Bill Clinton on the ‘Explosion of Public Service’

In every corner of America and all over the world, intelligence and energy are evenly distributed, but

opportunity, investment, and effective organizations aren’t. As a result, billions of people are denied the chance to live their lives to the fullest and millions die needlessly every year. …

The modern world, for all its blessing, is unequal, unstable, and unsustainable. And so the great mission of the early 21st century is to move our neighborhoods, our nation, and the world toward integrated communities of shared opportunities, shared responsibilities, and a shared sense of genuine belonging, based on the essence of every successful community: that our common humanity is more important than our interesting differences.

Many of the problems that bedevil both rich and poor nations in the modern world cannot be adequately addressed without more enlightened government policies, more competent and honest public administration, and more investment of tax dollars. There is plenty of evidence that more effective government can produce higher incomes, better living conditions, more social justice, and a cleaner environment across the board. But in many areas, regardless of the quality of government, a critical difference is being made by citizens working as individuals, in businesses, and through nongovernmental nonprofit organizations. …

What makes the current movement remarkable is the sheer number and global sweep of such efforts, from the multibillion-dollar Gates foundation to groups like the Self Employed Women’s Association in India, which makes small loans to poor village women to start or expand businesses.

There are several reasons for this explosion of citizen service. First, since the end of the cold war, for the first time in history a majority of the world’s people are living under elected governments, which create more opportunities for democratic societies and citizen activism to develop. And because of the global mass-media culture and leaders’ unavoidable sensitivity to public opinion, even nondemocratic governments find it increasingly difficult to prevent people from organizing for advocacy or action. …

Second, the information-technology revolution and the globalization of commerce have produced vast new fortunes. There are more millionaires and billionaires than ever, and fortunately, many of them want to reinvest a sizable portion of their wealth in solving problems and giving people in their own countries or people half a world away the chance to break down chains of poverty, disease, lack of education, or group hatred so that they too can live productive, peaceful, and fulfilling lives.

Third, charitable giving has been democratized as never before, primarily through the Internet, enabling citizens of modest means who share a common concern to amass huge sums of money. …

The impact of these three trends — the growth of civil society in the developing world, the vast pool of new wealth available for giving, and the rising influence of small donors — has been reinforced by the proven ability of NGO’s of all sizes and missions to have a positive effect on problems at home and abroad, often in partnership with governments and local NGO’s in developing countries. Still, both the potential and the need for further advances are enormous, largely due to the staggering scale of global poverty and underdevelopment and the persistence of pockets of poverty and other social problems in the United States and other developed nations.

— Excerpted from Giving, by Bill Clinton. Copyright © 2007 by Bill Clinton, with permission from Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information about the book, go to: http://giving.clintonfoundation.org.