Giving from the Heart/Mark Goldring
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| Event at the London Guildhall, London, June 1, 2007. Richard Regan, Sheriff of the City of London; Mark Goldring — CEO, Voluntary Services Overseas; Simon Keyes — Director, St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace; Prem Rawat — Keynote Speaker |
[edit] Mark Goldring — CEO, Voluntary Services Overseas
Thanks very much, Richard. Especially, I think you told everyone about VSO, I could tell them about the city.
Thank you for such a warm welcome. And it’s fantastic to be able to speak not only to such an engaged audience, but in such fantastic surroundings. Representing the City of London in terms of some magnificent achievements, but also a real desire and wish to connect right across the world with those who have rather less than we do.
And so, Excellency, Aldermen, Sheriff, lords, ladies and gentlemen, let me pick up why VSO is relevant to the issues that we’re talking about tonight, and let’s start with the shared mission of the range of organizations who are here and involved this evening. Because The Prem Rawat Foundation, St Ethelburga’s, the City of London and VSO actually share a very related mission and some very closely-held values: that belief that we can make the world a fairer place, that we can promote prosperity in its broadest sense, and that the world is interdependent, and our lives depend on others just as much as theirs depend on us, is something which we all hold very dearly.
It’s a shared mission. And that word, “Share” is very important to VSO. The motto, the commitment of VSO and of the Lord Mayor’s appeal is Sharing Skills, Changing Lives. And that’s what we are trying to work on together. How do we do it in the 21st Century? Many of you might first have come across VSO as a very well-intentioned, hardworking (word? 12:45) organization for young people. That’s the way it started. And some of that passion, some of that commitment, we still value. But the world has moved on, and our work has had to move on, too. So now we recruit about 2,000 skilled professionals from around the world from developing countries, and developed, at any time working with thousands more national volunteers and paid staff to share their skills to try and tackle some of the causes of poverty across Africa and Asia.
Now, all these volunteers come from very different professional backgrounds, but they share one thing which is that commitment to sharing—with no financial reward—their skills with others who want to use them. Traditionally, we all associate that with teachers, with health workers, with agriculturalists. But the need today is much more likely to be represented by the broad spectrum of people in this room than by those definitions. The sort of volunteer that we’re recruiting is well-illustrated from our work in Mozambique, towards which the donation from The Prem Rawat Foundation will go tonight.
In Mozambique we’re working particularly on, how do poor people make a living, how do they get an education, and what could we together do to reduce the scourge of AIDS?
Last year, Gordon Brown visited that program. He met a teacher trainer working to train the next generation of primary school teachers, without which, the hopes of universal education are simply a pipe dream – however much money is poured in. But had he gone a little further afield, he’d have seen other VSO volunteers. He would’ve seen an agriculturalist working with people whose families were being affected by HIV to promote vegetable growing, to improve the diet of people who were seeking to access the newly-available anti-retroviral drugs, but which are useless—and even poisonous—unless taken with a good diet. The agriculture, the livelihood, and the treatment have to go hand-in-hand.
Or he could’ve visited a VSO volunteer who is just up the road who’s an accountant, taking his skills from a big city company no more than half a mile from here to use to strengthen the finances of one of the powerful Mozambiquen organizations, which is trying to use the new money which is coming in as effectively as it possibly can to tackle HIV with the government and the voluntary sector across the country.
Those are the sort of roles that VSO volunteers are doing around Africa and Asia today. The volunteers see the benefit to the local communities, but they also see the benefit to themselves, and their employers in the UK—whether in the city or beyond—see the benefit to themselves because they’re getting back employees that really develop their initiative. Their cross-cultural skills, their problem-solving skills. Their ability to work together and actually other leaders of tomorrow.
The financial support that we’ve received today from The Prem Rawat Foundation and that we are receiving from a wide array of sources through the Lord Mayor’s appeal will help us to address one critical constraint. We simply cannot respond to the level of demand that we are receiving. Finding those volunteers is expensive. Training them and supporting them is more expensive. And raising the money for that is a real challenge. So we’re really pleased to have been selected by the Lord Mayor’s appeal as its charity for this year.
John started his working career as a VSO volunteer. As I’m sure did a wide range of people in this room, and an even wider range at the top of government, diplomacy, business, the teaching, the health professions right across our country.
The 30,000 returned VSO volunteers working within the UK are bringing a breadth of vision, commitment and compassion to British society that the whole country is benefiting from in ways which are just as important as the benefits that they’re bringing to Mozambique to Mongolia or to any other country that VSO is working within.
So we’re delighted that the Prem Rawat Foundation has chosen to support the VSO. We commit ourselves to using those resources in Mozambique to tackle poverty and disadvantage in the most effective way we can. Transferring money without building people’s capacity, without sharing the skills and strengthening the institutions cannot work. The two things have to go hand-in-hand, and we see ourselves as playing a part in that for the long-term.
So the opportunity that the city is giving us, the potential partnerships that we’ve built with the Foundation, with others in this room that we might make contact with can help us to extend and expand that work, and we really appreciate the support that you’re bringing to us. Thank you very much.
