Sally Osberg Closing Remarks to the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship 2008
By Sally Osberg, 03.28.08

We have nearly come to the end of our fifth annual Skoll World Forum.  We do so in an institution and a city that has seen its fair share of anniversaries. 

One of the more interesting commemorations happened exactly 200 years ago next fall, when Great Britain celebrated the 50th anniversary—the Grand Jubilee—of King George III’s ascension to the throne. 

The King chose to celebrate the occasion in a unique way. He gave 2000 pounds out of his personal dowry to the Society for the Relief of Persons, to help more than 7,000 people pay their debts.  The reason was simple:  he had come to believe that the legacy of past debts should not be a burden on future generations.

Thankfully, the ability to affect change has been greatly democratized the past 200 years.  But in a way, it was that same issue that brought us all together when we first met in 2004:  the idea that the legacy of past transgressions—on the environment, on economic growth, on education, on sustainable development, on peace—should not be a burden to future generations.  That together, we could come up with new ways to create new opportunity and solve some of the world’s most intractable problems.

We weren’t exactly a voice in the wilderness—but there weren’t very many of us.  But to say the battle has been joined the past five years is a vast understatement. 

Jeff Skoll has used Google hits as a barometer of progress.  Two years ago, he did a search for “social entrepreneur” and got 12,400 hits.  Last year, he did the same thing, and got more than 100,000 hits.  This week, I did my own search for social entrepreneur.  The result:  more than half a million hits. 

In the span of just a few years, there has been an explosion of books, articles, television programs, and online networks celebrating and supporting sustainable social change.  The world’s top business schools have launched programs and research centers dedicated to social entrepreneurship. 

According to the Aspen Institute, the number of elective courses per school that feature some social or environmental content has increased by nearly 50 percent in just three years.   In 2007, 63 percent of schools required students to take a course dedicated to social issues, nearly double the level of 2001.

Social entrepreneurs have been central players at the Clinton Global Initiative and the World Economic Forum.  They’ve won Nobel Peace Prizes.  They’ve been recognized as MacArthur Geniuses.  They’re advising heads of state and U.S. presidential candidates. 

This has occurred alongside an explosion in non-governmental organizations worldwide dedicated to seeking new solutions to our oldest problems.  In Russia, we’ve gone from virtually no NGOs eight years ago to more than 400,000 today.  In China, there are more than 280,000 registered, and twice that number not registered.  In India, the number is over half a million.  And in the United States, there are more than one million, more than half of which were started this decade.   

All of these developments point to a deeper truth.  Social entrepreneurs – you in this room - have achieved the crucial and all-too-elusive task of capturing the public’s imagination. 

But what’s the next chapter in this story?  I believe it’s the ecosystem.

More and more, social entrepreneurship is not only about the power of the brilliant individual.  Increasingly, it is about the power of strategic partnerships—the coalitions that take the solutions you envision and bring them to scale.

This is the direction we’re headed—toward a new model of social change—smarter, broader collaborations with businesses, governments, universities, and of course, with each other. 

It is no accident that the last three years, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to collaborations between an individual and an institution.  

Last year, it was Al Gore and the International Panel on Climate Change.  Before that, it was Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank.  And before that, it was Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

It often takes an individual to have the game-changing insight—to see what no one else has seen—to make the leap beyond what is known to what has only been imagined. 

But without institutions, even the most transformative ideas are unlikely to translate into sustainable change. 

And when we take that truth one step further, and unite many institutions in strategic, multi-sectoral alliances—that’s when we see the full potential of brilliant ideas to change the world.

I believe that this is the next step in our work—achieving this “community effect” wherever possible—whether it’s in fighting a disease, or opening schools, or devising new solutions for delivering clean water to people everywhere.

We can point to several current examples of this kind of creative partnership for social change.  One of the most exciting is the global fight against malaria.

To fully appreciate today’s war on malaria, it’s important to know about another time the world tried to defeat this disease—the cautionary tale of Fred Soper. 

Fred Soper was the head of the Global Malaria Eradication Program in the 1930s and 40s.  He was fiercely determined in pursuit of a noble goal. One person described him as “the General Patton of entomology.” He passionately believed in his key idea, which was to deploy workers throughout the malarial world to kill mosquitoes with the help of an amazing new technology—a pesticide called DDT.  

No one could ever doubt Fred Soper’s extraordinary commitment to his mission.  But like all truly tragic heroes, his greatest strength—that single-minded focus—became his downfall.

Fred was sure that DDT was the silver bullet for defeating malaria.  But then Rachel Carson wrote “The Silent Spring” about how DDT was causing a lot of environmental problems; it was killing birds and plants and contaminating the soil.  Public outcry grew.  In 1972, the US banned DDT.  Other countries followed.  Soon, public health officials in places where malaria had been nearly defeated began seeing an alarming rise in malarial mosquitoes.  Infections increased—but by now, many people had lost their acquired immunity to the malaria parasite.  So infections skyrocketed.  And they’ve stayed high ever since.
 
Luckily, the world has learned from the lesson of Fred Soper.  We have learned that the search for silver bullets is naïve.  With issues as complex as malaria, it takes people working from many different angles.  Today, we’ve taken up the mission of eradicating malaria again.  But this time, we’re not putting all of our hopes in a single breakthrough technology.  Instead, a broad coalition of groups is attacking malaria from many different fronts.

One of the more promising collaborations is a partnership between the Institute for One World Health, a company called Amyris, and a team at the University of California at Berkeley. They are working together to manufacture a synthetic version of the key component in anti-malarial compounds, called artemisinin.  The process typically involves a rare Chinese herb.  This team is using vats of e-Coli sugar water and then modifying bugs, who eat the sugar, and excrete artemisinin.  They believe they’ll soon have it for 60 cents a dose, which lowers the cost dramatically—and will save an estimated 30 million lives a year.

On another front, the UN Foundation, the Methodist Church and the National Basketball Association in the U.S. have sent almost 2 million bed nets to Africa through the “Nothing But Nets” Campaign.

Governments around the world are crafting national plans for fighting malaria.  They are deploying public health workers throughout malarial regions to teach people the behaviors that can keep their children safe: sleeping under bed nets, staying inside after dark, cleaning up the trash that holds stagnant water. 

Foundations… corporations… governments…. churches… sports associations.  Each of these groups—and many others—have roles to play in this enormous mission, and through smart coordination, each group’s unique contribution is enhanced by the contributions of their partners. 

We see similar coalitions around many issues, like the collaboration between the United Nations Foundation and dozens of leading investment banks and institutional investors, to factor carbon capture investments into financial decisions. 
Here in this room, there are people working to eliminate hunger, fight climate change, establish schools, and achieve equity for women.  Many of you entered these fields because you had a compelling idea, and you just couldn’t stop yourself from pursuing it—even if it meant disrupting your life and veering off onto a very different path.

Your ideas deserve to be celebrated.  But as you all know well: lasting change doesn’t happen because of a great idea, or an inspiring leader.  It doesn’t even happen because of how hard people work for it.  Lasting change happens when strong alliances unite to build networks to sustain change.

What is the equivalent of the modern global malaria alliance in your field—the network of partners who can build up and build around your idea, to create an unstoppable force for change?

As we’ve heard here this week:  answering this question may not be easy.  It points to the difference between working for change and organizing for change—two distinct actions that require somewhat different skill sets. But the work we do together to organize alliances will be crucial for giving your ideas the greatest impact.

That’s one reason we organize this forum every year—to give you the chance to make the connections that can lead to powerful partnerships.

Partnerships are key to scale.  And scale is key to impact.   When we hesitate to scale up our solutions, the problems we face scale up in their complexity. 

As we heard Jeff Skoll say earlier this week:  our biggest enemy today is time. We are quickly reaching a tipping point. It’s not too late to make change.  But that clock has ticked a few minutes closer to midnight.

We all need to leave Oxford this week with a sense of urgency. But we also need to leave with a renewed optimism.  The resources that are being brought to bear on some of these big challenges are increasingly impressive.  And I don’t just mean money or political focus. I mean intellectual resources, commitment, and personal energy.

The social entrepreneurs we have been celebrating this week personify that optimism.  You have successfully tackled—and continue to tackle—some of the globe’s most complex challenges.  While many of you might deny your role as symbols, the truth is that what you do shows an often skeptical world that seemingly insurmountable challenges can, in fact, be met.  The symbolism is important.  The people in this room are masters at recognizing a moment of opportunity, and then seizing upon it. 

Nearly fifty years ago, a different kind of activist was presented with a moment of opportunity, and he seized it.  Wallace Stegner, a Pulitzer-Prize winning American novelist and early conservationist, was approached by a young researcher from the University of California at Berkeley’s Wildlands Research Center.  The Center had been given a task by the federal government:  to write a six-page letter for publication in a fairly obscure Congressional Report articulating why saving the environment was important.

Stegner seized the moment.  He wrote the now-famous “Wilderness Letter” that talked about wilderness not just as a place or thing to be protected, but as an idea—a concept that was important for the full realization of human potential.  He wrote: 

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . . so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world . . . we simply need that wild country available to us . . even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.  For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.” 

Within a year, Stegner’s letter was everywhere.  He saw it posted in a game park in Kenya and on posters in Rhodesia, South Africa, Australia, Canada, and Israel. The phrase “geography of hope” lent itself to the title of at least seven books.  And most importantly, it provided the intellectual underpinning for early conservationists, who passed the most far-reaching Wilderness Protection law in American history three years later.

That is the effect of one passionate person, dedicated to change, seizing a moment.  I believe that spirit is alive and well here at Oxford this week.  Your dedication  gives us new optimism that we can solve the challenges we face.  You and your work help reassure us of our humanity, of our sanity as creatures.  You are helping expand the geography of hope.  

We are privileged to take that journey with you.  Thank you. 

© 2008, Skoll Foundation.