Skoll's Message So Far? Think Even Bigger

A couple weeks ago, I pondered what the tone of the Skoll World Forum would be this year, and particularly, what people thought would be the "next big thing" for the field. About half way through the Forum, the answer -- at least from the organizers -- is a resounding "think even bigger."

Last year, Jeff Skoll announced a new initiative called the Global Threats Fund. Run by former Google.org director Larry Brilliant, the Fund is specifically aimed at dealing with the most challenging, intractable and essential challenges of the times -- climate change, Middle East peace, nuclear proliferation and more. These are threats that, in Skoll's estimation, have inescapable consequences for everyone if they remain unaddressed.

This year's Skoll Forum has these issues at the very front and center of the program. The theme of the whole event is "Catalyzing Collaboration for Large Scale Change," and the collaboration they seem to be talking about is social entrepreneurs partnering with the worlds biggest institutions, governments, and multinationals to address these challenges. Last night's opening ceremony featured Paul Farmer imploring every social entrepreneur in the room to help earthquake relief in Haiti, an event he called the "greatest natural disaster of our time." The daily content has an entire new "Critical Issues" track to focus on these challenges.

While discussing these issues is not new to the social entrepreneurship field, their supremacy at this event is a departure from the more familiar conversations of impact metrics, social finance, and the challenges of scaling nonprofit social enterprises.

The tone shift is largely a welcome one to me. It represents, as far as I can tell, a move away from the idea of the social entrepreneur as lone hero to social entrepreneur as disruptive, opinionated, creative catalyst in the larger stew of change actors. That seems to me a much better representation of what social entrepreneurs and their institutions should strive for. If for many that has always been the objective, it is nice to see the brand catching up to it.

As with any attempt to get a community with diverse interests to focus on a few issues that some subset of that group holds up as most vital, there could be backlash and bristling against the idea that poverty, health, market access, and the other work that has been highlighted in the past is some how any less essential.

But the message so far is more about the interrelatedness of these issues, and the Skoll folks seem more interested in expanding the context of the work of social entrepreneurs addressing those issues than in suddenly converting their efforts. An example of this perspective might be that nuclear proliferation happens because of the existence of terrorists and substate actors, who exist because of weaknesses in the state, which exist because of corruption, lack of funding, and lack of capacity, which exist because of a lack of a tax base, which exists because of poverty, which remains the dominant paradigm because of all of the cyclical traps above and more.

It's a vital conversation to have, and I'm glad they are trying it out here.

Photo credit: tm-tm