Skoll World Forum: Phil Hope & Karen Tse

The opening session of the Skoll World Forum last night was a terrific reminder of the value of bringing different perspectives together and having the chance to stop and listen and reflect on the work that we do. The two most memorable speakers in the formal program, in my opinion, were Phil Hope, the Minister of the Third Sector in the UK, and Karen Tse, of International Bridges to Justice, a network of legal clinics and public defenders working for judicial reform around the world.

The Minister’s comments were the most forward thinking and provocative about the social enterprise that I had heard from an elected official: he talked about how social enterprises can tap into capital markets, how we might be able to create a social stock exchange, and the need for more transparency and accountability in thinking about impact.

Karen Tse was talking on a panel about how to navigate across cultures; she commented that the oversimplification of cultural difference often leads to mistaken assumptions. For example, she said that as an Asian woman, she often found the overt biases working in Asia to be easier to overcome than the subconscious biases she faces in the West, or that there are in fact some universal principles of justice that we should not be afraid of promoting globally. She reminded us that she and her colleagues view compassion and recognizing our interconnectedness as the essential tools to being personally effective in this work.

And of course, the value of any conference is who you meet in the halls and at the receptions. There are many personal friends, friends of Acumen Fund, and new faces who are on a shared journey of inquiry about how to make social enterprises more effective. More later.