Insights for Social Impact Leaders from the 2024 Skoll World Forum
Forward-Thinking Strategies for a More Inclusive World
This year’s Skoll World Forum offered a wealth of insights for social entrepreneurs, implementers, and funders navigating today’s interconnected world. Here, we highlight select sessions, share summaries, and provide key takeaways from #SkollWF.
TL;DR — 3 Key Messages
distilled the following insights from our comprehensive conference coverage.Democracy is at Risk
More people globally are expected to vote in 2024 than ever before. At the same time, the mass acceleration of disinformation, fueled by technological advances such as AI, threatens to undermine democratic institutions. We can learn from past mistakes made with social media regulations, incentives, accountability, and transparency to ensure we leverage technology tools ethically to benefit everyone equally and to protect democratic values. But the time to act is now.
Lead with Empathy
Kindness is not weakness, and we should expect all government, civic, and business leaders to lead with curiosity, generosity, and humility. Social entrepreneurs, who understand the problems they seek to solve first-hand, play an important role promoting empathetic leadership and collaborative approaches to social change. They should tackle complex problems through empathy, innovation, and inclusivity, while tapping into their communities’ feelings of “actionable anger” against injustice.
Trust Drives Systemic Change
There’s a growing movement towards a more interconnected and responsive philanthropic ecosystem that reduces power imbalances in funding relationships. Trust-based philanthropy incorporates multi-year grants, patient capital, and unrestricted funding, and it ultimately empowers local communities to make their own decisions. This trust in local expertise and decision-making recognizes that integrating indigenous knowledge, narratives, and wisdom into broader initiatives will help ensure relevancy and effectiveness in areas such as the fight against social injustices and the climatic crises.
Highlighted Sessions
Read key takeaways from our favorite conversations:
- Unlocking Change at #SkollWF: Insights from Skoll World Forum 2024’s Dynamic Opening
- Amal and George Clooney Headline #SkollWF: Insights from Skoll World Forum 2024’s Inspirational Closing
- Realities & Potential of AI for Good: Promising AI Applications from #SkollWF
- Skoll Honors Social Entrepreneurs
- Reimagining Philanthropy for Systemic Change: A Better Giving Blueprint from the 2024 Skoll World Forum
- Understanding the Unseen: Measuring Systems Change at #SkollWF
- Driving Change at Scale with Philanthropy: Insights from Global Philanthropists at #SkollWF 2024
- Building a 360 Degree Approach to Climate Financing
- Envisioning the Information Ecosystem of the Future
- Redefining Love in Social Impact Work: Insights from Global Change-Makers at #SkollWF
- Reclaiming Truth in the Digital Age
Learn More
Now in its 21st year, the annual Skoll World Forum brings together visionary leaders, innovators, and change-makers from around the globe to share insights, forge partnerships, and drive systemic change. The Skoll Foundation is committed to content shared at its forum accessible to everyone, even those who were not able to attend as delegates.
We highly recommend the nine minute highlight video posted on the foundation’s website. You can find recording of most sessions on its YouTube channel. Additionally, check the organization’s LinkedIn and Twitter / X feeds for bite-sized clips and quotes from panelists.
You can also check out what other social impact leaders learned from the Skoll World Forum.
- 5 things I heard at the Skoll World Forum | Devex (Paywall)
- Top 5 Game-Changing Insights from Bridges to Prosperity at Skoll 2024 | Bridges to Prosperity (via LinkedIn)
- Jacinda Ardern at Skoll 2024: ‘Hope dies when we lose our sense of expectation’ | Pioneers Post
Our StartingUpGood team believes that events and conferences are great places to learn, share ideas, and innovate. While nothing replaces the benefits of attending in person (networking, collaboration, inspiration, building camaraderie, etc.), we recognize that emerging technologies continue to make conference content more accessible than ever before.
We are committed to using our innovative tech tools to share key insights and learnings from top conferences. These tools not only enable us to capture online content but also to summarize and synthesize this information into digestible chunks quickly and efficiently. They foster equity by enabling those who can’t attend a conference in person, for whatever reason, the ability to access timely data and trend information.
We don’t minimize the importance of human expertise and curation, but we don’t shy away from exploring and experimenting with new technologies that help us achieve our goal of supporting fresh entrepreneurial approaches to social impact. As such, this article uses Otter.ai to create transcripts and various LLMs to generate content summaries. All work is hand-checked for quality.
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