RESULTS EDUCATION FUND
Moderator: Dr. Joanne Carter
09-21-13/8:00 p.m. ET
Confirmation # 36823228
Page 1
RESULTS EDUCATION FUND
Moderator:Dr. Joanne Carter
September 21, 2013
8:00 p.m. ET
Operator:Ladies and gentlemen, we are now beginning the conference call. If you get disconnected during the call, please call 1-888-409-6709. Again, the number to get reconnected is 1-888-409-6709.
At this time, your line is muted and will continue to remain muted during the duration of the call. To ask a question or if you have a comment, please press star one. If at any time during the conference you need assistance, please press star zero.
I would now like to introduce, Dr. Joanne Carter, Executive Director of Results located in Washington, D.C., to open the call.
Joanne Carter:Thanks so much, everyone and Operator, and welcome everyone to the special book party event for Reclaiming Our Democracy. Reclaiming Our Democracy is a story of Results but really it's the story of our grassroots activists who are a leading force for reshaping our country's political priorities to make a huge impact toward eliminating poverty around the world and here at home.
I'm Joanne Carter and I'm executive director of Results in the U.S. and I'm with you from WashingtonD.C. And we're thrilled to have all of you joining us from communities across the U.S. and from Canada as well. And I want to particularly welcome you folks who are hearing about Results and our work for the first time. We're thrilled to have you.
In a few minutes, you'll have the chance to hear from the author of Reclaiming Our Democracy and Results founder, Sam Daley-Harris, and from Nobel Peace Prize winner, Grameen Bank founder and Results board member, Professor Muhammad Yunus.
If there are just two things I hope we can convey to you tonight, they are the following – first and foremost, that ordinary people, each of us, all of us have extraordinary – can have extraordinary impact to the political process on life and death issues. Results is about giving people the tools and the support to make this people and our activists have proved that this is true for this last 30 years. And second, through the advocacy of Results and other allies to increase funding and push the right policies, we've literally been able to help save millions of lives, help tens of millions of the world's most dispossessed kids to go to school and help tens of millions of the world's poorest women access microloans and other services that have transformed their lives and allow them not just to survive but to thrive.
For those of you who are here tonight for the first time, Results in the U.S. has over 100 volunteer chapters in 38 states advocating for programs and policies to end poverty globally and here at home. And we have partner organizations in nine countries and some of our Canada partners are on the phone tonight as well.
The exciting and unique thing about Results is that our grassroots activists are not simply signing petitions or sending e-mails to Congress. We train and support people to develop strong relationships with congressional staff in Washington, D.C., to meet in person with members of Congress back in the district and to ask those members to take bold actions.
Literally, when I meet with members of Congress in Washington, they know their local Results activists by name. And we also train folks to generate op eds, editorials and letters in their newspapers to influence key decisions in their communities.
Given the crazy dysfunction in Congress right now, it might seem like an odd time to talk about working with Congress to make profound changes to some of the world's biggest scourges. But there really is an untold story of how we've got members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats across the political spectrum to come together around a range of critical issues and to achieve amazing positive impact, again in no small part driven by Results grassroots volunteers over the last years and decades.
When Results – just a few examples, when Results first started working to address the issue of needless child deaths some 30 years ago, more than 14 million children were dying every year, 41,000 a day from mostly preventable causes. Today, even if population has increased, that number has been cut by more than half, the latest stats just released were 18,000 a day. That's still far too many, but it's incredible progress and we played and are playing a key role.
We began in the1980s by bringing media and congressional attention to simple life saving interventions like a measles vaccine costing less than a dollar. And over the decades, we work with Congress to create wide political support anda child survival funding account. And just a little over a year ago, we helped secure funding for the world to make two new vaccines against diarrhea and pneumonia, the biggest killers of kids in the planet, available to a quarter of a billion children. That will save a child's life every 40 seconds. And that's 45 kids lives saved in the 30 minutes that will be on this call together.
When Results started working with Professor Yunus to bring attention to the life-saving power of microfinance, there were just a few hundred thousand of the world of very poor people with access to this life-changing loans and other services.
With advocacy and mobilized media attention and congressional support and setting a bold global goal, programs are now reaching some 130 million very poor women and their families to transform their lives.
I have worked with Results for 21 years and I can tell you that we are at an unprecedented moment of potential in the world, really a crossroads when we can literally finish the job of ending some of the greatest blights and injustices on the planet. We're no longer talking about just reducing child deaths. The U.S. and many other countries have committed to ending preventable child deaths globally. President Obama used those words in his State of the Union, and we're no longer talking about fighting AIDS and tuberculosis. With adequate resources, we're talking about defeating them.
And it's going to be a political decision more than a medical one as to whether our progress is rapid; we're slowed by lack of resources and commitment. And that's really where our work comes in.
And just this year, the goal to actually eradicate extreme poverty on the planet, the goal that Muhammad Yunus articulated so powerfully when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and called for putting poverty in museums. That goal has been put forward by the World Bank president, Dr. Jim Kim to virtually eliminate extreme poverty in the planet by 2030.
I want to just end by saying that here at home in the U.S., it's deeply unacceptable that we actually face the risk of not just failing to make progress against poverty domestically but of backsliding and literally balancing our budget fund on the backs of the poor because they lack political power. And we know that there are a set of programs that can help break the cycle of poverty and cushion against poverty’s worst consequences. And that's why we're also fighting to protect those programs here at home.
Our work is far from done and it's a moment of huge opportunity, but also huge risk. And that's why we have such a key role to play through our advocacy. It's going to be essential to protect what works and get decision makers to invest the resources and set the policies to actually end hunger and poverty and everyone can play a role in that.
And now I want to turn the call over to Sam Daley-Harris, the founder of Results and author of Reclaiming Our Democracy. In founding Results, Sam helped demystify the process of creating big change and he has put so many of us in touch with our power to do this. Sam, we're so happy to have you on the call.
Sam Daley-Harris:Thank you, Joanne. Hi everyone. It's great to be with you. And I'm excited to talk with you about the 20th anniversary edition of “Reclaiming Our Democracy: Healing the Break Between People and Government.” The book's Web site is
In some of your rooms, there may be only a few copies of the new edition. You can go online during the book party tonight and order your own copy from Barnes & Noble or Amazon. You might also want to make plans to schedule a book club discussion in a month or two when people have had a chance to read the new edition.
I'm going to talk about why Results was started in the first place and then share a few ideas from the book that you can find in the work of Results. I have 21 lecture schedules between now and the end of November and many interviews. Whenever a radio interview – I did about five radio interviews last week, whenever a radio interviewer asks me about Results, I'm always aware of the audience's potential despair about big issues like poverty. So I always try to tell my journey from hopelessness to action.
I was a musician and when I started, I was oblivious to hunger and poverty. But the death of a friend at the time of high school graduation and the death of Robert Kennedy at the time of college graduation four years later both got me to asking the questions of purpose, why am I here, what am I here to do? And then nine years later, I was invited to a presentation on the Hunger Project.
I really felt world hunger was inevitable that there were no solutions because if there were solutions, somebody should have done something by then. But that night at that presentation, I realized the obvious. There was no mystery to growing food. There was no mystery to clean water or basic health. I realize that I wasn't hopeless about the lack of solutions. I was hopeless about human nature. People who just never get around to doing the things that could be done. But there as one human nature I had some control over, my own and my questions, why am I here, what am I here to do. So I got involved.
In 1978 and 1979, I spoke to7,000 high school students. Before going into the first classroom to talk about world hunger, I read some quotes from the National Academy of Sciences Food and Nutrition Study, and others, calling for the political will to end hunger. So I asked 7,000 high school students what the name of their member of Congress was. Only 200 knew the name of their member of Congress. Fewer than 3 percent, 6,800 didn't know. More than 97 percent didn't know the name, so Results started out of this gap between the calls for the political will to end hunger on the one hand and the lack of basic information on who represented us in Washington on the other.
I'm going to close with three quotes that can be drawn from the story I just told and that point to the essence of the book. The first quote is from Mark Twain who wrote, "The two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why." The work of Results is part of that "why." We all want our lives to matter. We all want to leave the campsite cleaner than we found it and Results is a vehicle for doing that on a national and global scale.
The next quote is from inventor and futurist, Buckminster Fuller who said, "The things to do are the things that need doing that you see need to be done and that no one else seems to see needs to be done." When I read the calls for the political will to end hunger and found that more than 97 percent of the high school students I asked didn't know the name of their member of Congress, I saw there were something that needed to be done that at that time few others saw.
The last quote is from Apollo Astronaut Rusty Schweickart who said, "We aren't passengers on spaceship earth, we are the crew. We aren't residents on this planet, we're citizens. The difference in both cases is responsibility." In the book, I say that in mid-1980s when some of us were really getting going, we began to get up out of our passenger seats and walk up to the cockpit and notice there's nobody up there. Those cockpit seats are our seats.
In one of the new chapters, there's a drawing. On the left side of the page is a small circle labeled "Your comfort zone." To the right is a much larger circle labeled "Where the magic happens." The work of Results is to help us move out of our comfort zone and over to where the magic happens.
After Muhammad Yunus' remarks in a moment, we'll have about 10 minutes for comments and questions. I'd love some of you to consider sharing this, who were you before Results as a citizen, as a change-maker, as a community leader and who are you now? The question that I'd like you to consider is who were you before Results? As a citizen, as a change-maker, as a community leader, and who are you now?
So now it's my honor to introduce Muhammad Yunus. He's the seventh person in history to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. He founded Grameen Bank 37 years ago. He joined the Results board in 1988, 25 years ago. He's written a foreword to this new 20th anniversary edition of Reclaiming Our Democracy. It's been a profound honor for me and for Results to have his partnership and support over the last 25 years. I'm actually going to get out of this chair so Professor Yunus can be closer to the microphone.
Muhammad Yunus:Thank you, Sam, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about the Reclaiming Our Democracy book, and hello to everybody. I'm very happy to have a chance to talk to you because I'm a living witness to the power of what Results have accomplished. And Sam is trying to communicate this power through the book. And I have experienced it, simply not just watching Sam going around doing things. And I personally benefited from that whole structure that he has built around the country and around many other countries of the world.
I met him in connection to my work and our first meeting was I was introduced. I was to speak to a conference call, and I have no idea how a conference call works at that time. And so I was talking to some editorial writers throughout the nation. And there were lots of questions about the work that I do, about microcredit in Grameen Bank. And I was passionately trying to explain to them what it means to me. I have no idea how they will perceive this, all my work.
And in fact, since I don't see them in front of me, I'm just talking to kind of talking to the air with the microphone in front of me. So I saw these voices coming from all directions and I tried to explain as completely as I could. But that one conference call had created so many reactions. I was amazed over the years. One of them was (Christine Hillnut) from Christian Science Monitor. She was on the call and she wrote an article about my work.
And that was one outcome, I thought this was legitimate because of these editorial writers were interviewing me for the conference call. But I didn't realize that it will be led by some people in NBC and they will think about creating a segment for 60 minutes. And they came to Bangladesh, spent two months of their time researching to everything about Grameen Bank so that they can be absolutely sure this is a legitimate thing and it works and there's no secrets about it so that they don't get later on caught because they didn't research it well. They have researched it before they came to Bangladesh.
And that segment which was, what, a 13 minute segment in a 60-minute program, created so much impact in people all around. And I keep hearing years later, they interviewed themselves and such and such when your segment was aired. And my mother called me up to – I was a student in university and she wanted me to see to watch your show. So I did. And that changed my life. So I heard so many people saying that I could change my life. So this is the – when you take an action how it's – by going through so many different ways to do that, this is an example.
And later on, not only about one particular segment of the television show, many people came to know about microcredit because of Sam's work through Results in this country. And many Congressmen and senators came to know about microcredit and poverty issues, poverty issues not about just sending some grant money to one country, it's a complete way of doing things. And that the result, U.S. policy has changed and that on the – U.S. AID policy has changed.
I remember because the Congress was trying to do something about microcredit, but U.S. AID was very stubbornly protecting their normal activities rather than doing the kind of activity reserved by microcredit. So that interaction between the Congress and the government agency, and I was a witness to that too. Again, this is happening because Results volunteer all around the country talking to their Congressmen and their senators about the miniature, paying serious attention to the poverty issue. And there's a tool available where it can be addressed more concretely, and that is microcredit.