November 2025 Update
This Fall, we concluded the USIT Foundation’s fifth giving cycle. Our donation of $130,000 was distributed to eleven nonprofits, including five new organizations sourced in 2025. Since our inception five years ago, we have donated over half a million dollars to high-quality charities. Thank you to everyone who has contributed their time, energy, and resources in getting us to this milestone!
Looking ahead, we expect to accelerate our institutional capacity building for impact generation. This includes continuing to strive for greater accuracy and thoughtfulness in our giving processes, as well as expanding our sphere of influence in redirecting philanthropic dollars to great interventions.
This year, the USIT Foundation is trialing a partnership with the Canfield Family Foundation. We are conducting a philanthropic diligence process for their giving, which will be focused on interventions based in Central Texas. You can read more about Phil and Mary Beth Canfield’s background and $20 million gift to McCombs in 2019 here. We are excited to incorporate our research and impact quantification methods to support their approach – without any changes to the USIT Foundation’s core mission. Please reach out with any questions, and we look forward to sharing more about this collaboration in future newsletters.
Special Announcement: Manideep Ravi’s Upcoming Charity Boxing Match
On November 6th, Manideep Ravi (class of 2016) will be fighting in the Haymakers for Hope boxing match to “knock out cancer.” Over the past months, Manideep has been working with Dinesh Elanchezhian (class of 2026) in a PIT-style process to identify the cancer charity recipient of his fundraising (in addition to training!). Dinesh is a Computational Biology and Economics major researching colorectal cancer, community mental health infrastructure, and biological machine learning. He was PIT’s Director of Philanthropy last year. See below for reflections from Manideep and check out his event page here.
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When we first reached out to alumni to participate in the Giving Pledge, one of the core premises of the organization was that whether a dollar goes to a non-profit or for-profit entity, we are taking a view on value. For the former, it was too often that individual donations were driven more by emotions, recency bias, and marketing savvy, without regard for what was actually being done with the money and to what end.
The opportunity Haymakers for Hope gave Dinesh and myself was a way to evaluate and raise money for effective charities within the often opaque cancer charity space. Through applying a PIT-style investment process, we discovered that the deceptively simple act of providing meals that are nutritionally tailored to the patient had a disproportionate impact on outcomes and quality of life. We have selected In God’s Love We Deliver, a non-sectarian 501©3 charity focused on providing medically tailored meals to cancer and other chronic disease patients. They have delivered over 4 million meals serving close to 16,000 patients in New York City and are growing. We have raised over $25,000 for this charity and invite you to donate as well!
2025-26 Giving Cycle
Our 2025-2026 Giving Cycle kicked off in September. PIT student analysts hit the ground running, with a strong showing during new member recruiting (140 applications and 8 new Junior Analysts). This year, our analysts will source within the verticals of economic mobility, environment, and recidivism, along with a special Canfield vertical.
If you are interested in participating in our student mentorship program, please reach out to alumni@usitfoundation.org.
The Philanthropy Investment Team is 27 analysts strong and held its first-ever retreat this October.
Thank you to Harvey Powers, Eddie Wu, and Nilay Gandhi for their contributions to the 2024-2025 Giving Committee. They are rolling off the Giving Committee due to the conclusion of their terms, but will continue to be engaged with the USIT Foundation.
Our 2025-2026 Giving Committee is comprised of Chengxi Gang, Ariel Johnson, Taha Siddiki, Angela Yang, Sunny Pamidimukkala, Matt Rindelaub, and Benedikt Kroll.
Giving Committee Member Reflections: Eddie Wu
Our Giving Member reflection for the November 2025 newsletter comes from Eddie Wu, who graduated from UT Austin in 2021 and is currently an investor at Partnership Fund for New York City.
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Two years ago, I began a new job in the impact world, joining an impact investment fund allocating private capital to largely for-profit impact enterprises. Since then, I’ve developed a few thoughts about the impact sphere. First, even many impact-oriented professionals and capital allocators do not measure and track their social impact in meaningful ways. Second, there are many, many populations and issues often overlooked by our current political, social, and economic systems that must and can only be addressed through philanthropic efforts. Third, goodwill and good goals do not always lead to good outcomes (and can sometimes even lead to worse outcomes). PIT, while still having some work to do, represents a key critical step in the right direction to address these points, and I believe we will continue to drive outsized social impact as the organization continues to iterate.
One of the verticals PIT looked at this year (and in previous years as well) is the ever-constant and pervasive topic of climate change. It’s hard to overstate the severity of the climate crisis, and current political climates across the world are among the most climate anxiety-inducing in recent history.
In the for-profit world, the disasters of the “Cleantech” bust in the 2010s still reverberate in for-profit and multi-bottom-line institutions, and the “ClimateTech 2.0” trend stemming around COVID-time is seeing significant drawbacks from the new U.S. administration, with some estimates going up to $1 trillion in clean energy investments and 4 billion tons of CO2 at risk. Thus, while government and for-profit entities still have a large part to play (e.g., electric vehicles, LL 97, etc.), it’s up to the philanthropic world to serve as the last line of defense for the home we all live in.
For PIT, climate change is an interesting opportunity to consider for a few reasons.
First is the urgency of the climate crisis. Each degree of global warming is significantly more harmful than the previous degree. Conversely, while incubating a single marine organism is marginal, the revival of an ecosystem can have synergistic and far-reaching effects.
Second, nonprofits in this sphere tend to have multi-year, long-lasting effects relatively independent of how the overall environment shifts, with little-to-no requirement for follow-on investment.
Third, the impacts of climate change nonprofits are in an interesting position where, while impact sounds easy to measure (e.g., how many metric tons of carbon mitigated for $x) and return sounds easy to quantify (e.g., how much does one metric ton of carbon sell for on a carbon exchange), there is still a lot of murkiness. While PIT won’t be able to provide the solution for climate change or force transparency in carbon markets, there’s an interesting opportunity for us to measure our approach towards SROI and compare that to an actual dollar equivalent.
To that end, one of the tasks the students took on this year was drafting a carbon pricing white paper to better map out the dollar benefit of a metric ton of carbon that PIT can use as a standardized measure across all carbon-focused nonprofits. Again, while PIT is not (yet) in a position to systemically change the way carbon abatements work today, this white paper at least serves as a guidepost and rationale for our independent considerations, while also being an educational resource. At the very least, through PIT, we can do our part in our little corner of the world to effectively and efficiently protect our home.
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You can find more information about the team and work product at the USIT Foundation website. As always, feel free to contact us with suggestions or questions.
Best,
Angela Yang | Chairperson of the 2025-2026 Giving Committee