Katharina Lichtner, with a degree in immunology and a background in for-profit companies such as Mc Kinsey, is Managing Director of the Family Larsson-Rosenquist Foundation. She has been able to use her skills to establish a successful foundation and has managed to seize an opportunity where many saw mostly risks.
How did you handle the key moments that made you the professional you are today?
«With courage, curiosity, tenacity and hard work. My career is marked by some dramatic shifts moving into completely different environments – from the immunology lab to McKinsey, to entrepreneurship in private equity, to leading a software startup and finally, to leading a foundation. Often working way outside of my comfort zone, every move came with highly valuable learnings. Also, working mainly in high growth start-up situations, always in executive leadership functions, exposed me in my early 30s to management responsibilities usually only accessible much later in a corporate career. Sometimes that was daunting but most of the time it was inspiring.
Along the way, wonderful colleagues and mentors as well as three major global upheavals had a great impact, shaping my experience and pushing me to grow as a professional. The risks for failure during those times were very real. Over the years it became easier to deal with challenges, and it always helped me to view failure as a learning experience instead of a personal defeat.
After this journey over almost 30 years, I now possess experience and a network in very different fields, providing me with a unique perspective. Being able to move fluidly between the worlds of science, finance, technology and philanthropy – being comfortable with the languages, connecting the dots across boundaries – is a key trait of the professional I am today».
Today much weight is given to the gender issue. But there is much more behind the achievement of a result like this: studies, professionalism, goals achieved. What qualities do you recognise that have led you to such a significant role?
«For me, achievement in a career never had anything to do with gender. Having children and working in a demanding job does add complexity and constraints on the personal time budget. On the other hand, I have never met anyone in business, man or woman, without something outside of work that needed attention. In general, I believe career trajectories depend more on preferences – for example, how much a person genuinely enjoys a certain level of responsibility, leadership exposure and challenges. Those who are energized by them will step forward and seek them out, and they will also thrive in those situations.
In my situation, there are several qualities that underpin where I am today. Some are innate, some are acquired. I’ve always been very curious, ventured beyond, wanted to learn new things and loved it to mentally dissect things, pestering everyone around me with questions. Luckily, my mother was very patient and encouraging.
Over the years I then acquired and cultivated the ability to develop a vision for a given topic or problem and learned how to translate that vision into a business plan and to implement it effectively. When I had a chance to move into a leadership position, it felt right. I enjoy the responsibility and the challenge, even during difficult times. It’s not for everyone and that’s OK. For me the balance has always been positive, and I have mentored many younger women encouraging them to go a similar way».
How important is family support in a job like yours. Is there a person who has particularly inspired you?
«Support at home is crucial. For me it was my mother who inspired me. She always encouraged me to do what really mattered to me. At the same time, she always required that I complete what I started – a great school for life. My mother has also been a powerful role model for what women can do. My father died when I was 10 and my brother seven. As my mother never remarried, everything that was done in our household was under her leadership. So, I grew up in an environment where there was no distinction between a ‘woman’s role’ or a ‘man’s role’, as a result the question of whether a women could do something or not never featured».
What does the Family Larsson-Rosenquist Foundation engage in? What area does it work in?
«We are exclusively focusing on projects involving breastfeeding and human milk. The vision of the foundation is for every child to have an optimal start in life through the benefits of human milk. Our mission is revitalizing the journey from science to impact. That means we are exploring and testing new ways to generate knowledge to close critical gaps and then drive the translation of that knowledge into forms that are accessible to practitioners where they’re needed most. This is often in countries in the global south. We rarely just provide funding, but rather collaborate with our partners. Our strategy is long-term and centered on enabling concepts».
What makes breast milk so important?
«Breastmilk is, according to our current scientific knowledge, the best nutrition for infants. In contrast to formula, which is a highly processed industrial food based on cow’s milk, human milk is a living fluid. It not only provides infants with all the nutrients they need, but also many bioactive ingredients that protect and help the baby develop healthily».
How does the foundation describe its activities and what projects is your foundation currently pursuing?
«We are actively seeking ways to revitalize the journey from science to social impact and have developed a concise, long-term strategy for how to achieve this. For those who are interested, much of this information is on our website. We have addressed critical research gaps by endowing five independent research centers. Each focuses on a different aspect of human milk research. We are now working with all five centers to build a functional, collaborative network with interdisciplinary projects and new perspectives.
We are also building LactaHub, a free, online knowledge platform that offers better access to critical breastfeeding knowledge, especially for health practitioners in low resource settings. Our current key emphasis is to develop innovative concepts systematically translate a county’s breastfeeding policy into actionable, long-term plans to improve a country’s breastfeeding environment. We are currently testing and finalizing the development of that approach with the Ministry of Health in Ghana and Ubora Institute, our local partner. We are aiming to publish the results next year».
An example of a successful project?
«It is five projects rolled into one, actually – the endowment of the five research centers. We chose this approach of philanthropic endowment because it is much more effective than spend-down funding of research and it is starting to demonstrate its power. We now have five established centers, each with an associated chair funded in perpetuity. Each endowment suffices to cover the professor’s salary and provides funds to back new ideas and generate pilot data.
This last aspect is especially important because it is very difficult for researchers to secure funding for new ideas if no data is yet available. This way each team has a better chance to win additional funding. The numbers speak for themselves. Even though we only started five years ago – very little time in the world of science – endowments totaling CHF 46.5 million have already generated CHF8.2 million in income, over 120 publications, and CHF 2.5 million in additional funding, while the value of the endowments has increased over the same time to CHF 49 million. Over 40 to 50 years, the endowments should generate an additional CHF 200 – 250 million in funds across the five centers».
What is your vision of future philanthropy?
«My personal vision is of a paradigm shift away from an individual solution-based approach to a more process-based approach. In this vision, we can systematically identify the multifactorial issues that make it in our case difficult for mothers to breastfeed successfully and then develop the right mix of long-term activities to sustainably change the environment. It means moving away from trying to find ‘the one’ solution to a more realistic mix of solutions. Along the way I would like to see the philanthropic and corporate world collaborate more effectively».
