President Bill Clinton: Closing Plenary
April 12, 2006
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of speech
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2006 presentations
Charlie MacCormack: Good afternoon everyone. For those of you
who were at last evening’s reception you know that I am
Charlie MacCormack, and I’m honored to be the incoming
chair of InterAction. I’d like to thank the co-chairs for
having put together a wonderful forum, and perhaps we can have
a round of applause to honor them (applause), our outbound chair,
Dan Pellegrom who has done a fantastic job, Dan thanks for everything,
and to Dr. Mohammad Akhter and the wonderful InterAction
staff who really made it all happen.
If I were introducing 200 years ago Thomas Jefferson as contrasted
to William Jefferson Clinton after President Jefferson’s
retirement from office, he would have asked me, as he asked all
those who introduced him, to introduce him as the founder of
a great university and the author of a declaration of human rights,
which I’m told is also the engraving on his tombstone,
founder of the University of Virginia and author of the Declaration
of Human Rights.
Along the way, he served eight years as President of the United
States and instigator of the Louisiana Purchase and layer down
of some of our most important values, but most important to him
were these things he saw as more lasting legacies. And I also
do think for William Jefferson Clinton the best is yet to come.
And he will be long remembered for his path breaking work in
reducing the scourge of HIV AIDS, the provision of anti-retro
virus impacted by HIV AIDS, the programs to inspire leadership
opportunities for young people all over the world, the provision
of basic education, and all the priorities of the Clinton Foundation.
Along the way, he did serve eight years as President of the
United States, eight years of peace and prosperity. He was also
obviously asked by Kofi Annan, the United Nations’ Secretary
General, to serve as the United Nations’ Special Envoy
for Tsunami Relief and Recovery. And I think that I can speak
for the many scores of InterAction members who have been responding
in India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia for the past 15 months, that
many an obstacle has been removed and many a standard has been
set.
And I think that Tsunami response for our community could have
made us or broken us, because never have we had so much responsibility,
played such a large role, dealt with so many resources. And if
it was seen as a failure I think our college would be seen as
a failure. And we have a lot to thank President Clinton and his
team for in setting the framework for our Tsunami response to
proceed in a more positive way then would otherwise be the case.
So with these words of thanks and appreciation, it’s
a great pleasure for me on behalf of the entire InterAction community
to introduce William Jefferson Clinton.
President Clinton: Thank you, Charlie, for the kind remarks.
Mohammad, it’s good to see you again. Ladies and gentlemen
thank you for the warm welcome. When I was recently in London
with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, we had a
globalization conference, and I’m going to steal, but give
him credit for this great line he had. He said that you know
sometimes you talk to people and you have something that you
want to convey, and you are afraid you can’t convey it.
He said that when he felt that way he sometimes was reminded
about what the great poet John Keats said about his grandmother:
that she had lost the ability to communicate, but alas not the
ability to talk. So here I am holding on for dear life. We’ll
wait and see what happens.
I wonder how many of you felt a sense of personal pride and
understood the direct connection to your work last December when
TIME Magazine named Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono the people
of the year. It was really an award to all of you. Think about
it, these people have never been elected to anything, and they
represent the two great strains of NGO activity.
The Gates Foundation, as all of you know, is directly involved
in funding operations of various kinds. They have spent a billion
dollars, give or take, on health care in Africa and India, and,
if Botswana survives, it will be in no small measure, I think,
because of the work they have done. They spent hundreds of millions
of dollars in America trying to create modern globally competitive
high schools that are good in math and science and small enough
for children who have troubled backgrounds to get good personalized
education. And, of course, before the One Campaign, which is
different, but, before that, Bono represented the other great
strain of NGO activity, that is organizing citizens to influence
what governments do. He helped me immeasurably in 2000 to get
the support of the United States Congress across party lines
for what was, at that time, the largest international debt relief
effort in history.
We forgave all the bilateral debt of the United States and
then supported the global effort to reduce the debt of the poorest
countries in the world if they put all the money into education,
health, or economic development. We had enormous NGO support
for the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, which created hundreds
of thousands of jobs in Africa by opening American markets, which
had previously not been opened, to African products. And then,
of course, just in the last year, there was a big lobbying effort
to get the G8 to commit to double the aid to Africa and to do
another round of debt relief. Now with this One Campaign, they’re
trying to basically give citizens the power, to dramatically
increase aid to fight poverty by buying certain products that
are labeled with a red label where the seller of the products
commits to give a certain amount of money per product to the
global fight against AIDS.
But you should feel really good about this because in the last
several years, private citizens have acquired more power to do
public good than at any time in human history. Now here in the
United States it has always been a part of our sort of collective
public DNA. Benjamin Franklin organized the first volunteer fire
department in the 18 th Century in Philadelphia. When Alexis
de Tocqueville came here from France in the 1830s and traveled
around America, he said the biggest difference he found between
our country and Europe was that the citizens here were always
organizing themselves to solve some problem instead of petitioning
someone else to solve it. He was talking about NGOs, we just
didn’t call it that in 1830.
When I became President in January of 1993, I thought one of
my most important responsibilities to the future was to see that
the democratic experiment in Russia did not fail, either by a
reversion to militarism and maintaining Russian troops in the
Baltic States and trying to be too heavy handed with the other
neighbors or by a collapse of the market economy and a reversion
to a controlled economy and a constriction of personal freedom
within the country. At the time there were no NGOs in Russia.
The day I took the oath of office there were zero organized NGOs
in Russia. Today there are 63,000. And now there’s a big
issue because President Putin is trying to constrain the power
of NGOs in Russia. And I recently flew over there to Boris Yeltsin’s
75 th birthday party, and I have always had a great relationship
with Putin, we were sort of always brutally frank with each other.
And I tried to get him to amend the ABM Treaty so it wouldn’t
be thrown away in the event that President Bush won the election
because I knew that the current government didn’t believe
in it. And he said, “No, I’m not going to do that,
because you’re on the way out. If Gore wins I want him
to get credit for it and if Bush wins he’ll just tear it
up anyway. So, I’m sorry you can’t have it.”
So we had this kind of relationship. And I said, “Vladimir,
you need to get off the backs of these NGOs. You think that they’re
really giving you trouble, but, you don’t know what trouble
is. You’ve never been criticized, I have been criticized
and you have no idea what this is like. You need to loosen up
here and let it go a little bit.” I don’t want to
make light of this, as it is a serious issue, but, the point
is it’s a high-class problem, right? Better there be 63,000
NGOs fighting with the government about what the proper scope
of their activity is than there be no fabric of civil society
at all.
Just two days ago there was a fascinating article in the paper
about the rise of NGOs in China, which I’m sure all of
you read, and there will be all kinds of problems with it, but
the point is that the reason Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono
were named TIME Magazine’s People of the Year is not only
because as private citizens they have done enormous public good,
two with their wealth and one with his fame, but also because
they represent a moment in time when all of you are engaged to
an extent that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
And there are lots of reasons for it. One is the rise of democracy.
More than half the world’s people live under governments
they voted in, and politicians, even in non-democratic societies,
are more sensitive to public opinion than ever before. So it
gives you the possibility of acting in all kinds of countries.
Two is the rise of the Internet as a tool of political influence
and communication and fundraising. In the SARS epidemic that
developed a few years ago, it broke out first in Hong Kong, and
then it appeared in Toronto. At first, the Chinese government
was in denial about it, and what certainly had to have been the
truth was that it had to have originated on the Chinese mainland.
The Chinese young people demonstrated, but instead of going into
Tiananmen Square where they could be picked up and arrested,
they jammed the government’s websites and demanded that
the truth be told. And to the everlasting credit of the Chinese
government, they turned on a dime, said what the facts were,
and began to cooperate with the Canadians and the Americans and
others. And an epidemic that could have killed tens of thousands
of people wound up killing only a few. And now we know, thanks
to our friends in the media, that if there’s one chicken
with Avian flu in Romania, we know how many chickens were killed
within two square kilometers.
This is a very good thing – that citizen activists all
over the world have sensitized governments, and now we’re
having the right argument. Are we stockpiling enough vaccine?
Is it the right vaccine? Will it get to somewhere else if it
breaks out there? All these things are happening because of the
very high level of citizen awareness and organization that exists
in the world today.
And the money. . . . I’m here primarily in my capacity
as the UN Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery. And with Eric Schwartz,
who has run this program for me so ably, and I thank him. And
I want to talk about that. But about a third of American households
gave money to tsunami relief, over half of them over the internet.
This is unprecedented.
When the President asked his father and me to go raise money
for Katrina relief last September, I never will forget this,
only a month after Katrina hit, I went with my wife to the only
place that is a mandatory appearance for me as a Senate spouse,
there’s only one place where the Senator from New York
can get anything out of having a husband from Arkansas, and that
is at the New York State Fair because my boots have well worn
soles. They’re not just something I bought for that one
day appearance, and I’ve got belts with rodeo buckles on
them and I know one end of a cow from the other; I’m quite
handy at the State Fair. So I’m up there with my 10-year-old
nephew, and we’re walking down the midway, we’re
passing all these little booths where you throw balls at targets
and try to win the stuffed animal and all that. And this lady
runs out from behind one of the booths, she’s in a khaki
shirt with a little logo, and she stuffs $50 in my hand and says, “This
is for the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund and I am sorry to give you
this money in cash, but as you can see I’m working and
I don’t have time to send it over the net.”
Hello? Go figure. This is an inconceivable conversation just
two years ago. This lady is not a dot.com millionaire. How much
money can she make working in a fair booth in Syracuse? But her
preferred way of giving is over the Internet, and she knows that
if there are enough people like her, through the Internet, they
can change the world. This is an astonishing development. And
it’s affected all of you in one way or the other. The per
capita giving in America for the tsunami, while generous, was
actually exceeded in the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark, and one
or two other countries. This is a stunning thing that we have
to deal with.
We have, as private citizens, because of the rise of democracy,
the rise of the Internet, and the rise of the NGO in the developing
as well as the developed world, we have more power as private
citizens to do public good than at any time in world history.
Does it matter what governments do and what their policies are?
Absolutely. Are there some objectives, like in America, we will
-- in my opinion -- not have? Either the economic or the energy
or the health care policies we need in the absence of the proper
government policies? It matters not only what kind of and how
much money we’re giving in foreign assistance, but how
we give it and how it is spent.
So governments really do matter. But if there ever comes a
magic day when everybody you vote for gets elected and they do
everything you think they should and the economy is humming along,
there will still be gaps in where we are and where we ought to
be and we will have to step into that breach. And in times when
public policies are not perfect and the economic circumstances
of the places that you care about are difficult, the gaps are
wider and you have to step more lively. But you have the power
to do it now to an extent never before known in all of human
history. And when you have greater opportunity to do something,
you, by definition, have a greater responsibility to do it because
you can make that kind of impact. And therefore this organization,
InterAction, which is committed to making sure that NGOs do not
live unexamined lives, but instead constantly examine not only
what you’re doing but how you’re doing it and whether
you’re working with others to maximum effectiveness is
profoundly important.
And I am honored to be here. I support the support given to
me in our UN efforts by many of you in this room. There are scores
of NGOs in this room that have been involved in tsunami relief,
and I thank you for that. I think that you are asking the right
questions at this conference about how you should be working
with government and other donors and communities to alleviate
poverty and deal with the other challenges. And I’m glad
that you’re thinking about overseas assistance.
One of the things that I regret about my Presidency, I had
to struggle because, when I was President, the Congress was very
hostile to all foreign assistance and I really had to struggle
to find ways to help other countries, and after we threw the
dictators out in Haiti, when I realized that I was going to get
no money for civilian reconstruction, I just left the military
there as long as I could and told them build roads and schools
and do all this stuff that we should be doing through USAID because
I knew that I had control of them, so they just stayed down there
and did it. It is a different world now when people, when the
Congress, is actually willing to appropriate money for AIDS,
for debt relief, for the millennium development challenge. But
one of the things that I regret, to go back to the point, is
that when I was President I did not spend time analyzing sufficiently
how the money that we were spending was being spent. And it is
really, now that I’m an NGO and I get out here, and I realize
that I have a moral responsibility to be a bleeding heart cheapskate
and so do you.
When somebody gives you their money and, like me, I’m
supposed to be saving lives, and I can treat adults for $140
a year and children for $200 a year with AIDS medicine, the lowest
prices in the world. And I can test people for 50 cents now to
see whether they have it, and I can monitor whether the medicine
is working for $20 to $40 a year, which is about 10 to 20 percent
what it costs in America. If I can do that, it means that if
we blow $150, somebody is going to die that would not have died
otherwise. And I think about that. All of us do.
And I was amazed the other day, and again this is not a partisan
criticism, I know this happened when I was President. So I am
not being critical. But I read an article the other day that
we were going to spend $77 million, which is about what I spend
every year to train people in 22 countries and provide AIDS medicine
to 240,000 and do lots of other things in this AIDS program,
to set up a distribution center for the AIDS drugs that the United
States is going to send all over the world. And I thought, you
know, I bet FedEx would ice them down and deliver them anywhere
for $10 million. And I just ran the numbers.
And I don’t believe a lot of this is not done. One of
the things that I was always amazed at when I was President was
if we ever did anything wrong, made a mistake, everybody was
convinced that we stayed up all night planning to do just what
we did. Nobody ever believed that we did anything by accident
or that we ever made any mistakes because our behavior was unexamined,
that we had an unexamined policy.
I would just say to all of you, and I think this is really
important, you can help not only our government, but other governments
examine how these resources are allocated because there is $8.5
billion, more or less, being spent on AIDS every year and with
our donors. With these donors we literally have accounted for
about 25 percent of the increase in the number of people on treatment
from 2003 to January 1 st of this year, for only $75 million.
Now something’s going wrong here: we’re not maximizing
our dollars; we’re not saving as many lives as we can with
the dollars that have been allocated; and this is something you
can do, because I know now, I’ve talked to enough people
around the world in other governments, that there is now a very
high level of interest in this, about how in donor nation after
donor nation an unusual percentage of the money allocated to
foreign aid by the legislative bodies never leaves the shores
of the country in question.
And so I ask you to take this responsibility seriously. I know
we need more money for AIDS, TB and malaria, and other infectious
diseases. I know that we need to make sure that we bring clean
water and sanitation to people throughout the world. I know about
all these other things we need to do, but it will be much easier
to do that if we can prove that we have gotten the biggest impact
out of the money that has been appropriated. And every one of
you, if you think about it, can think of some way to get more
bang for the buck that is presently being appropriated.
Sometimes I think that the NGO community is afraid to talk
about this too much for fear that our own arguments will be used
against us by people in Congress that say well, they don’t
need any more money, all they need to do is spend the money they
have more effectively. And I understand that fear, but it’s
been my experience that there will never be enough money, at
least by our definition, to take care of all the world’s
poor and deal with the world’s diseases and all this. And
we need to help figure out how this money can be spent more effectively.
We need a much higher percentage of the foreign aid money of
the United States and every country leaving the country where
it is appropriated and getting to the countries where it is needed,
and when it is there, ensuring that it is being spent in a way
that saves the largest number of lives. You can help with that.
And, again, I say this is not a partisan issue. This is a systemic
problem that existed when I was President. I’m not blaming
anybody, but it’s time to change it. I’m very sensitive
to it now; people are dying because we’re not squeezing
the last amount of effectiveness out of the money that has been
appropriated in the developed countries for the developing ones.
You can help, without making anybody a demon you can just help.
You’re social entrepreneurs and this is one area where
entrepreneurialship has largely been absent: figuring out how
that money actually gets from point A to point B. So I urge you
to continue to do that, to continue to talk about it. Again,
I urge you not to demonize anybody, just give people the facts
and offer a constructive alternative about how we can do more
good with the money that has been appropriated.
I also would just say a few things about the tsunami itself.
I’d like to give you an update because you might have some
ideas for me. In the beginning an unbelievable job was done,
massive amounts of money came forward, and we had temporary shelter,
temporary schools, and, most important, the starvation and widespread
disease that everyone predicted was avoided. And much of this
was due to efforts of NGOs, the people that I met in abundance
when I first toured the area. We got a lot of help from the military
early, but as they receded, we had to see the civil society sector
come in and begin to work on the longer term projects.
Now this was an interesting sort of problem, because in theory
we always had as much money as we needed, for all the countries
affected by the tsunami. The only country left without actual
dollar commitments sufficient to the acknowledged needs is The
Maldives and I’m convinced that it’s because it’s
so small and because their damages in the aggregate amount to
almost two-thirds of one year’s GDP. So we’re still
about $100 million short there. But, in every other country,
there have been commitments equal to or in excess of the generally
acknowledged cost of reconstruction and rehabilitation.
In that sense, it’s turned out to be a very different
job than I thought I’d get when the Secretary General asked
me to do it. The only reason he asked me to do this is he thought
that I could guilt the world’s leaders into coming up with
the money necessary to rebuild the area. He says who’s
the best guy I know at raising money who can just guilt the living
daylights out of anybody and he called me on the phone and said,
it’s you, I want you. And I said I would do it.
It turned out we spent much more of our time trying to make
sure that the UN was maximizing its effectiveness, that we coordinated
all the UN agencies together, that we were coordinated well with
the local people and the other NGOs from around the world, and
with the United States and the other governments’ efforts.
And I think we’ve done a lot of good, but it’s not
the good we thought that we would be doing when we started this
project.
The Red Cross raised over $1 billion, the Red Cross and other
NGOs together raised about $5 billion. NGOs represent over a
third of the money that has been pledged for recovery in the
four most affected countries. And so we got the money. And I
will say again we also need to, just as I talked about governments,
try to be quite accountable for spending the money wisely, remaining
engaged as long as it takes to complete the recovery and for
building back better.
There’s been a lot more scrutiny with how this money
is spent in the tsunami, and that’s been good. And we’ve
worked very hard to make sure that we had good accountability
systems, that we not only built back better, that we not only
had enhanced coordination, but that we had an actual system that
would be very accountable for how every single dollar was being
spent on every project in a common website. It’s been really
an exciting and rewarding endeavor. And it’s been interesting
to me, the strong support we’ve received from the countries
involved for online tracking. And it’s been helpful and
I’ve encouraged several members of the press that ask me
questions whenever I go to the region just to get on there and
find out how they think we’re doing, and if they believe
there’s some information that should be on the site that’s
not, to let me know and we’ll try to provide it for them.
Now all of this, it seems to me, is very good, and it means
a lot because we know where we are keeping up, where we’re
failing and where we’re succeeding. And it’s taken
too long to get people out of the tents in Indonesia, but it
takes too long to get people out of the trailers in the Katrina
area too. And in some of our severe hurricane sites in America
we’ve waited over a year to get people in anything like
permanent housing. It just takes time. But we’re getting
there.
And you should feel good; according to all the recent polls
at the enormous credibility that NGOs in general enjoy in this
country. By and large you have high levels of trust. You know
every now and then we’ll have a scandal about some money
being spent wrong, and some of you remember the ones that have
been most highly publicized, but by and large people believe
that you are not only well motivated but competent. And that’s
good.
There still remains a very high level of willingness in America
to grant the benefit of the doubt to the NGO community and to
respond in an affirmative way when funds are needed. But I think
this credibility is a fragile asset and, again, that’s
why I think it’s important for InterAction to keep doing
what you are doing. And I think it’s important to recognize
for those of you who are involved in the tsunami reconstruction
effort, that we have got to continue to do this work and continue
to be accountable.
I want to announce an initiative today that we are going to
follow from now until this whole work is through, to keep faith
with the affected communities. A number of InterAction NGOs have
committed to an intense review of five of the critical areas
that face the American and international NGOs in finishing this
job right. They were brought into starker relief in the context
of tsunami recovery. And all of you will recognize these questions,
but again, we want to honestly and openly deal with them.
First of all, what can NGOs do to improve consultations between
donors and affected communities to enhance accountability to
beneficiaries? It’s one thing to be honest about the way
that you spend the money, but quite another to be effective and
quite another to be perceived to be effective by the people you’re
trying to help. You know there is nothing worse than feeling
like somebody ought to be grateful to you and wondering why they
aren’t grateful. And the reason is it is not their deal.
It’s funny. I just left a group of young people associated
with the Fulbright Center, and I met all these young people who
had worked in various capacities in Bolivia. And so I asked this
one young girl, I said, what do you think about the new President
of Bolivia? She said, if I were poor and I lived in Bolivia,
I certainly would have voted for him, because I wouldn’t
have been part of the global economy, I wouldn’t have been
part of the future, I wouldn’t have known what to do. She
said, he’s a good man, and I think we can work with him;
we just need to find a way to make sure that this whole globalization
begins to help more ordinary people. Very perceptive comment.
So we do have to improve our communication, and we can’t
be paternalistic here and be resentful. When our people are out
there breaking their backs in these countries, and we think people
aren’t grateful, it may be because we’re doing B
and they think we ought to be doing A.
The second thing is how can NGOs better enhance development
of local capacity in affected countries? I think this is a huge
problem. The more I worked on this as President, and the more
I worked on this since I left office, whenever I go to people
to try to get development projects, going in countries, people
talk to me about corruption, but the truth is that lack of capacity
is a far bigger problem than corruption and feeds corruption
in most places - the absence of systems.
Just look around this room today; just think about all the
stuff that you take for granted that people in the places that
many of you work can’t take for granted. You weren’t
scared to drink the water. You’d be shocked if the lights
went off. You assume that the cameras work, and this will be
covered.
The microphone is going to stay on until I shut up. Just think
about it. You didn’t worry when you ate the apple pie that
you might get some dreaded disease. And the air is running here
so even though there are a lot of people here and I’m putting
out a lot of hot air you’re still cool enough to sit here.
All systems that you completely take for granted, if you want
to take a bathroom break, you have access to one. And there are,
you know, just think about all the people in the world who can’t
take any of that for granted, everything that makes it possible
for you to sit here today, every single thing.
So this capacity issue is very, very important. I believe there
will be less corruption as there is more capacity in the developing
world. And, to me, it’s something that I want to keep working
on. I like working on it, because it’s not a particularly
sexy topic. But I’ve already had enough headlines to last
me five lifetimes, so I don’t mind working on boring topics.
I like boring. Boring is good. And this is very, very important.
So I say to you I hope you will support this.
The third question is can we do more to ensure high standards
in the professionalism of NGOs? Fourthly, how do we assess the
current efforts to incorporate NGOs into and to develop better
coordination structures? What further changes should be made?
And fifth how should NGOs seek to incorporate human rights into
their humanitarian and development assistance programs? This
is a very important issue. This review will draw from the experience
of the tsunami and tsunami recovery, but it will also include
recommendations for future operations.
Several of you are members of a volunteer group that will review
these challenges, and I hope that all the InterAction members
will participate in working with one or more of the groups, because
we can’t do this without you. I’ve also asked my
UN office to help broaden the initiative so that NGOs across
the Atlantic and in affected countries can also participate.
Let me say just a word or two about each of these. First, accountability
to beneficiaries. We know how important this is. NGOs have often
led the way on this issue. I have seen very many examples of
deep engagement with local communities, but I also have seen
recovery efforts that missed that critical element. I’m
grateful that Mercy Corps and the American Red Cross have offered
to convene the working group.
Second, on enhancing efforts at local capacity building, I’ve
already said why I think this is important. The International
Rescue Committee has volunteered to convene a working group on
this issue, and they’re interested in linking up with an
ongoing project that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have
on improving local capacity.
On the third issue, professionalism, Plan USA has agreed to
convene a group to identify mechanisms to address the issue within
the NGO community. And they bring to this review InterAction’s
experience in developing standards.
The fourth issue, coordination is obviously an old one for
all of you who are here today and have worked in this area. International
Medical Corps and Save the Children will convene a group to consider
whether evolving models of coordination are adequate to address
the challenges we confront today.
And finally, the UN has endorsed a human-rights based framework
for humanitarian and development assistance that helps empower
local communities and ensure basic standards for access to food,
shelter, and non-discriminatory treatment. But the human rights
and humanitarian assistance groups have not always worked together.
And therefore our final group will examine the advisability and
needs for more thoroughly incorporating these principles into
our training and advocacy. And I’m very grateful that Care
and Refugees International have agreed to convene this group.
So we’re going to continue to work on this.
I believe that the more we can get continued cooperation and
coordination with NGOs across the widest range of activity, the
more effective we will all be. I think one of the reasons that
the local initiative that I’ve brought together at the
beginning of the UN last year, you know we had developing country
NGOs, we had developed country NGOs, we had international financial
institutions and political leaders and business leaders and philanthropists.
We raised $2.5 billion in two days from 500 people in 300 projects
in poverty alleviation, combating climate change through generating
jobs, increasing local governance capacity and promoting religious
reconciliation, partly because they felt the synergy of working
together.
And I think that if you think about it, if you look around
this room it’s sort of like a United Nations of NGOs. And
yet there’s hundreds of thousands, maybe millions more
of you, your organizations in developing countries that aren’t
represented in this room today. Anything we can do to keep build
these networks, raising these standards, increasing our accountability
and effectiveness is going to increase the capacity of private
citizens in America and in the countries in which we work to
do public good.
And I’ll just leave with that thought when you go home
today. When I left the White House I was determined that I would
not spend the rest of my life wishing I were still President.
It seemed to me to be a stupid and counterproductive way to spend
a day, much less a lifetime. And I wanted to help people to see
the future, to solve problems, and to save lives.
The NGO structure of my foundation gave me a way to do that.
We are quite fortunate to be involved in this work at this moment
in history for the reasons that I have said. We have to keep
trying to do it better, to do it more effectively, and to model
the kind of world we want for our children and our grandchildren.
But just think about it when you leave here, think about on
the one hand, how much there is to do because of all the things
that you take for granted every minute you don’t even imagine
you take for granted. And then, on the other hand, how incredibly
lucky you are to be alive and active and well enough to do this
work at the moment in history; when you have more power as private
citizens to do public good than ever before and at the moment
in history when it is most needed.
Thank you very much.
