells the story of how it all happened. "I have never met a girl who said she didn't want to go to school," she says. "Every single girl wants to be able to go.”
Published by Harper Collins India, we have to wait a bit longer for publication in the UK and Europe - but you can borrow our copy from the Greenwood Place library if you ask us. In the meantime, we were delighted to learn that Safeena has been named a TIME Woman of the Year for 2026 and her TIME profile is linked here.
Compassion in healthcare
Can listening drive better patient outcomes? Andrew Bastawrous - founder of another of our long-term partners, Peek Vision - gave a short TED talk recently that we keep thinking about. He describes a patient who came in late for cataract surgery. He listened to her for ten minutes. When she returned after her operation, she didn't mention that she could see. She showed him photographs of her daughter, who had just died. She closed the album and said: "Thank you. You were the only person that listened to me.”
Peek’s newly adapted KPIs drive listening, not just activity - asking eye-health screeners how many stories they remember of the people they've seen. As Andrew says "The measure of a life well lived isn't how much we do, but how much we connect with one another.”
The salt of the earth
We recently watched this documentary portrait of photographer Sebastião Salgado, directed by Wim Wenders. Salgado spent decades bearing witness to the farthest reaches of human experience - poverty, conflict, migration. His photographs, Wenders says, "still move me to tears." And then he came home to his family's land in Brazil and planted two million trees.
listening to whales
60 decibels write a newsletter that we enjoy…. It was from that source (thank you Tom) we learned that nearly a million miles of fibre optic cable snake across the ocean floor and that when sections age out Cornell Lab researchers use them to pick up blue whale calls in the Arctic. It’s not only a very cool fact, but it's shaping up to be a game-changer for marine conservation.
flowers
We are very excited about the newly published How Flowers Made Our World by David George Haskell. Our community member Jeanne Work has just posted a copy to the Greenwood Place office. Haskell's thesis is that flowers are not ornaments. When they evolved 130 million years ago they transformed the planet - not through competition but by offering beauty, nectar and fragrance as gifts to other species, drawing insects, birds and mammals into relationships of mutual dependency that eventually shaped human evolution too. "Thriving worlds grow from cooperation, mediated by beauty."
Jeanne tells us that it’s a mind-blowing - as well as joyful - book. We’re looking forward to reading it.
voices by Max richter
In Voices, music flows through readings of the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 70 languages, with an orchestra playing beneath. Rebecca went with her son, and friends from ClientEarth, to hear Richter, accompanied by Jessie Buckley reading, violinist Rakhi Singh and the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Southbank last week. When Singh's closing solo ended, we all found we had been holding our breaths.
The $4 Billion edtech paradox
"If you put a Teacher, a Minister of Education, a Non-Profit Director, and an Investor in a room to define 'EdTech evidence', you'll get four different answers." The reason for this disconnect is a fundamental diligence divide: those with the contextual expertise and the people with the capital are speaking two entirely different and often incompatible languages. Thank you to Gail Campbell for sharing this sharp and urgent read for anyone working at the intersection of education and philanthropy.
making life happier
Mark Williamson, co-founder and CEO of Action for Happiness is a long-term member of the Greenwood Place community. We supported Action for Happiness in its earliest days and have watched it grow from a start-up to a movement that now has over 780,000 members in 100+ countries.
Drawing on his fifteen years of working closely with leading experts in wellbeing, Mark has written Make Life Happier - sharing simple, proven ways to make life happier for yourself, your loved ones and the wider world. We're excited to read the book when it launches - next week!
AND FINALLY...
Music for Spring - Vivaldi’s Concerto for strings in G minor
This gorgeous piece is from violinist Raki Singh’s playlist. She writes how she loves the energy and life to be found in Baroque music: “It’s interesting how it forces one into a certain physicality of playing. I find, if I’m doing it well, I literally feel like I’m dancing."
community Events
Some of you are joining us in a couple of weeks to talk impact with Safeena Husain of Educate Girls, Tom Adams of 60 decibels and Atti Worku of African Collaborative. We can’t wait.
And a few short weeks later, we’ll be visiting Greenwood Place partners New Horizon Youth Centre and Little Village in Camden with a handful of this year’s Pathways participants. We’re looking forward to reconnecting with Pathways friends then.
HOW CAN WE HELP YOU?
Greenwood Place provides philanthropy support, advice and execution for a small group of strategic philanthropists. We take an entrepreneurial approach to tackling tough social and environmental problems. We work closely with our clients to find the places where they can make the most difference, we support their learning and we partner with them to achieve real, lasting change.
The Greenwood is the place in Shakespeare's plays where characters go to grow, change and learn.