The Clinton Global Citizen Award Winners

Andre Agassi and the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy (AACPA)

Most of us know — and love— Andre Agassi for his brilliant tennis and spirited on-court antics. He’s been the best tennis player in the world, won eight Grand Slams and is one of a handful of players who’ve won all four Grand Slam titles. Now, in his “retirement,” he’s taken on a new challenge: building the spirit of disadvantaged kids through the Andre Agassi Charitable Foundation (AACF).
Agassi started his foundation in 1994, in his hometown of Las Vegas. The main purpose was to support after-school activities and programs for at-risk kids. Since the beginning, the AACF has funded more than 20 organizations, including a Boys and Girls Club, Child Haven and the I Have a Dream Foundation.
In 2001, Agassi opened the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy (AACPA), a charter school with the mission, according to its Web site, “to enhance a child’s character, self-esteem and career possibilities. Admission to AACPA is based on a lottery system and comes with one requirement: parental involvement. “Unless parents can support what their kids are striving for, it’s counterproductive,” says Agassi.
Still, he’s been surprised by the level of commitment he’s seen in parents, who are often raising more than one child and working a couple of jobs. “It speaks to what the human spirit strives for,” he says.
Agassi’s passion is all about spirit — and nurturing it in young people. “It’s one thing to educate children with books,” he explains. “It’s another thing to teach a child to be a powerful part of society — to respect themselves and respect their culture. That’s what we focus on. What the person is.”
At AACPA no student will ever get kicked out of school for bad grades; it’s bad behavior that will result in walking papers.

Why does Agassi feel a need to give back? “It did feel inherent,” he says.
He remembers conversations with his best friend when they were just 11 years old, the two of them talking about “if they ever made it” what they would do. “We wanted to give back to our city,” Agassi says, who refers to Las Vegas as “one of those cities built on vision.” Eventually, the tennis player found himself asking: “What if you dreamt of really giving people equal opportunity?”

Next year, AACPA will celebrate its first graduating class. For Agassi, the passion and enthusiasm for his foundation and school only grows. “You feel like you start on your terms, and then you feel like you serve something bigger,” he says. “You don’t expect to have the process lead you. As you start to give, care and make a difference, you can’t stop. As students get closer to their dreams you realize it’s a crime that others don’t have the opportunity.”

For more information, visit the Andre Agassi Charitable Foundation and the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy.

The ‘70s were a tumultuous decade for Bangladesh. A 1970 hurricane killed more than 200,000 people and a year later the Liberation War erupted. Around this time, Fazel Hasan Abed returned home from living and working in London. What he witnessed was utter devastation — more than 1 million Bangladeshis dead from the civil war.
“That’s about the time I became acquainted with death, destruction and the meaning of life itself,” says Abed, who comes from a privileged family. “In the face of death, one has to rethink life itself.”
And so, Abed got involved. He left his corporate job, joined the liberation movement and after the war, worked in northern Bangladesh to rebuild the remote villages there.
That was 1972. What Abed thought would be a two- to three-year stint doing relief work turned into a 35-year career  working with impoverished communities and, ultimately, the creation of BRAC (the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee).

BRAC provides microfinance loans and educational resources to help poor communities master their own development.  The dual mission, as BRAC’s Web site describes: “Alleviation of poverty and empowerment of the poor.”
“You try to provide enabling conditions,” Abed explains. “If children are not going to school, you can provide some kind of possibility for children to go to school; if people are trying to earn an income, you give them a loan.” And the work is done with respect. You don’t talk down to people,” Abed says.
As a self-sustaining organization, BRAC relies on both nonprofit and for-profit partnerships. The for-profit organizations (like small banks) provide jobs and services to people in disadvantaged communities.
Today, BRAC is one of the world’s largest development organizations in the world, with 6.4 million microfinance clients in Bangladesh alone. The organization has expanded to Afghanistan and Sudan, and has been called on to help countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
From the beginning, BRAC has given almost 100 percent of their loans to women. “We find that women tend to be the best change agents in any community,” Abed explains. “It’s not that men can’t do business. But you get the real needs from women. “Men might say, ‘Oh, we need electricity — we want to watch TV.’ For women, it’s water, food for children, health centers.” Plus, Abed says, women are more willing to share the money with their families.  Often, they’ll use the first loan to bring home the children who have been sent away for work.
 “By making your clients women, you serve the entire family [and community] better,” says Abed.
 What’s up next for Abed and BRAC? “We would like to work in 10 countries in Africa and five to 10 countries in Asia. We want to go global, and make a difference in people’s lives.”
Abed says he always felt the desire to give back — it was just a matter of timing and the right opportunity. With BRAC, he says, “I’ve never felt that I’m sacrificing anything — only that I’m lucky to do this.”
“It’s gratifying” he says. “No human being should be in dehumanizing poverty for any time. And we would like to break the cycle of poverty into a cycle of human existence.”

For more information, go to the BRAC Web site.

What gets John Chambers’ philanthropic chops watering?  These days, it’s the Jordan Education Initiative (JEI), an e-learning program aimed opportunities for Jordanian citizens.
Founded by King Abdullah II of Jordan, JEI was spearheaded by the Cisco CEO and chairman, who calls Abudullah a friend. The organization was launched in 2003, after the World Economic Forum at the Dead Sea.
As Chambers tells the story, he was sitting at a table with other corporate bigwigs, telling them about JEI, which was in its infancy at the time. He explained that JEI would offer online courses to train Jordanians in technology, the kind of educational outreach that could expand the country’s social and economic development.  The organization was set to launch in Jordan and then in countries around the world. By the end of the evening, Chambers had 17 corporations on board to help fund the project.
Chambers is a well-known visionary, entrepreneur and straight-talker. Not to mention money-maker. As Cisco’s CEO since 1995, he’s taken annual revenues from $1.2 billion to a current run rate of approximately $24.8 billion. Still, he didn’t expect his involvement with JEI to have an impact on Cisco’s business numbers. But since Cisco’s involvement — which includes on-the-job training at Cisco for young people in the Middle East — the company’s business has boomed in the region.
“Doing the right thing affects business in the right way,” he says.
JEI became involved with the Clinton Global Initiative after the former president came to talk to the group. “What hooked us on CGI was the ability to rethink out of box with groups we normally would not associate with,” Chambers says. “It’s not about what one party or individual can accomplishment — Clinton brings together people from different backgrounds who wouldn’t normally have anything in common.
“And I’m a Republican!” he says, laughing.
Chambers sees JEI as an example of a new era of collaborative problem solving, both in business and in philanthropy. “People call it collaboration,” he says. “It’s what our children call social networking.” And here’s what this type of social networking does for people like Chambers and companies like Cisco:
“You’re not just making a difference,” Chambers says, “but you’re constantly learning and growing. That’s fun. It motivates not just the company and its CEO, it also motivates our employees.”
Over the years, Chambers has won numerous awards for his business and his philanthropic acumen. He was won several CEO of the Year awards and has won the Excellence in Corporate Philanthropy award from CECP (Committee Encouraging Corporate Philosophy).
Giving back is imperative, and Chambers credits his parents, who were both doctors, to passing along a drive for philanthropy. “I think from the beginning, the importance of sharing was deep in my DNA.”

For more information, visit the JEI Web site.

Vicky Colbert had the luxury of a great education. And this luxury — which includes a graduate degree in comparative education from Stanford University —has been put to tremendous effect: Colbert has reformed education throughout her native Colombia. These days, her curriculum is going global.
Colbert is the founder and co-author of Escuela Nueva (or E.N.), an education model launched in 1975. It was inspired after Colbert, fresh out of graduate school, visited teachers and classrooms in rural communities in Colombia.
Before E.N., these schools had one or two teachers overseeing multiple grades. As a result, there was little learning taking place, low teacher moral and high drop-out rates. Since E.N., classroom sizes are smaller and there’s a focus on teacher-student relationships. The active-learning model means teachers don’t stand at a pulpit talking to the kids; they sit down and work with them.
“It’s active, child-centered learning,” Colbert says.
From the beginning, “necessity was the mother of invention,” Colbert says. She worked closely with the local teachers to create a child-focused model that would address areas “invisible to education planners.” The result was a curriculum that cut to the core of the community.

“To make changes with children, we have to make changes in how we work with people across the board,” Colbert explains. “There is a strong relationship between what the child learns and applying the knowledge to the family and community.” Colbert says she knew this was the paradigm shift that would impact a country’s national policy.
Yet Colbert remained a realist: She made sure the E.N. model was cost effective as well as scalable for a national expansion. “It was built on what was existing, but also introduced strategies that could be politically, technical and financially feasible.”
And it worked. In fact, it worked so well that by the late ’80s, E.N. had nationwide scope and has been used in almost 20,000 schools throughout Colombia. In 1989, World Bank selected E.N. as one of the most effective reform policies in the world among developed nations. 
Colbert, however, didn’t stay at the helm of E.N. for all this time. After nine years, in the mid-’80s, she left for a post as Columbia’s vice minister of education. Soon after she was also appointed as UNICEF’s regional adviser for education in the Americas. However, as the ‘90s got under way, the government decentralized its education programs and the E.N. model lost ground. So Colbert resigned from her vice minister job and went back to her roots — sort of.
What she did was start the Escuela Nueva Foundation, a nonprofit NGO that uses private funds to keep the curriculum sustainable.
But even in the down times, the E.N. model showed what it was made of. “The students were the agents of change,” she says of this tumultuous period. As teachers moved from school to school, it was the children who taught the teachers how to apply the Escuela Nueva curriculum.
Today, the E.N. continues to evolve; it’s been adapted for urban schools and displaced populations, and has influenced education models in countries throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa.
Colbert, whose mother was a respected teacher, is a recipient of several prestigious awards, including: Most Successful Woman in Colombia’s Educational Field, in 2002; and Outstanding Social Entrepreneur by the Schwab Foundation.

For more information, visit the Escuela Nueva Foundation Web site.
Tatyana Mishel is a writer for MSN.