Little heralded, or even known, in this country was an event that took place halfway across the globe last week. That was the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, “the Davos of doing good,” which culminated in the presentation of the Skoll Awards at the New Theater in Oxford, England. The awards are the Nobel Prize of sorts for social entrepreneurship and carry the same cash prize of $1 million. Four organizations won it this year. One of them is Gawad Kalinga.
The forum is the brainchild of Jeff Skoll, who himself revolutionized marketing by founding Ebay. The awards are administered by the Skoll Foundation, headed by Sally Osberg. The agenda of social entrepreneurship is as simple as it is formidable. It is to “force society to reconsider its conception of the very nature of human progress, of how we carry out business, construct and hold our governments accountable, tap and replenish natural resources—how we survive and thrive, together.”
Or put another way, it is to show that saving the planet is good business, uplifting the poor is good business, making lives better is good business. The very opposite of the theory, much borne out by practice, that business can only be ruinous, calamitous and poisonous, and result in destroying the planet, making the poor poorer, and reducing the quality of life while increasing the quantity of goods.
The awards ceremonies last Thursday night, March 29, began and ended with short videos on the work of past awardees (the awards have existed for nine years), both of which are of humongous interest to us, the first having to do with the planet and the second having to do with the country.
The first had to do with the efforts of several organizations to save the Amazon rainforest, which really means saving the earth itself. The pace at which the Amazon is being destroyed is terrifying. The rainforest isn’t just home to breathtaking biological biodiversity, it is where a third of the earth’s carbon dioxide goes to. The trees trap the gas inside them. Destroying the trees is truly destroying the planet, bringing global warming at a level that becomes irreversible even closer than we think. This is a case where greed, which has always been associated with business, is plain unacceptable.
One interesting way by which an organization has gotten Amazonians to stop deforestation (for conversion to cattle farms) is by showing that it’s more profitable to keep the forest intact by charging the companies in Brazil and elsewhere a fee for the service the trees provide in absorbing carbon dioxide.
The second had to do with our very own Visayan Forum, which has done a marvelous job fighting human trafficking in this country. That organization, headed by Cecilia Flores-Oebanda, was in fact the first Philippine recipient of the Skoll Awards in 2008. It began by engaging government and the police to help in quite physically stopping the trafficking (boarding ships, raiding hideouts and rescuing the girls) by going to the source of the problem itself, which is the desperate plight of the girls, which made them resort to that desperate action in the first place. Visayan Forum has since gone to engaging schools and vocational institutions to teach the girls skills with which to earn a livelihood.
The awards this year have gone to, apart from Gawad Kalinga, Landesa, a lawyers’ group that has already helped more than 105 million families gain legal rights to the land they till (more than a billion people globally do not have it); Nidan, an Indian organization that has collectivized informal workers (street hawkers, etc.), most of them Untouchables, and given them a voice in society; and Proximity Designs, which is producing inexpensive tools, like plastic pumps, to boost agricultural productivity in Burma.
Gawad Kalinga of course needs no introduction, its impact on the country particularly in the last few years being incalculable. It began by building houses for the poor, and went on to building communities for people, and went on to building hope in the heart of a nation. GK hasn’t just put a roof over the heads of the poorest of the poor, including the erstwhile thugs, derelicts, and petty and not-so-petty criminals, it has made them, by giving them the power and responsibility to run their villages themselves, masters of their fate. That’s as empowering as you can get. It has since gone on to try to promote among Filipinos a sense of having a stake in their country—ano’ng taya mo?—which is the only thing really that gets all of us to pull together. Dignity does matter. Pride does matter. Character does matter.
It’s a glimpse of resurrection amid death. What it says is that there is another way of doing things, there is a path beyond cooptation and confrontation. There is such a thing as innovation. I myself still believe confrontation is necessary, greed is not so easily pushed back, you still need to occupy Wall Street to save the planet in more ways than one. But I believe as well in inventiveness, creativity, and innovation, more so now than before, with ample demonstrations that whatever it is that needs doing can be done. The one thing, quite incidentally, that social entrepreneurs like to hear is people telling them, “It can’t be done.” It’s what drives them to make sure it is done. Who knows? After everybody has told us we can never get ahead in life with all the corruption, crab mentality and signs of a “damaged culture” we exhibit, we can prove them wrong, we can show it can be done. Maybe there will be resurrection after death.
Appropriately enough, the awards ended with Annie Lennox signing several songs ending with one from her Eurythmic days, “Sweet dreams are made of this.”
Maybe they really are.