For this Humanosphere podcast, we chat with Kristen Dailey, about becoming the new executive director at Global Washington and our region’s role in the aid and development arena. Global Washington is an umbrella organization that seeks to support the hundreds of local organizations working on reducing poverty and inequity around the world.
Seattle is already recognized as an epicenter for global humanitarian efforts, largely because the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation happens to be headquartered here. But there are hundreds of other, smaller organizations here, many of them having long preceded the Gates Foundation, working in myriad ways to make the world a better place. So, yeah, we are big on the humanitarian stuff.
Is it yet a community or a hodgepodge of competing organizations working in parallel, in isolation? Could we do better by coming together, by learning from each other and creating a more powerful synergy? We chat with Dailey to see how we’re doing on building a large and fairly unique humanitarian community.
First, Tom and I go over some of the headlines this week beginning with the news that some Seattle scientists have published one of two reports on a collapsing ice sheet in Antarctica that contends major impacts from climate change are now inevitable. Humanosphere is concerned because climate change tends, like most bad things, to hit the poorest people hardest. We also talk about the Obama Administration’s new initiative, Power Africa, and David Francis’ reports on extremism in Africa, especially in Nigeria and Kenya, and why they appear to be on the rise.
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