Monday of this week I traveled into NYC for the Mashable Social Good Summit. If you’re not familiar with what that is, it is a two day collection of global leaders and grass-roots game changers in the world of social good. There are tech-giants and kids with great ideas and each one of them has done something remarkable to change the world.
I wrote about how I usually end up coming home from these things feeling bad about myself because I am not doing enough to make the world a better place. This year though, I went into the conference with a different attitude and came back with something pretty wonderful-Hope.
Don’t get me wrong, there were some pretty staggering facts thrown around about the global state of things. I mean, some of the topics were elephant poaching, maternal and infant mortality and of course, Ebola, so you may imagine it would be easy to feel down about the state of things.
While there are many problems to solve, my overall take away from the Social Good Summit was hope. Hope because as bad as things appear, many of them are better than they were just a few years ago.
Carolyn Miles, President and CEO of Save the Children, an organization that is doing great things for mothers and children all over the world, pointed out that while we might not meet every single Millenium Development Goal set forth for 2015, we are going to come close to many and these were viewed as some pretty audacious goals back when they were set.
Setting audacious goals, like ending hunger by 2015, may seem pointless. I mean, does anyone really believe we can end world hunger, ever? It turns out some people do and they are willing to work hard at figuring out as long as it takes. The result is that we may not have ended hunger, but we’ve come closer than ever before.
There is something powerful about knowing change is happening. It’s easy to get bogged down in the terrible news stories that swirl around us regularly. It is not as easy but twice as powerful to be reminded that there are people out there doing things to fix what is broken and there is no reason we can’t join them.
Audacious goals are realized when everyone does a little bit to add up to big change. We are part of that everyone. Why not start today?
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