In 2013 I was living in an ashram in India, practicing yoga and meditation, living each daylight hour in focused discipline. As that time came to a close, I got a call from a mentor, who was working at the Gates Foundation. She asked if I’d come on a short contract to help design a performance partnership program for internal teams.
So, from an ashram in India, I found myself inside one of the world’s largest foundations.
I had beginner’s mind. I was also positioned to observe something rare. I was sitting in on team meetings across the entire organization, from Global Health to Policy & Advocacy. My job was to listen, so I did.
What I noticed was startling. One team would be struggling with an issue, and another had already solved it - again and again, but they weren’t talking to each other. The knowledge was right there, trapped in silos. It felt too obvious to say out loud, but it hit me hard: there was no system in place to support lateral collaboration inside even the most well-resourced institutions.
What makes collaboration work?
We’re all using the same words, but we don’t mean the same thing, and in that confusion, we’re missing collaboration that could transform what is considered to be “just the way of the world”.
I began researching: what makes collaboration successful? Why don’t people do it more? And how can we design incentives that make it easier?
In my next assignment at Gates, I was with the vaccine development team. Part of my job was to facilitate a collaboration between the WHO and the IHME. The Global Burdens of Disease Estimates indicate how many people are affected by every ailment - and have significant funding and policy implications. The results of this report between the two of them were greatly misaligned and the data was showing huge gaps.
So we made an attempt to bring them together. At first, it was hostile – no one wanted to concede anything. But the breakthrough came thanks to a neutral facilitator. Someone who wasn’t on either side, but could hold the space and move toward a unified plan.
Once they started talking, they realized their framework distinctions were different. They had never plugged each other’s data into the other’s models. So they tried it. And the report became stronger. They’ve met every year since. What began as a funder-mandated meeting became a trusted collaboration that amplified their desired outcome.
That experience taught me something vital: with the right incentives and the right support, even “rivals” can become partners. But the structure matters.
About Soaro
For the past twelve years, I’ve been designing Soaro – the Shared Outcome Algorithm – as one such design. It is not a platform that serves “beneficiaries” at a distance. It is a living infrastructure co-created with those investing capital, those most affected by its flow, those working tirelessly in between.
Here’s how I often explain Soaro in practice.
Let’s say a foundation in Seattle wants to improve girls’ education. They fund schools in two places – Willoa, Peru, and a village in the Kondoa District of Tanzania. The schools are built. Teachers are hired. Supplies are delivered. But attendance stays low.
Why? In Peru, girls are staying home to care for siblings after maternal deaths. In Tanzania, they’re gathering water and fuel. The barriers are completely different. So, the solutions have to be different too. And they might involve partners the education funder hadn’t considered: health clinics, clean water providers, local businesses.
No matter how many schools are built, the desired outcome of full attendance is out of reach until these seemingly separate sectors are addressed - a locally specific sequence is necessary. And the correlation between them is not just “nice” to acknowledge - rather the education foundation’s success hinges on that of these seemingly disparate sectors.
Soaro makes those connections visible. It makes interdependence legible. It helps organizations say: “We can’t succeed in isolation. Let’s find the ones who are working on the thing we need – and help each other win, in service of this earth.”
Soaro is infrastructure for collaboration. It helps funders find and vet local partners. It helps organizations and compassionate individuals define their goals, align their resources, and see where they intersect with others.
It provides real-time feedback tools. It offers neutral facilitation—sometimes human, sometimes AI-powered. And it’s designed around a shared language—the Soaro 5: Desired Outcome, Desired Input, Current Input, Current Output, and Resource Offerings.
By making those things visible and matchable, Soaro turns intention into coordination. It brings ease to a system weighed down by duplication, opacity, and silos.
Building on What Works
The idea of asset mapping isn’t new – frameworks like the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) model, developed by John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann in the 1980s, have long emphasized the importance of identifying existing community strengths rather than just needs. What Soaro does is take that wisdom and make it actionable at scale.
It doesn’t just catalog assets – it connects them. Soaro helps communities and organizations map both needs and offerings, surfacing resources that often remain invisible: a truck that’s idle three days a week, a midwife with extra time, a youth leader with access to a recording studio. These are more than line items – they’re leverage points. By making these visible and matchable in real time, Soaro creates the conditions for coordination to emerge naturally, turning scattered potential into collaborative power.
A prerequisite to any dignified system of resource mapping is the recognition that people traditionally labeled as “recipients” are themselves primary sources of relational intelligence, adaptive skill, and effective solutions – often with a comparative advantage rooted in lived proximity, trust, and real stakes in the outcome.
The urgency that moves a mother toward water before dawn is not the same as a quarterly planning cycle in Geneva. And yet, much of our current architecture continues to privilege distance over immediacy, and abstraction over lived reality.
The vision is simple: make interdependence visible. Make collaboration practical. And make local leadership the default – not the exception.
If we want to realize a world in which every life is valued – not rhetorically but materially – we need an infrastructure that can carry that vision. One that holds the weight of our principles in practice.
We already have the tools. We already have the stories. What we need now is structure.That’s what Soaro is designed to be: nervous system for a world that’s ready to heal.
