CGI: Guest Post: Accelerating Social Change at This Year’s Clinton Global Initiative

Each year at this time, world leaders from every sector— private, nongovernmental, academic, and everywhere in between—convene in New York City at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting. Former President Bill Clinton’s initial concept for the meeting is actually quite simple: bring together a diverse group of individuals dedicated to realizing positive, lasting change, and provide them with the enabling environment and inspiration to work together to turn their ideas into action. In short, the meeting is a time not only to develop a shared vision of the future, but also create tangible, measurable, and sustainable plans of action toward achieving that vision.

This year CGI invited us and Microsoft to develop and facilitate a pre-meeting workshop that would help non-profit, citizen sector leaders attending CGI make the most of the experience, leverage the participant network, and accelerate skills and knowledge. For the second straight year we were pleased to be partnering with Microsoft to present this session. Today, each participant was able to identify and articulate a unique value proposition that projects their organizational missions into the future, and think through ways in which information technology can help accelerate their vision and bringing to life their current and future value to other CGI members.

Additionally, this year four senior staff members of Ashoka will also be playing a mentorship role for all nonprofit leaders to help them work through their organizations’ strategic objectives and needs, as well as identify new connections and partnership opportunities during the course of the meeting. By working individually with these leaders, we can ensure that they make the most of their CGI experience. Our goal is to help participants seed innovative partnerships, develop new plans of action, leverage their impact, and enable everyone to fulfill their objectives for the meeting.

Read on at Microsoft's Unlimited Potential blog.

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