The first leadership change in any large complex organization in its history
is always a bit unsettling. And so I just wanted to
take a few minutes and just tell you, share with you,
at least three qualities about OSF
that attracted me
in addition to the opportunities
to collaborate and work in partnership with George and Aryah.
The first is
the combination here of agility and persistence.
The, I learnt from Herb Sturz at the Vera Institute the
importance of persisting
with new ideas.
He once told me, he said you know
on Monday and Tuesday everybody was against us, but
by Friday we were the only ones still in the room, and we usually got our way.
It's a,
it's a great lesson. But that ability to persist is combined in
this organization, as it was at Vera,
with an extraordinary agility. It comes from George's sense of
being able to find and seize opportunities.
But it's not just George, I've seen it happen across
the Foundations and the programs in the last decade. And that ability to
persist and yet to move quickly
is probably one of the hallmarks
of this set of organizations that I
hugely admire.
The second
is the combination of a global, really powerful,
global vision
with real local knowledge and local legitimacy.
There is no
philanthropic enterprise even remotely
this size that combines this
strong global consistent
approach, set of values,
ambitions,
with the extraordinary talent, knowledge, skills, and
credibility
of the, I think literally
hundreds of board members,
staff members, working in
their own regions, countries
and fields.
It is, it looks to some I think, I suspect, in this last process when
we were considering this, like a bit of a messy structure,
but in that mess is tremendous knowledge, is tremendous commitment,
and is tremendous value.
And certainly, that's actually a part of what has attracted me
to this.
The,
I learned,
Aryeh mentioned sort of open society values, and I was trying to think of where
for me those values began to be turned into
forms of practice.
I had a very privileged education, but the place I think I
learned the most earliest
was in a series, was over two and a half years during
my time in law school
when every two weeks I would take a group of students from the college and
the law school and drive the two-and-a-half hours to Green Haven
Prison
a few miles north of here.
And work over a couple of hours every two weeks
with a group of
really extraordinary, we called them then jailhouse lawyers.
These were men
serving life sentences
pretty much in the New York state prisons.
And because of the Attica Accords in those years
if you were working with outside groups you could meet outside of the
presence of any officials in the prisons.
And we were able to spend, every two weeks, a couple of hours
together and we organized the time so that for the first hour
the men who were serving time in Green Haven
were the teachers and we were their students. And then in the
second hour
we flipped and talked about recent court decisions which their law library
was not going to receive for another couple of years, probably, in
print.
The lessons I learned there about human dignity, about respect, about what
equality really means, about working in partnership with people,
about democratic practice
even in the midst of authoritarian structures
have guided my work ever since.
I feel I've had the fortune, good fortune in this world
to essentially take that work that began in that prison classroom
and find
place after a place where I was able to pursue it, each time on a slightly
larger scale.
Whether was working as a public defender in Washington D.C.,
helping create the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem,
working with colleagues at the Vera Institute,
to help others who had ambitions for changing governmental systems on
which people depend
and to do so in innovative and creative ways.
Or in these last seven years, trying to train a new generation
of innovators from around the world
to practice their own version of expanding justice,
respect for human rights and human dignity.
It's been it's been an extraordinary path,
and I thought,
I thought that when I got Harvard actually I'd found at the place I would,
I would make a longer-term home.
But the chance to work with all of you
is that third attraction I was going to
mention.
The thing that really draws me here is the relationships, the people
the skill, the strength, the commitment
that is in this room and around the world
in our colleagues. And I just thank you all for the opportunity
that I look forward to over the months and years ahead, to get
to know you,
to work with you, and to help you succeed in your vision of a just
and open society.
Thanks very much.