Renjie Butalid

Opening Keynote, Global Young Leaders Conference
Washington, DC  - July 12, 2010

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Thank you very much for the kind introduction, I appreciate it.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, most especially to the delegates of the Global Young Leaders Conference. My name is Renjie Butalid and I am from Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, a city that is home to one of the most famous and recognizable products in the world: the Blackberry smartphone produced by Canadian company Research In Motion. Now for my own curiosity, how many of you own a Blackberry? Well then, I actually own an Apple iPhone myself, but please don’t let that information leave this room, since I do have to go back to Waterloo after all.

It is my sincere pleasure to be with all of you here in Washington, DC this evening.

On a personal level, my presence on this stage is extremely humbling. You see, back in 2002, I was a 17-year old teenager who had just graduated from high school in the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East. That summer soon after finishing high school and before I went off to the University of Waterloo in Canada to eventually earn a degree in Economics and Political Science, I found myself here at the Global Young Leaders Conference as a delegate. At the opening keynote, we were in a room much similar to the one we are in now and I was in the audience surrounded by a group of exceptional young people from all over the world, just like all of you today. Many of the people I met back at the GYLC, I still call friends to this very day.

And just so everyone knows, when I was a delegate at the GYLC eight years ago, I was a delegate representing India. Where are the Team India delegates in the audience this evening? Namaste.

And I remember all I could think of when I sat quietly and reflected, after having traveled thousands of miles to get to this conference, which was also my first visit to the United States of America, was,

“What am I really doing here?”

“Am I really a leader?”

“I don’t even know what it takes to lead, let alone, know what it takes to be a ‘global young leader’.”

Now, if you find yourself asking these very same questions at this particular moment in time, I will let you in on a secret that has taken me a while to discover.

That it is OK to be scared and uncertain, not knowing what to expect and to not have all of the answers all the time. At times, it is ok to even question whether you have the capacity and makings of a leader. I know that I’ve certainly questioned myself in the past, especially when I was a highly involved student leader at the University of Waterloo, where at one point, I had the responsibility of overseeing a budget of over $1.2 million dollars on behalf of 24,000 undergraduate students when I was on student government. I’ve also questioned myself on numerous occasions, most recently as a community organizer involved with a number of local community events back in Waterloo. But I prevailed.

What I have learned throughout my own leadership experience is to let that feeling of self-doubt and uncertainty motivate me and I would encourage all of you to do the same; there is after all, only a very small difference between excitement and fear of uncertainty. Instead of being scared, tell yourself that you’re excited to be here and open yourself up to the possibilities that exist out there in the world. There is a reason why you are all here in Washington, DC and will be in New York City, attending this global conference on youth leadership over the next ten days. This is an opportunity of a lifetime and I really hope that you make the most of it.
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I found the video above of a recent lecture given by Antony Bugg-Levine of the Rockefeller Foundation, when he came to visit MaRS in Toronto back in early April, to be one of the most insightful and compelling talks on impact investing and social finance that I have come across.

If you are currently working in the private capital investment sector or perhaps with a non-profit or charity organization, interested in social enterprise and sustainable revenue generating models, I would highly encourage you to take some time out of your day to watch this video. It may change your perspective on the traditional view of only using the for-profit model to make money, while only using the charity and non-profit model to address social problems.

In this day and age, where the problems we are facing are accelerating at a pace and complexity never before seen in history, it is evident that we require new approaches and tools that will enable us to tackle these problems at their scale and level of complexity. In the coming decades, experts have noted that we will begin to see rapid systemic changes on many levels, from the weakening of national public institutions, widening gaps between rich and poor, increasing scarcity of energy, and worsening damage of our environment as a result of climate change.

With this in mind, how are we to tackle many of these emerging globally complex problems, given the traditional models of charitable giving and our reliance on government to solve these issues for us?

The simple answer is that we cannot, given the current tools that we have at our disposal.

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I am excited to share that I have been invited to give the opening keynote at the Global Young Leaders Conference (GYLC) in Washington DC this coming July 12, organized by the Congressional Youth Leadership Council.

As an alumnus of the GYLC, I am extremely excited and humbled at the very same time, to have been asked to give the opening keynote. I attended this very same youth leadership conference back in July 2002. The difference is, back then, I was a young and naive 17 year old teenager who had just graduated from the International School of Choueifat in Al Ain, with a world of possibilities before him. Given my work with Social Innovation Generation these past few years and my keen interest in social entrepreneurship, I still feel that there is a world of possibilities out there, it is certainly an exciting time to be a part of this growing social innovation movement.

I was asked to write up a reflections piece by the CYLC discussing my journey beyond the conference in 2002, to be featured in their newsletter to parents and students thinking about attending the GYLC. If you are one of those students and you are reading this, I would highly recommend you attend.

I have shared my reflection piece below, feedback welcome.

With this in mind, I will be in Washington DC July 10-14, 2010 and then in New York City from July 14-18, 2010. So if you are in town and would like to get together, please feel free to drop me a line.

Reflections of a GYLC Alumnus (2002) – by Renjie Butalid

I attended the Global Young Leaders Conference in July 2002 after I was nominated and encouraged to attend by my high-school teacher during senior year. I did not realize the extent to which the conference would have an impact on me until now, when I was asked to submit a reflection piece by the Congressional Youth Leadership Council on my journey after the GYLC. Looking back over the past eight years, I can say with utmost certainty that it was a transformative experience for me and I would not be the person I am today if it had not been for the days spent in Washington DC and New York City that summer. The lessons that I learned and the people I met from all over the world, many of whom I call close friends and still keep in touch with, have had a profound impact on me even to this day.

Making the decision to attend the GYLC was not an easy one as it required a much bigger personal and financial commitment coming from the United Arab Emirates, a country situated in the Middle East and halfway around the world from the United States of America. I lived and grew up in a small oasis desert city called Al Ain in the emirate of Abu Dhabi, with parents who decided to move to the UAE from the Philippines in 1990. Growing up, I was your average teenager, not quite shy, and yet, not too sure what my identity was and where my place was in this world given my cultural background and heritage living in a foreign country. I also never considered myself to be a leader, even though it seemed I was highly involved in high school through playing on a number of sports teams and competing with other schools in the local area.

Attending the GYLC changed all that and I was able to see myself in a different light from then on. There is something very powerful in the notion that someone out there believes in you and sees your leadership potential and capabilities. You ultimately begin to believe it yourself and it eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. More than anything, the GYLC allowed me to find the courage within myself as I embarked on my leadership journey moving forward.

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The case below, involving a gay elderly couple who were together for 20 years before they were forcibly kept apart by government officials when one of them fell down and was hospitalized, makes me really angry that I felt the need to speak up about it and be heard.

Clay and his partner of 20 years, Harold, lived in California. Clay and Harold made diligent efforts to protect their legal rights, and had their legal paperwork in place—wills, powers of attorney, and medical directives, all naming each other. Harold was 88 years old and in frail medical condition, but still living at home with Clay, 77, who was in good health.

One evening, Harold fell down the front steps of their home and was taken to the hospital. Based on their medical directives alone, Clay should have been consulted in Harold’s care from the first moment. Tragically, county and health care workers instead refused to allow Clay to see Harold in the hospital. The county then ultimately went one step further by isolating the couple from each other, placing the men in separate nursing homes. Ignoring Clay’s significant role in Harold’s life, the county continued to treat Harold like he had no family and went to court seeking the power to make financial decisions on his behalf. Outrageously, the county represented to the judge that Clay was merely Harold’s “roommate.” The court denied their efforts, but did grant the county limited access to one of Harold’s bank accounts to pay for his care.

What happened next is even more chilling: without authority, without determining the value of Clay and Harold’s possessions accumulated over the course of their 20 years together or making any effort to determine which items belonged to whom, the county took everything Harold and Clay owned and auctioned off all of their belongings. Adding further insult to grave injury, the county removed Clay from his home and confined him to a nursing home against his will. The county workers then terminated Clay and Harold’s lease and surrendered the home they had shared for many years to the landlord.

Three months after he was hospitalized, Harold died in the nursing home. Because of the county’s actions, Clay missed the final months he should have had with his partner of 20 years. Compounding this tragedy, Clay has literally nothing left of the home he had shared with Harold or the life he was living up until the day that Harold fell, because he has been unable to recover any of his property.

With the help of a dedicated and persistent court-appointed attorney, Anne Dennis of Santa Rosa, Clay was finally released from the nursing home. Ms. Dennis, along with Stephen O’Neill and Margaret Flynn of Tarkington, O’Neill, Barrack & Chong, now represent Clay in a lawsuit against the county, the auction company, and the nursing home, with technical assistance from NCLR. A trial date has been set for July 16, 2010 in the Superior Court for the County of Sonoma.

If say for example, Monika and I had been living in the United States in the early part of the 20th century, based on our race (i.e. Filipino and German-Portuguese), our relationship would have been looked down upon and in some cases, we may have even been thrown in jail if we decided to get married.

Anti-miscegenetion laws, otherwise known as miscegenation laws, were laws that prohibited interracial marriage. From the 19th century into the 1950s, most US states enforced anti-miscegenation laws. In 1967, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled in the landmark case Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional, overturning Pace v. Alabama (1883) and ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States.

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