Photograph by Barbara Kinney/Clinton Global Initiative
Since leaving office, Bill Clinton has become a sort of worldwide problem solver. Through his foundation, he’s started a series of programs, each with its own official title, aimed at fighting AIDS, obesity, and climate change; growing economies in Africa and Latin America; supporting small businesses here in the U.S.; and rebuilding Haiti. He’s even helped the Cardinals. When persistent delays in the development of Ballpark Village left the Cardinals Hall of Fame Museum without a home, Clinton put 100 pieces of team memorabilia on display at his presidential library in Arkansas.
Perhaps his most successful post-presidential effort has been the Clinton Global Initiative, an annual meeting of heads of state, CEOs, and philanthropists to discuss common challenges. It’s not just talk: Attendees make specific action plans and then reach into their wallets—they pledged roughly $2 billion last year. And since 2008, CGI has gone to school, with the annual Clinton Global Initiative University. Students apply by proposing a “commitment to action.” Those lucky enough to be selected come together to refine their ideas, rub elbows with world leaders and celebrities, and compete for more than $400,000 in seed money. This year’s CGI U meeting will be held at Washington University from April 5 to 7, bringing in roughly 1,200 of the world’s most promising college students, plus Jack Dorsey, Stephen Colbert, and of course, Clinton himself.
I was sorry to see that you didn’t win the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.
Well, I have two. That’s enough. Somebody else can do it. I was thrilled Janis Ian got it, actually. I’m a huge fan of hers.
What did you hope to accomplish when you started CGI U, and now that you’ve been doing it for five years, how has it lived up to expectations?
Well, university students have a lot of really good ideas and not very much money. So there were going to be very few come to CGI… I wanted to do something just for them that would involve students from all over America and all over the world. A few years ago, when we were at the University of Texas at Austin, we had a Burmese student there, who was in college in London, read about CGI U, applied online, got accepted, and somehow got himself there. I said, “What are you doing here? Why did you do this?” He said, “My country will not be controlled forever, and we need civil society.” I thought it would be inspirational to the students. I thought we could get good ideas out of it to solve larger problems. And I thought that it would help to build a service ethic among young people and inspire them to do it. That’s what I hope. I think after five years, we’re doing pretty well with it.
What’s the most important aspect of CGI U? I was struck by the diversity of the students, and also how practical their commitments are.
Well, I think it’s the way the diversity of students who are there discuss these things, and make and then modify their own commitments. That’s the most important thing. They learn creative collaboration, which I think is the decision-making model that will shape success in the 21st century. We live in a country where our politics seems to be dominated by constant conflict. But if you look at the places that are doing well or coming back from the brink of the financial collapse, by and large, there is a whole lot of collaboration across different sectors of society and different political parties. For example, in Chicago, where we have a CGI devoted to the American economy every year, they developed the country’s first urban infrastructure bank. They said, “Well, they’re not going to do it in Washington; we’ll do it here.” You had all these public employee unions and Republican bankers and business people, and everybody just got together and decided how to do it, in a way that would maximize the long-term economic benefit to Chicago and the short-term job creation. During this period, they have done a lot of other things that have led the city to be, in terms of its population base, I think the biggest job creator of any big city in America.
Are there commitments from past CGI U meetings that stand out? At last year’s closing session, you told Jon Stewart about Kyle McCollom, a St. Louis native who founded Triple Thread Apparel, which gives job training to former criminal offenders.
Yeah, I love that. I think there are too many people in jail, and they are too poorly prepared when they get out to make any kind of a living anywhere. It’s a small thing. All of these university projects are smaller than the people who commit millions at CGI. But this project has created more than 30,000 shirts. They’ve raised $65,000 in capital. And what they have done could be done all over the country. They’ve been featured on ESPN, on local news. What a lot of these young people do is something that they can’t take to scale, but if people were paying attention, could be done everywhere. I think that’s really important.
What commitments are you excited about this year?
There is a new commitment that will be made this time by students at Washington University to end a food desert in Columbus Square by providing fresh fruits and vegetables. A food desert is basically a place where people have no grocery stores and a lot of fast food. They have the highest heart disease mortality and the second highest diabetes mortality rate of any neighborhood in St. Louis. Almost 100 percent of the kids receive free or reduced-price lunches. So they have worked out a system, Mallika Tamboli and Chris Halline are the students’ names, to increase access to healthy fruits and vegetables. It’s the beginning of something that’s really good. They are going to create a student-maintained farmers market that will provide this produce at a low price and yet will be sustainable. So it’ll earn enough money to keep going year in and year out. This is the sort of thing, again, that could be done almost anywhere. But if you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, if you can just get on the Internet and find out what they did and then figure out how to adapt it to conditions in any other neighborhood, I think it has real potential. My foundation’s Alliance for a Healthier Generation, which works to reduce childhood obesity, has worked with Michelle Obama’s effort, and she talks a lot about these food deserts. So we are going to serve up a model that we think would involve people of all ages and would be sustainable, and I hope a lot of other people will copy it.
What else are you looking forward to?
The “Up to Us” competition, sponsored by Net Impact and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, to give a $10,000 cash prize to the team that comes up with the best plans to deal with America’s financial challenges. They’re going to offer plans to how they would reduce the deficit, how they would bring the debt down. I’m going to be really interested to see what choices they make. We got a pretty good panel of judges that includes Erskine Bowles, who was my chief of staff and co-chair of the Simpson-Bowles Commission. Simpson is going to be on it. George Stephanopoulos is going to be on it.
Plus, you have some fun, too.
It won’t all be business. Stephen Colbert is going to host the closing. He’ll probably find a way to be funny and enlightening, too.
Who else is going to be there? I’ve heard Jack Dorsey’s name.
Jack Dorsey is a good St. Louis boy, isn’t he? Salman Khan, the founder and director of the Khan Academy, is coming. It’s online courses, 20 minutes in length. There’s thousands of them online now in all disciplines. Salman Khan is a Pakastani American who started trying to help his niece with math online. He realized that he had fallen into a discipline of sending her discrete lessons that could be read and processed in 15 to 20 minutes, and that this model might become larger. Now, it’s this massive online educational service that millions and millions of people have utilized all over the world. Then there is a woman named Sally Madsen who is a design lead at Ideo, which designs a lot of our online work. The senior advisor for innovation at the State Department, Alec Ross, is going to be there. He worked with Hillary and now has stayed on with Secretary [John] Kerry. Brendan Tuohey, who founded and runs a thing called PeacePlayers International, which gets young people in conflict areas together through sports, will be there. Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank and probably the world’s most distinguished micro-lender, will be there. Jada Pinkett Smith, the actress who is married to Will Smith and has been a real advocate against sex trafficking for young girls, is going to be there. So we’ll have a wide variety of people. They’ll have a lot to say and do. My daughter has gotten increasingly active in our foundation, and Chelsea will be there helping us operate this.
And every year you end the conference with a service project. We started our first year with Tulane University in New Orleans, and we cleaned an area of the old Ninth Ward, which then became a national showcase for sustainable building. Brad Pitt and an architect named Bill McDonough had an international competition for building affordable hurricane- and flood-resistant housing that also was lower cost to operate. They built, I don’t know, almost 300 houses on this plot we committed. Ever since then, wherever we are, we do a service project. We’ve done one in San Diego and Austin and Miami and George Washington University. And we’ll do one in St. Louis at the Gateway STEM High School. That will also highlight the need for more kids to go into the STEM courses. We had, at the Clinton Global Initiative, when the president said we needed 100,000 more STEM teachers, we put together about 2,000 partners with a goal of providing 20,000 of those teachers. Now we are on track to do about 27,000, I think. We beat our goal.
With so many Washington University students participating in this year’s event, their commitments will have an impact on the community beyond the meeting.
Well, I hope so. Since Washington University and other schools in the St. Louis area have a strong service ethic, I hope that a lot of the commitments that are made by young people all over the country will be sifted, and maybe some of them will be adapted there, too. I think just the publicity will lead more young people to volunteer in existing programs and to get involved and to come up with their own ideas. That’s the whole idea: It should have a radiator effect. Then when all these students go back home, they normally get articles in the local press, articles in their university newspapers. They do interviews. They tweet online. They post online articles when they get home. So the collective impact of this has been far greater than just the people who come. Normally, it’s been greatest in the communities where we’ve met.
With 1,200 top students from all over the globe coming, maybe some of their enthusiasm will rub off on us.
I hope St. Louis enjoys it, because it’s really just all these bright young people coming together and talking together and saying, “What are we going to do?” Maybe I’m super attuned to this, because I used to be president and then I wasn’t anymore, but I realized, it’s not the power you don’t have; it’s the power you do. It’s what you can do. One of the things that the social media specifically and the Internet in general has done is to basically devolve enormous potential down to individuals, if they can figure out a way to make common cause. You saw the young people demonstrating in Tahrir Square, the Internet connections they made with people who had successful efforts elsewhere. A billion dollars was given to Haiti after the earthquake. It was the first text disaster, where people could dial Haiti in a certain number and $10 would automatically be transferred to the Red Cross or to the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund… These young people realize that, yes, their financial resources may be limited, but if their energy is great and their intensity is there, they can really make a difference.
You’ve been to St. Louis quite a few times. You debated here in ’92. Not to be too provincial, but are you a fan of our city?
Oh, God yeah. I really wanted to go to St. Louis when Wash. U. asked to be considered for CGI U. It’s a heartland city that I think has really consistently worked to deal with a lot of very profound challenges, and keep modernizing itself and reaching out. I first came to St. Louis when I was in elementary school on a train with my dad to watch the Cardinals play baseball. I’m an old guy, you know, I can still remember when Harry Caray was the baseball announcer for the Cardinals, before he moved to Chicago and worked for the Cubs. So I’ve been coming there all my life. We did have that great debate there. Then I came back as president a time or two. I just really, really like the city. The pope was there, remember? I think the pope was there my second term, and I brought a priest who didn’t have long to live to see him.
So can we claim you as a St. Louis sports fan?
I’m still a Cardinals baseball fan… We had an exhibit of all that Cardinal memorabilia at my library recently. It was a big hit.
Influencing all of these young people through CGI U, will that be your lasting legacy?
Well, the whole CGI movement. You know we’re going to have one in Latin America this year. We had one in Asia a couple of years ago. We do the ones for the American economy and the university students. And then we have the main meeting at the opening of the event every year. What I tried to do when I was president was to empower people to live their own lives, to live their own dreams, to make the most of their lives. What I have tried to do since is to use my foundation proper to figure out how to solve problems faster, better, at lower cost. But beyond that, just to try to give people the means to work together. There are a lot of studies over a 20-year period that show that if you put 20 people who are well-motivated, of average and above average intelligence in one room, and you put a genius with a 200 IQ in another room, and you keep feeding in problems to both rooms, over time the group will make better decisions than the genius. I think that this whole idea of constructive collaboration is really the key to whether we can meet any of the challenges we face today and the ones we’ll face after I’m long gone. We live in an interdependent world, and it’s the only real model that works. The latest example of it is a book that was published last year called The Social Conquest of Earth by E.O. Wilson, who’s 87 years old now, Nobel Prize–winning biologist, who won two prizes for his studies of ants. He basically says the world belongs to the cooperators, the ants, the termites, the bees, and the people. The people have a conscience and a consciousness, and they can do more. Basically, what led us to survive through a couple hundred thousand years of existence has been the ability to cooperate to avoid destruction and to make good things happen. I still think that’s the case. I’ve spent most of the last 12 years trying to create constructive cooperation.
At CGI U, you’ve got local projects taking on global problems. Which is more important, home or Haiti? Or is that a false dichotomy?
Well, it is interconnected, but I think that everybody should take care of home first. If you’re relatively better off, then you should do more. But we are interconnected. For example, after Hurricane Sandy in New York, we had a group of Haitians who were also hit hard by Sandy, come up and work on Staten Island, trying to help people fix their homes. It’s a remarkable commentary. They said, “You guys were there for us; we wanted to be there for you.” That’s amazing. And it’s the poorest country in our hemisphere—70 percent of the people live on less than $2 a day. They came anyway. It sort of comes back to you. But no, I think everybody should first look at their neighbors, their families, their communities. But I don’t think you should be under the illusion we can put walls around them. I think that the further we reach out, the more we’re likely to learn. Then we bring that learning back to everything we do where we live.
Is the same true of CGI U’s focus areas: education, energy and climate change, peace and human rights, poverty alleviation, and public health? Are they all linked?
Absolutely. If you look at climate change for example. If that dislocates large numbers of people, it’s going to aggravate income inequality. If the oceans become more acidic, as they are, and the fish docks dry up, that’s going to affect malnutrition among kids. A billion people have fish as their main source of protein. I could give you just lots of other examples. If you don’t have a good maternal and child health system and you don’t get kids to age 5 in good shape, their brains won’t properly develop, and the education that you do try to provide won’t be as effective. In a very, very poor country, every year of schooling adds 10 percent annually to income potential for life. So all these things are related one to the other.
I listen to NPR in the car, and sometimes, between the wars and the deficit and the crime, I get to work and think, “We’re hosed.” Does interacting with the students at CGI U help inspire you to keep going?
Absolutely. I never try to take out the bad news, but I find it’s more productive to say, “OK, the news is bad. What are we going to do about it?” If you spend all your time concentrating on things you can’t control, you don’t spend enough time concentrating on what you can.
