Global Goals in an Uncertain World
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
Session Description
In 2015 the member nations of the UN arrived at an unprecedented agreement on 17 Sustainable Development Goals – an ambitious vision for transforming the world. While it was always clear no one sector alone could realize the SDGs, geopolitical changes over the last two years have made cross-sector collaboration even more central to the vision encapsulated in the goals. How can the UN work in concert with other institutions and sectors to achieve the global goals? We will discuss promising developments and share lessons learned from across sectors and geographies.
Time & Location
Time:
1:30 PM - 2:45 PM, Wednesday, April 5, 2017
BST
Location:
Pyramid Room
Speakers
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Moderator
Principal, SEM Strategies
Susan has served as Strategic Advisor to Goal 17 Partners, a non-profit organization that provides a platform for private-private collaboration toward sustainability, equality and accessibility since January 2020. She also serves as an adviser to the UN World Food Programme and a social impact firm, 196, where she advises corporate clients on their strategies on the Sustainable Development Goals and multilateral engagement. Susan’s current work builds on a 20-year long tenure working with the UN and the global policy-making community, most recently as Senior Vice President of the UN Foundation where she managed the organization’s unique relationship with the UN and led its presence in New York. Susan has worked with leaders from the UN, government, business, civil society and academia, brokering partnerships and building efforts to drive progress on global development and the SDGs. She is also active in her local community as a Board Member of Community Lifestyle in Hoboken, NJ.
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Speaker
CEO, Biocarbon Engineering
Lauren Fletcher is the Founder and CEO of BioCarbon Engineering which has the objective to plant 1 billion trees a year with drones. He holds a PhD in Physics (Oxford) and M.S. in Civil & Environmental Engineering (Stanford). He has 20+ years of experience as an Engineer and Scientist for NASA and Lockheed Martin across Space Shuttle, International Space Station, and Mars exploration programs. He also has extensive entrepreneurial experience as founder of two previous companies and as a member of the founding faculty of Singularity University. His expertise includes project management; environmental engineering, bio-technology and biological sciences; space and systems engineering; planetary science; and social impact and entrepreneurship. He is driven by a genuine concern about the state of our world: degrading climate, loss of natural environments, significant biodiversity losses, and a increasing potential for human suffering driven by a rapidly changing climate. He believes that emerging and exponential technologies, when appropriately applied, can solve global scale problems in ways that we have never been able to do before.
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Speaker
President, Ford Foundation
Darren Walker is president of the Ford Foundation, a $16 billion international social justice philanthropy. Under his leadership, the Ford Foundation became the first non-profit in US history to issue a $1 billion designated social bond to stabilize non-profit organizations in the wake of COVID-19.
Before joining Ford, Darren was vice president at Rockefeller Foundation. Previously, he was COO of Harlem’s Abyssinian Development Corporation.
Darren co-founded both the US Impact Investing Alliance and the Presidents’ Council on Disability Inclusion in Philanthropy. He serves on many boards, including the National Gallery of Art, Carnegie Hall, the High Line, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, Committee to Protect Journalists, Block Inc., and Ralph Lauren.
Educated exclusively in public schools, Darren was a member of the first Head Start class in 1965 and received BA, BS, and JD degrees from the University of Texas at Austin. He has been included on numerous leadership lists including Time’s annual 100 Most Influential People and Out magazine’s Power 50. He is the recipient of 16 honorary degrees, Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Medal and was named the Wall Street Journal’s 2020 Philanthropy Innovator.
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Speaker
Vivek founded Namati in 2011 to grow the movement for legal empowerment around the world. Namati and its partners have built cadres of community legal workers – sometimes known as “barefoot lawyers”– in ten countries. The advocates have worked with over 65,000 people to protect community lands, enforce environmental law, and secure basic rights to healthcare and citizenship.
Namati convenes the Global Legal Empowerment Network, more than 1,000 groups from every region in the world who are learning from one another and collaborating on common challenges. This community successfully advocated for the inclusion of access to justice in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.
Vivek is co-author of Community Paralegals and the Pursuit of Justice (Cambridge University Press). His TED talk, How to Put the Power of Law in People’s Hands, has been viewed over a million times.
