Gary White is executive director and co-founder of Water.org. His entrepreneurial vision has driven innovations in the way water and sanitation projects are delivered and financed, and these innovations now serve as a model in the sector. White is a founding board member of the Millennium Water Alliance and Water Advocates, a fellow of the British American Project, a member of the Philanthropy World Hall of Fame, and a Skoll social entrepreneur.
2010 SESSIONS
Structuring Collaboration: Mergers, Partnerships And New Business Models
To achieve impact at scale, social entrepreneurs are inventing new ways to collaborate with a diversified range of partners. This session will share three successful approaches that have led to sustainable scale: merging two social ventures as a means for collaboration and growth; partnering with government, private sector, banks and endusers, and shaping sustainable development practices through new business models such as spin-offs structured for growth and leverage.
Speakers: Victor d’Allant, Sue Riddlestone, Andrea Coleman, Gary White, David Bornstein
2010 SESSIONS
Water Scarcity And The Human Right To Water
In recent years the right to water has grown in importance as a moral, religious, legal and practical question and as a tool for tackling water scarcity. Join thought leaders, academics, activists and social entrepreneurs for a revealing discussion about the barriers and opportunities presented by the human rights agenda. We expect vigorous discussion around issues such as charging the poor for water, privatisation, local control of water management, and the rights and duties of government, farmers, and the urban poor in water management.
Speakers: Gary White, Gidon Bromberg, Fred de Sam Lazaro, Peter Gleick
2009 SESSIONS
2009 Skoll Awards For Social Entrepreneurship
Skoll Awardes at the 2009 Skoll World Forum receiving their awards: Bart Weetjens of APOPO; Soraya Salti of INJAZ Al-Arab, JA Worldwide; Jordan Kassalow of VisionSpring; Paul Van Zyl and Juan Mendez of ICTJ; Martin von Hildebrand of Fundacion Gaia Amazonas; Wendy Kopp of Teach for All; Pooran Desai and Sue Riddlestone of BioRegional Development Group; Gary White of Water.org; Munqeth Mehyar, Nader Khateeb and Gidon Bromberg of Ecopeace/Friends of the Earth Middle East.
Featuring Remarks by:
Dr R.K Pachauri, Chair, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the 2009 Skoll Awardees
Musical performance by:
KT Tunstall
Speakers: K T Tunstall, Paul Van Zyl, Juan Mendez, Pooran Desai, Munqeth Mehyar, Nader Khateeb, Sue Riddlestone, Gary White, Gidon Bromberg, Jordan Kassalow, Wendy Kopp, Dr R. K. Pachuari, Bart Weetjens, Soraya Salti, Jeff Skoll, Sally Osberg, Martin Von Hildebrand
2009 Skoll Awards Ceremony
From: 2009 Skoll Awards For Social Entrepreneurship | With: Bart Weetjens, Soraya Salti, Jordan Kassalow, Paul Van Zyl, Juan Mendez, Martin Von Hildebrand, Wendy Kopp, Pooran Desai, Sue Riddlestone, Gary White, Munqeth Mehyar, Nader Khateeb, Gidon Bromberg
We're coming to the finale of the evening. The reason we're all here. So if you'd take your seats again. And I'll ask Jeff to join me on the stage. The nine organization thirteen leaders, we are about to honor are exemplary social entrepreneurs. Individuals whose innovative ideas, coupled with the drive, tenacity, and determination that characterizes all great entrepreneurs, are solving tough problems all over the world.
Bart Weetjens, APOPO.
APOPO's innovation is simple to grasp, by the scruff of the neck, actually. APOPO trains African giant pouched rats to detect land mines and the presence of tuberculosis. To date, APOPO's hero rats have cleared 400,000 square meters of mined land, facilitating the return of 50,000 internally displaced people to their homes.
In addition to land mine APOPO's rats have also been trained to identify TB. In one test run of 29,000 patients More than 2,000 additional positive samples were detected than had been identified through traditional means. Ladies and gentlemen, Bart Weetjens. Thank you so much, Jeff, Sally, all Skoll community.
Let me use this opportunity to share with you how APOPO will use this Skoll grant to advance our work. Since late 2007, APOPO is in the process of transitioning from a project-oriented time-bound nonprofit for organization into a sustainable social enterprise with a long term vision. APOPO is becoming an African center of excellence.
APOPO will focus on being the best in detection rat technology and will develop, promote, and manage high quality standards. The Center of Excellence is supported by APOPO R&D and training strategies, to advance best practices in detection rat technology and to maintain our market leadership position. With the endorsement of 11 governments in the African great lakes region, APOPO will expand operations in sub-Sahara Africa, providing detection service is to both humanitarian de-mining organizations and public health programs.
By doing so, increase the ratio of earned income versus grants and continue building credibility through proven impact. APOPO will lay the foundation for the next generation, building a large citizen-based supporters group worldwide, through our hero rat adoption program. Yet, by the way you can actually adopt a rat online, you can receive letters from your rat and.
Actually this is only one of the strategies in branding. We will actually further disseminate the know-how in detection rats technology through our trainer's curriculum at Sequoia University of Agriculture in Tanzania. You actually should see the self esteem in the eyes of our trainers who go and work in Mozambique.
Before they were actually depending on foreign expertise, and now themselves have become experts and go and deploy expertise abroad in other African countries. Isn't that wonderful? Isn't that what we dream of? Of reversing this spiral of dependency into empowerment. Yes, indeed, it is a dream come true.
Empowerment of vulnerable communities by teaching animal training skills is for APOPO the most direct way to impact and scale up. The Skoll grant is exactly what APOPO needs at this moment in order to build the required organization capacity. In the name of the communities we serve, I thank you very much indeed.
Sue Riddlestone and Pooran Desai, BioRegional Development Group.
Many of us dream, as Doctor
Pachauri described it, of how to live sustainably without having to surrender many of the modern conveniences we've come to depend upon. BioRegional is proving that this dream can, in fact, be reality, today. BioRegional has helped build one of the few zero carbon communities in the world.
They have created technologies and practice that use local, renewable and waste resources to meet society's needs. They've proven it's possible for all people to live comfortably, using only their fair share the Earth's resources, what they call one planet living. Due in large part to BioRegional work, the UK government has a zero carbon target for new homes by 2016.
Ladies and gentlemen, Sue Riddlestone and Pooran Desai.
Thank you so much on behalf of Pooran and all us at BioRegional. This award is going to make a fantastic difference to us and enable us to expand our work internationally. We've heard today Dr. Patchauri, how much we need to do something about climate change.
We all know this, we all know we need to reduce our ecological footprints. If everyone in the world lived like we do in Europe, then we'd need three planets to support us. We need to live within our fair share of the resources of our one planet. What we found is that, if you tell people they need to reduce their footprint by two thirds and their carbon emissions by 90%, then they think this is be difficult, they think, I'm going to have to go and live in a teepee and give up everything and I just can't take that cut in my quality of life. But what we found is if we show them what it's like in a real life setting.
When people can see it's actually attractive, even better then they're more willing to make the change and as Sally says, we found that this makes the difference, not just for individuals but for policy makers and the industry. So the Skoll award will support us to work with partners in China and Africa on real-life one-planet communities.
Sharing knowledge with projects from the UK to North America, these neighborhoods will show that one planet living is attractive and affordable. We'll bring these stories to Copenhagen and to other policymakers, and make the tools available on the web so that anyone can write up their own, make their own one planet plan.
What I really love this work is the spirit of international cooperation. This idea of joining hands around the world to show that this is what our future could be like. Thank you very much.
Gidon Bromberg, Nader Khateeb and Munqeth Mehyar, EcoPeace, Friends of the Earth, Middle East.
The Middle East is region fraught
with conflict, where working across borders can be considered traitorous and nearly always carries great personal risk. EcoPeace is the only social benefit organization in the region operating with a Tri-national structure.
Its model of shared leadership an emblem of hope for the region. EcoPeace's good water neighbors initiative has paired seventeen communities across borders to make up potential source of conflict water, a wellspring for cooperation. EcoPeace is also leading an initiative to create a trans-boundary, Jordan River Peace Park, on an island through which the Israel-Jordan border currently runs.
Ladies and gentlemen <span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Gidon Bromberg, </span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Nader Khateeb</span> and Munqeth Mehyar Thank you very much. We're very, very honored to receive this award. I want to share with you a story, a story from one of our communities, a story about a schoolteacher that is participating in a parents/teachers night. Where one of the parents stands up and charges that the teacher is collaborator that the teacher, sorry, that the school principal is working with the enemy and that everyone in the room in the parents teacher night should get up and leave.
The school principal has to defend himself. He has to defend himself because indeed he brought Palestinian, Jordanian and Israeli children to learn about each others shared water resources. He helped train youth - Palestinian, Jordanian, Israeli - how to build rainwater harvesting facilities. And in fact, he even accepted that they build such facility in his own school.
So he responded and he stood up and he raised his voice and he said to the parent, I'm the collaborator? I've brought water resources to our children. I've empowered our youth to understand that they can contribute, that they themselves can make a difference. They don't need to wait till end of conflict.
I have enabled that your children don't need to come to school with a bottle of water, because water is not guaranteed every day when you turn on the tap. It's not surprising that the only parent that left the room was that the charge, the schoolteacher, the school principle of collaboration. Empowering, indeed empowering, those of the silent, those of the silent majority of our peoples, Palestinian, Jordanian, Israeli is what we do.
And we do it through the shared water resources that are all over our region. With the Skoll award, we're going to be having access to more communities, to more school principals empowering teachers, and students, and mayors, to understand and to take responsibility that they can make a difference.
That they can, from the bottom up, build the peace that we so desperately need in the Middle East. I thank you very, very much.
Martin von Hildebrand. Fundación Gaia Amazonas.
Nobody knows how to sustain
vital ecosystems better than the indigenous people who've lived there for generations. Yet policies around the world routinely disempower, marginalize, or slaughter native peoples, often in the name of progress.
In the Amazon, the result has been massive deforestation, in turn an enormous driver of global climate change. Gaia Amazonus helps local indigenous people regain their rights and lands, manage their own education and health, and design and implement environmental management plans. With Gaia Amazonas' help, over eighty thousand indigenous people from more than fifty ethnic groups have been given legal title to more than 25,000,000 hectares of the Colombia Amazon, the largest contiguous property owned by indigenous peoples in the world.
Ladies and gentlemen, Martin von HildebrandThank you. Thank you all. Thank you Jeff. Thank you Sally. It's a very special moment for me tonight. I've been accompanying indigenous people in the Colombian Amazon for now for nearly forty years. And we have worked, as Sally mentioned. We have worked in getting their rights recognized. Their land rights recognized, their property over an area larger than the United Kingdom.
We have worked with them so they can put into practice their programs, that can sit with the authority of national government, setup public policies, setup local governments, in a new way that's based on the indigenous traditional knowledge. And now we are confronted with climate change. And as we know the Amazon policy is threatened and the indigenous people have an enormous role to play there.
They have an enormous role to play not only because they can care for the land, they live the land, they own the land, but also because they knowledge that they've developed over ten thousand years of living with the forest. Obviously they will not be able to do it on their own and those that have been working with them would not be able to do it.
So we will have to get together and think together and work together, and this is where the Skoll Foundation comes in. This is where they offer new possibilities, new spaces, and new optimism. Thank you very much.
Soraya Salti, INJAZ al-Arab.
In
the middle east, seventy percent of the population is below the age age of 25, and most of them do not, and will not find jobs.
School curriculum may remain traditional, leaving graduates unprepared to compete effectively in a global market or to create the businesses that will generate new jobs on the scale required. INJAZ's innovative approach engages leaders from the private sector, to introduce entrepreneurship, work and life skills education into the school systems throughout the Middle East.
INJAZ has reached more than three hundred youth in the Arab world, engaged more than 10,000 volunteers from the corporate world, and expanded the programs from Jordan to 11 other Middle Eastern and North African countries.
Ladies and gentlemen, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Soraya Salti.
</span>
I want my colleague and partner, Akef Aqrabawi, to stand up with me this evening.
Well, I want to start with a story in 2001, there was a group of young girls coming into our office from all across Jordan and one of them was completely veiled. The only two sparkling things that I could see were two black eyes in front of me. And I was trying to understand what she was saying to me but the scarf was bobbing up and down, and I just finally said "Could you just please draw for me what INJAZ means to you?" And she drew this bright yellow sun, and called it INJAZ and drew a boy, not even a girl with short sleeves and shorts, and then she wrote on the side and she said "I look to the outstanding, to the freedom full with energy and power." This is what I want and this is the life I want to live and she signed it Selsun Spectra School [sp].
It was such an incredible experience for me, just to see her soul and what she was crying for. To be liberated. The private sector volunteer, a female walking into her classroom in Petra, her only hope, to equip her with the skills she needs to break out and to break through. What is most incredible about their abuse is how excited and thrilled they are to see a glimpse of hope and they hold onto it with their life, to take on that opportunity.
All we've done is just open the door for private sector leaders like Fadi Ghandour, who was here this evening, and his staff, to just tap into the energy and enthusiasm of the Arab world's youth, the excitement that they have, they want to explore, and to see what strengths they have and to live productive lives.
The Skoll Awards will help us reach one million Arab youth. We are coming to Libya. We're going to help me. Yemen, Algeria and Syria, and also to empower as many youth as we can, and mobilize as many business leaders across the Arab world, thank you so much for this award.
Juan Mendez and Paul Van Zyl, International Center for Transitional Justice.
Few people predicted the peaceful transition from apartheid rule to democracy that we've witnessed in South Africa over the last 15 years. Much of the credit goes to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The visionary transitional justice approach that helped a nation deal with the legacies of past atrocities and heal its people.
The International Center for Transitional Justice has now taken this innovative methodology global, bringing transitional justice specialists and practitioners together from diverse contexts to share knowledge, offer comparative advice and technical assistance and build local capacity. ICTJ has helped create transitional justice systems in more than 35 countries.
Healing millions of human beings who thought they were beyond redemption.
Ladies and gentlemen, Juan Mendez
and Paul Van Zyl.
Thank you very very much. When the military expelled me from Argentina after torturing and detaining me without trial. I was obsessed with stopping torture, liberating political prisoners and finding the Desaparecidos. Those taken from their families, never to be seen again. At the end of the dictatorship, the mothers and the relatives of the disappeared were not only asking to have their loved ones returned to them.
They also wanted to know the truth and to see justice done. My unforgettable mentor Emilio Mignone articulated this demand as intrinsic to the nature and quality of the new democracy we were building. Truth and justice is a name that victims give to what others in more abstract terms like to call the rule of law.
Much later, as Kofi Annan's special adviser on the prevention of genocide, I saw first hand in Darfur that justice as an antidote to impunity for mass atrocities already committed must play a central part in our efforts to prevent new violations from happening. The ICTJ and our partners in 35 countries work specifically in this new horizon of human rights protection.
We assist societies moving from dictatorship to democracy or from conflict to peace. We assist them to reckon with legacies of egregious human rights violations. I am proud to work with dedicated, talented activists and scholars, all of them my ICTJ colleagues, but also many partners around the world.
It is great to see new generations take on the fight for human rights, renew it with fresh ideas, and teach a few things to those of us who are no longer human rights rookies. I find it especially rewarding to work shoulder to shoulder with Paul Van Zyl, a brilliant, resourceful, highly organized dynamo of a human rights activist and a justice entrepreneur.
Thank you very much.
Wendy Kopp, Teach for All.
Fresh college graduates looking for meaningful work. Undeserved schools needing inspired teaching. Why not bring them together. Since Teach For America's inception in 1900, 20,000 young teachers have dramatically improved learning for 3 million disadvantaged students.
Today more than 35,000 outstanding graduates each year apply to Teach For America, competing for 3,000 coveted slots. Teach for All extends Teach for America's innovative model overseas. Working with local partners Teach for All recruits recent topcollege graduates, trains them to be successful teachers in disadvantaged communities, and fosters their ongoing leadership in addressing educational inequity.
Ladies and gentlemen, Wendy Kopp.
Thank you. Our work at Teach for All is inspired by two things. The first source of inspiration is the most salient lesson we have learned through our work at Teach for America, which is that we can solve this problem of educational inequity. I know I came into this and most people who join Teach for America come into this out of a sense of idealism.
You know, they think this is an unconscionable problem and that we have to do something about it. But what we realize through our work is that not only is it an unconscionable problem and not only do we need to do something about it, but we can do something about it and in fact can solve it. We see that in the classrooms of teachers who even in their first and second years put their kids on a completely different academic trajectory.
We see it now in the work of some of our alumni who are pioneering in the development of a new generation of schools that are taking whole schools full of kids in urban and rural communities in our country, and truly putting them on a trajectory to graduate from college at the same rates as kids in privileged economic environments. And now we see the possibility of true system level change through the work of other alumni who are serving as school superintendents as social entrepreneurs and as policy makers.
We have the problem of educational inequity, not because children in low income communities and children of color aren't motivated or can't do the workm not because their parents don't care but because we as a society have not given them the opportunities they deserve. We can solve that and if we can, then we must.
The second source of inspiration behind Teach For All is the inspired, passionate social entrepreneurs in countries all around the world from India to Chile to South Africa, to Germany, to the Baltics, to Estonia, who believe that in this theory of change. Who believe that recruiting their nation's most promising future leaders to commit two years to teach in their highest poverty communities will be life changing for the kids they reach and will also be a fundamental force for long term change.
Through producing leaders who understand what you understand after you've taught successfully in a low income community, which is that we can solve this problem and who know how to solve it. And knowing that they will go on and work from inside of education but also ultimately every sector, at every level of policy to affect the fundamental changes necessary to ultimately, truly eliminate educational inequity.
We can realize a world in which all children have the opportunity to obtain an excellent education. And the question really, is whether our response to the problem is commensurate with the magnitude of the problem. We believe, and those social entrepreneurs, and I have to just say that this award really is a tribute to their efforts, we know that the answer to the question of whether it will solve the problem lies in whether enough of our society's most promising future leaders will step up and say, "We're gonna lead us to that day".
Thank you, Skoll, for your vote of confidence.
Jordan Kassalow, Vision Spring.
For most of us here, the need to don a pair of reading glasses is a minor affair. In the developing world, where millions depend on precision work, the degraded vision associated with aging threatens livelihoods and leads inexorably to poverty.
Vision Spring has created a market based scalable model for delivering quality glasses to the rural poor using its business-in-a-bag innovation as a ready to go Micro-franchise. Together with it's partners, Vision Springs supports nearly 1000 vision entrepreneurs who earn or supplement their livelihoods selling reading glasses.
These micro-franchises in turn bring the blessing of sight at an affordable price to millions of the rural poor.
Ladies and gentlemen.
Jordan Kassalow.
It is with deep honor that I accept this award. On behalf of the entire Vision Spring family. Four members who are with us tonight who must be recognized. I'll ask you to stand, Peter Eliassen and Miriam Stone, Graham Macmillan and my wife, Erica Kassalow, and my best friend. I'd like to share a formative story that helped me discover the work of VisionSpring.
I met Maria Lopez in 1984, in rural Mexico. She came into our clinic with her bible clutched to her chest and her simple request was she would like to be able to read that bible for the first time in ten years. She went ten years without reading her Bible. I looked at her eyes and, quite simply, determined that all she needed was a simple pair of eye glasses.
The kind that you can buy at a drugstore on the corner for under ten dollars here in the United States. We put the glasses on her face and instantaneously, after ten years, she was able to read her bible again. She was overwhelmed with emotion. She hit the floor. She hugged my legs and started to cry and I remembered that moment was one of the moments where I felt the most alive in my life.
It was a very powerful moment. By the way, this is another one. Thank you. The next day I got to the clinic and Maria Lopez was first in line, and my thought was, oh gosh, I gave her the wrong glasses. I screwed up. And she found her way over to me and she said to me, she said, Doctor, to you perhaps, these are just a pair of glasses.
But to me, you've given me back my God. That's one story. There are four hundred million people around the world who need simple eyeglasses. So that they can see to work. So that they can see to read. So they can see to learn. This award fortifies our unstoppable determination. It will enable us to provide vision, opportunity and hope to hundreds of thousands of Maria Lopezs.
For this, Jeff and Sally, we are forever grateful. Thank you very much.
Gary White, WaterPartners International. Water is life but increasingly scarce as sources dry up or are depleted all over the world. Micro-finance is a proven means of economic development, but there hasn't been any obvious way to connect the two until now.
By brokering relationships with social benefit organizations and micro-finance institutions, water partners structures loan products that enable the poor to secure the clean water and sanitation solutions that best meet their needs. WaterPartners programs have dispersed more than 1.6 million in support of water credit initiatives to benefit directly more than 110,000 people.
WaterPartners has ten active water credit programs globally, as well as a growing network of 23 local partner organizations.
Ladies and gentlemen, Gary White.
Thank you. Thank you. I'm honored and it's such a pleasure to be here to accept this award on behalf of all of those at WaterPartners and water.org, but more importantly, on behalf of the one billion people around the world who still lack what you and I take for granted. That's safe, clean water.
The Skoll grant will help us to accelerate our water credit initiative. This means a greater number of people will be empowered to achieve access to clean water and access adequate sanitation through affordable credit. We'll do this by continuing to attract new and existing micro-finance institutions into the water and sanitation
space. One vivid example of this is Guardian. We helped Guardian launch in 2007 as a spinoff of the Indian NGO Gramalaya. We believe it's the first MFI set up to lend into the water and sanitation space and target urban slum dwellers. It was early water credit pilot programs that provided the proof that the poor are a viable market for water and sanitation micro-credit loans.
Without this proof, Guardian would have not...would never have launched. Now last year Guardian broke new ground once again. It was able to access 1.6 million dollars in private capital from commercial lending institutions in India and rapidly scale up its portfolio for water and sanitation loans.
The Skoll grant will allow us to push the charity driven water sector toward models that incorporate commercial capital, will continue attracting microfinance institutions to the water sector through our smart subsidy model, allowing them to better understand the market and build relationships with borrowers.
We will provide credit enhancements where necessary and then exit as these institutions began to independently source commercial financing for their portfolios. We believe we can lead in making financing for water and sanitation services for the poor both affordable and ubiquitous. Thank you.
Bart Weetjens, APOPO.
APOPO's innovation is simple to grasp, by the scruff of the neck, actually. APOPO trains African giant pouched rats to detect land mines and the presence of tuberculosis. To date, APOPO's hero rats have cleared 400,000 square meters of mined land, facilitating the return of 50,000 internally displaced people to their homes.
In addition to land mine APOPO's rats have also been trained to identify TB. In one test run of 29,000 patients More than 2,000 additional positive samples were detected than had been identified through traditional means. Ladies and gentlemen, Bart Weetjens. Thank you so much, Jeff, Sally, all Skoll community.
Let me use this opportunity to share with you how APOPO will use this Skoll grant to advance our work. Since late 2007, APOPO is in the process of transitioning from a project-oriented time-bound nonprofit for organization into a sustainable social enterprise with a long term vision. APOPO is becoming an African center of excellence.
APOPO will focus on being the best in detection rat technology and will develop, promote, and manage high quality standards. The Center of Excellence is supported by APOPO R&D and training strategies, to advance best practices in detection rat technology and to maintain our market leadership position. With the endorsement of 11 governments in the African great lakes region, APOPO will expand operations in sub-Sahara Africa, providing detection service is to both humanitarian de-mining organizations and public health programs.
By doing so, increase the ratio of earned income versus grants and continue building credibility through proven impact. APOPO will lay the foundation for the next generation, building a large citizen-based supporters group worldwide, through our hero rat adoption program. Yet, by the way you can actually adopt a rat online, you can receive letters from your rat and.
Actually this is only one of the strategies in branding. We will actually further disseminate the know-how in detection rats technology through our trainer's curriculum at Sequoia University of Agriculture in Tanzania. You actually should see the self esteem in the eyes of our trainers who go and work in Mozambique.
Before they were actually depending on foreign expertise, and now themselves have become experts and go and deploy expertise abroad in other African countries. Isn't that wonderful? Isn't that what we dream of? Of reversing this spiral of dependency into empowerment. Yes, indeed, it is a dream come true.
Empowerment of vulnerable communities by teaching animal training skills is for APOPO the most direct way to impact and scale up. The Skoll grant is exactly what APOPO needs at this moment in order to build the required organization capacity. In the name of the communities we serve, I thank you very much indeed.
Sue Riddlestone and Pooran Desai, BioRegional Development Group.
Many of us dream, as Doctor
Pachauri described it, of how to live sustainably without having to surrender many of the modern conveniences we've come to depend upon. BioRegional is proving that this dream can, in fact, be reality, today. BioRegional has helped build one of the few zero carbon communities in the world.
They have created technologies and practice that use local, renewable and waste resources to meet society's needs. They've proven it's possible for all people to live comfortably, using only their fair share the Earth's resources, what they call one planet living. Due in large part to BioRegional work, the UK government has a zero carbon target for new homes by 2016.
Ladies and gentlemen, Sue Riddlestone and Pooran Desai.
Thank you so much on behalf of Pooran and all us at BioRegional. This award is going to make a fantastic difference to us and enable us to expand our work internationally. We've heard today Dr. Patchauri, how much we need to do something about climate change.
We all know this, we all know we need to reduce our ecological footprints. If everyone in the world lived like we do in Europe, then we'd need three planets to support us. We need to live within our fair share of the resources of our one planet. What we found is that, if you tell people they need to reduce their footprint by two thirds and their carbon emissions by 90%, then they think this is be difficult, they think, I'm going to have to go and live in a teepee and give up everything and I just can't take that cut in my quality of life. But what we found is if we show them what it's like in a real life setting.
When people can see it's actually attractive, even better then they're more willing to make the change and as Sally says, we found that this makes the difference, not just for individuals but for policy makers and the industry. So the Skoll award will support us to work with partners in China and Africa on real-life one-planet communities.
Sharing knowledge with projects from the UK to North America, these neighborhoods will show that one planet living is attractive and affordable. We'll bring these stories to Copenhagen and to other policymakers, and make the tools available on the web so that anyone can write up their own, make their own one planet plan.
What I really love this work is the spirit of international cooperation. This idea of joining hands around the world to show that this is what our future could be like. Thank you very much.
Gidon Bromberg, Nader Khateeb and Munqeth Mehyar, EcoPeace, Friends of the Earth, Middle East.
The Middle East is region fraught
with conflict, where working across borders can be considered traitorous and nearly always carries great personal risk. EcoPeace is the only social benefit organization in the region operating with a Tri-national structure.
Its model of shared leadership an emblem of hope for the region. EcoPeace's good water neighbors initiative has paired seventeen communities across borders to make up potential source of conflict water, a wellspring for cooperation. EcoPeace is also leading an initiative to create a trans-boundary, Jordan River Peace Park, on an island through which the Israel-Jordan border currently runs.
Ladies and gentlemen <span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Gidon Bromberg, </span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Nader Khateeb</span> and Munqeth Mehyar Thank you very much. We're very, very honored to receive this award. I want to share with you a story, a story from one of our communities, a story about a schoolteacher that is participating in a parents/teachers night. Where one of the parents stands up and charges that the teacher is collaborator that the teacher, sorry, that the school principal is working with the enemy and that everyone in the room in the parents teacher night should get up and leave.
The school principal has to defend himself. He has to defend himself because indeed he brought Palestinian, Jordanian and Israeli children to learn about each others shared water resources. He helped train youth - Palestinian, Jordanian, Israeli - how to build rainwater harvesting facilities. And in fact, he even accepted that they build such facility in his own school.
So he responded and he stood up and he raised his voice and he said to the parent, I'm the collaborator? I've brought water resources to our children. I've empowered our youth to understand that they can contribute, that they themselves can make a difference. They don't need to wait till end of conflict.
I have enabled that your children don't need to come to school with a bottle of water, because water is not guaranteed every day when you turn on the tap. It's not surprising that the only parent that left the room was that the charge, the schoolteacher, the school principle of collaboration. Empowering, indeed empowering, those of the silent, those of the silent majority of our peoples, Palestinian, Jordanian, Israeli is what we do.
And we do it through the shared water resources that are all over our region. With the Skoll award, we're going to be having access to more communities, to more school principals empowering teachers, and students, and mayors, to understand and to take responsibility that they can make a difference.
That they can, from the bottom up, build the peace that we so desperately need in the Middle East. I thank you very, very much.
Martin von Hildebrand. Fundación Gaia Amazonas.
Nobody knows how to sustain
vital ecosystems better than the indigenous people who've lived there for generations. Yet policies around the world routinely disempower, marginalize, or slaughter native peoples, often in the name of progress.
In the Amazon, the result has been massive deforestation, in turn an enormous driver of global climate change. Gaia Amazonus helps local indigenous people regain their rights and lands, manage their own education and health, and design and implement environmental management plans. With Gaia Amazonas' help, over eighty thousand indigenous people from more than fifty ethnic groups have been given legal title to more than 25,000,000 hectares of the Colombia Amazon, the largest contiguous property owned by indigenous peoples in the world.
Ladies and gentlemen, Martin von HildebrandThank you. Thank you all. Thank you Jeff. Thank you Sally. It's a very special moment for me tonight. I've been accompanying indigenous people in the Colombian Amazon for now for nearly forty years. And we have worked, as Sally mentioned. We have worked in getting their rights recognized. Their land rights recognized, their property over an area larger than the United Kingdom.
We have worked with them so they can put into practice their programs, that can sit with the authority of national government, setup public policies, setup local governments, in a new way that's based on the indigenous traditional knowledge. And now we are confronted with climate change. And as we know the Amazon policy is threatened and the indigenous people have an enormous role to play there.
They have an enormous role to play not only because they can care for the land, they live the land, they own the land, but also because they knowledge that they've developed over ten thousand years of living with the forest. Obviously they will not be able to do it on their own and those that have been working with them would not be able to do it.
So we will have to get together and think together and work together, and this is where the Skoll Foundation comes in. This is where they offer new possibilities, new spaces, and new optimism. Thank you very much.
Soraya Salti, INJAZ al-Arab.
In
the middle east, seventy percent of the population is below the age age of 25, and most of them do not, and will not find jobs.
School curriculum may remain traditional, leaving graduates unprepared to compete effectively in a global market or to create the businesses that will generate new jobs on the scale required. INJAZ's innovative approach engages leaders from the private sector, to introduce entrepreneurship, work and life skills education into the school systems throughout the Middle East.
INJAZ has reached more than three hundred youth in the Arab world, engaged more than 10,000 volunteers from the corporate world, and expanded the programs from Jordan to 11 other Middle Eastern and North African countries.
Ladies and gentlemen, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">Soraya Salti.
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I want my colleague and partner, Akef Aqrabawi, to stand up with me this evening.
Well, I want to start with a story in 2001, there was a group of young girls coming into our office from all across Jordan and one of them was completely veiled. The only two sparkling things that I could see were two black eyes in front of me. And I was trying to understand what she was saying to me but the scarf was bobbing up and down, and I just finally said "Could you just please draw for me what INJAZ means to you?" And she drew this bright yellow sun, and called it INJAZ and drew a boy, not even a girl with short sleeves and shorts, and then she wrote on the side and she said "I look to the outstanding, to the freedom full with energy and power." This is what I want and this is the life I want to live and she signed it Selsun Spectra School [sp].
It was such an incredible experience for me, just to see her soul and what she was crying for. To be liberated. The private sector volunteer, a female walking into her classroom in Petra, her only hope, to equip her with the skills she needs to break out and to break through. What is most incredible about their abuse is how excited and thrilled they are to see a glimpse of hope and they hold onto it with their life, to take on that opportunity.
All we've done is just open the door for private sector leaders like Fadi Ghandour, who was here this evening, and his staff, to just tap into the energy and enthusiasm of the Arab world's youth, the excitement that they have, they want to explore, and to see what strengths they have and to live productive lives.
The Skoll Awards will help us reach one million Arab youth. We are coming to Libya. We're going to help me. Yemen, Algeria and Syria, and also to empower as many youth as we can, and mobilize as many business leaders across the Arab world, thank you so much for this award.
Juan Mendez and Paul Van Zyl, International Center for Transitional Justice.
Few people predicted the peaceful transition from apartheid rule to democracy that we've witnessed in South Africa over the last 15 years. Much of the credit goes to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The visionary transitional justice approach that helped a nation deal with the legacies of past atrocities and heal its people.
The International Center for Transitional Justice has now taken this innovative methodology global, bringing transitional justice specialists and practitioners together from diverse contexts to share knowledge, offer comparative advice and technical assistance and build local capacity. ICTJ has helped create transitional justice systems in more than 35 countries.
Healing millions of human beings who thought they were beyond redemption.
Ladies and gentlemen, Juan Mendez
and Paul Van Zyl.
Thank you very very much. When the military expelled me from Argentina after torturing and detaining me without trial. I was obsessed with stopping torture, liberating political prisoners and finding the Desaparecidos. Those taken from their families, never to be seen again. At the end of the dictatorship, the mothers and the relatives of the disappeared were not only asking to have their loved ones returned to them.
They also wanted to know the truth and to see justice done. My unforgettable mentor Emilio Mignone articulated this demand as intrinsic to the nature and quality of the new democracy we were building. Truth and justice is a name that victims give to what others in more abstract terms like to call the rule of law.
Much later, as Kofi Annan's special adviser on the prevention of genocide, I saw first hand in Darfur that justice as an antidote to impunity for mass atrocities already committed must play a central part in our efforts to prevent new violations from happening. The ICTJ and our partners in 35 countries work specifically in this new horizon of human rights protection.
We assist societies moving from dictatorship to democracy or from conflict to peace. We assist them to reckon with legacies of egregious human rights violations. I am proud to work with dedicated, talented activists and scholars, all of them my ICTJ colleagues, but also many partners around the world.
It is great to see new generations take on the fight for human rights, renew it with fresh ideas, and teach a few things to those of us who are no longer human rights rookies. I find it especially rewarding to work shoulder to shoulder with Paul Van Zyl, a brilliant, resourceful, highly organized dynamo of a human rights activist and a justice entrepreneur.
Thank you very much.
Wendy Kopp, Teach for All.
Fresh college graduates looking for meaningful work. Undeserved schools needing inspired teaching. Why not bring them together. Since Teach For America's inception in 1900, 20,000 young teachers have dramatically improved learning for 3 million disadvantaged students.
Today more than 35,000 outstanding graduates each year apply to Teach For America, competing for 3,000 coveted slots. Teach for All extends Teach for America's innovative model overseas. Working with local partners Teach for All recruits recent topcollege graduates, trains them to be successful teachers in disadvantaged communities, and fosters their ongoing leadership in addressing educational inequity.
Ladies and gentlemen, Wendy Kopp.
Thank you. Our work at Teach for All is inspired by two things. The first source of inspiration is the most salient lesson we have learned through our work at Teach for America, which is that we can solve this problem of educational inequity. I know I came into this and most people who join Teach for America come into this out of a sense of idealism.
You know, they think this is an unconscionable problem and that we have to do something about it. But what we realize through our work is that not only is it an unconscionable problem and not only do we need to do something about it, but we can do something about it and in fact can solve it. We see that in the classrooms of teachers who even in their first and second years put their kids on a completely different academic trajectory.
We see it now in the work of some of our alumni who are pioneering in the development of a new generation of schools that are taking whole schools full of kids in urban and rural communities in our country, and truly putting them on a trajectory to graduate from college at the same rates as kids in privileged economic environments. And now we see the possibility of true system level change through the work of other alumni who are serving as school superintendents as social entrepreneurs and as policy makers.
We have the problem of educational inequity, not because children in low income communities and children of color aren't motivated or can't do the workm not because their parents don't care but because we as a society have not given them the opportunities they deserve. We can solve that and if we can, then we must.
The second source of inspiration behind Teach For All is the inspired, passionate social entrepreneurs in countries all around the world from India to Chile to South Africa, to Germany, to the Baltics, to Estonia, who believe that in this theory of change. Who believe that recruiting their nation's most promising future leaders to commit two years to teach in their highest poverty communities will be life changing for the kids they reach and will also be a fundamental force for long term change.
Through producing leaders who understand what you understand after you've taught successfully in a low income community, which is that we can solve this problem and who know how to solve it. And knowing that they will go on and work from inside of education but also ultimately every sector, at every level of policy to affect the fundamental changes necessary to ultimately, truly eliminate educational inequity.
We can realize a world in which all children have the opportunity to obtain an excellent education. And the question really, is whether our response to the problem is commensurate with the magnitude of the problem. We believe, and those social entrepreneurs, and I have to just say that this award really is a tribute to their efforts, we know that the answer to the question of whether it will solve the problem lies in whether enough of our society's most promising future leaders will step up and say, "We're gonna lead us to that day".
Thank you, Skoll, for your vote of confidence.
Jordan Kassalow, Vision Spring.
For most of us here, the need to don a pair of reading glasses is a minor affair. In the developing world, where millions depend on precision work, the degraded vision associated with aging threatens livelihoods and leads inexorably to poverty.
Vision Spring has created a market based scalable model for delivering quality glasses to the rural poor using its business-in-a-bag innovation as a ready to go Micro-franchise. Together with it's partners, Vision Springs supports nearly 1000 vision entrepreneurs who earn or supplement their livelihoods selling reading glasses.
These micro-franchises in turn bring the blessing of sight at an affordable price to millions of the rural poor.
Ladies and gentlemen.
Jordan Kassalow.
It is with deep honor that I accept this award. On behalf of the entire Vision Spring family. Four members who are with us tonight who must be recognized. I'll ask you to stand, Peter Eliassen and Miriam Stone, Graham Macmillan and my wife, Erica Kassalow, and my best friend. I'd like to share a formative story that helped me discover the work of VisionSpring.
I met Maria Lopez in 1984, in rural Mexico. She came into our clinic with her bible clutched to her chest and her simple request was she would like to be able to read that bible for the first time in ten years. She went ten years without reading her Bible. I looked at her eyes and, quite simply, determined that all she needed was a simple pair of eye glasses.
The kind that you can buy at a drugstore on the corner for under ten dollars here in the United States. We put the glasses on her face and instantaneously, after ten years, she was able to read her bible again. She was overwhelmed with emotion. She hit the floor. She hugged my legs and started to cry and I remembered that moment was one of the moments where I felt the most alive in my life.
It was a very powerful moment. By the way, this is another one. Thank you. The next day I got to the clinic and Maria Lopez was first in line, and my thought was, oh gosh, I gave her the wrong glasses. I screwed up. And she found her way over to me and she said to me, she said, Doctor, to you perhaps, these are just a pair of glasses.
But to me, you've given me back my God. That's one story. There are four hundred million people around the world who need simple eyeglasses. So that they can see to work. So that they can see to read. So they can see to learn. This award fortifies our unstoppable determination. It will enable us to provide vision, opportunity and hope to hundreds of thousands of Maria Lopezs.
For this, Jeff and Sally, we are forever grateful. Thank you very much.
Gary White, WaterPartners International. Water is life but increasingly scarce as sources dry up or are depleted all over the world. Micro-finance is a proven means of economic development, but there hasn't been any obvious way to connect the two until now.
By brokering relationships with social benefit organizations and micro-finance institutions, water partners structures loan products that enable the poor to secure the clean water and sanitation solutions that best meet their needs. WaterPartners programs have dispersed more than 1.6 million in support of water credit initiatives to benefit directly more than 110,000 people.
WaterPartners has ten active water credit programs globally, as well as a growing network of 23 local partner organizations.
Ladies and gentlemen, Gary White.
Thank you. Thank you. I'm honored and it's such a pleasure to be here to accept this award on behalf of all of those at WaterPartners and water.org, but more importantly, on behalf of the one billion people around the world who still lack what you and I take for granted. That's safe, clean water.
The Skoll grant will help us to accelerate our water credit initiative. This means a greater number of people will be empowered to achieve access to clean water and access adequate sanitation through affordable credit. We'll do this by continuing to attract new and existing micro-finance institutions into the water and sanitation
space. One vivid example of this is Guardian. We helped Guardian launch in 2007 as a spinoff of the Indian NGO Gramalaya. We believe it's the first MFI set up to lend into the water and sanitation space and target urban slum dwellers. It was early water credit pilot programs that provided the proof that the poor are a viable market for water and sanitation micro-credit loans.
Without this proof, Guardian would have not...would never have launched. Now last year Guardian broke new ground once again. It was able to access 1.6 million dollars in private capital from commercial lending institutions in India and rapidly scale up its portfolio for water and sanitation loans.
The Skoll grant will allow us to push the charity driven water sector toward models that incorporate commercial capital, will continue attracting microfinance institutions to the water sector through our smart subsidy model, allowing them to better understand the market and build relationships with borrowers.
We will provide credit enhancements where necessary and then exit as these institutions began to independently source commercial financing for their portfolios. We believe we can lead in making financing for water and sanitation services for the poor both affordable and ubiquitous. Thank you.
