Forward Global Summit 2025 | Nicholas Palahnuk, Forward Global

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Nicholas Palahnuk

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Forward Global

play_circle_outline Addressing mental health challenges in developing countries like Malawi

play_circle_outline Importance of storytelling and communication in amplifying impact and support

play_circle_outline Global Summit: Interdisciplinary Connections, Diverse Contributions, & Leveraging Capital Markets for Social Impact

play_circle_outline Advancing philanthropy through research, community engagement, and collective problem-solving

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Nicholas Palahnuk, Forward Global

Nicholas Palahnuk

Member Forward Global

Analyzing the Intersection of Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy at Forward Global Summit 2025

In this insightful episode of theCUBE, we welcome Nicholas Palahnuk of Forward Global, an entrepreneur and philanthropist from Canada. As a forward-thinking member, Palahnuk brings a unique perspective to the issues discussed at the Global Summit 2025. This session delves into the evolving landscape of philanthropy, guided by innovations and collaborations that transcend traditional boundaries.

Nicholas Palahnuk, an esteemed member of Forward Global... Read more

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What prompted you to shift your priorities towards addressing mental health care needs in developing countries? add

What organization have you been partnering with and where are they expanding their work? add

What are some considerations for leveraging philanthropic capital within the context of overall capital markets? add

What are some ways to leverage capital to have an outsized impact, especially in local communities? add

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Nicholas Palahnuk, Forward Global

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>> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE. We're here in Los Angeles for the Forward Global Summit 2025. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Nick Palahnuk is here. He's from Canada and he's an entrepreneur and a philanthropist. Nick, great to have you on.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Thank you.

>> We're winding down the second day of the event. Great event. All the best people are here. Cross-section entrepreneurs, philanthropists, scientists, thinkers, doers, builders. We even had a lawyer on here earlier.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yes.

>> Susan McCormick.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Susan, yeah.

>> She's amazing.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah.

>> But this innovation and partnerships, community, a lot of activation around new systems, this has been a big theme. So what's your reaction to the event so far?

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> It's been amazing. I mean, the sidebar conversations that have been happening are incredible. I think when you get this many people together with all these different lenses coming together in one place, you have a lot of connection. And that's what's been amazing is seeing all those sidebar conversations and even just hearing them as you're walking down the hall and people connecting with each other. I mean, it's just a buzz. So it's pretty neat to be a part of it.

>> The Canadian Contingent has been great. We had great conversations. Also, you're seeing a lot of global discussions around freedom fighters, a lot of things around democracy.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah.

>> But one of the things that jumped out at me, and I'm glad you're on because entrepreneurship is a theme that's in here too. It's not like a main theme like democracy, but you're starting to see the participation and contribution from people that are, I would say, entrepreneurial philanthropists or anyone just contributing. You're doing both, so explain your story. You have a foundation and you're an entrepreneur, you got a platform.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah.

>> Take us through. It's exciting.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah, yeah. So I set up a foundation years ago in really looking at targeting mental health challenges. And being in the financial sector, I was very interested in doing a lot of planning work with the foundation, how much is going in, how much is going out, building multi-year plans, and that was giving me this idea that, "Hey, we could probably make this a lot more efficient." And so we were building out some spreadsheets and custom stuff and that led us to say, "Well, could we do something for the whole sector that could actually nudge people into making these long-term plans?" And really using the financial sector as a jumping off point to do so. So being able to get this type of a mentality embedded in the financial ecosystem that not all clients want to just accumulate wealth, there are people like me and my clients that want to actually give that back to society. And so that's where this came out of, you know?

>> So the problem that you were solving was, what, money coming in or management of deploying?

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah.

>> What was the core? Or was it two-sided?

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Just lack of planning. So when you think about financial planning and you think about wealth management, we have plans. We want to save for retirement, we want to gift assets to children, we want to do these things that really are wealth accumulation or wealth preservation strategies. Philanthropy is a divestiture or a movement of your power and your capital out into society, a spending out or a spending down of assets. And so that's something that the financial sector is not set up to perform. We don't have the tools and resources to do that. And so it really is, well, I guess you're going to spend these assets, but there's no plan to do so. So that's where we're solving for that and getting organized around it, so you have a professional plan.

>> Can you give an example?

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah. So let's say you set up a foundation and you're really interested in philanthropy and there's a sum of money in that foundation, what is the five-year plan of how much you should grant out from it? And how much is going to come in the next transaction that you might have with your private company? What's a sustainable granting plan? Or do you want that granting to end by the time you're in your 80s? So how much should be granted out on an annual basis? And should you increase your granting with inflation? Should you have multi-year commitments to charities or maybe just one-off commitments? So it's answering those questions of, how do you actually do it?

>> What's it like to get into a foundation and deal with some of the incumbent mindsets or structures? One of the things we talked with Susan McCormick about was she called it scaffolding. And you had scaffolding, I called it horses for courses. You see that, but if you're a small business, you don't want to scale, you're self-funded, cash flow positive, looking good. I want to build the next big thing, I need some R&D.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah.

>> And so you have this different corporate structures. Philanthropy seems to be old and outdated, at least... Let me rephrase. Philanthropy's changing and it's moving from the old way to the new way. And the new way is cool in the sense that it's more systematic. The game is still the same, but there's new things happening.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah.

>> How would you describe that transition from the old, I won't say slow-moving, but in some cases? It was slower, it's faster now.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah. I would say that sometimes people feel that they're boxed into this set of rules based on the bylaws of a foundation. So maybe some stale mentality about, "This is how we're going to work. We're going to not encroach on our capital, we're going to grant out this percentage each year, and this is the way that it's always been." But the reality is that people that are on boards can make decisions to change bylaws. We can change these things. These are not set in stone very often. And so I think when people are thinking about their options, now we have this opportunity to actually challenge the status quo. And so I think, to your point, people are becoming more energized to do things that are different, but they have to understand their options and they do have options to change. Just because if something's been the same way for 50 years in a family foundation, doesn't mean it has to always be that way.

>> So who's your target customer for the software platform?

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah, yeah, so we're hoping that the financial sector will actually use the software more proactively with clients so that they're actually offering...

>> Like who? Like advisors?

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah, advisors. So firms, large banks, large wealth management firms, that they'll actually embrace this concept of servicing clients that say, "I want to distribute assets. I have enough of my own wealth to cover myself, and now I want to actually give the rest back to society in creative ways."

>> It's like Venmo.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah.

>> Press a button. It's oversimplifying it, but that's the value. You're making it easier to onboard that process.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah.

>> That's the gap you fill.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah, and just make a more professional plan and really treat it...

>> That's actually great....

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> as you would any kind of financial modeling. If you're thinking about a retirement, if you're thinking about gifting large assets to children, we wouldn't do this without a model and without a very complex set of analyses.

>> So you're increasing the TAM, basically, for donations.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah.

>> It's like a power law, you get the long tail.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> And a lot of people too don't understand the capacity that they have. So for example, if you have someone that you sit down and say, "Well, if you were to grant out this much from your fund, this is where you're going to end up being in the fund in 20 years," they don't understand that that's actually going to grow and accumulate. And so if we actually say, "Okay, well, this is the amount you'd have to grant out," that's powerful information.

>> Got it. All right, let's talk about some of the work you're doing around mental health. You brought that up earlier. I looked at some of the stats on the Pew Research session I went to yesterday. It was about democracy, but it was good to see how they organized. There's obviously money in politics, that's the top line. Everyone's talking about that. But there is a mental health crisis. We're seeing a lot of discussions around if you could have gotten involved in social media earlier, and not regulate, maybe put some guardrails around, but you're seeing AI built systems where I heard a stat where someone was saying that teenagers are having their first sexual experience with bots and artificial intelligence, which is weird, but okay, I guess that's the culture shift. But in general, you start to see a lot more impact from, say, social media. Seeing anxiety up in schools.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah.

>> Bipolar, more spectrum kind of numbers that we've never seen before. I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not an expert on this, so take me through some of the things that you're seeing and what are some of the things you're directing resource at?

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> So when I started out, and I have a personal experience, my father committed suicide, and so I had a really difficult time looking at the mental health situation in Canada and people were lacking access to care and there were a lot of structural issues. However, when I started to go down this path and I was in Malawi in East Africa, I started to recognize that people there, I was there visiting a girls' education NGO, realized that they actually have a significant lack of support. Zero organizations were operating in Malawi with a mental health lens. And so what we realized is that there was this very basic need in developing countries for access to mental health care. And so my priorities shifted to go towards that direction to say there are actually needs that are being completely unfulfilled in the emerging world.

>> Just staff or just resource?

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Resources. There's no programs, there were no group therapy programs, there was no one-on-one. There are two psychologists in all of Malawi, this country in East Africa, for over 20 million people, so there's a lot of...

>> Tough to get an appointment there.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah. And it was difficult to hear local leaders there say this is an area that funders have continuously unfunded. They have not viewed this as a priority. Where they're viewing what their lens of impact is for the country, that is where they're funding. And so it was very difficult to hear leaders say, "Yeah, we just never receive..."

>> So they saw the priority?

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yes.

>> And external did not?

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah. So I met with politicians, I met with senior folks within the country that said... And community leaders, church leaders even that were saying, "Yeah, we are being given people, women that are depressed and they're suicidal and there's no programs for us to support." So that was where I realized in Canada where we're funding, there are issues, but there are really basic problems to solve in countries where there just simply hasn't been any funding at all. And so that's where I've

>> What are some of the things you're working on now? Can you share any projects that you like where you're directing the problem?

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah, so in Malawian in specific, we talked to folks and said, "How could we co-create something that would work really well within the country's context?" And so we worked with this young woman, Twisile Kalinga, she's a PhD student on a Fulbright scholarship in the US, she's Malawian, and said, "What are different things that can work?" So with Twisile's help, our foundation funded a pilot program in Malawi of another organization that was working really well in Uganda and brought their methodology to Malawi. And we started a pilot program last year and 2,400 women went through it. The success was very, very strong because it was local leaders that instituted it and used local community health workers to deliver, so it was very much localized and...

>> Local is big for you.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah, I think that you can't come in with your lens and say, "This is how I think this problem should be solved." That's ridiculous. So having community co-create this and say, "This is what we want..."

>> So go local and localize are two different things. Local means the community is involved, localized means tailor it to the country.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Localized meaning the leadership, right? It's like the decision making. So instead of it being, "Okay, well, this is how we're going to decide what the budget should look like, what the regions should look like. This is our grand plan for it," is to say, "No, this is localized leadership," to say, "What do you think is the best solution here? How can we support? How can we provide some of the resources that are missing, whether it be connections or financial resources to be able to make that happen?"

>> How about Forward Global, what do you think about the organization from an innovation standpoint? What jumps out at you on Forward Global, their mission? What's different about it?

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah, I think the quality of the membership. And so when you look at the types of individuals that are within the group, everyone is really passionate about what they're doing. And so you have a lot of really plugged in members versus it being something that's more off the side of your desk. People are really, really passionate about what they're doing. And so I find whenever I meet a member, it's a different level of energy that you get, and that's a very exciting thing to be a part of.

>> What's your takeaway from the show? The show. It's not a show, this is a show.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah.

>> Conference.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> My takeaway really is that we have a lot of storytelling to do about the work that we're doing. So for example, the work in Malawi, if we want to be able to really get the message out what we're doing and be able to amplify it, then we need to understand what the story is that we're telling and be able to get people to come alongside that and really be able to support.

>> On your project, scope the deployment. Is it one place? Is it expanding? How do people get involved? Put a plug in.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah, so Strong Minds is the organization that we've been partnering with. They're moving all through East Africa, so there's a lot of opportunity for growth. And it's proven it's a process that really is working in East Africa.

>> Awesome. And plans? Your focus for your next year? What's the goal?

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> The hope is that the pilot project will turn into something more long-term and staying. There is a memorandum of understanding with the government that we can operate in Malawi and do this project, so hopefully we'll be able to expand to other regions within the country and see how that goes.

>> Has there been any parts of this event here at Forward Global? I mean, storytelling makes movements. I totally love that one. Any other sound bites that's going to stick with you, that resonates, or common theme?

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah, I think the theme of storytelling, it really resonates when you think about the importance of communicating what you're doing. I think that's the theme that I'm walking away with, is that we all need to tell a story, and that if we want to get support and really be able to reflect back to the community around us, what we're doing, we need to be able to tell that story.

>> Yeah. I think they're innovating around this idea, at least my opinion is my first time here is that they identified an interdisciplinary connection point.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Totally.

>> Entrepreneurs. You're multiple threats, entrepreneur and philanthropist, but they have diverse people here that are contributing together.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah.

>> It's not just the money.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> And that's so important. Yes, and it's so important. I mean, Susan McCormick, like we said, from a legal standpoint, there are so many different lenses that we need to look at problems. One of the sound bites I picked up from her is, one quarter of a percent is the amount of capital allocated to philanthropy within the context of the overall capital markets. It's a quarter of a percent. So when you think about the lever...

>> And the problem got bigger

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah, but then how do you lever that? Do you do research? Do you fund research that can then be put in the hands of capital markets participants? How do you lever up that capital to have an outsized impact? But getting that perspective, I don't think us in a chamber without these other folks would be able to have that.

>> Of course. We love the journalism conversation because we are pushing the envelope, theCUBE, but I'm glad to see that the local...

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah.

>> Local community is, I'll tell you, it's going to probably rise to be one of the most important concepts in the next decade as change happens.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah.

>> Connective tissue around the core things are key.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> For sure. And listening to local stories and what really matters, what people need in Stockton or Fresno or or Addis Ababa, understanding what local issues are and listening to stories is so important.

>> Yeah.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah.

>> Nick, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Thank you.

>> Really appreciate it.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah.

>> Thanks for sharing.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah, thank you so much.

>> Congratulations on both fronts.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Thank you.

>> On three fonts, project momentum, the startup, and obviously deploying capital.

Nicholas Palahnuk

>> Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much.

>> All right, I'm John Furrier here at theCUBE. We're here at the Forward Global. The leaders are getting together. There's excitement, there's connection, there's community. More importantly, the systems are changing and it's a whole new way of doing things. The game is still the same, make the world a better place. We're doing our part. Thanks for watching.