Together, Booz Allen and the Clinton Global Initiative Foster Collaboration

At a recent CGI conference, Booz Allen facilitated a series of megacommunity-style sessions to deal with critical problems – and then watched as exciting partnerships began to flower.

Since the founding of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in 2005, Booz Allen Hamilton has been helping to shape both its thinking and strategy. Booz Allen significantly expanded its role at the CGI’s most recent annual meeting, providing hands-on expertise in how to create megacommunities™.

Executive and senior vice presidents from Booz Allen served as moderators and facilitators in key sessions at the CGI’s September meeting in New York, which brought together leaders of government, business and civil society to help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.

That kind of tri-sector collaboration is central to the megacommunity, a concept that Booz Allen has been pioneering. Booz Allen Executive Vice President Reggie Van Lee, a founding member of the CGI and co-author of Megacommunities - How Leaders of Government, Business and Non-Profits Can Tackle Today's Global Challenges Together, has contributed to the organization’s thinking on the subject.

“The aspects of the megacommunity approach are exactly the aspects of the Clinton Global Initiative approach,” says Van Lee. One persistent issue that the CGI has faced, he says, has been how to get the most benefit from the various commitments made by the leaders of government, business and civil society – so that the effort isn’t weakened by too much overlap in some areas and too little attention in others.

“One of our roles at the meeting was to help them understand how to maximize the commitments,” says Van Lee, who moderated a session on health issues. “You have to make sure the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”

Booz Allen Senior Vice President Robin Portman, one of the facilitators of the session on health, notes that the word’s most serious health problems are far too complex to be solved by government alone, or by business or non-profit groups. In true megacommunity fashion, she says, the CGI brought “top caliber” leaders together to stimulate ideas and get people thinking about how they might commit their organizations to a common cause.

Helping Non-Profits Make the Connection

The meeting gave Portman herself an idea – to connect the Virginia Hospital Center Medical Brigade with other non-profit organizations in the CGI. Portman is an advisory board member of the Brigade, which makes trips to Honduras to provide medical assistance in rural villages. Booz Allen has contributed, pro bono, a wide range of expertise to the effort.

“A goal of the meeting was to generate creative ideas that could be followed up on – and that happened in my case,” she says.

A Megacommunity Approach to Chronic Illness

In the same session, Senior Vice President Susan Penfield, who specializes in health issues at Booz Allen, facilitated a work group on chronic illness. Members included the head of a major American organization that promotes cancer research, a woman who runs a not-for-profit group in Africa that helps educate people about HIV and AIDS, an African health minister, and a Saudi Arabian pharmaceutical manufacturer.

The session got those and other participants thinking, in some cases for the first time, how they might address chronic disease in the developing world – and how they might do it together, says Penfield. That was heartening, she says, because infectious diseases tend to get most of the attention in the developing world, while chronic disease, an extremely serious problem, “isn’t even on the radar screen.”

That one work group may have witnessed the birth of a megacommunity – fulfilling the vision of both the CGI and Booz Allen.

“What’s interesting,” says Penfield, “is that you bring together people from around the world, who are in all aspects of health care, and you begin to dialogue about an issue that affects each of them individually, and that dialogue moves the ball forward on problem-solving for the global community. It’s local thinking that really impacts people around the world. And it’s a really good feeling to be part of that process.”

story posted January 11, 2010