Kul Gautam: Response to Juan Aguilar with Proposals on How to Mark the 25th Anniversary of Jim Grant's Passing and Plans of the The James P Grant 25th memorial committee

My dear Juan,


Thank you again for always remembering and reminding us all of our dear JPG on the anniversary of his passing away.


You should know that Jim Grant's sons - Bill and Jamie, and a small group of his colleagues and admirers both ex-UNICEF and outside UNICEF - are trying to organize a series of events to commemorate his vision and applicability of his approaches to today's development priorities as reflected in the SDGs.


I attach a couple of concept notes and plans in the making, more to come later...


May JPG's memory continue to inspire us...


James P Grant 25th - Mission and Strategy



Jim Grant is best known for leading the largest social mobilization for a humanitarian purpose in the history of the world while he was the Executive Director of UNICEF. This effort was hugely successful and in JPG's lifetime saved the lives of 25 million people and reduced illnesses in hundreds of millions more. In the years since his death, his efforts have lived on and saved the lives of tens of millions more. The strategies that he utilized and the leadership qualities he displayed have relevance to countless initiatives ranging from global issues--such as the problem of climate change and growing inequality--to nation-specific and community issues.



Jim’s approaches and strategies were developed over a lifetime of activism. Growing up in China as the son of one of the first pioneers of public health Jim was surrounded by leading activists devoted to understanding and addressing the critical social and economic problems of their day. This launched Jim on his lifetime pursuit of practical solutions to drive impact at scale.



Armed with economics and law degrees, an irrepressible optimism and limitless energy, he played defining roles in establishing the US foreign assistance framework with the State Department and USAID in the 1950s and 60s. In the late 1960s and 70s he established and ran the Overseas Development Council (ODC) to advocate for strong development policy. He built strong alliances with practitioners from around the world through serving on the boards of the Society for International Development, Rockefeller Foundation, and the World Council of Churches placing him at the center of an unparalleled network of international thinkers on development.



When Jim became Executive Director of UNICEF in 1980, he saw an opportunity to leverage UNICEF to achieve a quantum leap in developmental impact. Over the next 15 years, Jim strategically turned UNICEF into a highly effective platform to drive impact at scale. Jim’s formula for driving the Child Survival Revolution was simple: he identified critical evidence based solutions that could address problems affecting tens of millions of people, focused on achieving a limited number of ambitious but realizable goals, shamelessly used his marketing skills to mobilize national governments and whole nations to meet those goals, leveraged the entire UN system, and put in place effective monitoring systems to hold people accountable. Jim’s array of practical and simple solutions to mobilize international support to achieve these tangible results are documented in Jim Grant – UNICEF Visionary, edited by Richard Jolly.



Today, 25 years later, new challenges are coming. The UN has used his evidenced-based approaches to set concrete targets for the SDGs, but the world is behind in achieving them. The UNDP’s 2019 Human Development Report and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) have cited inequality as the major challenge to overcome to achieving the SDGs. When Jim passed away in 1995, he knew that the challenge for the 21st century would be around equity and equality. How are we going to solve this and other problems? Jim Grant’s methods and approaches have great relevance to today and need to be better understood by those grappling with today’s social, economic and environmental problems.



With this background, the mission of the James P Grant 25th memorial committee[1] is “to raise awareness of JPG’s methods and approaches and to get them into application by focal institutions to address the critical social, economic, or environmental issues of our time to achieve positive and equitable impact at scale.”


Strategy:

· Organize meetings among key decision makers to discuss the critical issues and identify how the JPG approaches could be applied. These would define some of the key issues and build awareness and demand for JPG tools. Meetings might continue on past the end of 2020 – starting a process.

· Develop tools and materials and package them into modules that could be shared either in a formal training or as principles for action;

· Develop dissemination strategy for the tools;

· Get organizations to buy into the vision and to organize their own initiatives (not dictated by us) applying the tools;

· Get universities and academic institutions to challenge their students to research and the write about how to apply JPG approaches to major problems in their areas of specialization (Public health, climate change, economic growth, etc.);

· Etc.




Next steps:

Agree on/add to note above

Disseminate notes from the meeting (Valeria is producing);

Plan next date – early January (13? 14?). but before then a number of things need to happen:

· Develop objectives and participant list for the dinner at CGDev and finalize date

· More direct meetings with interested people

· Make sure that UNICEF is read-in and agrees to participate at highest level


Thoughts for activities from previous meeting (reminder and some updates)


Ideas for points of leverage:

§ Must have a world class leader to get behind the initiative to give it credibility and outreach to hit scale.

o Bill Gates is the first prize, especially as Bill Gates and the BMGF are really the successor to JPG’s legacy. Chris Alias (president) or Mark Suzman key points of entry. Dan’l has been following up. Also gotten interest from Hilton Foundation

o Bill or Hillary Clinton (Clinton Foundation is also a great point of leverage that has convening power), Outreach to Bill Clinton and interest on his end to provide input

§ Abed and the JPG School of public health in Bangladesh. Talking with them, but Abed passed away

§ Institute for Development Studies in the UK

§ RESULTS is having their 30th anniversary next year (Kul is Chairman of the Board)

§ UNICEF is a challenge since the new leadership did not work with Jim. Alex has reached out. March will be the major Pneumonia conference in Barcelona, where BMGF is sponsoring something for JPG.

o UNICEF is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the UN Convention on the rights of the child, adopted in 1989

o Note that 2020 will also be the 30th anniversary of the World Summit for Children and 25th anniversary of the U.S. signing of the Convention on the Rights of the Child

§ SID International (and the Washington Chapter which is the largest). Reached out to Larry Cooley, President SID international and Katherine Raphaelson, President SID W.

§ Ashoka can be a good brainstorming body and leverage their network of social entrepreneurs. Ashoka strongly engaged

§ CGDEV has really taken over the mantle from ODC as the thought leadership NGO in Washington. CGDev have agreed to host a dinner in February or early March. We need to strategize the objective, participants

§ UNICEF Retiree Network – especially useful for global outreach.





Some Ideas for activities

§ Convince and organization to organize a small, but high level event early in the year to do a stocktaking of where we are 25 years later and where should we go from here (a Tidewater style event)

§ Bigger conference, maybe to wrap up towards the end of the year. Would need to be sponsored by one of the big institutions;

§ Let each institution decide how best they want to use his legacy to further their own objectives around development (passive but with support on access to information)

§ Get universities to have competitions, write papers, etc.

o the challenge of getting a university, like Johns Hopkins, to do something is that they may organize an event, but it would likely end up being a one-off; would need to have them use it as a theme for a course

§ Get the UNICEF Retirees to speak in their countries (would be best if it was tied into the bigger mission statement and provide them with access to the videos, etc.)

§ Case studies on JPG’s leadership style.



[1] The James P Grant 25th memorial committee is comprised of former colleagues and family members of JPG who wish to see his legacy not only remembered, but who believe that the strategies and approaches he used in driving change in his career are highly relevant to tackling the critical issues of our day and that they be put into regular application by innovators and social entrepreneurs to tackle those problems. This committee is not restrictive in nature but is open to any contributors who wish to actively engage.