- Ladies and gentlemen,
our 2018, Skoll awardees.
(audience cheering and clapping)
I know Jeff is watching online,
so I just wanna ask him, how did we do Jeff?
(audience laughing)
It was outstanding, thank you so much.
Many of you know my love of poetry,
a love I share as it turns out,
with many of this year's awardees.
Poetry offers me wisdom to understand
and work through whatever is troubling me.
Over the past year, I have kept returning
to Robert Frost's poem, Mending Wall.
The poem quietly, subversively, reflects on a ritual
Frost shares each Spring with his neighbor,
repairing damage that Winter has done
to the stone wall between their lands.
I'd like to share a few lines with you.
There where it is, we do not need the wall.
My apple trees will never get across
and eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, good fences make good neighbors.
Spring is the mischief in me,
and I wonder if I could put a notion in his head,
why did they make good neighbors?
Before I built a wall, I'd ask to know
what I was walling in, and walling out,
and to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
that wants it down.
There is something about a social entrepreneur
that wants to tear down walls.
To get us all listening to each other,
understanding each other, sharing our dreams for the future
and our ideas about how to create it.
Global Health Corps is breaking through the silos
of culture and expertise and forging an integrated workforce
of global health professionals
who will ensure high quality care
reaches all who need it.
Angaza is lowering the cost barrier
that cuts people off from the products
they know will enrich their lives
and putting decision-making power
in the hands where it belongs.
Code for America is cutting through
bureaucratic barriers made of red tape
and redesigning technology platforms
to make it easy for citizens to take control
of the benefits to which they are entitled.
SELCO is dismantling an entire paradigm,
one that believes the West knows best,
and building energy ecosystems in partnership
with the poor who have all it takes
to light their own pathways out of poverty.
Callisto is battering down the wall of fear and shame,
that has silenced victims of sexual violence
for far too long.
Callisto's platform provides a safe space for them to speak
and a way to hold their assailants accountable.
Miagro's tiny scratch cards are bridging a vast gap
in the small farm's supply system,
earning farmers dramatic increases in income,
and reinforcing their self-determination.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
that knows it's time to take down all the divides.
Time to call out trust, and distrust, and intelligence
and ignorance, and hatred, and refuse to let those negatives
destroy who we are as human beings and the human family.
And something there is, that signals
the tough work that lies ahead.
For with every barrier that crashes to the ground,
legions of us should be right there,
ready to build the bridge that must take its place.
Long before Luke Skywalker strode across our movie screens
and into our collectives imaginations,
there were the first American Mohawk Skywalkers,
men, and they were always men,
who for generations left their homes in Canada
to build New York's famed bridges.
Let us all, women and men, leave here as Skywalkers.
Let us leave here prepared
to scale evermore daunting heights.
Let us leave here determined to put in place
the girders of justice and compassion
that will connect us across whatever chasm divides us,
and that will bend the arc of the universe
in the right direction.
(audience cheering and clapping)
I only hope, I thanked everyone
I should have thanked.
Every member of our board of directors,
every staff member,
every member of our social entrepreneur community,
every partner, my family,
all of you,
thank you, I am so honored to have been
on this journey with you.
Godspeed.
(audience cheering and clapping)