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The Philanthropy UK Newsletter is grateful to Alliance magazine for its permission to reproduce the following summaries of its event reports. The full reports can be accessed via their website.
The annual Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, now in its fifth year, is above all a celebration of social entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurs. The annual Skoll Awards are unchallenged Oscars of the field. The recent Forum, held in Oxford, UK at the end of March, was also live testimony to the pulling power, sorry, convening power, of today’s philanthropists, with one ex-US President, one almost President and a clutch of Nobel Laureates heading a glittering array of speakers.
The potential benefits of this convening power are clear. Jeff Skoll’s film company Participant Productions funded production of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, which has played a huge role in bringing the issue of climate change onto the public agenda, to take just one example.
But there are others who feel the social entrepreneurship field over-emphasizes the importance of individuals. Paul Farmer, founder of Partners in Health and one of this year’s Skoll awardees, ended an inspiring address with the suggestion that social entrepreneurs should ‘get on the social justice bus and learn to sit quietly, only occasionally taking the driving seat’. Even Skoll Foundation President Sally Osberg, closing the Forum, quoted Jean Monnet’s saying that ‘Nothing changes without individuals; nothing lasts without institutions’.
Whatever view one takes about the importance of social entrepreneurs in the scheme of things, it seems that the struggle for definitions continues. While honoured to receive a Skoll award, Paul Farmer confessed to feeling puzzled as to what made him a social entrepreneur. But there also seems to be widespread agreement among the social entrepreneurship community that social entrepreneurs are peculiarly well fitted to deal with the overwhelming urgency of the problems the world faces – an urgency to which both Jeff Skoll and Al Gore eloquently testified.
What about culture, the official theme of the fifth Skoll World Forum? ‘Culture is who we are and what we believe,’ said Stephan Chambers, chair of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship. ‘Sometimes problems are about behaviour and habits and histories not about cash or incentives, and the solutions also lie in behavour and habits and art.’
But in a way all this is obvious. The real crowd-pullers were not the breakout sessions in the ‘Culture, Context and Social Change’ track but those on topics of perennial interest like measurement and finance in the aptly named ‘Evergreen’ track.
Caroline Hartnell is Editor of Alliance magazine.
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