“Change history by your passion,” says Stephan Chambers

Stephan Chambers, chairman of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, speaks at the opening plenary of the Skoll World Forum 2009. He quotes a Polish poet saying, “The passionless cannot change history.”

Thank you, Ken. As will become apparent over the next minute or two, Ken and I rehearsed. It really is now, only me between you and dinner. And I know therefor that I should be brief. We heard a number of extraordinary testimonies tonight and I take from them that we need to hold in our minds two contradictory impulses.

A clear sighted view of how bad things are and a resolute commitment to how good hey could be. I've heard a few important things tonight, existing models of reality are not reality. Power equals passion, plus rational argument. Social entrepreneurs: You are the bridge between local solutions, telling and system to change and the means to hold governments to account.

Telling other truths is trans-formative and sometimes a celebrity helps. The Polish, rather than Russian poet Czeslaw Milosz famously wrote, "The passionless cannot change history". it's your challenge here this week to change history by your passion, by your ideas, by your conversations and by the connections that this event allows.

I wish you success in that passion and joy in those connections. Each of you has a dinner invitation, which shows which college will host your passion. It looks like this ok and It will tell you which college you're going to. All of those colleges are close and all will be pointed out to you by helpful marshals as you leave this building.

It remains only now for me to thank a few people. I thank our partners at the Skull foundation especially Sally, Lance, Dan and Paula. without whom we wouldn't be here. I thank my colleagues at the Skoll center, without whom I wouldn't be here and particularly I thank my new colleague Pamela Hartigan and my long standing colleagues.

Liz Nelson, Hannah Grimm, Popper Hitchens, and Samita Mahishwari. Finally, I thank you and I thank our students. Without whom, I'd be less grey but also less knowledgeable, and I leave you with the words of an Oxford philosopher, Isaiah Berlin. He wrote that few new truths have won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.

May the World be shifted and your cause overstated.
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