2009 Skoll Awards Ceremony
Video Description
Skoll Awardes at the 2009 Skoll World Forum receiving their awards: Bart Weetjens of APOPO; Soraya Salti of INJAZ Al-Arab, JA Worldwide; Jordan Kassalow of VisionSpring; Paul Van Zyl and Juan Mendez of ICTJ; Martin von Hildebrand of Fundacion Gaia Amazonas; Wendy Kopp of Teach for All; Pooran Desai and Sue Riddlestone of BioRegional Development Group; Gary White of Water.org; Munqeth Mehyar, Nader Khateeb and Gidon Bromberg of Ecopeace/Friends of the Earth Middle East.
Speakers
-
Chair, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Dr. Rajendra Kumar Pachauri is the Chair of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific intergovernmental body that provides decision makers and the public with an objective source of information about climate change. He is also Director General of TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute), an independent research organisation providing knowledge on energy, environment, forestry, biotechnology, and the conservation of natural resources. He is active in several international forums dealing with the subject of climate change and its policy dimensions. He was awarded the second-highest civilian award in India, the ‘Padma Vibhushan’ and received the ‘Officier De La Légion D’Honneur’ from the Government of France in 2006.
-
Nader Al-Khateeb served as Chief Engineer for the Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Beit Sahour Water Authority from 1984 to 1993, where he was responsible for planning and fundraising, as well as operations and maintenance of the distribution network. After returning from leave to acquire his M.Sc. degree, he also became the Project Manager for their drainage and sewerage project. From 1994 to 1997, Mr. Al-Khateeb was a senior water resource engineer with the UNDP's Water Resources Action Program, working as a consultant in the effort to formulate and establish the Palestinian Water Authority (PWA). He then became associated with the PWA itself, coordinating a host of water and wastewater projects.
-
Munqeth Mehyar received a degree in Regional Planning and Architecture from the University of Louisiana, USA in 1981, upon which he became the planning engineer for South Amman. Being a committed sportsman, he was the project manager for the German Balsam International Sports Company, and then the Middle East Manager of the Athlete Sports Contracting Company. He serves on the Board of Directors of both the Jordan Sports Federation for the Handicapped, and the Jordan Royal Ecological Diving Society.
Mr. Mehyar was awarded a medal from Al Houssain Distinguished Giving for his charitable activities. Further to being co-founder of EcoPeace Middle East, Mr. Mehyar is also the Founder and Director of the Jordan Society for Sustainable Development, an environmental NGO based in Amman.
-
Wendy Kopp is CEO and Co-founder of Teach For All, a global network of independent organizations in 61 countries across every region of the world that are working to develop collective leadership to ensure all children have the opportunity to fulfill their potential. Prior to launching Teach For All in 2007, Wendy founded and led Teach For America. She led the development of Teach For All to be responsive to the initiative of social entrepreneurs around the world who were determined to adapt this approach in their own countries. Wendy holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University as well as honorary doctorate degrees from 15 universities. She has been recognized with numerous awards including the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, the Wise Prize for Education and the Schwab Foundation’s Outstanding Social Entrepreneur Award.
-
Sue is a 2009 Skoll Awardee and a Schwab and Ashoka award-winning social entrepreneur with 30 years of experience in sustainable living, focused on our homes, cities and the products and services we use. Including the world-famous BedZED eco-village in London, where Sue lives. Sue and the team systematised their approach as “One Planet Living” which is freely available for anyone to use. Based on 10 principles and a sustainable carbon and ecological footprint. There is now a global network of exemplary communities, and 10 million people living in places that have used One Planet Living. Sue draws on these inspiring examples to support policy change, for the built environment and through a formal role in the UN process to create the UN Sustainable Development Goals. At global social entrepreneur network Catalyst 2030 Sue helped secure a UN Resolution on the social and solidarity economy. Sue was awarded an OBE in 2013 for services to sustainable business and the London 2012 Olympics.
-
A native of Argentina, Juan Méndez came of age during a time of great upheaval in Latin America. As a result of his legal and advocacy work, he was arrested, tortured and exiled. He refused to be broken and dedicated his life to pioneering ways to protect human rights. Juan joined ICTJ as president in 2004. Paul van Zyl, a native of apartheid-era South Africa, committed to working against intolerance at a young age. He helped draft legislation to establish the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and was hired by Archbishop Tutu as its Executive Secretary. Paul co-founded ICTJ in 2001.
-
Senior Vice President of Middle East/North Africa for Junior Achievement Worldwide,
INJAZ al-ArabSoraya Salti was Senior Vice President of Middle East/North Africa for Junior Achievement Worldwide, INJAZ Al-Arab. Her efforts had led to the expansion of INJAZ to 15 countries, in the most successful private public sector partnership in education reaching more than 1 million youth, in the region with the world’s highest youth unemployment. She won the 2006 Schwab Social Entrepreneur award for Jordan, became a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum and was the first Arab woman to win the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship.
The Skoll Foundation mourns the loss of Soraya Salti, founder of INJAZ al-Arab. In 2015, Soraya and her sister, Jumana, both died tragically and unexpectedly.
-
Thirty years of working in sustainability.
-
Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer, The Conduit
Paul served as the Executive Secretary of South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 1995 to 1998. His background is in human rights law, and he has received a number of scholarships and accolades for his work in global social impact. Paul was selected as a Hauser Global Scholar at NYU, a program which selects 10 of the finest students from countries across the world. He received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2009 with Juan E. Mendez, with whom he founded the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), an international human rights organisation based in New York. Paul was chosen as a Young Global Leader by the WEF in 2008. He has served as an adviser and consultant to many NGOs and Governments on transitional justice issues in over 30 countries. Paul co-founded The Conduit in 2018, and that year was named by London Tech Week as one of its 30 "Change Makers'.
-
Jordan Kassalow is an eye doctor, social entrepreneur, and author. He is the founder of VisionSpring, the co-founder of EYElliance, and a Partner at Drs. Farkas, Kassalow, Resnick, & Associates. Jordan also founded the Global Health Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations and co-founded Scojo New York. Prior to his position at the Council, he served as Director of the River Blindness Division at Helen Keller International. Jordan is a fellow of Draper Richards Kaplan, Skoll, Ashoka, and is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute. He was named one of Schwab Foundation’s 2012 Social Entrepreneurs, was the inaugural winner of the John P. McNulty Prize, and was recognized in Forbes Impact 30. VisionSpring has been internationally recognized by the Skoll Foundation, the Aspen Institute, and the World Bank; is a three-time winner of Fast-Company's Social Capitalist Award; and a winner of Duke University’s Enterprising Social Innovation Award. Additionally, he co-authored Dare
-
Gary is the CEO and Co-founder of Water.org and WaterEquity, two organizations dedicated to empowering people in the developing world to gain access to safe water and sanitation. Gary developed Water.org’s WaterCredit solution, creating new financing options for poor populations to meet their water supply and sanitation needs. He also developed WaterEquity, an impact investment manager dedicated to ending the global water crisis, with an exclusive focus on mobilizing private investments in water and sanitation throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He is a leading advisor in the water and sanitation space, counseling organizations such as Inditex, Reckitt, Amazon Web Services, the Water Resilience Coalition, and Bank of America on responses to the global water crisis.
Gary holds three degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Missouri University S&T.
-
As the first President and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, Sally Osberg partnered with Jeff Skoll to build it into the leading philanthropy in the field of social entrepreneurship. During her tenure, the Foundation supported more than 100 entrepreneurial organizations driving equilibrium change on many of the world’s most pressing problems and developed innovative platforms for connecting civil society, government and private sector leaders with societal problem solvers. Among these platforms are the annual Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, the Skoll Centre at Oxford University’s Said Business School, and the Sundance Institute’s “Stories of Change” initiative.
In 2015, Sally and Roger Martin published Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works, which articulates a theoretical framework for social entrepreneurship and distills lessons for practitioners, academics and impact investors. Her thought pieces have appeared in leading social impact and business journals and books; in 2015, she and Roger Martin were honored by Thinkers 50 for their intellectual leadership in the field of social enterprise.
Prior to joining Jeff Skoll and the Skoll Foundation, Sally served as the founding Executive Director for Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose, a pioneering institution in the field.
Sally currently serves as the Chair of the Camfed (the Campaign for Female Education in Africa) USA Foundation, on the Philanthropy Advisory Council of the Royal Bank of Canada, on the Advisory Council of the Elders, as Vice Chair of the Social Progress Imperative and as a board director for New America and the Palestine-based Partners for Sustainable Development. She is also an Associate Fellow of the Said Business School of Oxford University.
She received her M.A. in English and American Literature from the Claremont Graduate School and her B.A. in English from Scripps College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
-
Martin Von Hildebrand has spent the last five decades accompanying indigenous communities in the Colombian Amazon. During this time, he has been a fundamental actor to obtain the recognition of indigenous communities rights in the National Constitution, including the collective ownership of their land and the development of their governments. They now own 26 million hectares of continuous rainforest. Their rights have been recognized, and they have set up many governments.
Currently, Martin, along with NGOs, indigenous organizations, civil society, governments, and private enterprises, is coordinating the protection of the largest stretch of rainforests on the planet (the northern part of the Amazon between the Andes and the Atlantic, 260 million hectares).
He is an ethnologist with a doctorate from the University of Paris VII, founder and the current president of the Gaia Amazonas Foundation. He has been awarded a dozen international awards.
-
Musician / Singer,
Kate Victoria "KT" Tunstall is a Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist from St Andrews, Scotland. She broke into the public eye with a 2004 live solo performance of her song "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree" on Later... with Jools Holland. She has enjoyed commercial and critical success since, picking up three nominations before winning a BRIT Award, and a Grammy Award nomination. She is also the recipient of an Ivor Novello Award.
She has released three studio albums internationally: Eye to the Telescope (2004), Drastic Fantastic (2007) and Tiger Suit (2010).
-
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
-
Gidon Bromberg is the founder and 3 decade Israeli co-director of EcoPeace Middle East. EcoPeace is a unique regional organization that brings together Jordanian, Palestinian, and Israeli environmentalists to promote sustainable development and advance peace efforts in the Middle East.
Mr. Bromberg has spearheaded the organization’s advocacy campaigns in the Middle East and internationally. He developed a cross-border community peace-building program known as “Good Water Neighbors.” The program has helped advance rehabilitation efforts in the Jordan River and defuse the sanitation crisis in Gaza, leading to the removal of most of the pollution from Gaza Strip and southern Israel beaches. The program is seen as a model for environmental peacebuilding in other conflict areas around the world.
Bromberg co-authored EcoPeace’s call for a Green Blue Deal for the Middle East, to advance climate resilience and peace. The report and later EcoPeace efforts led to the signing in November 2021
-
Bart is a Zen Buddhist monk and social entrepreneur.
He took the initiative to train giant African rats (AKA HeroRATs) as sustainable detectors in response to the global landmine problem. What started in 1995 as a modest research initiative in detection rats technology, gradually grew into a global humanitarian operation through his organisation apopo.org which became one of the leading social enterprises in the world, recognised and awarded by networks like Ashoka, the Skoll Awards and the World Economic Forum.
Bart transitioned from his executive role in 2015 to focus on the practice of Zen. In the same year he got involved in The Wellbeing Project which aims to catalyze a culture of inner wellbeing for all changemakers.
While exploring the relationship between personal growth and social innovation, he recently co-founded a new initiative innerpreneurs.org which is a brave space for entrepreneurial leaders to fulfilll their noble life purpose.
