Thursday, March 27, 2008
Empathy And Ethics: Drivers Of Our Shifting Culture
Session Description
Technology has increased the flow of information and made our decision-making more transparent. This rapid shift presents us with an historic opportunity to create a global culture driven by the need for trust and inclusion. This is why it is so important for those who are defi ning the world’s future structures to consciously build the ethical skills necessary into their designs. The building of empathetic ethics has to begin with individuals and quickly move into the organisations we lead and ultimately the societies we serve. How are we doing this? And, more importantly, how do we make this happen more quickly?
When | Where
10:00 - 12:00
Thursday, March 27
Session leaders
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Bill Drayton is a social entrepreneur with a long record of founding organizations and public service. As the founder and CEO of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, Bill Drayton has pioneered the field of social entrepreneurship, growing a global association of over 3,900 leading social entrepreneurs who work together to create an ‘Everyone a Changemaker’ world. Ashoka Fellows bring big systems-change to the world’s most urgent social challenges. Over half have changed national policy within five years of launch.
As a student, he founded organizations ranging from Yale Legislative Services to Harvard’s Ashoka Table, an inter-disciplinary weekly forum in the social sciences. After graduation from Harvard, he received an M.A. from Balliol College in Oxford University. In 1970, he graduated from Yale Law School. He worked at McKinsey & Company for ten years and taught at Stanford Law School and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. While serving the Carter Administration as Assistant Administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, he launched many reforms including emissions trading, a fundamental change in regulation that is now the basis of much global as well as US regulatory law, including in fields beyond the environment.
Bill launched Ashoka in 1980; in 1984, he used the stipend he received when elected a MacArthur Fellow to devote himself fully to Ashoka. Bill is Ashoka’s Chief Executive Officer. He also chairs Ashoka’s Youth Venture, Community Greens, and Get America Working! Bill has won numerous awards and honors throughout his career. He has been selected one of America’s Best Leaders by US News & World Report and Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership. In 2011, Drayton won Spain's prestigious Prince of Asturias Award, Other awards include Honorary Doctorates from Yale, NYU and more.
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Founder and Executive Director, Sports4Kids
Jill C. Vialet is the founder and Executive Director of Sports4Kids. Jill has worked for more than 20 years in the non-profit sector, during which she focused her entrepreneurial skills on conceiving of and growing two non-profit organisations. Jill launched Sports4Kids in 1996 with two schools in Berkeley, California. Currently the organisation brings play and physical activities to more than 115 schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, Baltimore, Maryland, Boston, Massachusetts and Washington, DC with plans to expand to Charlotte, NC this coming school year. Prior to Sports4Kids, Jill founded the Museum of Children’s Art (mocha) in Oakland, California. Jill served as the Executive Director at mocha for nine years, ultimately expanding its programs to reach 20,000 young people each year. Jill was a Eureka Fellow from 2000 to 2001, and in 2004 she was selected as an Ashoka Fellow.
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Director, News & Knowledge Initiative, Ashoka
Keith Hammonds is a writer and editor based outside New York City. He is team leader for Ashoka’s journalism fellows initiative, a new programme funded by the Knight Foundation to identify, seed, and connect social entrepreneurs in the realm of journalism. Hammonds was previously executive editor at Fast Company magazine, where he helped shape editorial strategy – and where he co-founded the Fast Company / Monitor Group Social Capitalist Awards. Over eight years, he wrote many of Fast Company’s defining articles, including: “Why We Hate HR,” “Balance is Bunk,” “Size is not a Strategy,” and “The New Face of Global Competition.” Hammonds also has been a bureau chief and editor for BusinessWeek in Boston and New York; a writer for The New York Times in London and Johannesburg; a consultant to New Nation in Johannesburg; director of an emergency food distribution program in Namibia; and (currently) coach of the Firebolts, a fearsome girls soccer team.
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Executive Director, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics
Kirk O. Hanson is executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and the John Courtney Murray S.J. University Professor of Social Ethics, positions he has held since 2001. In 2001, he took early retirement from the faculty of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where he taught for 23 years and is now an emeritus faculty member.
The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics is one of the most active ethics centers in the world, working in the fields of business, government, journalism, engineering, internet ethics, health care ethics, social sector ethics, leadership ethics, and K-12 character education. Hanson coordinates the activities of over 25 staff members who work directly for the Center and 70 affiliated faculty scholars who work on all aspects of applied and professional ethics.
On the Stanford Business School faculty from 1978 through 2001, Hanson was a pioneer in the study of business ethics and business responsibility.
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Founder and President, Roots of Empathy
Mary Gordon is Founder and President of Roots of Empathy, a citizen-sector organisation harnessing the power of the parent-infant attachment relationship to build empathy in elementary school children. This programme – evidence-based to reduce aggression and bullying – has reached hundreds of thousands of children on three continents. An internationally recognised social entrepreneur, educator, author and child advocate, Mary is an Ashoka Globalizer Fellow and in 2011 received a Manning Innovation Award as Canada’s top social innovator.
