When Monique Villa took over the Thomson Reuters Foundation five years ago, she had a clear goal in mind: Leverage the company's unique set of skills to go beyond grants and traditional charity.
Villa, CEO of the Foundation, women's rights advocate, and a journalist by trade, has spent the last five years reforming the global news agency's philanthropic arm to better reflect the company's values and assets. Instead of giving out small grants to NGOs, Villa helped build initiatives around news and information and extended Thomson Reuters' coverage of crucial human rights issues around the world.
"We decided to create new programs to use the best skills of the company," Villa told HuffPost's Ahmed Shihab-Eldin last week at the Aspen Ideas Festival. "Now we give services and information and we cover the underreported stories around the world on humanitarian issues, on corruption, on women's rights. It's more useful and it has a much bigger impact than buying blankets."
Villa also discussed TrustLaw, a marketplace for pro bono legal work she founded to push the practice world wide, as well as women's rights and what success means to her. Watch the video above to see the whole interview and hear what Villa believes is the key to tackling poverty.