Nestled high in the Swiss Alps, Davos, Switzerland, is a beautiful little village with great skiing that is most famous for hosting the annual World Economic Forum. For fifty years, the founder and chairman, Klaus Schwab, has brought together leaders in politics, business, and philanthropy from all over the world to discuss the state of the world’s economy, and its most pressing political issues. Corporations pay hefty fees for their leaders to attend, both for the public programs and for the receptions, meals, and meetings which give the attendees a chance to hear about and discuss issues important to them.
To its critics, Davos symbolizes what is wrong with globalization—a lot of rich people pretending to care about poor people, with no intention of doing or paying for what it would take to make a real difference. That may apply to some of the attendees but not to all. Many of them have done a lot to help improve health and education, raise incomes, and reduce the threat of climate change. Leaders of NGOs also come to discuss their work and seek support. And people who disagree about globalization as practiced are given a platform, including Joe Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, former member of my Council of Economic Advisers, and a fierce critic, who is usually there to argue his case.
My first visit was on January 29, 2000. With about a year left in my second term, I brought five cabinet members with me to the gathering, both to support the benefits of our growing global interdependence and to warn of its dangers. In my speech, after making the obvious point that the new technologies which power positive globalization were also available to the world’s bad actors, including terrorists, narcotraffickers, and organized crime syndicates, I said our interdependence would continue to pose new challenges, including the speed with which new diseases spread, the rapid increase in economic inequality and insecurity, and the likely return of ethnic, racial, and religious tribal conflicts. As the United States continues to wrestle with COVID-19 and growing racial disparities in economic opportunity, healthcare, law enforcement, and other aspects of our lives, I wish I had been wrong about all of that more than twenty years ago.
When I first spoke at Davos, despite large numbers of people moving out of poverty and improvements in access to healthcare, half the world still lived on less than $2 a day, a quarter had no access to clean water, 130 million children never went to school at all, and 10 million of them died every year of preventable diseases and conditions like diarrhea. Even in wealthy countries, including the United States, the rapidly changing economy was damaging communities and dislocating workers, particularly older workers without college degrees, who lost their jobs and couldn’t find work paying anywhere near their previous incomes.
While the opening of new markets across the world had indeed lifted millions out of poverty, by 2001 it had been clear for years that too many people were being left out and left behind while global financial giants and multinational corporations enjoyed enormous profits. As the chief beneficiaries of globalization, they have a responsibility to dramatically reduce the burdens on those whose lives and livelihoods are hurt by it and to increase the number of people able to participate fully in its benefits. Twenty-plus years later, the imperative is clearer and the consequences of continued neglect more dire.
To reduce damaging conflicts rooted in racial, religious, tribal, and cultural hatreds, people need to believe they and their families can build better futures in a time of rapid economic and social change. Otherwise, they will feel trapped in stagnant waters, seething at being looked down on or forgotten, desperate for any lifelines, including ones woven from fibers of racial, religious, and cultural divisions, driving people to the false conclusion that authoritarian dictators can take care of your group’s anxieties by keeping the “others” down and out.
The Davos crowd gave me the polite reception you would expect them to give to the U.S. president, but I could tell most of them were convinced that the new order was doing far more good than harm, and that national governments, not corporations, were mostly responsible for doing something about the excessive inequality and insecurity the modern world had wrought.
Now as a former president starting a new foundation, I no longer had the power and resources of the executive branch to build more inclusive prosperity, but my foundation’s early successes lowering the price of AIDS medicine and reducing the calories in drinks served in public schools had shown that partnerships between the private sector, nonprofits, and governments could go a long way toward solving big problems no single group had been able to tackle successfully on their own.
For the next decade, I continued to go to Davos when invited, to speak and meet with political, business, labor, and NGO leaders. I especially enjoyed the forum offered to Israeli president Shimon Peres and me for a couple of years, a late-night conversation with a question-and-answer session that highlighted Peres’s brilliance, eloquence, and foresight as we tried to convince people they had to and could do more to humanize globalization.
I enjoyed the World Economic Forum, but no one was ever asked to commit to do something about all the problems we discussed, and when projects were announced, there was no system to help those who made them succeed in keeping them and no required report on progress or lack of it.
After I got home from Davos in 2004, I started talking to my staff about whether we could hold a similar meeting during the annual United Nations General Assembly week in New York in September when key world leaders would already be in town. Some of my advisors thought it was a great branding and fundraising opportunity. I said it might be, but the world didn’t need another talkfest, so I’d do it only if we asked every attendee to make a concrete commitment to action in the U.S., their home country, or region of their choosing, and report on their progress in keeping it. Would people actually pay to come to a meeting which required them to spend even more time and money to help save the world? I had a hunch that a lot of people, especially those who didn’t go or weren’t ever invited to Davos, might be open to the challenge.
So our foundation team began to design what would become the Clinton Global Initiative, a forum to bring people together who wanted to make positive change, and give them the chance to do it. I hoped to create a diverse community of doers, including heads of state and other government officials, leaders of NGOs, philanthropic organizations, business, labor, and finance, artists and athletes, and other citizens hungry to make a difference and advance causes they believed in. Many of them routinely attended conferences within their separate sectors—gatherings of similar businesses, philanthropies, and NGOs—but I thought they could do so much more together and I hoped that beginning with a commitment in mind would get attendees to move beyond talk to specific actions that would create more opportunities and solve more problems.
We announced the first CGI Annual Meeting at Davos late in 2004 and began to prepare for September 2005. Our small staff was led by Ed Hughes and Mary Morrison, both of whom had worked with me in the White House and were eager to accept the challenge. Ed worked on developing the programs, Mary handled membership and logistics. Our largest angel investor was Tom Golisano, a no-nonsense businessman from Rochester, New York, who founded Paychex, which provides payroll and other services to companies. In those early years, Tom was the difference between life and death for CGI. He remained our lead sponsor for eight straight years. Finally, when he knew we could make it without him, he went on to pursue his deep interest in helping people with intellectual disabilities, including supporting the Special Olympics. We were so lucky to have him as long as we did.
We spent a lot of time not just on what topics would be discussed and who would speak at the plenaries and on the panels, but on what to name the gathering. Publicis Events helped us with the branding. I’m not too good at that, but I know a good brand when I see it. Publicis suggested fourteen possible names. Two of them had the word I was looking for—Initiative. Not a Meeting. Not an Exchange. Not a Summit. Initiative implies action, which requires commitment. And since we were asking people from all over the world, we settled on the Clinton Global Initiative, CGI. It’s turned out to be a good call.
The inaugural meeting and all those that followed through 2016 would be held at the Sheraton in midtown Manhattan, which had the right mix of meeting space and a central location far enough from the United Nations to be relatively free of the normal General Assembly traffic gridlock. From the very first, Ed Kane and the Sheraton staff went the extra mile to help, including bailing us out of early problems with registration.
The first registration period was chaotic and the commitment process was rudimentary to say the least. People just wrote down the commitments on cards, which we used to organize follow-ups. But year after year, we worked to improve the process, helping members design their “Commitments to Action,” giving them a commemorative certificate, encouraging them to network with like-minded members from another sector or discipline, and facilitating and supporting those interactions however we could. For instance, if a nonprofit needed funding, we would help them find a corporation or philanthropist with similar interests and join forces to launch a project, and give them tools to manage the commitment.
There were a lot of positive responses to our invitations in the months leading up to that first September meeting, but as the date approached, I still had no earthly idea if anyone would show up for the three days of plenary sessions and programs, let alone if it would work. Along with the requirement to make a commitment, we had instituted a membership fee of $20,000 to help cover the cost of the conference. It was modest by Davos standards and often waived for people and groups who were doing good work but barely able to afford the travel and lodging costs. Still, who had ever heard of charging people to brave the New York traffic in U.N. Week to make commitments to spend more time and money?
But people did show up, at first nearly overwhelming our hardy staff and hardworking volunteers. King Abdullah of Jordan, British prime minister Tony Blair, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice participated in our first plenary session, and were joined in the audience by current and former heads of state, including the presidents of South Africa, the Dominican Republic, Turkey, Nigeria, and Ukraine; heads of international and multinational companies such as Coca-Cola and Dow Chemical, as well as nonprofit leaders and social activists from around the world. More people attended in the subsequent days, including U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan and the leaders of Rwanda and Norway. The plenary sessions were open to all and people chose which issue panels they would attend.
Somehow it worked. Those in attendance made more than $2.5 billion worth of specific commitments, including the construction of two wind energy power plants in the Dominican Republic, millions to bolster microfinance projects of the Grameen Bank, and a $100 million Africa investment fund.
From start to finish not all our commitments were large, but they all made a difference to those who kept them and to those who received their benefits. At the second meeting in 2006, a New Jersey businessman, Barry Segal, said he wanted to donate $100,000 and asked our staff about projects where it could make a real difference. They introduced him to Sustainable South Bronx, an NGO then managed by Majora Carter. In 2006, the South Bronx included the poorest congressional district in the United States, with more than 40 percent of its population at or below the poverty line and an unemployment rate in the high double digits. The population, two-thirds Latino and one-third Black, had an obesity rate of 27 percent, and a severe asthma rate seven times the national average. People lived surrounded by manufacturing operations, four power plants, and dumps with 40 percent of New York City’s garbage, with the smallest amount of open space in the city, less than one-half acre per thousand people.
Carter grew up in the neighborhood. When she moved back in with her parents to go to graduate school, she organized a drive to beat back another waste facility, started a job-training program in waste cleanup, and established Sustainable South Bronx to create green jobs and a healthier, happier neighborhood. The city gave her the funds to create an eleven-mile greenway network in Hunts Point, with tree-lined streets connecting open parks. But she had no money to hire people to maintain the parkland, to train people to care for the trees on the streets, or to involve young people in maintaining the greenway. Barry Segal was so impressed he committed $100,000 a year for three years to hire Greenway Stewards to do that work. They soon found more neighborhood partners, increasing their impact and that of the Segal Family Foundation gift.
A lot of good things happened in CGI’s second year. More than 1,000 leaders of nongovernmental and charitable organizations, business, labor, and government, including fifty current and former national leaders, came. During the first session, First Lady Laura Bush announced the first of more than two hundred commitments, a joint pledge of $16.4 million from USAID, PEPFAR, and the Case and MGT Foundations to bring clean water systems to 1,000 villages in sub-Saharan Africa.
I was so glad Laura came. It was important to me to establish CGI as an inclusive, nonpartisan community of people who do things. And Laura Bush cared about a lot of things that mattered, including the fate of Afghan women and girls and poor people in African nations who needed clean water to survive and thrive. She was clearly a big influence in the White House. And she doesn’t miss much. Two years earlier, when she and George came to my library dedication, they joined his parents, President and Mrs. Carter, and the other first family members for a brief reception in the apartment built atop the library. It’s a nice space full of artifacts from Arkansas history, memorabilia from our family’s years there, arts and crafts from the collection Hillary put together in the White House, and a large selection from my personal collection of books, many dating back to my college days. Ever the librarian, Laura took some time looking over the books, then came up to me and said, “The books are organized by subject area, then put in alphabetical order by author. Who did that?” I smiled and said, “I did. Hillary says I’ve spent years organizing our books.” She deadpanned, “Pretty impressive,” and walked away. Laura Bush is a “still waters run deep” woman. The more I saw of her, the more I appreciated the deep caring that drives her life.
After the first two meetings, it was clear that we were on to something special, with real potential to do good, so we needed someone who could run CGI full-time, find more sponsors, and properly staff the commitment-making.
Bob Harrison, a former Goldman Sachs executive, had decided to devote himself to charitable work. He was chairman of the Cornell University Board of Trustees, and for the previous eighteen months had served as the executive director of the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, our partnership with the American Heart Association to combat childhood obesity, which I’ll talk more about later. The alliance’s work was important, but I was confident that we could find an able public health expert to keep it going. We needed Bob at CGI. Thank goodness, he took the job and stayed for a decade.
Although CGI’s format and some areas of concentration changed over the years, as the changing world required, the core elements of the CGI Annual Meeting remained from start to finish: we celebrated doers, empowered every attendee to be one or become a better one, and fostered partnerships among people who didn’t normally work together. We never figured out how to get small donations to the commitments, other than by streaming the meeting every year, so we featured crowdfunding sites, especially Kiva.org, an organization where you can make small business loans of $25 or more, and when they’re repaid, you can keep your money or reloan it. To date, Kiva has handled more than $2 billion in loans by 2.2 million lenders in eighty countries with a 96 percent repayment rate. It’s an amazing operation.
The commitments department soon became the largest unit of CGI, filled with young, knowledgeable, and energetic people, who were always on the lookout for rising stars in the NGO world. Whenever possible, we began to include three other elements into every aspect of our work: first, an emphasis on the empowerment of women and girls as central to advancing all our other goals; second, the nonpartisan aspect of our work; and third, the necessity of creating market-based solutions to problems to assure their sustainability, essentially to operate like B Corporations in the U.S., companies that tell investors on the front end they’re working on a longer time frame, committed to the well-being of their customers, suppliers, employees, and communities as well as their shareholders. Believe it or not, from the 1930s until the early 1980s, that was what corporate law was supposed to require. (In 2019, Doug McMillon, president of Walmart, urged the Business Roundtable to embrace the stakeholder position again.)
Over the years, President George H. W. Bush, Senator John McCain, and Governor Mitt Romney came. In 2008, as the Republican nominee for president, McCain announced at CGI that he was suspending his campaign to return to Washington to work on the financial crisis. After Superstorm Sandy, we gave Governor Chris Christie a plenary session to discuss the challenges New Jersey faced in rebuilding.
Of course, the Democrats were always well represented. Barack and Michelle Obama came, as did John Kerry and several other members of Congress, governors, and mayors. Foreign leaders were invited and attended, including King Abdullah of Jordan and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi soon after he took office. Hillary also attended while she was secretary of state. In 2010, she spoke at CGI to announce the formation of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a more than $60 million public-private partnership, coordinated through the United Nations Foundation, to create a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions. Because the primary means of cooking and heating for three billion people in developing countries was and still is traditional stoves and open fires, nearly two million people, mostly women and young children, died every year from illnesses related to breathing smoke and other cooking gases. Since its founding, the alliance has helped more than 600 million people gain access to clean cooking fuels and technologies, which not only improve their health, but reduce harmful emissions, and its efforts have sparked new investment in the technologies, totaling more than $200 million in 2022. Hillary is still supporting the project.
One of the most interesting parts of CGI for me was responding to the long action memos on choosing main topics and picking the speakers and moderators for each panel and plenary session. Chelsea and I joined Bob Harrison and the CGI staff for hours of poring over the options for topics and participants. Often, Chelsea and the staff knew more than I did about what people were doing on a given subject and I learned a lot from and usually deferred to them.
Chelsea was also instrumental in CGI’s focus on initiatives to help girls and women, including the creation of a permanent track on women and girls at CGI. In 2022, she did panels with young activists and led the tribute to her mentor and friend the late Dr. Paul Farmer. She dedicated our Public Health Equity initiative to his memory and announced we were naming it for him, saying we intended to do our part to carry on Paul’s work by working to expand and support the global healthcare workforce, following the example of his beloved Partners in Health.
Every year, we kept working to improve the CGI model. For instance, we noticed that several of the commitments we announced on the last day of each meeting had been sparked by spontaneous conversations in the hallways after sessions or some other event. Members were finding partners with shared interests who needed complementary skills, had or needed funding, or just wanted to join forces. One of many examples of this was the unlikely meeting in the hallway at the Sheraton of Zainab Salbi, the founder of Women for Women, an NGO that supports women in war-torn areas, and Richard Adkerson, the CEO of Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, an international mining company. As the two of them started talking, Zainab mentioned that Women for Women was trying to expand in Congo, where Adkerson’s company had operations. Soon she had a partner to support her efforts there.
To foster more of these spontaneous partnerships, we began to schedule time and space for networking at our meetings and added technology to make it easier for like-minded partners to find each other. We also added a smaller midyear meeting to touch base with members and chart progress on commitments, and added working groups to combine commitments for specific target areas, such as the Haiti Action Network, which is still active and doing important work amounting to more than $500 million in committed aid so far.
In 2007, CGI hosted the first Clinton Global Citizen Awards to recognize leaders from civil society, business, the arts, and government for their contributions to society. The ceremonies, which included appearances by Alicia Keys, James Taylor, K’naan, Juanes, Angélique Kidjo, the Roots, Janelle Monáe, Tony Bennett, Ben Stiller, Seth Meyers, Elvis Costello, and Diana Krall, among others, served as uplifting moments for our attendees after what were often busy days. One of the most moving moments at CGI came when Andrea Bocelli performed with the Voices of Haiti youth choir his foundation supports.
Philanthropically minded celebrities who wanted to use their gifts and success to do something for society also did much more than just perform at CGI. Matt Damon, who learned about global development at a young age from his mom, came to CGI to learn what he could do to help millions of people with a scarcity of water. He met Gary White, a brilliant sanitation engineer, and they formed Water.org, which has now helped millions of people get access to safe, clean drinking water. Jon Bon Jovi, Ben Affleck, Ashley Judd, and others joined us to raise the profile of their work and explain it to a wider audience.
Also in 2007, I wrote a book called Giving, which covered the different ways other-directed people of all ages across the United States and around the world were trying to make a difference in local, national, and global issues. It was full of stories of real people doing amazing things, some of whom were involved in CGI, and I hoped it would inspire others to give it a go. It sold well for a book of its kind and still sells a few copies every year.
In response to a growing demand from people who couldn’t make the trip to New York or wanted to involve more local partners in their region, we held three meetings overseas. The first, in 2008, was in Hong Kong. CGI Asia was a new experience for many Asian businesspeople, but it did result in $185 million in commitments to help some 10 million people in the areas of education, energy and climate change, and public health. Commitment-makers included the BAIF Development Research Foundation, Boeing, WWF, Credit Suisse, and the World Food Programme. I was especially honored that Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of Singapore, came and participated as well.
We put our international meetings on hold while Hillary was secretary of state, because we needed foreign sponsors to pay for them and didn’t want to raise conflict-of-interest questions. We started up again in Rio de Janeiro in 2013, where leaders from across Latin America and around the world met to find ways to carry Latin America’s social and economic progress into the future, with a focus on developing human capacity, designing for green growth, and harnessing innovation and technology in the region. Chelsea led a Day of Action at a community day care center in Rio’s Morro do Vidigal neighborhood. Although Hillary, Chelsea, and I had to leave early to fly to Nelson Mandela’s funeral in South Africa, we later announced twenty-seven Commitments to Action valued at more than $222 million, with the expectation they would help more than 500,000 people.
Our third international meeting was held in Marrakech, Morocco, in 2015. CGI Middle East and Africa focused on investing in youth; securing access to energy, food, and water; and expanding infrastructure for communities throughout the region.
One of the best things we did with the CGI model was to extend it to college students in the United States and around the world. The Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) was announced at Harlem’s Apollo Theater in 2007, an event we held with MTV and featured Bono, Alicia Keys, Chris Rock, and Shakira, who were all active in philanthropy. The first CGI U, at Tulane University, brought together students from more than 250 colleges and universities, representing almost every state and continent except Antarctica, to make commitments focusing on energy and climate change, global health, poverty alleviation, and peace and human rights. Each annual meeting of CGI U included, in addition to the plenary sessions and programs, a day of service to the community hosting the meeting. For example, in Nashville in 2023, 530 CGI U students provided groceries to families alongside a local food bank, prepared supplies for schoolkids, and cleared land for an upcoming Native American cultural center.
After Tulane, we went to the University of Texas in Austin; the University of Miami twice, in 2010 and 2015; UC San Diego; Washington University in St. Louis; Arizona State University; UC Berkeley; Northeastern University; and the University of Chicago. We were scheduled to have our first international meeting in 2020 at the University of Edinburgh but had to substitute online events because of Covid. Howard University, Vice President Kamala Harris’s alma mater, hosted our 2021 CGI U online and she participated in our discussion about creating opportunities in a more inclusive economy and eliminating the economic and health disparities made even clearer by the COVID-19 pandemic. We did another online CGI U hosted by the American Association of Community Colleges in 2022, then had a great in-person return at Vanderbilt in 2023.
The Commitments to Action the students made ranged from on-campus clean energy programs to U.S. and international efforts to advance health, education, and economic conditions. In 2013, Donnel Baird, then a student at Duke University, formed a group called Bloc Power to finance and market energy efficiency and retrofit efforts in 1,000 churches, charter schools, small businesses, and other nonprofits in U.S. urban areas. In 2019, I met him in an old Brooklyn church with the pastor and community leaders who had improved not just the church but several buildings on their block, providing lower energy bills and a cleaner environment. Bloc Power is still going strong.
In 2009, two Vanderbilt University students, Chanukya Dasari and Birju Solanki, committed to open the first no-cost vision clinic in Kansas City, where the low-income population relied on free and lower-cost health facilities that didn’t offer eye care. By recruiting medical students and other volunteers, each clinic can treat several hundred patients and provide vision screenings for many more, on an annual budget of $2,000–$4,000 after the diagnostic equipment is purchased. Fifteen years later Birju still runs the clinic, and you can see for yourself how successful they have been at KCFreeeyeclinic.org.
All told, there have been more than 7,000 of these commitments, made by more than 10,000 students from 160 countries. Many of the students raised their own money for the projects, but the CGI U Network, a group of schools, companies, and foundations, have also provided more than $4 million to help.
Chelsea led the CGI U service days that were an important part of every meeting. After Superstorm Sandy, she helped raise more than 1,000 volunteers in eight hours to participate in a service day in the Rockaways in Queens, one of the hardest-hit areas. They spent the day picking up debris from streets, doing basic house repairs and cleaning, handing out disaster relief supplies and coats, and clearing a new playground on the beach buried in a mountain of sand. Chelsea’s friend Zach Iscol, then out of the Marine Corps, enlisted the veterans’ disaster relief organization Team Rubicon to help organize the day, guided by a software program developed by a young Egyptian American. They knew exactly how many people were needed to complete the assigned work in each area, meet their goals in the allotted time, finish all the houses, and clear the last of the sand mountain off the playground. And Zach is now New York City’s Emergency Management commissioner.
One of the most exciting innovations to come out of Chelsea’s involvement with CGI University was the CGI U Codeathon, a two-day competition in advance of the annual meeting that challenges student teams to develop technology platforms to address a specific significant problem with a proposed effective technological response. The event culminates with students pitching their ideas to a panel of judges to determine the winners. In recent years the Codeathons partnered with Clinton Foundation initiatives like the Health Matters Initiative and the Clinton Climate Initiative to focus on digital solutions to address mental health on college campuses, energy efficiency, and disaster recovery.
The Codeathons continued through the coronavirus shutdown. In 2020, for the second year in a row, IBM sponsored the Call for Code Global Challenge, supporting nearly 59,000 students through training and a series of hackathons to find the most innovative proposals to reduce the risks of climate change or the adverse impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The five semifinalist projects included: an online portal to provide small farmers in developing countries with the latest weather forecasts and crop water requirements based on the type of crop and the farmer’s location; a one-step site for small businesses in Australia that provides information on all available relief programs for small businesses hurt by the Covid shutdown and a simple process to apply for help; a browser plug-in that makes it easy for online shoppers to buy carbon credits to offset the emissions that come from transporting the goods they order; an app that replaces physical lines with virtual ones for shopping and voting; and an app designed by a working mother with two school-age children and a toddler that synthesizes what schoolwork is to be done each week in any home school, public school, private school, or other lesson-based entity like a drawing or martial arts studio. The information is securely distributed in a format easy for parents, grandparents, and guardians to understand.
You never can tell where one of these coding ideas will catch on. Fifteen years ago, Ashifi Gogo developed an online app that can be used to check the integrity of drugs shipped to developing countries. At the time, more than 25 percent of them were diluted, contaminated, or outright phony. The app, called Sproxil, works with unique labels that are attached to products and can be scratched to reveal a code, which is looked up using the app. It has worked so well that the company has expanded its focus to other kinds of counterfeit goods, including bottled and canned beverages. It’s still going strong, still a private company run by Ashifi, the very embodiment of CGI’s culture of possibility.
Despite the seriousness of the subject matter, CGI U was also a lot of fun, as students often chose to spend part of their spring break with us. They seemed to value the opportunity to meet other students from around the world in person they otherwise would have never met. We were grateful that many of the most creative and big-hearted people in entertainment and sports also chose to spend time with these students: Jon Stewart, Usher, Alonzo Mourning, Pharrell Williams, John Oliver, Natalie Portman, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, and so many others joined us through the years.
One of my favorite moments was when Stephen Colbert joined us in 2013 at Washington University in St. Louis. He did a special episode of his show from CGI U, including announcing his commitment to launch his own CGI—the Colbert Galactic Initiative—because simply solving the earth’s most pressing challenges wasn’t ambitious enough!
While the students may have been comfortable joining the global conversations online, I had been reluctant to join in, although I knew I should, since we were missing an opportunity to amplify important issues and our work. My staff conspired with Stephen and his team to accelerate it. As part of his interview with me during our closing plenary, Stephen surprised me by announcing that he had launched an account for me on what was then called Twitter as @PrezBillJeff. Over the next couple of days we traded tweets before he handed the account and the audience back to me to become @BillClinton. So I have Stephen to thank—or blame—for welcoming me to social media.
By 2010, I knew I wanted to do more to help the United States recover from the Great Recession that had struck hard in the fall of 2008, with the effects lingering for years. I wrote a book, Back to Work, which laid out some of the things I thought both governments and NGOs could do to boost the economy in the short and long terms, and decided to hold special annual CGI meetings to bring people together to focus on creating jobs and driving economic growth in the U.S. In June of 2011, we convened the first CGI America meeting in Chicago, to which we’d return twice more, followed by two meetings in Denver and the final one in Atlanta. We had good local experiences in cities with active, effective mayors who worked hard to ensure success. The six CGI America meetings from 2011, to 2016 produced more than six hundred Commitments to Action, which improved the lives of more than 4.9 million people in the United States.
Two big programs came out of CGI America. First, the AFL-CIO pledged $10 billion to jump-start large-scale construction of our public infrastructure, including retrofitting existing buildings to become energy-efficient. Much of that investment came from teachers’ and other public employees’ union pension funds, and the effort included training hundreds of thousands of men and women to qualify for good union jobs as the clean energy and green building markets increased. I first raised the idea with AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka in Davos in 2011, and he brought in Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, which was looking to invest, and the Building Trades Unions, which wanted the jobs. Randi drove the effort and by the end of their five-year commitment, they had exceeded their goals, eventually growing the fund to $16.5 billion, the largest private infrastructure fund in the country then. The fund’s projects have already created more than 100,000 jobs nationwide, including 18,000 in the modernization of LaGuardia Airport in New York. I hope they’ll keep at it. The union pension funds earn a good return on projects that agree to hire other union workers. New jobs are created and the pension funds of building trades workers, who have been underemployed for too long, are strengthened.
The second one was a Carnegie Corporation commitment to fund 100,000 new STEM teachers for our public schools. President Obama had called for them in his 2011 State of the Union address, but the Republican Congress wouldn’t provide the money. After the Carnegie Corporation made a CGI America commitment to fill the gap, the number of partners, originally twelve, more than doubled. A full-page editorial in The New York Times said the commitment, named 100Kin10, was the most important effort in STEM teacher preparation in the country. In November 2021, they announced that they had exceeded their goal by adding more than 108,000 STEM teachers to our nation’s classrooms in ten years, and re-upped in 2022.
In advance of the 2014 CGI Annual Meeting, our tenth, we decided that it would be a good idea to do an independent review of our commitments, find out how many had been successful, and see if we could determine a pattern in which projects had gone well and which hadn’t. The results were intriguing and in many ways reflected what we wanted CGI to be. The raw numbers were encouraging, with around 80 percent of the nearly 2,900 commitments completed or still actively pursuing their goals at the time of the survey. The rest were either inactive, stalled, or unsuccessful, not a bad record for what were in many cases bold and innovative projects in very challenging environments like public health and international development. Most of the projects that failed did so because they couldn’t raise the necessary funds, or changing conditions made the work too difficult to execute.
But what was most interesting to us was that the commitments most likely to succeed were true partnerships, where people from different sectors brought distinctive talents and resources to bear on a common problem. Taken as a whole, the partnership projects actually exceeded their goals. It appeared that what I had seen in countless examples across the world as president was also true in philanthropy: that cooperation beats going it alone nearly every time.
What did all the commitment-making and -keeping amount to? From 2005 through 2016, more than 3,600 commitments improved the lives of more than 435 million people in more than 180 countries. Here are three examples:
In June 2012, Procter & Gamble made a CGI commitment to save one life an hour every day by 2020. Through Flash Flood for Good, a partnership with a Christian relief organization, World Vision, dedicated to serving people in need regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, or gender, P&G produced a water purification packet that can quickly turn ten liters of dirty, unsafe water into clean, safe, drinkable water. The packet eliminates waterborne viruses, bacteria, and disease-carrying microorganisms and reduces diarrhea in developing countries by up to 90 percent. World Vision is one of P&G’s hundred partners in fifty countries, helping distribute 200 million packets a year at a cost of 10 cents a packet.
In 2013, on a visit to a small village primary school in Rwanda, Chelsea and I poured filthy, fetid water into two large containers, filtered only through a white cotton cloth to get the largest chunks out. Then we added the purification packet and stirred. The water began to clear almost immediately. After a few minutes we put glasses in the water, filled them, and drank. The water was delicious, clean, and safe, a potential lifeline for countless millions of poor people who don’t have access to something that life requires. As of 2024, P&G’s partners have provided more than 22 billion liters of clean water to people in more than one hundred countries.
Wings to Fly, a partnership between the Kenyan Equity Bank, led by James Mwangi, and the Mastercard Foundation and its president Reeta Roy, provides scholarships to bright, underprivileged children in Kenya to attend secondary school. Wings to Fly has given scholarships to 10,000 students, with 98 percent of the scholars graduating secondary school and 94 percent continuing on to college. In 2015, Chelsea and I spoke to 5,000 of them in a large indoor stadium in Nairobi and listened to four of the young people tell their stories, including a young man I met who talked about how he used to intentionally get arrested so he could spend the night in jail with a roof over his head and food to eat, and a young Muslim woman in a majority-Christian nation who thanked her fellow students for supporting her desire to get an education and to contribute to society. Her classmates high-fived her after she finished her talk. The students in Wings to Fly are all asked to become instructors to others who follow in their footsteps.
In July of 2012, Chelsea and I visited the Building Tomorrow Academy of Gita in Uganda. At the CGI Annual Meeting the previous fall, Building Tomorrow had committed to build and staff academies for 15,000 primary-level students by 2016. We met teachers and students in classrooms and greeted hundreds of community members thrilled with their new school and the opportunities it brought.
Founded by Joseph Kaliisa and George Srour, Building Tomorrow works with the Ugandan government to build the schools in rural communities and partners with more than twenty-five colleges and universities internationally to involve young people, mostly American college students. When a community is chosen, local citizens commit to volunteer over 20,000 hours to construct each school. When construction is completed, the building is leased to the local government to manage day-to-day operations and the Ugandan Ministry of Education funds teachers’ salaries and other long-term operating costs. Currently, more than 200,000 students are enrolled in Building Tomorrow programs across Uganda, including more than 2,000 with disabilities.
We can’t include all the stories I’d like, but here are some figures that show CGI’s impact:
Nearly 2.7 billion metric tons of CO2 were cut or abated.
More than 401 million acres of forest were protected or restored.
More than 8 million people gained skills to cope with environmental stress and natural disasters.
Nearly 4 million clean jobs were created.
More than 37 million people became actively engaged in efforts to promote climate change solutions.
Nearly 78 million people got improved access to financial services or capital.
More than 13 million girls and women were supported through empowerment initiatives.
More than $1.6 billion was invested or loaned to small and medium-sized enterprises.
More than 50 million farmers or small-scale producers gained access to better inputs, like seed and fertilizer, better supports including more systematic planting and harvesting training, and up-to-date knowledge of fair market prices.
More than 5.9 million girls were reached with efforts to increase female enrollment in schools.
Nearly 35 million people obtained access to information technology.
More than 52 million children received a better education.
More than 114 million people had increased access to maternal and child health and survival programs.
More than 33 million people got access to safe drinking water and sanitation.
More than 36 million people received treatment for neglected tropical diseases.
More than $318 million in research and development funds were spent on new vaccines, medicines, and diagnostics.
Over the twelve years that we convened CGI meetings in New York, there were many unforgettable moments, both onstage and behind the scenes, including a live conversation with astronaut Reid Wiseman aboard the International Space Station and a televised conversation between Archbishop Desmond Tutu, always a popular guest, and Aung San Suu Kyi, who was then under house arrest in Myanmar. (She’s now in tighter confinement again, in spite of her good-faith efforts to work with the military.) And on the final afternoon of each meeting, I announced the tallies of commitments made during the previous days, and sent our members off with a few words of thanks.
In 2016, we held what we thought would be the final Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting in New York, having bested our original commitment by two years. It was a bittersweet event, especially for Chelsea and me, not long before the end of a bitter, divisive election, but we had to do it. If Hillary won the election, we couldn’t take foreign sponsors and even U.S. companies would be accused of getting involved in order to influence the White House. If Trump won, he would go after anyone who supported us, foreign or domestic.
In my final remarks I tried to explain how CGI was an outgrowth of my other foundation work and my desire to get others involved, to help those already doing good things increase the impact of their work, and to encourage our partners to press on in the face of the ferocious headwinds of divisive tribalism at home and around the world.
After reviewing the history of CGI and highlighting some of its remarkable contributors and their work, I tried to address the current moment:
Don’t be disheartened. Don’t be deterred. Or in the wonderful words of my tradition, “Do not grow weary in doing good.” Deal with the headlines, but never forget the trendlines. The trendlines are better than the headlines. Good news about what’s going right in the world is a hard sell today, but look at the trendlines. More than a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty since 1990. We have dramatically reduced the number of people dying from tuberculosis and malaria on all continents. Infant mortality is going down. The gender gap in global primary school enrollment has virtually been eliminated.
Don’t ever give up what brought you here…. The next thirty years could be the time of greatest discovery and possibility and creativity the world has ever known…. But only if we get up tomorrow knowing that if we just get caught trying, and we do it with somebody else, chances are it’ll work out better than we ever dreamed.
CGI worked out better than I ever dreamed—thanks to you. God bless you.
Although we halted the annual meetings between 2016 and 2022, we kept the CGI model going. Our Action Network on Post-Disaster Recovery for victims of the 2017 hurricanes in the Caribbean brought together over 750 organizations in several meetings that produced more than eighty-five new, specific, and measurable plans that advance recovery and promote long-term resiliency across the region. As I described earlier, the Haiti Action Network is alive as well.
Experts recognized how CGI had helped transform the possibilities for philanthropy. Matthew Bishop, who cowrote Philanthrocapitalism and served as U.S. business editor for The Economist, observed in Politico, “In providing a marketplace where these partnerships could be forged, Mr. Clinton put CGI at the heart of a new movement in international problem-solving…. If for some reason CGI does have to stop, it would almost certainly be necessary to invent something else like it.”
Not everyone agrees, of course. In 2018, Anand Giridharadas, former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times and contributor to The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New Yorker, published Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. The book is a blistering critique of the growing inequality in the United States and around the world and the global elites who have claimed an unfair and unsustainable share of the world’s wealth while “pretending to care” about the people they had shafted. The book holds up Davos for special scorn, but also criticizes CGI and me personally for letting big corporations and the super-wealthy off the hook by giving those he dismissively calls “globalizers” a forum to look good and do very little. He has the same criticism about the Robin Hood Foundation, which raises over $100 million a year to help poor people in New York by holding a gala dinner to raise the money.
Unlike Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash, which I’ll discuss later, this is not a piece of political propaganda designed to help elect far-right wolves in populist clothing. Instead, Giridharadas argues that inequality keeps increasing because the principal architects of the global “winners take all” economy do try to do some good, but never propose anything that will make a significant difference because doing so would reduce their wealth and power.
There’s something to it. I’ve seen people set up tax-exempt foundations with high overhead costs that didn’t fund charitable operations as fully as their contributions would permit. The author interviewed Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, who was candid in admitting he worried about the same thing. I like and admire Walker. He’s brilliant, energetic, and committed to improving lives.
The book’s main argument is that real change will only come when we change the power structure in the United States and the world from the bottom up. That would certainly make a big difference, but as the 2020 and 2022 election results show, it’s not easy or quick work in a deeply divided country. The United States has suffered two severe meltdowns in the new century—the 2008 crash and the Covid-driven collapse in 2020. Both required much more government investment at the national level to rebuild the economy and, in the meantime, to help people pay their bills and keep businesses afloat. For a while it looked as if the deficits produced by this spending were manageable, but the return of higher interest rates on our national debt of $33 trillion and our low savings rate show that it’s not a sustainable policy.
So should we all stop what we are doing and just work on redistributing wealth and power at the grass roots? It’s a compelling argument in theory, but in practice I’m convinced that in the messy real world, where markets play a big role in the allocation of goods and services, working people worry a lot about high interest rates, and the struggle to make all of it more effective and more fair has faced stiff headwinds, we’d be worse off without people like Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, MacKenzie Scott, Susie Buffett, and Laurene Powell Jobs trying to save lives, empower poor people with better healthcare and education, strengthen global and national health systems, and incentivize governments in developing countries to build their capacity and eliminate corruption.
With large government donors keeping their donations flat, or pulling back to deal with COVID-19’s economic damage in their own countries and other pressures, we’d better hope NGOs, businesses, philanthropists, and crowdfunding groups keep stepping up, especially when it comes to global health and climate change. I hope the examples offered here will persuade you to support that position.
Better health and thriving children give families the chance to be more productive workers and better, more involved citizens. Doing that work hasn’t stopped Bill Gates from opposing the repeal of the estate tax, supporting good climate policy, or advocating other progressive issues. CHAI only works in countries where it’s invited and always tries to help countries improve their ability to take care of themselves with less corruption and more capacity. CGI America worked with the labor movement to establish a $16 billion infrastructure program, but the unions didn’t stop working for more progressive economic policies, including President Biden’s much larger infrastructure program, which thankfully finally passed in early 2022.
Would we really be better off if all those CGI commitments were never made and kept and all that money had been spent on local politics in the U.S. to counter the gains made by the antigovernment forces in Congress and state legislatures all over the country? What about the work in developing countries? We didn’t turn them into Scandinavia, but millions of people are better off.
Of course, politics and government policies matter everywhere in defining how much people can reduce inequality, increase incomes and social mobility, and improve the quality of life. But politics, as Max Weber said a century ago, is “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” There are times when big changes can be made, but most times require hard work to make modest progress and protect existing gains. And, as I’ve painfully learned, there are no permanent victories or defeats in politics. We had repealed Reaganomics in 1993, substituting an “invest and grow” model designed to grow the middle class, reduce poverty, and raise incomes across the board. This approach produced the most widely shared prosperity in a generation, but when the GOP later won the White House and Congress, they still went back to trickle-down economics. Meanwhile life goes on and those without direct political power have to decide what to do with each new day.
I believe the right approach is to be active in politics, supporting policies more likely to achieve shared economic prosperity and more inclusive communities; to push large corporations to act in the interests of all their stakeholders—their shareholders, and their employees, suppliers, and communities; and to back nongovernmental activities that bring as many positive changes and help as many people as possible by filling the gap between what the government does and the private sector provides, doing so faster, better, at lower cost, and doing it whenever possible in cooperation with both the public and private sectors. This kind of creative cooperation may be a lot to ask in today’s polarized business and political climates, but there’s plenty of evidence that working together to solve our problems works better than constant conflict.