Oregon Business News Note:
From Forbes magazine on the U2 lead singer, Bono, when speaking this month at a philanthropy conference in Dublin, Ireland .
The Irish singer and co-founder of ONE, a campaigning group that fights poverty and disease in Africa, said it had been “a humbling thing for me” to realize the importance of capitalism and entrepreneurialism in philanthropy, particularly as someone who “got into this as a righteous anger activist with all the cliches.”
“Job creators and innovators are just the key, and aid is just a bridge,” he told an audience of 200 leading technology entrepreneurs and investors at the F.ounders tech conference in Dublin. “We see it as startup money, investment in new countries. A humbling thing was to learn the role of commerce.”
It was also mentioned…
“…he’d had other, similarly tough realizations: that there are “enormously useful,” people on the left and right. “You just have to reach them.”
Hence the “unusual” people he has on the board of ONE, including the former U.S. Secretary of State under the Bush administration, Condoleeza Rice, Desmond Tutu and the finance minister of Nigeria, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. “People go, ‘Huh? Why?’” said Bono. “Our single idea is that normally these issues we fret about, which are seen as left-wing subject matter, we figure, ‘Why divide our audience in half?’ So we work with left and right.”
Read more Forbes here.
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