A Global Walk

By: Cristin Tarr Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Community Polly Letofsky headed west across four continents, 22 countries, and more than 14,000 miles – by foot – to become the first woman to walk around the world.

I had a business meeting late one afternoon with a woman who worked as a sales manager at a local hotel. I was anxious to get through the meeting quickly and go home to my three school-aged children. Little did I know that I was about to meet – Polly Letofsky – an extraordinary woman who had accomplished an extraordinary feat. I asked her my usual client questions, "What have you been doing the last few years? Where have you worked? Where have you lived and what is your favorite hobby?" She sat for a moment and said, "Well, I’ve spent the last five years walking around the world." Needless to say my attention focused and I wanted to hear her story.

The first steps of Letofsky’s "walk" sprouted at age 12. While growing up in Minneapolis, she read about a Minnesota man who had become the first to walk around the world. Inspired, she held the same desire, and wanted to be the first women to walk around the world.

The Inspiration to Walk

In the mid-1990s, several of Letofsky’s family members and friends were diagnosed with breast cancer. So, to ease her mind, she made an appointment with her doctor for a mammogram. Letofsky’s doctor said, "Don’t worry about getting a mammogram; you don’t have any risk factors. It doesn’t run in your family." With great relief, she shared this news with a friend, but her friend was outraged by the doctor’s advice—arguing that 80 percent of those diagnosed with breast cancer have no known risks.

This was Letofsky’s "aha" moment. She thought, "How many women around the world have been told similar tales about breast cancer? How many women around the world have no idea that breast cancer exists?" That’s when she decided to walk for women—to educate women all over the world about the disease that bonds us all—breast cancer. And from that moment, the GlobalWalk for Breast Cancer Awareness was formed. Armed with passion and determination to inform women in every city, town, and rural village about breast cancer, Letofsky began her Guinness World Records-setting journey with very few sponsors and more than 14,000 miles to walk over four continents.

She was not walking for the record books, but rather, for women all over the world. Her hope was that in every country where she walked, she would be a voice to encourage local breast cancer organizations to spread the message of early detection and prevention. Because many countries have cultural sensitivities surrounding breast care, women are often not informed of the severity or the widespread impact of the illness. After two years of planning for the journey, Letofsky sold all of her belongings to fund the work, and she walked out of Vail, Colorado.

The Global Trek

She trekked across the western United States and flew to New Zealand first. After walking across New Zealand, with several substantial mishaps and money running short, she successfully arrived in Australia. In a small rural Australian town, Letofsky met a woman at a stoplight who asked what she was doing. That woman, Margaret, was the president of the local Lions Club; she invited Letofsky into her home that night. What Margaret did next changed the course of the GlobalWalk.

That night Margaret introduced Letofsky to the crowd at the local pub. When they heard her story, the patrons started passing around a hat for contributions to the cause, and within 15 minutes, that little Australian pub had raised $332 for the Breast Cancer Network-Australia. The next morning Margaret called the next Lions Club up the road, and the members took her out to their local pub for fundraising. Then, they called the next Lions Club, and they called the next Lions Club…and in short order, Letofsky found herself doing a 2,000 mile fundraising pub crawl up Australia’s east coast.

With the help of the Lions Clubs, Letofsky was safe every night with someone from the club hosting her with a warm meal and comfortable bed. What’s more, the Lions Clubs of Australia became the primary fundraising venue for the walk, where local excitement generated substantial exposure throughout the region. Their support inspired an entire country to rally behind Letofsky’s GlobalWalk for breast cancer awareness.

As she traveled on, breast cancer groups would hear her story on the radio and throw a fundraising afternoon tea when she walked through their town. The police would patrol "her" road to make sure she was safe. Cancer survivors would host fundraising dinners and "pass" her to the next breast cancer survivor up the road. Even McDonalds jumped on board—by feeding her and hosting fundraising events at every McDonalds up Australia’s Highway 1.

The Turning Point

Six months into the Australian leg of the walk, one of the Lions Clubs invited her to become a member. She agreed and her walk took a major turn. Now with the help of her Lions Club in Mackay, Queensland, Australia, Letofsky’s walk quickly turned into an unprecedented grassroots breast cancer campaign that stemmed from an army of local everyday people who cleared a path from village to village—through Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Turkey and other exotic world locales.

While walking through Singapore and Malaysia, her work reached epic levels. As she entered these Muslim countries, she was repeatedly told by officials that she would not be able to talk about breast cancer. They were wrong. "The Lions Clubs are enormous in Southeast Asia, and are very highly regarded. They are planners, advocates, and community leaders, and when they talk, even the government listens," said Letofsky.

As a result of the persistent grassroots efforts of the Lions Clubs across the region, breast cancer was now being talked about in all five national newspapers—almost daily. The clubs arranged radio interviews, television appearances, and organized educational forums in small towns where they would invite a local doctor to talk to their local women. From these successes, the Lions Clubs in Malaysia recruited the Rotary Clubs to help with the advocacy work, who then invited the Red Cross, whose members decided to join the walk every day. Next, the Hash Harrier Running Clubs joined the walk.

With the number of walkers growing and the press coverage swelling, the government of Malaysia could no longer ignore what was happening. When Letofsky and her entourage of concerned citizens reached the capital of Kuala Lampur, they were met by a member of Parliament, Datuk Napsiah Omar, and 100 of her colleagues. Amid a ceremony filled with pomp and fanfare, Omar not only announced that she was starting a breast cancer awareness campaign in her region, but would urge the Malaysian government to subsidize annual mammograms for women aged 55 to 64. It was the first program of its kind in Malaysia.

Similar success stories continued as Letofsky plodded along at 3 miles per hour. After five years, she brought her GlobalWalk for Breast Cancer full circle spanning 14,124 miles, across 22 countries, wearing 29 pairs of shoes, and raising over $250,000 for 13 breast cancer organizations around the world.

Letofsky continues the legacy of her GlobalWalk for Breast Cancer awareness through her highly regarded motivational speaking engagements and outstanding documentary. In her newly released book 3mph: The Adventures of One Woman’s Walk Around the World, Letofsky highlights the successes of the walk and recounts the story that unfolded. She tells how, "truth was stranger than fiction when I took on the world by myself, but was never alone. Thousands of strangers came to my aid in many small ways and in record numbers. On average, 10 people a day for five years—or nearly 20,000 people—formed a human chain of collaboration around the world to help me, keep me safe, and bring me back to Colorado and ultimately spread the word of breast cancer awareness."

As I think about Polly Leftosky and her GlobalWalk, it confirms for me that people all over the world are better when we are working together. Letofsky proved it—a childhood dream undertaken with determination can prove transformative and can create of culture of collaborative action.

Where would the world be if we could all make a little step toward a big feat?

Cristin Tarr is the founder of Business Service Corps (BSC), an organization that helps companies develop, organize, implement, and measure community outreach programs. BSC maximizes corporate charitable and philanthropic outreach goals while minimizing the use of valuable resources, time and money to create a collective shared value. To learn more about BSC visit www.BusinessServiceCorps.com.

Young Leaders Connecting and Collaborating Globally

By: Luke Wyckoff Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Community

ICOSA:What is Junior Chamber International (known worldwide as JCI and in parts of the USA as the Jaycees)?

GREENLEE: The organization was started in 1915 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA to give young people an opportunity for leadership development and networking. Today, the organization has almost 200,000 young men and women between the ages of 18-40 in 120 countries, but there are millions of alumni members who have turned 40, like me. Many have gone on to be heads of state, hold other political positions, are leaders in non-government organizations (NGO), are business and corporate leaders, and are making a difference in many other ways around the world. The mission of JCI is: "To provide development opportunities that empower young people to create positive change," and the vision of JCI is: "To be the leading global network of young active citizens."

ICOSA: How did you get involved?

GREENLEE: Like most members, I had heard of JCI but was then asked to join and get involved by a current member. I was 23 at the time and looking for chances to meet people and help out my community, and JCI was the perfect vehicle to do both.

ICOSA: What is your most memorable moment as a member of JCI?

GREENLEE: Being elected the JCI world president for 2007 was a real highlight of my time in JCI and my life. Having the confidence of members from around the world and the opportunity to take a year and gain that experience, meet members and people from all over the world, and advance the interests of young people, was great.

ICOSA: As the JCI world president, what were you trying to "do" around the world? How many countries did you visit?

GREENLEE: The JCI president acts as the CEO of the organization for one year. During my tenure I oversaw the board of directors and the almost 100 global member appointments. I also oversaw a 25 member internationally-based staff; served as the chief spokesperson for JCI; and worked closely with our partners like the International Chamber of Commerce, the United Nations, and the Global Compact among others. I also helped to manage the finances while working to make JCI more attractive from a marketing and branding prospective. Our end goal was to increase the number of members, the number of countries JCI was in, and the number of people who were familiar with JCI. I visited 52 different countries that year, many of them multiple times, but have visited 76 total countries through my JCI activities.

ICOSA: Were some countries more receptive to your causes than others?

GREENLEE: Interestingly no. I found that young people around the world, as well as companies and governments share in the same goals of making a better world through active involvement. Different countries have different ideas of specific goals based on their economics, geography, population, etc., however, at the end of the day, each wants to always improve and be better and be involved. JCI is the way for young people to do that.

ICOSA: What were some of the biggest learning points you had from all of your travel?

GREENLEE: As I mentioned above, one of the most important things I learned was that most people share very basic, common goals. I also learned the value of staying in touch as a leader and a networker. One thing that I tried to do after every visit I made was to send a quick email of thanks to each person I met. I think that far too often we attend conventions, functions, or the like and come home with stacks of business cards that sit in a drawer. I made a conscious effort to reach out to each person I met so that I could build rapport, and in many circumstances it led to a higher level of activity in JCI and other business possibilities and deals over the years.

ICOSA: Tell me some stories about the great things that other international JCI chapters and national organizations are doing to better the world?

GREENLEE: Wow—there are so many! In Taiwan, the JCI group partners with the government and does an annual medical and dental relief trip to the Dominican Republic. JCI members in the Dominican work to set up the logistics on their end and Taiwan brings doctors and medicines over for a week to see as many people as they possibly can.

In Hong Kong, the JCI organization annually works with the All China Youth Federation to bring children from Hong Kong to China to provide educational experiences. In Europe, JCI annually visits Brussels for a knowledge transfer, where they meet with members of the EU to discuss issues they are facing as young people while sharing best practices. In Zimbabwe, JCI recognizes the most active citizens of the country for their good works. JCI Monaco runs business networking happy hours for people to meet various corporate leaders. Domestically, like in Victoria, Texas; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Indianapolis, Indiana; and at many other chapters throughout the U.S., JCI members and chapters take underprivileged children shopping at Christmas in an effort to make sure no child misses a holiday.

With over 5,000 chapters worldwide I could give you 5,000 different stories. And of course, these local organizations all run multiple projects every year where their members run the events, gain the experience from doing so and leave the community much better than they found it.

ICOSA: Going forward, where will JCI focus its attention?

GREENLEE: As a major NGO, JCI will stick with its mission and vision, and continue to look for more young people to get involved and gain leadership experience. JCI is also always looking to partnering with organizations and corporations around the world that share the vision of a better world through better future generations. JCI will continue to be a force for good and will become better known and recognized for its works and successes.

ICOSA: Why should someone be a JCI (Jaycee) Member?

GREENLEE: I have always said there are five good reasons for every person ages 18-40 to join JCI. The first and most obvious is leadership development. You can gain skills that will make you a more valuable employee and more marketable, while preparing you to run your own organization. Members gain experience in speaking, organizing, managing people and projects, and proper budgeting. Second, you have the chance to give back through JCI projects. I was raised in a home where I was taught no matter how tough things were, there were always people and things worse off than me and it was my responsibility to try to help out wherever I could. With JCI, you get to join with like-minded people from all over the world in making a real difference through real community service. Third, you will meet potential customers, partners, employers, and others that you would not come in contact with if you did not join and get active. I have met so many people just in my town from joining, not to mention interesting and influential people from my state, country, and the world. Fourth, you make lifelong friends. It is always great to get together with other active young people who share your ideas and want to accomplish things. These are people who are about your age and have similar values—what better people to have as friends? Finally, JCI is just plain fun.

ICOSA: How can corporate America and businesses around the world take advantage of their local JCI (Jaycee) Chapters?

GREENLEE: Great question for this group. Businesses and JCI groups working together are almost always a win-win proposition. Any business that wants a more prepared group of employees would love the training that JCI offers. In addition to the "learn by doing" mindset, there are seminars at local, state, national, and international levels that members can take. Additionally, there is a worldwide training program where members can become certified trainers or certified in various programs. Furthermore, many companies would like the networking that happens and the amount of people whom our members gain exposure to. Additionally, most companies have a CSR program and working with JCI can do a lot in the areas of charitable volunteer work. JCI is always looking for new partners at every level of the organization, so reach out to your local chapter in your town, or search the JCI website at www.jci.cc, or contact me directly at my personal email at [email protected]. I am always glad to help put people together in situations like this.

Luke Wyckoff is the Chief Visionary Officer for Social Media Energy. He can be reached at [email protected].

The Peace Corps - Rotary Connection

By: Arianne Burger Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Community For those who have served in the Peace Corps, the journey is never over. We return home from our countries of service seeing the world with a new perspective and possessing a determination to live our lives in a meaningful way. That new-found determination leads us to seek experiences at home that are as important as our service and that oftentimes leads Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs) to Rotary International.

Sue Fox had an idea. As a returned volunteer from Liberia (1968-‘70) and a past-president of the Denver Rotary Club, she knew that there was a natural connection between Rotary and Peace Corps. She felt that, "RPCVs and Rotarians are kindred spirits, seeking the same goals embodied in Rotary’s motto, ‘Service Above Self.’" She followed up on her idea by bringing together a group of Rotarians and RPCVs in November, 2009.

Since that November morning, the "Tiger Team," named after Fox’s aging Golden Labrador Tiger, has met on numerous occasions and made incredible progress on formalizing how an official partnership between Peace Corps and Rotary International could work. The committee has grown to include other non-RPCV Rotarians, representatives from the Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of Colorado, as well as the Peace Corps Community at the University of Denver. Together, the team has drafted a resolution to Rotary International, proposing that a formal alliance be formed between the two organizations that will serve as a prototype for similar alliances between Rotary and the international volunteer service organizations in many countries around the world. Conversations have also been held with top members of the Peace Corps administration, who are also keen on moving forward with the idea.

The Goal

Connect Rotarians with Returned Peace Corps Volunteers

There are teams of Rotarians working on projects around the world. Many times, representatives from clubs in the U.S. will travel to other countries to provide technical assistance with those projects. While technically prepared for the work ahead, many Rotarians are not as culturally prepared for what they will encounter while abroad. Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, however, have a fundamental understanding of cultural mores in their countries of service. By connecting outbound Rotarians with RPCVs, they can provide valuable information that can lessen the culture shock and provide an easier working environment for the new volunteers. It has in fact worked. A team from the Meade, Colorado club visited Nicaragua in the fall of 2010, armed with valuable cultural information and connections to the "in-country" Peace Corps office, provided by three RPCVs who had recently returned from their service. The connection was facilitated by Rotarian and Tiger Team member, Ted Bendelow, who just happens to be a member of the RPCV of Colorado (Liberia 1964-‘66).

Connect Outgoing Peace Corps Volunteers to Rotary Clubs Both Here and Abroad

Once abroad, many Peace Corps Volunteers create projects that require funding as well as technical expertise. By formalizing a relationship between the Peace Corps and Rotary clubs, groups both here and abroad could be connected to these projects and provide either financial or technical support. Judy Beggs, an RPCV from Senegal and member of Englewood Rotary started a nonprofit called Friends of Gueoul, whose mission is to educate girls in the village of Gueoul. She received a large matching grant from the Rotary Foundation to build a computer classroom in Gueoul, and Peace Corps Senegal has assigned a new Small Enterprise Development Volunteer to the project, with a PCV assigned to it for a total of six years (three tours) to maximize the possibility of the facility becoming self-sustaining. This is just one example of the ad hoc partnerships that are already underway around the world between Rotarians and Peace Corps Volunteers.

Create a Stronger Community of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers by Introducing Them to Rotary International

Many of the RPCV-Rotarian members of the District 5450 Rotary-Peace Corps Alliance Committee have found kindred spirits in their fellow RPCV-Rotarians. Sue Fox has found that, "Rotary gives Returned Volunteers the opportunity to continue their service to the world while they are occupied with careers and family responsibilities. And it even offers a way to teach these values to their children."

Steve Werner, RPCV (South Korea 1976-‘78) and 23-year member of Rotary Club of Denver Southeast, assisted Fox in the creation of the committee because he felt that the partnership would, "Generate more members for each other's programs and create more fellowship among the constituents of each organization who believe in service above self and world peace." Steve has a long history with both organizations, having served as Chair of the Board of the National Peace Corps Association.

Charlie Hunt, RPCV (Vanuatu 2006-‘08) joined Rotary later in his career. After returning to the U.S in 2008 and settling in Denver with his wife, Nancy Cole, Hunt started his own project back in Vanuatu with the support of his LoDo Rotary Club in Denver. The LoDo club is working to demonstrate how to use smokeless cook stoves to the rural women of Vanuatu. Hunt has connected his home club with the Vanuatu Port Vila Rotary Club through Assistant District Governor Robert Bohn. His club and the New Zealand District are supportive of the project.

Hunt contacted the program and training officer at the Vanuatu Peace Corps office to ask if the cook stove demonstration could be provided through their 15 Community Health Volunteers who work in the Shefa Province. Peace Corps Vanuatu approved the project, so now Hunt is working with the Peace Corps and his Rotary club to determine the next steps. Currently, the LoDo Club will facilitate a demonstration in the rural villages with Peace Corps Volunteers monitoring usage to see if the village women will consistently use the clean stoves.

Peace Corps Volunteers and Rotarians have been working together for years on projects such as the ones described. And, as Peace Corps celebrates its 50th anniversary in March 2011, we believe it is time to formalize this partnership so that future generations of Rotarians and Peace Corps Volunteers can continue the legacy of promoting peace and fellowship throughout the world.

Arianne Burger is RPCV (Kazakhstan 1999-2001) and serves as President, Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of Colorado. To learn more about how your club can work together with RPCVs in your community, or to share your own success stories of Peace Corps/Rotary collaborations, please contact Sue Fox at [email protected].

We Can Only Be Free Together

By: Kim DeCoste Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Nobel

As I wrote this article on a beautiful, clear day in Keystone, Colorado, I felt close to the prevailing sense of hope and optimism that was shared by Bishop Desmond Tutu. While he and I have little in common, I have long been inspired by his work and his influence around the world.

I must preface this piece by saying that Bishop Tutu has been in my lexicon since the early 1980’s, when I learned of Apartheid. I heard about it first at the dinner table from my stepfather who had lived in Africa as a young man.

While my interview with Bishop Tutu was conducted via email, his tone was so clear that I felt as if I could hear him—quite literally—in my head as I read his words. I asked him about progress, collaboration, leaders who inspired him, and his own personal source of joy. And as I read his responses I was reminded that we have the ability to effect change in the world in all that we do. But perhaps, we just don’t think about it as often as we should.

ICOSA: When you look at the situation in South Africa now relative to when you began your work, where do you see the most change? What makes you most proud?

BISHOP TUTU: Well, it is the people. The people have proved to be really incredible. I mean, obviously we have spectacular examples like Nelson Mandela, but there are many, many, many others. I could give so many examples here. Long before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I was the general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, and I was sitting in my office minding my own business, when a young man came in who had been tortured in detention, and had been serving a banning order, and I still remember so vividly him saying to me, "You know, Father, when these people are torturing you, and they say that they are in charge, you say ‘yes’ they are running this country. But you look at them, and you see these are God’s children, and they are losing their humanity. They need us to help them recover their humanity." Now that was a young man who was probably in his late twenties. At the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I remember a white woman who had survived a hand grenade attack, but it had left her so badly injured that she spent six months in ICU, and when she was discharged, she could not do things for herself—she had to be helped by her children to bathe, to clothe, to eat, and she had shrapnel still in her. She said of the experience, that had left her in this condition, that it enriched her life, and she said, "I want to meet the person who did this in a spirit of forgiveness; I want to forgive him." She went on to say, "I hope he will forgive me." Now all you can say is it is mind-boggling when you have people of that kind of character, and we have been blessed in our country that we have many such.

ICOSA: Are there any particular leaders in human history who have inspired the work you do?

BISHOP TUTU: Well, you know, I had tuberculosis as a child, and went to the hospital for nearly two years. During that time, about once a week, Trevor Huddleston, a priest who became a renowned anti-Apartheid activist, came to see me in the hospital. I wasn’t aware at the time that maybe something was etching itself into my consciousness, but I must have been taken in, because the impression that it made was of someone caring…and caring for me. In South Africa, a white person caring for a black township urchin went to contributing to a lack of bitterness against whites, because there was at least one white man who seemed to be a nice white man. He lived in Sophiatown where he shared the life of the deprived people. He touched my life, and I’m so very grateful that he did, because he was just a tremendous advertisement for God and goodness. He was a champion of the dispossessed and really cared enormously.

ICOSA: What gives you the greatest joy? What inspires and invigorates you?

BISHOP TUTU: I am quite taken by young people. I’m always amazed, really, at their idealism—the fact that they do indeed believe that this world can become a better world. Myself, I have very great hope for the world. We face enormous problems—there is hunger, there is conflict, there is poverty. We, particularly in South Africa, are being devastated by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and in a way, you almost want to say there is no hope, that the world is going down the tubes. But I think, No!

There are these fantastic people, especially these young people, who dream dreams, who are idealistic, who really do believe that the world can become a better place and I think that is one of our greatest hopes. So it is young people, not exclusively, who usually have demonstrated against war, who have demonstrated against international organizations that seem to favor the affluent, and they are saying, "This world can become a better place. This world can become a place that is hospitable to peace, to justice, to compassion. It can become a world where poverty is indeed history."

ICOSA: How does collaboration play into your approach to solving different problems?

BISHOP TUTU: In South Africa, we have something we call Ubuntu. Ubuntu means that a person is a person through other persons. In other words, I can be human only through relationships with other human beings. Because I wouldn’t know how to speak as a human being, I wouldn’t know how to walk, I wouldn’t know how to be human except through learning it from other human beings. And so we see eliminating poverty, ensuring that people are healthy, providing education and things of that kind is not being altruistic, it’s the best form of self-interest. It means that we’re safe. Actually, I say that we can be human only together. We can be prosperous only together. We can be free only together. We can be secure, ultimately, only together. This is God’s dream, that we will realize that we are family. That at our best, it is when in fact we show that we are connected. And until we do, we’re going to find that all kinds of things go wrong.

I could not find a more perfect ending for this article than Bishop Tutu’s simple words, "We can be human only together. We can be prosperous only together. We can be free only together. We can be secure, ultimately, only together. This is God’s dream, that we will realize that we are family."

These simple words written from a man in Africa to a woman in Colorado—two distant people, who will likely never meet, inspire me to work harder to be understanding and to be more "human" in the spirit of hope and optimism.

Kim DeCoste is the Director of Career Services for Colorado Technical University and President of DeCoste & Associates, LLC. She can be reached at: [email protected] or 303.362.2948.

Listen to the Truth of our Opponent

By: Michael Connors Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Nobel

Before speaking with Mairead Maguire, I had the privilege of interviewing Rigoberta Menchu-Tum for a previous ICOSA piece, and what I have found is that Nobel Peace Prize winners have a deep understanding and connection with what is best in the human spirit. This may be so because as Nobel Peace Prize winners, they have often experienced the worst that humanity has to offer in the perils of war. Rigoberta lost much of her family in the Guatemalan civil war. And for this article I was fortunate enough to speak with Mairead Maguire, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who, along with Betty Williams, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976 for her dedication, tireless efforts and passionate pleas in the cause of peace for Northern Ireland.

Williams was a witness to the deaths of a family of four who were killed by an Irish Republic Army (IRA) member while fleeing from British soldiers. Those killed were Maguire’s nieces and nephews. These tragic deaths led Maguire’s sister to take her own life four years later. Shortly after the funerals of the children, Maguire and Williams formed, with the help of journalist Ciaran McKeown, the Community of the Peace People, and organized a march of more than 35,000 participants who demanded an end to the violence that had gripped their country for decades. Today, many would argue that this manifestation of unity and focused collaborative effort was the beginning of the end of the Northern Ireland conflict. After speaking with Maguire, it was evident that passion, dedication, and hope are often what pulls people through such events and enables others to finally believe that peace is possible.

While her passion and dedication are apparent, what Maguire imparted was the importance of the process and collaboration. How is peace actually achieved? She helps others understand some of the fundamental underpinnings of peace that must be in place before the fighting stops. "Many believe that conflict and war are often based on religious, ethnic or racial biases, and while these may be the marks of the underclass being persecuted, they are often only superficial traits. The truth is that these traits are what help those in power segregate groups of people in order to maintain their own power," said Maguire.

Since the 12th century, Northern Ireland has experienced internal and external strife, but on December 6, 1921 with the signing of the Irish Free State Treaty, Northern Ireland officially became part of the British Union, the same union that caused the 1922 Civil War. The conflict in Northern Ireland continued for decades and became worse during the period from 1969-1998. That period, known as The Troubles, was not caused by differences between the Catholic and Protestant religions, but was instead a conflict rooted in economic and political dichotomies. In Northern Ireland, Catholics often faced discrimination—they usually lived in poorer neighborhoods and were often prevented from getting good jobs or receiving a good education. Because of this, many Catholics, or Nationalists, wanted Northern Ireland to become part of the republic to the south. However, Protestants/Unionists wanted things to remain as they were, with Northern Ireland linked to the United Kingdom.

Maguire was raised in a Catholic ghetto in Belfast during some of the hardest years of the conflict, and she explained that much of the fundamentals of the conflict were about basic civil rights. "When the civil rights movement started here, it took its cue from the civil rights movement in America. The root causes here were injustice and inequality and we had a minority community that didn’t have the right to vote. Had we had real political leadership in those days, you would have had to deal with the root causes of division and inequality in order to really have peace, but tragically that didn’t happen for all sorts of reasons. Instead of going down the road of social and political reform, we went down the road of violence," she said.

She explained, "As long as you have populations that are segregated and inherently unequal, you will have political, social, civil and economic inequalities that are part and parcel of the system. These inequalities and the injustices, perpetuated in the absence of equality under the law, fester and over time lead to violence. Thus, it is imperative that individuals and governments work together through collaborative models in order to facilitate change."

This focus on human rights as an integral function of peace is also why Maguire and Menchu-Tum belong to the Nobel Women’s Initiative. "Women and children often suffer the most as a silent population with the least rights within an already oppressed group. So while it is fairly easy to identify those who are disenfranchised, it is the work of peacemakers and those dedicated to the hope of nonviolence to ask, what is the solution here?" said Maguire.

Because the world is becoming so interconnected today, it almost seems to share one large consciousness. The importance and relevance of international influence is not to be understated or ignored. Maguire outlined some of the actions that individuals and governments could participate in to help bring peace to the Middle East. "We won’t solve the problem. We are outsiders. But, we can stand in solidarity with the Israelis and Palestinians and say that militarism and paramilitarism is not going to solve the problem here. Let’s do it through dialogue," she maintained.

"The American government currently funds the Israeli government’s huge military budget. If American officials firmly said to Israel tomorrow morning that there is a solution here and that what they are doing affects everyone in the Middle East—problem solved! America has the power to do that because it holds the purse strings. It is in everyone’s interests that the Israeli government moves toward policies that are fair and just. But, what is lacking is the political will inside the Israeli government to move forward. There are solutions and it is possible. I have hope. I really do have hope that there will be great changes in Israel and Palestine," asserted Maguire.

While the direction may be clear, political will and diplomacy often seem to be lacking, perpetuating a sense of helplessness and hopelessness. But this is where the new global consciousness and cooperation becomes paramount according to Maguire.

Perhaps no generation personifies this new global consciousness better than the youth of today. For the last 15 years, Maguire has been involved in PeaceJam (www.peacejam.org) and has supported its mission to infuse young people with a passion for peace by connecting young people with the tools and inspiration they need in order to create change. Co-founded by Dawn Engle and Ivan Suvanjieff, PeaceJam is an organization that gives voice to Nobel Peace Prize laureates to inspire, instruct and personify the business of peace. Her hope is that future generations may grow up in a world where peace is no longer the exception, but the rule, and that violence is intolerable.

Of PeaceJam, Maguire states, "I just love Dawn and Ivan, the founders of PeaceJam. What that couple has done through PeaceJam has really spread—not only in America but in other countries. Billions of young people have gotten involved in works of peace, and it is a wonderful model of really how we will build a new culture of non-killing and nonviolence starting with our children. That is a model that can be used in any culture."

Maguire shared her thoughts on peace. They should be highlighted and promoted in order to inspire all of us to action. She said, "Gandhi taught that nonviolence does not mean passivity. It is the most daring, creative, and courageous way of living, and it is the only hope for our world. Nonviolence is an active way of life which always rejects violence and killing, and instead applies the forces of love and truth as a means to transform conflict and the root causes of conflict. Nonviolence demands creativity. It pursues dialogue, seeks reconciliation, listens to the truth in our opponents, rejects militarism, and allows God’s spirit to transform us socially and politically."

Michael Connors has an M.A. in literature and an extensive background in teaching. He is a Colorado native and spends his free time in the Rockies skiing and hiking.

Jody Williams

By: Judith B. Taylor Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Nobel

Jody Williams, the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize winner is a woman with a global mission. As a teacher and aid worker, she is a relentless proponent for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and has helped save thousands of lives.

Williams’ first position as an aid worker was in the Nicaragua-Honduras Education Project as a grocery worker. Following that, she became the deputy director of a Los Angeles–based charity, Medical Aid for El Salvador. Then, in 1992, she accepted a position with the ICBL, whose goal was to free the world of antipersonnel landmines and cluster munitions.

At the onset of her work at the ICBL, Williams felt the need for global recognition and a resolution to ban landmines. After almost five grueling years, the organization achieved one of its goals—The Axworthy Challenge. The Axworthy Challenge was the momentum gaining point where 50 governments and 24 influential observers met to craft an agenda for action which highlighted steps to reach a global ban on landmines. Just over a year later, in 1997, a series of meetings occurred around the world to develop the diplomatic channels and negotiations to put a worldwide treaty in place. Later that year, The Ottawa Treaty was signed in Canada by 122 nations and was in force within two years—faster than any treaty of its kind in history.

Williams said about the treaty, "A treaty is merely words on a piece of paper; unless you force governments and militaries to comply, to obey their own words on paper, then things don’t change. None of us in the campaign, none of civil society saw that as victory. We actually saw it as the first step toward the possibility of victory. It was our responsibility to continue public pressure, to make sure that governments obeyed the treaty, and to make sure that armies no longer used the weapons."

"We didn’t start the campaign in order to get the Nobel Prize. I don’t think I ever thought much about the Nobel Peace Prize. We started the campaign because it was a crisis situation—landmines were killing people all over the world. We thought it was something, a little contribution that we could make, making the aftermath of war easier for poor people to deal with. That’s why we did it. We thought it was right," she emphasized.

Personally for Williams, the work was bigger than the treaty that was signed, the awards that were won, and the accolades that were bestowed on the organization. It was about accountability and responsibility. It was about the rule of law. "Every time the international community and governments come together and make beautiful words on paper that they do not obey, it fosters belief that armies can get away with whatever they want—that soldiers, the military, and the police can act with impunity, and are above the law," Williams said. She emphasized the importance of re-educating soldiers, police, military, governments, as well as people like you and me—that laws apply to everybody.

She described her work in El Salvador as the "scariest country I have worked in" because there was no law that applied to the army. She said that there was no law that applied to the soldiers, the police, the paramilitary, and the "fake military." They could do whatever they wanted, to whomever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and nothing would happen to them, she expressed.

While outlawing antipersonnel landmines is impactful, Williams, along with other female Nobel Peace Prize winners founded The Nobel Women’s Initiative. The Initiative consists of six brilliant and influential women representing North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. All have brought together their experiences in a united effort for peace with justice and equality by supporting women’s rights around the world.

Today, Williams teaches Global Justice Patterns: Perspectives and Strategies at the University of Houston’s Graduate College of Social Work. The class builds a practical and theoretical understanding of international political, economic, and human rights issues with a focus on the rights and responsibilities of global citizenship and effective citizen-advocacy strategies for achieving social justice goals. She continues to serve with the ICBL as a campaign ambassador and editor of the landmine report, as well.

Jody Williams is a humble woman with global reach, a global voice, and a Nobel Peace Prize. She says, "I’m an ordinary gal from Putney, Vermont, a town of 1200. Who would believe that I would change the world on this issue? But, I have. It is important to remember that ordinary people, when they believe in themselves and the things they want to do, can achieve extraordinary things. It’s what makes a person extraordinary."

Interestingly, at the end of our interview, Williams said, "Don’t be me; be better than me. I’m not all that great. I’m not Mother Theresa." Perhaps Jody Williams is not Mother Theresa, but she is extraordinary in many ways. She is certainly a woman who has changed the world for the better and made it safer for us all.

Note: Although not a party to the treaty, the United States remains the world’s largest donor to humanitarian de-mining and has banned all persistent antipersonnel mines.

Judith Brissette Taylor is a journalist, speaker and speech writer. She has been a practitioner in the women's market for over twenty-five years as a writer, editor and publisher. She served for two years as president of the Women's Regional Publications of America. Email her at [email protected].

Betty Williams

By: Jan Mazotti Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Nobel

In the early 1970s, Betty Williams was a wife, mother, and office receptionist in Northern Ireland. But, by the mid-1970s, Williams was well on her way to becoming a Nobel Peace laureate committed to active non-violence. What started as a car accident on August 10, 1976, proved to be a turning point in her life. The car accident was the result of a shooting of an IRA member by British authorities. The IRA driver died at the wheel and his out of control car hit and killed a group of children. Moved by the events, Williams, along with fellow Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire, began their campaign for peace. Within two days, Williams obtained 6,000 signatures for a petition for peace. As their peace movement gained momentum, Williams began to organize mass protests and peace marches. In fact, the first march hosted 10,000 Protestant and Catholic women, but was quickly quashed by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Undeterred by the IRA, the next march was attended by more than 35,000 protestors.

Today, Williams is the head of the World Centers of Compassion for Children (WCCC) International, founded in 1997, an international organization working to protect children’s rights and promote children’s welfare. The organization is committed to change how governments deal with children’s issues and is currently proposing the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Rights for Children by governments worldwide and the General Assembly of the United Nations. Her motivation to work with children is embodied in her thoughtful words, "I had no concept of the depth of the children’s suffering until witnessing their pain. Yet in a world that we know can feed itself, upwards of 40,000 children die every day from conditions of malnutrition. Surely we must question why we are allowing this carnage to continue." Headquartered in the Republic of Ireland, WCCC is building the first City of Compassion in southern Italy.

Williams is, perhaps, a beacon for those who believe active non-violence is the way through sometimes tragic and horrific circumstances. She says, "It is not enough to know what you want; you must know how to achieve it with integrity. No matter what the goal, if the path is without integrity, it will lose its way and be destroyed." Below, are thoughts shared by Williams with ICOSA.

ICOSA: With so many notable achievements, what motivates you?

WILLIAMS: Well, the hope for me, that's an easy one. I see hope in the young people, and I know, because I'm with young people on very regular occasions, that they're very displeased with the way their world is going at the moment. They desperately want to change that. So, if there's hope to be had, it'll come through the youth.

ICOSA: If you were to visit with young future leaders, what advice would you offer?

WILLIAMS: I hate to use the word responsibility, especially in terms of saying that youth have the responsibility of taking care of our mistakes. But the bottom line on it is that we have made so many mistakes and those of us—I'm in my 60's now—who see clearly those mistakes, and we've left the youth to deal with them. We must teach the youth how to deal with these problems, which is one of the things I love about our program in PeaceJam is that it does just that. I've never been at a PeaceJam yet where a youth or several (or more than that) ask questions that are so deep that they blow my mind. They're very aware of what's going on around them. We've got to empower them, to help them change what we've left them—we must change the legacy of violence and misunderstanding and mistrust. They're aware; it's just showing them how to do it.

ICOSA: What current issues/problems concern you the most and why?

WILLIAMS: My greatest fear at the moment is that the future looks like it's going to be pretty violent. We have countries that are surpassing themselves in terms of terrorism and acts of terrorism camouflaged under the name of governments. There is really only talk about one kind of terrorism. We should be talking about the terrorism of governments and that it’s got to be stopped.

ICOSA: You regularly address the issues of military spending and how if we even cut into the budgets in small percentages we could change things for the better. What could it mean to the world?

WILLIAMS: Right now military spending is out of control—the United States spends $420.7 billion and China spends $62.5 million. It's ludicrous that these incredible amounts of money are used for death and destruction when it could be put into life and creation.

ICOSA: Do you believe there are any problems that are "just too big" to be solved? Can any challenge be broken down to sub-parts and addressed incrementally over time and be solved? In other words is persistence or lack thereof a bigger problem than we think it is?

WILLIAMS: You know, everybody thinks that because the problems are so huge that there's really no way of addressing them. To me, that's a complete cop-out, because if you're not doing something to solve the problem, then you're very definitely a part of it. If you want to change the world, you have to do it one person at a time. Even in the work that we do—well, particularly in the work we do—it's amazing what happens, because in the beginning it's all over the place, and at the end it's totally interconnected. It's all a system of education, of showing youth how they can connect to build a better future and a better world for us all. I don't want to sound like an idealistic flip, but we see these programs of interconnection; when you make them happen, they work.

ICOSA: You said in a recent speech, "Peace in the world is everybody’s business. Turmoil is everywhere and the whole world is waiting for solutions to come from the top-down. That’s not how it works—community change from the bottom up is what makes a real difference." How do community members get involved in a bottom up approach?

WILLIAMS: We have to hold governments responsible for what they do, and that’s number one. I remember the days when the world looked at the United States and the Constitution of the United States of America—it was something that every country wanted. In fact, my own country of Ireland, and the Constitution of the Republic of Ireland was based very much on the Constitution of the United States. I think that the biggest threat to peace in our world is the fact that militarism rules the day. We have to get to the stage where pacifism rules the day. To be a pacifist doesn’t mean that you have to be non-violent, and when I say that, I mean I have a very violent tongue when it’s necessary. Violence comes in all forms, whether it be from a gun or a tongue. The gun destroys. I hope what I say provokes thought because I think dissention provokes thought. Your question is a very difficult question to answer because each day, we get some news from somewhere about mass destruction. It’s very hard to keep yourself stabilized and say to yourself, "I’ve got to be stronger." Every blow that is thrown at non-violence means we have to be able to take it on the chin and prove that non-violence is the weapon of the strong.

To learn more about the World Centers of Compassion for Children, visit www.centersofcompassion.org.

A Defender of Human Rights

By: Beth Parish Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Academics

Iran is an enigma. It is an industrialized nation steeped in Islamist ideology, where women are educated and can legally vote, but are subject to arrests, beatings, and imprisonment. It is a country that has access to the Internet and other communications portals, like Facebook, yet free speech does not exist. In modern Iran, human rights activists are perceived as agitators and are subject to beatings, arrest, torture, and even execution.

Ms. Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim female Nobel Peace Prize recipient (2003), has advocated for the human rights of women, children and political prisoners in her native Iran and spoke out against the current regime in her homeland, only to be exiled and stripped of her Prize. A lawyer, judge, professor, and activist, Ebadi is focused squarely on her opposition to cultures that deny equal rights to women and girls—representing almost half of the world’s populations. At her Nobel presentation speech, she was described as a "conscious Muslim" who sees no conflict between Islam and fundamental human rights and who is determined to insure that things change in her native land and around the world.

In our interview, we discussed how future leaders and young people could make a difference in the human rights movement. With great gusto, Ebadi admonishes young people to not pattern their life after anyone else. She said, "Don’t imitate anybody! Refer to your own nature and your own essence! Don’t be afraid of making mistakes! Everyone has the right to make mistakes. It is important that we make mistakes, and when we find out we made a mistake, we must try to correct it. If we’re afraid of making mistakes, we can never move forward with our programs and advance. Youth must move forward with confidence."

Ebadi, the mother of two daughters, says they face the same problems that young people all over Iran are facing today—they want more freedoms. While looking for financial stability, the young people in Iran are looking for jobs that use the skills that they have gained through their studies and education. She believes that freedom and finding work are the two most important issues for Iran’s young people, and for her daughters, these concerns are amplified because they are female.

As we have seen recently in the news, the governments of the Middle East are under increasing pressure to support more equal environments, especially for those at the bottom of the social ladder. Frankly, with the upheaval in the region, it appears that many governments have but two options—they will either listen to the will of the people or they will generate negative media and could ultimately fall.

In a recent interview with Euronews, Ebadi commented on the human rights agenda in the Middle East and its importance to people around the world, and more specifically in Iran. "The west is still preoccupied with its own security and is not stressing the principles it claims to defend," she said. When asked about the various global interpretations on human rights issues Ebadi purports that the Iranian government resorts to cultural differences. And while Iran has publically and unconditionally accepted the conventions on civil, political, and economic rights of its citizens, Ebadi argues that they have not been implemented. "This is an international code of behavior and has nothing to with East and West or Muslim and Christian. If Muslims take it upon themselves to write a Declaration of Human Rights in accordance with religion, then naturally they should allow the same religious rights of other denominations. We should witness a Jewish Declaration of Human Rights, a Buddhist Declaration of Human Rights, a Hindu Declaration of Human Rights, and thousands of others. Human rights are an international code of behavior."

Because of her outspoken nature on human rights, the Iranian government confiscated all of Ebadi’s property, using the excuse that she had failed to pay taxes on the Nobel Peace Prize she won in 2003. "It was interesting that the amount of the tax was greater than the amount of the Prize," she said. "My whole family was imprisoned and now they are not allowed to leave the country. In short, it has caused me a lot of trouble. In 2008, they illegally closed Tehran’s Human Rights Center which I established with my prize money. I complained because they had acted illegally, but to this day, no judge has dared open the file on it. When I tell you that Iran’s judiciary has lost its independence, that’s what I mean."

Growing up as a tomboy, Ebadi admits that she had great dreams. As she says, "Let me confess to you, from childhood I had big dreams. I always believed I would become a great person, but these great dreams had different interpretations at different times of my life. When I was a kid, I wanted to become a math teacher and that was the most important person for me at that time in the world. Now, I wish to help all the children in the world. As one grows up, one’s own dreams also become larger." And indeed Ms. Ebadi continues to grow her dreams, fighting for human rights, publicizing government initiated murders of dissidents, and rising above the focus of scrutiny and harassment by the Iranian government.

A fierce advocate for women, children, and the underserved, Ebadi reminds us that in most countries the budget for the military is larger than the budgets for programs addressing the needs of children. The Nobel laureate argues that children are vulnerable and cannot defend themselves; therefore they need more care and concern from leaders, governments, society, and the adults in their lives. She contends, "When setting country budgets, money must be set aside first for educating the children and then second for their health and hygiene."

And while most countries of the world have military budgets that are larger than the budget for children, we cannot ignore them. Ebadi says emphatically, "The killing of children is not from a bullet that we fire at them—but rather when we forget their rights."

Beth Parish teaches marketing and business classes at Regis University where she is committed to helping her students understand the strength of products and services that benefit the community and minimize their impact on the environment. Beth is honored to be a member of the Board of YouthBiz, an organization devoted to advancing the empowerment of youth.

Play It Forward

By: Judith B. Taylor Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Collaboration Close Up

It was the first, and it won’t be the last. Play It Forward presented by the Women With A Cause Foundation moved forward with the gusto of a long lasting, unique and fun event held on February 18 at the beautiful Denver Seawell Ballroom. The Women With A Cause Foundation promotes economic development programs that focus on education and skills training, enabling women to be lifted out of poverty toward self-sufficiency while earning a sustainable income.

Although it was the inaugural gathering, there was a sellout crowd, along with a unique auction, and gourmet hors d’oeuvres. A distinctive talent show of music and dance acts were selected by Women With A Cause judges and votes from the community. Then, the acts performed and a group of celebrity judges picked the top three acts. It culminated in an entertaining evening full of laughter, appreciation, and local talent.

Along with the talent show, nonprofit unsung heroines, Jill DiPasquale and Sandee Walling were honored for their outstanding grassroots, behind-the-scenes efforts in numerous volunteer endeavors.

One of the event’s main goals was to raise money for homeless mothers and female veterans to attend nursing schools at area universities. "It was a little different type of event," said Susan Kiely, CEO and founder of Women With A Cause. "The feedback has been kind of interesting. People were so surprised. They loved the energy and loved the event. A number of my friends heard about the rave reviews we got. And, we made over $100,000."

Some of the beneficiaries included The Matthew Shepard Foundation from T Strickland who won first place in the talent showcase. Sixteen year old Raeanna Clark performed a moving vocal performance that earned her second place. She "played it forward" for Friends First. Third place winner, Rikka Zimmer, a singer/songwriter "played it forward" for Denver’s Road Home.

Plans are already in the works for what Kiely hopes will be an annual event for Women With A Cause Foundation’s WE Initiative. The WE Initiative will be conducted in conjunction with Regis University: Rueckert-Hartman College Professionals, the University of Colorado College of Nursing, and the Community College of Aurora. These institutions have agreed to admit 10 qualified women from the WE Initiative into their nursing programs.

Clearly, Women With A Cause Foundation and its premiere event, Play It Forward, met its goal of assisting homeless mothers and women veterans to attend nursing schools at local universities. With such a success in its debut, Play It Forward is likely to become one of Denver’s premier annual events. "We have been floored by the accolades," Kiely said.

The Happiest Man In The World

By: Heidi Rickels Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Collaboration Close Up

Dr. James W. Jackson often describes himself as "The Happiest Man in the World." A successful businessman, award-winning author and humanitarian, Jackson is also a renowned "cultural economist," and international consultant, helping organizations and governments to apply sound economic principles to the transformation of culture so that everyone is "better off."

As the founder of Project C.U.R.E. and chairman emeritus of its board, Dr. Jackson traveled to more than 150 countries assessing healthcare facilities, meeting with government leaders, and "delivering health and hope" in the form of medical supplies and equipment to the world’s most needy people.

Now, he has written a book about his life experiences and adventures, providing an honest, personal assessment of the challenges and professional obstacles that confronted him, as well as best practices for building a "Business of Goodness."

As a boy, Dr. Jackson sat fascinated as his mother read stories about America’s golden boys of business who did well so that they could do good. At a young age, Jackson determined that he would be a millionaire by the time he was 25. By the time he was 30, he had exceeded that goal several times over, but he realized that he was not happy. So, together, James and his wife, Anna Marie, decided to give away their wealth and start over.

After writing a book on economics titled, What’cha Gonna Do with What’cha Got, Dr. Jackson landed consultation and speaking engagements with government leaders around the world. When he encountered the poverty and desperation of healthcare in developing countries, his heart was moved, and it ultimately changed the course of his entire life.

In his new book, The Happiest Man in the World: Life Lessons from a Cultural Economist, Dr. Jackson describes the dark side of making money and self-centered accumulation, as well as his struggles with institutionalized religion and the disappointments of man.

From his personal experiences visiting some of the world’s poorest and most dangerous places, Dr. Jackson explains the heartbreak of seeing children die of treatable illnesses simply because the doctors and nurses lacked proper medical equipment and supplies. He also shares the joy expressed by doctors and nurses who saw containers full of donated medical supplies arrive just in time to save a life.

Along with 600 of his friends and international humanitarian partners, Dr. Jackson launched his new book at the Newman Center for the Performing Arts in Denver on January 20, 2011. During this inspirational evening, the author shared stories and images of a life refocused from one of "getting" to one of "giving." Dr. Jackson was emphatic that the cultural economic principles shared in his book are transferable and can be applied to individuals, organizations and governments for the transformation of culture.

Bertha Lynn, anchor for KWGN-Channel 7 News in Denver, emceed the event. After welcoming the audience, she shared how the evening would provide a "glimpse into the life and legacy of a man whose work has touched thousands of lives around the world."

The presenting sponsor was Winston-Crown Publishing House, whose mission is to share stories of modern "humanitarian heroes," and to encourage readers to their own call to compassion and service to those who are suffering most in this world: the poor, the forgotten, the lonely and the sick.

After introducing his wife, Dr. Anna Marie Jackson, to whom his book is dedicated, Dr. Jackson also brought on stage his two sons, Jay Jackson, who was the first vice president of Project C.U.R.E., and Dr. Douglas Jackson, who is the president and CEO of the international humanitarian organization.

In his humble and engaging manner, Dr. Jackson sat on a stool and read excerpts from the book using the "power of story" to share the principles he learned from over 25 years of observing cultures from an economist’s perspective. Through his inspiring life story, he shared the despair of selfish accumulation and the joyful adventure of relinquishment, the development of Project C.U.R.E. as a model for cultural transformation, and how to live the best of your life for the rest of your life—helping others.

"What Project C.U.R.E has done for our hospitals in Brazil, and for the people who received medical supplies and equipment all around the world, is a true miracle," said Dra. Lorena Velho. "We will always be very grateful to Jim, who was sensitive to the needs of the world, and because of the love that lives in him, decided to change a successful life into a significant life."

Dr. Jackson ended the evening by challenging the audience and people everywhere to learn from his life experiences and join him in becoming the happiest people in the world!

The Happiest Man in the World: Life Lessons from a Cultural Economist is now available for purchase online at www.winstoncrown.org.

Big Idea to Change the World

By: Jan Mazotti Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Collaboration Close Up

In the November-December 2009 issue, Gayle Dendinger, our publisher was inspired by the multi-national work ICOSA collaborators were doing with several nonprofits and U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. He described the modern-day collaborative efforts of 300+ organizations and people who were committed to the cause—helping to rebuild 14 cities in Afghanistan—all of it collected, transported, and distributed for just $22.50!

There have been many positive outcomes from the project since we first highlighted it. For the Afghanistan work, we asked military units and nonprofits what they needed to "make a difference" across Afghanistan. We then took the list and asked for time, talent, and treasures from our collaborative partners. Surprisingly, no one we asked for help said no. In fact, most companies and/or organizations were excited to use their core skills or products to help make a difference in that part of the world.

During the project, we had many obstacles. And even though we (ICOSA/CAP) knew how to get humanitarian aid into the developing world, I can tell you that an active war theatre was a completely different beast. And, maneuvering through the federal government was no easy task. Early in the process, we used the tried and true rules of the game—be kind, courteous, and conscientious; relentless, but not offensive. In this case, that didn't seem to work so well and the project became stuck in the bureaucracies of D.C. Yet we trudged on and took persistence to a whole new level, sending a global email campaign to anyone we could find working in Afghanistan. Needless to say, it took only two hours for the people in D.C. to get global feedback from our email request and to contact us with a, "Don’t ever do that again." To which our reply was, "Then do your job." From there, it only took a few short weeks to get the project moving. It was really the right combination of collaboration, persistence, and persuasion that made the project successful.

Most people who have heard the story of the Afghanistan project have asked with amazement and disbelief why we did it. Frankly it was to make a difference, to change the world, and to make it a better place for the people there. That sounds fuzzy and sweet, but in reality, there were expected outcomes to our Starbucks napkin strategy—build 25 health clinics, clothe at least 10,000 people, supply basic hygiene to at least 2,500 refugees, build 50 sports teams, give toys to the children who had lost so much, take farmers out of the Taliban-directed opium trade, and help our troops and nonprofits build goodwill on the ground.

And what actually is happening on the ground is showing much more result than expected. The facts are: We filled a C-17 cargo plane on November 22, 2010, flown by the Mississippi Air National Guard from Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, Colorado. Once at Bagram Air Force Base in Kabul, the goods were sorted for distribution across 14 Afghan cities. There were enough supplies from collaborative partner, Project C.U.R.E. to build and/or re-supply 29 health centers and clinics, and we can report that as a result, at least two lives have been saved so far. We had enough winter clothing and shoes, donated by the National Ski Areas Association and the Coalition to Salute America’s Heroes, for nearly 30,000 people to date to receive something. And then there were 5,000 toys sent by JAKKS Cares, the philanthropic division of JAKKS Pacific, Inc. The U.S. Olympic Committee knows that sport is an inhibitor to violence, so with their collaborative assistance, we were able to send over 2,500 pieces of sports equipment and uniforms—enough to outfit close to 250 teams. And, there were enough seeds and irrigation equipment to help approximately 3,000 farmers begin to put food on their tables through a legitimate outlet. Most importantly, the farmers will have the opportunity to extricate themselves from the clutches of the Taliban-driven opium/heroin trade.

So when it comes down to it, our big idea to change the world really only touched 14 cities and tens of thousands of people. Perhaps a collaborative of businesses, nonprofits, and government entities, when working together can make a measurable difference, either here or abroad. We know it works!

The World Affairs Challenge

By: Jennifer D. Klein Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Community

There is little more inspiring than watching several hundred teenagers try to solve the world’s problem in a day. After 20 years in education, I remain moved by the positive change young people can envision well enough to argue and work toward it, whether that be through globally-oriented competitions or local community service work. Perhaps it is a bit idealistic to think that young people could solve real global issues now, before they’ve been empowered by a college education and substantive job experience, but every time I attend an international educational event like the World Affairs Challenge, which brings Colorado students together to compete and collaborate on real solutions, I become more convinced that the world will be better off in their hands.

The movement toward internationalizing education has taken hold in schools across the United States, particularly since discussion of 21st century skills began in the late 1990s. Our experiences on 9/11 further reinforced the need to teach our young people to build more constructive relationships with the larger world. Pedagogically, global education seeks to humanize the world for students; it is one thing to understand a global issue in the abstract, but it is quite another to feel a sense of global interconnectedness with (and even responsibility to) the humans experiencing that issue daily. Global education prepares young people, as early as kindergarten, to see the world through another cultural lens, developing students’ curiosity about and pluralism toward global perspectives and experiences. Schools with a global orientation are developing the cross-cultural skills young people need to become leaders who know how to collaborate across both visible and invisible borders to solve the world’s problems. These are no longer the "soft skills" global education was relegated to in the past; the capacity to work across cultural and geographical borders is increasingly vital to a myriad of corporations and professions, and this is pushing global curriculum into the mainstream in schools.

Beyond the very practical need for Americans to learn a wider array of world languages—for the sake of international politics, business, and development—we also need a generation of leaders who, even before they leave middle or high school, feel empowered to engage with the problems of the world. Global education is most engaging for students when it contains an action orientation, a design which naturally leads to and fosters active solution building in response to the global issues being studied. Young people are generally viewed as a disenfranchised group, yet youth under 25 years old currently represent nearly half of the world population—as such, we need them to feel empowered to create positive change. Young people crave this empowerment; as one middle school participant remarked about the World Affairs Challenge, it "…made me feel like just because I'm a teenager doesn't mean I won't be included in helping make this world a better place." This orientation is key to the goals of global education, and the absence or presence of an action component often decides whether students react to the complexity of global issues with paralysis or constructive engagement. By focusing curriculum on collaborative solution building and constructive action and less on competition and argument, teachers have the opportunity to channel students’ compassion into practical collaborative responses—with transformative results.

Founded by Dr. Josef Korbel nearly 40 years ago, the Center for Teaching International Relations (CTIR) provides international education services for youth, teachers and administrators in the United States. CTIR pursues its mission by helping K-12 teachers bring a global dimension to their classrooms via curriculum materials and professional development, and by creating avenues for K-12 students to engage directly in global issues. CTIR strives to help schools foster students who inquire, research and engage in global issues and ideas, teachers of all levels and disciplines who creatively infuse their curriculum with global topics and perspectives, and school classrooms in which young people acquire a deep understanding of and appreciation for global, political, economic, social and environmental systems. CTIR currently accomplishes these goals through two keystone programs: the World Affairs Challenge for students, and the International Studies Schools Association Annual Conference for teachers, to be revived in the winter of 2012.

The World Affairs Challenge brings together teams of middle and high school students to explore and solve the world's pressing problems through an issue-based and creativity-based academic program which culminates in a day-long tournament at the University of Denver. The WAC’s broad thematic structure encompasses a variety of global topics, allowing all students and teachers to find a topic they feel passionate about. The program poses essential questions that help students discover the issues most important to them, select a specific topic of study (i.e. water-borne diseases in Cambodia, or poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa), and then prepare for tournament day. A middle school participant said of the experience, "[The WAC] has made me a better and more aware person… This experience has been truly life-changing."

This year, the 20th anniversary World Affairs Challenge will be built around sustaining the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) beyond their 2015 deadline and is dedicated to the memory of Georgia Imhoff, long-time board member and supporter of CTIR. There are eight goals to be achieved by 2015 that respond to the world's main development challenges, but few organizations are talking yet about what will happen after 2015. The MDGs are drawn from the actions and targets contained in the Millennium Declaration that was adopted by 189 nations—and signed by 147 heads of state and governments—during the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000. The 2011 WAC will challenge students to provide sustainable solutions to those MDGs which, even once fulfilled, will not fully resolve the problems they aim to address.

The World Affairs Challenge includes the following components:

•The Formal Presentation:

Each team of 6-10 students creates a 10-15 minute presentation/skit showcasing their research findings and related solutions. The presentation must be international in scope and fall under one of the eight MDG categories, and must focus on a specific global issue within that category. Students may present in any creative way that communicates an understanding of the topic’s complexities and proposes an achievable, sustainable solution.

The Quiz: Students have 30 minutes to complete the 50-question, multiple-choice Global Awareness Quiz, which encompasses events, institutions, places and people in the national and international news.

• The Collaborative Question: Participants are assigned to new teams with peers from other schools, and they receive a "real world" question, simulation, or problem. This year, the CQ will be a ficticious crisis set on January 1, 2016, based on the current trends and challenges of MDG fulfillment. Students must come to consensus on how to respond to the crisis from a set of governmental and non-governmental solutions they are offered. The CQ process helps young people synthesize knowledge and develop leadership skills, teaching them to work with others and listen to a variety of views as they work toward consensus. Students also have a valuable opportunity for discourse with the adult judges in their group, who are generally prominent local leaders in globally-oriented professions. Participants are assigned to new teams with peers from other schools, and they receive a "real world" question, simulation, or problem. This year, the CQ will be a ficticious crisis set on January 1, 2016, based on the current trends and challenges of MDG fulfillment. Students must come to consensus on how to respond to the crisis from a set of governmental and non-governmental solutions they are offered. The CQ process helps young people synthesize knowledge and develop leadership skills, teaching them to work with others and listen to a variety of views as they work toward consensus. Students also have a valuable opportunity for discourse with the adult judges in their group, who are generally prominent local leaders in globally-oriented professions.

The World Affairs Challenge has provided transformative experiences for a wide range of middle and high school students from varied socio-economic and geographic backgrounds across Colorado. Several years ago, a student team from Rifle, Colorado came to participate. All the students spoke English as their second language, and some were recent immigrants to the United States. The teacher sponsor from Rifle said that only about 25 percent of this community’s students graduated from high school, and the percentage who went to college was much smaller.

The night before the WAC, the team nearly backed out because they feared they would be outclassed by the more affluent students from Denver. The teacher convinced them to go ahead with the competition. The team presented in Spanish with English translation; they met all the goals of the WAC and were so compelling that they won the whole competition. The teacher said that the experience boosted the students’ interest in learning and gave them so much confidence that everyone on the team graduated from high school. Even more importantly, half of the team went on to college, and the other half raised money to help provide scholarships for them.

The students from Rifle attended the WAC through the generosity of scholarship sponsors, and there are many stories like theirs, of students who were able to see themselves as change makers because CTIR is determined to provide equal access to global programming. Global educational initiatives are still painfully underfunded in most schools, and the WAC needs the financial support of conscientious individuals and corporations in order to be deeply enriching for a broad range of students, regardless of socio-economic background. In past years, both local and global corporations have helped to sponsor the WAC financially, and in doing so, they forge a direct connection with their own supply chain, with the young global citizens who will someday enhance their corporations with a pluralistic, constructive world view. Local corporations have encouraged their employees to become involved as judges or volunteers, and the WAC is always grateful for judges with a background in global development, as these adults can take the Collaborative Question dialogues to a higher level for students. Many organizations have also offered in-kind donations or pro bono assistance with key event needs, and all forms of support help to make the day rich and meaningful for students. Ultimately, the future of corporate America depends on the work being done in globalized classrooms, and many corporations feel that an investment in the WAC is an investment in that future.

People often call youth the next generation of leaders, yet young people are already creating significant change around the world. Programs like CTIR’s World Affairs Challenge recognize that youth are already a vibrant, constructive force, and these programs merely harness and direct their urges so that young people feel empowered to be partners in solution building. As a high school participant put it, "[The WAC] is awesome. You get to meet new people, learn new things about the world and its problems, and you get to, in general, think differently about how you spend every day and how it's affecting those around you." The fact that students begin to reflect sincerely on their own behavior and their role in the world indicates the power of engaging students in world issues. Through activities which allow students to practice solving global issues collaboratively, the WAC and programming like it help educators influence and inspire pluralistic, constructive young leaders who can envision the kind of world they want to create and who are already taking steps to get there.

Jennifer D. Klein taught high school and college English for 19 years, and has a background in experiential, project-based global education. As the founder of PRINCIPLED Learning Strategies, Jennifer is now working with the Center for Teaching International Relations as Educational Director for the World Affairs Challenge.

For more information about how to get involved in CTIR’s work in K-12 global education, please contact CTIR Board Chair Steve Werner at [email protected] or [email protected]. For more information about how to support the World Affairs Challenge or participate as a judge, go to www.worldaffairschallenge.org or contact Maro Casparian at [email protected].

Stand and Deliver

By: Terri Munson Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Community

When Javier Alvarado was in middle school in Brooklyn, New York, his good friend was stabbed in a neighborhood riot. That was the day Javi decided there had to be a better way to live, so he concentrated on his education as his ticket out of poverty. He sought advice from adults and credits his mentors for helping him strive—not just survive. Today Javi’s impressive credentials include a doctorate in electrical engineering from Cornell University.

In January of her senior year in high school in the Dominican Republic, Albedith Diaz decided that she needed to go to college in the United States to reach her potential. Despite application deadlines looming and despite the fact that she didn’t speak English, Albe was accepted at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, conditional on her learning English before the semester began. She was a freshman at WPI that September. Albe believes that, "When you want, you can do anything."

As a senior at Bowie High School in 1967 in a poor section of El Paso, Texas, Armando Alcantar assumed his good grades meant that he would be offered scholarships to college. He didn’t realize he had to apply because no one told him. Much later, as a Vietnam vet, Armando went to the University of Texas on the GI Bill.

These three remarkable people from Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico all became citizens of the United States, earned college degrees, and are engineers at Raytheon Company in Andover, Massachusetts. They are also mentors in Stand & Deliver. They are each matched with a student from the Lawrence public schools and meet with them at Raytheon once a week to work on mathematics, college prep, and life. Growing up in difficult circumstances themselves, they can relate to teenagers facing similar challenges. They have become wonderful role models for their mentees who have developed goals and strategies for success under their influence. Javi, Albe, and Armando are three of more than a hundred Raytheon mentors.

Stand & Deliver Mentoring Program

One afternoon a week throughout the school year, more than one hundred students from the 8th through 12th grade at Lawrence public schools are bussed to Raytheon Company to meet one-on-one with their mentors. The students academic levels range from the lowest to the highest levels so their mentors’ help ranges from remediation to enrichment. The only requirement for the students is that they want to improve their academics. Once they join the program, they can continue as long as they want until they graduate from Lawrence High. Many students have been in the program for four, five, and six years.

Lawrence, Massachusetts

Lawrence is a town of 70,000 people located within a 10 minute drive of two Raytheon facilities. The student population has a high poverty rate and a high dropout rate. Most, like Javi, Albe, and Armando, learned English as their second language. Many of their parents and guardians struggle with day-to-day basic needs and often do not have the time or the experience to guide their children—especially when it comes to mathematics, which is Raytheon employees’ forte.

History of Stand & Deliver

The Stand & Deliver academic mentoring program was founded in 2001 by Ed Warnshuis, a retiree with a huge heart and the energy to match. Ed heard about the MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System) tests that were soon to become state requirements for high school diplomas. Predictions were dire for students in Lawrence to pass the test which motivated Ed to act. He founded Stand & Deliver and matched Lawrence 8th graders with people from the community. Each mentor and mentee pair arranged to meet each week at a place and time convenient to both. In 2004, Ed needed more volunteers and came knocking on Raytheon’s door—which turned out to be fortuitous for Stand & Deliver, Raytheon, and a lot of young people.

That first year of Raytheon’s involvement, the 15 matches were whittled down to six by the end of the school year because of student "no shows." Yet, one Raytheon volunteer was struck by how dramatically mentoring can impact children. She was matched with an 8th grader named Jaime and was warned, "He probably won’t graduate." She and Jaime met at the public library each week and within a short time, she noticed something new about Jaime—he had a bounce in his step and a ready smile. Jaime’s grades rose from all D’s and F’s to all A’s and B’s not because of the homework they did together but because of Jaime’s new found motivation and confidence. Based on these results, she decided that the program needed to continue and grow.

Corporate Campus

Raytheon Company uses their own brand of Six Sigma to solve problems, and this proven process was used to address the program’s attrition problem. The outcome was Corporate Campus. The paradigm shifted from matches meeting individually in various sites around Lawrence to meeting in groups at the mentors’ companies. This made it doable for the mentors to conveniently walk to the company cafeteria to meet with their mentees. Meeting at the company site proved to be even more beneficial to the mentees by exposing them to corporate America, opening their eyes to possibilities they had never considered.

Kristine Matson College Bound Program

A pilot program was launched for the 2005-2006 school year with fourteen students, which grew by word of mouth to forty-five students the following year. The main focus was preparing for the MCAS math test. Raytheon mentor, Kristine Matson, recommended that the program expand to help higher level students with AP calculus. Although the current students were 8th and 9th graders, the idea would jump-start the process to help the older students who had already passed the MCAS test. Sadly, Matson was diagnosed with cancer and died after a courageous battle, but the idea of adding AP calculus students was not forgotten. Anne Chay, Matson’s friend and a calculus teacher at Lawrence High, called the Raytheon Stand & Deliver coordinator asking to create the Kristine Matson College Bound Program—to honor Matson and keep her memory alive. Within a few weeks 28 calculus students arrived at Raytheon. Now, each year, the Kristine Matson Unsung Hero Award is awarded to a student who best exemplifies her vision. To explain the impact of having a private tutor, Chay explains that one of her students who was not grasping a new math concept in class said, "Don’t worry Miss. My mentor will explain it to me." Another of her students, Joshua Maldonado, wrote this about his experience, "Stand & Deliver is more dynamic than just a mentoring program; it can change lives. Stand & Deliver saved my educational career. During my junior year of high school, I was taking an early morning course at UMASS Lowell which got me to Lawrence High too late for most of my AP calculus course. Guidance was ready to kick me out of the class, but Ms. Chay and I were able to convince them that my mentor would teach me. I learned more quickly and efficiently than I had before and earned a five on the AP calculus test. I realized the value of one-on-one mentoring and the chance to have all of the attention."

Navigating the College Application

Many of the older mentees began asking their mentors for specific information on the college application process. Janet Dellea from Raytheon Finance offered her expertise and thus the spin off program, Navigating the College Application, began. In addition to regular mentoring sessions, high school seniors come together to complete on-line college applications under the guidance of volunteers with recent college application experience. A private college fair is run for them at Raytheon with admissions officers from a dozen schools. Of the thirty-three seniors in the program last year, twenty-six went on to four-year colleges including MIT, Brown, Tufts, and Holy Cross—most with scholarships. Several students have expressed the wish to, "bring my mentor to college with me."

Opportunities for mentees

Raytheon’s close association with these students makes it possible to take advantage of opportunities that arise including touring college campuses, going on field trips to science fairs and the Museum of Science, attending the Massachusetts Conference for Women and IEEE Conference and, for a lucky few, singing the National Anthem at Fenway Park (www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0zEFvweZ7Q). Mentees in the program are encouraged to do community service work. For example, six Stand & Deliver high school girls joined The Science Club for Girls Junior Mentor program to work with 4th and 5th grade girls.

The Bookmobile

The focus of Stand & Deliver is mathematics, but students need to do well on standardized tests in English, as well. The Bookmobile helps fill the gap. Raytheon employees donate gently used, popular teen books for the kids to take and keep—no strings attached. Every December, Raytheon organizations and employees donate funds so that each mentee can request a book of their choice. Judging from the reactions, including one student hugging her new book, the goal of getting them hooked on reading is working.

MathMovesU and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) Initiatives

Raytheon Company is working diligently to promote STEM to show kids how much fun math can be and to encourage them to pursue STEM careers. Six years ago, Raytheon launched MathMovesU (www.mathmovesu.com), an interactive website for middle school students designed to make math exciting. Raytheon also sponsors a ride at Walt Disney World called the Sum of All Thrills where students use math concepts to design their ride and enjoy a different experience each time they ride. Raytheon also helps sponsor MATHCOUNTS, FIRST Robotics teams and many STEM related programs such as Stand & Deliver.

Go Fly A Kite

An annual MathMovesU event that is often the highlight of the year for the Stand & Deliver 8th grade students is Go Fly A Kite. Mentors and mentees run around a field on the first nice Thursday in April and fly kites. This is a great way for the kids to learn the Pythagorean Theorem. The mentors pace off the distance from where their mentees stand holding their kites to the point beneath the flying kite to get one known component of the equation. The other known component is the hypotenuse (length of the string). Using a2 + b2 = c2, they can figure out the unknown—the distance from the ground to the high flying kite. Seeing the tiny dot of a kite in the sky and using math to figure out that it was 1,472 feet in the air was "like magic" according to one mentee.

Pipeline for Engineers in Raytheon

Although Raytheon would be pleased if all the Stand & Deliver students became engineers, an interest in engineering isn’t required or even asked when students join the program. Approximately 30 percent of the program’s students are not U.S. citizens, a requirement to work in the defense industry, but many of the Stand & Deliver students aspire to careers in education, health, law enforcement, and business. The goal is to help the students reach their goals, and with the influence of mentors who are engineers, many students are becoming more interested in engineering. To date, seven Stand & Deliver graduates have completed successful summer internships at Raytheon and are well on their way to becoming engineers at Raytheon upon their college graduation.

Mass Mentoring Partnership and Family Service, Inc.

Massachusetts mentoring programs, including Stand & Deliver, benefit from the support of the Mass Mentoring Partnership, which provides mentor training and best practices sharing at Raytheon—an important factor in the program’s success. Furthermore, Mass Mentoring sponsors Mentoring Night at Fenway Park each year where over 700 matches from around the state attend a Red Sox game for free. Stand & Deliver invites matches to the game based on the mentee’s perfect attendance throughout the year. Mass Mentoring was also instrumental in the smooth transition to Family Service, Inc. Because of recent budget cuts in the Lawrence Public School District, Stand & Deliver was forced to find another source of support. Family Service, Inc. graciously took on the Corporate Campus program, adding it to the five other mentoring programs they already run. David Shapiro, CEO of Mass Mentoring believes, "Raytheon has served as a catalyst and an inspiring example that we can use to get other corporations involved in mentoring."

Is Corporate Campus Mentoring a Good Fit For Your Company?

Corporate Campus academic mentoring can be replicated by companies all across the country with great benefits to mentees and mentors, schools, corporations, the economy, and society at large. Most companies have empty cafeterias in the afternoon which is the ideal setting for mentoring sessions. After enjoying a snack and catching up with one another, students and mentors hit the books. Volunteering for an hour or two out of a forty to sixty hour work week re-energizes employees. Surveys show that employees who volunteer for Corporate Campus have higher job satisfaction and increased communication and leadership skills. And, while most mentoring programs have a wait list of children looking for mentors, this is one of the few mentoring programs that consistently has a wait list of mentors. For a small investment of time, mentors are helping to change the future for these young people and for us all.

At the first-ever National Mentoring Summit on January 25, 2011, First Lady Michelle Obama lauded the commitment of more than 17 U.S. corporations to expand or create mentoring programs that increase graduation rates among America’s youth and position them for success. Raytheon Company was among those 17 corporations that accepted "The Corporate Mentoring Challenge."

There are mentoring support agencies like Mass Mentoring Partnership throughout the country that can help determine which mentoring programs and opportunities are best suited to your company. By accepting this challenge, you can join with other corporations that are investing employee time and money to improve outcomes for youth. To find your local mentoring partnership or to learn more about The Corporate Mentoring Challenge, contact MENTOR at www.mentoring.org.

Vint Cerf

By: Eli Regalado Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Business It doesn’t matter if you’re bored, researching, or downloading music—if you’ve ever "surfed" the web, you can thank Vinton Cerf. Vint, as he is called, is one of the forefathers of the Internet and is tied to engineering the original saleable email. This Stanford graduate continues to thrive within the world of the Internet as an employee of Google. He has seen the beginning, he has seen what it has become, and he will continue to design where it will go. With almost two billion people connected to the Internet worldwide, there is plenty of room for improvement and Vint Cerf is helping lead the charge.

ICOSA: As the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, what are you doing now?

CERF: Since October 2005, I have been Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist which means that my job is to stay on top of the technological evolution of the Internet and the applications that are rapidly evolving on it. I also deal with domestic and international policy issues. There is still a continued effort to get more Internet built because only about 25-30 percent of the population is online at this point. I’d like everyone—all 6.6 billion of us—to be up on the Net.

I’ve observed that mobiles have become a very significant part of the Internet’s environment. Today, there are about 4.5 billion mobiles in use, but not all of them are Internet enabled. However, a reasonable percentage of them —maybe 20 percent—are. As time goes on, more and more phones will have the ability to make use of the Internet and the World Wide Web through mobile applications. So, I see a kind of rapid advance on the mobile side to bring people up on the net and a slower, or at least delayed, introduction of broadband services.

ICOSA: In its earliest stages the Internet was an experiment—when you started where did you see it going and did you have any idea it was going to be as big as it is today?

CERF: The simple answer is no. We had no idea the Internet would be what it is today. ...Well that’s not entirely fair and I need to give you a little context in order to appreciate that. In 1973, Bob Kahn and I started designing what we call the Internet today. It was built on the strengths of an experiment that was done four years before, called the Arpanet (Arpa), which was a network based on dedicated telephone circuits linking specialized packet switching computers together. As graduate students and engineers, we were developing this technology as we were using it; we were making use of remote time share access to machines in the same kind of way that a web server is used today remotely on the net. Keep in mind the World Wide Web hadn’t been invented yet, so it was a much simpler interface, but the whole idea and motivation was resource sharing, the ability to share other people’s software and share people’s data on machines that were located elsewhere.

More importantly, around the late 1960’s a man by the name of Douglas Englebart had undertaken an interesting project at Stanford Research Institute International in Menlo Park, California called the augmentation of human intellect. The idea was that computers would be able to augment our human intelligence by performing repetitive functions, indexing or doing other kinds of tasks with large amounts of data that we couldn’t otherwise do ourselves. Englebart’s group was interested in information sharing, document creation and sharing, and from that he invented the notion of hyperlinking. There was a lot of collaborative technology. He invented a portrait mode presentation that looked like a black and white piece of paper as opposed to the yellow and green screens of the day. It was an extremely advanced piece of work that was all taking place in the late 1960’s.

Also around 1970, Xerox started a research organization in Palo Alto called Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which brought some of the smartest people together—many from the ARPA sponsored programs. Back in ’73 and ’74, everyone at PARC had their own personal computer. These machines were $50,000 each. It was at this time, Bob Metcalf, a member of PARC went to an ARPA project at the University of Hawaii (ALOHAnet). ALOHAnet was a radio-based network where terminals on the outer islands were transmitting data back to Oahu where the University of Hawaii is located using a very dynamic spectrum sharing technique. Well, Metcalf went back to PARC and said, "I can do this on a coaxial cable and I’m going to call it Ethernet." So, he’s inventing Ethernet in 1973, linking all these Alto machines together at high speed. At the same time, I was a mile and a half away at Stanford University inventing TCP/IP with Bob Kahn. Electronic mail had also been invented for the Arpanet during the same time period. So, we’re all using email; Metcalf is doing the Ethernet and the Alto personal computers; I was doing TCP/IP Internet architecture with Bob Kahn—and by the launch of this thing in early 1983—we all have had over a decade of experience in computer networking in the form of the Arpanet.

At the same time, personal computers were starting to emerge in the private sector and the Ethernet had become publically available as a product, proving there was a growing appreciation for the capability of the system. At a point when we rolled out the Internet in 1983, we knew we could do packetized voice and video on satellites, on the radio, and it could work on the Arpanet and Ethernet.

Now, none of this was commercial and it didn’t become commercial until around 1989. I realized in 1988, however, that the only way it would ever become available to the general public was if it could be made to be commercially self-supported. So, I went on a campaign to get the rights to carry commercial traffic on the government sponsored backbones of the Internet. I got that permission in late 1988, and in 1989, some of my colleagues and I put up a gateway linking the Internet email system, which had been around since 1971, with the MCI Mail System that had been built and rolled out in 1983. Just five years later we started to link this commercial email system with the academic Internet.

In 1989, three commercial Internet services came along and about that same time, Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web, which started to show up in the form of the Mosaic Browser in 1992. By the time the mid-1990’s rolled around, we were in the dot-com boom period. The point is that during the course of nearly 20 years of evolution—from the early 1970’s to mid-1990’s—we saw repeated opportunities for the Internet to increase its utility, until finally it became available to the public.

ICOSA: While the Internet was being developed, did anyone think you were nuts for working on this project?

CERF: Well, certainly in the earliest period during the Arpanet phase, the conventional wisdom for telecom was that the circuit switching technology used in the telephone system was the only way to do this type of communication. We were soundly criticized for attempting to do this "silly" thing by AT&T and others who had been in the telecom game for a while. We said, "Well, we are going to do it anyway." And they said, "We’re happy to lease you the circuits and we’ll let you do this ‘silly’ thing." Of course later on it actually worked and they didn’t’ think it was so "silly" then. This "silly" thing was a paradigm breaker because packet switching was dramatically different from circuit switching technology. Now the technologies support the exploration of the solar system with manned and robotic space craft and so many other things.

ICOSA: In your opinion, how does rapid information sharing affect modern society?

CERF: There are positives and negative aspects of rapid information sharing. On the good side, we learn about events much more quickly and in ways we wouldn’t have before because they are being indexed by our search engines. On the negative side, bad things happen around the world and when we become aware of them, it feels like it’s local. So, when negative things happen you get this uneasy feeling that bad things are happening everywhere, including where you are, even if that is not true. The immediacy of the information gives that feeling.

While television networks like CNN and FOX have those same characteristics, the Internet exacerbates it. People tweeting, taking video and posting to YouTube, and sending emails increase the amount of interaction and awareness of what is going on in the world. We have seen potential political ramifications of this especially in the post-Iran election period. Videos were posted to YouTube and tweets were picked up on the user’s mobile that painted a picture for the rest of the world about what was going on there—we’re seeing this rapidly growing network giving voice to things that otherwise would have been invisible.

Also on the negative side, the network is a bearer of terror. It is used by groups that have inimical agendas; whether it is terrorists, people committing fraud, or other abuses on the Net, it becomes a conveyor to those anti-social activities. The benefits seem to outweigh the deficits, yet we are hard pressed as countries to find ways of protecting access to the network while also doing something about people who are abusing it.

ICOSA: What is your view on Internet television and where do you think it is going?

CERF: We are seeing a fairly quick convergence of all the various means of delivering video coming together—in some cases they are converging on set top boxes and in some cases coming out of multiple boxes. For example, DVD and Blue-Ray players have recently become Internet capable, so you can go to Netflix or YouTube through those players and control your experience with a remote. Or, you might actually use your laptop to surf the Internet, find videos that can be streamed, and then output it all onto a high resolution large screen display.

It’s been a very interesting phenomenon watching separate networking and media come together in one presentation device. What is happening now is that all three of these different kinds of communication networks—voice, television, and Internet—are becoming commonly interconnected, and all the different media that can be carried on them is becoming interconnected. What used to take weeks now takes minutes or seconds.

ICOSA: What are you working on now that is changing the way things are done?

CERF: Back in 1998, I started working on the design of an interplanetary extension of the Internet—something that would allow us to operate networks across the solar system. The first reaction was, "This is just silly. It’s science fiction. And, I hope you are o.k. in your little padded room." However, just over 10 years later this is serious engineering. We have already done testing in deep space with the new protocols that will work over huge distances. The purpose of the technology is to support the exploration of the solar system with manned and robotic space craft. It will also provide a richer networking environment so that information can be obtained from the robotic devices—like the rovers and the orbiters—that are exploring the surfaces of planets or are looking down on activities of asteroids or comets. And, of course, this technology will help astronauts interact not only with each other, but with Houston back on earth. Because the networking capabilities up until now for space communications have been point-to-point radio links, my colleagues and I have been working to make the network as rich as the Internet, in terms of being able to easily allow multiple devices to be part of the interplanetary communication network.

And, we at Google are heavily invested in cloud computing systems. My academic colleagues are irked when I say, "Gee it’s time-sharing all over again." They argue, "Well it’s more than that." So, to be fair, that’s probably right—in a sense.

The computing utility used to be displayed as this giant building somewhere in the middle of the country with steam coming out of the top and a bunch of telephone lines connected to it. Today, it’s a bunch of big buildings with a bunch of steam coming out of the top with essentially laptops all stacked up on top of each other and a whole bunch of Internet connections going into it. We’ve reinvented big computing utility. It’s dramatically different in its character. There are a lot of very useful notions of cloud computing to do business, and it also presents the most interesting problem—getting the clouds to talk to each other. Here we are in 2011, and inter-cloud interactions are in a state where we were with the Internet in 1973. For somebody, this inter-cloud stuff is going to be another incredible experience.

Saving Lives with Unconditional Love

By: Rebecca Arno Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Community

A boy jumps into a swimming pool, arms akimbo. As he emerges from the water, his smile dazzles. He scrambles out and stands up tall. He can’t wait to do it again.

Mere months before, this same boy walked into the Mother Teresa Orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He walked slowly, was lethargic, and obviously in pain. "They say you can fix my back," he said in English to a man with a stethoscope around his neck and a colorful hat perched on his head. The boy had come to the right place. From his small office in the Ethiopian orphanage, Dr. Rick Hodes had cured hundreds of children’s backs, children who were victims of a disease all too common in Ethiopia—spinal tuberculosis.

But this time, the doctor would identify another problem. While the boy, whose name was Akewak, had a small lump on his back, he also had a scar across his shoulder blade, evidence of heart surgery. Dr. Rick listened to his heart and could tell that Akewak was in danger. "I sent his cardiac echo test to Denver for confirmation of my diagnosis. That $30 test saved this boy's life," he recalls.

This was not the first life that Dr. Rick had saved. In 1985, he went to Ethiopia to teach in the medical school; in 1990, he returned with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) to help with Operation Solomon, the airlift of more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the midst of civil war. The JDC is considered by some to be the "Red Cross of the Jewish World," and has been working for 97 years to provide humanitarian assistance to Jews and non-Jews in crisis. Twenty years later, Dr. Rick still serves as JDC Medical Director in Ethiopia, having saved thousands of lives and given care to untold numbers of people in need. He plans to live out his life in his adopted country.

What Dr. Rick found that day when he examined Akewak was a congenital heart defect that could be repaired, if treated soon enough, and if operated on by the right surgeon. But, Akewak also had a spinal defect. Treating both of these ailments would take money and a network of support for the boy, before and after the surgery, in a place far from Addis Ababa. Thanks to the JDC, The Children’s Hospital of Denver, and Dr. Steve Berman, Dr. Rick found the community that Akewak needed.

A generous Denver family opened their home to Akewak. After his surgeries, they helped him recover and gave him the chance to explore the possibilities offered by his new healthy body. He jumped on a trampoline, went swimming, and even tried indoor skydiving. Eventually, Akewak returned home to Ethiopia a changed boy. His parents said, "You’ve given us back a new son." Today, he goes to school and plays soccer with his big brother. He will live and learn and build a life, all because of Dr. Rick Hodes.

Because of stories like this, some call Dr. Rick "the modern day Mother Teresa." He could easily have lived the life expected of a Long Island-born doctor, trained at Johns Hopkins—in an upscale neighborhood and played golf. Instead he spends his days helping the poorest of the poor, treating spinal tuberculosis, scoliosis, heart disease, and cancer, on the dusty streets of Ethiopia, a country where UNICEF estimates there are five million orphans. Instead of being overwhelmed by the enormity of the need, Dr. Rick simply treats the children who come into his clinic. He treats them with care and love, first taking their pictures to attach to their files, so that they never become just words on a page, numbers on a medical test, or shadows in an x-ray. Jewish writings state that saving one life is like saving an entire world, and Dr. Rick lives according to this principle, as the lines continually blur between his professional and personal life. In fact, several years ago, when he wasn’t able to find donations to support surgery for two boys with severe spinal deformities, he adopted those boys as his sons. Dr. Rick has now adopted five boys, and about twenty other children live under his care in three homes in Addis Ababa. Some of his sons study in different high schools and colleges in the United States.

Dr. Rick’s work has not gone unnoticed. Author Marilyn Berger wrote of Dr. Rick in her book This is a Soul: The Mission of Doctor Rick Hodes (Harper Collins, 2010), and HBO featured his life in the 2010 documentary Making the Crooked Straight. Berger’s book described how her encounters with Dr. Rick not only inspired her, but changed her life forever by introducing her to a boy named Danny. After a day spent in Dr. Rick’s clinic, she found Danny crouched in front of a bakery on the streets of Addis Ababa, "his tiny right hand cupped skyward to catch the occasional coin that came his way." She immediately noticed that he had the same curved back she’d been seeing in Dr. Rick’s clinic. Dr. Rick examined Danny, diagnosed him, adopted him, and eventually sent him abroad for corrective surgery. On a later visit, Berger invited Danny to live with her in New York—her first and only child. This is just one example of the small miracles that seem to be commonplace in the world of Dr. Rick Hodes.

When Dr. Rick is not at work in his clinic, taking care of his adopted sons, or sending e-mails of medical files to hospitals in the United States, India, and Ghana where life-saving surgeries are performed for his patients, he does what he can to raise the money needed to fund these surgeries.

Brent Weaver, a Denver entrepreneur and co-owner of the company Hot Press Web, has seen Dr. Rick at work in Addis Ababa. "He looks at money differently than the rest of us do. To him, $10,000 is a surgery, $600 is a set of medical tests, and $18 provides monthly transportation for patients who live in remote villages and need to come into Addis for treatment." Weaver was part of a group in Denver that recently worked with the JDC to host a fundraising dinner for Dr. Rick called "A Dinner of Unconditional Love."

The mastermind behind the dinner was Noel Cunningham, owner of Strings Restaurant. "There’s nothing like a Jewish doctor in a Catholic orphanage, helping some of the world’s poorest children," he says. "We can’t be there with him helping those kids every day. But we can help him get the money he needs to save their lives." Cunningham worked with a steering committee that included community leaders such as Elaine Gantz Berman and Jennifer Kraft, as well as former Colorado Governor Bill Ritter and his wife, Jeannie. When they held their kick-off event in October to launch the dinner, the group announced a goal of raising $250,000. The first $18 was contributed by Akewak himself—proceeds from a lemonade stand that he ran at the Cherry Creek Arts Festival.

Most people considered $250,000 to be a stretch for a first-time Denver fundraiser, half a world away from Ethiopia. But the goal was reached in just weeks, and by the time the dinner took place on January 13, 2011 generous donors had contributed almost $500,000. Several friends of Dr. Rick’s traveled from throughout North America to be there for the evening. Supporters from Vancouver and Dallas who had hosted children from Ethiopia in their homes following surgeries were in attendance, and a number of Dr. Rick’s sons took a break from their studies at U.S universities to fly in for the event.

The evening offered rare inspiration. Marilyn Berger was there, on stage with her son Danny, to share the story of how they became a family. Father Michael Sheeran from Regis University bestowed an honorary doctorate on Dr. Rick, an honor often reserved for Nobel Prize Winners such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Muhammad Yunus. Dr. Rick shared slides of patients before and after their surgeries, and he then talked about a recent patient, a woman he met at the Telluride Film Festival where Making the Crooked Straight was being shown.

Prudence Mabhena was also in Telluride as the subject of a documentary, hers entitled Music by Prudence. That film went on to win the 2010 Academy Award for best short documentary. Born in Zimbabwe, Prudence has arthrogryposis, a disease that affects her joints and restricts use of her arms or legs. She was abandoned by her parents and raised by her maternal grandmother, eventually moving into the King George VI School and Centre for Children with Disabilities. There, she formed the band Liyana with other disabled musicians. Shantha Rau Barriga wrote in the Huffington Post, "The music of Liyana sends a clear message of how the lives of us all – abled and disabled – are enriched when the barriers that separate us are broken down."

At the dinner in Denver, Dr. Rick told the story of meeting Prudence. He immediately identified her as having a spinal issue that needed treatment, a diagnosis that would prove accurate. Without surgery to correct her spine, her lungs would eventually be crushed, and she could die. After the audience viewed an excerpt from the Oscar-winning film, the room went dark, and from the darkness came the voice of an angel singing Amazing Grace. Prudence herself had come to Denver. Emcee Bazi Kanani told the crowd that Prudence would be evaluated by Children’s Hospital for potential surgery on her spine. "They’re going to save my life," Prudence said.

Yet another small miracle along the path of Dr. Rick Hodes.

Noel Cunningham hopes to inspire other cities to host dinners to support Dr. Rick and his work, along the lines of the "Taste of the Nation" events that raise millions for hunger and poverty relief. He thinks it would be incredible if donor communities could raise $10 million to allow Dr. Rick to build his own hospital. Cunningham recently told the Denver Post, "In my 24 years of doing different things, I believe this is the most meaningful, significant thing I've ever done. Rick's selflessness is truly inspiring."

Rebecca Arno has served for eight years as the Vice President of Communications for The Denver Foundation.

A Cafe for Comfort

By: Candace Ruiz and Jan Bezuidenhout Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Community How much would you have paid for your last restaurant meal if there were no prices? How much is it worth to you? This is the model for many community kitchens and nonprofit restaurants. Daily menus, no prices and donations accepted. At the Comfort Café in Denver, Colorado, the menu changes daily and the "three old-broads" volunteer each day to bring home-style meals to all who are hungry. When you enter the Café near 39th Street and Tennyson in northwest Denver, you feel comfort and caring from the volunteers who serve you. Local artists’ works adorn the walls and food from the kitchen is made fresh each day.

There are many entities that have the general idea to provide food for the hungry. This is not a new idea. In 1989, Robert Egger started the first "community kitchen," DC Central Kitchen. This Washington, DC establishment trains the unemployed to learn marketable culinary skills with food donated from local restaurants. The food is prepared providing balanced meals for the needy. In early 2001, Denise Cerreta, founder of the One World Everybody Eats Café in Salt Lake City, Utah, converted her for-profit restaurant to a nonprofit. She had hungry patrons who were willing to work for food, and she needed more hands in the kitchen. With that, a small group of followers developed, and over time, a foundation was started to support growth and expansion for other community kitchens around the United States.

Jan Bezuidenhout is the visionary who joined forces with like-minded friends to breathe life into the long held dream that is The Comfort Café. A social worker by training, with education in business as well, Bezuidenhout spent most of her career working with hospice, providing patient-directed comfort care to terminal patients and the people who love them. She is the founder and president of Namaste Hospice, which has cared for thousands of people in the Denver area since its inception in 1998. Early in her 26 year hospice career, Bezuidenhout discovered that bereaved people were likely to reject traditional counseling interventions, insisting they were just "fine." She understood this type of assertion, which is not necessarily true, to be a reflection of the death denying, death defying culture prevalent in the United States and throughout most of the world. Bezuidenhout had worked in commercial kitchens when she was in high school, college, and graduate school and understood the healing power of food, especially food that was connected with the memory of loved ones and happier times gone by. More than 20 years ago, she and her staff began asking the bereaved to tell stories about their deceased loved ones that involved food. Hundreds of recipes and stories were shared and documented over the years, and these serve as the inspiration for the extensive menu at The Comfort Café. About five years ago, Bezuidenhout became aware of the community kitchen model, which does not list prices but asks diners to make a fair donation for their meal. The two concepts seemed to fit well together and the Café was born in 2010 as a place where the bereaved and others experiencing sadness or challenge are comforted, community is created, and everyone eats high quality, delicious healthy food regardless of their ability to donate for their meal.

The big idea of the Comfort Café is an empowering, community connection point. Patrons come in as strangers and leave as empowered friends. It is a place to build a personal network, a safety net, and friendships. In May 2010, with generous foundation funding, The Comfort Café opened as a comfortable, welcoming restaurant atmosphere where—not just seniors, not just one religious group, not just the poor—everyone is welcomed.

The fresh new menu is posted each day, but no prices are listed. Patrons just donate for what they eat. In fact, the Café finds that 25 percent pay less than the fair market value for a meal, 50 percent pay fair market value, and 25 percent pay extra. And while it is important for people who can pay nothing or just a little, are included in the restaurant, the Café has one patron who pays $50 for his meals, and has had some pay as much as $500 for theirs. Another weekly customer comes in always by himself, yet he never sits alone—he sits and visits with anyone. He says he likes the idea that he can support a place where everyone in the community belongs.

Understanding the social and community value of the restaurant is important since 75 percent of existing paying patrons could choose any other restaurant on the street. So why do they come to The Café? They say they like the inclusive, caring atmosphere—something much different than just being friendly. The Café is creating hope—not from the food and not from the service—but from the sense of hopefulness that comes from the volunteers and the patrons.

Another patron, a former hotshot executive, suddenly unemployed and who had lost everything began coming to the Café regularly. He couldn’t afford to eat so he volunteered for his meals. Bezuidenhout observed him one day, alone at a table with his coffee, his plate of food, and his laptop. As she observed him, she noticed he was wiping away tears so she sat down with him and asked him what was wrong. He said it was the one year anniversary of the suicide of his son, and that he was filled with such pain that he needed "the comfort of the Café." During the conversation, a young mother, and regular customer, entered with her mother and sister and gave Bezuidenhout a big hug. The young mother explained that her mother had just been diagnosed with cancer—they too were grieving in their own way. Bezuidenhout suggested, with the gentleman’s permission, that they all sit together. As they talked, they realized that they were all experiencing pain that day. The Café volunteers gave comfort by listening to them, supporting them, and normalizing their feelings.

What sets The Café apart from other nonprofits is its participatory aspect—each volunteer is given an opportunity to contribute, whether fulltime or for just a few hours. The Comfort Café seats 65 in the dining room, 45 on the outdoor patio area, and there is a separate conference room available for small groups. The first Friday of each month, The Café hosts a big feast and invites local artists to display their work and musicians to play.

So, the next time you are in the mood for comfort food, feeling low, or just interested in a new experience, visit The Comfort Café—you don’t know who you might meet or who might just lift you up.

Candace Ruiz is managing director of Business Service Corps, a company that assists for-profit companies in the development, organization, implementation, and measurement of community outreach programs. Contact her at [email protected].

Jan Bezuidenhout is a founding member of The Comfort Café and founder and president of the Namaste Hospice. Visit The Comfort Café at 3945 Tennyson Street, Denver, Colorado or visit their website at www.thecomfortcafe.net.

Smart People, Big Ideas

By: Emily Haggstrom Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Business

History has amassed a collection of influential leaders. These leaders secured a following of people who accepted their principles and organized through their guidance. They have defined cultures and shaped generations of people. Leaders often exude passion, charisma, and poise, but the defining qualities of a leader seem to be unmistakably intangible. These leaders have become examples of how business executives and government officials operate: by emulating the qualities they feel should be represented and exhibited to achieve bottom line results.

There have been many debates waged about whether leaders are born or made, and while most people continue to debate this theory, one man has engineered the topic of leadership into a science. "The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born-that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born," Warren Bennis has said.

Bennis, an accomplished writer of over 30 books on leadership development, a professor, consultant, and speaker to some of the greatest leaders in U.S. history, believes that leaders are shaped by the opportunities and trials that life has imbued on them. And while there are negative leaders, which Bennis describes as "destructive achievers," most leaders are defined by passion, purpose, curiosity, and the adaptive capacity to create cultural candor within the organizations they lead. Their true mark as leaders is their ability to surround themselves with great people and the ability to make the right strategic decisions in business. "Without your eyebrows raised, without curiosity, without awareness of possible disruptive inflection points, and unless you keep an eye out and learn how to adapt, leaders will fail," said Bennis.

Leaders should bring out the best in their groups by accentuating individual talents, realizing people’s full potential, and ensuring safety, satisfaction, and a collective desire by the group to belong. Great leaders inspire collaboration from their groups to achieve the organization’s full potential; they are quantified by the results they produce and the respect that they garner. "A culture of candor is what creates organizations that don’t get into trouble; truth speaks to power," said Bennis.

He was slated to be a great leader at 19 after requesting and then being chosen to command a platoon as a second lieutenant in World War II. "There is an underemphasized importance of what it means to put on a uniform which in itself is a set of expectations of what others think of you and what you think of yourself; it is such a powerful factor in leadership," said Bennis. It was during this time that he learned the significance of his role and the power that came with it when he truly possessed that role. By putting on his uniform and choosing to be a leader to his platoon, Bennis was awarded the Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for his valiant efforts. "Nobody who has to make choices that result in the deaths of others takes leadership lightly," said Bennis.

After the war, he studied under Douglas McGregor, his mentor, who initiated Bennis’ thoughts on the human condition and the common element such as rules and policies to create enlightened bureaucracy that takes into account equally the human condition and the bottom line. "I’ve continued to believe this, and I have continued to carry on Doug’s tradition ever since," said Bennis.

The guru’s defining leadership moment was during a speech at Harvard when one of the school’s deans asked him if he loved being president of the University of Cincinnati. He described the moment as a long pause that hit him straight to his core. "Everything went silent and I could hear my heartbeat," said Bennis; all he could reply was that he didn’t know. It was on the flight home when he realized that he didn’t love what he was doing and he decided to return to teaching.

Bennis describes this transition as finally understanding the difference between his ambition and his calling. "The difference between a good leader and a great leader is the amount of passion they have for their role," said Bennis. "Leaders act with a sense of purpose; they are eternal optimists." Because of this transition, Bennis was inspired again. Through his new role, he regained the charisma and the candor that had laid dormant until he sought the role that brought forth his defining characteristic leadership qualities. "We have so many possible selves we can choose from, once we designate roles for ourselves," said Bennis.

It is no surprise that after 50 years, Bennis remains one of the foremost thought leaders on this subject, consulting presidents such as John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan along with senior executives from Fortune 500 companies across the nation. At the age of 87, Bennis continues to speak, although now it is from the comfort of his home. As the years progress, he continues to fine tune his philosophies no matter how banal they may seem, in an effort to continue a legacy that has not only shaped him, but defined him as a person.

The Six Characteristics of Leadership

In most instances of dramatic leadership, Bennis believes there are six characteristics of a leader: integrity, dedication, magnanimity, humility, openness, and creativity. By embodying these characteristics, great leaders can establish trust, purpose, and help drive results from their followers.

INTEGRITY

Integrity means alignment of words and actions with inner values. It means sticking to these values even when an alternative path may be easier or more advantageous. A leader with integrity can be trusted and will be admired for sticking to strong values. They also act as a powerful model for people to copy, thus building an entire organization with powerful and effective cultural values.

DEDICATION

Dedication means spending whatever time and energy on a task that is required to get the job done, rather than giving it whatever time is available. The work of most leadership positions is not something to do if time permits. It means giving one’s whole self to the task, dedicating one’s self to success and to leading others.

MAGNANIMITY

A magnanimous person gives credit where it is due. It also means being gracious in defeat and allowing others who are defeated to retain their dignity. Magnanimity in leadership includes crediting people with success and accepting personal responsibility for failures.

HUMILITY

Humility is the opposite of arrogance and narcissism. It means a leader recognizes that you are not inherently superior to others, and consequently, others are not superior to them. It does not mean diminishing one’s self, nor does it mean exalting one’s self. Humble leaders do not debase themselves, neither falsely nor due to low self-esteem. They simply recognize all people as equal in value and know that their position does not make them a god.

OPENNESS

Openness means being able to listen to ideas that are outside one's current mental models, being able to suspend judgment until after one has heard someone else's ideas. An open leader listens to their people without trying to shut them down early, which at least demonstrates care and builds trust. Openness also treats other ideas as potentially better than one's own ideas. In the uncertain world of new territory, being able to openly consider alternatives is an important skill.

CREATIVITY

Creativity means thinking differently, being able to get outside the box and take a new and different viewpoint on things. For a leader to be able to see a new future towards which they will lead their followers, creativity provides the ability to think differently and see things that others have not seen, and thus giving reason for followers to follow.

Mixing Business with Pleasure Never Felt So Good

By: Emily Haggstrom Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Business

The better part of America is composed of entrepreneurs who seek a challenge, innovation, risk and investment. In fact, entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of the American economy. From small to large businesses, capitalism is at the core of our society and is the fundamental defining characteristic of a free market that is propagated by this breed of individuals. And while having the next big idea can bring about prosperity for small businesses to cultivate communities, it is the ideas of large businesses that cultivate nations.

In his book Blueprint to a Billion, David Thomson explains that highly successful businesses cannot be realized "from soft subjects such as organization or leadership theory," but through "innovation and growth." Having an idea is merely an essential starting point for business owners. However, seeing the bigger picture of a great idea, "far beyond mere improvements to existing products," but through the, "delivery of breakthrough products," is the core of a highly successful company.

Establishing himself among these highly successful businesses and living the quintessential American dream is David Merage. With absolutely no experience in the food industry and equipped only with ambition, drive and the support of his brother and father, the trio founded Chef America, Inc., a frozen food manufacturer that distributed Hot Pockets and its subsequent brands. Initially, David and his brother Paul tested recipes and designed specialized proprietary equipment to mass produce Belgian waffles, which in 1977 had not yet reached America. Once the waffles gained market share, the group sought to design a product that took their consumer straight from breakfast to lunch.

What started as a Belgium waffles business turned into a frozen food empire overnight with the introduction of their world famous Hot Pockets to schools and vending machines across the country. By 1983, Hot Pockets began distribution to grocery stores and supermarkets around the United States, and eventually their distribution reached 99 percent of the nation. Over 200 products emerged; Hot Pocket eventually went croissant and then turned lean. With $750 million in sales, the brothers looked into taking this business international while diversifying their business. It was after going international that Nestlé, who purchased Chef America, Inc. for $2.6 billion in 2002, approached them to take over distribution and marketing.

With his new fortune, David Merage wanted to take his knowledge of business and management and give back to communities that directly affected his life. Along with his wife, Laura Merage, he formed the David and Laura Merage Foundation, whose mission is to promote self-sufficiency through education and community involvement. By incorporating real business experience combined with an entrepreneurial spirit, the two set off to develop projects intensely focused on benefiting society. The foundation works in two parts—first through private funding and secondly, through grants and public funding. This model allows the Merage’s to be truly diverse in the types of programs and endeavors in which they become involved.

In addition, David continued to seek new ventures and business propositions as a principal for Consolidated Investment Group. Collectively, these partners created not only current project opportunities, but hedged a sustainable future for future projects.

Reviewing the project initiatives, education is a common theme that resonates throughout. "Education empowers people, and gives people the tools that they need to succeed," said Mr. Merage. Their U.S. flagship project, Early Learning Ventures, is focused on early childcare and quality education.

The desire to become involved in education started when the Merage’s had their own children and the challenge to find good schools became a big issue. "We wanted them to have a good experience," said Mrs. Merage. "We are born with creative thinking, but it’s beaten out of us. Unfortunately, by second grade, kids have been taught that it doesn’t pay to think creatively. But we know that if you want to be successful in business, and later in life, you need to have a creative mind." The Foundation uses a results-oriented business approach to develop the Early Learning Ventures Alliance model, a community-based partnership comprised of small childcare affiliates working together to share costs and deliver services in a more streamlined way. The ELV Alliances provide back office support and training to develop high quality early care and education. There are currently eight ELV Alliances in development throughout Colorado.

As an artist and photographer, Laura does not believe education stops with traditional schooling. For her, art fosters local community relationships. Through her pet project, an artist colony aptly named Redline Gallery she invites resident artists, collectors, curators and the public to seek creativity outside the lines by exciting the senses and daring patrons to push the envelope of what is considered art. The massive space supports not only 15-20 emerging artists, but hosts local community events, fosters creative relationships between the art community and local schools, as well as hosts a one-on-one summer program that helps children develop their own artistic expression.

And while the Merages continue to stay focused on children and the community, they are still entrepreneurs at heart. "We provide the best services and quality no matter what we do; we go where not many people are willing to go," said Mr. Merage. The Merages, who hail from Iran, are active supporters of Jewish life and are the only existing foundation in the state of Israel devoted strictly to the development of the southern Negev region. They are targeting the area with over 40 simultaneous projects and 200 partners aligned to promote the Negev as the future of Israel—a place that will embrace all cultures within the region, from Israelis, to Bedouins, and even new immigrants—with the objective of educating the world through business outreach and marketing.

Along with the development of the Negev, through housing and healthcare, the duo has teamed up with two army veterans to establish permanent student villages within the Negev and into the area of Galilee. The Merage Foundation provides support through grants to the Ayalim Association (pronounced Aya-leem) for operating and building expenses associated with the build-out of these small-fee student communities. The catch is that these students live in the houses they have built for themselves. And the payback for the housing is through the 250,000 hours of collective community work the students performed within their own village in 2010. With the establishment of these communities, healthcare and other much needed services will continue to open and be available for the first time to residents in these regions.

The two continue to stay busy and are intimately involved in the day-to-day activities of their various programs with a hands-on management approach. Through the help of an amazing 50 person staff, David and Laura Merage continue to educate, inform, invest, and develop aspects of their lives that they are passionate about—proving that mixing business with pleasure isn’t always a bad thing.

Enabling Global Leadership Through Energy Transition

By: Probir Ghosh Issue: Big Ideas, Smart People Section: Business

invVEST is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to enable Global Leadership through Massive Scaling of Sustainable Energy Initiatives (SEI). invVEST stands for invest in Energy that’s Sustainable through Virtual Collaborative Teams. The stretch goal is for major economies of the world to strive to generate at least 35 percent of their energy from sustainable energy sources by 2030. One key area of focus for invVEST is to exponentially increase joint SEI between Colorado and India that lead to significant business and job opportunities for both sides. To understand why this is critical to our future, we in developed countries must first understand the impact of globalization that is leading to rapid growth of emerging nations, especially China and India and how we can leverage their growth for our prosperity.

Energy is the lifeblood for economic development. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution during the mid-1800’s, the growth of developed countries has historically been powered by fossil fuels to fire our power plants, run our cars, heat our buildings, and cook our food. In fact, it is hard to think of anything we do that does not use energy in some form.

After the Second World War, the United States emerged as the world’s largest economy, and by the year 2000, its GDP was more than twice that of Japan, the second largest economy at that time. The U.S.’s GDP surpassed the combined GDP of the five largest countries in Europe. The bone of contention by most other countries was that the USA, with only five percent of the world’s population, was consuming 25 percent of the world’s energy resources.

United States’ energy consumption since 2000 has hovered around 29 trillion kilowatt hours, with roughly 39 percent of energy used coming from oil for transportation, 23 percent from coal for power generation, 22 percent from gas used for power generation and heating, and the balance coming from nuclear, hydro & biomass. At this time, wind and solar-based energy were almost non-existent. So even while the economy grew from $11 trillion in 2000 to roughly $14.5 trillion in 2010, energy consumption in the U.S. stayed relatively flat.

With the turn of the century, globalization accelerated and emerging economies, led by China, started growing rapidly. China’s double-digit growth over the last decade stems from its transition to the manufacturing mecca of the world, which is emphasized by the huge trade imbalance between the U.S. and China. In 1985, trade with China and the U.S. was even, at roughly $3.8 billion from each side. In 2010, China’s imports to the U.S. ballooned to $369 billion, while exports from the U.S. only reached $100 billion. The energy requirements for China surpassed U.S. energy consumption in 2010, much earlier than analyst projections. If China continues to maintain its growth profile, its energy consumption will be one and half times the energy usage in the U.S. Because its use of coal as a fuel is significantly higher than the U.S.’s, its greenhouse gas emissions surpassed U.S. levels in 2008 and will continue to be significantly higher going forward.

And while there are still many unknowns to be solved, the majority of scientists are convinced that fossil fuel usage is the cause of exponential increases in CO2 levels, leading to global warming. It should be noted that the U.S. is no longer the largest emitter of greenhouse gases as much of the world still presumes. More importantly, rapid growth of China and other emerging countries will significantly increase the demand for fossil-based resources for energy, leading to a quicker depletion of fossil-based resources unless the U.S., China, and India work aggressively towards more sustainable energy resources.

The following example notes how important moving towards more sustainable energy truly is. Last year, the Chinese imported more cars from the U.S. than ever before, an event that was unimaginable just 10 years ago. Twenty years from now, even if only 40 percent of China’s population has cars, there will be 560 million cars in China alone, twice the amount of cars on the roads in the U.S. today. Considering this, even if more fuel efficient cars are manufactured, the world’s demand on oil will escalate significantly as a result.

China’s leadership has concluded that the continued use of fossil fuels will not only continue to deplete their coal resources, but it will hold them hostage to foreign oil. Yet, China’s ability to grow and become the dominant superpower will depend on its ability to transition to sustainable and renewable energy sources. Currently, China is aligning its policies, technology, and funding to exponentially grow its renewable energy-based infrastructure. China has become the world’s largest manufacturer of solar and wind energy, and surpassed the U.S. in 2010 in installed wind capacity.

Compared to China, India was a slumbering giant until the year 2000. Most of the country’s growth was based on domestic demand, with the majority of its exports focused on service sectors like information technology and back-office support. In 2010, India’s trade with the U.S. was close to $30 billion in exports and around $20 billion in imports. During the last decade, realizing that growth would be stunted unless officials urgently addressed their woefully inadequate infrastructure, India’s government started reforming its policies to address these issues. According to The Economist, over the last five years, despite the global economic turmoil, India grew on average eight percent a year and is geared up to grow approximately 10 percent per year in the coming decade. If India maintains an 8-10 percent growth rate, its purchasing power parity based on GDP will grow from $3.8 trillion to $10-$15 trillion by 2020. Moreover, its energy consumption could more than quadruple by 2030, if business continues as usual. Even if India incorporates invVEST’s recommendation for aggressive energy transition to sustainable energy initiatives (SEI), India’s energy consumption will grow to around 65 Quads (unit of energy equal to 1015 BTU) by 2030 from its current usage of 23 Quads.

This staggering statistic brings about some significant implications. First, India’s energy growth in the next 20 years will grow to 40 or 50 Quads, which is roughly what China will install in the next 20 years. And while 70 percent of all new energy growth happened in China over the last decade, China and India will each install 30–35 percent of the world’s total new energy infrastructure within the next two decades.

However, India is at a crossroads. While many of the policymakers and businesses are leaning towards following what developed countries and China have done in the past to grow their energy infrastructure by relying heavily on coal based energy infrastructure, there are more and more policymakers and businesses being educated by entities like invVEST to consider a much more rapid transition to SEI-based growth. Even if India incorporates invVEST’s recommendation to aggressively address energy efficiency and conservation, India’s need for fossil fuel will grow at least two times, instead of the projected three to four times, over the next 20 years. This provides a huge opportunity for Colorado and U.S.-based entities to provide state-of-the-art fossil-based energy products and services.

India leapfrogged technologies when it bypassed building landline infrastructure and jumped straight to cellphone based telecommunications infrastructure. Today, India has not only the most modern and reliable communications system in the world, but phone connections have grown a mind blowing 1000 times in 10 years. invVEST believes that while energy issues are far more complex and capital intensive, the same can be done for energy transition. And while developed countries and China had to rely on fossil-based energy infrastructure growth because SEI sources were not a viable option, for India, which is going to exponentially increase its infrastructure in the next 20 years, there are quite a few SEI options that are viable today, and by 2020 there will be more reliable and economically viable sources of energy.

Given this background, the U.S. and Colorado in particular can exponentially increase joint initiatives to create business and job opportunities for both sides. Besides California and a few communities in other states, Colorado, can showcase its own energy transition initiatives. By identifying a spectrum of energy products and services to specifically targeted entities in India, collaborative public and private partnerships can engineer pilot programs or joint ventures that can snowball into multi-million dollar businesses within the next few years.

invVEST has put together a strong team of advisory board members and experts known as ambassadors in Colorado and India, who in turn work with private and public entities, governments and institutions in both places to identify specific joint initiatives that can be turned into tangible business opportunities. The invVEST team headed by Mr. Subir Das in India and Probir Ghosh in the U.S. have conducted extensive research on India’s Energy Infrastructure needs and have published a position framework paper, Global Leadership Through Breakthrough Sustainable Energy Initiatives: Will India Forge A Breakthrough Like The Cell Phone Revolution? that resulted in an invitation to present at several major conferences and interact with key executives from public and private businesses, grassroots organizations, educational institutions, as well as government entities involved with creating the future energy infrastructure of India.

For the U.S. to prosper in the future, the government must figure out how to sell more products and services to China and India, who together will potentially have a combined purchase power parity based GDP that will be double that of the U.S. by 2020 resulting in more balanced trade. For India, building a state-of-the-art portfolio of energy infrastructure that can support its aspired 10 percent annual growth over the next two decades is going to be a major focus and investment area. Through the support of private and public partnerships, invVEST can enable Colorado and U.S.-based companies to make this a reality.

For more information about energy transitions or energy based opportunities in India, please contact Probir Ghosh at 720-323-6896 or email to [email protected].

The World's Only Solar Light Bulb

• Did you know that more than 1.6 billion people worldwide—a quarter of the world’s population—lives without electricity, and billions more live with intermittent electricity?
• Did you know that each year there are approximately 190 million tons of carbon dioxide released by fuel lanterns—the equivalent of 30 million cars?
• Did you know that more than 1 million people die every year from fires caused by fuel lighting?

Nokero, a Colorado-based company with production in Asia, is working to diminish these staggering figures and improve lives by introducing the world’s only solar light bulb as an economical, safe, and clean-burning alternative.

Nokero created the light bulbs with a goal of lowering overall CO2 emissions globally by improving quality and efficiency in consumption. In the developing world, people do not have access to high efficiency lights, stoves, or other modern necessities. Instead, citizens burn kerosene-filled lamps for light, and sometimes heat, made from recycled cans and strips of cloth. These lamps generate dangerous fumes that can cause health problems and are relatively expensive for people making an average of $1 per day.

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