Members of the Global Philanthropists Circle gathered at the Royal Berkshire Hotel with other philanthropists and bridging leaders from around the world, including USA, India, Ghana, and Turkey. Themes of collaboration, leading with empathy and inclusion, tackling hard challenges, working with the next generation and creating next steps to build a better, more regenerative world were all covered during this immersive and reflective program.

Resources

• Detailed Programme
• Speakers & Participants Biographies
• More on Spiritual Civilization

Day One: Overcoming Conflict
Sunday, 13 October

A Visit to Cumberland Lodge

Our program began with a group outing to Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park, being taken on a tour of the Lodge’s history and the powerful figure that began it all: Amy Buller, who was awarded Cumberland as an educational foundation to inspire the youth of tomorrow, after she witnessed the rise of Nazi sentiments amongst students and academics in Germany in the late 1930s. Inspired by her story, participants partnered and walked the grounds, engaging with each other to discuss personal stories of conflict, lessons learned and steps taken from those hardships.

 

Day Two: Listening, Coexisting, Bridging
Monday, 14 October

We began with a poem...

Synergos Founder Peggy Dulany opened our morning sessions with a poem written by her son, who is a poet, songwriter, and singer.

“I have found that in our efforts, to both go inward and then go outward, poetry is a good way of often beginning, because it kind of sets the stage and grounds us a bit.”

I know you.
You’re one of those people who struggles and loves.
Welcome.
Tell me all about yourself.
For I know nothing and could use the refreshment of your face and laugh.
Your hands and tears.
Enter here into this special place I know.
It’s called the heart and is the birthplace of our kind.
When we meet here, we meet alone in darkness and in light.
This is the place to sing.
Let others come in too.
Let others hear us bearing many strange gifts.
Confusions. Feelings. Fears.
We’ll dance these things into the open sky and lay them on the solid earth to rest.
They’re welcome here. And here.
Everything knows its place.
What’s that?
I hear a drum.
I see the spark of fire.
I feel the wish of a bird’s wings.
Let’s go together, find what’s next.
What adventure cries out.
Welcome home.

The Critical Skill of Listening
Manish Srivastava, Senior Practitioner, Presencing Institute

Manish, a wonderful partner to the Spiritual Civilization affinity group, led the participants through the 4 Levels of Listening: Downloading, Factual, Empathic and Creative (Generative):

“We’re starting with the foundational skill: listening. Which is the foundation of everything. To me, listening is also attending. The quality of attention, with which we attend to something that grows….often listening is related to verbal space, but how do we listen in a non-verbal space?”

Listening: An Essential Leadership Skill (video)

The group was then asked to “let go of any words” and “let go of any outcome”, which led to choosing partners and entering a non-verbal conversation resembling a dance.

• “It was passionately interesting, because I learned more about Daniel (Kropf) in that short time, than I could’ve done with an hour conversation.” – Dr. Scilla Elworthy
• “It’s deeply touching and enabling that sort of communication is quite amazing. We really need to learn to use this.” – Daniel Kropf

Promoting Harmonious Coexistence and Peace
Shahabuddin David Less, Founding Member of Abrahamic Reunion & Synergos Board Member Uday Khemka

In a conversation with Uday, David guided us on a tour of his path to creating more harmony in the Holy Land, and how this work lead to the founding of the Abrahamic Reunion:

• David: While I was in law school, I was really searching. I had an awareness that there was more here than what was apparent. I don’t know where the awareness came from.
• David: What I experienced was that there was no “living ideal”. There was nothing people were moving towards. Without an ideal, it’s very difficult to have any growth.
• David: My big advantage was that I knew nothing. I had no preconceptions on what should be or even what could be.
• David: Back to Israel and Palestine…we began to recognize that these cultures are very oral cultures. If you can affect a few people, if you affect ten, a hundred people will know about it by the evening. And so, we started to bring small groups of people together, with no agenda. People would just talk to each other.

Abrahamic Reunion

Building Scale through Collaborations
Bill Holroyd, Founder of OnSide Youth Zones & Synergos Founder Peggy Dulany

Bill reminisced, with Peggy and the group, on the entrepreneurial and rebellious spirit that supported his strive in collaborating with others to provide hope and safe spaces for disadvantaged youth in the UK:

• Bill: I walked into this institution (in Bolton) and the first thing I see is all of the kids who terrify me in my normal life…there they all are, same people, having a great time, but in wonderful facilities…In this awful phrase that I have to use, it’s done to an “adult standard”. How bad is that, that we actually say that? Because we normally give the kids rubbish. We give them all the stuff that we don’t want, in a very benign, benevolent fashion…what’s that telling the kids? It’s telling them: “We don’t care.” “You’re second best.” “We have all the good stuff.” But it’s just wrong.
• Bill: Think big. It’s very easy to say “think big”, but if it’s a big problem, it needs a big solution.
• Bill: It’s breaks my heart to see fragmented little charities working with kids and it’s so ineffective because we don’t actually work together; we work in little silos, all around the place, scared to death someone’s going to nick our funding. But the collaboration and thinking big... and that’s where we started on it (Onside Youth Zones), that we had to do something big and think big. Partnerships work best.

OnSide Youth Zones
Onside Introduction Video

Bridging a Divided World
Dr. Scilla Elworthy, Founder of Peace Direct & Synergos Chief Executive, Henri van Eeghen

Henri introduced us to Scilla, who asked us to view the road to peace in a different light, with a business plan on how we can build better bridges to bring an end to war:

• Scilla: I finally figured, we know enough now about what works to prevent armed violence that, actually, we don’t need to have war anymore. Many people find this extremely hard to align themselves with, to accept the notion that war is now unnecessary.
• Scilla: I just lined up 25 initiatives that we know work, in our experience, both at international level and at grassroots level, and costed them out over a 10-year period. Added up the numbers and it came to only 2 billion dollars, while we spend 1,739 billion dollars on militarization every year. So, it’s obscene and crazy.
• Scilla: Another thing I’d like to talk about is divestment…the trend that we’re encouraging now, with the major investment houses, is away from investment in weapons production and into the prevention of conflict.
• Scilla: The amount of work that has to be done in terms of trauma work, in terms of healing, in terms of communication, that your bridging leadership skills are what are absolutely vital in countries that have been through this kind of terror. Otherwise, it’s just passed down from generation to generation…this is why prevention is so important and often goes hand-in-hand with healing.

More on Dr. Scilla Elworthy
The Business Plan for Peace: Building a World Without War

Spiritual Civilization Affinity Group: Moving Forward
Senior Director of Philanthropy Melissa Durda & Manish Srivastava, Senior Practitioner, Presencing Institute

When we compare data from the inception of this project, we see significant progress made in all parameters. The three biggest shifts have been depth of practice, increasing impact by co-creating platforms & developing others. This data indicates that the Spiritual Civilization Group has helped its members increase their self-awareness, deepen their spiritual practice and co-create platforms/projects that spread the ideals of spiritual civilization.
Spiritual Civilization 5-Year Evaluation

Day Three: Connecting, Investing, Committing
Tuesday, 15 October

Morning sessions began with a meditation, led by GPC Europe Senior Advisor Jamie Webb, and reflections from the group as to how they felt on all they'd heard and learned so far. Building on the previous day, the group revisited their “gallery” of shared visions for 2030:

 

Social Investment Insight Talk
Founder of the Conduit & GPC Member Rowan Finnegan & GPC Europe Senior Advisor Jamie Webb

Rowan heightened a sense of urgency within the group, towards climate change, answering Jamie’s questions on how philanthropists can better respond, both individually and collaboratively, to this global threat:

• Rowan: I’m very rarely in a room where people can raise their hand and say 100% of my investments across all endowments (personal and so on) are invested in line with what I want to see created in the world.
• Rowan: In the context of social investment insights, (you know, you come to a conversation like this hoping for some takeaway) the takeaway that I would give you is that: I think the best return on investment that any one of us can make, in any asset class and any field, is to get engaged. Either from a direct investment standpoint, from a grant-making standpoint, from an engagement…educate oneself, be able to have the conversations and taking action in relation to climate.
• Rowan: Arguably, we wasted 30-40 years, in which it was a lot less expensive to make incremental change. And now, we’re in a place where it’s going to take significant change and that’s going to require that people across the spectrum to be standing up and saying, “This is a change that has to happen and has to happen now.”

The Conduit

Fighting a System of Evil
Monique Villa, Author of Slaves Among Us and Synergos Managing Director of Philanthropy Anne Bahr-Thompson

We learned more on the harsh reality of modern-day slavery as Anne dug deeper with Monique on how she navigates talking to victims and creating a platform where their stories can be shared, her efforts to eradicate human trafficking and false labour, and examples of how bridging leadership principles could be applied:

  

• Monique: When you think of it, one of the biggest issues in the world today is probably access to justice. When you think of the millions of people who don’t have access to justice, because it’s costly, because you don’t know how to do it…access to justice is an enormous issue…it’s absolutely fundamental in every country and for the lives of people we help.
• Monique: No business can say, “I’m slave-free”, because they use material, they use people, they don’t control their whole supply chain. This happened because, 40 years ago, we started to outsource production to developing countries in order to pay less, without paying any attention on how you pay less.
• Monique: You have a lot of very good NGOs on the ground...but to educate the police, to educate the investigators, to educate all these people: you need survivors, because they know exactly the tricks. And so, survivors, once they have this role of educating, they start to feel (a little bit more) good about themselves finally. So you have a lot of ways (to help) but one crucial bit that is not being addressed is the mental health of survivors, and the mental health is a huge issue…

More on Monique Villa
Slaves Among Us

Data-driven Systems Thinking
Michael Green, CEO, Social Progress Imperative

Michael fascinated the group with a new structure for rating countries on their social progress, to compliment the standard ranking by GDP, and how this data could inform the work of the philanthropists in the future:

• Michael: We (myself and Matthew Bishop from The Economist) decided to write a book about the new emerging financial crisis (in mid-2000s) called The Road from Ruin…and in that book, we wrote about how there was an opportunity in the financial crisis. An opportunity to remake our economic system. To build on the positives in our system. To actually make something better and stronger.
• Michael: We weren’t “anti-economy” or “anti-business”, but if you could create a measure of social progress independent of economic variables, then you might generate some insight in what on earth this thing that everyone wants, but people have struggled to define, called “inclusive growth”. To understand when and how economic developments lead to better lives for people and when doesn’t it…that’s one big idea behind bringing about Social Progress Index. It’s a measure of society’s performance based entirely on non-economic indicators.