blog

Post-WEF 2010: MIPing at Davos (2)

Wednesday, 10 March 2010 | posted by Matt_BC
Global Youth Summit 2009, WEF Davos 2010

| Share

Read the first installment of this entry here.

“BANALAKAGA” was the wakeup call that our 24/7 mummy-on-board, Francesca Martonffy (Director GCMs) gave us each day on our way to the Conference Center, and the other stress busting moves and grooves that the D6 followed. This prepared us for the really awesome ‘4am sleeps and 6am wakeups’ that made us real Davosians that lived by the motto; Play hard & Party hard!

We went GAGA over the fact that Paolo Coelho was the first person we met as we stepped into the Conference Center, but as the days went on in supersonic speed we acclimatized to the fact that saying Hello to Fareed Zakariya on the corridor having coffee with Muhammed Yunus was the Form of the Forum, and thus we learned to strive in this amazing atmosphere. It is this sense of maturity and insight that I believe is the core to what Davos brings to the world; a setting where people are not judged on what company they own, or what religious faith they uphold, but by the essence of humanity that live by and this is what transcends down to principles and values that are imperative in Improving the State of the World.

When a country mourns over a loss in a catastrophe, the world at Davos sits up and listens. At the special Plenary on the ‘Crisis in Haiti’ where the WEF and the Clinton Global Initiative pledged to collaborate on recovery efforts in Haiti, one individual stood out of the crowd to me as a panelist; President Bill Clinton. It was an honor to meet the President after this session and briefly introduce ourselves whilst query on the role of youth, like us lending a hand to rebuild a New Haiti, as he put it. But the surprise came when his Personal Assistant repeatedly said to the President ‘Mr. President, you have a meeting with the President of Columbia now, you have to go’, but he just stood there conversing with the youngest minds at the forum and on his commitment to youth. WOOOHOO!!! Global Changemakers, we kept two Presidents waiting at the same time.

Conformity has never been written on our foreheads, but dissipating this with the originality of fresh ideas, whilst challenging those in power to not merely think out of the box, but to think like there was no box was the name of the game of the Davos6 2010. So when Bill Gates, PM Morgan Tsvangirai, Helen Clark and a few other big names in the business were challenged on their business by three Changemakers in a row, it made the crowd in the Session on MDGs ask the Q, ‘What were those 3 bullets whizzing in the air?’ And the answer was simple; We were catalyst of positive change and agents of action that had laid its ground in over 98 countries across the globe affecting 50,000 communities. Most importantly we were ourselves, from the way we saw a problem to our strategized plan of action the 6 of us thought, walked, ate and integrated differently. This is what made us alike; a mosaic of change.

Davos is about making the right connections by sometimes saying the right thing at the right time, and although our MIPing adventures got us stacks of business cards and reduced our own piles, I had quite a different twist to my MIPing. I think I owe this to the fact that my MIPing at the Forum was sometimes a hybrid laid-back version that got tired after 12 hours of being on my feet non-stop. But when the microphone reached my hand, the words from MIPing got explained. When I was called in as a Keynote Speaker for the Nestlé Breakfast Discussion on ‘Childhood and Youth in the 21st Century’, with only a few minutes of preparation, amidst filling myself with cereal beside the COO of Facebook, when I took to the podium it all fell into perspective. It was this feeling of speaking out for a group who needed to be heard at this Forum that kept me going to conclude with the words that later resulted in congratulatory handshakes and the voluntary compliments of business cards on the part of famous strangers:

‘Our future will not be made for us, but by Us.’