Regional Briefing: Contemporary Arab World: Present and Future

The 2011 Global Donors Conference will feature region-specific briefings so participants can gain a sense of the top trends in the areas they fund, and have an opportunity to meet other people who are also funding in that part of the world. Here is a preview of one of briefings!

Topic: Contemporary Arab World: Present and Future

Presenter: Marwa Maziad, Fellow Middle East Center, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington

Description: On April 1st I will be giving a regional briefing on the Middle East, with a focus on “Contemporary Arab World: Present and Future,” after a two-week fieldtrip to Egypt. The Arab World is undergoing massive transformation that will have long-lasting consequences in establishing a new relationship between citizens and government, in these countries. This change is both positive and inevitable. Arabs have revolted armed only by their youthfulness and their use of technology, in a quest for liberty and dignity as citizens. This is a transformation the entire world is eager to support.

In my briefing, I will focus on Egypt as a significant country in the Arab world, the Middle East, and International affairs. What opportunities might ensue for global philanthropists to catch a “Revolutionary Train” that has already left the station? How can Arab values of liberty and dignity intersect with the values of foundations and organizations in the Pacific Northwest in order to instill new partnerships, alliances, and coalitions that exceed mere “charity” or “donation”, given the existing riches of the Arab world, but rather foster sustained “philanthropic” ties in promotion of the well-being of all humans? And what are some of the best practices in international grantmaking, specifically in the Arab context? It seems that an “Emerging Democratic Arab World” is an idea whose time has come, and as Victor Hugo said “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” This briefing will highlight and answer questions regarding the context in which opportunities could emerge for philanthropists interested in supporting this powerful idea.

One Man’s Plan to Save a National Treasure

Take a few minutes to watch Scott Pelley’s interview with Greg Carr on 60 Minutes.

http://cnettv.cnet.com/av/video/cbsnews/atlantis2/cbsnews_player_embed.swf
 

Below is an excerpt from the accompanying article:

As Carr and the 60 Minutes flew over the landscape, they saw hippopotami, antelope and elephant. But not many – Gorongosa is a tragedy in two parts, with the loss of its animals and the suffering of its people, whose lives haven’t improved much in a few hundred years.

Asked why he chose this place, Carr tells Pelley, “Gorongosa was, most people consider, the most popular national park in all of Africa and the most density of animals, the most beauty, the most diversity of ecosystems. So, you have one of the most beautiful places in the world and you also have perhaps the worst poverty of anywhere in the world, side by side.”

To Carr, that’s an opportunity. It’s the same kind of business sensibility that made him a fortune. Right out of Harvard in the mid-1980’s, he and a partner developed a hot new product called voicemail. In 1998, he cashed out to the tune of $200 million and devoted himself to bringing entrepreneurship to charity.

“So, the idea is take the beauty of the park and use that to do human development. Attract the tourists who will spend the money to create the jobs and lift everybody outta poverty. For an entrepreneur, it’s kind of a compelling opportunity to, you know, one plus one equals ten,” he explains.

Margaret Larson to deliver closing keynote speech

We are pleased to announce that Margaret Larson, award-winning broadcast journalist and host of KING 5 Television’s “New Day Northwest” will deliver the closing keynote speech at the 2011 Pacific NW Global Donors Conference.

For more than twenty-five years, Margaret Larson worked as a broadcast journalist, most notably with NBC News as a foreign correspondent based in London, news anchor for the Today show and Dateline NBC reporter, and as a reporter/news anchor at KING-TV in Seattle.

During the Kurdish refugee crisis in southern Turkey at the end of the first Persian Gulf War, she began reporting on global humanitarian crises. What she learned and experienced changed her outlook, her career and her life.

As a result, she and her husband moved to Seattle in 1993 to focus on family, settle into a community to raise their son, and find time to devote to international causes in partnership with relief agency Mercy Corps.

In 2003, she formed a communications consulting practice for international nonprofit organizations including World Vision, Mercy Corps, PATH and Global Partnerships, creating videos and online content to serve humanitarian causes.

Her aid-related work has taken her to southern Lebanon, the Kosovo crisis, Afghan refugee camps one week after the launch of the US bombardment, the most recent Iraq ground war, the South Asian tsunami and its one-year anniversary, the depths of the African AIDS pandemic, maternal/child health programs in India and Asia, and the child soldier crisis in northern Uganda.

Larson has won broadcast journalism awards including four Emmys, two national Clarion awards, three Telly awards and a national Society of Professional Journalists award. In 2004, she received the national Headliner Award from the Association of Women in Communication. In 2005, she was named “Best Voice for Humanitarianism” by the Seattle Weekly newspaper. In 2007, she was selected for the Women of Vision award by the “Women Work!” organization in Washington D.C. And in 2008, she was chosen to create the profile videos for the global humanitarian Opus Prize awardees in Nicaragua, India, and Burundi.

Larson lives in Bellevue, Washington, with her husband Tim and son Kyle.

Greg Carr’s Big Gamble

Greg Carr, keynote speaker at the 2011 Global Donors Conference has been profiled in numerous publications including the Smithsonian. An excerpt from the article is posted below – but you can read the whole thing by clicking here! We look forward to sharing more of the articles with you over the next few months in preparation for his speech on Friday, April 1st.

What Carr has embarked upon is one of the largest individual commitments in the history of conservation in Africa. To restore Gorongosa National Park, he has pledged as much as $40 million over 30 years, an almost unheard-of time frame in a field where most donors—governments and nonprofit organizations alike—make grants for four or five years at most. He also plans one of the largest animal reintroduction efforts on the continent and hopes to answer one of the most debated questions in conservation today: how to boost development without destroying the environment.

His efforts come against a backdrop of worldwide biodiversity loss, which is at its worst in developing regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, where conflict and poverty accelerate natural resource destruction. Last year, the World Conservation Union reported that 40 percent of the species the group assesses are under threat of extinction.

Gorongosa, Carr believes, will change all that.

The park was once one of the most treasured in all of Africa, 1,525 square miles of well-watered terrain with one of the highest concentrations of large mammals on the continent—thousands of wildebeest, zebra and waterbuck, and even denser herds of buffalo and elephant than on the fabled Serengeti Plain. In the 1960s and ’70s, movie stars, astronauts and other celebrities vacationed in Gorongosa; tourists arrived by the busload. Tippi Hedren, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, was inspired by Gorongosa’s lions to build her own exotic cat preserve outside Los Angeles. Astronaut Charles Duke told his safari guide that visiting Gorongosa was as thrilling as landing on the moon.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/mozambique.html#ixzz1CLLXzDFa

Keynote Speaker Confirmed: Greg Carr, Philanthropist & Human Rights Activist

We are pleased to announce that one of the keynote speeches at the Pacific NW Global Donors Conference will be delivered by entrepreneur, human rights activist and philanthropist, Gregory C. Carr.

Greg Carr is leading a bold philanthropic venture to restore Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, which was once described as the place “where Noah left his ark”. The Carr Foundation has committed $40 million dollars over 30 years to protect and restore the park’s ecosystem, and to help develop an eco-tourism industry in the communities surrounding the park. By reintroducing animal species (elephants, hippos and other bulk grazers) to the land, creating jobs within the park, funding schools and health clinics and training local farmers, the Carr Foundation (in it’s partnership with the government of Mozambique) has embarked on an ambitious restoration effort.

Carr’s environmental work in Africa is supplemented by his commitment to human rights in the Pacific NW. Born and raised in Idaho, Carr purchased the Aryan Nations compound in Northern Idaho, following a successful lawsuit by the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of two victims of attacks by security guards near the compound. The lawsuit effectively bankrupted the far-right white supremacist organization. He then dismantled the compound, turned it into a peace park and signed the deed over to the North Idaho College Foundation in 2002.

We invite you to read more about Greg Carr and his philanthropic ventures and work as a human rights activist. Carr has been profiled in Outside Magazine, The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes.

Don’t miss the opportunity to hear Greg Carr speak at the 2011 Pacific NW Global Donors Conference on April 1, 2011. Register now!

2010 Global Donors Conference Highlights

Bookda Gheisar, Paula Clapp, Kavita Ramdas, John Harvey and Bill Clapp

On March 19-20, over 180 participants, speakers and volunteers gathered in downtown Seattle for the first-ever Pacific Northwest Global Donors Conference.

The conference, called “Pathways for Strategic Giving,” included plenary sessions featuring Kavita Ramdas, President of the Global Fund for Women, and Bill Gates Sr., Co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Participants shared strategies with their peers in lively workshops ranging from “Conflict Resolution, Peace and Human Security” and “Building Sustainable Assets for the Poor” to “Pathways for Global Giving” and “Monitoring and Evaluation Strategies that Make a Difference”.

Ramdas opened the conference with a passionate defense of the importance of small grants, risk-taking, and the great outcomes that can be born from modest beginnings. Plenary speakers John Harvey from Grantmakers Without Borders encouraged us to listen to grantees, and Betsy Brill helped us hone our missions. Gates Sr. closed the conference by suggesting that attendees do research, choose an issue, talk to each other, and work with the organizations represented at the conference. He ended by suggesting that “Knowledge is not a finite resource; neither is compassion.”

Positive feedback on the refreshing and energizing nature of the conference has been pouring in. One participant commented that “[the conference] was small enough to get to know folks and large enough to show a movement brewing up.”

Take a minute to watch the video highlights from the 2010 conference!