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2012 Global Hero Award: Therese Caouette

By Nina Carduner

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn presented the second annual Global Hero Award, which recognizes a Washington-based change agent who has made significant contributions to global issues. In light of Seattle’s Next 50 celebration, Mayor McGinn shared his appreciation for being the mayor of a city that is full of people dedicated to connecting locally in efforts to leverage global social change. He recalled that, 50 years ago, Seattle sowed the early seeds of innovation and outward facing compassion when the city hosted the ambitious 1962 World’s Fair. We may not have fully understood the challenges we would face, but thanks to those early innovators, Seattle is “known for caring,” leadership in creativity, innovation, and deep compassion for everyone in the world. As a city and a community, McGinn said, Seattle reflects a group of people who connect their values both locally and globally.

This year, the Global Hero Award went to Therese Caouette, Executive Director for Partners Asia, in recognition of three decades’ work with organizers and advocates in Southeast Asia. Caouette’s work has emphasized community engagement as a means to building leadership and skills to bring resources to the local levels where they are most needed. Using participatory models in research and development projects has been the cornerstone of her work with refugees, migrants, and displaced persons across Southeast Asia and most recently, on the Myanmar border. In a brief acceptance speech, Caouette spoke movingly of the progress made by refugee and displaced persons communities on the borders of Myanmar. She is currently a faculty member at the University of Washington, Seattle University, and Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand.

The Evolution of Corporate Social Responsibility: Development, Fair Trade, and Best Practices

By Nina Carduner

Plenary Panel, Redefining Development: From Silos to Collective Impact

• Raymond C. Offenheiser, President, Oxfam America
• Joe Whinney, Founder & CEO, Theo Chocolate
• Amir Dossal, Founder and Chairman, Global Partnerships Forum
• Moderator: Bill Clapp, Founder, Global Washington & Seattle International Foundation

Moderated by Bill Clapp of the Seattle International Foundation and Global Washington, the panel addressed recent trends in public-private partnerships, as well as some of the changes both sectors have had to make in order to create lasting social impact. One major trend has been the increase in direct foreign investment from the private sector. Twenty years ago, the primary funding for foreign economic development came from multilateral government agencies. Over the last decade, aid funding has been decreasing as world governments face significant domestic economic challenges. Meanwhile, large corporations and small businesses alike are beginning to invest and trade in the world’s poorest countries, which has exposed them to challenges and risks they may not have faced domestically. Foreign governments are challenging these companies to prove they are doing good work for development in those countries; this has lead to deep discussions on supply chains and their environmental and social impacts. Now, companies are generating new compliance standards and some have even adopted the human rights charter into existing company policy. Coca Cola has been a prime example of this type of socially-oriented evolution in the private sector, working to increase social responsibility while keeping costs down. Ray Offenheiser of Oxfam observed, “we are moving toward globalization 2.0.”

Amir Dossal, founder and chairman of the Global Partnerships Forum, expanded on this notion by adding that companies are not just asking, “how can we make profits?” but also, “how can we do good at the same time?” He cited MTV’s working in conjunction with Coca Cola to address HIV/AIDS in Africa: to raise awareness, education, and supply basic resources to combat the spread of infection. To Dossal, the rhetoric of corporate social responsibility has gradually evolved into corporate leadership in terms of individual social responsibility. As individuals realize the need for social responsibility, corporations in turn take on a larger share of best practices in development and philanthropy.

Offenheiser articulated a few effective methods that Oxfam America has found in creating successful public-private partnerships. These methods include building core competencies in the public sector to approach and understand the perspective of private sector companies, as well as leveraging changes in company policy to increase beneficial outcomes. Most effective has been the use of “quiet dialogues” to engage progressive minded companies, eager to incorporate sustainable social practices into their supply change, but not ready to go public with their efforts. These dialogues often result in new norms for company behavior and involvement from trade associations.

Joe Whinney of Theo Chocolate brought a private sector perspective to the panel. Consumer engagement and transparency are the keys to creating social benefit in the supply chain; Theo Chocolate’s business model centers on paying cocoa farmers fair prices for their product, which they believe produces a higher quality chocolate. Thanks to customer engagement and unprecedented transparency on all company policies, handbooks, practices, and pricing (which is all available online), Theo Chocolate has been able to create an educated consumer base that is willing to pay a higher price for higher quality.  Whinney emphasized the importance of these practices in an unconventional recommendation for the current USAID budget: “take half of the USAID budget and put it into consumer education in the global north so you can build an educated market that is willing to pay for a better product. At the end of the day, it’s consumer education that pulls future investment.”

As Dossal exclaimed, “When you do this work in silos, you have less opportunity to have impact. It’s not just about me, it’s about us working together. Once you do that, you start seeing solutions and impact through a different prism.”

The Power of Education: Sakena Yacoobi’s Hopes for the Women of Afghanistan

By Nina Carduner

Photo credit: Rodrigo Valenzuela

Dr. Sakena Yacoobi, founder of the Afghan Institute of Learning, opened this year’s Global Washington conference with an impassioned retelling of her experiences working to bring education to the women and children of Afghanistan.

She described her own childhood in Afghanistan as happy and secure. They were poor, she said, but able to sufficiently provide for what they needed in their own country. She described a life where women and children could freely go from place to place, visiting neighbors and celebrating various holidays with other families. But now, the people of Afghanistan have been traumatized by forty years of war.

While completing her education in the US, she had supportive teachers, the ability to ask questions, and freedom of speech. But when the Shah invaded, she could not return home and her family became refugees. Still, she explained, her heart never left Afghanistan and she began a career in public health, remembering how few resources there were for maternal and child health was when she was growing up.

On a trip to an Afghan refugee camp, she was shocked by what she witnessed. She met women who had lost everything: their fathers, husbands, and brothers. They were left helpless and completely unable to do anything for themselves. “They were like animals. They felt less than human,” she explained. That’s when she realized that education was the solution to helping these women.

At that time, many Afghan refugee camps were in Pakistan, and she began going camp-to-camp to offer education. Many of the mullahs in the camps believed that education was not good for children, but over time, she convinced the mullahs to became teachers. In one year, the number of students she reached went from 300 to 27,000. Education in the camps was not just a critical need, but a clear desire for the refugees. But this presented a new problem, she went on. When children are traumatized by war, have never been educated before, and are mixed with other children of all ages, it can be very difficult to motivate them to come to school. She created a curriculum that would challenge these children and emphasize critical thinking skills.

When the Taliban took over Afghanistan, schools were closed and women could no longer go out freely by themselves. Dr. Yacoobi knew she had to do something to bring her curriculum to the children of Afghanistan, but understood the risk and danger she was bringing on herself and colleagues. Through various creative methods, they were able to secretly open 80 underground schools. They also risked their lives to set up a mobile library traveling from school to school, hiding the books in sacks of flour and rice with three men acting as male relatives. Every time they traveled with the mobile library, she didn’t fear death but feared getting caught by the Taliban would mean the end of the entire program. Each class was only supposed to support 35 students, but they attracted over 75 students to every class. It was clear that Afghans would risk certain danger to educate themselves and their children.

Today, her schools teach over 3,000 students in rural Afghanistan and have reached 10 million people with a variety of health services, in addition to education. Their teachers receive training, materials, and salaries. The children her organization has educated have now grown up and can be seen in all levels of Afghani society. When people ask Dr. Yacoobi how she has done this work for the last twenty years, she always responds, “I love my country. I love my people . . . the Prophet told us in the Qur’an that women and men can learn side by side and they can be anything they want to be.” The women who benefited from her programs are also more empowered today because they aren’t just seeking basic education; they are also pursuing higher education. She continued, “the women of Afghanistan are not the same women they were five years ago. They have been oppressed for forty years, and now with education, they will not accept the treatment they experienced in the past. When children have mothers who are no longer helpless, they will succeed.”

Dr. Yacoobi closed, “if the tank and the gun didn’t solve our problem, I am 100% sure that the women of Afghanistan will.”