Solving the World's Greatest Problems

Giving your child a phone does not give your child access to the world. It gives the world access to your child. The apps are engineered to hold attention, and the same design that keeps a kid scrolling is the design predators use to reach them. A 1996 law called Section 230 means the platforms owe your family almost nothing when it goes wrong.

The platforms that profit from exploitation run like any business: revenue lines, marketing departments, a product to sell. The product is a person. Scarlet Hope fights it at the same scale. Their team uses text outreach to reach ten times the women they could meet in person, and since launching has sent more than 17,000 messages and engaged over 2,000 women with hope and real resources. The first reply came five minutes after a text to 500 people: "I am being trafficked. Can you help?" Rachelle Starr's ask is pointed. The church has to move from writing checks to getting in the fight. Follow Rachelle Starr and Scarlet Hope. The full story is live now on our YouTube channel.

"I am being trafficked. Can you help?" That reply came five minutes after Rachelle Starr 's team sent a single text to 500 women. Two hours later the woman was in Scarlet Hope's resource center in Louisville. She had been trafficked for eight years, had left her trafficker the night before, and had prayed for one reason to stay alive. The text reached her at 8 the next morning. The part worth studying is how it reached her. Scarlet Hope uses a tool called Freedom Signal that scrapes sex-for-sale ads in a zip code, compiles the phone numbers, and messages them. Microsoft built it in a hackathon and let it sit. Scarlet Hope acquired it and put it to work. In one hour of outreach the team can reach ten times the women a strip club visit ever could, and it now sends tens of thousands of messages a week. The lesson for anyone building or funding this work is about proximity. Reach used to cap out at how many rooms you could walk into. A tool like this lifts the cap without losing the personal invitation that makes someone reply. That is how a woman invisible to every system for eight years got found in five minutes. Scarlet Hope is one of the voices we are learning from. Follow Rachelle Starr to learn more.

89 percent of women in the sex industry want out. They do not believe there is a door. That number comes from Rachelle Starr , who has spent years walking into strip clubs with home-cooked meals and walking women out of that life. The lie that keeps them in is that they chose this and can leave anytime. Most never chose it, and most cannot see a way out. Follow Scarlet Hope to learn more.

Every wealthy nation shares one trait before its institutions, before its markets, before its technology: cheap, abundant energy. It's the upstream input behind almost everything we call progress. Jobs. Health outcomes. Education. Mobility. Take the energy away and everything falls apart. Isaiah Taylor is testing that premise for real. From an empty site, his company Valar Atomics took its first reactor to criticality in about ten months, then used it to power an Nvidia AI chip. Their first working unit.  He's not doing it because energy is a good business. He's doing it because he believes God is on a rescue mission to lift the world's poorest, and cheap electricity is one of the clearest paths that movement runs through. The argument is old. The proof keeps arriving: nothing in history has moved more people out of poverty than cheap energy. What would change in the places you care about if energy stopped being the constraint?

America has started construction on only two new nuclear reactors since 1978. China has more nuclear power under construction than the rest of the world combined. Isaiah Taylor had read every reactor design he could find by middle school. His great-grandfather was a Manhattan Project scientist. His grandmother was born in the Secret City. He assumed someone had nuclear covered. Then he looked, and no one did. So he founded Valar Atomics. His team designed, built, and commissioned its first full-scale unit in 10 months, and named it Ward Zero after the great-grandfather who started the family's story. They're now working with the government of the Philippines, a nation of 7,000 islands running largely on imported energy. The claim underneath the whole film: nothing in history has pulled more people out of poverty than cheap energy. It's the industry that powers every other industry. Jobs, livelihoods, security for families. All of it sits downstream. Isaiah believes God is on a rescue mission and pulls His people into it. This is what that looks like in hard tech. 🔗 Learn more at solving.org 💰 SWGP Giving Funds: solving.org/about-funds

80% of Uganda's 50 million people identify as Christian. The workplace tells a different story. Bribery for grades. Sexual favors for opportunity. Workers paying recruiters for jobs. It starts in university and never stops. Elizabeth Ntege founded NFT Consult to fix the pipeline. A human resource management firm focused on one thing: dignified work. The math matters. Every person employed on the African continent supports six others. A single placement changes an entire household. For 18 years, NFT Consult operated in one country. No expansion. Revenue flat. Two years ago, Elizabeth partnered with MasterCard Foundation. The company expanded to six new countries, doubled its footprint, and found revenue growth she had been chasing for nearly two decades. Her operating principle is unusual for a CEO. She calls God her co-CEO. Starts every morning in prayer, not as ritual, but as a strategy meeting. "You wouldn't skip 50% of meetings with your co-founder," she says. "Why would you do it with God?" NFT Consult focuses on placing young women graduates with small businesses who want to invest in talent but can't afford payroll. The program covers salaries for a full year, bridging the gap between education and employment. Some associates came in off the streets. Some with substance abuse issues. The work addresses all of it. Elizabeth's reputation precedes her. People have told her: "I don't like Christians, but I think I like you." No sermons. No slogans. The marketplace as mission field. 🔗 Learn more at solving.org/joblessness

More choice was supposed to make life better. Open Netflix: thousands of shows. Open Amazon: millions of products. Open Spotify: 100 million songs. Open the stock market: thousands of companies. Open the nonprofit world: more than 1.8 million organizations in the U.S. alone. We’re living in the age of unlimited options. Instead of better, it often leaves us overwhelmed and paralyzed. I think we spend more time stuck there than anywhere else. But even if we get through that gate we can spend more time comparing than committing. More time researching than acting. We keep waiting for the perfect answer, the perfect investment, the perfect opportunity. But progress rarely comes from perfect choices. It comes from making thoughtful decisions, staying the course, and learning along the way. We’ve felt this in investing. Some days it seems like there are endless stocks to analyze and endless opinions about what will outperform next. The same is true in generosity. With so many worthy causes, many people end up giving less not because they care less, but because they don’t know where to begin. One of the greatest gifts we can create isn’t more options. It’s clarity. The leaders and organizations that win the next decade won’t simply provide more choices. They’ll help people make better ones. That’s what we’re endeavoring to do with Solving the World's Greatest Problems. In a world drowning in information, clarity becomes one of the most valuable unlocks of our time.