2008 Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship

The 2008 Skoll Awards ceremony. Winners were Bill Strickland, Manchester Bidwell; Amazon Conservation Team, Michael Eckhart of ACORE, Connie Duckworth of Arzu, Jeremy Hockenstein and Mai Siriphongphanh of Digital Divide Data; Jenny Bowen of Half the Sky; Matt Flannery and Premal Shah of Kiva; Mitch Besser and Gene Falk, Mothers2Mothers; Paul Farmer of Partners in Health; Daniel Lubetsky of PeaceWorks; Mechai Viravaidya of Population and Community Development Agency; Cecelia Flores-Oebanda of Visayan Forum Foundation

With: Bill Strickland, Michael Eckhart, Jeremy Hockenstein, Mai Siriphongphanh, Jenny Bowen, Matt Flannery, Premal Shah, Mitch Besser, Gene Falk, Paul Farmer, Daniel Lubetzky, Mechai Viravaidya, Cecilia Flores-Oebanda, David Bornstein
Thank you Sally. It's really a privilege and an honor to be here with you and Jeff and President Carter. You, in your encore career, have really redefined the post-presidency, also the almost post-presidency in some cases and really set a standard for everybody who is a head of state to live up to.

And thanks also for reminding us of all the shoulders that we stand upon when we cause change.


There is a quote by Walter Lippman that is always stuck in my mind. It goes, "The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what people will do." It's a pretty simple idea, and yet it's really difficult to imagine a world that is very hopeful, if we just watch the television and read the newspapers everyday.

We certainly can't deny our problems, but we also can't deny our great strengths and our resilience and the courage and ingenuity that is out there in the world we don't see enough of it. It's been said that pessimism about human beings is one of the chief forces that maintains the status quo. But on the other hand, Oliver Wendell Holmes said that "a mind once stretched will never return to its original dimension"and that's why the stories of the social entrepreneurs I think are so important.

These stories do stretch our minds. Like the runners of the elders, they bring vital wisdom and information back and forth to people. They're also richly textured stories. Today we're celebrating a dozen individuals for qualities that are often overlooked when society anoints its leaders: courage, respect, compassion and ethical fiber.

But we're also celebrating their organizations. Collections of many, many unnamed people who have often made great leaps in their lives and taken great risks to cooperate these organizations, to bring them to life, to participate in them as lenders, as borrowers as home builders, whatever function.

So at the deepest level these stories help people to see what's possible both in their own lives and in the world. There is a quote from the book "The Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker that captures this. "After all is said and done the only real problem of life, the only worthwhile preoccupation of man is the question what is one's true talent, his secret gift, his authentic vocation.

How can the person take his private, inner being, the great mystery that he feels at the heart of himself, his emotions, his yearnings, and use them to live more distinctively. To enrich both himself and mankind with the peculiar quality of his talent." The lives and work we celebrate today help us in this challenge.

They help us to reimagine the world in a way that makes each of us a feel little bit bigger, a little bit more powerful, and that helps us to trust and feel connected to one another. this is what helps us each come to know our own gifts and find our true pathways. And now I'd like to invite President Carter, Jeff Skoll and Sally Osberg to the stage to present the Skoll Awards.

We begin this evening's program by honoring a Skoll social entrepreneur award winner from 2007 who was unable to come to the forum last year. Bill Strickland, Manchester Bidwell Corporation. Bill Strickland was a struggling high school student in Pittsburgh when he met Frank Ross who taught him about clay, introduced him to jazz and architecture and transformed his life.

Bill founded Manchester Craftmen's Guild and later added Bidwell Training Center to encourage inner-city Pittsburgh youth and adults to develop their potential in beautiful surroundings with state of the art equipment. The programs connect arts knowledge and skills with academic standards, citizenship, and life disciplines.

Under the aegis of the Manchester Bidwell Corporation, facilities in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Cincinnati, and Michigan serve more than 4,000 youths and 792 adults annually. With help From Skoll these programs xx individuals five more additional communities by the year 2010. Ladies and gentlemen, Bill Strickland.

Mark Plotkin and Liliana Madrigal, Amazon conservation team. Mark Plotkin, an ethno-botanist and Liliana Madrigal. a conservationist and crusader for indigenous rights, created the Amazon conservation team in 1996 to help preserve the Amazon rainforest and its indigenous people. ACT currently partners with 25 local tribes in Brazil, Colombia and Suriname to protect the rainforest by using sophisticated mapping technology and by establishing legal claims.

To preserve native culture, ACT establishes ethno-education centers that teach traditional arts, forestry and farming techniques. By 2011, ACT's goal is to double the number of rainforest acres mapped and manage from 40 million to eighty million acres. ACT plans for its indigenous partners to eventually maintain field offices and training centers independently.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mark Plotkin and Lilliana Madrigal. Michael Eckhart, American Counsel on Renewable Energy. Michael Accord first understood the promise of renewable energy in the 1970's when he carried out pioneering energy studies under funding from the Carter White House. After years in business, he worked in India and Africa on solar energy. In two thousand and one, Michael and colleagues founded the American Council on Renewable Energy, ACORE to establish an all renewable organization for the United States. His volunteer role soon grew into a full-time commitment. ACORE's goal is to ensure that twenty-five percent of US energy needs are met from renewable sources by twenty twenty-five.

ACORE catalyzes change through membership, working group, partnerships and conferences. By twenty eleven, it plans to increase member ship from five hundred to one thousand organizations. Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Eckhart Connie Duckworth, Arzoo. Connie Duckworth made history as the first female sales and trading partner at Goldman Sachs and Company.

A longtime woman's advocate, she visited Afghanistan and was shocked by the hardships that women faced. In 2004, she founded Arzoo, to provide sustainable livelihoods for African women engaged in rug weaving. Arzoo weavers receive basic health care and above market compensation for their rugs. In exchange, they must send all their children under 15 to school full time, and all women in their home must attend literacy classes.


Arzoo now supports 700 weavers and aids more than 2100 individuals through its core program. By 2011, Arzoo plans to double the population it assists. Ladies and Gentlemen, Connie Duckworth. Jeremy Hawkinstein and Mi Seri Fung Pan, Digital Divide Data. On a 2001 vacation, Jeremy Hawkinstein was struck by Cambodia's juxtaposition of extreme poverty with emerging technology.

He created Digital Divide Data to break southeast Asia's cycle of poverty, by providing high quality technology services to the global market. Mi Seri Fung Pan recognized the potential of Digital Divide Data and brought her social entrepreneurial savvy to the team in 2003. Founded upon an innovative and sustainable fair trade outsourcing model, Digital Divide Data offers above market wages and educational benefits to disadvantaged employees, equipping them for better futures.

Growing rapidly, with $14 million in increased wages, and having impacted 7,000 people already, digital divide data is shaping a new core of leaders empowered to participate fully in their country's development. Ladies and gentlemen, Jeremy Hockenstein and [xx] Jenny Brown Half the Sky Foundation, I'm sorry Jenny Bowen, pardon me Half the Sky Foundation.

Jenny Bowen learned first hand devastating effects of institutionalization of children when she and her husband, Richard, adopted a toddler from a Chinese orphanage. Almost two, the child Could not walk and talk and was emotionally vacant. In time her new family's loving attention enable the daughter to blossom.

And the idea for Half the Sky was born. Half the Sky provides family-like nurturing care for thousands of orphan children in 38 state run orphanages across China. In 2007, the organization was invited by the Chinese government to expand it's model to 3 hundred institutions and beyond. Half the Sky's long-term strategy is for local governments in China to operate these life changing programs themselves.

Ladies and gentleman Jenny Bauen. Matt Flannery and Premal Shah Kiva. After seeing first hand in East Africa, how a small loan could change the life of an entrepreneur in the developing world. Matt and Jessica Flannery co-founded Kiva.org in 2005 to enable individuals to loan as little as $25 to emerging businesses.

Matt quit his job at Tivo to work full time as Kiva's CEO and Premal Shah a project manager at PayPal join Kiva as its president to help scale the idea. In it's first three years over 148,000 internet lenders made 25 million dollars in loans to 33,000 entrepreneurs in 40 developing countries. Kiva aims to scale to 1 million internet landers and over 100 million dollars in loans by 2010.

Ladies and gentlemen Matt Flannery and Premal Shah. Mitch Besser and Gene Falk, Mother's to Mother's. While pediatric AIDS has virtually been eliminated in the developed world, in Subsaharan Africa, hundreds of thousands of babies are needlessly infected with HIV each year. To confront this tragedy, longtime friends, Mitch Besser, a doctor and medical researcher, and Gene Falk, a media executive and AIDS activist, developed Mothers to Mothers.

A grassroots program for under-resourced healthcare systems, Mothers to Mothers trains and employs new mothers with HIV to provide education and support to their peers, empowering them to access life-saving treatment for their babies and themselves currently operating in 160 locations in four countries.

By 2011, Mothers to Mothers aims to support over 3.6 million women and children, in more thant 11 nations. Ladies and gentleman, Mitch Vesser and Jean Falk. Paul Farmer, Partners in Health. When Paul Farmer founded Partners in Health in 1987, he wanted to prove that cost effective, high quality healthcare could be delivered in the most challenging contexts.

Believing that healthcare is a fundamental human right, it can be effectively delivered through community-based healthcare systems, Paul and his team developed a powerful model, tested and proved first in Haiti, so effective with Partners in Health and it's "accompagner" methodology, that it went on to change World Health Organization policy.

Over the past five years, the program has grown from 60,000 patient visits to 1.7 million. Partners in Health now operates in 10 countries worldwide and will continue to expand into the most difficult and resource-deprived countries in the years ahead. Ladies and Gentleman, Paul Farmer. Daniel Lubetzky, PeaceWorks Foundation.

The son of a Jewish immigrant and a holocaust survivor, Daniel Lubetzky began advocating and fostering entrepreneurial joint ventures between Arabs and Israelis in 1989, to bring stability to the Middle East through economic cooperation. He then founded the PeaceWorks Foundation in 2002 to encourage political moderates to build a new movement to unite for peace in the Middle East.

The foundation's OneVoice movement re-frames the debate into one that positions the vast majority, composed of moderates from both side,s against violent extremism. OneVoice has trained 3,100 Palestinian and Israeli youth leaders and recruited more than 650,000 signatories to demand immediate and uninterrupted negotiations toward the conclusion of a peace agreement.

Ladies and gentleman, Daniel Lubetzky. Michai Vera Vidia, the Population and Community Development Association. As a young economist working for the government in Thailand, Michai Vera Vidia saw a link between rapid population growth and poverty. He launched the Population and Community Development Association in 1974, to distribute contraceptives and introduce sex education in rural communities and schools.

By 2005, the population growth rate had dropped from 3.2% to 0.5%. During the 1990s, PDA's aggressive campaign reduced new HIV cases by 90%. In it's next generation of innovative work, the organization is enlisting private partners in over 450 village development partnership programs that will enable the poor to generate income and sustain their communities without having to migrate to cities.

By 2011, PDA plans to expand the partnership program to at least 100 more villages. Ladies and gentlemen, Mecha Viravaidva.


Cecelia Flores-Oebanda, the Visayon Forum Foundation. As a child in Philippines, Cecilia Flores-Oebanda helped her family survive by selling fish and scavenging garbage. As freedom fighters against the Marcos dictatorship, she and her husband were imprisoned for four years and separated from their oldest son.

Their two other children were born in detention. After democracy prevailed, Cecilia founded the Visayan Forum Foundation in 1991 to eliminate human trafficking through public private partnerships including the powerful transportation industry, among its allies. They rescue, protect and reintegrate victims.

The organization has served 18,500 victims and potential victims to date, and has filed 66 legal cases on behalf of 166 complainants. By 2011, Visayan Forum Foundation plans to expand its multisectoral networks to defeat human trafficking where it is most entrenched. Ladies and gentlemen, Cecelia Flores-Oebanda.

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