What I am Also (detail), Del Kathryn Barton, 240 x 180cm, acrylic on polyester canvas, 2013. Fully pictured on page 4
Hi Everyone, It’s our 10th birthday this issue! Holy moly. What an incredible milestone. We thought the best way to celebrate would be to share some mind-blowing conversations with you. Jane Goodall, who graces our cover, has spent her life devoted to the study and protection of chimpanzees. That doesn’t really cut it though; Jane is a legend, she is a role model. Her radical devotion and campaigning over a lifetime, defying stereotypes, has taught us to see ourselves as part of the animal kingdom. Quiet and graceful, Jane reminds us that compassion is the strength of real warriors. Every day, one million people read Seth Godin’s blog. What!? Seth insists that all he does is explore the questions and therein lies the magic. Challenging the way we’ve constructed our modern lives, Seth encourages deep enquiry and ultimately, connection to ourselves, our surroundings, and each other. One person embodying this vision of connection is Bunker Roy, who in 1972 left a life of privilege and expectation to found one of the most remarkable and innovative learning environments in the world. The Barefoot College teaches impoverished communities to be self-sufficient. From children to grandmothers, Bunker finds hope where others see despair. The same year Bunker Roy established Barefoot College, Farah Mohamed was fleeing Uganda. A disruptive social-entrepreneur extraordinaire, Farah founded G(irls)20, championing the voices of young women on the global stage. Her hope for the future is firmly grounded in the work of empowerment. The challenges explored by each of these thought leaders are in some ways ancient. The most exciting thing about being a part of a continuum is that there is SO MUCH wisdom that precedes us. Our struggles are not new, and have often been considered by great minds of the past. Harriet Taylor Mill is one of the greatest. A revolutionary genius unknown in her time (or even ours for that matter), Harriet wrote the “Enfranchisement of Women,” a document so radical in it’s proclamation of equal rights, it is shocking to think women in some parts of the globe are still fighting for these principles 200 years later. A little while ago, Dumbo Feather became a B Corp. “What is that?” You ask. It’s a new certification for ethical business practice. We’ve interviewed one of the founders, Bart Houlahan, who saw a community of change growing in the business world and conceived of a way to unify the cause. He argues that business can be a force for good, after all. Our enormous gratitude goes out to Del Kathryn Barton for so generously allowing us to wrap our birthday issue in her magnificent paintings. Del, you are a national treasure and we are very honoured. A friend recently said to me, “Hope is not something you have or something you wish for, it’s something you do.” Lead with love. Pass it on. Berry
Artwork: What I am Also, Del Kathryn Barton, 240 x 180cm, acrylic on polyester canvas, 2013.
—COLOPHON— PUBLISHER & EDITOR Berry Liberman DEPUTY EDITOR Livia Albeck-Ripka ART DIRECTOR Amandine Thomas EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Katherine Wilkinson ADVERTISING & PARTNERSHIPS MANAGER Dianne Cotter advertising@dumbofeather.com +61 3 8534 8042 GENERAL MANAGER Mele-Ane Havea COMMUNITY MANAGER Madeline Lucas COMMUNICATIONS Jessica Wilkinson INTERNS Emily Clarke, Nadia Jude, Mim Kempson, Kathleen O’Neill, Lena Todorovski CONTRIBUTORS Oscar Schwartz, Daniel Teitelbaum COPY EDITOR Miriam Kauppi TRANSCRIBER Anthony McCormack PHOTOGRAPHERS Marcelo Bigilia, Leah Robertson, Chris Sembrot, Tony Trichanh, Hamed Uood, Michelle Yee COVER PHOTOGRAPH Hamed Uood SPINE PATTERN What I am Also (detail), Del Kathryn Barton, 240 x 180cm, acrylic on polyester canvas, 2013. Fully pictured on page 4 FEATURED ARTIST Del Kathryn Barton SUPPORTED BY SMALL GIANTS Danny Almagor, Adam Borowski, Joel Cohen, Kaj Löfgren, Simon Matthee, Connie Musolino, Daniel Teitelbaum
DUMBO FEATHER ISSN 1838-7012 Issue 40— Third Quarter, 2014 Published by Dumbo Feather Pty Ltd, 11 Princes St, St Kilda VIC 3182, Australia. Phone: +61 3 8534 8040 Email: info@dumbofeather.com AUSTRALIAN DISTRIBUTION: Australian Distribution: Network Services (networkservicescompany.com. au) INTERNATIONAL DISTRIBUTION: Eight Point Distribution PRINTING Dumbo Feather is lovingly printed by Printgraphics (Printgreen), Mount Waverley, Victoria. Learn about their comprehensive and deep environmental commitment at printgraphics.com.au. Our beautiful paper is called Sun, and our cover stock is Sovereign Offset—all from the good people at K.W. Doggett Fine Paper, sourced from responsible forestry practices, manufactured using the ISO14001 environmental management systems and is Forest Stewardship Council certified. TYPESETTING Dumbo Feather is set in the Founders Grotesk and Tiempos typefaces, created by Kris Sowersby of the Klim Type Foundry in Wellington, New Zealand. COPYRIGHT & LEGAL STUFF All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without permission from the publishers. © 2013 Dumbo Feather Pty Ltd. The views expressed in Dumbo Feather are those of the respective contributors and are not necessarily shared by the publication or its staff. If you’d like to contribute, email us. We’ll respond if you’re nice. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT We acknowledge the Elders, families and forebears of the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri tribes of the Kulin Nation who are the traditional custodians of the lands upon which Dumbo Feather is (mostly) created.  
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DUMBO FEATHER THIRD QUARTER, 2014
Behind extraordinary ideas, there are extraordinary people. Dumbo Feather is a magazine about these people. In each issue, we scour the globe for those with the drive to make a difference. We seek out those who inspire us, excite us and thrill us with possibility. Whether they’ve touched millions or just those nearby, what unites them is their passion.
14
10 Years of Dumbo Feather
16
Inspiration Genealogy
24
Seth Godin is an Ideas Man
40
58 58
DANIEL TEITELBAUM
40 Jane Goodall is a Primatologist LIVIA ALBECK-RIPKA
50 LEAKEY’S ANGELS
KATHLEEN O’NEILL 58
Historical Profile: Hariet Taylor Mill
66
OSCAR SCHWARTZ
IDEAS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
ENFRANCHISEMENT OF WOMEN
66
Bunker Roy is a Barefoot Educator
80
96
LIVIA ALBECK-RIPKA
Farah Mohamed is an Enabler BERRY LIBERMAN
80
Bart Houlahan redefines Business MELE-ANE HAVEA
96
Air roasted - noticeably different Our coffee is roasted using hot air technology a method chosen to carefully preserve the unique flavour of the beans and produce a cleaner, sweeter tasting cup of coffee.
Online At Explore dumbofeather.com for more blogs, DIYs, inspiration, and conversations with extraordinary people.
BLOG
BLOG
New Conversations
Conversation Toolkit
We are thrilled to announce the return of Dumbo Feather’s annual high school student storytelling competition, New Conversations. Open to students in year 7—10 from across Australia, enter the competition for the chance to win an iPad and be published in DF.
Living with passion and purpose and creating impact all starts with conversation. That’s why, to coincide with our 10th birthday, we’re launching the Dumbo Feather Conversation Toolkit: a way to engage more deeply with our content.
BLOG
A letter from our founder, Kate Bezar
Worm Farm
I’ve always reckoned that “magazine years” were more akin to “dog years” than human ones. Longevity in this game is rare, particularly when the odds are as stacked against you as they were for Dumbo Feather.
DIY SERIES
Nina Simone
REVISIT
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Faith used a pseudonym with the johns; a different name for her alter ego, who whipped and sucked and was paid. And the next year, when Eunice began playing in bars, she gave herself another name too: Nina Simone. “Eunice is extremely soft and frightened to death of almost everything. She has to be handled extremely gently… Nina, Nina takes care of Eunice.”
DUMBO FEATHER
REVISIT
No matter how much organic fertiliser and material you pile onto your patch, without worms you will be fighting a losing battle. Not only do worms help transform materials into accessible plant nutrients, but their burrows also loosen the soil, admitting air and water and helping roots to grow.
Maria Popova is coming to Melbourne “Books are the original internet,” Maria Popova tells me with a grin. She is switched on, ballsy, irresistibly articulate, fully engaged. This is Maria’s gift. She makes big concepts relevant. “My bookshelves are completely full, and I’m still buying new ones compulsively,” she adds. “They’re piling up around me!”
Community & Events BRINGING DUMBO FEATHER TO LIFE. TO JOIN OUR EVENTS SIGN UP AT HELLO@DUMBOFEATHER.COM
DF IN COLOMBIA Earlier this year, our GM Mele-Ane went to Colombia—one of the most beautiful and biodiverse countries in the world. While there, she met the extraordinary Bart Houlahan (featured in this issue, and pictured far right).
TSOL+DF The much-anticipated collaboration between Dumbo Feather and The School of Life saw 80 people gather in our ballroom for a workshop with DF writer Myke Bartlett. People were encouraged to confront their biggest conversation fears—such as silence—as we placated them with wine and cheese.
DO LECTURES For the first Australian Do Lectures, held at Payne’s Hut in the Alpine National Park, our deputy editor and art director Livia and Amandine led a DF style illustration workshop, attended 20 lectures (in a tipi) and came back inspired to DO more.
CONVERSATION DINNER In July, we introduced our new conversation toolkit with the very first conversation dinner at DF HQ. Using issue #39 as a catalyst for meaningful discussion, guests enjoyed a three course dinner made by Firecracker event using Kitchen By Mike recipes.
Images: TSOL+DF—Prue Steedman. DO Lectures—Mark Lobo
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DUMBO FEATHER
Dumbo Feather Conversation Dinners
DUMBO FEATHER EVENTS
GOAT’S CHEESE AND TAPENADE ON TOAST* Serves 12
For the tapenade (makes 60g) • 15g anchovies • 10 salted capers • 1 clove of garlic, peeled • ½tsp savory, chopped • 1tsp fresh parsley, chopped • 15ml extra virgin olive oil • 50g olives, pitted • ¼ lemon To assemble • 1 baguette 60ml extra virgin olive oil • 60g tapenade • 120g goat’s cheese • Salt flakes and pepper, to serve
METHOD: With a sharp knife chop the olives finely until a paste is formed. Mince the garlic, anchovies and half of the capers in the same manner and combine with the olive paste. Fold through the remaining whole capers, olive oil and chopped herbs and season to taste with salt, pepper and the juice of the lemon. Slice the baguette at an angle, cutting pieces around half a centimetre thick. Brush them with oil and grill in a griddle pan until crisp and slightly charred. Remove from pan and spread with tapenade and a smear of goat’s cheese. Season with sea salt and a grind of black pepper.
*Recipes provided by Mike McEnearny of Kitchen by Mike
If you would like to host a Dumbo Feather conversation dinner, download our conversation dinner toolkit here: www.dumbofeather.com/conversationtoolkit
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DUMBO FEATHER
10 YEARS OF DUMBO FEATHER
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Image: Anna Wolf
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DUMBO FEATHER
“People forget that books are the original internet... While books take time and commitment to read, there’s something really valuable that happens when we do. We remind ourselves that the issues facing our world are very human, and that other humans have thought about them before, and have sometimes thought about them much better.” —Maria Popova, issue 36
10 YEARS OF DUMBO FEATHER
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“The human animal is a fragile creature, and we’ve got a lot on our plate, all of us... We’re not short of good ideas in the world, the problem is that most good ideas are slumbering somewhere.” —Alain de Botton, issue 30
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DUMBO FEATHER
Image: Siddharth Khajuria
10 YEARS OF DUMBO FEATHER
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“I can’t know everything. Nobody can know everything. But at least I can be some sort of conduit… getting people who have that knowledge and spreading it to other people.” —Karl Kruszelnicki, issue 39
Image: Tobby Burrows
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DUMBO FEATHER
*Big thanks to Austin Kleon for inspiring our creative genealogies through Steal Like an Artist, and to those profilees who submitted their inspirations. Please note—we’ve been lenient, including friends, lovers, colleagues and heroes. (We have an inkling that the people we surround ourselves with might just be our greatest teachers!)
10 YEARS OF DUMBO FEATHER
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SETH GODIN IS AN IDEAS MAN SUBJECT
INTERVIEWER
LOCATION
WEATHER
Seth Godin
Daniel Teitelbaum
New York City, USA
Indoors
OCCUPATION
PHOTOGRAPHER
DATE
UNEXPECTED
Author and entrepreneur
Tony Trichanh
June 2014
900 rejections
Seth xxx Godin thinks that mainstream schooling teaches our kids to be uninteresting. A product of industrialism, the education system was invented to train people to be willing to work in the factory; to behave, fit in and comply. But in the Information Age—where the technological barriers to spreading ideas have all but disappeared—breaking the mold, not fitting in, is the key to success. Knowing what gets people’s attention, is more than useful; it’s powerful. With more than a million people reading his blog everyday, Seth understands what it means to be interesting. He has written 17 books about the way ideas spread and how education can be revolutionised to serve its students and society better. He is also a successful (and unsuccessful) entrepreneur. From a magazine stand to a travel agency, Seth has started businesses that have failed. Lots of them. He has sold businesses like Yoyodyn (an internet-based direct marketing tool) and founded new ones, most notably Squidoo: a community website platform that allows users to create pages for subjects which interest them. All of these pursuits have stemmed from Seth’s philosophy that in the connected world, cultivating the courage to explore our interests in the public space is an important step towards a more meaningful existence. Sharing our questions begin important conversations about who we are and where we are going. Conversations shape the way we think, and the way we think changes the world. Well known for talking about how ideas spread, Seth rarely talks about which ideas he believes are worth spreading. So when we met over a Skype connection between my bedroom in Melbourne and his office in New York, I asked Seth about his own beliefs.
“The things I do are about creating an environment where I am colliding with things I don’t understand and trying to figure them out.”
DANIEL TEITELBAUM: You talk about what it takes for an idea to enage people, and why some spread. Are you agnostic about which ideas are worth spreading?
SETH GODIN: Well I would hope that every caring individual has an agenda about the ideas they wish would spread. I wish the ideas that elevated our conversations, that made us our better selves, that helped preserve our environment for our grandchildren, were the ideas that spread. But wishing doesn’t make it so.
Right—well I’d really like to know a bit more about you, and the ideas you believe should spread. [Laughs].
Yes, that’s my least favourite thing to talk about.
I’m happy to do that a bit, but the problem is that as soon as one’s personal agenda is at the centre of a conversation, it’s very difficult to distinguish between the obligation to do work that matters, and a point of view. People are often looking for a reason to say, “Well sure, it works for you…” A lot of people would like to believe that you need to be gifted in order to do work that changes people. I will be the first to admit you need to be gifted to play the piano at a concert setting. But it’s not clear to me, at all, that you need to be born in a certain place, or gifted in a certain way, to do work worth doing.
So do you think that people look to you as somebody who’s doing great things and say, “Well that’s not for me, because he’s obviously had the right circumstances lead him to that”?
People always look for excuses. My favourite one is, “Well that’s easy for you because you have a really popular blog.” As if my really popular blog was something I won in the lottery. I had a really unpopular blog for three years in a row where 10 or 20 people a day were reading it. When I got started in the book business, I received 900 rejection letters. So you can’t look at the end result—at the Richard Bransons or the Maria Popovas—and say, ‘Well they have that thing and I don’t.’ They got that thing by showing up. I am really focused on helping people understand that not showing up is a failure of will more than it is a failure of birth.
Why do you think people don’t show up?
Well it’s really culturally and evolutionarily frightening to say, “I made this.” We did not build schools that raise kids by teaching them that they should solve interesting problems and lead. Instead, we created an environment where you are told what to do, to fit in. We’re taught that we need way more followers than we need leaders. So from the time you’re four, you’re reminded that the safest, easiest, most reliable thing to do is to keep your head down.
DUMBO FEATHER
SETH GODIN
LEADER OF THE PACK
On top of that, if you look at cortisol levels and the way the brain works,
it’s not an accident that we, like most mammals, evolved to want to be in the middle of the pack. The people on the edges of the pack are the ones who get eaten by saber-tooth tigers. So when we are confronted with an opportunity, it often feels like a risk. We’re given the chance to say, “Here, I made this” and instead we say, “How can I get this over with and go back to my day?” For 50,000 years, fitting in and working hard was the way. But now we’ve created this new economy, where the people who are benefiting are the ones who we decide we can’t live without. If your idea spreads, you win, because when people know your idea,
they trust you, and when they trust you they’re more likely to connect. We live in a connection economy now, not in an industrial economy.
So people now need to be brave— is that a virtue we need to cultivate?
Yeah bravery’s an interesting term. Because usually, that word is associated with Robin Hood and people on horseback— where you are risking mortal wounds. In fact, all you’re risking is that someone in the crowd won’t get you. All you’re risking is a one-star review on Amazon. All you’re risking is that someone will say, ‘He’s not as smart as I thought he was.’ Mostly, people are experiencing failure in advance. That’s my definition of anxiety.
When you’re imagining all the things that could go wrong before you even bring the work into the world, you are not only punishing yourself but you’re sabotaging the work. How do we help people move away from anxiety?
My thesis is that we used to get paid to dig holes, carry objects, do physical work. At the end of the day, if you were tired, you didn’t whine and complain about the fact that you were tired, because that that’s what you were getting paid for. Being tired was your job. Now, many of us are paid for emotional labour; the labour of doing something you don’t feel like doing. If at the end of the day, you say, ‘I’m worn out because the work I did today was frightening,’ why are you surprised? That’s what you were paid for. Once we can understand that this feeling of “it might not work” is the signal that we are doing the job we are supposed to do, we don’t have to run away from it, we can embrace it.
So it’s just a shift in mindset; appreciating what we’re here to do?
You put the word “just” in front of it, but I think it’s the hardest work many people will do in their entire life. I think that rewiring our cultural perceptions, rewiring what we think our parents are hoping for us, is extraordinarily difficult work. Which is why so few people have figured out how to do it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important.
Yeah. And 80,000 people came to the finals in Houston a couple of years ago. Once you understand that what you can do in high school is originate, design and build a killer robot instead of joining the football team, a transformation happens in your head. Most people’s football careers peak in high school, but your killer-robot-building career doesn’t have to peak until you’re in your seventies.
ISSUE 40
[Laughs] there’s a television show like that.
PAGE 29
A lot of my colleagues and the people I look up to have devoted their life to this. Sir Ken Robinson—who’s done one of the most popular TED talks ever—if you watch his talk in light of what I just said, you’ll see that that’s exactly what he’s doing. If you look at open platforms, these exist so that people, in a safe way, can experience the joy of sharing an idea that they believe in. Dean Kamen, the guy who invented the Segway, is a brilliant inventor. One of his biggest projects— which people don’t realise he’s associated with—is called “First.” First is an engineering competition, in which nerds in high school build robots that go into an arena and try to destroy each other.
THIRD QUARTER—2014
Are there any people changing that?
In reading your manifesto, I found myself nodding the whole time. I agree there needs to be a revolution. But what I’m struggling with is how ingrained the system is, how it perpetuates itself because the only people allowed to change it are those who have come through it, and those who have come through it drank the Kool-Aid. So how do we break it?
Well, I’m going to challenge one thing you just said, which is that the only people who are allowed to change it are the people who have been through it. The thing is, it’s a wide-open opportunity. Anyone is allowed. If I think about the Khan Academy, we see somebody with no authority, who came from completely outside the system, building an online community, a network that has changed the education of millions of people already. When I started in the book business 30 years ago, you mailed the five-page proposal to someone in New York who decided if you were going to be allowed to write a book. Now you write a book, you make it a PDF and you share it. If 10 people send it to 10 people, send it to 10 people, the next thing you know you’re on your way to a million people reading your book. We don’t have the cop-out available, that “we are not allowed” to change this. What we do have is the ability to realise that the current system is entrenched and it’s not going to change easily. But that doesn’t keep us from building new systems right next to it.
Right, so that’s the way? To build alternatives rather than to change what’s already there?
I think that’s the way everything has changed throughout history. The car wasn’t something that Karl Benz brought to the horse and carriage association and got them to incorporate in their standards. He just broke the system by inventing a new system right next to it. Email—in every country that I am aware of—had nothing to do with the postal authorities. In retrospect you say, ‘Well that would have been logical to have the post office authenticate email accounts,’ et cetera, but it never would have happened.
I actually just got a letter the other day from Australia Post saying they’re now creating an online post box, as though they’ve just invented something!
[Laughs] that’s pretty funny.
DUMBO FEATHER
SETH GODIN
ENTREPRENEUR
But what do parents do? You’ve got to send your kids to school; it’s the law in Australia. And if they go, they’re going to go to a school that’s going to teach them the old system.
I think we want to send our kids to school, not just have to, because the cultural acclamation and connection is vital. Going off the grid, never interacting with the people, isn’t, I think, a sensible way to develop community. What some have chosen to do is you send their kids to school during the day and home-school them at night. So your 10-year-old is busy editing Wikipedia and your 11-year-old is publishing her poetry online, and your 12-year-old is making stop-motion photography, and your 13-year-old is building a network of fellow travellers all around the world. And by the time your kids are 14, they have failed countless times. They have connected with other people, they’ve contributed, they’ve volunteered to run their local habitat. They’ve discovered what it is to lead, what it is to solve interesting problems, despite the fact that they go to school, not because of it. Most people who have a privileged background—I’m not talking about people that are making three dollars a day—go to their middle-class job, they work all day to make enough money so they can go home and watch TV for four, or five, or six hours a night. That’s just the numbers. That’s ridiculous. We need to turn off the television, move to a smaller house if necessary, buy a used smaller car and take the money to buy free time to raise our kids.
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ISSUE 40
THIRD QUARTER—2014
This model that says, ‘I have to go to work all the time so I can save enough money so my kids can go to work all the time so that they can have enough money so their kids can work all the time.’ Where did that deal come from? I guess people experience status anxiety.
Yeah. Which is built into the culture, on purpose. The average person 125 years ago in Australia and the United States owned two pairs of shoes and two pairs of pants. One of the challenges of the industrial revolution of the early 1900s was that industrialists were petrified that the new machines that they were installing would make stuff faster than people could buy it. They were really sure that there was going to be a demand problem. Let’s say you can figure out how to make 500 pairs of shoes a day, instead of five, you say, ‘But everyone already has shoes! If I make a hundred times as many shoes a day, who will buy them?’ What they had to do was sell us discontent; you are not happy if you don’t have as many shoes as someone else. You need another T-shirt, you need a new garden set, you need a better this, or a better that. This discontent fuels demand, and demand is met by industrialists. Discontent is not inherent—it is merely inherent in the Western world, with money to spend on stuff that’s getting advertised to you. Marketing was built right next to mass-production. They call it mass marketing for a reason. Mass marketers got money and approval because they could take what mass producers made, and market it to the masses. The only reason we have magazines and television is because we needed places to put advertising. The internet is the first mass medium in 75 years that was not invented to make advertisers happy.
I want to go back a little bit, to where you get your inspiration for your ideas, your influences.
DUMBO FEATHER
SETH GODIN
NOTICER OF THINGS
Just about everyone has ideas. Very few people wake up in the morning with talker’s block. But when you put a piece of paper in front of them and say “write it down and own it” writer’s block kicks in. I give talks fairly often, and at the end of the talk, we’ll ask, “Any questions?” There’s 1000 people in the audience, and no one raises their hand. Do we really believe that of the 1000 people, no one has a question? I mean you’re very talented, we’ve been talking for half an hour, you’ve already had 20 questions!
[Laughs].
We don’t raise our hand because the act of raising our hand is petrifying. I have made a practice of noticing things. I was at the Blue Note Jazz Club two nights ago and I noticed a woman, sitting four feet from Christian McBride, the musician—she wasn’t clapping, she wasn’t making eye-contact, she wasn’t engaged in the music, she was just looking at her watch; couldn’t wait to leave. I made a connection about what it is to be a musician in front of someone who’s not there to hear you, and I wrote it down. A million people will read it on my blog today, because I noticed something. That’s what I do for a living. I notice things. I think all of us have the same inputs, the question is: Do we choose to notice things and do we choose to write them down?
So what does your day look like?
Well I set out 25 years ago to make it so I don’t have an average day. I don’t go to meetings or have a television, so I have time. I will some days write 20 or 30 pages and some days, write zero. I will find myself at the end of a
100-click-spree online and feel like I wasted an enormous amount of time, but then a few minutes later, something will come to me. I am also the chairman of Squidoo, an online sharing site. We just launched a new division and I spend three or four hours a day working on that; thinking about how to make that work better. There are friends and people I admire, who I consult and coach. When I get really stuck, I’ll invent an internship program or a school or a new project, post it on my blog and people will apply and show up at my office. The things I do are about creating an environment where I am colliding with things I don’t understand and trying to figure them out.
What’s something that you’re still struggling to figure out?
I don’t think anyone has done a good job of figuring out why certain ideas spread better than others. People can’t look at a video and say “that will go viral” or “that won’t.” There’s a lot to understand about the complexity of our culture. I am also really fascinated and concerned about how good marketing has become at getting people to act against their best interests. I would like to figure out antidotes for that, to help people come back to their senses. When you see people doing long-term damage to themselves and to their family by the choices they make—that is almost entirely the result of marketing taking advantage of cultural glitches.
What are some examples of that?
Well you see somebody who lives in a community where there’s toxic waste and their family is already sick, and they are arguing that there needs to be toxic waste because that’s where good jobs come from. Or you see somebody who is 23 and unemployed, who hasn’t read a book for fun in their entire life, who sits down to spend two hours playing a video game instead because it’s easier and they’re they can’t back themselves into learning something new. Or you see the obesity crisis that’s spreading around the world, where it doesn’t matter that the facts are clear, that it is more dangerous than smoking to be that fat. What is clear is that in that moment, it is irresistible to someone to make a bad choice about what they eat, because marketers, combined with culture, combined with physiology, have made it irresistible.
What for you is the scariest thing about the future and these things?
I grew up in the Cold War, and a lot of smart people thought we were going to blow up the whole planet. I’m glad they were wrong. But that was a really close call. I think that the whimper that we are facing is almost certainly going to be the melting of the icecaps, the rising sea level. I think that an enormous number of people influenced by very powerful wealthy fuel and energy interests believe that it’s no big deal. I think it’s going to be a big deal faster than most people realise.
THIRD QUARTER—2014
Almost everything ends with a whimper, not a bang.
I know that there’s a long history of human beings doing their best work when they feel backed into a corner. The question that’s unknown to me is: How long before people feel they’re backed into a corner, and will we have enough time to do our best work if we are?
ISSUE 40
Would you say you’re pessimistic or optimistic?
I made a marketing contribution five or 10 years ago that didn’t catch on, but I may have to revisit it, which is: we need to stop calling it “global warming” and start calling it “atmosphere cancer.” Because that’s what it is. Cancer’s one of the greatest brands of all time. We have
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Do you see yourself as playing some role in that?
a chronic degenerative disease that is scientifically based. “Atmosphere” is a scientific word and “warming” is a happy word. There are very few cancer-deniers in the world. If you walk up to someone and say, “I have cancer” they don’t say, “I don’t believe in cancer. Cancer is a hyped-up plot.” You would punch them in the face! Right?
Yes, you would!
So I think we need to have the same intolerance for people who say they don’t believe in what the scientific method has really clearly delineated.
We have cancer. The question is: What should we do about it? Not: Should we argue about whether we have it or not? I completely agree. Where are you leading your tribe?
Well the idea of it being “my” tribe is a bit of a challenge. I don’t think it is. This tribe of connected, synchronised people, who share ideas and missions is one that I contribute to, but lots of other people do as well. I show up in a lot of different places, in terms of where my ideas are being discussed, and in many cases, they don’t have an enormous amount in common other than the desire to test the status quo and to explore work that matters. But other people are doing that as well. I’m one of many coal-delivery guys throwing coal into the furnace, helping that move forward. In the past I’ve started online communities, and I’ve found I’m just not that good at it. I don’t want to spend a lot of time saying, “Do this, follow me.” I’m more comfortable saying, “Pick yourself what’s important to you.” It’s very tempting, both professionally and from an ego point of view, to say, “You are my tribe, let’s go do this,” but that’s not who I am.
DUMBO FEATHER
SETH GODIN
BLOGGER
So this idea of people doing things that are meaningful to them—I feel often that we’re speaking to the group of people who kind of get it, or are very close to getting it. I’m struggling with how this idea can be mainstreamed.
I would beg you to not struggle, to understand that it takes 20, 50, 100, 500 years to mainstream a significant cultural shift. Mainstreaming isn’t the goal. The goal is 10, by 10, by 10. We get so hung up on mass—because that’s our culture, that’s our history. But it turns out mass has not built a major new initiative in 20 years. If you look at the list of important brands and important shifts that have shown up—Airbnb, Facebook, Zipcar, TED, Kickstarter, Instagram, Kindle, PayPal—all of them happened because one person brought one person. If you look at a business like Airbnb, which is the biggest hotel chain in the world, with more than 600,000 beds at last count, almost no one you know has ever stayed in an Airbnb, and yet they’re changing everything. If they said, “We have to be as important and as known as Hilton before we start,” there’d be no Airbnb. These things happen person to person, not from the top down.
In Stop Stealing Dreams, you talk about the importance of people finding mentors. I was thinking about this from a philosophical perspective— Aristotle said that the important thing to do morally is to cultivate good virtues, and the only way to do that is to spend time with people who have the virtues you think are worth cultivating. Who are your mentors?
I wrote a blog post called “Mentors and Heroes” and I think the distinction is important. Mentors are almost impossible to find because it is a really asymmetrical relationship. It doesn’t scale. What really scales, are heroes. I’ve had many heroes. Heroes that are either known or obscure, people who have written books, people who have lived life. If you think about Patrick
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THIRD QUARTER—2014
McGoohan—the guy who wrote and produced The Prisoner TV show—he made a whole bunch of choices about content that were against his financial interests. That rubbed his backers the wrong way. But he created a 17-volume bit of art that resonates 50 years later. So there’s a hero. The people who inspire me the most, though, are people who almost no one has ever heard of, who are without unlimited resources and without unlimited confidence doing work that they believe in. Starting a little granola company, starting a little church, starting a little movement within their community, building houses.
I was watching a talk recently that compared the plot lines of wellknown myths and in those myths there was always a hero chosen by somebody else. They were given permission and told, “You’re the one who has to lead,” rather than it coming from internally. I think it’s interesting—people have to find the way to do it themselves.
King Arthur and Star Wars both let us off the hook. Right? It’s someone else’s job. We’ve invented these myths for a reason, by people who had power as a way of telling everybody else, ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got it, just do what you’re told.’ When you see someone who hasn’t been ordained by anyone saying, “Follow me,” I find that heroic.
What was your school experience like?
I was the obnoxious-outspoken-bullied-nerdy kid. I joined a lot of clubs and stuff, but didn’t have a lot of friends. I had incredible parents who pushed my sisters and me to lead and to be as generous as we could be, but put very little pressure on us to be popular, be on the sports team, et cetera. They really pushed us to be out in the world. To explore a city we’d never been to before by ourselves at the age of 14 kind of stuff.
Wow, that’s amazing.
DUMBO FEATHER
SETH GODIN
THE NERDY KID
Yeah. When I got to college, I shifted gears a little bit, but I ended up co-founding a business there that grew to 400 employees. That’s where I learned the knack of starting stuff. We started 15 different divisions in a six-month period of time. Ticket bureau, snack bar, travel agency, magazine stand, a little business that did on-campus concert promotion. I had nothing to lose. I got hooked on that idea that the world is more open to a new thing than we think it is, as long as we can accept the fact that it’s never going to be really popular. It’s just going to make a small difference and give us the privilege to do it again.
There’s a quote I read recently, which says you know you’re a good parent if your children don’t want to be famous. I think that’s an idea that goes against the grain of how a lot of kids grow up—with this idea of stardom, of the YouTube video that has a billion hits.
Yeah. I’ll tell you an anecdote that blows me away. A kid that my kids grew up with ends up at an Ivy League school. He auditions for the improvisation troupe. The troupe announces its results—he came in 12th, and they only let 11 people into the troupe. He was very disappointed. I said, “Why don’t you start your own troupe? It is improvisation after all! Just put some signs up around campus! You’ll have a troupe within a week!” He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t find it in himself to start his own troupe, because it would mean that he would have to pick himself as opposed to getting picked, and he needed the authority to do that. He didn’t feel he had it.
I guess if you pick yourself then you put yourself on the line and a lot of people are really scared of failing, of being the one that doesn’t make it…
Right. Which means they’re going to fail. The people who aren’t willing to put themselves on the line have already announced they are failing.
You have two choices: you might fail, or you will fail. It feels to me it’s better to “might fail.” But you can “will fail” quietly, while you have to “might fail” loudly.
Correct! And what I have found is the cost of that isn’t nearly as high as people think it is.
Right. It is always easier to look back on failure in hindsight and say “that was a great learning curve.” But the emotional experience of failing— is that something you’ve ever struggled with?
Oh constantly! I still struggle with it every day! That’s my job. But what I say to people is: start a blog, under another name, don’t tell anybody, no one will read it, write every single day, no one will read it. You are failing, completely in private, completely quietly. And then, through the magic of search, someone will read it. They might hate it! So you have failed again—almost silently. But over time, 10 people, 15 people, will engage with your work. That is about as quiet a failure as one can hope for, as quiet a success as one can imagine. But it inoculates you against being stuck. My first book sold for $5000. I didn’t sell another book for a year. I sold my second book for $3000. It took me 20 years to become an overnight success. I’m really glad it took a while because if it had happened the first day, I would have been completely unprepared for the criticism that would have followed. But at the beginning, when no one’s watching, when you’re just getting quiet, private rejection letters, you learn that it’s not fatal.
What was it like struggling with it when you were not a success for so long?
You know, the big challenge here is how much support do you get from people who care about you.
Do you get a lot of support?
Yeah. Kevin Kelly has written a fabulous, important book called What Technology Wants. His thesis is that technology is a species, that it is evolving before our eyes to accomplish something. Technology does what it wants, not what we want it to do. When you read the book, I think you’ll find it’s quite profound. I think business is the same thing. Business isn’t any longer a tool for human beings. It’s becoming its own species. I think that what human beings have to do is say, ‘Wait a second! Business exists to serve us, not the other way around!’ The goal of government shouldn’t be “how can we enable business,” the goal of government should be “how can business enable people to accomplish what they need to accomplish?” Sometimes we get stuck on the distinction between the two. Just because somebody has a big company with a lot of employees and a lot of money, we cede authority to that institution when in fact, that institution exists to serve us.
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Do you think there is a particular role that business should play in the world?
Exactly. I think we can complain about that or we can go find those people. And the act of finding those people is easier than ever before.
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I think external motivation is one of the things that a lot of people lack—that there isn’t actually somebody saying, “Hey, you can do it.”
THIRD QUARTER—2014
Well, my Mum died about 15 years ago. She was extraordinary in understanding what I wanted to do, and in giving me the right amount of quiet support. I was living in New York, surrounded by investment bankers and lawyers and fancy people, it was tough… It’s really important that you find fellow travellers, people who aren’t going to put you down as a defence mechanism but are going to cheer you on, because you are on the same path.
I think there are a lot of businesses that aren’t serving us. Are they going to change?
Only if they have to to survive, that’s the way evolution works. The question is: how do we make it in the interest of the royalty that is now running the Fortune 500 companies? They have private armies, private jets, and they’re surrounded by knights and knaves and soldiers and jesters. How do we make it so that that royalty comes to the conclusion that what is in their best interest is also what’s in our best interests? We have to start asking questions that lead to conversations.
What are you most excited about for the future?
When I started on the internet, I had to explain to people that email was a real thing that would be popular one day. We had to build enormous expensive systems to make even the most basic thing work. I imagine it was a little bit like being a blacksmith at the beginning of the Iron Age. The tools have, in the last 10 years, evolved faster than they have ever evolved in human history. I don’t think we’re good yet at using the tools. I think that as a generation that takes the tools for granted comes up, they’re going to build things with the tools that we could not even imagine.
I agree. I think the tools are moving so fast we haven’t yet worked out what the hell they are capable of.
Yep. And it’s up to us. It’s not up to some stranger.
Your sons—how have you tried to educate them?
I am super proud of both my kids. I don’t talk about them a lot. But they have grown up to be exactly the kind of questioning, leading, interested and interesting people that my wife and I set out to raise. It involved, at every step along the way, doing the thing that we thought was important as parents as opposed to doing the thing that was easy or convenient. It involved making a lot of choices that sort of undermined the fabric of the industrial educational establishment and instead challenging our kids to become humans as opposed to cogs in a system.
What were some of those sacrifices or changes that you had to make?
Well the simplest one is if all you’re going to do is reward an A and frown when your kid gets a C, you’ve made a really clear statement about what’s important—compliance to the testing regime. On the other hand, if a C came with enormous months of effort and led to insight, then you have to celebrate it. That’s the goal. When you’re in an environment where the goal is to get into a famous college, and the definition of a famous college is one that requires high compliance to standardised tests, then that means the other parents are rooting for something totally different to you.
DUMBO FEATHER
SETH GODIN
AUTHOR
Have people ever said you’re doing things wrong?
You need to shun the non-believers. I wasn’t looking for approval or feedback from the system. I was looking for the right thing to do. I’m not a perfect parent. I don’t think there are perfect parents. But I am thrilled that the work my kids put in, and the support they got from their parents, seems to have created two positive contributions to the planet.
Go agile. Work with the digital team that gets stuff done. Call Vic on 0466 166 121. Do it right now.
JANE GOODALL IS A PRIMATOLOGIST SUBJECT
INTERVIEWER
LOCATION
WEATHER
Dr Jane Goodall
Livia Albeck-Ripka
Melbourne, Australia
Cloudy
OCCUPATION
PHOTOGRAPHER
DATE
UNEXPECTED
World’s foremost expert on chimpanzees
Leah Robertson, Hamed Uood
June 2014
Michael Jackson’s chimp
“I suppose this awful travelling round and round, which I truly hate, I suppose you could say that’s a sacrifice. I’d much rather be out in the forest… But right now, that wouldn’t work, because I know I’m supposed to be doing what I do.”
Jane Goodall often jokes that Tarzan married the wrong Jane. “That other Jane,” she says, was a wimp and a sissy. Jane Goodall, however, is nothing of the sort. She has spent more than 25 of the past 30 years moving through countless airports, taxis, lobbies and auditoriums, tirelessly fighting for chimpanzees. I meet her at the end of one of these long days, looking over the cloudy city of Melbourne from the 30th floor of her hotel. This life is a far cry from Jane’s beginnings as a 23-year-old crossing the ocean to the “dark continent” of Africa. She had loved Tarzan as a child, and was insistent that one day, she would live with and write about chimps, however naive the idea sounded to others. While her peers were vying for jobs as airhostesses, Jane was saving up to go to Kenya and live out her dream. By a stroke of luck, the famed archaeologist and paleoanthropologist, Louis Leakey, offered to send her to Gombe National Park to conduct one of the first studies of wild chimpanzee behaviour. For the next 25 years, Jane lived in the Tanzanian forest, maintaining little contact with the outside world. She married twice: once, to the photographer who made her a National Geographic cover girl, and then to the park’s director, whose death six years later tore her apart. Jane’s son to her first marriage, Hugo (better known as Grub) was terrified of the chimps. Once, she rushed to his cot when she heard the chimps calling in the way they do only when they’ve found meat, to discover that a student was simply replaying old recordings of their sounds. During her time in Gombe, Jane observed that chimps had the capacity for humour, awe, compassion, brutality, warfare, and most significantly, toolmaking. When she faxed Leakey news that she had observed a chimp stripping back a blade of grass to fish for termites, he wrote, “We must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human!” Nevertheless, Jane was criticised by the scientific community for her lack of experience and objectivity—insults no doubt bolstered by the fact that she was a woman. She had named and grown close to the animals she studied, and was mocked, as well as praised, by the media, who crafted the cult of Jane, without which, her work wouldn’t have been funded. But unlike “that other Jane,” she wasn’t feeble, and upon realising the dwindling numbers and devastation of the chimp’s natural habitat in the mid 80s, Jane left the peace of the forest. Since then, she has campaigned on the road more than 300 days a year, and is never in one place longer than three weeks. Her toy monkey companion, Mr H, is a talisman for the silenced. He has met more than four million people. It’s hard to fathom how an 80-year-old can sustain the battle, but Jane speaks in “musts” rather than “want tos”; dismissing the idea of sacrifice. Behind a face whose lines tell the story of over half a life crusading, there’s a young woman longing for adventure and freedom, who had no idea of the legend she would become. Many have called her “the voice of the voiceless” but it’s the chimps, insists Jane, who gave her a voice. Perhaps that’s why she most often introduces herself with the pant-hoot of a chimpanzee.
LIVIA ALBECK-RIPKA: How many times do you think you’ve had your picture taken in your life? [Laughs].
I could wallpaper the whole of the Tate gallery!
I’m sure there are people who would like to live in that mansion… you have a lot of fans. And you must have earned some new ones here? Really?
JANE GOODALL: I honestly wouldn’t like to think about it. I could wallpaper a mansion.
One man came up to me in the airport and gave a $100 donation.
Yeah. He said, “You’re beautiful.” Another one compared me favourably with… not the wombats… the Wallabies! He said, “They’re something, but you’re better.”
So how has it been going, the touring? It must be tiring travelling around the world, more than 300 days a year? But you still do it.
Busy, busy, busy. Very exhausting schedule. Of course, it’s horrible! Airports, planes, hotels. You know… On, and on, and on.
I have to. I have to!
If you care about the future, if you care about the present, if you care about what’s going on and you think that there’s something you can do to make a difference—what option do I have? If people didn’t tell me that they get inspired to change, that they now realise their life is more meaningful than they thought, if children didn’t write and say, “You’ve taught me I can do it too”... I mean I have to go on, don’t I? It’s a gift. If you have a gift and you don’t use it, not very good.
Is it a gift? From what I know about you, you seem incredibly hard-working…
Oh yes, there’s a lot of work, communication, writing. I always loved writing. I never thought I could speak, and then I found I could. But have I worked to get it all perfect? Yes.
DUMBO FEATHER
JANE GOODALL
SELFLESS
When you say you never thought you could speak, what do you mean?
Because I’m so shy, desperately shy! As a child, I could not stand up in front of my class.
Really? And what changed?
Well, I took money from the National Geographic and it was agreed— not by me, but by my mentor Louis Leakey—that one of the things I would do for them was to write a book. That wasn’t a problem. But National Geographic also do a series of lectures, and I would have to give one of those lectures. I was at Gombe when I got this letter from Louis Leakey telling me... I prayed to break a leg or something so that I wouldn’t have to do it.
Literally!
Yes, literally [laughs]. And you know, I was so frightened, and nobody noticed. I found I could do it. I found that words came, I found that I could make people laugh. And eventually, I found I could make people cry. Obviously, you get more confident as you get older. To start with I wasn’t confident, and then I would feel better, and then I would move a little bit out of my comfort
zone into some new aspect and I’d be nervous all over again. But obviously by the time you get to 80, you know, if you haven’t become a little bit more self-confident… then you probably shouldn’t be doing it! I was shy of speaking in public. I was shy going into rooms full of people, but once I was with people, I wasn’t so shy. I guess in the beginning I had leadership qualities…
So you see yourself, now, as a leader?
Well I have become one, yes. If a leader is somebody that other people follow. So I’d better become a better leader and have more people follow me, because we don’t have so much time to change attitudes.
It’s funny, I read that you once went to Michael Jackson’s house, and told him off for keeping his pet chimp, Bubbles.
Yes [laughs]. I knew absolutely that what he was doing was wrong. And I was more than happy to tell him so. I said something like,
“Well Michael, you know I don’t approve of your going around with a pet chimp, don’t you?” And he said, “Yes.” I said, “You know I don’t approve of putting clothes on chimps, because it’s disrespectful.” It was a very amicable conversation.
So did you manage to change his attitude?
I think he understood. But, you know, he was run as a sort of show, really, by his people. A lot of the things he did were things that he was told to do.
Like all of us in some way I guess… I think we too often view our relationships with animals as one of ownership; keeping them as pets, using them as food. But you’ve spent your life teaching people that animals, like us, are sentient beings— how would you describe your relationship to them?
When I was 23, a school friend invited me to Africa. I quit my job at the time in London and worked as a waitress to save for the boat fare. When I arrived, I met Louis Leakey and he suggested I might like to live with chimps, which was beyond my wildest dreams. It took a year back in England, while he tried to get money and permission. They wouldn’t let me go alone, so my mother came to meet me, and when I finally went to Gombe, it was 1960. It was a dream come true, but at the same time, I was looking up at the mountains along the edge of Lake Tanganyika, seeing the thick forest and the valleys, wondering, How on earth am I going to find them [laughs] let alone study them!?
THIRD QUARTER—2014
As one of respect. At the age of about 10, I read Tarzan of the Apes and knew I wanted to go to Africa—it could have been another place where there was wilderness, but Africa came top—and live with animals and write books about them. So it wasn’t a drive to study them in the scientific way; that was imposed upon me.
That was really when the chimps began to lose some of their fear. One day, my cook told me that one of the chimps, dear-old David Greybeard, had come to my camp.
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I wasn’t scared. It was a sense of total unreality. I just had this feeling that it would work out, I didn’t really know how. When I started climbing the mountains, right at the beginning, I was made to take the game ranger with me. I wasn’t allowed to be alone. After a couple of months they realised that, you know, I was crazy perhaps, but it was okay. So I was able to go alone.
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Were you scared?
Then when I met a group in the forest, the others were ready to run, but they looked from David to me, and back again. I suppose they thought, Well, she can’t be so frightening after all! Then I began to learn about the others and their personalities, watch their behaviour and gradually came to understand the meaning of the gestures and postures and sounds.
And you forged this incredible relationship with them. You were accepted into their society. [Laughs].
I wasn’t really accepted into their society. I was trusted by their society. That’s the difference. You know, Dian Fossey sat on the alpha male gorilla’s lap!
She made their sounds back to them… I didn’t want to do that. Okay—maybe right at the beginning. It was magic when David Greybeard let me groom him. It was magic when I could play with Figan and Fifi. I think those relationships were really important in cementing my love and my determination to carry on. We don’t touch them anymore, but it was important at the beginning.
But it’s a kind of fantasy to have that intimacy with other beings, like Tarzan did, isn’t it? Was there a shift, when the relationship became more complex, one of respect?
Well at the beginning, there was no blueprint for long-term study. The maximum that seemed possible was two years. Most studies were one, or less. So in those early days it was: Well I must make the most of it and get as close as I can because it’s all going to stop. And then of course, it turned out it didn’t have to stop. I remember the day it came to me: Of course I need to get people in, involve them so that they can study if I’m not here, and the study can go on. It was a very special moment. Kind of like a “wow” moment.
And then, you changed the way we see ourselves as human beings, which is a pretty incredible feat…
It wasn’t me that changed our understanding, it was the chimps. I used the chimps to help change people’s attitudes. See ourselves as part of the animal kingdom and not separated from it. And we still aren’t there yet. There are still far too many people who… I don’t know if they really believe animals don’t have feelings, or they act as though they believe that. They try and kid themselves.
Why do you think we do that?
Well if you’re doing medical research using animals, if you’re hunting, it’s better, it’s easier if you think that these are just things, just objects.
DUMBO FEATHER
JANE GOODALL
ACTIVIST
So how are we going to shift that? As a young person, I do find myself feeling hopeless sometimes.
That’s why I started the Roots and Shoots program, because of that feeling in so many young people.
The best way to overcome apathy is to actually take some action, to throw yourself into making a difference. There is a part that you actually can influence, and then you realise that all over the world, there are people just like you, doing their bit too. I think of the world as thousands and thousands of interconnected jigsaw puzzle pieces. Everywhere there’s a problem, that little piece is black. If you look at the whole globe, it’s black! So much black! But if you imagine it as a touch screen, and you enlarge the place where you are, you can see, okay, well we can clean this street.
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THIRD QUARTER—2014
That’ll be something we can do. That means clean water going into the river. I’ve been on three continents where this has happened—children cleaning streams. So every time you achieve your goal, you clean up something, you reduce poverty or you decrease some suffering, then the black becomes green or blue, and so gradually—there are 150,000 active Roots and Shoots groups around the world, 136 countries—there’s more and more black changing into green. Even as more and more places become black. It’s a race, really.
Will we win it?
We have to. We have to. But we won’t if young people like you lose hope. If you lose hope, you’ll do nothing. You’re apathetic.
I think Al Gore said, “Between denial and despair, there is action.” Looking at the whole world can often create despair, but when you at your small piece and what you can do to change it, you are empowered.
Yes! We’re getting more and more adult groups now. So if you realise that you make a difference every day through your choices, how you live, what you buy, particularly what you buy: Where did it come from? Did it involve cruelty to animals? Did it harm the environment? Was there child slave labour? Why is it so cheap? Should you get something that’s a bit more expensive knowing that it was made in a more ethically acceptable way? Do you need to buy this particular thing? Maybe you don’t.
And you have grandchildren. How do you impart this to them? Do you find that they’re making ethical decisions?
They live in Tanzania, so they’re not completely bombarded with this materialistic consumer society. They’re living actually, quite simple lives. Although nature’s been pretty well destroyed in Dar es Salaam.
How does it feel to watch the place you knew so well become devastated? I know you’re hopeful, but it must make you deeply sad…
CRUSADER
Of course it does. We’ve seen development all over the world. That’s why you have to work even harder, so that the children will grow up and think about the planet differently. We have to change attitudes.
We don’t have the luxury of a planet with infinite natural resources. We’ll finish. And a life that’s based on continued economic development on a planet with finite natural resources is stupid, it doesn’t make sense.
DUMBO FEATHER
JANE GOODALL
We have to change that attitude. Listen to Gandhi who said, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.”
Thinking about greed, what did you learn about us as human beings through the chimps?
I learned about the importance of being a good mother, what a difference that makes with a young chimp. You have to be protective but not over-protective. You have to be affectionate, playful, you have to impose discipline. And above all, you have to be supportive. I had that same kind of mother, very lucky. I think it’s just as important for our own children. The offspring of the good mothers are more assertive, they play a more important role in their society. The males of good mothers get higher up in the hierarchy and probably have more offspring as a result.
So when your mother put her hand up to come with you to live in Africa, what was that like? You were in your twenties, it was the 60s, I imagine that your peers might have been doing other things…
Ooh yeah, they were. Most girls were really interested in becoming airhostesses; it was the big thing in those days. You had to be super-qualified to be an airhostess in the early days; you had to know something about nursing, medicine, speak several languages. You had to be beautiful [laughs] all those things.
And was that ever an option for you? You ticked the beautiful box!
My friends said, “You could be an air hostess.” But I didn’t want to be. I remember my mother saying, “They’re just glorified waitresses.” [Laughs] which is true.
Leaving for Africa at that time, as a woman, was quite a radical thing to do—did you feel supported?
Well my family supported me and that’s all that mattered. Family and close friends.
And what about later, once you had been living in Gombe? I read that your son, Grub, was actually quite afraid of the chimps. And did that change for him?
Yeah, quite right. You know, with reason.
He still doesn’t like them.
What was that like? This was your passion.
Well, his passion was the sea.
You can’t change your child. I was totally happy for him. I hoped he’d do marine biology. Of course then, he wanted to export live crabs from deepsea fishing. I didn’t like that at all, and he knew I didn’t like it. It was. So we didn’t have a good relationship at that time. And then after he had children, he changed. He actually admitted on camera, “My Mum was right.” He never said it to me! Now, he’s designing and building the most amazing boats in my garden. He taught himself from the internet. He’s now had two ambulance boats ordered by the Tanzanian government. He’s got a boat that takes 80 passengers back and forth to the island. He’s got orders for about 50 fishing boats, which saves the last of the tropical hardwoods. So, you know, in his way, he’s doing a lot for the environment. Behind the scenes, he was working against prawn farms, which are so damaging.
You observed the chimps having a war, which was a surprise for you, because up until then, you’d thought that they were actually a lot kinder than we are. So if brutality is innate, what hope do we have? What is it that we should do to cultivate the best in us?
I read a story about a Native American girl who kept having this dream at night. She goes to her grandfather, the wise elder, and she says, “Grandfather, every night I have this dream. There are two wolves fighting. There’s a good wolf and
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Absolutely. And you don’t change people by lecturing them and pointing fingers. You can only change people if you get into their heart, and that’s with stories.
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So I guess he’s a good example of the way we can change our mindsets?
THIRD QUARTER—2014
That sounds completely at odds with what you were doing.
A LI T T LE BI T MO R E ABO U T...
Leakey’s Angels WORD S: K AT HLEEN O’NEILL I MAGES: T HE JANE GO O DALL IN STITU TE , MI CHAEL NEU G EBAU ER
In the 1960s and 70s, paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey sent three women into the forests of Tanzania, Rwanda and Borneo to study primates. Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and later, Birutė Galdikas, became known as “Leakey’s Angels”—an unfortunate name that undermined the women’s groundbreaking discoveries under the direction of their male mentor— overshadowing and trivialising, rather than celebrating, their independent research observing chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. Before Dian Fossey was able to trail into the Rwandan mountains, Leakey pulled her aside. If Fossey was serious about her research, if she was committed, an appendectomy was mandatory to prepare for the high-altitude conditions. Six weeks later, her appendix was gone. Returning home, however, Fossey noticed a new letter from Leakey. “Actually there really isn’t any dire need for you to have your appendix removed,” it read, “that is only my way of testing applicants’ determination!” Eight months later, Leakey had secured the funds to launch Fossey’s study. Such was the scientist’s humour. An authority on fossilised hominids, Leakey knew that his research was incomplete. Despite decades of excavations deep into the African landscape, and the groundbreaking discoveries that ensued, there was a depth to the story that could not be accessed from fossils alone. To understand humanity’s origins, Leakey needed to understand early hominid behaviour. He turned to homo sapiens’ closest relatives—the apes. Why Leakey chose to three women (two of whom were inexperienced) to pursue and observe the then elusive great apes is hard to say. In truth, Leakey didn’t find his researchers; they came to him.
After the pivotal research of Goodall in Gombe, Fossey approached Leakey, followed by Galdikas. What made the Trimates’ work remarkable was the long-term, indefinite nature of their study—they went into the forest, jungle or swamp, and stayed there, observing generations of primates. Before Goodall’s studies, most insight into primate behaviour had been gathered from apes in captivity. But in the wild, with no deadline or hypothesis to prove or disprove, the Trimates were free to accumulate data over time. Their commitment to the research and what it required of them personally was unshakeable. For Galdikas, it would take 12 years before an orangutan was habituated to her presence. Tragically, Dian Fossey was murdered by poachers. In a male-dominated field, Goodall, Fossey and Galdikas were outsiders. The thought of women with no scientific specialisation addressing primatology at all, let alone in the wild, was unheard of and mocked. For every obstacle the women overcame, their critics matched it with the repeated doubt: would a woman’s sentimentality get in the way of finding concrete facts? In the end, the Trimates found not just facts, but observed at close range great-ape behaviour that had never been witnessed before. By introducing empathy into their approach, all three primatologists got to know the chimps, gorillas and orangutans on a new, more intimate level. The apes were no longer unnamed “subjects,” but individuals.
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ISSUE 40
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a bad wolf. But I always wake up before I know who wins. Who will win?” He says, “Depends which one you feed.” It’s a very good story.
As a society, to me it seems we’re feeding the bad wolf.
As a society we are, but I’m thinking in terms of individuals. The first thing is education, so you know the bad wolf from the good wolf. Some people don’t, they don’t understand enough of what’s going on. If you know that you have a tendency to lose your temper, or you have a tendency to be unkind, you can work on it. We all do. We can all be mean and nasty and horrible.
And what about the chimps? You describe them as brutal, but also as kind, as having a capacity for humour, and “awe”, which they show when they dance in front of waterfalls...
Yes, all of those things.
Might language actually impede us from being spiritually connected to those moments?
It can! Because we label things. And once you’ve labelled it, you’ve stopped thinking about its essence. That came to me with this fly. It was the most exquisitely beautiful little creature. I was just looking at it in absolute amazement.
The sun was shining on it, it was gold and green and everything. And then I stated, “It’s a fly.” As soon as you say “it’s a fly” it demeans it somehow. That’s when I was able to take that “fly” word away, and get back to looking at it, like a child would look, with wonder. Does that mean that in some way, beings without language might have a greater capacity for awe and connectedness?
Well it might, but I don’t know. All I know is that because we have this language and we have words, we can have a discussion. We can discuss the wonder we feel at the waterfall. I think that could have led to an early mystic religion, worship of water. The chimps, you know, probably feel the same sort of emotion, but they can’t talk about it. So it can’t go beyond this feeling they have.
DUMBO FEATHER
JANE GOODALL
HOPEFUL
And also our language gives us a responsibility, doesn’t it? To speak for them.
Yes. Human responsibility. All around the world, human rights are being negated. Just about every day in some places. Even where people have signed the bill of human rights, they’re abusing humans. So how much will rights really help? It’s respect that I want. Whether it’s humans or animals. Rights are a starting point. You can win a case in a court of law. But they won’t help animals that are being killed for bush meat. Give those animals rights, but the people who go out hunting, they’re not going to worry about that.
You do incredible work in Africa to educate people, to put them in a position where their basic needs are met, so that they then can take on responsibility. Has there ever been a time that it hasn’t worked?
Exactly. And it’s worked. They’ve turned around and put land aside, trees have grown back, chimps have more land.
Well, there’s lots of times you feel absolutely helpless, of course.
And what do you do in those moments?
Well what I do in those moments is I say, Well this is a fight that I don’t think I can win, maybe there are other people who can do better. But I think I can make a difference here, and here, and here, it’s better to concentrate on those… Unless it’s something that’s so horrible that you have to go on battering your head against a brick wall—like medical research, and we won in the end. It took years with The National Institutes of Health, but finally, they released them. Almost all of their chimps are now in sanctuaries.
How does it feel to be 80 and to have achieved so much? I’m listening to you and thinking, If only, when I reach 80, could I have made so much impact on the world!
Well quite honestly… there’s so much left! [Laughs] it’s like stepping stones!
Well maybe you will. We all have the potential. Not in the same way, but in your way. You know?
So who would Jane be without the chimps?
I think I would have been studying some kind of animal. When I studied hyenas—people always despised them— I found out how amazing they actually are. But I don’t think hyenas could have done for the animal kingdom as much as the chimps did. So I think it must have been meant to be.
Your personal life was so completely merged with your career. I’m wondering if you can imagine your life any other way…
No. I can’t.
People say, “What would you do differently?” Well of course I made mistakes, but you learn from your mistakes. Mistakes are quite useful. Well… the banana feeding, I suppose, did change things for a while. At the time it didn’t seem to matter, because I was interested in individual behaviour. We would set bananas out for the chimps, so that they would come to the camp. That was with my first husband. He was a filmmaker and he had to get footage. They’re really hard to photograph when it’s misty and dark out in the forest. We didn’t have digital cameras back in those days, so it was lugging around a 16 millimetre heavy Bolex. Using bananas, he was able to get those scenes that captivated people’s hearts. We couldn’t have done the study without that footage. The money would have come to an end. So in a way, it was a mistake to interact with the chimps; it would have been better if we hadn’t influenced them at all. But on the other hand, it was a kind of experiment. Yes. It’s like a good zoo now. ISSUE 40
It’s interesting because while that may have not been the best thing for those individual chimps, those images gave people the capacity to care about the species as a whole.
THIRD QUARTER—2014
So what’s been your biggest lesson?
Yes, it was. But you know, there’s nothing really, when I look back, that perhaps shouldn’t have been. Not really. I mean, I wish that I hadn’t got divorced from my first husband. I don’t think it was good for our son Grub. On the other hand, we were fighting so much that it might have been much worse for him if we hadn’t.
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So it was worth it?
And what about you? What about your happiness? And less important than the chimps’?
Well that was less important than my son’s!
I don’t know. I don’t think of myself in terms like that.
Sometimes people think I’ve made huge sacrifices, I haven’t really. I suppose this awful travelling round and round, which I truly hate, I suppose you could say that’s a sacrifice. I’d much rather be out in the forest… But right now, that wouldn’t work because I know I’m supposed to be doing what I do. If the time comes when I can’t travel, which it will, providing my mind stays okay, then I’ll have time to write books. I want to write more books, but I got out most of the stuff. This last book, it started off being a very simple idea to just talk about plants rescued from extinction. It ended up to be this amazing journey through the kingdom of the plants and learning wondrous things about communication between trees and plants and how we use and abuse plants.
Plants and animals too. I notice you have a new toy with you. I’ve seen Mr H, but—
Cow was given to me in Wisconsin, which is the dairy state, just as a little joke, with a little jacket saying “Wisconson loves you” or something silly like that. I was about to give Cow to a child and I thought, No, Cow is going to be my spokesperson for the abused farm animals.
VOICE OF THE VOICELESS
You know, the more I think about this, it’s not just the cruelty to the animals. It’s horrible, unbelievable, which is why I stopped eating meat. But it’s the chopping down of forest to grow the grain, it’s the millions of cattle and goats and sheep destroying the environment. It’s more and more people who want to eat more and more meat. And they want cheap meat, so it’s produced in the cheapest way, which imposes all the suffering. So there’s that, and the misuse of antibiotics, so that the bacteria build up resistance. The headline in the paper when I left England was: “The era of the antibiotic is over.” Scary. One of the main causes of this escape of antibodies into the environment is this factory farming. And even if people say, “Alright, I won’t eat meat two days a week,” or “I’ll eat much less,” or “I will buy ethically produced meat”—it’s a start. But you feel so much better. That’s the great thing! We have the gut of a herbivore. This particular section of the gut in a herbivore is long because we’ve got to get the last goodness out of all these bits of leaf and grass. In a carnivore, that same piece is short, because they’ve got to get rid of the meat quickly before it starts rotting. So we’re eating lots of meat and putting it in a herbivore gut.
DUMBO FEATHER
JANE GOODALL
I didn’t know that. That’s amazing.
Yes. [Laughs] I discovered that when I was writing Harvest for Hope. So anyway, when we went to Argentina, Cow was shivering with fear. But 10 people became vegetarians in five days. Even in Argentina.
I want to come back to the way you spoke about happiness before… it sounds like it hasn’t been the goal for you. I think that’s so profound in a time where people are chasing it. Do you really think that?
Yes!
No it hasn’t. But I don’t know. I’m just me. I’m not taking any credit for how I am. It’s just the way I am!
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Don’t you think you’ve cultivated who you are?
Well I suppose, you know, there’s that biblical saying, “He girded his loins.” No doubt, I do sometimes feel I’m girding my loins [laughs].
When I was about 13, I gave my grandmother a Christmas present; we called it “the Bible box.” It was six little matchboxes stuck together, the kind with the little drawers, you know? Her husband was a minister. I never met him. He died sadly, of cancer. She wasn’t particularly religious, but she would go to church sometimes. She had this Bible box—they were such platitudes, quotations from the Bible, soothing, gooey stuff. So I read the entire Bible. Every chapter. I pulled out all the little texts, you know: “He who behaves like this shall roast in the fires of Hell!” [laughs]. I wrote them really neatly on bits of paper, two or three lines which had to fit in the matchbox, with the chapter and verse on the back. All six boxes were filled.
DUMBO FEATHER
JANE GOODALL
TIRELESS
At the end of my three-week vacation, when I have to pack up and go off again, after being three weeks in one place—I hate it, awful feeling, I think, I can’t do this, I want to stay here, want to walk the dog, want to write! But twice, my sister Judy got out the box, as I was on my way out, groaning and moaning. We always put the things back in a different place so that it’s completely random. But both times I pulled out the same thing. And it says: “He who has once set his hand to the plough share and turns back is not fit for the Kingdom of Heaven.” Twice!
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HISTORICAL PROFILE
Harriet Taylor Mill WORDS: OSCAR SCHWARTZ
There is a house among the lavender fields of Avignon, France. Inside, an ancient-looking man is doubled over his desk, recovering from his last coughing fit. As he looks up over his books, through the window to a nearby cemetery—at one grave in particular, her grave—his eyes begin to twitch. He loved her for her mind. But, for a moment, in the early summer of 1830, when he was a young man at a small dinner party in central London, when she entered the room, it was her swan-like throat, her pearl complexion, large dark eyes—not soft or sleepy, but with a look of quiet command in them— yes, it was her beauty, that irrational thing, that had first utterly seized him. ••• Harriet Hardy was born in 1807 in the great and dirty city of London. Her father was a successful surgeon, and arranged for Harriet, along with her many siblings, to be educated at home. Her mother was distant and submissive, fearful of her short-tempered and domineering husband. In her parents’ relationship, Harriet first observed the inequality between men and women in Victorian England: husbands ruled, wives obeyed. Perhaps to escape a stifling home, Harriet married only five months after her eighteenth birthday. Her husband, John Taylor, was a pharmacist 11-years her senior. His colleagues described him as a man of habit, severe in appearance, yet predictably civil and measured in social dealings. For the first five years of their marriage, the couple lived in Finsbury Circus, in the centre of London. They quickly had three children, two boys and a girl. Mr Taylor became active in the Unitarian Church, while Harriet stayed home to educate the children, and, in her spare time, write poetry. To onlookers, it was the ideal Victorian household. Everything in its right place. Yet, if you read Harriet’s poems from those early years they ring with simmering anger and a sparkling critical intellect, frustrated by domestic confinement.
HI S T O RICA L PROFILE
’Tis man, not nature, who works the general ill, By folly piled on folly, till the heap Hides every natural feeling, save alone Grey Discontent, upraised to ominous height, And keeping drowsy watch o’er buried wishes. •••
John Stuart Mill was born in Pentonville, London, in 1806. He was the eldest son of James Mill, a notoriously intense Scottish writer who moved to London to promote the work of the famous Utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. James chose John to be the subject of an experimental form of education that Bentham prescribed in his writings on childhood. The method was to force as much learning on the young child as possible, while the brain was still malleable, so that once a teenager, they would know as much as any normal person could learn in a lifetime. John, who possessed an abnormally absorptive brain, proved the perfect subject. By the age of six he had written the history of Rome, and the very next year, was reading Plato in Greek in his spare time. John was also inculcated with Bentham’s Utilitarian philosophy, a doctrine that his father subscribed to with an almost religious radicalism. Bentham’s idea was that actions could lead to happiness or suffering, and the right action was the one that led to the most happiness for the most people. By the age of 18, John, a vastly successful experiment, had become a reasoning machine, incapable of making any decision without calculating the possible utility of his every action. Those who knew John at this age described his personality as resembling an abstract idea. He was utterly ignorant of social conventions, he did not know how to be idle, and he had never spoken to a woman outside his own family. In his 20th year, John sunk into a helpless depression, caused by incomparable loneliness. In later life, John reflected on this period, writing, “I sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. If I had loved anyone sufficiently to make confiding my grief a necessity, I should not have been in the condition I was.” As a distraction, John buried himself in his work for the East India Company, where he was employed as a clerk. He also wrote radical editorials for newspapers on the topic of social justice, through which he discovered like-minded thinkers, such as Reverend WJ Fox, who was the leader of London’s Unitarian congregation. In 1830, Fox invited John over for dinner
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one night to introduce him to a close circle of other liberal, radical thinkers. The dinner was to be held at the house of a young couple—Mr John Taylor and his wife Harriet—who lived at Finsbury Circus, in the centre of London. There would have been no room for the romantic notion of “love at first sight” within John’s rational model of the world. Yet those who were present that evening, those who saw John’s anxious, pathetic expression soften when he laid eyes on Harriet, when he heard her low, intense voice— sensed that he underwent an instantaneous transformation. He was 24. Harriet was 23. John was constricted by his father’s experiment; Harriet was imprisoned by the conventions to which, having been born a woman, she was an unwilling signatory. In John’s modest, yet remarkably gifted, lucid and lonely eyes, she saw the mark of a fellow outsider. Reverend Fox invited both Harriet and John to contribute to his magazine, the Monthly Depository. It was an unusually liberal group of writers, featuring a disproportionate number of women, who encouraged their readers to question social and political conformity. The publication also served as a means of correspondence for John and Harriet. Harriet, who had been restricted to writing poetry, suddenly began to compose fierce philosophical criticisms of the convention of marriage. “In the present system of habits and opinions, girls enter into what is called a contract perfectly ignorant of the conditions of it,” she wrote, “and that they should be so is considered absolutely essential for their fitness for it!” John, the reasoning machine, began to write floridly about poetry, which he described as possessing “the deeper and more secret workings of human emotions.” Theirs was an intellectual and ethical symbiosis so complete that their friends started to question whether John and Harriet were secretly composing their pieces together. Harriet’s intellect blossomed. She read voraciously, everything from daily newspapers to Renaissance histories of Venice in the original Italian, to the philosophers of Athens in Ancient Greek. She wrote compulsively in her journals—with large, passionate handwriting—about ethics, religion, art and the political economy. But her brilliant mind was most astute when writing about the politics of being a woman, in which she displayed a humbling knowledge of women’s history. The painful irony was that only a tiny fraction of this writing was ever published. It was too radical. And after all, Harriet was a woman. She was reminded of this every day by her permanent dependence on Mr Taylor, a man whom she regarded as her inferior in intellect and culture.
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John Stuart Mill, Harriet felt, was different. He was the only person who called forth all of her love, in whose presence she felt fully woman. John was more cautious than Harriet, wary that she was still, after all, married. If it weren’t for her courage in these early years, he might have moved on. “Would you let yourself drift with the tide whether it flow or ebb if in one case every wave took you further from me?” Harriet wrote to John in 1833. “Would you not put what strength you have into resisting it? Tell me—for if you would not, how happens it that you will love me?” On the premise of editing each other’s writing, John made almost nightly trips to the Taylors’ home. Mr Taylor, who was stoically tolerant, would slip off to his club when he heard John arrive. John and Harriet also held secret meetings at the London Zoo, by the cage of a magnificent, captive Rhinoceros. Mr Taylor was, however, still in love with his wife, and in 1833, he demanded that she make a choice between him and John. Harriet travelled to Paris to think, and shortly after invited John to stay with her for six weeks. They had never been allowed to be so near, so perfectly intimate. All that had been restrained and untold could be revealed. John was convinced that there would never be another obstacle in them passing the rest of their lives together. Harriet was overwhelmed with doubt. She knew that Mr Taylor loved her, perhaps as much as she loved John. His dignity throughout the affair drew her, strangely, closer to her husband. This, and her children, led Harriet to the decision that she would stay with Mr Taylor. She moved to a small country cottage to live with her daughter. John made secret visits. But on the weekend, she lived with Mr Taylor, maintaining, with outward poise, the appearance of being a devoted wife. This absurd arrangement only confirmed a deeply held intuition that John and Harriet shared: that the law of marriage as it then existed, a law that precluded a woman from divorce, led them to believe that she was incapable of being an independent person. John and Harriet argued that, by being married for any reason other than love, was being forced, by society, to tie the ropes around her own soul. If their writing was radical, even more so was their lifestyle. By the mid 1830s they were no longer seeing each other only in private. People started to gossip. There were whispers that Harriet was seducing John to further her career. John denied in his journal that their relationship had become physical, but there are letters that suggest the contrary. “While you can love me as you so sweetly and beautiful showed in that hour yesterday,” he wrote to Harriet, “I have all I care for or desire.”
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John was deeply hurt by the gossip. Once again he withdrew from society and became depressed. Through the 1840s he worked feverishly on his book The Principles of Political Economy, consulting Harriet via meticulously hand-written letters throughout the process. John completed the book in 1848, and asked Mr Taylor, who had been diagnosed with cancer that year, if he could dedicate it to Harriet in honour of her contribution to its ideas. He refused, and Harriet was once again denied the recognition she deserved. Nevertheless, John publically attributed a chapter called “On the Probable Future of the Labouring Classes” to Harriet, in which she demands equal education for men and women of every class and race. In 1849 Harriet distanced herself from John, nursing Mr Taylor through the final months of his illness. As always, Mr Taylor bore his pain with dignity, and when he finally passed away, leaving everything in his will to Harriet, she was overcome with grief, and for the next two years, was plagued by guilt. After Mr Taylor’s death Harriet grew frail from chronic bronchitis. In 1851, fearing she might not have much time left, she agreed to marry John. The ceremony was performed only in the presence of Haji and Lily, Harriet’s two youngest children, now in their early twenties, who signed as witnesses. John vowed that their union did not change his views on marriage, that Harriet would have the same “absolute freedom of action and freedom, as if no marriage had taken place.” The newly-wed couple believed, perhaps unjustly, that not only their friends, but that John’s family disapproved of their relationship. Spurned, they set up a house in Blackheath Park, a rural district on the outskirts of London, a wide-open space of rolling meadow bordered far off by the blue silhouette of hills. They had very few visitors. It was a type of peace they had yearned for. In the quiet comfort of Blackheath, Harriet had time to develop her ideas. In an essay entitled “The Enfranchisement of Women,” Harriet envisaged a future of equal opportunity, in which women of her intelligence, of her drive, would be able to freely express their talents, and earn for themselves. Since the opportunity for women to compete with men in areas of the intellect and arts was so small compared with the length of their oppression, a woman’s potential, Harriet argued, was unknown and limitless. Harriet’s health declined further. John had also become sick with tuberculosis, an illness that had taken his father and brothers at a young age. In the autumn of 1858, they travelled to France to recuperate in the
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warmer climate. They had planned to write a great book together. But death stood in their way, and on November 3, 1858, Harriet Taylor Mill died of respiratory failure, and was buried in a small cemetery amidst the lavender fields outside Avignon, France. Once again, John was alone. His partner, the companion to all of his greatest emotions, the prompter of his best thoughts, the guide to all of his actions was gone. He had a monument constructed for her in Avignon, with the inscription, “Were there but a few hearts and intellects like hers, this earth would already become the hoped-for heaven.” He bought a small house among the lavender fields in which he lived and grieved alone, from where he could look out of his window and see her grave. Like he had done in his youth, John tried to muffle his suffering with work. The month after Harriet died, he sent his magnum opus, On Liberty, to the publishers, dedicating it to the memory of “the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement.” The book, which is a celebration of the value of human freedom, was, according to John a joint production with Harriet. “There was not a sentence of it that was not several times gone through by us together, turned over in many ways, and carefully weeded of any faults, either in thought or expression, that we detected in it,” he wrote. He imagined, correctly, that On Liberty would be his most lasting book, because the conjunction of his mind with Harriet’s made it a living philosophy of love and struggle. John lived out the rest of his life in isolation in Avignon, buried, at the age of 67, next to Harriet. In John’s autobiography he wrote, “All that excited admiration when found separately in others, seemed brought together in her… she possessed a vigour and truth of imagination, a delicacy of perception, an accuracy and nicety of observation, only equalled by her profundity of speculative thought, and by a practical judgment and discernment next to infallible.” The reverence of John’s words is touching, and shows how much he loved Harriet. But one feels that if Harriet were given the opportunity to write her own autobiography, we would get a much clearer picture of who she was, what she believed. Much of what we know of her has to be inferred from the voluminous letters and journals she wrote that were never published. Her voice, in these texts, is intelligent and free-willed, and because of this, destined to censorship from the patriarchal values of her society. Her voice in history, like that of so many women throughout history, is muted. It was towards a future in which women would be able to write their own history, to speak in their own voice, that Harriet devoted her life. 64
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BUNKER ROY IS A BAREFOOT EDUCATOR
SUBJECT
INTERVIEWER
LOCATION
WEATHER
Bunker Roy
Livia Albeck-Ripka
Tilonia, India
Blue skies
OCCUPATION
PHOTOGRAPHER
DATE
UNEXPECTED
Founder of Barefoot College
Livia Albeck-Ripka, Marcelo Bigilia
January 2014
Coca Cola
New Delhi, India, is a city so polluted that the weather forecast can read, “smoke.” That’s as it was the day I left for Barefoot College. During the seven-hour cab ride there, my driver, Surinder, told me he’d earn very little from my fare, while his boss would take the balance. He lived, as many city-dwellers do, with his entire family in an apartment in Delhi, having left their village in the hope of a better life. That night I arrived in a place that was not only training grandmothers from around the world to become solar engineers, but was making it possible for Indians like Surinder to remain in their villages, rather than leave for unsustainable, overcrowded cities in search of jobs. At the heart of this work is Bunker Roy, who set up Barefoot College in 1972 to reawaken rural wisdom and empower one of the most marginalised groups in society: illiterate women. Every year, the college brings dozens of women from around the world to Tilonia, India, where they are trained using sign language to make solar panels. To qualify for Barefoot College they must be illiterate, between 35 and 50 years old, never have gone to school nor left their villages. They choose women, Bunker explains, because when men gain skills they leave for the cities in search of work. Women, especially grandmothers, take their education and its benefits back to their communities. Bunker understands the power of ideas, so this is a story he has told at hundreds of conferences worldwide—evidenced by the impressive collection of lanyards I notice while sitting on the floor of his office drinking chai. Yet it is his work with the locals that truly moves me. The college runs a night school for children who have to work in their villages during the day, gives voice to rural communities through its radio station, uses the ancient art of puppetry to promote health awareness and teaches the illiterate to become acupuncturists, dentists, doctors and architects. Aptitude, for Bunker, has little to do with literacy or formal education. Ram Niwas, my guide and the Barefoot communications manager, tells me of his journey from “untouchable,” to accountant, to puppeteer, to the person responsible for imparting Barefoot’s mission. Like so many of the villagers, his attitude to caste and what he was capable of were transformed by the philosophy of the college: leave the restricting aspects of rural life behind, while remembering what tradition, community and the stillness of nature have to offer. It’s for enabling this shift in thinking that Bunker has been named one of the 50 environmentalists who could save the planet by The Guardian, and one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. But after more than 40 years spent teaching self-reliance to the disenfranchised, retirement is on the horizon. Education is empowerment, and Bunker has all but made himself redundant.
“Just because you can’t read and write, doesn’t mean you can’t become an engineer.”
LIVIA ALBECK-RIPKA: The primary story that you tell about Barefoot College is how grandmothers come here to become solar engineers, but over the past day, what’s really moved me are the hundreds of locals whose lives and attitudes to class and education you’ve changed through this place. What defines the mission across all of it for you?
BUNKER ROY: We’re trying to improve the quality of life for people living on less than one dollar a day. That covers water, education, employment, communication, health, lighting. All these are basic services. When I talk about the Barefoot College abroad, I try to connect with lots of people. To bring a grandmother who can’t read or write, from a very marginalised community, to India, to make them into a solar engineer in six months—there’s something that people can identify with. It’s a global issue. But what is happening in the Barefoot College is much more than that, because it is also addressing an Indian issue. We’re trying to bring the alternative into the mainstream. We’re trying to show that the night school is as important as day schools. The village, as an institution, is being devalued. We’re trying to show it’s as important and relevant today. So these are hidden messages, and this is relevant for India. But what we find, is that some of these grandmothers actually go to the night schools and say, “Well it’s also relevant for our communities.” We try and expose them to all these skills while they’re here—how to make toys out of waste, how to make mosquito nets…
Have you found that any of the grandmothers have taken other elements of the Barefoot College home with them? “I’m not only a solar engineer!”
They put pressure on the community who sent them here, saying, “Why don’t we have more of this? I’m not only a solar engineer!”
Yeah [laughs] you know! They’re grandmothers…
It’s incredible. Because they probably came here saying, “I’m only a grandmother.”
DUMBO FEATHER
BUNKER ROY
ENTREPRENEUR
That’s right. But now they’re happy and proud that they have become an engineer—and they don’t miss an opportunity to say so. They giggle, but they say, ‘Yes, I’m an engineer, I know how to make these liner tanks.’ But all these messages are very discreetly exposed to them. It is supposed to make them think. Whatever they see in the Barefoot College, they see whether they can put it into practise when they go back home. That’s the whole idea. We don’t thrust it down their throats, we just say, ‘Look, these are the options you can always try in your own community.’
Going outside the mainstream education system, even in the Western world, can be a challenge. And you’re doing it in a place where there are already so many…
Just because you can’t read and write, doesn’t mean you can’t become an engineer. Or an architect, or build a campus like this. Traditional knowledge and skills need to be respected, identified and applied on a large scale. You can’t have an urban solution to a rural problem. Never going to work, because the people don’t take ownership of the whole process. Some so-called “expert” comes from outside and tells you what to do. That’s not going to work in the long run; it’s going to collapse. You haven’t really taken the community into your confidence. Whether it’s employment, whether it is dentistry—they all have to be owned by the community. That’s the sustainable solution. Rural solutions have to be grounded in the community; they have to depend on and get its endorsement. All of this is simple stuff, but lots of people don’t implement it because they cannot get to those communities. Barefoot College has. How we got there? Most of the people who work in the college are people from the rural communities. Ram Niwas, who’s now our
communications manager, comes from a marginalised community. All the staff are people who belong to very poor communities back home. We’re working in about 100 villages, over 500 square miles. We’re reaching more than 100,000 people.
What kind of community did you come from?
Me? I come from a very snobbish elitist urban community. So people shouldn’t see my face—the faces of people like Ram Niwas are the faces of Barefoot College.
You were 24 when you started Barefoot College? What was happening for you at that time?
I had no idea that I was going to stay for 40 years!
I just wanted to live in a community.
I wanted to get away from 100-miles-per-hour lifestyle to a zero-mile-per-hour lifestyle. I just wanted to see if I had it in me. It was also a testing ground for me.
A testing ground for what?
I went straight from digging wells as an unskilled labourer to starting a college, because I saw this tremendous knowledge, skill and wisdom that very poor people had, which was just not recognised. I started a college—only for the poor—where these skills would be recognised and applied. This model is applicable anywhere in the world. These grandmothers are walking, talking Barefoot Colleges. I don’t need bricks and mortar to have a college.
You mentioned before that you came from a snobby community. So what did your parents think of you leaving that life behind for this one?
My father died in 1957. But my mother hated the idea because it was totally new for her, alien. Other people did that, not your own son. To go into a village, and there was no money… She wanted me to be a diplomat or a lawyer or a doctor, make money, become a businessman. What all normal parents expect of you. You don’t go out of the box and do something strange like this and then expect her to accept it. And she didn’t. So…
So was there a moment when you realised: This is what I want to do? Or was it a progression?
I knew from the very beginning that I wanted to do something in a village. But I didn’t know how long I’d last. I didn’t ever think that I would have a college that would have such an impact on so many people all over the world. I just lived and mixed with people and heard what they had to say. It was a learning process. My real education started here. Not in the school or college I went to. I heard and saw some extraordinary people. You’re never exposed to these people, but there they were, living in a village in the middle of nowhere, and they had such extraordinary things to say. Why not have a place where they could say it to other people, and other people would learn from them as well?
So it sounds like the people in this village have been some of your greatest teachers. Who else have you looked up to?
Mahatma Gandhi. He said some things that I read now that make a lot of sense. But if I had read them when I started the Barefoot College, I would never have started it.
THIRD QUARTER—2014
Snob, she was. That made her think I must be doing something right! [Laughs].
ISSUE 40
[Laughs].
I think she melted the day she heard the Prince and Princess of Wales were coming to visit.
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Did she ever?
Really? Like what?
Yeah, it’s so simple and yet so difficult. ‘Live with a village, stay with them, see what they’ll need.’ How can you help them? You’re nobody, you’re just one person. How will you start an organisation that will respond to so many needs? Billions of people, life and death situations. It takes time.. To think that one day, I could have an organisation responding to the needs of these people. I keep telling people here in the college,
“You’re more powerful than the prime minister of India; prime minister of India can’t start a night school tomorrow like you can, prime minister can’t put in a hand pump like you can. You can do it overnight. You have the power and the resources. So remember, you are a very, very important change agent. Every day you are making a difference to lots of people who wouldn’t otherwise get that sort of access.” It’s demystifying technology, it’s decentralising decision making. Simple stuff, but to make it work you need some staying power and you need some people who think like you.
So you started in ’72, The world has changed drastically in that time. How has Barefoot changed with it?
DUMBO FEATHER
BUNKER ROY
EMPOWERER
Mindset has changed. Lots of people who were part of the organisation have realised how important they are, how much of a difference they can make. Barefoot College has shown that a bottom-up model is workable. Globally; not only in India. It has shown that the resources that are available in a village are universal, and can be used for development. It has shown that women can be empowered to do extraordinary things, like become engineers, dentists, teachers and communicators. It has shown that there’s a difference between literacy and education. Literacy is where you learn how to read and write, and education is what you get from your family and environment, and that is very important, more than anything else. It has shown that even if you’re illiterate, you can become a major change agent in your own community. Lots and lots of messages are contained in the philosophy of the Barefoot College—which is completely outside the mainstream thinking of how we can develop communities. It has shown that you can do so much with very little money. People think Barefoot College is a huge organisation, actually it’s a very small organisation, but the ideas are big. And the ideas have gone beyond the college; lots of people have adopted that idea, which makes me feel it’s made some sort of impact.
Being the age that you were when you built this place, the thing that really frightens me is what the lives of our grandchildren are going to be like, given the direction we seem to be heading in. You spend most of your time here, in this beautiful setting where there is change and hope. But when you go to Delhi— when you’re outside this sphere—do you still feel hopeful?
Always. I think this country will depend, eventually, on these very ordinary people who come from the 600,000 villages of India. Hope does not come from Delhi, it comes from the villages of India. I keep telling that to all my friends who live in Delhi: “You should go and see how people survive, how they live in villages, how simply they live. How they don’t waste resources, how they respect the sun, how they respect the water that they use.” We have so much to learn. That’s where the hope is. Not in Delhi. Delhi’s a disaster.I keep telling people in powerful positions,
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THIRD QUARTER—2014
“Just take one day out and live in a village and see what it’s like. You’ll see how much you can learn from these people.” They’re so detached. It’s so important that they meet and learn from each other. It’s not happening enough. They talk about it but they don’t have time for it. That’s the sad part.
Speaking of power, you’ve had to make some difficult decisions along the way—like accepting the funding to build a well from Coca Cola. What are we supposed to do when corporations that damage the world also provide clean water for communities?
So difficult. Coca Cola needs to be told about some of the mistakes they’ve made from within. They’re not going to listen to a rabble outside shouting “it’s you!”. They’re closed to that. But if you sympathise with the rabble, go inside and sit at the board table, tell them that they’re doing something wrong, they will listen to you. That is what one of our roles is, to tell Coca Cola, very objectively, without getting emotional about it, that they’re doing something wrong in some places, and should hear about it. But they’re also doing something right in some places. They have the money, and there are communities all over India that have no water. People are walking for five kilometres. If you can make a difference for these women, by making sure they have access to water through the wells and traditional sources, that’s good. I think I play a very crucial role in making sure that the money that Coca Cola has made available reaches the poorest and the right communities—who are very far away from Coca Cola, who don’t drink Coca Cola, but can benefit from this money. That’s what we’ve done in five different places here. With only about $50,000, we built a dam that has affected over 200,000 people; over 100 water sources have been revitalised. That’s not small. They couldn’t give a damn about Coca Cola—they don’t have to walk for miles for drinking water. So the way I think about some of these multinational companies shouldn’t get in the way of making decisions that affect hundreds of thousands of people.
Where do you draw the line though?
MAN OF INFLUENCE
The line is a bit wobbly. The older you get, the less you look at it in black and white. There are grey areas. And you have to live with those grey areas. I have no qualms about that. I will go to multinational companies if I think that the money that they have will reach the very poor communities I have access to, who will not ever have money from government or from any other industry.
I just want to make sure that the money reaches the right people, affects them tangibly and improves their quality of life. My wife may not agree. So your wife is more of an activist than you are?
DUMBO FEATHER
BUNKER ROY
Is that hard?
Very much so, very much. She does not agree with lots of things I do.
No, we have been married for 41 years and we fight every day. It’s a good thing [laughs].
[Laughs] and what does she do?
She’s an activist, she campaigns on the ground. She helped bring in the Right to Information Act and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which extends the minimum wage to over six hundred million people and provides, under law, 100 days of work for everyone who lives within five kilometres of the village. That’s a major act.
Amazing.
Amazing. Six hundred million people have benefited from this act. So you can understand why she doesn’t like Coca Cola.
Okay. So you and your wife are both activists in your own ways... what is the best way, do you think, to affect change?
You must think with your heart and feel with your head. There is a place for both. I’m not so affected by the politics of it. I’m merely affected by the people who really have no access to water and light. If I can get money from any multinational that can make sure that their quality of life is improved through water and light, I’ll go for it.
What are the biggest challenges for you at the moment?
To make people understand that even if you’re illiterate you can still become an engineer; that the formal education system is not so important. More important is jobs, more important is work on the ground, more important is skill, more important is people developing with self-respect and dignity. All that is more important.
Who’s most resistant to hearing these ideas from you?
The immediate response is: “You mean my five years at university has been a waste?” I say, “No. Your five years in the university are catering to a different type of people, people who want jobs in cities, in urban areas.” The people who work with the formal education system don’t want to come back to a village. The formal education system believes that if you come back to a village, it’s a punishment.
What did you study at university?
English.
And then you went to work in the world?
Became an unskilled labourer, yeah. I just went into the bush. Took the train. First of November 1967, I remember. It was tough. It was a complete contrast.
And you never went back?
Never went back! [Laughs] I’m setting a poor example for young people!
THIRD QUARTER—2014
What are you going to do with the millions of people who can’t read and write? Are you going to write them off? They’ve got nothing to contribute? They don’t have a skill that can be used? Nonsense. Of course they have. Barefoot College is catering to those millions who do not read and write, making sure that they have something to offer. We’re trying to show slowly, very slowly, how that’s possible. That is upsetting a lot of people. They’re saying, “Do you mean to say the Barefoot College doesn’t want to encourage literacy?” I say, “No. I’m saying we have opportunities for people who want to learn to read and write.” “But what about the people who don’t want to?” “We are also catering to those people.” That’s more important for me. I wouldn’t put anyone into a different category just because they can’t read and write. They’ve got so much to offer.
We’ve got 23 Barefoot Colleges in 13 states of India. Young people come here, stay with me for two, three years, and then go back and start their own organisation— it’s possible.
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When young people say, “What should I do?”, “How can I start?” I say, “Identify an organisation that you are ideologically close to and work with them for a couple of months. Just volunteer. See whether you have it in you to do it. See whether you feel comfortable with it. And then branch off somewhere else on your own.”
ISSUE 40
Or perhaps a very good example.
So now that you’ve officially retired...
I have.
Will Barefoot function without you?
The foundation of the Barefoot College is sound. It has the staff, it has the resources to be able to survive and make an impact. Now we’re looking at making it grow. We have someone full time looking after Latin America, we have someone full time in Brazil. So gradually, we’re developing it internationally.
Do you ever get tired? Never? So what’s next?
No.
Never. What is there to be tired about? You’re always thinking, you’re always doing something that makes a difference to someone’s life. There are 47 least-developed countries, identified by the United Nations, around the world. We’re in 35 countries. The sky’s the limit. You have hundreds and hundreds of villages which have no electricity, no lighting, no water. You just get to those communities—and we will get there, the model has proven itself. There’s a great demand for the Barefoot College, and pressure on the Indian government to open colleges with this model all over. And this has happened grassroots; it’s happened bottom-up.
And what’s next for you, in your personal life?
I still go and select some grandmothers. I love it. I love the feeling. Now within a half an hour of being with any community, I can make out which grandmother would be fantastic. And she doesn’t even know it. We went to Papua New Guinea the other day and there were chiefs and presidents and political leaders there. On their own, they had selected grandmothers who they thought should go to India. We selected a completely different set of grandmothers, and the whole community erupted. They’re coming in March 2014. They’ll be incredible grandmothers, incredible solar engineers.
DUMBO FEATHER
BUNKER ROY
GRANDMOTHER SELECTOR
So how exactly do you select them?
We first identify a community-based organisation in the country we’re going to. The NGO then says, ‘Yes, we would like to solar electrify some villages,’ so we give them a criteria. The village must be 10 kilometres away from the nearest electricity, it must not have a generating set, it must have a hundred houses, it must be very far away from the road. That takes them a couple of months. Then we say, “All right, we’re going to visit personally and see whether you’ve done the right selection.” Ninety per cent of the time it’s good. So we go to the village and they have to make a few decisions. First they tell us how much they’re spending on lighting; on kerosene and candles and torch batteries and diesel and wood. It comes to X dollars, and I say, “Are you prepared to spend X dollars a month if solar light comes?” “If solar light comes? Yes, yes, yes!” So we all sign an agreement that they will pay X amount, depending on the economic status. Then: “Are you prepared to give us a building where we can set up a workshop?” So they do. They agree to all this very casually and without any hesitation, because they think that we will never come back. You know? We’re just like any other Westerner; makes promises and never comes back. “Are you prepared to form a small committee which monitors the money if and when the money comes?” “Yes, here’s the committee.” “And now, you have to select a grandmother.” That’s a big surprise!
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I say, “She has to be illiterate, between 35 and 50, she should never have gone to school, and she should never have left her village in her life.” That shakes them up a bit. They think it’s a big joke. But then it gets more serious; making someone from that village go to India for six months, that makes them think, These guys are really serious about what they’re doing. Finally, two women are selected in front of the whole village. The elected NGO has to have the resources to prepare their passports, give them to the embassy, and then they fly to India. That is when it becomes very serious; now there is a connection between the Barefoot College, and the grandmothers, and the community. Now there are two people all the way in India.
So the women who are selected, they want to come? And they have to go?
No, no. Everyone is dragged screaming onto the plane. Every one of them. They hate the idea.
Well the community has chosen them, the community pressures them to go.
How do you feel about that?
I can see six months down the line in a way that they can’t. I can see that these people will be marvellous engineers. We’ve produced 600 of them. An engineer has never failed us. Never. Never. They don’t come willingly. Some of them think it’s a joke, but most of them are dragged onto the plane. First time going onto a plane, first time coming so far, can’t speak your language for six months. That takes tremendous courage. Tremendous. I wouldn’t do it. Lots of people wouldn’t do it. They come back like tigers. They know exactly what to do and they want to change the communities. And everyone is petrified of them. Everyone! Even the husbands are petrified of these people coming back as engineers, they can’t recognise them— she’s bubbly, she’s confident, she’s cocky, she’s arrogant, she knows that she’s got a skill that no one else has in the village has. She’s a rock star when she goes back. And in every case, these women have solar electrified their villages within one week of equipment coming.
DUMBO FEATHER
BUNKER ROY
NOT A JOKER
So you send it over to them?
Before the women come from any country we have an arrangement. And once they go back, they give us the money for the equipment to be sent. We don’t train for training’s sake. When they come here, the first couple of months they have to really dig in and learn something about solar. When they have some confidence, they are taken for a week to see how to construct a rainwater harvesting tank; how to dig for it, what materials are needed, why you collect the rainwater. They get it right away, because water is something that is so important for them. We ask them whether they have malaria in their villages and we train them to make mosquito nets. Menstruation is a major issue everywhere, so the sanitary pad union’s a big hit. There are some schools there which have no chalk. We teach them how to make chalk. So they’re all not only solar engineers, they’re entrepreneurs as well. So whatever is available in the college—whether it is carpentry, whether it is dentistry, whether it is communications, whether it is marketing—they pick up these ideas. When I went to Ethiopia, they gave a solar lantern to every birth midwife. Five hundred babies have been born with solar lanterns now, instead of using the fireside and candles.
And what about the work you do for the local community here?
The Indian side is all about responding to basic needs. Water is a basic need, work is a basic need. If you can improve the quality of life in the villages, there’s no reason why people should migrate. So this is actually an exercise in how to reverse migration; how we can make sure that we don’t allow people to leave their village to the city looking for a job. We can improve the quality of life there.
So they live and work here?
They get paid. But we are the lowest paid NGO in the world; you don’t come for the money. Their food, board, medical, and education is free. People stay here for 20, 30 years, and with very little money. What is the magic here? I don’t know, I can’t explain. Ask them. You ask them what makes them stick. They’ll feel shy about it, but put them on record, I want to hear. They never tell me. They’ll probably tell you [laughs].
Do you think that one day we’ll all be back living in villages?
I think one day, people will realise that living in cities is hell and it’s time to go back home.
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The time is coming very fast. The south of India is bursting—not acceptable. We can’t live decently, with dignity, with self-respect and with self-esteem like this. We have to come back to the villages, and when we do, I think we will find a quality of life that is different.
FARAH MOHAMED IS AN ENABLER
SUBJECT
INTERVIEWER
LOCATION
WEATHER
Farah Mohamed
Berry Liberman
Toronto, Canada
Windy
OCCUPATION
PHOTOGRAPHER
DATE
UNEXPECTED
Founder of G(irls)20
Michelle Yee
July 2014
Common sense
In 2012, Farah Mohamed was voted in the top 25 most influential women in Canada. A far cry from her childhood as a refugee fleeing Uganda with her family, which saw them leave a life of plenty for a life of hard work and sacrifices as Idi Amin expelled all Asian-Ugandans in the early 1970s. Farah grew up aware of those sacrifices and conscious of her privileged fate. Today, her resume is a list of dazzling achievements, from politics, philanthropy and finance to climbing Mount Kilimanjaro—feats, which according to Farah, involved no risk-taking at all. That is, until she became the founder of G(irls)20, an organisation which enables young women to design solutions that economically advance girls and women around the world. For Farah, life has become a commitment to challenge the status quo, to “push that envelope, take that risk, dive into the deep end.” I first met Farah at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford, a gathering of social entreprenuers, thinkers and changemakers who are tackling the world’s biggest problems. Just the place you’d expect to find a person who describes herself as “disruptive.” A brief chat in the tea tent was not enough, so we planned to catch up again. Months later on Skype—it’s midnight in Toronto and midday in Melbourne—Farah is planning a trip to Australia for the G(irls)20 Summit, and I’m brimming with questions. Every year, the G(irls)20 Summit strategically meet in the lead up to one of the world’s most powerful gatherings—the G20. Women between the ages of 18–20 are selected from the G20 nations to define the issues they feel are most important and require global attention. Make no mistake, this is a very big deal. One of the strongest arguments for solving global poverty problems is the empowerment of women. Recent studies show undeniably, that education and financial liberation of women—from land ownership rights to banking— brings measurable, scalable impact to the entire community. For the first time in history, women are being valued as core social, economic and political players. Yet violence and prejudice continue to plague society. The road is long and for those of us impatient for change, it seems much too long and too arduous. That’s why Farah Mohamed and G(irls)20 are seating young women at the table, placing their agenda wholly in view and putting hope back into the conversation.
“Cynicism is like the death of creation.”
BERRY LIBERMAN: So, tell me, what is G(irls)20?
FARAH MOHAMED: G(irls)20 is a Canadianbased, globally active, organisation that puts at its very heart the importance of economically advancing girls and women around the world. Basically, we took the concept of G20 and said, “If you are truly serious about growing your economies, stabilising your countries, you need to use all of your resources. Half your human resources—human resources being one of the most important resources—are girls and women. You clearly have to invest in girls and women if you’re going to reach those growth targets.” We took that concept and put girls at the centre—18 to 20-year-old girls, one from each G20 country, as well as other countries. We look at the agenda of the G20 two months before they meet so we can give recommendations back. And while we’re doing that, we invest in the girls. If you only get together and tell stories, then all you’ve done is have a nice little “kumbaya” meeting. So we go to the host country—this year it’s Australia—we bring these girls together from different backgrounds, over the course of 10 days and spend 50 per cent of that time investing in the girls. Let’s spend two days looking at the issues the G20 leaders will be looking at, a day strategising and what the recommendations should be, and then present it to the G20 leaders. In this case, we’re in negotiations with the prime minister’s office to have it actually hand over the communiqué to the prime minister. And then—the part I love the most, the girls have new ideas and new networks, new skills—let’s send them back home and get them to start their own initiative based on what they’ve learned, with ongoing support. That is what G(irls)20 does.
That’s remarkable. Why such young women, and only in that age bracket?
It was a big decision, but we’re actually going to raise it to 23 next year. We chose the original category because after consulting with people who work in this area and looking at what was coming out of the International Labour Organization, the OECD [The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development], the World Bank—these are the developmental years for girls.
DUMBO FEATHER
FARAH MOHAMED
MIGRANT
We believe that you need to engage young women at the age when they’re starting to make some very big decisions about their careers. They’re either just coming out of high school, maybe starting their first job, maybe trying to figure out what career to take. This is such an important time for young people. Now we’ve decided to raise it to 23, because we’re dealing with some pretty big issues. It’s important to adjust the age in different countries. In some countries, you might find an 18-year-old is right up there with a 23-year-old and vice versa.
I’m very concerned that politics includes just one demographic; mostly it’s older men. So I’m fascinated with the idea of crafting these really important policy documents with certain age brackets…
Yes. We’re not just about putting together a policy document. We’re really trying to be true to our tagline, which is: “cultivating a new generation of leaders.” If we start when their ideas are already formulated, or if they’ve taken particular positions, we’ve missed that window. Right? I think it’s great to engage elders and seniors on particular issues because they have lots of wisdom. When we’re looking at where the world should go around economic policies and opportunities, I think we have to have our pulse on what young people need, particularly as we face things such as massive unemployment. What are young people going to do? What do they want to do? Where do they see the economic benefit? Where do they see the challenges?
I have found the government of Australia in particular, over the last five summits, to be incredibly open to hearing from young people. There seems to be a desire to say, “Look, we know what we know and what don’t we know.” And that has been unusual. That has been unprecedented. At least from here…
Hah! I’m not sure if you’ll find that the case this year. We’re on rather a rocky road.
Yeah, your politics are very interesting. There’s no doubt. But my communications with the Sherpa’s office and the prime minister’s cabinet have been very open and inviting. I think that speaks to Australia taking its role as the chair of the G20 incredibly seriously.
So how do you select the young women that come along for each G(irls)20 Summit?
The first step, I think, is the most important: we work with more than 40 different organisations around the world. We get them to disseminate the opportunity. It’s not Farah Mohamed sitting in Toronto trying to figure out who to go. The delegates can apply in many different ways. Where they have access to technology we ask them to directly apply to us. There’s a seven-question application form. We don’t look at their socio-economic status, we do not look at their academic status. We look at how innovative are they, how creative are they, how focused they are on their community service. What are their ideas for G20 leaders? Then we ask the girls to try send in a video if they can, and they must send in reference letter. If they can’t apply through the digital way, we ask them to either mail or fax something in, or they can work with one of our 40 partners to get something in.
Why, in the last decade particularly, are we seeing this surge globally in awareness and support of women’s issues? What’s changed?
I share that struggle. It’s not an issue of developed versus developing. Violence against women exists and it should not exist. Period. It exists in the home, it exists at work. But you’re seeing a shift. For example, there’s a program in India called Ring the Bell. This was an India-wide community-based program that called on people to ring their neighbour’s bell when they heard women being beaten in their own homes.
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This is where I personally struggle. Women were at the forefront of the revolution in Egypt, but it was also this time when they were raped in the streets; sexually brutalised.
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Then, we’ve seen great leadership on this issue. When you have people like the prime minister of Japan or President Clinton or Desmond Tutu saying, “We need to pay attention to the role of women in society,” then people start paying attention. So you’ve got that economic factor, you’ve got that leadership factor. I think the last thing you have is people saying, “Hang on a second—this shouldn’t be the exception to the rule. It should be the rule.” Girls should have every opportunity, girls can be engineers, girls can be doctors. Yes, we have challenges in certain parts of the world where women are not afforded the same access to education or jobs. But slowly, that is changing. Look at the revolution in Egypt. Women were at the heart of that.
THIRD QUARTER—2014
I think there are a couple of factors that have created this perfect storm. One has been a change in the way women are in the workforce. It used to be unusual to have this many women in the workforce. We have created this culture where women can be great mothers and great employees and CEOs and presidents and prime ministers. And this didn’t come easy, right? But mostly, we’ve seen great success at having women in leadership positions. Success breeds success.
We were in Mexico for our summit and every year, we choose an issue that even though it’s not on the G20 agenda, we believe should be addressed. When we were in Mexico, we chose violence against women in the workplace. And what we saw was that because the government realised women cannot go to work and be productive if they were going to be in violent situations, they were rolling out a cross-country campaign.
Wow. Initiated by the G(irls)20 Summit?
No, it started before we got there. What we were able to do was shine a light on it from an economic point of view.
You’ve got young women coming from regions of the world that are very fraught politically. If the key to economic growth and change is the empowerment of women, how do we get developing nations and countries with authoritarian regimes to understand this, or will they just follow the curve?
A bit of both. I think in places like India you see rape, violent against women. But we also see many, many women joining the workforce. There’s a study that showed one billion women will join the workforce in the next decade. So if India and China are going to keep up with growth, they’ve got to actually have humans able to do the work. Which means they have to employ women. They can’t just do it with men alone. They’re also seeing the quality of work that comes from women. If women owned more land, they wouldn’t just be farmers, they’d be small business owners. In many countries, you can’t own land if you’re a woman. We’re seeing that change. That’s a very developmental issue but it’s actually starting to take hold because we’re seeing the economic benefit. I think when you have people, again, like the prime minister of Japan, who has said the Japanese economy can only grow if women are a part of it, that’s a huge message.
I’m really glad you’re doing the work you’re doing and I’m not— I’d be so impatient and frustrated the whole time [laughs].
To be frank with you, I get frustrated. I think the best thing that can happen is there’s no need for me to have to empower girls or women because that is what happens. Not what needs to happen, but is happening.
DUMBO FEATHER
FARAH MOHAMED
OPTIMIST
Imagine if I talked myself out of a job, wouldn’t that be great? You know what I think is really striking—look at the women in positions of power. We only ever used to look at who was around G20 and say, “Oh look! Angela Merkel’s there.” That’s shifted. Look at the International Monetary Fund, headed up by Christine Lagarde. This is remarkable.
You sound really hopeful… Talk to me about your optimism in the light of a very frightening and often bleak political, economic and environmental climate.
I think my optimism comes from the delegates. You meet these young women who don’t see gender as holding them back. The other thing is, I’ve seen great results. At the end of it we say, “Go back and do something in your community.” I love that an 18-year-old girl will leave our summit, go back to Indonesia and start a mobile library. That’s crazy! She’s 18! My optimism comes from spending time with these young women. They see themselves as the next prime minister or CEO or farmer or whatever they want to see themselves as. They’re not told what they’re going to be.
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THIRD QUARTER—2014
There are days where I’m reading the newspapers and feel so down and out, like, How will we ever fix the world’s problems? There are many of them. But I have to believe that I can continue this job and make the kind of investment that I do. A wise friend recently said to me, “Hope is not something you have or something you wish for, it’s something you do.”
Yes. I think that is so wise. Every year, when I walk away from the summit, I’m dead tired. But I’m as tired as I am completely revved up. It is the most unique feeling in the world to be equally as exhausted as you are exhilarated. Truly.
I was raised by people who said, “If you don’t like it, fix it. Don’t bitch about it, don’t complain about it.” These are two people who grew up very, very wealthy in Africa, lost everything because they had to come to Canada as refugees. And guess what? Survival instinct kicks in, right?
Tell me about your parents’ journey and subsequently yours…
I get very emotional when I talk about my parents. I don’t think that I would ever have had the strength of character to do what they did. Our heritage is Indian, but my parents were born in Africa. They lived very comfortable lives in Africa. They had my sister in London, in Wimbledon, and then they came back to Africa, and had me. In 1972, Idi Amin decided that Asian Ugandans were no longer welcome in Uganda. So he kicked them all out. They were given very little time to leave with whatever they could take. So my parents jumped on a plane and they came to Canada, because the prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, said, we’ll keep it open until every last Asian Ugandan is through that door.
DUMBO FEATHER
FARAH MOHAMED
SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR
What leadership!
Wow!
It’s funny, no one really knows the full extent of the relationship between Pierre Trudeau and the Aga Khan. But there was an affinity between Canada and Ismailis— they’re a sect of Muslims, the Shi’ite category, very liberal minded. Canada is a country known for—or was, maybe, I hope it still is—its “humanitarian” view of the world. So if people are in danger, we have a very open policy towards refugees. So this policy allowed this body of people, 30,000 of them, in a very short period of time, to find their way to Canada. So much so that when Prime Minister Trudeau died some 10 years ago or so, the Aga Khan was an honorary pall bearer at his funeral. Isn’t that crazy? Anyway, my parents came to Canada. My father’s sister was in the town that we moved to. Everyone got spread out. So some family ended up in Switzerland, some in Germany, some in Russia, some in Miami. Everyone just went wherever they could. So my parents went to Canada and they were raising two kids without much money. We grew up without a lot of stuff. We went to Niagara Falls a lot because it was free entertainment! And my parents were very big on keeping our family together. They came to Canada speaking six different languages and they only spoke English in the house so my sister and I would learn English. My sister was only three so she had a very slight British accent. I only spoke Swahili and now I can’t speak any, but my parents decided we were going to speak English so we would learn the way of being in Canada. When my sister and I were old enough, we had to go and volunteer, so we volunteered at nursing homes, my sister had a paper route. We were very civically minded. So I think it was just ingrained in us. That if you wanted to make the world a better
place you’d better do your part. And we’ve only recently started talking about this, but they felt pretty indebted to Canada too.
Listening to your story of coming into a liberal, pluralist, humanitarian country like Canada—which Australia once was— makes me think of what we’re experiencing here at the moment: violence, aggression and enormous xenophobia towards refugees and asylum seekers, who come for solace and often feel so indebted to the nation that welcomes them. As is Australia.
Yeah. And many nations are built on that. Typically, refugees or immigrants work very, very tough jobs. They build communities and countries and become the backbone of them quite often. Canada’s a country made up of refugees, it’s a country of immigrants.
Yes! Very much so! But I’ve been to Australia three times in the last year and I’ve noticed there doesn’t seem to be a great openness towards people who are from “away,” if I might put it that way.
“People who are from away.” That’s the way we should put it and it would be less aggressive. I think being isolated and affluent has somehow dimmed the Australian sensibility to struggle. This week, the Australian Government sent a boat of Tamils back to Sri Lanka. I think this country is in crisis, a moral crisis.
Wow. Well I hope it hasn’t turned the tide. When you have political shifts, when somebody comes in and changes the way your social fabric works, people can’t just assume that that’s okay. It will start to take over, slowly. It’ll creep into your social fabric; it’ll creep into the way you do immigration.
And that’s what we’re seeing.
Well I worry that Canada has the potential to go down that path and I’m glad we haven’t yet, we still understand that we’re a nation made up of immigrants.
Well, I don’t think I ever thought of myself as an entrepreneur, until I was in the back seat of a cab in Mexico City and this woman turned around and said, “So when did you figure out that you were going to be an entrepreneur?” And I looked at her and I’m like, “What?”. She said, “Yeah Farah! You might not think of yourself that way, but you are in fact a social entrepreneur.” The way I think about being a social entrepreneur is first of all, I’m out to change the term “not for profit.” I hate being defined by what I’m not. So when people say, “Oh you’re not for profit!” I’ll stop them. Dead stop them. And say, “Actually I’m a social profit.”
I like to be a disrupter.
ISSUE 40
I want to change things. So I became very comfortable with the word “entrepreneur.” Entrepreneurs by definition don’t let things stay the same. I think that’s what I really identified with. I don’t think the status quo, when it comes to women, is good enough. I don’t think that equality is enough—why should we stop at 50/50 when in
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I think the reason it took me a while to get used to the label “social entrepreneur” was because when I think about what I do through G(irls)20, I don’t necessarily think about it as what you would normally see an entrepreneur do. That’s more aligned with business. And when people think about charity, and then you put the word “business” in there, it makes people uncomfortable. I finally figured out that I like to create that level of discomfort.
THIRD QUARTER—2014
You’ve come from such an interesting background. And you’ve been called a social entrepreneur—I want to talk about that term. I want to know what that means to you.
some places it should be 80/20? So I became very comfortable with the idea of being an entrepreneur. And then I thought, Why shy away from being a social entrepreneur? You are in fact driving a profit. The profit in this case, is a people profit. Somebody once called me a “disturber”; someone who thrives in chaos. I don’t need chaos to do a good job! But I need to know that the status quo can be disrupted and can lead to good change. And that’s the charge. That’s why I think the words and the term “social entrepreneur” fit what G(irls)20 does. We’re looking at something like the G20, which is established, and we’re saying, “Hang on a second. We want to use the structure that exists but we want to change the impact that structure is having.” You don’t need to blow things up to make them work better. You can actually work with something that is structurally there but redefine it.
What impact do you think G(irls) 20 has had so far?
This will be our fifth year. I think we are part of a global community that has been able to really knock on the door of the G20 and other leaders and say, “You will only succeed in meeting your economic goals if you strategically invest in girls and women.” We’ve now started to really articulate that women need to be part of every aspect of that equation. You can’t just say, “We’re going to allow more women to have access to capital.” Nuh-uh. Not good enough. You can’t do this in a piecemeal approach. I think one of the best things we’ve done is, every single year, enabled a young woman to do something, to see her own potential, to take that potential, go back to her community and start something. For me that domino effect is incredibly powerful. People say to me all the time, “Farah, 24 girls, 21 girls, 20 girls, really?”
Meaning: “Is that enough, come on, what kind of change can you expect?”
Yeah. And what I would say to you is:
Nelson Mandela was one person who had incredible impact. Mother Teresa had a great impact. The world is made up of very powerful individuals.
DISRUPTER
Our girls, we’re cultivating them to be whatever they want to be, wherever they want to be, whenever they want to be it.
Sometimes I think, If I had a big microphone and the world was listening, what would I say? What would you say?
DUMBO FEATHER
FARAH MOHAMED
Hah! It’s a big one…
[Long pause] Apparently nothing…
My mind is spinning. I would say, “Don’t invest in women because you think it’s the right thing to do.” I’m struggling with this. I don’t want people to invest in women because they feel like they have to. I want people to invest in women because it is a game-changer. I truly believe it’s a safe bet to invest in a woman. It is a calculated well-thought-out-risk to invest in a woman. When you make an investment, you look at it from a bunch of different angles. And in every single aspect, when you look at investing in a woman—whether it’s going to have a spin-off effect, an impact, be an advantage to a bottom line—the answer is yes, yes, yes. If somebody gave me one of those bullhorns, asked me to stand on a milk crate, I think I would struggle because there’s so many things that you could say about why it’s important to invest in women. I would almost stand up there and go, “Duh”
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THIRD QUARTER—2014
[laughs] “this is a no-brainer! Right?”. I’m not going to win any awards for being pithy. But I would say if anything’s common sense, this is common sense.
Common sense is not so common, by the way…. And you’re seeing the change when these young women go back into their communities.
Oh yes. I am. And not just in themselves. You see how hard they work in their own communities, how hard they work to get media to pay attention to the messages, meet with their ministers, to go back to their schools, to engage other girls to see the potential in themselves. So picking these young women, you’ve got to be careful. Because you’re asking them to be ambassadors for change.
Well that’s interesting because you’re bringing these young women—some of them from places where religion and state are not separate—of vastly different backgrounds together. Have you seen any conflicts between them emerge?
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t call it conflict. But I would say there are times, particularly in the early days when they all come together. But they don’t struggle necessarily to see the other’s point of view because they’re so open-minded and they’re so eager. Like, here’s a group of girls who know they’ve been chosen for this from 1200 applications. So they’re invested in already. They’ve had media training, access to some information they would not have otherwise had; they’ve got a bundle of reading that they’ve had to do. So they walk into the room they’re eager and excited and nervous. Where I think you see the dynamic between different cultures and the different ways that these girls have been raised, or the way that they think, is when they spend an entire day negotiating their recommendations. They will fight for what they believe in. And it is phenomenal.
Do you grapple with moving past prejudice, which can come from our narrative and the narrative of our parents and of our cultures?
DISTURBER
Yes. And it goes deeper than that. All of these girls have access to some kind of communication. They’re all worldly. They probably all come with their own perception of what each culture is—whether it’s timid or outspoken or whatever. I don’t know how it all plays out. We haven’t seen a pattern of: “these countries hang out with these countries,” or anything like that. In the lead-up to the summit, they all have to write something, and we share it amongst them. We try to just kill all those pre-conceived notions before they even walk in the same room. I didn’t set out to create an alumni of young leaders. But now, we’ve created this network of young women who help each other. So for example, today I was on their Facebook group, and one of them said, “I’m doing research on X, Y, Z, can anyone tell me blah, blah, blah?” Well, within like 45 minutes, she had 10 responses from 10 different girls in 10 different countries
FARAH MOHAMED
When the woman who was the benefactor and I first met, we decided we were going to work in three areas. One of the three areas was girls and women. I struggled for about six months trying to figure out what we could do that was not going to duplicate what other people were doing, was not going to compete with other people. So I went through a number of different things we could do, none of them panned out, none of them seemed like they could be a good idea.
DUMBO FEATHER
So what originally gave you the idea?
Canada was hosting the G20. I was reading the paper. I went to bed. Four o’clock in the morning, I woke up and went, “We’re going to have a G(irls)20!” She said, “I really like the idea but let’s pitch it to some people.” So we put together a group of six people.
I pitched the idea and six months later, of course, we had our first summit. It worked because it was great timing. I wanted to make sure we were going to work in the space between politics and economics, because I think that’s where change happens. And she took a leap of faith. And boom, there we were. I wish there was something more academic to the creation of this. But truly, it was timing, thinking creatively, having someone who would believe in the idea and then just putting your head down and getting it done.
Your work is inspiring, but I guess sometimes it’s intimidating—if you’re sitting at home going, Yeah, I don’t have any fabulous ideas. I’m stuck in a job that I hate. But I really, really care about the world and I want to be a part of change. What part do we play?
I love this question. I think change is so individual. You can be a part of it no matter what. I started off doing volunteer work. People should figure out what they are passionate about. They’ll find some way to make a difference. You can be on a board, it means you can be a volunteer, it can mean just about anything. We are not limited by access anymore. Technology has made the world a smaller place. So you could be passionate about gorillas in Uganda and do something about it.
I agree. But I spent many years personally feeling paralysed by all the things I wanted to do and no immediate awareness of the access points to do it…
We have to increase those access points. I want to create something called Girls on Boards. My vision is, by the time you’re 20, you should be on a community board. It’s not just about serving on boards, it’s not just about cutting a check, in fact, it should be anything but those things in some cases. People need to feel invited. People need to feel empowered. If you can create that, then people will come.
You use a word that’s my favourite word in the whole entire world: “empowered.” But to make someone else feel empowered, to lead a change where others feel empowered, that actually takes a great leader.
I appreciate that. I really do. You’ve caught me at an interesting time because we’re a month away from the summit and I’m in panic mode. Everybody wants to come to Australia. There’s a reason we had 1200 applications this year! The most we’ve had any year is close to 700 for Paris. Their expectations of what they’re going to get from the G(irls)20 experience is pretty overwhelming for me. Because these girls [sighs] their potential is great. They’re giving us 10 days of their lives, and they have already said to us, ‘This is what I’m going to do when I go back.’ I feel like that’s a massive responsibility. Forget about the fact we have people funding us, forget that we have many partners giving us content…
ISSUE 40
I can understand you feeling reticent about the Farah Mohamed show. Because you don’t want to distract from all the incredible work that everyone around you is doing. But it is so inspiring to hear about your journey and what you’ve built, because it sews the seeds.
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So you might have a leader, but if you have a leader and nobody following you, what are you leading? You’re in a group of one.
THIRD QUARTER—2014
But you’ve got to create that space, right? I very rarely do these types of interviews that focus on me, by the way. Because I do think the power of G(irls)20 is the delegates and our partners. And we’ve created that space where people can share that stage. To me that’s the recipe for success.
Incredible. So what advice would you give to 20-year-old Farah?
Oh good Lord. “Don’t be afraid to take a risk.” I took my risks too late in life.
Why do you say that?
The biggest risk I ever took was G(irls)20, to be honest. I graduated with two degrees, I went into politics, I moved to Ottawa, I took a job, I left that job, I went into another job. The biggest risk I ever took was when I was 40 years old. I think about the things I didn’t do that I could have done. And my life has turned out really, really nicely. I love my life. I absolutely love where I am in life. But I would say, “Don’t be afraid to take that risk. Think about all the things you want to do and the time that you have to do them. Just go for it!” They’ve got to be calculated risks. But to get up, you’ve got to fall. I would say to people, “Push that envelope, take that risk, dive into the deep end. Don’t worry about your plan B. Have a plan B, but don’t worry about it.” I’ve always trusted my gut. It doesn’t matter if it’s about what school to go to, what job to take, who to date, who to hire… People have said to me, “I wouldn’t hire that person.” I’m like, “Well I would.” You’ve got to believe in people, that’s the other thing. We are so sceptical sometimes. It holds us back. You don’t allow yourself to actually embrace that which could be good and you’re going to pass up on it because you’re too sceptical. Cynicism is like the death of creation. It’ll kill all types of creation.
Instantly.
It’s shocking.
Yeah. You might as well just put things over your ears, close your eyes and shove a sock in your mouth. Because you’re not going to go anywhere. You’re never going to move forward in society. You know, we just had a by-election—30 per cent turnout. It’s disgusting.
If anyone ever put me in charge of a country I would say, “If you don’t vote you don’t get a passport, you don’t get your health card, you don’t get your driver’s licence. Welcome to the world of Farah.”
DUMBO FEATHER
FARAH MOHAMED
FEMINIST
If you’re given the privilege of voting, you better exercise it.
www.leonardstreet.com.au . www.leonardstshop.com Melbourne . Fitzroy . Northcote . Windsor
BART HOULAHAN REDEFINES BUSINESS
SUBJECT
INTERVIEWER
LOCATION
WEATHER
Bart Houlahan
Mele-Ane Havea
Bogotรก, Colombia
Humid with drizzle
OCCUPATION
PHOTOGRAPHER
DATE
UNEXPECTED
Co-founder of B Lab
Chris Sembrot
May 2014
T-shirts instead of Harvard
“It made sense to us that business could indeed be a force for good and that this was an opportunity for us to serve a bigger role—to create a platform for those entrepreneurs and investors who wanted to use capitalism for change.�
xxx notorious for its high rates of kidnapping and terrorism, Colombia is now Once one of the most popular travel destinations in South America, an example of what is possible in situations where peace appears distant and largely impossible. It seemed apt, in this context of positive change, to be meeting with Bart Houlahan, a man who believes in what to others, might seem impossible; the idea of using business as a force for positive social and environmental impact. Bart is one of the three founders of B Lab—an organisation based in the United States that has started a movement to combine purpose and profit in business. The movement started seven years ago in the US, after Bart and his friend and colleague sold their t-shirt and basketball shoe company AND1, and watched as their integral values—community involvement, responsible business practice and workplace culture—were stripped away. They questioned how success in business had become limited to profit maximisation and set up B Lab with the goal of harnessing the power of business as a force for good. Seven years on, B Lab have developed a number of initiatives to further this goal: a certification for these types of businesses called the “B Corporation” certification, the “Impact Assessment” an online free assessment tool to “measure what matters” and a new type of company registration for businesses that want to pursue both profit and purpose. All of the tools have been created to support the entrepreneurs who believe that business can, and must, be done differently. I was in Colombia for a B Lab global gathering when I had the opportunity to talk to Bart. It wasn’t the first time we had spoken. In fact, we’d met a number of times through my work with Small Giants—Dumbo Feather’s parent company— to support this movement in Australia. It was however the first time we had the opportunity to sit down and talk properly. We spoke about the various twists and turns that had led us both to this hotel room, from him founding B Lab in the US, to my work in Australia in related fields, to meeting at the Skoll World Forum in the UK and now finally sitting in Bogota, Colombia. I was struck by Bart’s humility and authenticity, given how large his vision. It became obvious early in the conversation that it wasn’t about him, or B Lab or building the best certification in the world, but rather, it was about enabling a new way of doing business and the entrepreneurs behind them. Sitting with Bart, it was hard to ignore the serendipitous moments that had led to this conversation, and I couldn’t help but feel that perhaps, there was some element of fate at play.
MELE-ANE HAVEA: Do you believe in fate?
BART HOULAHAN: Do I believe in fate? I do not. I believe in free will. People make the life they work toward.
So tell me about the life that you’ve made for yourself. You, as a founder of B Lab, are leading a movement to redefine success in business. How did you wind up here?
Well just to explain from the outset, B Lab doesn’t want to be leading this movement. We view ourselves as a service agency for leaders who are truly creating impact, our entrepreneurs. There’s a reason why you may not have seen a lot of articles about us or about the non-profit B Lab. It’s quite intentional, in that we exist to serve entrepreneurs who are using businesses as a force for good. If we do not serve those entrepreneurs, we don’t create any impact. The real work is being done by the community of now 1000 B Corporations who are completely innovative in solving some of the world’s greatest challenges. Backing up to your question, I am a businessman by training. Went into investment banking on Wall Street right out of Stanford University. I actually loved the work, but didn’t enjoy Wall Street, so I left and moved to Boston where I continued in investment banking for another five years. I decided that investment banking— though I really enjoyed it—wasn’t going to be a career for me. I really wanted to be in operations. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I sketched out a six-year road map that included a business that I enjoyed, with partners whom I trusted and a place where I could be a senior member of the team. That plan included two years at Harvard Business School. I was a month away from starting at Harvard when I ran into my college roommate Jay Coen Gilbert, at a Stanford wedding. Perhaps a year earlier, he had started a small athletic T-shirt company called AND 1. It was very small; probably half a million dollars in revenues. Jay was lamenting that he hadn’t been able to find a chief financial officer to join the organisation. I called him some nasty words and said, “I can’t believe you didn’t call me.”
He said, “You’re going to Harvard! There’s no way you’re going to give up Harvard to come and join a half-million-dollar T-shirt company.” CAPITALIST
I said, “Well, it all depends upon what the T-shirt company aspires to be.” Over the course of the weekend we agreed that I should forego Harvard. I called, told them to keep their deposit, moved my wife and my two children from Boston to Philadelphia and joined AND 1.
DUMBO FEATHER
BART HOULAHAN
Wow.
That was in 1995.
So what was it that Jay said to you that weekend that made you change direction so completely?
It seemed like the six-year plan had accelerated. This was an industry that I was really interested in, with people I adored and trusted implicitly; an opportunity where I could be in a significant role, add immediate value and help the company grow. It was as if all the in-roads had been leap-frogged in a single weekend. It just made total sense. Harvard wasn’t going anywhere. If this didn’t work I could always go back to business school. This was the opportunity I’d been looking for, just a lot sooner than I expected.
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I originally joined AND 1 as the CFO, and became president a year later or so. It was a magical run. My first year we achieved 1.2 million in revenues and then we scaled it to a global footwear and apparel brand with 250–300 million in revenues. We were in 80 countries as one of the top-two basketball brands. And we did it the way that we wanted to; we built the company that we’d be proud of. For us, that meant an organisation that was family centric, that created an environment where employees and partners wanted to be, unparalleled benefits, a structure where nobody had set hours; you worked when you needed to work to get your job done.
You were responsible and accountable for your job, not for the hours at the office. Our sick policy was ‘if you’re sick, you’re sick, don’t come in and get the rest of us sick.’ We had eight dogs roaming through the office, a full court basketball court, yoga classes, dry cleaning and haircuts and all sorts of things to try and create an environment for the employees that felt like family. We realised pretty early on that the impact of our business was far beyond the 300 people that worked for us, that in fact, we had thousands upon thousands of people making our products overseas. We wanted to extend that familial approach to the factories where we made our apparel and footwear. That meant a rigorous code of conduct with quarterly audits. It meant approaching those suppliers like partners, rather than adversaries. That approach paid for itself many, many times over.
DUMBO FEATHER
BART HOULAHAN
EX-WALL STREET
We also were a global business that believed you could act locally. That meant we had 10 per cent of all profits going to charitable local organisations, we had a robust service program where we gave all employees two weeks a year to volunteer, paid. I’d say we were awakening to the global climate crisis. We were trying to do our part, albeit in small ways… I was there for about 11 years and there were some very clear learnings. The first was that business was the most powerful force in society. That if harnessed appropriately, it could be a force for good. But it wasn’t set up that way. As we scaled the organisation we recognised that our commitment to our community, our workers and the environment, frankly, became more difficult. We did a leveraged recap in 1999, where we brought in professional, outside investors. They were great investors, but we knew that the game had changed. We were playing with somebody else’s money and that meant that we had a legal responsibility to provide a real return to those shareholders. As we brought in new management, there were cultural expectations about what business was for. Finally, when we reached the moment of liquidity—the moment for this management team to move on—the opportunity for us to consider employees, community and the environment did not exist. At the moment of succession, certainly at least in the United States, it’s abundantly clear that you must maximise shareholder value as you sell the company. We knew what we were doing; I was an investment banker prior to our work at AND 1. The person who bought the company paid us absolutely fair value. It was his business thereafter. But within six weeks of the sale, whatever remaining commitment we had to our workers, our employees and the community was stripped out. It just seemed that there had to be a better way. There had to be a way that an entrepreneur could scale both profits and purpose and not lose mission at the moment that it mattered most, at the moment of succession. It was completely clear to me that business could be a force for good,
but there needed to be some structural changes to create an environment where an entrepreneur could indeed do both: make money, make a difference.
Were you and Jay both feeling the pressure from this experience to do something different?
It’s a good question. I think you’d get a different response from Jay and Andrew as to why they co-founded B Lab. We all came to this from a slightly different perspective, but with the same insight, which was that business was an incredibly powerful force that could be harnessed to truly solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. We also recognised we’d been given a gift through a successful private sector career. We’d be given the opportunity to choose our next step, which we all felt strongly should be more service oriented. It made sense to us that that business could indeed be a force for good and that this was an opportunity for us to serve a bigger role—to create a platform for those entrepreneurs and investors who wanted to use capitalism for change.
So what was the first step you took? What were peoples’ reactions?
The first step was listening. We interviewed hundreds, if not thousands of investors and entrepreneurs, thought-leaders, non-profits, who were in this space. Firstly, to try and figure out how we could be of service at all. If you look at our original business plan, it is very different than where we ultimately landed. The vision was the same, but the actual tools that we intended to use to build this platform—where we could redefine success in business—were different. That spirit has been maintained through all seven years of B Lab’s existence. We are true agnostics (but we’re not mission and vision agnostic). What we were trying to do for the first year and a half was to learn. There’d been people who had been doing this far longer than we had, who had made incredible progress. This existed way before B Lab and B Corporations.
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At the time, we observed that there were thousands of businesses that considered themselves triple-bottom-line businesses. But they were all screaming with their own voice: “I’m fair trade!” “I’m organic!” “I’m green!” “I’m local!” “I’m charitable!” “I’m an ESOP!” Those, to us, were manifestations of the same intent. Using business as a force for good. Our hope was to try and bring that community together under a common identity; to have a collective voice which could influence all business to move towards a sustainable future. So that was one novel insight we brought: this isn’t about your product or the practice, it isn’t about a particular constituency that matters most to you, it’s about a new way of doing business. We will be stronger and more impactful as a community rather than as individuals. So the idea of a corporate certification, something that looked at the whole rather than the individual pieces, was a novel place to start.
THIRD QUARTER—2014
All we were trying to do was harness this community, give it an identity and a platform to act as a collective.
We’re completely grateful to the founding B Corporations. Because frankly, they had an awful lot to lose in lending their name and credibility to a nascent movement. We were not competitive with any existing certification or existing organisation. We were creating a new opportunity for people to be part of something—cross industry, cross company size, cross geography,
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And what was the reaction of the market?
cross impact areas. I think people were willing to lead. At moments of crisis, leaders step up. People were evaluating the fact that there had been wonderful work for 35 years, but there just wasn’t acceleration. Leaders like Jeffrey Hollender of Seventh Generation and Adam Lowry of Method home products came together and said, ‘We’re direct competitors, but we both want to be B Corporations.’ Along with Xavier Helgesen from Better World Books and dozens of others, they ended up becoming our first 82 founding people. We stand on their shoulders, undoubtedly.
And now? Seven years on? How are you feeling about the progress of the movement?
Obviously we’re excited about the progress that’s been made and simultaneously realistic that we have an enormous way to go. We often talk about this collective work as a generational play, that we’re in it for the long haul. It’s a marathon. Perhaps we’re at marker one or marker two. But those markers were important. The next bit is about acceleration. So we’re really excited and simultaneously cognisant about the distance we still have to travel.
I share your views of both excitement and acknowledgement of the work that’s ahead. But do you feel successful in what you’ve done so far? How do you measure your success?
About two years ago, we banned any three-year outputs and outcome objectives from B Lab. We believe we have clarity on the next 12–18 months, and 20–30 years. What we are trying to instil in our team, our partners and in the community is the recognition that we need to be nimble, flexible and willing to pivot. We’ve pivoted over the last seven years, repeatedly, and it was simply a recognition that trying to predict clearly what tools would be necessary three years from now is unrealistic.
We measure our success in 12–18 month buckets, and whether it is moving us towards a generational change. The in-between is very murky.
DUMBO FEATHER
BART HOULAHAN
GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN
As a result, we need to be entrepreneurial in the way that we approach it. So we’re one of those organisations—and hopefully one of those movements— that believes that entrepreneurship can, and needs to be, at the centre of everything that we do.
And what about you personally? How do you measure your own success?
So if you haven’t noticed… I don’t like talking about myself.
[Laughs] I noticed! Has that always been the case?
It’s always been the case. It’s not that I’m uncomfortable with the spotlight. I don’t believe the spotlight deserves to be here. Well, for all the reasons we’ve already discussed. But, how do I measure my own success? First, as a father. Whether I’m prioritising family first. My definition of “family” is very broad.
I definitely get that sense.
Yeah, and as a result family to me includes friends and co-workers and the community of B Corporations and global partners. Those concentric circles, to me, matter most. I measure myself on whether I am being of service and use to people I care about most. Secondly, my time at B Lab is measured by what I—hopefully—have to give. If I thought there was something else that could use my modest skill sets to a greater
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ISSUE 40
THIRD QUARTER—2014
good, I’d go do that. But right now this seems like a place where I can be of service for, you know, the audacious goal of redefining the role of business in society. I think that’s a worthy cause to pursue. I think that’s pretty much how I look at the world. You can’t get mired in, ‘Who’ll join the community?’ ‘What partner did we sign?’ ‘What law passed?’ to measure your own success. It would be awfully exhausting.
It makes me think of a tweet from the Dalai Lama: “What is the meaning of life? To be happy and useful.” Where do you think that sense of responsibility came from? Was it something that was taught to you as a child?
Certainly. My father was a professor of English literature. My mother was originally a counsellor at the local YMCA. Both went on to successful entrepreneurial careers. I grew up in a suburb north of Chicago. We were fourth generation Evanstonians (this small town called Evanston where Northwestern University is). The sense of community is tangible in that area. So certainly, I think from a very early age, the idea of service to the community was incredibly important to our family. I’ve been asked often, “What was the ‘Eureka moment’ for you?” I don’t think there really was one. But there certainly was a moment of acceleration, and that was when my father passed at 63 of cancer. It was 11 years ago. I was 35. I had an 11 and nine-year-old daughter. Losing my hero, my perspective on the world was changed. I look at everything that has happened to our family from that day forward and the course was altered dramatically. I’m pretty confident that I wouldn’t be here at B Lab if my father hadn’t passed. My wife is the chief operating officer of an educational non-profit. I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t be doing that. My daughters, at 11 and nine, started their own B Corporation.
Your daughters started a B Corporation?
My in-laws raised bees and the year that my Dad passed was the first time that they had a significant honey flow, about 200 pounds—which is a lot of honey. We were around the dining room table talking about what to do with it and my nine-year-old said, “Well we should sell it and give the profits away to charity.” And my 11-year-old said, “Yeah, we should try to cure cancer.” So they came up with the name at the table and sketched out the logo. It’s called “Hives for Lives.” They have since raised $300,000 in nine years for cancer research.
Really?
They were in every Whole Foods store.
DUMBO FEATHER
BART HOULAHAN
AUDACIOUS
Wow. That’s a wonderful story!
That all wouldn’t have happened if my father hadn’t passed, obviously. My oldest daughter followed my father to Yale University, and she is about to graduate in a couple of weeks. My youngest just started at Stanford. It’s hard to know what the road would have looked like without that moment. But I think it’s fair to say that the idea of using the remaining time you have to the best of your own skill set became crystal clear. That changed me.
You described your father as your hero. I think that’s really beautiful.
He was all about family first. He lived his life with integrity and with community in his heart. He was adored by his family and friends, he was humble, he was brilliant and he was gracious. And he had great judgement without being judgmental. He was everything that I’d want to be.
Did he instil a love of literature in you?
Yes, yes! I really enjoyed sharing that with my daughters. My oldest is graduating with a theatre and film degree.
She believes in the power of art to change the world, using art as a tool for social justice. And both my daughters were honoured by CNN for their work at Hives for Lives, and one of the people they met at that gathering was Eve Ensler. Do you know Eve Ensler?
Yeah, The Vagina Monologues...
My oldest ran up to her and said, “You’re who I want to be. I’m trying to write my own book.” She was in eighth grade. And Eve, two years later, called Molly and said, “I’ve written a show for teenage girls, essentially about the plight of young women across the globe. I’d like you to audition for a role in it.” Molly landed a role. She travelled to Johannesburg to open the show and Eve has ended up being, essentially, a mentor and very close friend of Molly’s. That’s a gift, right? And that’s a gift from Dad.
Eve Ensler is remarkable…
She’s unbelievable. I’ve only had the privilege of meeting her a couple of times but the ability to be a global leader and still a personal friend to a 15-year-old girl is extraordinary. To see the kindness and the generosity in her heart and the time she makes for people is remarkable. She’s an amazing woman. So, I don’t know how I got on that tangent but in any case… I’ve enjoyed sharing that with Molly and Carly. The other thing is that you learn as much from your kids as you teach. The girls have taught me about entrepreneurism, they’ve taught me about leadership. They’ve taught me about grace and generosity and motivations, they’ve been a remarkable part of my life.
I heard a new word this morning—I think it sounds like it’s relevant to Molly—an “artivist.” Isn’t it? Activism in art. Art in activism.
Oh! That’s a beautiful word.
I love that.
I can imagine that watching B Corp translate to other cultures must be a really interesting experience.
I think more than anything else, attracting and retaining the next generation of great talent is going to drive this change as much as anything. When I speak to large corporations, and I talk about a shift in consumer behaviour, or the increase in capital flowing into “socially responsible” investing, sustainable investing and
ISSUE 40
When I graduated from college, I wasn’t looking for meaning in my work. I went to Wall Street and checked my values at the door; did my job for 15 hours a day picked my values up on the way back out. I think to a large degree that model doesn’t fly anymore. I think that millennials are looking for meaning and purpose in their work and in their life. They expect more than just money from their employment.
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Every Monday morning at B Lab we ring the bell to welcome new members into our community. And what is surreal for me is that currently, 27 per cent of those community members hail from outside of the United States. The incredibly innovative ways that they’re solving poverty challenges, rebuilding the community, preserving the environment, creating a great place to work or addressing wealth disparity—it’s absolutely amazing, and why we all get up in the morning.
THIRD QUARTER—2014
I certainly view this week as one of those markers that will redefine our trajectory as a movement. It is the first annual global gathering of partners, the recognition that there are entrepreneurs across the globe who are trying to use a for-profit vehicle to change the world.
impact investing, admittedly I don’t get a lot of buy-in from that community around those two issues. But then when I talk about talent and business schools and what currently represents 50 per cent of the global workforce millennials…
Really?
There is an acknowledgement that there is a battle for talent. If talent is interested in meaning and money, there is a realignment that will need to take place.
Sometimes I think, Is this a first world problem? I recognise that I’m hugely fortunate to find meaning in my work, but isn’t that something that only lucky people can think about? But that said, I do think this quest for meaning is universal, and, in a way, about evolution.
I think the evolution has been accelerated, frankly, by a tumultuous financial crisis that, for the globe, changed its perspective on business. When we began this initiative in 2006, the idea of talking about organisations with higher purpose, accountability and transparency was somewhat fringe.
Yeah. “Crazy hippies.”
Yeah, crazy hippies! Which was difficult for me to be categorised as! But post the financial decline, mainstream voices are calling for an evolution of capitalism. Some principles that we were fortunate to embrace early on put the movement in a good place to capitalise on a horrible financial crisis. Some of those include standing for something instead of against. Early on, as we talked with hundreds of entrepreneurs, there was clarity that they wanted to be a positive alternative. That being defined as what we are not wasn’t a great way to form a movement. So the impact assessment, you don’t earn any negative points. There are no prohibitives to being a B Corporation or joining this community. Instead, we’re offering a positive alternative for investors, consumers and policy makers to support. I think that has served this movement well. Positioning our core identity as being the positive alternative.
I’m curious about you and Jay being college roommates, friends and business partners. How does that work?
Jay and I have known each other now since 1985. I was 17 when we met. We were best friends before we became business partners. The reason why I get up in the morning is to serve the entrepreneur. I also get up to work with people I love. That begins with Jay and Andrew. Working with your best friends is a gift and a privilege. To have complete trust, recognise each other’s skills and weaknesses.
DUMBO FEATHER
BART HOULAHAN
THE CHANGE
I think the best entrepreneurs understand what they don’t know, and surround themselves with incredible talent. To have been surrounded by Jay and Andrew for decades now has been an incredible gift for me, because they bring skills I will never acquire. It’s made the team more powerful than the individual, by a lot.
Tell me about Andrew. How did he come into the picture? Wow. Long-term relationships!
Andrew was at Stanford with us. He was a couple of years behind us. But he was also a college dorm mate. So we lived together as well. We’ve known him for 27 years.
Yeah. So he was among the very first investors in AND 1, providing advice and financial wisdom. The three of us I think bring different skill sets and, most importantly, trust in each other.
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ISSUE 40
THIRD QUARTER—2014
Can I ask what really frustrates you? Please.
So I’m going to alter the question slightly. “What am I most worried about?” If that’s okay.
I worry about moving this initiative to mainstream. When we began this initiative, it wasn’t about just creating another certification or a new legal form or a vehicle to drive capital, it was about moving all business towards a more sustainable future. It was asking the fundamental question: “What is the role of business in our world?” and hoping to provide, along with legions of others who are working on the same issue, a path towards getting business more engaged. With more than three-quarters of the world’s economy in the private sector, it’s kind of necessary. Governments and non-profits are insufficient to solve these challenges. So what keeps me up at night, what I worry most about, are the incredible challenges of taking the power of a small group of visionary leaders and giving them the tools to affect business in the mainstream.
If we wake up a generation from now and all we’ve created is another bug on the side of a coffee bag… It probably will have been a waste of time. To come back to what we spoke about earlier: ‘Is this the highest and best use of your time? Is this achieving impact?’ The change that we seek is to redefine the role of business. The impediments and obstacles are many, and the journey will be a long one. I’m anxious about moving to mainstream.
DUMBO FEATHER
BART HOULAHAN
HAPPY AND USEFUL
I think this community has changed the conversation already, globally and beyond B Corporations. I think businesses as a force for good have already changed the conversation. You can see that in consumer trends, initiatives by government, movement of capital and business practice. If you go back, the change in how business engages with this idea in the last two decades has been dramatic. You go back two decades and people were writing a cheque to their local boys and girls club and calling it their corporate social responsibility. Providing a nice little ad campaign about it and they’ve checked the box. Today people are talking about subsidiaries and organisations that are focused on community and poverty alleviation. Sustainability is no longer just a department; it’s embedded in all departments of the organisations. So there’s been a pretty rapid movement. But that being said, we have such a long way to go. I’ll come back to when we started: people. I’m incredibly fortunate to work with and serve people that I love and admire. That keeps you going, very easily, very clearly. And secondly, I think there’s a reasonable shot that the vision of B Lab won’t be met in my lifetime. So you better enjoy the journey. Right? I try to do as much as I can with our community and the people with whom I work to enjoy those milestones, and recognise that the great progress we’ve made. We’ve in some small way contributed to that shift in the dialogue. We have these core guidelines up on the wall at B Lab that we’re going to share with the global partners this week about how to be an effective associate at B Lab: “We take the work seriously but not ourselves seriously.” You’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing.
“Be happy and useful.”
Indeed. I think that should be our new motto. I like that.
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The Nightingale and The Rose The Nightingale and The Rose is a collaborative film project between Del Kathryn Barton and filmmaker Brendan Fletcher (Mad Bastards). An animation based on the classic fairytale by Oscar Wilde, the story is a savage, timeless fairytale about a bird who discovers her “true lover.” She embarks on a quest to find the single red rose he needs to win his lover’s heart—but it comes at a chilling price. Watch out for the film in the next year.