Jacqueline Novogratz discusses her new book, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, her life in international development and the importance of investing in the poor.
Bio
Jacqueline Novogratz
Jacqueline Novogratz is founder and CEO of Acumen Fund. Prior to starting Acumen, she worked at the Rockefeller Foundation, where she created and directed the Philanthropy Workshop and the Next Generation Leadership program.
Novogratz has also worked at the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation and has served as a consultant to UNICEF and the World Bank in various African countries. She helped found a micro-finance institution for women in Rwanda and began her career in international banking with Chase Manhattan Bank.
Novogratz holds an MBA from Stanford and a BA from the University of Virginia.
Peter Reiling
Peter A. Reiling is the Aspen Institute's Executive Vice President for Leadership and Seminar Programs, and Executive Director of the Henry Crown Fellowship Program. In this role, he oversees the Institute's growing portfolio of leadership initiatives (the Aspen Global Leadership Network) and seminars (including The Aspen Seminar, offered at the Institute since 1950) as well as its flagship leadership program.
Reiling is a trustee, officer and senior moderator of the Aspen Institute, a Henry Crown Fellow (Class of 1998), and the founder of the Africa Leadership Initiative (ALI), a joint venture between the Aspen Institute and five African business leaders. ALI has since been replicated in Central America as "CALI" and in India as "ILI" with plans to expand into China, the Mideast and Central Europe.
Similar programs have also been launched in the fields of politics, education and the environment with plans to expand into health and social entrepreneurship. The goal of all these ventures is to stimulate a new generation of accomplished, entrepreneurial leaders to play a greater role in the social and political development of their communities and countries.
Prior to joining the Aspen Institute, from 1996 to 2004, Reiling was President and CEO of TechnoServe, an international organization helping entrepreneurs across Africa, Latin America, and Central Europe to build businesses in their communities (www.tns.org).
Reiling is co-founder of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs and currently serves as chairman of the board of the CALI Foundation as well as on the boards of ALI/East Africa, ALI/West Africa, ALI/South Africa, Agora Partnerships and the Energy Access Foundation.
Reiling is a former adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and guest lecturer at the Institute for Developing Economies in Tokyo.
He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Bretton Woods Committee, and was named "Outstanding Social Entrepreneur" by the Schwab Foundation in Geneva.
A graduate of Georgetown University (BSFS) and the University of California/Berkeley (MBA), with additional studies at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Reiling is married to Denise Byrne and is the father of two children, Dylan and Eva Luna.
Voluntary, organized efforts intended for socially useful purposes. Philanthropic groups existed in the ancient civilizations of the Middle East, Greece, and Rome: an endowment supported Plato's Academy (c. 387 BC) for some 900 years; the Islamic waqf (religious endowment) dates to the 7th century AD; and the medieval Christian church administered trusts for benevolent purposes. Merchants in 17th- and 18th-century western Europe founded organizations for worthy causes. Starting in the late 19th century, large personal fortunes led to the creation of private foundations that bequeathed gifts totaling millions and then billions in support of the arts, education, medical research, public policy, social services, environmental causes, and other special interests. SeeAndrew Carnegie; B'nai B'rith; Bill Gates; George Peabody; Rockefeller Foundation; Straus family.
The idea of Acumen Fund is the middle road of the microfinance debate between pure philanthropists and entrepreneurs trying to make money from poor by lending to them. Nowadays almost everybody agrees that traditional international aid is ineffective as it often consumed by the corrupt governments and stays out of reach from those who really need it. Professor Yunus, a founder of Grameen Bank, whose original goal was to to empower women and to contribute to their financial stability by providing them short-term microcredits believes that "maximization of profit" is inappropriate when dealing with third world countries where majority of population lives below the poverty line. On the other hand, a founder of Ebay, Pierre Omidyer, treats "helping poor” as just another business model. For more info on this debate, please, read the following publication in New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/archive/200...?currentPage=2
It is so frightening how people can be so easily brainwashed to think ethnic cleansing is ok. When she talked about how Agnus had convinced herself that what the Hutu had done was right it just reminds me of how many people did that during WWII. It's like people don't take a step back and use their common sense of what is right and wrong. And she is so right on when she says that after such a horrible event we will say "never again" but it continuously happens even today. Even the U.S., the country of the "free", is responsible for such horrible acts only we have a government that can surprisingly easily hide this. I just hope it doesn't take another World War for us to understand that we must accept and respect our differences between cultures even if we don't agree with them.
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