Empathy And Ethics: Drivers Of Our Shifting Culture

Speakers

• Mary Gordon

  Speaker

  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.

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• Kirk Hanson

  Speaker

  Author and Independent Consultant, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics

  Kirk O. Hanson stepped down recently as Executive Director of Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, one of the leading global centers for the study of applied ethics, where he held the John Courtney Murray, S.J. University Professorship in Social Ethics for 17 years. Previously Kirk taught business ethics at the Stanford Business School for 23 years and is recognized as one of the founders of the academic field of business ethics. He has been an emeritus faculty member at Stanford since 2001. Hanson writes and has published widely on managing the ethical and public behavior of corporations and their leaders. His current research interests include the design of corporate ethics programs and the responsibilities of boards for the ethical culture of organizations. Hanson has consulted with more than 125 corporations, nonprofit organizations, health care entitles, and government bodies on the design of ethics programs and the resolution of ethical dilemmas.

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• Keith Hammonds

  Speaker

  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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• Jill Vialet

  Speaker

  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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• Bill Drayton

  Speaker

  Founder and CEO, Ashoka, Ashoka

  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 and, in 2019, Drayton was elected as member of the American Philosophical Society. Other awards include Honorary Doctorates from Yale, NYU and more.

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