By all accounts, a week that starts with a speech from President Obama and ends with a speech by President Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; is filled in between by three and a half days of meetings with world leaders, and inspiring people who are fighting to defeat all the most serious social and environmental problems facing our planet is a good week. Add to that launching a program whose press release headline reads… Co-Founder & CEO Philippe Cousteau Joined by President Bill Clinton and Grammy Award Winner Usher Raymond IV to Announce Unprecedented Service Learning Program Reaching Millions of U.S. Middle and High School Student (full press release here http://is.gd/3JtEc) and you have all the makings of a week that will go down a one of the most impactful of my life. It is over now, but will define the course of EarthEcho and thus my life, for the foreseeable future.
The Clinton Global Initiative is in its fifth year and was founded by President Clinton to get things done. Unlike other conferences where all you get is talk talk talk, the purpose of CGI is to bring organizations that work to tackle all the major issues from climate, hunger, health and poverty reduction together with the foundations and organizations who are ready and able to provide the resources to make it happen. Politics aside, President Clinton has achieved more in his post White House life than any other president in the last 50 years…and any intelligent human has to appreciate that.
As for our project The Water Planet Challenge, we are very excited about launching a program that will revolutionize the environmental youth service movement and mobilize an army of young people to solve these problems. When Vice President Al Gore accepted the academy award for An Inconvenient Truth, he said (and I paraphrase) we know what the solutions are we just lack the will to implement them. I believe that there are millions of youth in this world that have the will to implement them; they just lack the tools and knowledge to do it. By focusing our distribution through a network like Discovery Education that immediately puts us into over 60% of the middle and high schools in this country coupled with partnerships with all the best youth service orgs as well as promotion through Planet Green, we are going to give those millions of youth access to the tools and knowledge they need and take a great leap forward towards making this world a better place. My grandfather believed that youth could solve the problems facing our world and so do I; EarthEcho’s Water Planet Challenge will give them the power to do it.