Our CEO, Jon Harper represented Future Foundations at the Emirates Foundation Youth Philanthropy Summit 2015 taking place on the 27th and 28th October 2015. He took part in a number of sessions exploring how we maximise investment in youth.
The theme of this year’s summit was “Philanthropy in Transition: Maximizing Impact Through Deploying Top Talent”.
Talent management is a key enabler to delivering high impact philanthropy with scalable and measurable outcomes. In the absence of capital assets, people are the most important input driving performance, innovation and sustainability in the organization. Too often in the social sector, insufficient investment is made in talent despite the complexity of creating social value at scale. This affects recruitment and retention of top talent and undermines the professionalization of the sector.
The Emirates Foundation believe that if global philanthropy is to rise to the challenges the world is currently facing, the sector’s perception of people development must change. It’s time for philanthropy to realize that talent is as important in the third sector as it is in any other and is critical to business success.
The two day programme had an incredible array of speakers and sessions drawn from around the world. The sessions ranged from The Coming Jobs Challenge to From financial literacy to financial capability among Youth.
The summit concluded with an inspiring speaker, Khalid Al Ameri who highlighted the need for Emirati Youth to value hard work to make their country proud. This is perhaps an important message for all young people in a world where fame and Dragons Den give the impression that hard work is not what pays, when in fact over night success is few and far between.
Jon also attended the Arab Foundations Forum (AFF) Annual Meeting which was hosted by the Emirates Foundation.
Of particular note was the session on “Accelerating Progress on the SDGs: Youth Inclusion in the Middle East”. Future Foundations is developing ideas for how we will develop young peoples understanding of the SDGs , and will be developing challenges and content which will be included in our 2016 Global Social Leaders programme and more generally in our wider leadership offer.
