VOICE OF THE YOUTH NETWORK BLOGGER
International Youth Foundation
Grantee: International Youth Foundation
Interviewee: Rick Little
May 2003, Baltimore, Maryland
Would you please state title and overall relationship to IYF?
I'm a founder of the International Youth Foundation.
Rick, you had a long history with the Kellogg Foundation. How you first came in contact with the organization is very important and telling. Would you mind sharing your story of how you first met Russ Mawby and what happened?
Okay. I first came to know the Kellogg Foundation when I was 19 years old. I was just out of high school. I didn't even know what a foundation was. I had never heard of a foundation and I remember being very surprised that there were actually organizations whose purpose was to give away money. Someone told me that there were such institutions and that I should go to the Kellogg Foundation. This was the 156th foundation that I went to. I had gone to 155 other foundations asking for money to support a project that I was trying to develop at age 19 to help other young people like myself who have come through difficult times. I had grown up in a family in a small Midwestern town, a little farming town in Ohio with a lot of pain in my family. An alcoholic mother, a drug-addicted father. I had walked through the pain and darkness of that kind of a family and having come through that hardship trying to figure out how to make sense of that and how to find your way through it, I decided to start an organization to help other young people like myself.
So in trying to raise money to start this organization, I asked some people how do you get money to do that? They said go to foundations. And after a 155 rejections, Kellogg was number 156. Many, many people had suggested a man by the name of Russ Mawby, and I remember writing to Dr. Mawby and having other people write to him, and I was able to secure a meeting. When I went to see Russ in 1975, 1976 perhaps, I begged my way into his office. I remember distinctly now, it seems so funny. In the old Kellogg building out on North Avenue there was a safe. This a memory of a 19-year-old who didn't have a clue what he was trying to do. I walked by this safe in the hallway being escorted to Dr. Mawby's office, and I remember thinking, 'I wonder if that's where Kellogg Foundation keeps its money?' What was supposed to be about a 30 minute meeting turned into a two and a half hour meeting. I poured my heart out to him about my own family and about this idea of developing a program for other young people like myself who struggle. We went to lunch together and within a matter of weeks he called and said that they had more than doubled the request, this without a formal proposal. That's how I first came to know the Kellogg Foundation.
Your proposal at that time, what was it targeting? How did your interest in serving youth come about?
The original proposal to the Kellogg Foundation grew out of my own struggle as a young person growing up in a small town with a lot of problems in my own family. But well beyond my own issues and struggles, one of the first things I did was to set out to talk with other young people to find out if my problems and issues unique or do other young people share these concerns? And so I interviewed more than 2,000 young people. I spent nine months living in my car, living in the streets and I went around the country and interviewed 2,200 young people in schools, in streets, in communities and I came up with the top 10 concerns of those 2,200 young people. Those top 10 issues became the basis of what then became the Quest Program. When I went to the Kellogg Foundation asking for resources to start Quest, it was based on these top 10 concerns, things like how to develop self confidence, how to get along with your parents, how to develop friendships, what's the meaning of life, how to set goals and figure out what you're going to do with your life, those kind of issues.
Did your work with Quest, the experience you gleaned during the years of running that program, provide you with a launching pad for the IYF idea? Is there a relationship and how did that vision come about?
I started the Quest Organization in 1975 with the support of the Kellogg Foundation and my dream for Quest at that time was that it would be able to grow and reach lots of young people, teaching life skills. Quest over the years actually grew into the largest, at the time, drug abuse prevention program in the United States and then in the world. Quest is used today in more than 30,000 schools and more than 30 countries around the world in teaching life skills. I've always believed and I still believe that we actually don't have a drug problem in the world, we have a people problem, and that fundamentally underneath the drug problem or the teen sexuality problem or many of the problems that we face in the world, underneath it it's a problem of values, it's a problem of relationships, a lack of life skills, a lack of confidence, it's a lack of a set of values and skills that young people have in their lives. As Quest grew over the years, I began to work with Quest in many countries, and working with leaders of local nonprofits and NGOs and schools around the world, it became clear to me that actually we know a lot about some things that work.
Quest is one example of something that works. It's worked effectively in many cultures and countries and contexts around the world. Quest is one example but there are hundreds, thousands of examples of things that work, ideas that work, programs that work, strategies that work, philosophies that work effectively in many countries and contexts. The problem often is that while we know a lot about some things that work they're often not done at scale, they lack capacity and they're not done in ways that are sustainable. And so in the mid to late 80s, after Quest was in 20 some countries, I became rather obsessed with this idea of how do you build on what we know as to what works, and how do you do it in ways that are scalable and sustainable? And so that started idea of IYF.
So in the late 80s I became rather obsessed with this idea of scale and sustainability and effectiveness and so the International Youth Foundation was built on that very simple idea. IYF is built on the notion of what we call ESS: effectiveness, scale, sustainability. How do you find what works, what's effective; how do you take it to scale; and how do you do that in ways that are sustainable?
So what are the mission and goals of IYF?
It's the work in local and national partnerships that means identifying NGOs, corporations, government in a country, and identifying with them strategies and other organizations that are effective in meeting the identified needs of young people in that country and then helping to scale up effective programs and approaches to meeting those needs and doing it in ways that are sustainable. If you look at the IYF of today, as it has developed over the last 13 years, what you would find is a network. IYF is a network of relationships more than anything else. There is a network in some 50 plus countries of partnerships, relationships of organizations, foundations, corporations, NGOs who have themselves a web of other organizations in relationships that are working on a whole set of issues--youth employment, drug abuse, life skills, reconciliation programs, tolerance programs, technology programs. There's a whole range of programs that we and our partners are funding together to meet the needs of these young people.
It's a huge idea. How did you get it off the ground? What took place?
How do you get something like this off the ground? You know, it's a grand concept, it's a big idea, how do you find what works in the world and then go out and do such a big thing from nothing? Well that nothing all started with significant grant support from the Kellogg Foundation. There would not be an International Youth Foundation without the Kellogg Foundation. The foundation provided three things at the beginning that made IYF possible. First was the intellectual support. There was a team of people with the Kellogg Foundation who were critical in helping to conceptualize and think about this idea, from board members to Russ Mawby to others on the senior staff and consultants that were provided. Second is in the financial support that was provided. Kellogg provided over the course of 11 years or so about $68 million, I think. Still the largest commitment perhaps or certainly one of the largest commitments in the history of the Kellogg Foundation. So the financial support of Kellogg was critical. Not only in the amount, which was unprecedented at the time, but also in the duration. It was long enough to allow for IYF to develop the other networks of support that have now developed. You don't launch something on this scale globally without enduring support from a founding donor. You need this kind of support and Kellogg had the wisdom and foresight to provide that kind of support, which was critical.
And then thirdly, Kellogg opened lots of doors. It brought in other networks of relationships and partners. So all three of those were critical in building the relationship. The other part of that, how you develop something like this from scratch has to do with other relationships we were able to bring to the table. From the beginning the International Youth Foundation was built on the very idea that, by our very name, International Youth Foundation, international was core to the concept of IYF. If you think about wanting to help the world's children, the world's young people, a lot of people would say, from the United States in particular, “Well, we have so many problems in America today with our own young people, why are you focusing so much energy outside?” Well, when you think about the fact that only about three and a half to four percent of the world's young people live in the United States, 96 percent live somewhere else, it's critical that we take a global point of view. In 1988, 1989, 1990 when IYF was being birthed, the Berlin Wall still stood, technology was incipient. Look at the Internet in 1989--it had about a hundred pages of material on the Internet and you think about how the world has changed since the late 80s. Fundamentally. Globalization wasn't even on the radar. Most people in late 80s weren't talking about the concept of globalization if you think back to the language that was used. We were living in a different era in the late 80s. It's changed dramatically. But IYF was born in that era, not this era. And in that era we took a bold step to say we wanted to be global. So from the beginning, IYF had this concept that we would be a global foundation that happened to be based in the United States rather than being an American Foundation that worked globally. Those are two very different concepts. And so our board is a global board. I'm one of only two Americans on the board of IYF. If you look at the character of IYF from its board to its staff, a third of IYF's staff comes from outside the states. Virtually all of our partnerships except one are outside the United States. If you look at our resource base, our financial base, a huge share of our money has always come from outside the United States. So we've worked very hard to not only talk about and think as a global foundation but to frame ourselves in that way.
You used the term bold, and it applies at a number of levels. Would you reflect on that point when you were coming to the Kellogg Foundation and asking for funding for this big effort. It was pretty risky, pretty bold. What were you thinking at the time?
You know when the International Youth Foundation was conceived, it was clear to me to do something on the scale that I and others felt needed to be done. When you look at the landscape of the world and at the problems that were clear and evident at the time, it was clear to me and to a lot of other people, there were many organizations in the world who were working on that zero to five age group, or on the older college age group, but for that population between the five and 20, it was a kind of wasteland. You'd be hard pressed in 1988 to find any. I think the Kellogg Foundation investment was about a million dollars in 1989. We convened more than 300 leaders from many countries to do the strategic evaluation of this. They were looking at and questioning and evaluating and developing strategy. What we found was that there was no organization on the global level that was about the business of this five to 20 age as a focus, about the business of mobilizing resources, about the business of finding what worked and scaling it up.
There were lots of organizations on the ambulance side of the equation, but on the prevention side, on the five to 20 side not much. So the boldness of IYF, if we call it that, in my judgment was and still remains critically important. Frankly I would say we need even greater boldness today, if you look at the challenges facing the world today. I spent a lot of time in many parts of the world where you speak with young people about hope and about what is it that they look forward to and you see for so many kids the sense of lost opportunities, the sense of no hope because either of HIV/AIDS or no jobs. What's at the end of the pipeline? You know, 80 percent of the new jobs created in Africa last year were created not in a formal sector but in the informal sector, the shadow economy. Kids have little opportunity to really find a job unless they go out and try to create one. There's so little opportunity for so many kids and something has to change in the equation. If anything, we need greater boldness. I think IYF is one small part of the boldness that's required.
Talk about some of the personal dynamics that go behind creating a vision. When you got that phone call from the Foundation, when they said “We're going to go with this, Rick, start moving,” you probably felt a mix of exhilaration and probably fear. What did you feel and how did you act at that point in time?
When I got the first phone call, the notification that the Kellogg Foundation had approved the first support for the International Youth Foundation's creation, it was quite a range of feeling. It was both exhilaration and excitement and a sense of 'We did it.' You know this is a moment for celebration because it was the culmination of a lot of work. It was also a moment of pause because I knew, having built Quest for 14 years, what it meant to actually start with nothing and try to build something. I knew what it was we were embarking upon, and in order to receive a big chunk of that Kellogg money, well over half of it, that meant we had to go out and raise a lot of money. A lot of the Kellogg money was conditional upon raising two to one, that is $1 from Kellogg for every $2 raised from other sources, and not just other sources but new money, nontraditional sources. So there were quite a few stipulations incumbent upon this grant. At that point, it was just me and an assistant, so I had to now go out and hire a staff, build an organization, build capacity and raise money, to build a global organization from Battle Creek. I felt a bit of doubt there, with that excitement. I also felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude to the Kellogg Foundation. I know that this was a very difficult decision for the Kellogg Foundation, it was a lot of money for a concept, and to this day I have such gratefulness to the board of the foundation and to Russ and the senior team at the foundation because I know that it took a lot of discernment and wisdom to make that decision.
It seems like, while you're out trying to build an organization, create those partnerships, get the buy-in, you're also being held accountable for getting things going and implementing on the ground, starting to serve the youth. How did the International Youth Foundation handle that and what were the tensions that existed?
That's a perceptive question because when you are building an organization, particularly one of this scale and magnitude, few people appreciate, especially when you have to raise so much money to meet challenge requirements and build the capacity of a new organization and build partnerships in countries where, say, in Poland, in a brand new democracy, civil society didn't exist before. The idea of a foundation, what is that? Let alone a grant-making foundation and with tri-sectoral partnerships, what is that? We've never had a private sector before, what is it? So trying to build these kinds of community foundations in places that are difficult while you are raising new sources of money, while you are building a global foundation and deliver effective programming, it's a difficult challenge because there are so many things operating simultaneously.
Trying to meet all of that at one time is a challenge. But you know this is a challenge not unique to IYF, one faced by many organizations small and large. This is not unique also to global organizations, this is a challenge in the reality of local community organizations as well. They're just at a different scale with different players. But it's a challenge that many donors don't fully recognize, but when it comes to accountability there are always these two parts to evaluation. You're evaluating both for outcomes, which is critically important, but also in terms of process. So we have always evaluated on both scores. The Kellogg Foundation was actually very helpful to us on both of those scores and we had a study team that was developed and organized by the Foundation, which proved to be invaluable to us. It was an independent group that walked alongside us for several years and helped us on both of those scores, process and outcomes. And we found it to be an extremely valuable process.
You've talked about creating a global network. Could you please provide a few examples of partnerships in that global network? Could you also give some examples of some of the Mexico and South African partnerships that were created?
When you think about the International Youth Foundation, one of the core activities of the International Youth Foundation is to create partnerships with indigenous organizations. These are often referred to as foundation-like organizations because in some ways they operate like a community foundation, like an operating foundation, like an NGO. They're kind of a hybrid. They have a grant-making portfolio, they have a program portfolio, they invest in programs, they run their own programs oftentimes. So they're a mix and they are in the business of looking in their own country for what works. What are the effective programs and practices in our own country that work? In technology, in health, in education, micro lending, in employment. And then they go about the business of either managing, running or funding a multitude of initiatives in their own country.
Some of these programs and initiatives are very large and some are relatively small, depends on the country. For example, in Brazil, there's a very large partnership with Abrinq. The Abrinq Foundation is in every region of the country. You look at the Philippines, that's one of our largest partnerships. Works all over the country from North to South, East to West, lots of islands are involved. It's a very significant, big partnership. They work a lot around juvenile delinquency issues and education issues, technology issues. A wide range of programming going on. If you look in South Africa today, we have a significant partnership in South Africa. One of our oldest partners in terms of how long we've been together. We started in South Africa I think in 1991 or 92. Mexico, one of our oldest partnerships. In fact. we have two different sets of partners in Mexico, which is worth noting. We have a partnership with the Oaxaca Community Foundation in the South that we do in collaboration with others and this is more like a traditional community foundation and they're funding a wide range of youth and children's initiatives. Then we have another partnership with Vamos, which is more national in its scale and character and they're funding a wide range of activities. So it depends on the country how we carry out our activities. Then we have other kinds of partnerships with companies. We have a significant global partnership with a number of global corporations. Nokia is a great example. Here's a company that has stepped up to the table in corporate social responsibility and we have a significant global partnership called Make a Connection. And together we are working in many countries around the world with local Nokia staff and employees to devise a program and a strategy that Nokia funds through us and so it's four-way partnership: Nokia Corporation in Finland, IYF in Baltimore, IYS in the country and Nokia team in that country. And we work as a partnership in carrying out programs in each country. We have those kind of relationships with a number of companies. Nokia is one of the largest but we have significant relationships with a number of private companies as well.
When IYF is building these partnerships, when you talk to business, when you talk to government, when you talk to leaders in civil society, what do you generally hear back? What's their first reaction to the whole idea of joining in to this type of network and being a part of the International Youth Foundation's work?
You know our team travels all over the world, we are constantly interacting with leaders of business and industry and government and NGOs and foundations, so we are engaged and the reaction to IYF's work is, I would say, fairly uniform across the spectrum. People are concerned. I would say there is more interest today in youth development, youth issues than perhaps at any time since IYF was conceived. I'm not sure if it's just a matter of how the cycle flows or of the geo-political environment today with terrorism concerns, but it's clear to me that there's a growing concern in the world and a growing recognition that unless we get the youth part of the equation right, we're going to pay great consequences on the other side. When you look at the six billion people who live in the world today, half of them are under the age of 25, and when you look at the poorest countries in the world, the proportion is much higher. You look at a place like Afghanistan and you think about what's happened in that country in the last couple of years since 9-11. Most people don't begin to perceive that 72 percent of the population of Afghanistan is under the age of 24, 72 percent. Well, what does it mean for a country like Afghanistan where there's now a major rebuilding going on since the war, what does it mean to a country where nearly three out of every four people are young people under 24? It means a lot about what you do there in the reconstruction, what you do there in terms of education and social service and the like.
If you look at the Arab world today where a lot of people are concerned and try to figure out what do we do? How do we relate? How does East meet West, etcetera? What about the cultural divides? What about the religious divides? What does it mean that more than half of the Arab world is under the age of 15? So there's a growing recognition. You find that even gatherings like the World Economic Forum, which traditionally deals with economic and trade issues, today they have as a regular part of their agenda a human development track that is attended as much by the participants as the economic and trade track. They have major sessions around what we do with the young people, how we better equip these young people so they don't become the terrorists of tomorrow. What do we do in terms of education and values formation? How do we begin to instill a sense of democratic values and open society values? So there is a readiness, I believe, and a recognition in many parts of the world and segments of society that the time has come, where in the past, well, “Youth, nice to do, somebody ought to do it.' Today I think there's a readiness that has not existed before.
Are there differences in terms of perceptions or reactions between those people in business or those in government or the nonprofits that you talk to? Does business come at it one way whereas government looks at the issue differently?
There is no doubt that while there is a growing recognition and a greater readiness to look and talk about and debate the youth question, each of these segments--business and industry and trade unions and governments and NGOs--looks at the question from their own perspective, and we're each touching a different part of the elephant, so to speak. Which is, I think, healthy and understandable and pragmatic. The important thing is we're all talking about the issue and, from my point of view, each side has something very valuable to bring to the table and that's one of the reasons why IYF and its work is so doggedly promoting multi-sector partnerships. Because we actually believe and have seen it in practice repeatedly that when all sides are sitting at the table they all have something to contribute.
You know, historically many NGOs are skeptical of the private sector, skeptical of working with business and many in business have been skeptical traditionally of working with NGOs. They have been on the receiving end of many who have been very critical of business. IYF has been working hard to begin to bridge some of the gaps and to say, 'No, we have to sit at the same table. We may have different perspectives. We may view some of the issues differently but actually we have a lot to bring to each other.' The same with government. And yes, they do approach these issues differently but we can learn a lot from each other. For example, we created something called the Global Alliance for Workers in Communities and at that table we have NGOs, trade unions, global brands like Nike and Gap and others, we have the World Bank. So we've brought together stakeholders who often do not sit together, but for the common vision of improving the lives of young people who work in those factories that many in the press would call sweatshops. I've been in many of those factories and we're working in those factories and those are also places of organized work, places where development can happen, places that provide employment. Those are places where young people are gathered in large numbers every day. Where schools can be. Where health clinics can be. Where development can actually happen and so by bringing the players together good things can happen for young people. And in our experience, many of these companies, including Nike and Gap and others, want good things to happen and so we're working hard to help facilitate that kind of dialogue and that kind of work.
Rick, are young people at the IYF table?
Young people are a critical part of the equation and young people are at the table. It's implicit and explicit in the philosophy and the work of IYF and in the work of our partners. It cuts through everything that we do, that young people are not just the future as folks talk about them, but they are the present, they are the ones that this is all about. So it's not only doing work for, it's doing work with. If you'll look at the work of the Global Alliance, for example, it starts with young people. When we are in the factory, we don't go into a factory and say 'Here's what we think young people ought to have in this factory.' It starts with the young people, the young workers. We actually interview young people in the factory, one on one, in large numbers. Hundreds, if not thousands in the factory to find out 'What are your needs? How do you see the situation? What would you like to improve? What's happening in your own life that you would like to see change?' So it starts with the young person inside out and then we form teams, project teams, made up of the young workers themselves. They help to direct strategy and program implementation, etcetera. Just in that one example of the Global Alliance, it's driven by the workers and young people themselves. If you look at the programs of our partners, not all, it depends on the program, but the majority of those are young-led, youth-conceived, youth are playing a key role in the work that we do.
Can you talk about why supporting 'what works' is the approach you've taken and what it means?
At the core of IYF's philosophy from its inception is the concept of what works. How do you build on what works? In the conceptualization of IYF, as best we could add up the numbers from all the sources we could find, as reliably as it could be done, we found that about 80 percent of the money granted by foundations and corporate givers to fund projects abroad, outside the U.S., about 80 percent of it in the children and youth field was to support the development of new programs, new project innovation, rather than identifying things that already work and helping to scale up, build to capacity and build to sustain things that already were working. I remember feeling so frustrated even in my own work in Quest for so many years before IYF. I would be so frustrated as a grantee. You develop a successful program, it was working, you had evaluation data to say it changes lives, it's transformative, it reduces drug abuse, it keeps kids in school – you can go through the list – and there are many, many organizations in the world who have the data and you go to donors and they say well, we don't fund ongoing operation cost. Well, we don't fund the sustenance of a program but we would be interested if you wanted to develop a new parent component or a new community involvement component or if you want a service-learning component, we'd be interested in doing that.
I remember scratching my head, wondering 'Well, if what we do works, why wouldn't we want to fund the expansion or continuance of what we do? It works. Why would you want to fund us to do something different?' I've talked to hundreds of NGO leaders over the years in many countries who share this deep frustration because there's somehow this assumption that is made often that somehow the government is going to pick it up if it works and somehow it'll be sustained by someone and yet we actually know factually, empirically that the vast majority of programs, some statistics run as high as 90 percent, of programs that are funded by private sector donors go out of existence within five years after the conclusion of the first grant from a private sector donor. So you get a grant for a three-year startup project and five years later the project no longer exists. Not because it wasn't effective. Not because it wasn't changing lives. Not because it didn't work but because that private sector donor didn't work with the NGO to find a way to sustain it. So I am rather obsessed about this idea, as many people are in the world today, about how to build sustainability for things that work? So IYF's philosophy is built on this premise that we know a fair amount about some things that work and we need to find ways to sustain them.
Rick, please talk a moment about challenges and opportunities over the years. Can you give a brief of summary of what some of those might have been?
IYF has been in existence now since 1990 and as I look at the challenges and opportunities, we've had a lot of both. If I think about the great challenges that we've faced, they kind of fall in blocks of time. In the very early stages it was just getting organized, getting capacity built, building a board that is representative of the globe and getting the right kinds of people involved early on. Broadening the funding base is one of the great challenges, and frankly, having the right kind of commitment from Kellogg Foundation was critical. The right amount of money at the right level for the right kind of time with the right kind of flexibility was critical to making this work. At the same time it was problematic, as I knew it would be. We had a lot of money to raise as matching money but one of the challenges was that some donors would look at that amount of money and say well, you've got so much money from the Kellogg Foundation, why would you need money from us? Or they perceived that Kellogg owned it. This has got Kellogg all over it, why would you need money from us? And so a real challenge early on was somehow making it clear that A), Kellogg didn't own it, didn't want to own it and B) while we did have a lot of money from Kellogg, we didn't have that money from Kellogg unless we raised more money. And so we had a lot of battles on the resource development side of this equation, and that was a great challenge in the first several years trying to get this thing off the ground and bring new players to the table.
The second great challenge early on was developing the partnerships. Because it's always important when you launch something new just to have some early, credible wings, some creditable successes and I emphasize both, early and credible. You need early successes but they have to be ones that have meaning, and we had some challenges in a very early stage of trying to identify the right kinds of countries where we would work. Mexico, South Africa, Poland, and Ecuador were the first four countries where we began IYF and we had some bumps in the road in Mexico and in South Africa as we got started. Some people saw a lot of money because of the Kellogg grant, but they didn't understand the terms of the Kellogg grant and so those became some challenges we had to work through. Again, a lot of it was perception and communication. In three of those countries we actually were forming new foundations where they didn't exist. We were working with leaders in the country to develop new, bottoms up foundations, national foundations with a new board and a new governance structure and new staff to raise money in the country. Trying to do that in three locations simultaneously was a real challenge. In one country, Ecuador, we were working with an existing foundation that already had some history and track record.
So where are you now? What is IYF?
IYF today has matured. It's grown. We're 13 years into it now and we've gone through the peaks and valleys of an organization that has grown and matured. We have a multi-faceted program; it's a much more complex organism today, working in a wide variety of countries and regions: the Balkans, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, Latin America, working in many parts of the world. We have a wide variety of partnerships working on a wide array of issues. So the portfolio is broad. Our partnerships and our relationships are broad and complex. Our funding base is broader. For the first time now, we are developing much more significant relationships with government income and support. So that has its own complexity. So the nature of the organization has changed, and I think for the better and in a good way. The tenets and the values of the organization, the character and the philosophy of the organization, I believe, remain pretty much intact with the original notion. We have not veered from our fundamental focus on young people, on things that are transformative for young people, things that work for young people. We're still focusing on scale, on effectiveness, on sustainability, on partnerships, on tri-sectoral relationships. Those fundamental tenets remain foundational to IYF.
When you reflect back on the last 13 years, what are the most important lessons you've learned?
There are lots of lessons but there are a few that are particularly important. I'm reminded about the importance of boldness, you know, when you look at the world today and you see the continued suffering by so many young people. When you work at this level, the global level, it's easy to get caught in the global issues and get distanced as an organization from the ground. And it is so important to stay connected, viscerally connected in every way. It is important to be bold, bold in thinking, bold in action, because the reality is, if you look at many of the driving issues in the world today for young people, while there has been great advancement in many areas of the world and great progress has been made, and IYF has contributed greatly to many of those, there continues to be great need in the world and there is much work to be done. So I'm reminded of an old lesson, that we need to keep at it and it doesn't matter how much we all think we're doing, whether it's the Kellogg Foundation or IYF or a thousand other great organizations doing great work, we're not doing enough. And the lesson is we have to be smarter, bolder, more imaginative than we have even been in the past.
And also that change is okay. You know, it's one of my favorite quotes and I've used it a thousand times because I believe it so deeply. Eric Hoffer said that, “In times of change, the learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” We surely are living in a time of incredible change in the world and it's incumbent upon the IYF, the Kellogg Foundation, and all other great institutions in the world to be learners and to embrace this world and to change the world as learners and to say: “How can we be more bold, how can we be more imaginative in the work that we do?”
I've learned not to be bashful about admitting mistakes. I've learned that it's okay to say some things aren't working. It's okay to say that there are some failures along the way, that failure is part of the process. Actually, if all of us collectively would acknowledge where some things aren't working so well, it would enhance our ability to get to success more quickly. I've learned that partnerships fundamentally add value. They're messy, they're difficult, they're complicated, relationships that are institutional, and cross-sectoral, but at the end of the day, none of us have enough money, enough wisdom, enough smarts to solve the problems alone. Relationships and partnerships, I still fundamentally believe, are the best way forward in addressing problems in young people.
What does the future look like for IYF? What might folks expect to see 10 years from now? Have you set markers?
What does the future look like for the International Youth Foundation? That's a good question. The board of IYF has been wrestling with this question. We have a new CEO, David Hornbeck, who is terrific. We've got a great team, Bill Reese and the team here at IYF. This leadership group, the board and David and Bill, all of us are looking now at the strategy going forward. What I'm clear about is that the foundational piece, effectiveness, scales, sustainability, remains intact. The focus on young people remains intact. What I'm clear about is that we will remain focused on transformative work and reconciliation work. I'm clear that the big driving issues in the world are youth employment and that issues related to tolerance and issues related to technology and education and the like will remain but the way in which we carry out that work will probably change. The way in which it's going to change, I can't say. I don't know. But we're going to be carrying out a strategy with strategic thinking process in coming months and I'm not sure when that's going to be.
How has it felt to you as an individual who had this vision in the beginning, how has it felt to be part of this and to see it grow and develop and succeed in the way that it has?
You know, as a founder, first of Quest and now of IYF, this is a deep, passionate work for me and it is part of my life. I do this because I care so deeply about the issues and it's something I've committed my life to. It's not just my work, it is my passion, so to watch and participate in the growth of IYF has been a great, great thing for me. I feel so privileged to have been a part of it and play a role in it, and I'm so grateful to the Kellogg Foundation for making it possible. It's been a great thing. I hope and pray that we've made a difference in the world for lots of kids. I think we have.
You had a vision for Quest. You had a vision for IYF. Is there another vision?
You know, as I transition from IYF and move now to my next work, I'm IYF's biggest fan and I remain on the board and actively engaged. I continue to chair the global alliance but my next chapter moves me to the work of something called the Imaginations Group. Imagining a nation that invests itself fully in the development of its young people, a nation that adopts a set of policies nationally that makes that happen. Imagine a nation that mobilizes its citizens to engage themselves in the lives of young people more fully. Imagining a group of nations that actually work together toward that end. And so I'm early in the process of pulling together some key leaders and others to work toward that end. But the focus of my next chapter will be largely around advocacy, and unlike IYF, which is programmatic in its nature, this next work for me will be much more focused on advocacy and will be complementary to the work of IYF.
