 I hope to be an optimist, and it's always the optimists who turned out to be great leaders in history. I humbly believe that we're in the presence of three great leaders today. And they are optimists. I know because I've met them. I'm going to introduce them just with their first names because that's how I operate. The first gentleman that's going to come up today, his name is Peter. If you want to read his bio, you can do that. But I would like to give him all the time to talk about what's in his heart. I asked him a very simple question. Pretend I'm a child and tell me what you do for a living. And he said, I let nature rule. With that, Peter, the platform is yours. Thank you. Wow. What I'm going to do today is I'm going to take you on a journey of a place that truly wows me and creates wonder for not just me, but for many. Before I take you through the Grand Canyon, which I spent a lot of time, I'm going to back up just a little bit and explain how I got there. I've worked for National Geographic for roughly 20 years and many others, where I was sent an assignment all over the world to do stories of the Sherpa on the south side of Everest, or to do unusual adventure stories involving replicating antique aviation stories through Africa. After doing this for some two decades and doing some foolish moves, this perhaps being one of the most foolish, where I decided I needed a shower after a long journey through Antarctica by kayak, you could say that my wanderlust of travel perhaps experienced a little bit of shrinkage. What happened at this point, though, is I decided I would go home. I would go back to this place right here. This is a hayfield where I grew up in central Colorado. I grew up on a small cattle ranch, and this is a gravity-fed sprinkler system. I wanted to do a larger story closer to my heart, closer to my home, and I wanted to understand this issue I keep hearing about water scarcity contamination. I decided to follow the water that we use to feed our cattle ranch, which originates here in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, 14,000-foot peaks, and I followed it all 1,500 miles, seven states, two countries, with a focus on what's changing, what is happening, why are these white lines appearing on Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam near Las Vegas, which represent the water we used to have. I wanted to understand how the tributaries that feed this river, like the Gila in Arizona, become this from 1930 to today. When you follow the Colorado River to its end, or now its new end, in the delta of Mexico, you see what happens when we ask too much of a limited resource. It simply disappears. The Colorado River flowed to the sea for six million years, and not a drop of it has reached the ocean for two decades. It was one of the largest desert estuaries in North America, and now it is basically just a cracked, parched earth. At this point, this was three years in this journey, I did a bunch of films and a book, and I was invited back upstream to this place. The Grand Canyon, where I was invited to tell a story of the architect of the canyon, the river inside it, and what is becoming of it and how it's changing downstream. When I started the project of the river, I figured the Grand Canyon is the most protected piece of landscape on this river. This was the shiny pearl on the necklace. It didn't need the attention of my lenses, but when I came to do a talk, I was surprised to hear that there was a host of threats across this landscape. Here's where I got the unusual idea to lace up my shoes and do a different type of adventure as a backbone to tell a story of this place. I'm going to be honest. I'm not sure I really like hiking that much. With a heavy pack and no guarantee of water, it's hard, stressful, and very slow. Sure, hiking can lead to some zen-like moments, but not so much if you're lost, really tired, and dehydrated. Yet there's something about the Grand Canyon and its rocky, secret world. It is alluring, magical even. So in the fall of 2015, my friend and author, Kevin Fadarco and I, set out to walk the entirety of the Grand Canyon from east to west. In order to understand the insanity of this venture, you first have to know a little bit about this place. In stretches, it is 18 miles wide and over a mile deep. No deep in fact, you could stack five Empire State buildings, one on top on the other, inside. It is 277 miles long if you're floating the Colorado River. But on foot, by the time you've gone up and back down the numerous side canyons, it's more like 700 miles. Oh yeah, and for most of it, there's no trail. As a result, more people have stood on the surface of the moon and have completed a continuous through hike of the Grand Canyon. It may have been the brashiest, scratchiest, longest day. I'll get them. I fell into a baroque actor and lumped some of my arm. This is wild, wondering what the hell we've gotten ourselves into. I was told that yesterday would be the hardest day. I don't see any difference whatsoever between yesterday and the day before yesterday, the first day of today. My body's falling apart. Kevin and I would be the first journalists ever to tackle this hiking lunacy. We plan to complete our mission over a year, watching the seasons change, and teaming up with hardened canyon veterans to help us find our way and our legs. We're running low on food, and if we don't keep walking, we're not going to get to our food cache. So my big question is when do I start to panic? Right now. Beyond that challenge, something else drew us on this quest. The Grand Canyon is facing an unprecedented array of pressures from all four points on the compass. Development projects are poised to change the integrity of perhaps the most monumental landscape in America. This is the most protected place in the world, and yet what do you think I spent most of my time doing is protecting this place? We believe walking the park might give us a unique perspective on this secret world and what's at stake to be lost. When I started this project, I had the false illusion that it would be something like this. It would be walking beautiful sand beaches through emerald light with lots of time to reflect on the beauty and majesty of the place. This little stretch of beach was the only stretch of beach I ever set foot on, because if you move laterally through this landscape, you have to move vertically. You have to move up through the layers of rock and time, and when you move vertically, you have to go back down often to find water or food which our friends helped or left in food caches. When you combine this with a temperature that swings up to 108 degrees at night, you quickly start to realize just a few days into this project that I'd stepped into something a little harsher than I had ever anticipated. If you don't see the anguish on my face, here's a little closer glimpse of it written on our feet. The soles of our shoes delaminated, so did our feet, and then there's the issue of how do you carry enough food? You can't if you want to keep moving. You quickly, your body changes and you change to the place, but it wasn't about the hardship of us finding a way through it. It was about this landscape, and it was about trying to understand how this could change. This is the Navajo Nation land which borders the Grand Canyon National Park. This is where the grand escalate is proposed to be built, where 10,000 people would come down into the canyon today. Which if you talk to many of the people that live here, like this woman Renee Yellowhorse from the Navajo Nation, this is her Sistine Chapel. The confluence of these two rivers inside the heart of the canyon is where they all come to pray and is where they believe they came from. So remarkably the people that live near the canyon are pushing back as hard and as effectively as possible with very little. Her and her friends, basically 12 Navajo women of which only four of them speak English, fought back this billion dollar development and remarkably have put it on hold for now, on pause. They are playing the long game on this development and it's an example of how we're looking at this park as a way to turn its beauty into cash. If you look downstream as we moved, you see where six and a half million visitors come to the Grand Canyon now. This is the South Rim. And because there's so many people coming, there is this allure to develop. On the backside of this photo is proposed to put in a waterski park three million square feet of commercial space. That may be good in some ways, but there's a giant question in this arid landscape of where water comes from. The water inside the canyon is always affected by what happens on the rim. And this water sustains a remarkable, rich, vast biodiversity and oasis inside it. It also sustained us. This creek in particular was interesting because when we came to it, it was too contaminated to drink. It was actually radioactive because there's evidence and a history of uranium mining all around the canyon on the north and south rim. Now, uranium mining may be the future in some argue for clean energy, but in this landscape it is complicated. And many people have been doing tests to try to understand the maze of water that runs through this place. They actually put in blue dye not far from this mine, which is on the north rim, trying to figure out where that dye would emerge to their amazement instead of appearing downstream in the Colorado River. It appeared 26 miles upstream at an elevation gain of 3,000 feet. So it reveals that the complexity of the water table here, the water table that supports 40 million people in the southwest on the Colorado River, is complex. The uranium industry says this is the richest cores of uranium in the United States, and they're doing everything legally. However, many people around it are concerned, particularly these people, who have a supai who lived there for centuries, say they're living on the front lines of a water contamination issue, as well as everyone else that pulls water from the Colorado River downstream. As fall turned in to winter, the storms moved in, the hot temperature swing quickly got cold, and this furnace of a landscape quickly turned to a frozen realm, which becomes very complicated. Friends joined me to walk through and with snow it became very complex, one misstep and you could easily go 3,000 feet. At the same time, I would say that this snow brought this new layered cake beauty to the place that I reveled in and loved, and it just showed the diversity and change of this landscape as it moves through the seasons. As winter melted into the spring, we walked through a doorway into what's called the God'scape, Western Grand Canyon, where the puzzles of rock and water get more complicated or hard to find, but it is also more silent and beautiful. We also came to the final development area on the Grand Canyon in the Far West Pocket, a place called Helicopter Alley, which many tourists now come and enjoy and they get to see the Grand Canyon and they get to check their bucket list. But this did not exist two decades ago and it has now become the busiest helicopter landing spot in the world. I walked through here to try to understand it and I did a photographic merge. I spent a day documenting what one day of traffic looks like in this landscape and how it's affecting it. To my amazement, it was more than I anticipated. This is 363 flights that I merged together over an eight-hour period and this was an idle average Tuesday in July. Helicopters now fly year-round up to 400 flights a day and it represents that tug-of-war between access and conservation and how do we find a balance? And as you walk through the final stretches of the canyon, many say don't go there, there's too noisy. But to my amazement, the slot canyons were more beautiful and deeper. The ramparts that we walked up to climbing up ancient 900,000-year-old ancient Puebloan roots were even larger and every bit of it in the far west from sunrise to sunset echoed with the sounds of turbine engines. You could hear the helicopter sound from 7am to 7pm every day we moved through this landscape. And finally, on a Wednesday in November, my friend Kevin and I stepped across the northwest corner of Grand Canyon National Park. A border so remote that it is delineated and marked only by three metal steaks jammed in the ground. This represented roughly 750 miles of hiking for us. Spread over eight trips over the course of 13 months. Eight pairs of shoes, four sprained ankles, two broken fingers, two girlfriends, the list goes on and on. However, the project was about looking at this place. What are the numbers of this landscape that we lived inside and had this immersion in? It has actually some of the greatest biodiversity of all the national parks in the United States. The range of biodiversity stretches from the equivalent of the Mexican border to the Canadian border. 1700 species, 91 mammals, 40 amphibians. It is truly remarkable. The late author Edward Abbey once wrote, you have to crawl on hands and knees through the sage bush and the sandstone and the cactus and start to mark your trail. Then you will see something. Maybe. So what did we see? This was an immersion to shine a light on this place and try to understand and learn how lucky we are to have this. And after doing it, reflecting on it, I come away with three lessons, three gifts as I'd say. The first is that we often think of the Grand Canyon whether you've been there or not as a place we defined visually. We think of it through color or we think of it through texture. But having spent that much time inside the place, I'm haunted by this concept to some degree because the one defining element that I cannot forget is that I define this place now with auditory. It's the silence. The blanket of deep silence that hangs over this landscape is like something I've never experienced. And it's not a silence void of noise. It's just a silence rich with natural sounds and not mechanical sounds. It's the flutter of bat wings in the morning or the distant bleat of sheep across the canyon wall. Those little things that you've forgotten to hear. It was so quiet at times too that my microphones and my cameras and my video cameras actually didn't work because they're calibrated to a noisier silence. And you quickly realize when you spend time in that deep, deep, dense silence, how fragile it is and how quickly it can be broken with the machines we bring into the place. The second lesson has happened every day about this time. As we would finish our day no matter how hard it was, no matter how tired we were, that emerald light would fade and you would hear below you the distant roar of the great American Nile, the Colorado River that sculpted this landscape, humming below you. And then as the light would descend in a nightfall and you get ready to go to sleep under the stars, you would realize that there's really two rivers. There's the river that carved and sculpted this place below you and there's a second river, the river of stars that sweeps over you every single night. It became so bright and so luminous that I could not stop focusing on it. I would get up and photograph every single night. And you realize how bright the stars are because if you use the help of NASA and you step up, you see the sweep of light pollution that's moving across the United States, frankly the entire planet. If you look on the left side, you can see the only canyon visible from outer space, the Grand Canyon. And when you're inside that landscape you realize how magical this night sky is. Lesson or gift is that when we look out in this place it is empty, vast. But you quickly realize how full of life it is with the biodiversity but you also realize how full it is of archaeology. Wherever we went there are tools of the people that came for us, the ancient Puebloans that called this place home. And in certain areas you can see where they stored their food on the right side of this image called granaries where they would conceal food for a year. And in secret spots you would find where they left their mark. Some of it 4,000 years old some argue that this could be as old as 10,000 years. And we often ask where did these people go? What happened to them? But you quickly realize they haven't gone anywhere. They're still with us today and they surround Grand Canyon National Park. There are 11 Native American tribes that still call this home and live up in the rim area. And they are, frankly, on development issues and challenges on the precipice of how to move forward, how to find economic stability in this place and how to preserve it. Which leaves us to ask the question of how do we see this landscape? Whether you're an American or you're not, this really is it's not a national park it is a world park. It is the seventh natural wonder of the world. So do we see it as a bucket list to check off for amusement or do we see this place as sacred or sanct? It is really a living classroom of not just geology but biodiversity, archaeology that's soaked in silence and shrouded in starlight that offers perhaps the greatest lesson of all and that is of humility. And as we, as Americans, pass this forward to the next generation we all have to keep that in mind because I can tell you we already have over 400 amusement parks that dot the American landscape and we only have one place that looks like this. Thank you very much. Thank you Peter. That was that was humbling. Next I'd like to introduce Andrea. So I put the question to Andrea. Pretend I'm a child and how do you describe your job and she said I am a teacher. It's pretty simple. Andrea, the stage is yours. Thank you. Good afternoon everyone. It's an absolute pleasure to be here today. So yes, I am a teacher and I'm currently a teacher in the school in the UK in Brent London and that's me with my kids and do not adjust your sets but I am a teacher of the arts. However, in March just gone last year I was blessed I was fortunate enough to be nominated for this award called the Varky Foundation Global Teacher Prize and I was amongst the 10 finalists there and I won and I won out of 30,000 applications from about 150 different countries and I won and I'm still pinching myself to find out why was that the case and I'm still in a fantastic great of discovery but I think and I'm hoping that it's because the role of the teacher for me never ever ends when the lesson is over the role of the teacher is something that continues and continues. So let me tell you a little bit about my day my life and what happens to me so these are my students and this is my art room I teach secondary education in the UK so that's ages from 11 to 18 and I love my job how many people can say that I love my job because I get the pleasure and the privilege of inspiring young minds I teach them art and I teach them textiles and these are subjects which they actually rush to go to in my school why? because it's where they get the opportunity to be themselves the opportunity to be able to break from the norm the opportunity to make mistakes the opportunity to be resilient the opportunity to be okay with a word that didn't work out but that's okay let me try again being resilient and my children do experience a lot of resilience in their daily lives so as you can see my particular school we have is a very multicultural school we have approximately 90 languages spoken in our school and it's in the inner city of London and with the inner city schools there is lots of social problems as you can imagine so many of my students are carers many of my students don't come from a single parent family many of my students lived in multiple occupancy houses which maybe are not that legal and they struggle and they are exposed to gangs and they get their streets outside their homes they are approached yet they get themselves to school and that's why it is a privilege to teach them because our children have got so much resilience they know they want to do the right thing and they know that being in school is a safe place for them and that's why we must make sure that we protect our students and protect our schools it's got to be their beacon and it's got to be the place where we make sure it's possible for them and I try and create that in my art room there comes times in every teacher's lives whereby you have those moments and I call them the wow moments the moments where something happens a child does a piece of work and that just blows you away and that happens because you know their journey now on the screen there in front of me you've got two pieces of artwork from two different students there and I'd like to ask a question to the audience in the room from those students which one of those do you think has special educational needs so do you think it's a student whose work is on that side of the room or the student on this side so if I was to ask you like a teacher would do put your hands up so if you'd like to put your hands up if you think the student is on that side of the room the student who has special educational needs put your hands excellent thank you very much how about on the other side oh wow fantastic great and that was a majority of you for this student well actually they both have and this is the one crucial message that I'd like to tell you about the arts the arts are the most inclusive subjects they don't discriminate they do not care if you speak they do not care if you can write they do not care if you are able to be fluent in maths in algebra that's not the problem but what it helps them to do is to communicate and from the artwork I have learnt so much about human being and what is possible and what they can achieve so for this particular students here and I'll take you through this work here so this is one of my boys here he came to the school and he was 14 years old so he had two more years left from secondary education he came from a special needs school and this student he was mute he did not speak and he was not able to communicate and he was almost like a ghost when he came to the school we offered him a very bespoke programme and art was a subject which he said yeah I'd like to do on the first lesson he was invited into the art room and he produced a piece of work and then he quickly packed away and he left on the second lesson he came back into the room again and as I was walking around the lessons seeing what they were doing I could see underneath his table underneath where he had his bag there was a piece of work hanging out and obviously it was his own work and I knew he put that on purpose and he was able to see it so I quickly went out to him and I said may I have a look at this and as I pulled it out it was the most amazing drawing I've ever seen it was a drawing of a guitar a bass guitar so it's quite clear that this student had a passion for music and the tone was beautiful the tone was accurate and at that moment my face was like oh my god who drew this and the first time I heard this child speak it's me I did it and I was like tell me and he goes you know I was like no tell me I want to know very slowly we built up his vocabulary I was interested and this guy had talent he had extraordinary talent and the work that we got on the screen here is a work of his final piece for his GCSE exam now he undertook his GCSE exam and he got one GCSE and that was from his art subject and when he came out from that exam hall and when he opened up his envelope to see his results I mean his face was just blown away because it meant that with his grade he could then study A level art and he's currently doing his A level art now and I've got absolutely no no hesitation that he will be a success that he will not only get into a university and do gaming design which is what he wants to do but the possibility that he has now got the confidence he can decide what the future is going to be and that's through the power of being in an art room and being allowed to have the opportunity and the time to succeed within our lessons also as you can imagine now we have loads of students and our world is exposed to social media and our children don't know how to cope with this they're very vulnerable and this piece of artwork here is from a girl who was really affected by who do I have to be what's my identity do I have to look like this who do I need to connect with and as you can see that piece of work there is almost like her communication to us to say help me I am not right learn behold or she was unfortunate experiencing self-harm so again it's the way that we are abling on communicating to our students are we listening to what they're saying and this piece of work blew me away so this piece of work is a very recent piece of work and it's from a student who was taking her GCSE exam and a very quiet girl she's a refugee who came to our school two years ago and she loves a very happy to be part of the art environment and this was a piece of work that she did and the project was called again identity and you can see so much from that piece of work I mean you can see the dove in the top corner there and you can see there's a bubble speech mark there that was left blank now this girl her journey to from her country to the UK was horrendous horrific and it still gives me goosebumps to find out exactly what it was that she had to undertake and you wouldn't want anyone let alone any child to undertake that but thankfully she's here with us now and I was waiting I remember waiting just watching what she was doing her work and I was thinking she's got three hours left that's fine most of it's done but she still hasn't done that bubble there so I've come back and I'll be going so she still hasn't she's not done it and then right at the end the time up was for the exam and I was like oh what's going on she goes miss what's wrong I was like what were you going to say what were you going to say in that bubble mark that speech mark right audience what do you think this child wanted to say yes she wanted to express that she had the right to say excellent thank you peace at home peace at world anything else when I asked her what do you want to say in there she turned around and she says but miss who will listen to me who will listen to my voice that's our job now especially where we are in this week we can really help these children so um with my award that I received in March I was given a million dollars I know wow yeah I was given a million dollars as you do you know give a teacher a million dollars extraordinary the Varky foundation there's a Sonny Varky he decided that you know to raise a profile of teachers and I am if you know me you will know that I will almost burn your ears of talking about creativity and the arts in education how important they are so I decided to put my money where my mouth was and to set up a foundation a charity called Artist in Residence because I have got this huge belief that children need to see role models they can't see where the future lies because they can't have they don't see what the jobs and opportunities are so with Artist in Residence I've decided to invite artists to give back by coming into schools having the opportunity to talk about their art to children to inspire children to have a chance to promote what they are saying with a hope with a fingers crossed hope that maybe they would like to undertake a career in the professions of arts because I do feel that now I mean we know with the WEF report that says in fact the future jobs that creativity is one of the top traits that students need and if we don't make sure that the arts are in our schools what chance will our students have so I'm just going to quickly fly through these ones so what's happening is that we've got some really prestigious artists who are now going into schools and they are changing minds they're inspiring our children and our children are saying hang on you mean you do a job that's your job and wow that's amazing and this is brilliant this is the kind of conversations that we need to be having our children need to see their potential where they need to be aiming for and by having professionals coming to the schools not just artists but any professionals you can and will be inspiring them so please please if you have an opportunity to go into the schools please do that and it's fantastic it's making a huge difference and not only that the artists are feeling yes this is just what I needed to inspire and we also it's not just artists I have it's also thespians as well so we have the wonderful Michael Attenborough who is one of the artists who is going in to teach Shakespeare into schools in very deprived communities and the kids are loving it they're absolutely thriving so I hope I'll convince you about the powers of the arts but now that's something else that I'm really keen to really step my foot and shake and say what's going on world and that's what are we doing about our teachers what's happening to our teachers I saw this magazine The Times magazine which published this extraordinary article and this is happening everywhere in the world whereby teachers who have got MAs who are extremely qualified and professional are having to earn or having to work two jobs in order for them to make ends meet and this particular colleague is having to donate blood just because to pay her rent and so I went to the states and I went into a school in New York and I asked the teacher I saw this report and I said is this for real does this happen do you have two jobs so we went into the staff room she opened up her locker and she goes what's that and it was a uniform and she goes when I finish teaching here at five o'clock I go to this hotel and I'm a valet and these are professionals who are responsible for educating our children and this is not the only country this is happening in many countries so if we are not looking after our teachers what kind of a future are our children going to have and I think we're forgetting that actually if you want to see the world please visit a school if you want to see what your country is going to be like go into a classroom there it is in front of you and these are the people who we need to make sure we are protecting teachers and our young minds and to finish off I'm going to leave you with this piece of work now you know I tell you that I have wow moments I have 80% I'm ripping my hair out moments when I'm in school but I have 20% wow moments and this is one of my wow moments so two years ago we had this wonderful student who joined us she came from India and she arrived now the region she was in India she never attended school and she was 11 years old so the first time she came to our school she had just started in the secondary education so she came in she was very shy very timid obviously not fluent had no English language whatsoever she came into the school but she used to seem to enjoy art lessons so she came into the art room and what I did was I set the class a piece of homework and I said please can you draw a figure that would inspire you I don't say or you know Lewis Hamilton who is your inspirational figure because we're just doing a project on portraiture portraiture just them and after the end of this classroom I asked the student to come near to me and I just said look I'd like you to as you know it's broken English I could I'd like you to translate I'd like you to try and draw a picture of your mum your dad or you and I gave her some piece of paper which I've literally just pulled out because I didn't have anything to hand and I gave her a packet of oil parcels and those oil parcels cost about two euros two days later she came back to my class before her lesson and she handed me this piece of work and I was mesmerised she's 12 she's 12 she can't speak English she can't access any of the curriculum at the moment but my god look at this talent my god look what she's trying to translate to us and when you're having a look at this piece of art the first thing I'll say to myself is what is going on in her head look at those eyes aren't they haunting what has this child seen what is the message and I'm happy to say that because of this celebration of this work which I've obviously gone and told the whole world in my school community look what she's done she now walks around the school with pride actually she skips, she's a skipper she skips down the corridors as you can imagine a 12-year-old do she comes in and she goes hello miss thank you miss, goodbye miss three words she helps to set up the classroom but the most important thing is that she feels that she's part of the community and she can and she will and she my friends definitely will she will succeed the power of the arts has helped to unlock her potential has helped us to communicate who she is and I just want to leave that as my final image and my last message to you all thank you very much thank you Andrea okay so that was very inspiring fighting back the tears now for our last panellist this lady Caroline I said to her I'm a simple man tell me in simple words what do you do for a job she said I dream with my eyes open with that said Caroline would you like to come up here and sit here and talk about your heart and your mind I'm not going to sit I'm not somebody who does what they're told good but it's strange to have you with my backs to you thank you both the wings of transformation are born through patience and struggle I want to tell you a story that I heard on Sunday that captures what I want to talk about today there was a man who was documenting how a caterpillar goes from the cocoon to a butterfly and during the day he was fascinated at the process of when the caterpillar emerges from the chrysalis and there was one particular caterpillar that he was fascinated by and he thought it was struggling so he got his tiny knife and slitted the cocoon to help the butterfly so the butterfly emerges but it very quickly collapses and it dies and the realisation about this is that actually because this little caterpillar hadn't pushed against the cocoon it had not built up the strength to survive to have the life force because he had made it easy she hadn't found her wings and so I think it's a great message is that we need to be gentle with our struggles and when we talk about resilience and what a powerful force and part of our lives they are so for all of those of us right now who are going through the pushing against the cocoon whether because we've lost somebody because our heart is broken because we are struggling with illness because we just simply do not think we're good enough because the nose are coming more than the asses my invitation to you is keep trucking it's an Irish expression or my family expression which is simply keep going because it's for those struggles that I stand here on this stage in this most important week of my life for 20 years my soul has had a purpose that has burnt through every single disappointment and success but disappointment to lead me to this place and there is no way I would have had the courage the strength and the absolute fire in the belly to see this through if it were not for that my gorgeous father Jerry Casey he passed away two years ago and he was the man who had basically told me be yourself be yourself it was through his death because he had told me that again days before he died that I found the courage to fulfil this wide open dream that I've held for so many years to launch a global campaign for disability business inclusion over the years of a career that has expanded 17 years I was like well who am I to do that I'm 47 years old why would I somebody else somebody younger somebody better what will they think about me but in his death I realised the only way that I was going to fail is if I didn't begin and I didn't want to die regretting that I didn't try so in that grief I found a way I don't know why and I don't know how to this day and in 2017 in August of 2017 I launched that campaign hashtag valuable and why did I do it well because we've talked about for years the inconvenient truth that Al Gore talked about here when I was here as my first Davos years and years ago well let me just tell you the uncomfortable truth the uncomfortable truth is that inclusion is not for everyone there is a disability inequality crisis out in the world where you're 50% more likely to experience poverty you're 50% less likely to get a job collectively this group of people is the most marginalised and discriminated group in the world yet there are 1.3 billion people in the world currently today experience disability that's more than vegans I'm telling you seriously 80% of that 1.3 billion acquired in the working lifetime between the ages of 18 and 64 80% of it is invisible okay but the crazy thing is if every one of us had a mum and dad who loved us it affects 53% of our global population and every human on this planet had such disability at some point in their life and why is it still on the sidelines well my passionate belief is the only way that we can eradicate this inequality crisis is to work with the most powerful force on this planet it has been my belief for nearly two decades if business was to see the value of people with disabilities and their families then society would too inclusive business would create inclusive societies charity is not going to fix this alone governments cannot business can and yet a further uncomfortable truth it remains on the sidelines of business why why when this is 20% of our global market one in seven of us because we still haven't understood the extraordinary value and the talent that exists and everything out there that is waiting to release the social economic and business potential of 1.3 billion people the other uncomfortable truth is actually the inclusion agenda in the world of business is diverse weird but we are competing in the inclusion agendas disability against LGBTQ against gender against race it's crazy we don't need pick and mix mix inclusion we don't have to have a la carte inclusion it is the human experience and this has been the driving force of my heart to say if we could see business represent society in their corporate cultures then we could eradicate exclusion couldn't we because the question is why and the most powerful force in business is business leaders look what happened when Cheryl Sandberg lent in a leader of influence brand of Facebook and platforms so through valuable we wanted to find the most important leaders and brands and platforms to position disability equally on the global business leadership agenda and that's important it's important statistically it's important for all of us because if we all belong the world is better right it's not one or the other but it is also so personal to me why well I was born in 1971 and I was born with a very rare condition called ocular albinism I am and was born at the level being registered legally blind and for those of you who don't have a clue what that means because I certainly didn't it means after my hands it's blur I'm very well known for saying it you all get to look like George Clooney particularly this man down here you get to be the best looking of all extraordinary thing for me is I often think if we took everybody glasses who wore glasses off we'd have how many billions of people disabled in the world so my parents when I was born and they knew about this condition made one of the most bonkers decisions in the world they chose not to tell me they chose to bring me up as a sighted child they believed that if they gave me a label it would limit me because we're so many of our labels they didn't want my wings clipped with the definition of what is normal and able and so I went through all of my school life thinking I could see just like any the rest of you until I was 17 years old and I went to get my motorbike licence I'm obsessed with motorbikes and cars and my father was the one to give me a driving lesson how crazy is that I had other dreams at the time I wanted to be Mowgli from the Jungle Book and I also wanted to be a cowgirl if I had been brave enough maybe or not I would have had a whole slideshow for you but I need to be myself I couldn't see that slideshow and I need to belong as who I am and not fit in I hope that my words will paint the pictures that these two so eloquently had because I see differently to you but at 17 years old I would not have been able to admit that I decided to do my first conscious act and I hope only one of discrimination I rejected that I had a disability I discriminated against my tribe of 1.3 billion and I hid it for fear that I would not have the dreams that I wanted to have come true and I went through 11 years of my life I was an archaeologist by the way crazy for somebody visually impaired and in the closet and then went to business school which is extraordinary that they didn't pick up I couldn't see and it was only when I was with them two and a half years I eventually found the courage to come out of the closet and own who I am fully because I was so desperately tired trying to be perfect and in doing that moment I fulfilled that first dream to become Mowgli from the Jungle Book and from management consultant to Mowgli from the Jungle Book I did it by going across India on the back of an elephant and it triggered these two decades of reframing disability not just for society but for business for the last nearly two decades I have fought to do what I wanted to get business to see that value and worth we have had extraordinary success and extraordinary failures it has been up and down every shape that you go on but this burning desire to create a world where everyone belongs has just pushed me forward more than anything I've ever known through marriage break ups I stand here firm because this is not a conversation about disability it is about humanity every single one of us has the right to belong and no human being should ever be defined by one tiny part of them because we all have difference so when I launched hashtag valuable in August 2017 I thought it was big to make the decision I didn't think for one moment that anybody would say no to my crazy idea no 53 companies in the world said no and I didn't know what to do and so I decided to fulfil the second ambition which was to be a cowgirl I rode across Colombia to the stage of one young world on a horse I'm not a horsewoman a thousand kilometres in five weeks and we got the voice of 810 million people to say I wasn't crazy on the stage of one young world in October 2019 the very first global business leader stood on the stage and his name was Paul Poman of Unilever I had wanted to meet him for years now I had to ride a horse for it but we got him and after he called me and he said how are you going to make this ambition come true he said go out and find the leaders go out and find the brands I have no money I'm exhausted we had remorgaged our house my grief was still pulsing through my veins and he said you must finish what you have begun so I stand here this week we did get the leaders Paul Poman of Unilever Mark Weinberg of EY Janet Riccio of Omnicom and Richard Branson we did get the brands we did get the media to back us 24 hours before my board shut me down I had a promise of financial support just to keep going and then Paul Poman and the World Economic Forum opened up the conversation about disability inclusion and they've done it before Weth but this time they gave it socks it is everywhere because if disability is included we all get to benefit it is a transformative moment for change and for inclusion on Thursday we will have a press conference at 345 to announce the valuable 500 in 365 days we ask 500 CEOs to put disability on their board agenda and make one commitment it will be the tipping point for change and that will be followed at 530 on the main stage in the World Economic Forum five of the biggest companies and their leaders for the very first time in history will talk about disability I have never been so scared and excited I am now ready to retire this is what my heart wanted it's time for me now to step back and let the tribe go forward and these are the resilience lessons that I have learnt I have learnt in looking at Pete's beautiful beautiful pictures I can hardly see them tears rolling down my eyes it reminds me that cliches do work the darkest hour is genuinely before dawn I have nearly given up more than you could even imagine and here we are right now I have learnt that change you can't give it a deadline there's no such thing as it and you know what as I stand back and look at it it all makes sense to hear so for those of you who are struggling with it let it go let the deadline go I have learnt more than anything nothing to find you no success, no falling in love no great moment, no stage opportunity no award, no death will ever define who you are you get to get up every day and start again I have learnt that your vision the vision of what you want will keep you alive and yet you don't need eyes to see will get you through the darkest bits I have learnt that dreams are the power that have kept me going and keeping my eyes open to see where they happen and I have learnt that magic does exist it's just you have got to choose to believe it because if I could share the serendipity moments that have broken open my heart a thousand times my life is like like fairy lights you put on a Christmas tree that every single light is a moment of magic which was preceded by pain but that's where the growth came Leonard Cohen says it's the light where the cracks get in oh my god it is and the string that keeps those fairy lights together is resilience it is our life force so I started with this quote very simply the wings of transformation