 Tenakoto, Tenakoto, Tenakoto Katua. Yeah. Kia ora everyone. We never usually get invited to speak together. Like we're usually one of us is in the audience being like, yeah, go, go. So it was awesome to even have the chance to be kind of seen and introduced as a couple. So the water to my pale is going to start us off. I'm glad I got that one. So I'm Ellie for those of you who don't know me yet and I do hope that I have a chance to connect with most of you. I have a really unique and extremely privileged background that I feel is essential to acknowledge as we start. I'm the daughter of aid workers. So I was raised in East Africa, in India, in North Africa, and actually under two really quite serious dictatorships. So I grew up on one hand hearing about social justice at the dinner table and on the other seeing not only the disparity of income inequality, like firsthand, which really strikes you when you're little. We somehow numb out to it as we get older. But then also see that the systems that we've created for ourselves are really unjust and the structural violence that they create actually seeds deep trauma. And I believe that all of us carry that in one way or another that part of healing, part of creating changes, healing and acknowledging that piece in us and being prepared to hold space for that in others. So as we go off and talk about the different pieces of what we do and weave that together, I think it's really important to acknowledge that. And each of us with our privilege to be able to be here, I think also with that comes responsibility. And it's for us to determine what that looks like, of course, and always. But there is within these systems that we're trying to change a grief, a despair and a healing that can take place. So something that I work a lot around. And one of the things that actually kind of brought us together when we both landed in New York was in a group of friends that were just kind of fending on all the cultural opportunities and the party and kind of being out of school in New York. And we were the only two that kept me like, when can we get back to Africa? She'd grown up there. And I had just spent about three years. The first two years, well, the second and third years that I spent full-time teaching, I was at a very kind of privileged private school but in a very depressed country. Gambia, you may have followed it in the news around its election recently. And I went there thinking that this was just kind of a step on the way to eventually living in Berlin and writing literature and engaging in the arts that I had studied and the arts that I love. And I was just totally derailed by the experience of living in such constant proximity to structural inequality and suffering and gender-based violence and systemic violence. It was just like everything that I still feel called to do and I still love to do when I'm at rest and in peace. I was like, I could write this but literally within, say, 800 square miles, I'm not writing that for anybody who's here, who's in my proximal community. This is not a gift for the people I'm around. I'm even actively trying to educate people up to the level that they would appreciate this experiment in literature in a language that isn't theirs. So that was a really hard place to have accidentally ended up by the fluke of where I got a job. And it totally grounded me in this idea that there's an urgency in the distant kind of suffering that people are enduring and there's a violence in privilege when you're just kind of resting in it. And so Ellie and I, after we got together, moved to Liberia, kind of down towards the bottom of challenged nations in terms of what it's come through and all of its wars and then all the different kind of types of power that are sitting there trying to grab its resources and like play with its power and so forth. And we were part of an effort, an early effort in the international development community, UNICEF in particular, to use technology to try to change the circumstances on the ground. We're like, ah, you know, now that there's this internet, there must be ways to use the internet to much more rapidly educate the entire population or change agricultural practices all at once. And there were some very well-intentioned efforts to come in with these huge tech projects and get the buy-in of ministries and then just kind of jam it down through the structures of the country. And these were all catastrophic failures, giant wastes of money, but they were good compost, right? Like these were, and not, you know, there's a thing, if this had been, if we'd been private companies and we'd been protecting our intellectual property, I kind of think of intellectual property as like plastic, it doesn't compost very well, right? So there's all these people sitting around on other people's intellectual property waiting to try to monetize it again. This was real compost because, you know, UNICEF and USA, they don't copyright these things. So we had a bunch of good ideas and set about trying to figure out how to scale them. And you're going to hear, that's like a theme that we're going to share with you a little bit throughout the talk. The one other thing I wanted to mention is, oddly, Silicon Valley in the shape of Singularity University came to recognize some of the success that the development community was having using technology and brought us there to try to make their efforts to use technology for good a little bit more grounded in global best practices. And so I do invite you to connect with me or Ellie about the program there this summer because we have a lot of control over how it's being run and that's why it's focused on climate change and environmental issues. So if you know people that want to contribute and get engaged or participate, do find us around that point. One of the things that we see from founders, though, a lot, and from the US, which is my country in particular, is this idea of the founder being a hero and the founder's story being all about them, which is a really interesting way of going about it. I like to not judge, but it doesn't seem to do justice to the ecosystem that's actually brought that person to where they are or to the privilege that they're building on. So one of the ways that we look at change is to look at process instead of the single person with the single story of transformation because what that single person tends to do is make other people think, they're special, I'm not, I could never do that. And there's a distance that's created between the change maker and the person who watches the change that almost makes them into a figure of authority and creates hierarchy. So we really want, when we're looking for leaders to encourage and when we're growing people as leaders, to step out of that model of aren't you so special because the truth is we all have these seeds within us if we know how to grow them and if we're supported in an ecosystem that allows that change to take shape. So one of the people who I've been, one of the groups who I've been really privileged to work with is a network called Women Living Under Muslim Law. They're actually a global network of feminists. They taught me to call myself a feminist. And they brought me to do sustainable leadership for them. And what I learned in doing this wellness work, it can look as simple as teaching yoga and teaching people how to breathe, but it can become also much more profound than that. Or rather, take place at a very deep level that looks unseen because the roots of your being really do start to reorient and change when you allow yourself that space to heal. One of the things I saw from them is that they were networked. There was no authority. It was completely horizontal, decentralized networked systems that were able to take someone who was, for example, like my friend Yara, arrested in Cairo for being in the wrong place at the wrong time next to a protest that was protesting and anti-protest law. And Yara got picked up. They realized she was a women's human rights defender and she was in jail for a few years. And then you need to write and speak to these people and show them that they're not alone. How do you as a community support people when things get really hard? And what we realized is it's all of us together doing this. It's not one person who's going to help get her out. She's since been pardoned by the leader in Egypt. She's not there anymore, but there are a lot of people who are still suffering for their beliefs, suffering for taking a stand and saying, I'm willing to be seen and I'm willing to be active. I'm willing to take a stand for those who have no voice. And our current system tends to punish them in some way. And it's up to us, those of us who have the luxury of not being touched directly by those systems, to also stand up and say no. No. And it's a very powerful no, especially when those of us come together. So to me, when I see change, it happens at the grassroots. It happens when someone says no. When something like a spark happens in the heart that makes us angry. Why is this still the way this is? Why hasn't someone changed this already? And what I've started to notice is if I'm asking that question, why hasn't someone changed this already? Usually it means there's something for me to do. Yeah. So like this, you get a long list of projects, but you also get a long list of people who are backing you up. People who are working with you because it is not done alone. And these women, I encourage you to check them out, the Women Living Under Muslim Law Network, they are standing up for secular rights, for human rights in some of the most challenging environments in the world, where there's Islamic fascism that has come to take over countries, Algeria, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran. So a really interesting organization to check out and support as well. And it can be helpful too if you're thinking, okay, I'm motivated by this challenge or this problem. And then a lot of us start spinning to the idea, okay, what will I do? What charity will I start? What product will I create? To remember these massive distributed groups of people whose daily experience often involves feeling unsupported, like unrecognized, unseen. If you have energy to do something but you don't necessarily have a particular direction or a particular gift that you wish to leverage at that point, often your privilege, your attention, your resources can be funneled directly to people who are actively and at their own peril engaged in these pursuits. So a similar situation, and yet radically different, is there's a lot of these organizations that people have started that have the potential to totally change the world, the ecology of the world, the way that villages organize, resources are handled. One of the ones I like to think about is called Blue Ventures. These guys started up in Madagascar and Madagascar, like many island nations that has reefs all around it, has become increasingly overfished for a whole complex litany of reasons, trawlers from other countries taking the fish that are far out, putting more pressure on the reefs and eventually killing the reef, along with ocean acidification, coral bleaching, whole mess of things making that tough. So Blue Ventures figured out how to take their sweet time about integrating into a village and showing the village what it looked like when you protected a tiny portion of that reef for long enough during a key part of the year when all the fish would like, and then it would be like 70% better than it was before. And the village could actually see that. They knew exactly how messed up that reef was before. And then they'd see what this kind of approach, this ecological approach did to revitalize what they have. And then slowly over time, they bring their reef back into existence and they have a whole sustainable fisheries approach. Now that takes time, right? And the issue is though lots of us have some of the resources and some of the entrepreneurial skills, perhaps some of the technologies to help that get everywhere it needs to be, which is like 200,000 or a million, two million villages around the world that have exactly the same problem, they get super irritating to see when you're like, that's a solution. So what does it look like to be humbly in support of that? Maybe some of us don't use tech and scale things. Maybe some of us are like, well, I could take that to a village and do it there. That's a great thing. We actually need to be revitalizing our coastal ecosystems everywhere, so we need to have consistency on it. Like if coral reefs have perhaps 20 more years only at the rate that they're dying, then doing this now matters a lot. So one of the things that we're always trying to do is see where are people, where have people come up with a really massive solution, especially one that honors the community that they're working within, that takes as a starting point whatever education is involved in allowing them to own that solution. And then how do we get that local thing to scale? It could be just by copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste. It could be brilliant systems and wonderful kind of mobile-based tools for helping people kind of scan and identify what they need. But being in support of those who hold the solution is critical and super fun also. I think there's a humility of it too that allows the work to create its own momentum. This word, emergence, I think is so pregnant with meaning for us now. Because we don't actually have the answers, but we kind of know, I think I want to go there. I'm not really sure. Okay, that didn't work that way. Okay, this way again. And it's kind of like paddling on a canoe where first you go one way and then you go the other. You kind of adjust your path. In order to replicate to what we do at Code, we find these amazing projects that are already really good at doing what they're doing and help them scale. And it sounds really simple or it sounds really technical, but first, and then asking again, listening, asking again, listening, and then going, okay, what about this and seeing how that lands and letting the people whose solution this is be the drivers of how that looks. So it's very much like being in service or for those of us that work in the private sector thinking about the person as your client and how do you serve them. Because if they're not actively involved, if there isn't co-ownership of these things, then we're going to put ourselves up as I have all the solutions and by necessity then a dichotomy is created where you don't and then you need me. And isn't it great to feel needed? We see a lot of the charity models working on that, capitalizing on the fact that I have so much and I'm so generous and so I'm going to help you and aren't I so wonderful to do that? And it really takes away the... It doesn't allow, first of all, the experience to affect us deeply and how the work to really land, the way that it can. So great that we had that model really useful in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s and now. Here we are able to connect in new ways, able to communicate in new ways, able to listen in new ways. So I think that's really also important. One of the ways that the aid community in its sea of decades of tech failure came together is because... First of all, open source. Because we were open source and we were allowed from our organizations to talk about the failures. Where normally you would have a PR or a media team, especially at UNICEF saying, oh no, that's not how we say that. No, no, you can't say that. You can't tell them that. So we said, well, why not? There's absolutely no shame taking a page book from Silicon Valley and saying that our failures happened. We've got to grow on them. We have to build on them. So a bunch of us came together about 10, 8, 10 years ago and started to say there has to be a pattern here. There's dozens of projects. Some things really work but some things don't. How can we develop design principles that can inform our work about how to do this impact thing using tech? And what we came up with, where nine principles, simple design principles, you can find them all listed on digitalprinciples.org. But they're basically, they're not going to sound new to many of you here, most of you here, but there are things like open source, open data, design for sustainability, plan to scale, collaborate, co-design. Re-use and improve what's already there. Things that when you read them you think, oh, that's so obvious. Yeah, I know that, but actually we don't. We are full of assumptions about how things need to go and very eager to bring our biases and our assumptions into the project. And so if we don't examine them and say, okay, this is what that looks like, I am not really thinking that far ahead, am I? In community we start to develop new ways of doing things that are more likely to succeed. And that's been really powerful because it's a huge assumption to think, oh, if I just sprinkle tech on that, it's going to be great. Absolutely not true. Absolutely not. And I could tell you lots of stories later if you want to hear of some of the failures. And one of the interesting points about the digital principles that were just kind of published about two years ago, is that because of some stealthy brilliant behind the scenes ninja work, a whole bunch of organizations and major donors are now totally constrained in how they spend their money such that it has to be in line with these principles. So there's a whole belt way of old consulting companies used to milking tons of money, tons of public money to try to solve problems whose business model is done. And there's a vacuum, a huge opportunity for anyone willing to come in and take part in solutions that they don't get to own forever and have passive income from to get access to supply chains of impact and influence that were not available to you before. So if that's really exciting and you want to hear more about that certainly during the workshop we'd be happy to talk a little bit more about that piece. But we wanted to land a little bit in a couple of things that excite us about the strengths of New Zealand in particular and how like here we're telling you some of the things from international aid and development that we think might be relevant, but I think that New Zealand has a couple of things at least that can really inform how international aid and development goes on to work in the future. One of those is the leadership that New Zealand is showing around the rights of indigenous people. The idea that there are, that the indigenous people of a nation become ambassadors within and officially recognized by international aid and development that making connections between indigenous people in different countries is part of an official policy of helping one another and learning what their practices are is something that I can, I think New Zealand is one of the only countries that could try to take such a step. It's the only country that has matured to the point in this issue to take leadership in it. And coming through international aid and development with it is an easier way than coming through the front door. That's still very much a back door where by the time people realize that oh my god like the Native Americans in Ecuador own a ton of their rainforest now. How did that happen, right? That kind of stuff can happen more easily through international aid and development than on the floor at the UN. It's not just about preventing legal personhood to a river and soon a larger national park. That sort of stuff belongs very much in the toolbox of foundations and international organizations that are looking for more permanent ways to protect that which is vulnerable and needs our support. Also Aotearoa, New Zealand the first country to give women the vote so I see there particularly being a real avenue for gender leadership because we still have more than half of the world's population not having equity experiencing disproportionate levels of violence and really that affecting economic outcomes, sure it's easy to argue that when you're talking to power but really the social outcomes are what we care about. Another piece that I'd like to bring as we land this here is this idea of change being at a different level than the systems that created the problem in the first place. There's that Einstein quote we've read you can't solve a problem the same level and I often think about that because our culture and our language in English has taught us dichotomies it's either black or it's white, it's right or it's wrong you're in or you're out and it's a very unhelpful way of thinking about the future it makes us enemies of each other quicker than we even realize and so where I sit and leading the wellness program at Singularity where we do have a lot of corporations and governments come I noticed when I first started doing that work it would be so easy to tell them that they were wrong and to come at them as you're the problem it's you. But of course with you know you do the thing where there's three fingers pointing back at yourself and I really had to sit with myself before I started to do this work and say Ellie you cannot do this this way this is not gonna work I had to find the parts of me that I was in opposition around and use the opportunity when I feel like going at someone who I feel justified to do so I could tell you all the reasons they're good reasons you'd probably agree with me many of you but it doesn't happen that way the minute that I go for the jugular the minute I start to point and go well it's you or you're wrong this space between us of heart space, of connection is gone and they are no longer safe to be vulnerable whoever they are arms dealer president of a tuna fish company is safe to be vulnerable and if I've made them wrong then I can feel really good about myself whoever I'm talking to wherever my work brings me if I can sit and hold space for them where they are without judging them then I've created a space for them to be vulnerable and that vulnerability may show up or it may not there may be a conversation impact that I see or it may happen 10 years from now maybe nothing happens it's not up to me what's up to me is what I bring to the conversation to the situation and if I can stay out of opposition with those people magic happens I've seen it and it is amazing so I would like to encourage as we walk towards our own wellness as we walk towards our own ability to affect change that we look at it as we're all in this together we sink or swim together we're all on the same boat so thank you so much Thank you