Opening Plenary Of The 2009 Skoll World Forum
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Session Description
Taiko drumming’s magical sounds set the stage for the 2009 Skoll World Forum. This performance by Taiko Meantime combined traditional Japanese rhythms and techniques with eclectic, original compositions.
Stephan Chambers, chairman of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, and Jeff Skoll welcomed guests.
Roger L. Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto shared his findings of what qualities all great leaders share.
The opening plenary panel was called “Power to the People: Citizen Engagement and Social Transformation“. The moderator is Ray Suarez of The NewsHour on PBS and panelists are Kailash Satyarthi, chairman, global March Against Child Labour; Daniel Lubetzky, founder and president, PeaceWorks Group; The Honourable Mary Robinson, president, Realizing Rights.
Kenneth Brecher, executive director of the Sundance Institute, ended the opening plenary with his talk, “Unfinished Portraits of Powerful Ideas.” He discussed the significance of poetry and shared a powerful story about Stalin asking a woman to write a poem praising him in exchange for releasing her son.
Time & Location
Time:
17:00 - 18:30, Wednesday, March 25, 2009
BST
Speakers
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Speaker
Freelance Journalist, Individual
Ray Suarez is a host of the radio and podcast series WorldAffairs, heard on KQED San Francisco and public radio stations around the country, and a Washington reporter for Euronews. He recently completed an appointment as the McCloy Visiting Professor of American Studies at Amherst College. Suarez hosted Inside Story, a daily news program on Al Jazeera America, until the network ceased operation in 2016.
Suarez joined American public television’s nightly newscast, The PBS NewsHour in 1999 and was a senior correspondent until 2013. During his years at the NewsHour he was assigned to cover global health. His reporting from Africa, Asia, and Latin America won many awards. He hosted NPR’s Talk of the Nation from 1993-1999. In more than 40 years in the news business, he has worked as a reporter in London and Rome, as a Los Angeles correspondent for CNN, and for the NBC-owned station WMAQ-TV in Chicago.
Suarez is the author of three books: Latino Americans: The 500 Year Legacy That Shaped a Nation (Penguin, 2013), The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration: 1966-1999, reporting on the causes of the destitution found in American cities after the Second World War, andThe Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America, examining how organized religion and politics intersect in America. His next work, on immigration, political, demographic, and cultural change, will appear in 2023.
He is a contributor to the Oxford Companion to American Politics (June 2012), and many other books, including How I Learned English, Brooklyn: A State of Mind, Saving America's Treasures, and About Men. He’s been published in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Britain's Independent, Harvard University's Nieman Reports, and the Chicago Tribune.
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Speaker
Institute Director, Martin Prosperity Institute
In 2017, Roger was named the world’s #1 management thinker by Thinkers50, a biannual ranking of the most influential global business thinkers.
Roger Martin serves as the Institute Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and the Michael Lee-Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship at the Rotman School of Management and the Premier’s Chair in Productivity & Competitiveness. From 1998 to 2013, he served as Dean. In 2013, he was named global Dean of the Year by the leading business school website, Poets & Quants.
He has published 11 books the most recent of which are Creating Great Choices written with Jennifer Riel (Harvard Business Review Press, 2017) Getting Beyond Better written with Sally Osberg (HBRP, 2015) and Playing to Win written with A.G. Lafley (HBRP, 2013), which won the award for Best Book of 2012-13 by the Thinkers50. He has written 25 Harvard Business Review articles.
Roger is a trusted strategy advisor to the CEOs of companies worldwide including Procter & Gamble, Lego and Verizon.
A Canadian from Wallenstein, Ontario, Roger received his AB from Harvard College, with a concentration in Economics, in 1979 and his MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1981.
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Speaker
President, Library Foundation of Los Angeles
Kenneth S. Brecher is president of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. He was formerly executive director of the Sundance Institute, president of the William Penn Foundation, director of the Boston Children’s Museum, and associate artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum. An anthropologist by training, Brecher was an honors graduate of Cornell and a Rhodes Scholar. He has received numerous fellowships, including a research grant from the Getty Center for Education in the Arts and a Ford Foundation Fellowship for his study of Amazonian tribesmen. He has lectured and published widely and served as an international consultant on challenges facing arts leadership. He has been a keynote speaker at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship and played a central role in organizing the closing plenary on the importance of activist artists in social change.
He is the author of Too Sad to Sing: A Memoir with Postcards and editor of the classic Xingu: The Indians and Their Myths, by Orlando and Claudio Villas Boas. His installation “The Little Room of Epiphanies” was at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.
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Speaker
Director, The Marshall Institute, London School of Economics
Stephan Chambers is the inaugural director of the Marshall Institute at LSE and Director of the 100x Impact Accelerator. He serves on the steering groups for the Just Transition Finance Lab and the LSE Grantham Research Institute. At LSE he also sits on the governing board for the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity and is Professor in Practice at the Department of Management and Course Director for the Executive Masters in Social Business and Entrepreneurship. Before joining the Marshall Institute Stephan Chambers was the Co-Founder of the Skoll World Forum. From 2000 to 2014 he directed the University of Oxford’s MBA and was the founding Director of Oxford University's Executive MBA programme.
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Speaker
Founder, Kailash Satyarthi Children's Foundation
The life and work of Kailash Satyarthi is synonymous with the crusade against child slavery. Kailash was born in 1954 in Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh, India. He has a degree in electrical engineering and a post-graduate diploma in high-voltage engineering. After a few years of teaching engineering in a college in Bhopal, Kailash founded Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save the Childhood Movement) in 1980. BBA symbolises the struggle against child labour and child servitude and initiated the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude (SACCS). Kailash started “Rugmark” in 1994, a social labeling program in which rugs are labelled and certified to be childlabour-free. Recently, he has promoted the empowerment of children through a nationwide crusade for the formation of Child Friendly Villages. Kailash is the founder of GoodWeave, a 2005 Skoll Awardee.
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Speaker
Founder & Chairman, Jeff Skoll Group
Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Skoll Foundation
Founder and Chairman Emeritus of Participant Media
Founder of Capricorn Investment Group
Co-founder and GP of the RISE Fund
First fulltime employee and President of eBay
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Speaker
Daniel Lubetzky is CEO of KIND Healthy Snacks, makers of award-winning healthy foods, and Chairman of PeaceWorks, pursuing both peace and profit through neighbors striving to coexist in conflict regions. He is also the Founder of the PeaceWorks Foundation's OneVoice Movement, empowering moderate Israelis and Palestinians to achieve peace, and Co-Founder of Maiyet, forging partnerships with artisans in developing economies to create a new luxury fashion venture. Lubetzky received a BA in Economics and International Relations (magna cum laude) from Trinity University, and a JD from Stanford Law School. He has received many awards, including the Peace Security and Reconciliation Award, the Peace Makers Award and the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. He was also selected as Entrepreneur of the Year by Entrepreneur Magazine. Lubetzky was selected by the World Economic Forum as one of 100 Global Leaders for Tomorrow in 1997 and later as a Young Global Leader.
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Speaker
Chair of The Elders, The Elders
Mary Robinson is a founding member and Chair of The Elders, an independent group of global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela in 2007, who work together for peace, justice, human rights and a sustainable planet. She has served as Chair since 2018, and is a passionate advocate for gender equality, human rights and climate justice. She has addressed the UN Security Council on multiple occasions and has met with world leaders including President Ramaphosa in South Africa, Pope Francis in the Vatican, President Macron in Paris and President Xi Jinping in Beijing. She was the first woman President of Ireland (1990–1997) and is a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997–2002). From 2013- 2016, she served as the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy in three roles; first for the Great Lakes region of Africa, then on Climate Change and then on El Niño and Climate. She was appointed Adjunct Professor for Climate Justice at Trinity College Dublin in 2019.
