After five amazing days, the World Economic Forum annual meeting is coming to an end, almost as quickly as it began. It's been a tremendous week -- full of fascinating sessions, provocative conversations with brilliant people and, of course, some good fun in between.
As I mentioned in my earlier blog, this is my 7th year attending Davos. It's hard to believe I've been here that many times. One of the interesting quirks about hotels in Davos is that they keep a record of the room you stayed in previously. I've stayed in the same room each year I've come to Davos. So, as I pack to leave, I feel like this room -- and Davos -- are a sort of bizarre home I come to once a year. The room, the frenetic schedule, the changing from snow boots to indoor shoes, the conference center's tiny lunch plates with tiny portions, the shuttle buses, the gorgeous snowy mountains calling you to come ski instead of sitting and meeting and the snowy main street -- it's all the same, yet a lot has changed over these seven years.
How the WEF and Davos have embraced the girl effect has changed and evolved over this time as well. We've gone from being a private event at 8 AM on a Sunday morning at a hotel miles from the main street, with no shuttle service (but a surprise sell out crowd), to a plenary during the main week, to a jam-packed workshop on the girl effect and countless sessions where the girl effect was raised and discussed.
The first two goals of the Nike Foundation's mission are to (1) get girls on the global agenda and (2) to drive resources to them. It is here, at Davos, that girls' issues first hit the primetime agenda. Now, we are at the key moment to convert goal #1 into delivering on goal #2, and we're on our way.
After an always fun filled Google party (that I just heard lasted until 8 AM!), I got ready for the morning and the last day of meetings. It's an interesting mix of exhaustion and urgency. All that but mostly calm, knowing the work has been done and it is time to look forward again to the year ahead.
I felt that even more firmly during today's last day of meetings. Today started as yesterday ended -- with discussions around the girl effect. We decided yesterday following the workshop that we'd meet as a small group to brainstorm where we go from here. The group included Mallika Sarabhai, an Indian activist and performer, and Kate Roberts, Founder and Director of YouthAIDs and VP of PSI, who were our discussion leaders from the day before. Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity and Dan Shine, President of the 50x15 Foundation also joined us. We came away from our hour-long discussion with four main ideas we need to go after:
1.Getting concrete: We need to be clear about what we want to accomplish for girls at WEF together. We need to identify the specific change we want to see and plot out how we can achieve it.
2.Leverage the moment: We need to create moments throughout the year that set us up to come back to Davos in 2011 and report on our progress.
3.Collaborate: There are lots of us out there doing this work. We need to come together and start identifying the areas for girls that each of us can drive forward based on our areas of expertise.
4.Tap into new networks: Who are our new girl champions?
Much of this was echoed in my next meeting with the WEF team. They have been incredible champions of the work for adolescent girls, and great advisers on how to utilize the WEF platform to move the work forward.
All in all, I'm up to the brim with food for thought, and I'm itching to get back to the west coast with my team so we can start to sort all of this out -- after a little sleep, of course.
Stay tuned.