Skoll Foundation Awards Ceremony

• Back at the Sheldonian, we had an evening dedicated to celebrating the stories of many of the leading social entrepreneurs gathered at this Forum. The evening started with music from the Pakistani musician Salman Ahmad, followed by speeches from Jeff Skoll, Muhammad Yunus and Peter Gabriel.

The 2007 Skoll Awards were then presented to ten recipients who will each receive $1 million, over the next three years, to target social issues in need of urgent attention and to bring their projects “to scale”.

What struck me during the Awards ceremony was the relative youth of so many of these recipients — many were in their 30s and 40s. Their stories and projects so far are already extremely successful, and there is obviously such great potential still ahead for all of them.

Sebastion Marot (centre) of Friends International receives his 2007 Skoll Award, with Sally Osberg, Peter Gabriel, Muhammad Yunus and Jeff Skoll — photo Fruchterman

— Vicky Colbert of the Foundation Escuela Nueva, which started in Columbia fostering education for underserved children through a more flexible approach and stronger school-community ties. This has grown into an international movement reaching 5 million pupils in various Latin American countries, Uganda, and the Philippines.

— Craig and Mark Kielburger of Free The Children. They started this group in their early teens as a classroom fundraiser and grew it to become an international organization with 1000 chapters in schools across the US and Canada fighting poverty, exploitation and powerlessness among children around the world.

— Sebastien Marot of Friends International, an initiative to take Cambodian kids off the streets and help them reintegrate society.

— Susan Burns and Mathis Wackernagel of the Global Footprint Network, developers of the Ecological Footprint, a tool that tracks the extent to which human demand on nature exceeds what the planet can regenerate. This measure, applied by countries, hundreds of cities and organizations across the world, has become a leading sustainability indicator.

— Joe Madiath of Gram Vikas, an organization helping develop the state of Orissa, one of the poorest regions in India.

— William Strickland of the Manchester Bidwell Corporation, which introduces young people in poor urban environments to arts and career education.

— Roshaneh Zafar of the Kashf Foundation focusing on microfinance for women in Pakistan. Started in 1996, the Foundation made 228,000 loans in 2006, has 135,000 clients and a recovery rate of 99.9 percent.

— Rupert Howes of the Marine Stewardship Council, focusing on reversing the decline in global fishing stocks through a marine certification and an eco-labeling program.

— Dan Viederman of Verité, which works on improving working conditions around the world.

— Dorothy Stoneman of YouthBuild USA, an alternative school where dropout youths re-enrol, complete high school, and at the same time work to build affordable housing for the homeless.

• The evening finished with two songs from Monica Yunus (daughter of Muhammad) who is a promising young soprano based at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The Forum participants then went on to a celebration and reception hosted in a marque at Trinity College.

Resources.
— Streaming video of the “Skoll Foundation Awards Ceremony” featuring Jeff Skoll and Sally Osberg with Peter Gabriel, Muhammad Yunus, Salman Ahmad and Monica Yunus (Real Player required) 1 hour 44 mins
— YouTube video of the ten recipients of the 2007 Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship
— short profiles of the 10 grantees

Monica Yunus singing at the 2007 Skoll Foundation Awards Ceremony — photo Fruchterman

• Some Quotes from the Skoll Forum:

“Every truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed.
Third it is accepted as being self-evident.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher

“There is no change without individuals, and nothing sustained without institutions.”
— Jean Monnet, the architect of the European Union

“Live like you will die tomorrow, but learn like you expect to live forever.”
— Mahatma Ghandi

“ It’s amazing what you can achieve if you don’t care who gets the credit.”
— Harry Truman, US President

“Skoll Foundation Awards Ceremony” featuring Jeff Skoll and Sally Osberg
with Peter Gabriel, Muhammad Yunus, Salman Ahmad and Monica Yunus
(Real Player required) 1 hour 44 mins

Larry Brilliant

Nelson Mandela Theatre, Said Business School
Thursday 29th March 2007

• Larry Brilliant was the final keynote speaker giving his reflections as a pioneer in social innovation. His presentation was challenging and inspiring, and something of a jolt back to “big picture” thinking after hearing so many inspiring local stories. If you watch just one of the pieces of video from this Forum ... make it this one.

Brilliant has long been a folk hero from the same loose network of American counter-cultural activists and entrepreneurs that include the likes of Ram Dass, Wavy Gravy, Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold and Paul Hawken. He is a doctor and a former professor of epidemiology who set up the Seva Foundation which has performed 2 million free sight-restoring eye operations in India and Nepal. He helped run the WHO smallpox eradication program in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh and was part of the Global Commission which certified that smallpox had been eradicated in the world.

As a technology leader, Brilliant was a founder of the world’s first online community, The WELL, and has been CEO of two public hi-tech corporations (SoftNet Systems Inc. and Network Technologies), and most recently he founded the WiFi company, Cometa.

Larry Brilliant was 2006 recipient of the TED Prize, which grants him “one wish to change the world” (... he is setting up a global warning system to track the spread of infectious diseases). And just last year, he was appointed Executive Director of Google.org, the new philanthropic arm of the Google company. So all eyes are on just what he is going to do next ....

• Brilliant started his speech with a short clip from a 1958 movie by Frank Capra, "The Unchained Goddess". The film contained a description of the causes of global warming, complete with images of melting Arctic icecaps and maps of rising sea levels inundating the southern regions of the US ... eerily similar to Al Gore’s more recent film “An Inconvenient Truth”. Brilliant: “So in 1958 we knew about global warming — should we feel good or bad that 50 years of foreknowledge accomplished so little?”

He then went on to list some of the Megatrends facing the current generation of social entrepreneurs:

— increasing global warming ... which has its gravest effects on the poorest and most vulnerable members of humanity
— increasing population levels ... expected to level out at over 9 billion people
— increasing urbanization ... we went past the tipping point this year with 50 percent of the world population now living in cities
— increasing desertification, loss of farming land etc
— increasing animal consumption
— increasing growth of technology, which is also having a downside in the growth of bio-weapons
— increasing globalization, which has big winners and bigger losers.

• Brilliant pointed out that today, the world is more diverse and more unfair than it has ever been in human history. One percent of world population owns 40% of all goods and services (he quoted Bill Clinton, who recently remarked: ”This situation is unprecedented, unequal, unfair and unstable”). And the situation will get increasingly instable as global TV, the internet and new media continue to expose the inequalities in life experiences and people’s expectations.

Brilliant drew out the “case for pessimism” in many areas ... water and other resource wars, sectarian conflicts, refugee crises, an increasing number and scale of weather-related disasters, and newly emergent disease patterns. Climate change will put all the social entrepreneurship successes of things like micro-credit into perspective. With the graphics provided by Google Earth, he “navigated” a map of Asia to show how deforestation and global warming will combine to raise seas levels and displace 100 million people in Bangladesh alone.

• But Brilliant also felt there is plenty of cause for optimism. He shared his personal story of wandering the Asian hippy trail in the 1960s before his guru sent him off to help lead the fight to eradicate Smallpox on earth. Smallpox has been the worst disease in human history — it killed half a billion people in the 20th century alone, which is more than all the wars in history. Ending Smallpox involved an immense collaboration between the World Health Organisation, governments, public and private health officials, and teams of volunteers. In India, Brilliant supervised thousands of workers who tracked down cases of smallpox, and kept visiting every household to ensure that the virus was quarantined. He suggests that the fact that we have conquered Smallpox “should make our species proud”, and it should also give us hope when we take on similar huge systemic challenges as global warming, or the many other megatrends that he had listed.

• As the new director of Google.org, Brilliant will be helping spend $1.1 billion of the assets of the world-leading company on addressing the sort of megatrends that he has described. Google.org is essentially a network that includes both a charitable foundation with a $90 million endowment, and also other forms of social investing (not unlike those being promoted by venture capitalists like Sir Ronald Cohen).

When they announced the establishment of the Google.org Foundation in 2005, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin promised shareholders they will make a social impact that will eventually “eclipse Google itself” by tackling the world's problems. Brilliant: “ In 10 years, I'd like people to say Google changed the world less for its search engine than for the way in which it changed philanthropy to make the world a better place.”

Resources.
— Streaming video of this session “Reflections from a Pioneer in Social Innovation” featuring Larry Brilliant
— YouTube video of Larry Brilliant’s speech to the 2007 Skoll World Forum (part 1 of 3) (part 2 of 3) (part 3 of 3)
— “Google's Brilliant Philanthropist” by Jessi Hempelin in Business Week 22 February 2006
— “Dr Brilliant Vs. the Devil of Ambition” by Andrew French in Fast Company Issue 39 September 2000
— “The Health of Humanity” by Larry Brilliant (2006 Sanford S. Elberg Lecturer in International Studies - UC Berkeley http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/Elberg/Brilliant/
— Larry Brilliant talking to the TED Forum January 2007 on the successful WHO campaign to eradicate Smallpox, and then unveiling his TED Prize wish - to build a global system that detects each new disease or disaster as it emerges or occurs.
— “Google”s Brilliant Philanthropist” by Jessi Hempel in BusinessWeek

Larry Brilliant’s speech to the 2007 Skoll World Forum: Part 1


Larry Brilliant’s speech to the 2007 Skoll World Forum: Part 2


Larry Brilliant’s speech to the 2007 Skoll World Forum: Part 3

Forum Wrap-Up and Ed Milibrand

• The 2007 Skoll World Forum was completed by wrap-up speeches by Bill Drayton, and Ed Milibrand, the British Cabinet Minister.

Bill Drayton reinforced what he felt was the changing focus of the social entrepreneur movement: “We used to have a small elite, now we need to get everyone involved in change-making, and figure out ways to think and work together in a way that builds on our individual entrepreneurial spirit...”

Drayton pointed out that governments and the universities are “the last remaining pre-modern institutions” to embrace the entrepreneurship challenge. The social entrepreneurs at this Forum would be an essential part of helping them make this transition.

Ed Milibrand and Bill Drayton addressing the final session of the Skoll Oxford World Forum — photo Hutchinson

• Ed Milibrant heads up Office for the Third Sector which has responsibility for government policy affecting social enterprise. He recognises the challenge that social enterprises bring to both the private and public sectors:

“ They are at the vanguard of change in both. To the private sector, the challenge is to put ethical values at the heart of their business and be a responsible member of the community. To the public sector, the challenge is to deliver public services in a different way, using the skills and expertise of users and frontline workers...” — Ed Milibrand, UK Minister of the Third Sector

Milibrand says that a major focus of his government’s policy is to simply recognise and spread the word that social enterprises do exist. His research showed that only about a quarter of British people know what they are, even though it was estimated that there are over 55,000 businesses in Britain that fit the government’s definition of a social enterprise. In November 2006, the British government launched a major 75-page “Social Enterprise Action Plan” that aims to “open the door to thousands more such enterprises” by:

— fostering a culture of social enterprise, embedding the change that is already underway, especially through inspiring the next generation to start thinking about the social impact of business
— improving business advice, information and support available to social enterprises
— tackling the barriers to access to finance that restrict the growth of social enterprises
— enabling social enterprises to work effectively with government to develop policy in the areas of expertise

• After some closing comments from John Elkington, and from some of the Skoll Award-winning social entrepreneurs ... the 2007 Skoll World Forum was over!

Resources.
— Streaming video of the session “Supporting More Social Innovation” featuring John Elkington, Bill Drayton and Ed Milliband (Real PLayer required) 41 mins
— Office for the Third Sector “Social Enterprise Action Plan” (2006)
— Streaming video of the session “Social Innovation: Where do we go from here” featuring Roger Martin, Roshaneh Zafar, Martin Fisher, Taddy Blecher, and Mindy Lubber (Real PLayer required) 49 mins

“Supporting More Social Innovation”
featuring John Elkington, Bill Drayton and Ed Milliband
(Real Player required) 41 mins


“Social Innovation: Where do we go from here”
featuring Roger Martin, Roshaneh Zafar, Martin Fisher,
Taddy Blecher, and Mindy Lubber
(Real Player required)49 mins

Gaia Foundation

London Meetings

• For the four days after the Oxford Forum I stayed in London to follow-up on connections made at the conference and to explore some other projects further.

• Ed Posey and Liz Hosken are a couple of “active citizens” and philanthropists based in Hampstead. We had last met during the New Economics conference held in Scotland in 1984. At that time, they were just establishing The Business Network, which was one of the first organisations promoting social and environmental responsibility in business.

Since then, Ed and Liz have established the Gaia Foundation, and their Hampstead home — now known as Gaia House — has become a seeding point and informal meeting place for many of the leading UK-based activists from environment and development organisations. The Foundation has taken a leading role in supporting indigenous activists including Professor Wangari Maathai (the Nobel Peace Laureate from Kenya), Vandana Shiva from India, Tewolde Gebre Egzhiabher from Ethiopia, Martín von Hildebrand from Colombia, José Lutzenberger from Brazil and Chico Mendes (the indigenous leader who was assassinated in Brazil).

• The couple invited me to attend a small public talk in Hampstead by Martín von Hildebrand, the leader of many development projects with indigenous people in the Columbian Amazon.

Hildebrand led the campaign to include significant indigenous rights within Colombia’s 1991 political Constitution. The Columbian Constitution explicitly recognises the cultural diversity of the Colombian nation and the rights of indigenous peoples to participate in the design and management of their own development, health and education programmes. It also recognizes the right of indigenous communities to collectively administer their own territories.

Over the last 17 years, these communities have developed innovative processes of self governance directed by shamans and driven by indigenous thought. Hildebrand’s COAMA programme focuses on reviving their diverse and ecologically centred collective governance systems, using elements from the western industrial world that do not compromise their autonomy. Thanks largely to these efforts, the indigenous communities in the Colombian Amazon are now self-managing a territory larger than the size of the United Kingdom.

The obvious improvements in Columbia through this indigenous self-development have become the envy of many other South American countries ... and has also inspired similar groups in Africa to follow the COAMA methods. In 1999, Hildebrand and COAMA received the Right Livelihood Award (sometimes called the alternative Nobel Prize) for this ground-breaking work.

• Meeting Martín von Hildebrand and hearing his presentation has given me quite a bit to reflect on when comparing his story to the New Zealand experience of Maori sovereignty and economic development. It is interesting for me to realise that so much of my own thinking on indigenous issues has been conditioned by our local debates on the Waitangi Treaty and the emphasis on “partnership” relationships between our majority culture and tangata whenua. This is in contrast to the Columbian Amazon story which has involved promoting grassroots community efforts to protect critical ecosystems, such as forests, watersheds and river basins, whilst working to empower local communities to take control and develop their own resources and livelihoods.

• The Gaia Foundation has been promoting the concept of “Earth Jurisprudence” based on the visionary work of the philosopher Thomas Berry. Their view is that our legal systems, and the corresponding human jurisprudences upon which they are based, continually promote the interest of the human community while affording no real protection to other species, or to the planet itself. The Gaia Foundation asks us to imagine another legal system where the planet and all of its species have rights – and they have those rights by virtue of their existence as component members of a single Earth community.

“ The dominant legal philosophies and laws both reflect and perpetuate the prevailing worldview that the Earth is merely a collection of 'resources' or objects which human beings are entitled to exploit for their exclusive benefit. A new Earth Law - or Earth jurisprudence - is essential if global human society is to achieve the radical shift in beliefs and attitudes that will be necessary to save the planet from ecological disaster.” — The Gaia Foundation

Resources.
— The website for The Gaia Foundation
— profile of Coama for the Right Livelihood Awards
— The Gaia Foundation’s Earth Jurisprudence website

London School for Social Entrepreneurs

• I had an appointment with Alastair Wilson, the Chief Executive of the School for Social Entrepreneurs, which is based in Bethnal Green in the East End of London. I was interested in finding out more about how this school operates ... and from the brochures I picked up at the Skoll Forum, I could see that their approach to learning and enterprise facilitation was very similar to the style of the “Skills of Enterprise” business courses I had set up for unemployed people in New Zealand in the 1980s.

Alastair Wilson, Chief Executive of the School for Social Entrepreneurs, at Bethnal Green, in the East End of London — photo Hutchinson

The Skills of Enterprise business courses were different from mainstream Polytech business courses because of their action learning approach. We didn’t just teach people how to set up a business ... we taught them how to set up their business. Our courses were half work and half study — and there were no certificates or accreditations involved other than having a viable business running at the end of the course, or the participant taking the decision not to go into business because of what they had learned.

I could see that the School for Social Entrepreneurs was following a similar approach to education, which they were also calling “action learning”.

• Each student on the SSE programme is chosen on the basis of their life experience, rather than their qualifications. They are each leading or establishing a new project or organisation, and have shown themselves to be “... driven, committed, persistent, engaged with the community they are aiming to serve, prone to action, and pragmatic”.

The SSE programme is a year long, and the sessions at the School are held one day a week. It’s not a course of instruction ... but more of a learning community where the diverse students are encouraged to help one another with their objectives. The School’s “facilitators” are able to get alongside the students providing information and guidance on a “just in time” basis.

• Gaining access to the networks of existing social entrepreneurs is obviously one of the main benefits cited by the students at this School. The SSE has a huge network of high-profile social entrepreneurs to call upon (from John Bird, founder of The Big Issue newspapers for homeless, to Tim Smit, the man behind The Eden Project). The students are able to interrogate these “expert witnesses” to find out exactly what they did, how they did it, what the results have been and what they have learned.

The School has been operating for ten years and the 250 students so far have become part of a SSE Fellowship Network which plays an active part in the staff team, on the Trustee Board, as expert witnesses, and in helping develop new services. (The Chief Executive Alastair Wilson himself is a former graduate of the School).

• The School for Social Entrepreneurs has recently been evaluated by the New Economics Foundation. Its October 2006 report finds that the SSE has a unique approach based on “the depth and duration of support, the high levels of personal support and the inspirational mixture of people and lasting support networks.”

The report shows that organisations established by SSE Fellows are over one-and-a-half times more likely to be in existence after eight years than conventional businesses. Each social enterprise established by the Fellows has created an average of five jobs (and a small proportion have created more than 20 jobs). The New Economics Foundation has calculated that for every £10,000 its takes to train a student at the School for Social Entrepreneurs, the return to the community is £100,000.

• The SSE has now started franchising its methods and approach — with similar Schools for Social Entrepreneurs now operating in Ireland, East and West Midlands, Scotland and Cornwall. And it looks as though they are starting to go international ... with discussions currently taking place for a similar School to be set up in Sydney, Australia.

Resources.
— The website for the London School for Social Entrepreneurs
— “Passion in Action” by Mira Katbamna in The Guardian 12 December 2006

The Young Foundation

• The School for Social Entrepreneurs was one of the last projects established in 1997 by Michael Young, later known as Lord Dartington, who is credited with being Britain’s most prolific and successful social entrepreneur of the 20th Century.

At the end of World War II, at the early age of 29, Michael Young drafted the 1945 Labour Party manifesto “Let Us Face The Future”, which helped bring Atlee’s reforming Labour government to power. He worked closely with Aneurin Bevan in the Labour government of 1945 to 1951, where he became convinced that successful social innovation was far more likely to come from individuals and communities than from the public sector.

Young set up his Institute of Community Studies at Bethnal Green in London’s East End. From this base, he gave birth to more than fifty organisations devoted to a huge diversity of social projects. These included establishing the Consumers' Association (1957) and their magazine Which?, the Economic and Social Research Council (1965), the Open University (1968), International Alert (1980), the University of the Third Age (1982) and Language Line (1990).

Young was once described as a shaman who sowed “dragons teeth”, then moved on while great organisations sprung up in his stead. When interviewed by Charles Handy (in his 1999 book The New Alchemists) Young simply remarked: “I can’t stop thinking of what appear to be worthwhile ideas. They seem so obvious.”

At the Skoll World Forum, one speaker remembered Michael Young as a social entrepreneur who always took “No” as a question, and who actively sought out objections to his ideas as a method of refining his plans and proposals.

Resources.
— “Michael Young 1915-2002: Social Entrepreneur” by vivian Hutchinson in The Jobs Letter No.161 14 February 2002
— Michael Young: Social Entrepreneur by Asa Briggs (book pub 2001 by Palgrave Macmillan)

School for Social Entrepreneurs, Bethnal Green, London — the base for Michael Young’s Institute of Community Studies, from which he developed his extraordinary range of social innovations — photo Hutchinson

UnLtd: The Foundation Supporting Social Entrepreneurs

• On my last day in London, I visited the headquarters of UnLtd: the Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs. This Foundation was established in 2000 by a consortium of groups (including Ashoka / Changemakers and the School for Social Entrepreneurs) who successfully bid for and were awarded £100 million from the UK Millennium Awards Endowment (part of the National Lottery).

UnLtd gives financial support to individuals who want to make a difference. They don’t fund organisations. The UnLtd awards are enabling emerging social entrepreneurs to tackle a wide variety of issues such as racism, the minimum wage, social exclusion, hungry schoolchildren and food poverty in inner cities.

UnLtd offers two levels of award: The first level gives between £500 and £5,000 to individuals or informal groups of people who have an idea and want help getting it off the ground. The second level (of between £10,000 and £20,000) is for supporting key people or paying for the living expenses of the award winners to enable them to devote more time to their projects.

UnLtd also runs a UK-wide Fellowship of the people who have received their awards, and undertakes research into the impact of social entrepreneurship on society.

Resources.
— The website for UnLtd: The Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs
— The Guardian UnLtd Social Entrepreneur Awards
— Everyday Legends: The Ordinary People Changing Our World, the Stories of 20 Great UK Social Entrepreneurs by Justine C. Law, James J. Baderman (book pub 2006 by WW Publishing)

• My interest in visiting UnLtd wasn’t so much about their funding programme — which was extraordinary enough — but to follow up on a conversation I had with Cliff Prior, UnLtd’s Chief Executive, when we were having dinner during the Skoll Forum.

I had mentioned a project we were exploring with the New Zealand ChangeMakers 5-10-5-10 group which is to establish a micro-philanthropy trading website. The idea is to provide a website where the network of people involved with ChangeMakers can be connected with the funding requests from local groups and organisations. Such a website (modelled on the popular NZ trading site TradeMe) would be a useful addition to the tools for generosity in our country, and could be especially useful as a fundraiser for smaller grant and donation requirements for individuals and community organisations.

Cliff Prior told me that UnLtd were pursuing much the same idea as a way of supporting the people and projects involved in their own network of social entrepreneurs. He put me in touch with their website developer, who was able to point me towards several existing examples of websites that were pursuing a similar strategy.

Some of these philanthropy marketplace websites include:
— Just Giving
— Generous Giving
— Fundable
— Kiva
— Global Giving

coda

• Well, that’s my notes from the week at the Oxford and from my time in London. There was so much going on at this World Forum that I would imagine that there could be 700 completely different reports of what happened and 700 different maps of connections to inspiring people, ideas and projects.

• As I was writing up my notes in a London hotel, I was struck by the contrast between the positivity generated by this global gathering ... and the much less hopeful headlines appearing in the daily British newspapers.

During the time of this Forum, the OECD reported that aid from Western developed countries to tackle global poverty had fallen by 5% last year, which was the first time that the level of aid had dropped in a decade. This was because the world’s richest countries were basically reneging on their Gleneagles pledges to give an extra $50 billion in financial assistance by 2010. (Remember Bob Geldof and Bono’s Live8 concerts?)

Also during the Forum, a report was released on Britain’s child poverty statistics. The latest government figures show that the number of children officially living in poverty in Britain has risen by 200,000 to 3.8 million children. These new figures mark the end of a sustained period of falling poverty since statistics were first collated in 1961. They also bring a bit of “reality” back to Blair and Brown’s ambitious social promise that they will abolish all child poverty in the UK by 2020.

These reports are a not-so-gentle reminder of just how far we still have to go. Larry Brilliant’s inspiring journey in ending Smallpox may prove to be a walk in the park compared the social justice struggle of ending the widening gap between rich and poor.

• Being my first Skoll Forum, I had no real way of comparing just how the social entrepreneur movement, at this series of annual gatherings, was evolving its own sense of balance between “hype” and “reality”. I was interested to read the following post-Forum comment on a Social Edge Blog by Dennis Whittle, the founder and Chairman of GlobalGiving:

“ Around 2001 there was a Cambrian explosion of ideas [on social entrepreneurship], and conferences were all about who had the best idea — and too often about why other people's ideas were dumb or inferior. Over the next couple of years, several of the people with ideas actually launched real initiatives, with great hopes and fanfare and excitement and hoopla, and often hyperbole. The conferences during those years were dominated by the swaggering of those people launching these start-ups.

“ [But] many of us have been through the wringer. We are making great progress now, but the last few years have been full of setbacks and reversals and S-turns. All of which have served to make us a lot more humble — and a lot more interested in reaching out to others to tell our stories and hear theirs in return. I think we all realize now that there is no silver bullet in this field — no “best idea.” Instead, we need — and are forming — a community of good ideas, and of good people. The way forward is through this community...” — Dennis Whittle

• I think this is a community we should be keeping in touch with ... and we should endeavour to maintain a New Zealand presence at these World Forums at Oxford. In future years I would like to try and ensure that both a member of our Social Innovation Investment Group and a member of the Social Entrepreneur Fellowship are able to attend. There is certainly many advantages to being on the spot, making connections with a huge diverse network, being within the dialogue, and having the time to think things through —away from home projects and responsibilities.

• But beyond this — bearing in mind all the carbon-miles involved in getting New Zealanders over to the other side of the world — perhaps we could also work with the Skoll Foundation or the Social Edge people to convene a satellite summit gathering at the same time in New Zealand. This would make it open to a wider range of New Zealand social entrepreneurs and philanthropists ... with the main plenary and keynote speakers from Oxford beamed into our satellite conference, accompanied by our own keynote speakers and our own workshop sessions.

Imagine if there was a whole network of these satellite summits in various countries ... with the best of their local keynote contributions being shared around the network. This would also be another way to extend the reach and impact of the important ideas and practical role models for change that are found within this Forum.


vivian Hutchinson
Social Innovation Investment Group
New Zealand Social Entrepreneur Fellowship
www.nzsef.org.nz

April 2007