Hope Is A Verb - Clinton Global Initiative - Millions of Little Bits

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

Two weeks ago, Amy attended the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, where she met some incredible change makers who are driving solutions across healthcare, water access, food security, conservation and scientific discovery. In this episode we'll take you behind the scenes of the two-day event and introduce you to some of the people she met in the corridors, including her interview with the legendary Dr Jane Goodall. Correction: Coalition for Mental Health Investment Five organisations are part of the coalition - The McKinsey Health Institute (MHI) has joined the African Venture Philanthropy Alliance (AVPA), Clinton Global Initiative, Kokoro, and Wellcome. The quote about “every country is a developing country when it comes to mental health” is attributed Shekhar Saxena. Find out more: https://www.clintonfoundation.org https://www.thementalhealthcoalition.org https://www.whywaste.io https://carolinafarmtrust.org https://www.millersocent.org https://sungai.watch https://www.adventurescientists.org https://www.clintonhealthaccess.org This podcast is hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose from ⁠⁠⁠Fix The News⁠⁠⁠. Audio sweeting by Anthony Badolato at Ai3 – audio and voice.

Hope is a reminder. It's the fuel of your soul. It's so much more infused with action. Ability to see a much better future. You really have to earn it to have it. Hope is happiness. Welcome to Hope is a Verb, a podcast about what it takes to change the world through conversations with the people who are making it happen.

I'm Amy. I'm Amy. I'm Gus. And in each episode, we shine a spotlight on the ordinary heroes who are stitching our social fabric together, mending our planet, and creating solutions to some of today's biggest global challenges. In this episode, my conversations with some incredible changemakers at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, including one of the world's most famous menders. I like to say I see humanity at the mouth of a long, dark tunnel

and there's a little star at the end that's hope. But it's no good sitting at the mouth of the tunnel and just waiting for the star to come. You've got to crawl under, climb over, work around all the obstacles between us and that star. We're doing things a little differently in this episode because Amy has been in New York for the past week where she's been attending the Clinton Global Initiative. And Amy, it's been a

big week for you. It has been a big week. It has been an amazing week. I have met incredible people, I have met incredible people, but I don't think I was quite prepared for how much it was going to untether me. I feel like my whole worldview has been slightly rearranged. So a little bit unmoored because you're in New York, a little bit scrambled. Can you tell us a little bit more about the event itself? And in this episode, I guess we're going to meet some of the people that you met in the corridors. I spent a lot of time feeling like I was swimming in an ocean of our stories. Anywhere I turned, there was somebody that was committed to doing something incredible in the world. And the Clinton Global Initiative is this big annual event that happens

in New York and it runs alongside the UN General Assembly and Climate Week. So it's this big gathering of really high profile people, presidents of countries, global business leaders, leaders in philanthropy. And there are also around about 2000 change makers that attend the event. And they come from every corner of the globe. And most of them are from really small NGOs. When you're there, it feels like a networking event, but there's also panel discussions and speakers and thought leaders and really big discussions on things that we're struggling with as a species. It's a lot to walk into, especially when you've stepped off a 21 hour flight, but there was such a buzz in the room. There were a lot of moments where I was like, how did a girl from the Gold Coast end up here?

of moments where I was like, how did a girl from the Gold Coast end up here? And you described it as the watering hole of progress. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? What I loved is in between those sessions, there's this huge lounge and everybody comes in. And after chatting to quite a few of these people, and as we've learned on this podcast from interviewing people that are driving this kind of change, it's really, it's lonely and it's hard and it's big work. And one of them who you're going to meet, Zach, he said to me, we come in here so exhausted. You walk in here heavy because the work is so much and it takes so much out of you. But it's hard not to feel gratitude when you see

so many other people doing such important work in circumstances that are 10 times harder than your own. It's this real opportunity for them to fill up the tanks. And in nature, you have those water holes where all the animals gather all their resources. Well, these people are gathering connections, they're gathering funding. You met quite a few of these people, including Jane Goodall, who we're going to hear from a little bit later. But one of the groups that really stood out for you was a group who are trying to tackle mental health. Yeah. So this was one of the first announcements that was made at the conference. Part of the Clinton Global Initiative is that all the changemakers who turn up, they have

to make a commitment to action and it has to be measurable. It has to have impact. This year, there were 175 commitments made and this mental health coalition was a big one. It's basically made up of four organizations that have come together to bring more funding into the mental health space. I had no idea that only around 2% of global financing actually goes toward this issue. And so this group is really focused on bridging that gap to make sure that we have all the resources we need to really

tackle this issue and to get a lot of these treatments to people on the ground. Now, I just want to flag, this is an incredible conversation, but it did happen just after everybody left the main stage presentation where the announcement was made. We are all huddled around a bar table. It is pretty noisy, but I think you're going to find it really inspiring. My name is Erica Koh. I am one of the global leaders of McKinsey Health Institute. Hi, I'm Jules Chappell. I am CEO of Cockerell. Hi, I'm Bec Smith. I'm the Director of Policy at Wellcome, the largest non-governmental funder of mental health research in the world.

Millions and millions of people are being held back by mental health problems, from incredibly severe mental health problems to just struggling day to day. And that's just not acceptable. And we know that the numbers are going up and that we know that we have some interventions that are really effective that aren't reaching people. And we know that there are some mental health problems which we don't have effective interventions. It's never been more important that we think about how are we going to address this in a meaningful way. Science is going to be part of the solution. Bringing in additional financing is going to be part of the solution. Listening to those with lived experience is going to be part of the solution. Like, it just feels that if not now, when?

It's about timing and it's about the bits of the puzzle all being ready to come together. We all sense that we've got the bits of the puzzle all being ready to come together. We all sense that we've got a bit of the puzzle. I think then it takes quite a leap of trust and the sort of radical collaboration. We really know that this is not going to be easy. It's a complex problem. It's a massive problem. And it can be easy to almost feel a bit overwhelmed by that or feel that you've got to have all the right answers and you can't start until you do. And actually coming together, I think we just sense this. We've got to get going. We've got to get started. Actually, we do know a lot now. I think about the name of your podcast,

actually. So I had a chance to write an article a couple of years back and I explicitly titled it A Reason for Hope. And it was my brother that gave me that title. And I do everything I do in this space because he has been suffering a serious mental illness for the last two decades. And I think we need hope. We need to know that hope can be a verb, that we should never give up, that as Beck said, it is unacceptable for some of these conditions to be in their place, and that it's not rocket science, which is what's exciting. We know what works, we know how to scale it, and by coming together in different ways,

we can make it happen. And if I could add to that, it's also looking at where the world is going, and we're in a time of sort of poly-crisis, many, many different issues that need humanity as a whole to be on its A game, and we are not. And we know the difference in ourselves between a day when you feel on your

A game and those when you struggle to get out of bed. And, you know, we're thinking about climate crisis, poverty, rising inequality, all these issues that human beings are at the heart of, both in terms of causing them and solving them. And so there are so many different arguments for this from health outcomes through to productivity and resilience through to humanity and what a different world we could live in if it were a mentally healthy world. One very poignant example that comes to mind that our partners from African Venture Philanthropy Alliance have emphasized is if you look at the crisis of youth unemployment right now that is happening across the continent of Africa, that is an excellent example where

an underlying focus on mental health can make a significant difference. And to Jules' point, we know there are more risks ahead and we need to be mentally healthy to be able to take them on. So I think circling back to where Erica started us on hope, I just think there's a new way of thinking about mental health that we've not heard before. And I just want people to understand that I think there's a lot of ways of thinking that we've gotten stuck into on mental health that actually we really can start to rewrite. And one of the things I'm just so excited about is because that requires resource

and we're starting to see more and more resource come into this space. And so what that's going to unlock for people that are currently suffering I genuinely think over the next five years is going to be transformational. It is really important the stakes are really high but there is real joy in this work too because if we can get this right we're going to be part of something that makes so many people's lives better and that's a real privilege to have a job where you feel like you're contributing to something like this. There was this line that Chelsea Clinton used when she announced this new coalition. And it was that every country is a developing country when it comes to mental health. I thought it was interesting, the cross-cutting nature of mental health. It runs through every health problem that we try to deal with and that it's so ubiquitous

and yet so under addressed. And I think the knowledge that there is a serious funding and a group of serious players now taking this on, that's a really fantastic milestone. It sure is. Another person that wasn't on my radar was Gavita Gulhati. She's only in her early 20s and she already has become a leader in water security in India. Yeah, this is a wonderful story about how one individual really can have a completely outsized impact. And of course, the beauty of this one, right, is just the

simplicity of it. Leftover water at a restaurant, I mean, it does not get any more basic than that. I really believe that understanding change at a young age only comes from having the right kind of inspiration around you. And I was surrounded by a phenomenal bunch of inspiring women and made me believe that I could be a part of the solution and make a change if I wanted to. that I could be a part of the solution and make a change if I wanted to. When I was 13 or 14, my environmental education teacher in school said that 14 million litres of water gets wasted every year simply in the water that we leave behind in glasses at restaurants. And to me that was shocking because there is of course millions and millions of litres of water that we understand people don't have access to. And really, it's not just the lack of access in rural communities, but it is the overconsumption in urban communities that is the real problem, in my opinion.

And that's what we set out to solve. And honestly, it was not an easy journey at all. Historically, it was necessary for restaurants to serve water to the glass full to any passerby for free. So the idea behind Glass Half Full was to tackle this problem of water getting wasted in restaurants, where we said that we want people to take just as much water as they need and not waste. So conceptually, it's very simple and it might feel like there's really nothing to it but what happens is it leads to a phenomenal mindset change in the person who actually does the action because now next time every time they use water or over consume water they are

thinking of the glass half full we were actually able to convince the National Restaurants Association of India to get the idea of glass half-folded restaurants across India, covering over 500,000 restaurants. Of our last calculation, it's been over 20 million litres of water that has been prevented from being wasted over the past few years. I think what works with water is simple solutions. Water doesn't need complex technologies. It just needs mindfulness and simple solutions and active action from every single person. What does the word hope mean to you? has been able to build change without hope and hope comes from having the right ecosystem around you that feeds you with it. You cannot find hope alone. You only find hope from those around you. It can be things, it can be the environment, it can be other people, it can be other creatures, but

hope is something that you get from your external environment and that's what you need to translate into an empowering, dignified and freedom-driven experience for yourself. Chatting with Gavita is one of the reasons why I feel like our future is in very safe hands. She was just so assured and articulate in a way that I certainly wasn't at her age. Do you think that assuredness is something that comes from clarity of vision? Or do you think the clarity

of vision comes from the fact that they were assured in the first place? I think it's both. There's definitely a power in focusing on a very specific piece of a big global problem like water but what this conversation really brought home for me is the role that parents, families, home for me is the role that parents, families, educators can play in giving these future generations not only the tools to solve these problems, but the confidence to believe that they can. Another person you met who really made you feel like the future is in safe hands was Zach Wyatt. Tell us a little bit more. So he's the founder of something called the Carolina Farm Trust, which is trying to create a sustainable food network in Carolina that will not only feed more people in a sustainable way, but also increase revenue for all the local farms.

And I just want to point out that Zach is a father of five kids. He's got lots of time on his hands. If ever we use the excuse that we don't have time because of family commitments, I just want everyone to think about Zach. I'm not sure whether those people inspire me or make me feel more resentful that I'm not doing more as well. But yes, I think it's incredible that someone with so many responsibilities is able to achieve so much. And of course, reminds me of the classic saying that if you want something done, give it to someone who's busy. It's funny when I look back on it.

I was going through a really tough time. I just had a partnership that just got dissolved. And I was the breadwinner of family of seven and kind of lost everything going on EBT and SNAP, which is our food stamp system here. And really soul searching on what's next for me and my family. And ironically enough, my wife was listening to a public service announcement about a farm in a neighboring county, and it just really sparked something in me. And then, you know, kind of really doing a deep dive in our food system, which is horrifying. It was just like this Manhattan-sized meteor that I could see in the sky inching closer to the earth.

So I just kind of poured myself into meeting a lot of different farmers and trying to understand what the real needs were. I think the future is regional food systems. It's a global issue, but we cannot solve it globally. We really need regional resilience and food and agriculture is really at the center. So Carolina Farm Trust is really about how do we build the infrastructure to support our farming community, really push them to start regenerative farming practices,

which has a huge implication around climate change, nutrition density, and then how do we create those easy supply chains? If you ask anybody, do you want to support local agriculture? Yes. How? I don't know. I mean, really the only way we can really do it at this point is really going to a farmer's market. Most people don't understand what a food system is, let alone that it's broken. So I think the big trick is, is how do we get local farms and regional farms into our supply chain. We have to lead with solutions. You know, that's the kind of the hard part. I mean, we see the documentaries, you know, we're losing all our soil health and our top soil and

climate change and everybody's frazzled because we kind of don't know what to do. Or we don't want to take that one big leap forward. When I look to Haiti or Kenya or Nicaragua, if we do not have a vibrant, resilient food system, that's the most basic thing. And everything else kind of comes after that. So how do we build a model in the Carolinas? And then how do we replicate? We can't scale it. I'm not interested.

And we have to go the whole way. We need to stop looking at food as a commodity. I have a chef friend. One of his sayings is food is the most intimate thing we do every day. So it's just something that I think if we really rethink our relationship with food, you know, we can really make a lot of impact, but we have to really go back and focus on our food system, which I'm really thrilled that food systems is such a major theme here at CGI this year, but it needs to be every year. We have a

long way to go. Wow. Listening to you speak, it sounds like when you first had this idea that you didn't even realize how big this was going to be. And I'm sure there have been so many challenges along the way and so many times where you've just gone, what am I doing? Yeah. I still think that. I mean, I think a lot of people discount what hope can really do. Everything positive in the world has always been kept going through hope that it can be done. On the dark days, I cling to it, you know, very tightly and just appreciate and have gratitude for all the partnerships and the people that have kind of helped us get here. And understanding that we're still laying bricks, you know, to jump up to the next challenges as they come up each day. You know, I've thought about Zach's description of hope a lot over the last week or so,

because, of course, North Carolina was devastated by Hurricane Helene days after our conversation. And I think his mission to support local farms is going to become even more important over the next 12 months as these communities rebuild. Something that strikes me in all of the conversations that you've had here so far is that all of these issues, when you boil it down to that, they're pretty simple. We're talking here about mental health, water, food. They're issues that go right to the core of some of the biggest problems that we have. And yet, even though they're simple, they are so cross-cutting. Their spread is geographical, cultural, political, economic. There's this real sense of drilling down to the absolute

center in terms of what challenges we're facing in order to try and solve them. And another area which is one of these cross-cutting topics is innovation, which is a word that gets thrown around a lot at these kinds of conferences. But you spoke to people who are trying to make that a reality and bring a little bit of that Silicon Valley flavor to solving a lot of these big issues. Yeah. One of the big themes that I kept hearing at CGI was how we can give a lot of these local communities the resources they need to create their own solutions. And one of the organizations that doing this is the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship, which is something that I didn't really know all that

much about, but I was able to chat to Bridget Helms, who's the CEO about the impact that this kind of work has made on a group of female artisans who are living in one of the poorest areas of Mexico. We are a social enterprise accelerator and we focus on women's economic power and intentionally creating good jobs for women. We're really excited about small and growing businesses that create jobs and we only look at those businesses that move the needle on poverty because at the end of the day we want to end global poverty. There's a really cool story of a company called Someone Somewhere. They're based in Mexico. They work with artisans, mostly women, who are living in the poorest areas of Mexico who are kind of resuscitating ancient indigenous ways of weaving or embroidering products that they sell in Mexico City and abroad.

And so what's interesting about them is that I've spent a lot of time in these villages and you can really see the difference because not only does it have the income effect, but also it has this unlocking of their power effect. So many of the women in the communities where they're working begin to get active in local politics. They start to advocate for their children's schools or better services from the local governments. And it really has this confidence effect. And you can see these huge jumps. And I think the more that we can help women to realize their own potential and their own power, the better off the entire planet's going to be. I have a question for you. Was there any sense that you got while you were there that some of this was maybe window dressing?

Is there a kind of a disconnect, I suppose, maybe between the glitz and glamour of these kinds of events and then the reality of what's actually happening on the ground in local communities? Yeah, it's a good question. And there was definitely a lot of talk about this around New York that week, and especially through climate week and around the dangers of focusing too much on the solutions. But I've got to say, I didn't pick up on any window dressing in any of the conversations that I had. And chatting with Bridget, having that context from the earlier sessions that we really do need to be empowering more local communities with the tools, with the entrepreneurship

to be able to drive their own solutions. I think it gave the whole conversation a really different context than what I might have had, you know, a month before. I think the thing that seems pretty apparent in that conversation is local solutions for local communities. And I think an organisation that embodies that better than any other that maybe we've ever written about is Sungai Watch. I think we first encountered maybe two years ago and have reported on multiple times in our email newsletter, but you got to meet them in person. And I remember you sending

me a message from New York and I was extremely jealous because those guys are awesome. Well, they really are. And for anybody who doesn't know much about these guys, Sungai Watch is a small organization based in Bali that was started by three siblings who took it upon themselves to start cleaning up the really heavily polluted rivers and oceans over there by using these floating barriers that you put in the water to collect all the rubbish. This was one of those moments where it became very clear how different we are to other media. Prince Harry had just spoken at the conference that day and I was more starstruck by meeting Gary than I think I would have been if I had been in front of Prince Harry, because these people have become household names for us.

They are the people that we follow. We know how incredible they are. So while the rest of the press pack was racing after Harry, Amy was racing after Gary. My name is Gary Denshigib. I'm the co-founder of sungai watch sungai means river in indonesian and we've been cleaning rivers in indonesia particularly in bali for the last four years so stop plastics before it goes into the ocean i'm originally french but yeah more balinese now i've lived there for 20 years in my family moved to bali to completely change our lives and we've seen sort of you know this paradise island with the most beautiful palm trees and very remote coastline to being a plastic apocalypse. You know, most of

the famous beaches of Kuta, Canggu, you can't see the sand. It's all plastic. And so growing up in rainy season when I would go out surfing with Sam, my younger brother, we always face just plastic everywhere. So at 14 years old, my brother and sister, we decided that we wanted to do something about it. Just with our bare hands, we just organized cleanups every single week. 15 years have passed. We've learned so much about the environmentalism movement. You know, 80% of plastics in the ocean come from rivers and streams. So it's so important to stop the problem before it goes into the open ocean to ensure that Bali doesn't have these plastic waves anymore. We started with very simple river barriers that are made from locally sourced materials, things like PVC pipes, metal grids,

and we sort of came up with our one solution that we've scaled now to 300 sites all around the rivers of Bali and East Java. We clean them up every day. So we have a team of 150 people on the ground that will take a before photo, after photo, clean them up. And that literally equates to mountains of plastics, three to 4,000 kilos of plastic, three big garbage trucks worth. Our technology is very manual. So we do have to get into the river,

cleaning up with our bare hands, with proper PPE and protective attires. But the idea is to really involve community doing it. A lot of other tech that exists to clean the ocean or clean our rivers are almost robotized and automatic conveyor belts. We're all about community activation and ensuring that every river, we can involve the communities that live along the river. So they think about plastic pollution in a different way and they actually start adopting their own rivers. People never

face the rivers. It's almost like the dump that everybody's very shy of looking. But what if every river could be that one spot where communities gather and the water is cleaned? So we've collected more than 2.5 million kilos of plastic over four years. It's quite considerable, but it feels like a tiny drop in the bucket when you're speaking about plastic pollution. Every second, one garbage truck of plastic pollution

enters our ocean through rivers and streams, and that's globally. So when you look at what we're doing, it's very, very minuscule. But some of the first barriers that we've placed in rivers in Bali, we've successfully removed them because of growing awareness within the local community. And I think that's where we see success.

We want to go out of business. We don't want our barriers to even be placed. So if we can change consumerism, if we can change mindsets and ensure that people don't dispose their garbage into the rivers. We've done our job recently. We were sort of overwhelmed with the amount of plastics that we had, so we decided to launch a new social enterprise to turn the plastics that we collect into long-lasting furniture. And so we worked with a couple designers to really come up

with a line of products. We launched Sungai Design six months ago and it's been a very exciting venture to really have a four-story loop and to have a place to upcycle this trash. Plastic waste is such a huge issue. Do you ever feel overwhelmed? And when you do, how do you just keep going? Yeah, I mean, you know, when you're literally in a river,

your entire body under the water and you can't even see the end of sight of how much you're going to actually clean that river. Sometimes, you know, it may take us days to clean rivers in the heart of the Mpissar. We'll clean them up for two weeks and then a week later, it's dirty again. We're destroying our planet much quicker than we can restore it.

And it feels like every step forward is two steps backwards. And it is very overwhelming. I think personally, we've been in this fight for 15 years, religiously for four years. Everything that we do revolves around this issue. But I think we're hopeful, you know, when we do see some of these barriers, communities taking action, when we see the power of community. This is a dedication of our life to this issue.

We want to see Bali without plastic. So something that really strikes me in listening to that is an aspect of progress that you've written about numerous times, which is that so many of these people are taking on such big problems, taking on plastic waste. I mean, the scale of that challenge is so enormous and yet they still kind of go out there and they just start something. And the scale of what they're actually able to achieve is still astonishing. And eventually they actually do start making a bit of a dent. Yeah. And the amazing thing is these are some of the world's most polluted rivers. And what I really loved about these guys as well is that because they were

struggling with the amount of plastic that they were collecting, now they've started a new arm of their business where they're taking all of that plastic and they're using it to create furniture. It's like you have the solution, which is then starting to create another problem. So then they've had to come up with another solution. Yeah, it's a fantastic organization and I'm so pleased that you got to meet them. Another person that you met was Greg Trainish, who is running a pretty unusual matchmaking service. Yeah, he has combined outdoor adventurers with scientists. So scientists who need plants or species collected in the field that maybe can't get there, they team up with an outdoor adventurer who might be going to that particular place, tell them what they need, and then the adventurer brings it back.

So the name of his organization is Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation. And I think you'll find this chat really interesting. So 20 years ago, I'm walking on the Appalachian Trail. I'm like halfway through and my ankles are all bloody. I fall down and slip on one of these rocks and I chucked one at a tree and I just sank in this selfish feeling that had been building in me. And I decided that I would dedicate my life to service. I was searching for how do I stay in the outdoors and be in the outdoors and be on expeditions, but make a difference. And then as I was hiking the length of the Andes Mountains in 2006 through 2008, I just desperately wanted to know and understand what was happening around me,

the ecology of how this huge landscape fits together. I went and got a degree in wildlife ecology and then just started doing biological expeditions. I don't have a PhD. I don't have any special outdoor skills. I have persistence is really what I have. I just saw that if we could really use the people who want to make a difference and utilize their outdoor skills, put them to work and empower them to really make change in the world that what we could do would be profound. So it started off as actually one-off expeditions coming to me and saying, hey, I'm going to Antarctica, I'm going to Greenland, I'm going to go climb this mountain, what can I do? And I'd find the right scientists and I'd partner them together over Skype at the time. And we would just have them talk and I would translate between the two Skype at the time and we would just have them

talk and I would translate between the two because I knew enough about science I knew a lot about adventure and then we flipped it where now we build projects with scientific institutions one of our very first projects we had two climbers climb up Mount Everest found the highest known plant life on earth up at 21,238 feet. They collected the moss sample that was up there and that partner of ours, Dr. Rusty Rodriguez, has taken the fungi that we found living symbiotically with that moss and uses the same family of fungi today as an inoculant across more than four million acres every year. We've collected the largest data set on earth from microplastics, which has now been used

by more than 300 institutions around the world to help create maximum contamination limits. So democratization of science, giving people the tools to become part of the solution, to demystify science, to get it out of the ivory towers, to put it in their hands, that is so powerful. And that has so much more impact beyond what what we document and what we capture as an organization we have projects for the

everest climbers and the elite athletes of the world but we also have lots and lots of people that can go for like two mile walks and make a big difference while they're doing it we have millions and millions and hundreds of millions of people that care, but they don't know what to do. We need to give them easy ways to make a difference. We know that we're over 10,000 volunteers and 27% of them go on to careers in conservation, or go back to school for conservation, or start their own non-profits. Now that's a massive, massive ripple effect and impact for us. And they're going to become change makers. They're going to become agents of change for this planet. He uses the word persistence there. And when I think about all the various definitions of hope that we've heard on this podcast, one of them that stands out is persistence, that hope is

persistence. And that is a quality that is inherent in so many of the people that you met and so many of the people who are out there trying to solve these problems. Where else did you feel like that quality of persistence kind of cropped up? I think one of the big ones was Neil Lakhani. So he works for the Clinton Health Access Initiative, otherwise known as CHI, because this world loves an acronym. But this organization is about solving access to health care, which, as I learned from listening to Neil, is really the missing link when it comes to fighting disease in many of the lower income countries around the world. And as you're about to hear, this whole concept of access is not only complex, but one that has been around for a long time.

What it boils down to at its most simple level is in many cases, we have very good drugs, diagnostics, vaccines, but unless you're able to make sure that those critical commodities get to the people that need them, it's effectively useless to have this innovation. You could have the best vaccine available, but if it's too expensive for somebody to afford, if it's too costly that governments are not able to buy them, if there are no supply chains to allow people to get them where they are, where the mother is coming to vaccinate her child, we define that as not having access. When CHI started, it was the Clinton HIV AIDS Initiative,

and the aim was to bring access, equitable access, to HIV medicines, right? Back in 2002, we had good HIV drugs. Not as good as you have now, but if you were born in the Global South and you acquired HIV, it was effectively a death sentence. Despite the fact that these drugs were available, humanity was failing the people that needed it most. People in high-income markets were able to access these medicines, but 90% of the population that needed AIDS drugs was in the Global South and we had no access.

And so CHI started effectively by trying to solve both parts of this access issue. The first part is how do we work with the businesses that are making these drugs so that there can be a viable commercial model? Like we don't want companies to just donate things. If they just donate things over time, companies' priorities change, their CEOs change, their CEOs change, and they may stop. And so when we started with the HIV AIDS drugs, they were $10,000 per person per year. They're now sitting at about $47 per person per year. And many steps were taken to get there. But even at $47 per person, the companies are still making money. And that's

the critical piece. People are still innovating and developing new, better antiretroviral drugs that are more effective, that have better side effect profiles. The second aspect of access is actually making sure that these drugs get to the people that need them. Unless those drugs actually got to the patients in Sierra Leone, in Kenya, in Uganda, they were effectively just press releases. We then worked with the governments to help them buy these medicines

at the lower prices, to help them build the supply chain, to train the health workers, build the health facilities. Listening to Neil talk about creating access to the HIV medication and the beginnings of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, it really brought home how much work goes on behind the scenes with so many of the big global healthcare stories that we share in the newsletter. Before I chatted with him,

I learned that the organisation is currently working on a project to combat tuberculosis in India. And so before we finished up, I just wanted to find out where things were at. So tuberculosis is one of humanity's biggest failings. This is a millennia old problem that now just affects people in poor and developing countries. India has the highest burden of TB. So there's a new infection every 11 seconds.

And every three minutes, two people die. The real tragedy is, you know, we were talking about access, like there are solutions to this. The solutions are not perfect, but we have drugs that can prevent many of these people getting sick, and these drugs are not getting to the people that need them in the way that is required to stop these terrible statistics. And we were trying to figure out what is the most cost-effective thing

that you could do to make the biggest dent in this very big and very complex and sort of huge problem. What we found was a number of people that die from tuberculosis are young children. And so the project is sort of seemingly quite simple. You were to go to a health facility and you get screened positively for TB, we would then go to your house and check the people in your house because everyone's living together, and so there's a very high chance that your family has been exposed to TB.

For the adults that are asymptomatic, we would then refer them to the public health system to get tested. For children under five, in line with the WHO recommended guidelines. If they're found to be exposed in the household, we would then test them and then put them on this prophylaxis treatment to stop them getting sick and stop them dying of TB. In hindsight, when I'm describing things to you, it seems like a very obvious thing.

And most people that I describe this to are like, well, why are we not doing this? It seems very obvious. It seems like, of course, the right thing to do. The reality of the world is very messy, and it takes a long time to focus in and zone in on a very simple, cost-effective solution. I think something that seems pretty obvious listening to everyone is that this is a lot to take in. Water, tuberculosis, plastic, mental health.

Each time you speak to one of these people, and I guess every time you saw an announcement, the kind of scale of the solutions becomes more inspiring and more exciting. But you're also grasping the scale of the problems that we face, right? That must have been something quite jarring or unsettling. Yeah. And I think, thanks to a few late night council calls with you, I think that's what I realized had scrambled me so much by the end is that I was there at a conference, the whole theme was what's working. And certainly there is a lot of incredible stuff happening in the world, but there were quite a few moments where hearing about what was working in one particular area actually made me aware of a problem that I didn't know about a

week ago. And by the end of the two days, like you're kind of on site for like 13 hours a day at these things. You're constantly chatting to people. You're constantly taking in information. And by the end of those two days, I really didn't know what to do with it all. So when you're stuck in that tunnel, you often need a way out. And fortunately you found that because you managed to speak to someone who perhaps more than anyone else in the world could be regarded as the avatar for the work that we do and someone who the Clinton Global Initiative really did a lot of work to make sure you had access to. It was quite a funny story. So I was able to meet

Jane Goodall in person and the guys at the Clinton Foundation really helped me get those five minutes and they did involve me literally running up to the room where Jane was after she'd stepped off the stage with Jose Andres and of course I didn't have any of my recording equipment but I had my mobile phone and all I can say is that if you are facing any kind of existential crisis, five minutes with Dr Jane Goodall will definitely do the trick. She's pretty legendary for being in these rooms where there's lots and lots of talk happening and she will just cut through the noise with like two sentences

that just make so much sense. Well, I wish people understood that we all can make a difference. Every day we live, we can choose what to buy and, you know, how was it made? Did it harm the environment? Was it cruel to animals? Is it cheap because of unfair wages? So we can all make some difference. Big corporations can make a huge difference. But we also need the right people in politics.

but we also need the right people in politics. And I know that this is tough because there's a balance between the economy of a country and feeding hungry people, but nature, we actually are part of the natural world and we depend on it for food, for water, for everything. We depend on healthy ecosystems. So it's really important that politicians put high on their agenda, protecting nature. We can't avoid protecting nature

because of the need to feed people. Because if we do that, then in the future there'll be no food left. I think my biggest takeaway from your conversation with Jose this morning is that all these things are interconnected. Totally interconnected. Totally interconnected. It's very interesting because he's feeding people and I'm trying to protect the future so that he can feed people. And also all our young members of Roots and Shoots, so many schools now have organic gardens, they're growing food, they're feeding the school very often,

they're taking food home to their parents in poor areas. And some of them are growing food especially to feed animals in zoos. I mean you know it's all food, life, water, environment. It's all important. There's a lot of work to be done. A huge amount of work. What have you learned through your lifetime? How do we keep going when things feel tough or the challenges just feel too big i have so many people coming to me and saying you know i care about the planet and it's all going wrong and i'm one person and they get depressed suicide rates are going up so i say to them no, you can't save the planet, but is there something you especially care about where you live? Maybe it's the streets are

littered. Maybe they're worried about homelessness. Maybe some of them are worried about stray dogs. People have different areas of concern. So I say, well, you know, go and find some friends and tackle the thing you care about. And then they find they can make a difference. We have this expression, think globally, act locally, but it's the wrong way around. So if you act locally, you see you make a difference, you want to make more.

And then you realize that around the globe there are other people doing their little bit. And millions of little bits add up to big change. And the good news, there are people working on every single one of the problems, climate change, loss of biodiversity, poverty, you know, a whole lot. Unfortunately, they so often work in silos. So you might solve one problem and be

really elated, but you might, if you're not thinking holistically, cause another. I mean, a very simple example, yay, we've closed down this coal mine. All that CO2 not going into the environment. But what about the people who lose their jobs? So if the holistic thinking at the beginning, then everybody would win. What does the word hope mean to you? Hope is not the same as wishful thinking. Hope is about action. So, you know, I like to say I see humanity at the mouth of a long, dark tunnel,

and there's a little star at the end, that's hope. But it's no good sitting at the mouth of a long, dark tunnel. And there's a little star at the end that's hope. But it's no good sitting at the mouth of the tunnel and just waiting for the star to come. You've got to crawl under, climb over, work around all the obstacles between us and that star. I love Jane's image of the star at the end of the tunnel. And I've got to say that being on the ground for those two days of the Clinton Global Initiative, that star felt really bright. And then over the last week or so, with everything

that's going on in the world, it has started to dim. The thing I'm taking home with me, and this is going to sound really obvious, is that it's people who drive progress. The millions of people around the world who are showing up every day to do their little bit and the people like the ones you have just heard and I do feel a lot of comfort now in knowing who they are. We'd like to thank the Clinton Foundation for giving us access to the event and the incredible people that I was able to chat to. You'll find links to all the different organisations in our podcast notes. We'd like to thank our paying subscribers for making projects like this podcast possible. If you're interested in finding out more about our work, check out fixthenews.com.

There are a lot of podcasts out there. It means a lot to us that you chose this one. This podcast is recorded in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal and the Wurundjeri and Woiwurrung people. If you enjoyed this conversation and would like to support Hope as a Verb, make sure you subscribe and leave a review. Thanks for listening.