As with Yee, Earthshot was not on the radar of Kat Rosqueta, the founding executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy. But when she looked more closely, she recognized one of Earthshot’s 2024 finalists, Build up Nepal, which was featured in a center toolkit this year.
“They have surfaced work that our independent analysis found to be worthy of highlighting,” she said, later noting that another 2024 finalist, d.light, won a Wharton School award more than a decade ago, for which her center serves as a partner.
Earthshot is “not capitalized” commensurate with its framing as a moonshot, Rosqueta said, but she sees other potential benefits, as with any prize competition: Earthshot could help attract new funders, identify new grantees, create new funder collaborations and raise public awareness.
Despite those potential upsides, Rosqueta, whose center works with big-donor philanthropy’s top prize platform Lever for Change, also sees prize fatigue in the field. The multitude of differing requirements and sometimes opaque processes can add up to a major burden on nonprofits.