Feast on Good Conference : Inspiring Social Entrepreneurs to Change the World

Categories: Good Magazine, social entrepreneurship, social responsibility

Oct 3, 2009 07:12 pm

Thanks to Timberland’s generous sponsorship, I was lucky enough to attend the Feast on Good conference this past Thursday. Since I read each issue of Good cover to cover never missing a word, I was expecting only the cream of the crop to attend. Boy, did everyone go above and beyond my wildest expectations.

"The Feast Conference gathers the world's greatest innovators from across industries and society to empower, inspire and engage each other in creating world-shaking change.  A creative look at the world's toughest problems, The Feast Conference presents the most innovative solutions, insights, and best practices as a catalyst toward action. More than a conference, The Feast represents a bottom-up movement, so we're curating an audience as cross-disciplinary and diverse as our talks. But we're doing something a little different -- we ask those who can afford to pay higher prices to micro-sponsor The Feast, which allows us to offer $99 invitations to awe-inspiring vanguards whose brains get them where their wallets can't."

So not only did Timberland sponsor me, but they allowed someone else to attend at a reduced cost. I was lucky enough to meet her-- Mary Anne Davis-- who runs her own beautiful ceramics studio, and she immediately turned around to buy a ticket for next year at the higher level, so she in turn can micro-sponsor another attendee. 

The speakers included:

-Ken Banks, Founder of kiwanja.net & FrontlineSMS

-Matthew Bishop, Chief Business Writer of The Economist

-Brian Bordainick, Founder of 9th Ward Field of Dreams

-William Drenttel, Partner of Winterhouse

-Annie Duke, Professional Poker Player

-Bob McKinnon, Founder and President of YELLOWBRICKROAD

-Rahul Prakash, President: Business Development & Marketing of Virgance

-Joshua Viertel, President of Slow Food USA

-Laura White, Entrepreneur in Residence at All Day Buffet

-Kenna, Musician okKenna

-Rod Arnold, Chief Operating Officer of charity:water

-Uffe Elbaek, Founder of TheKaosPilot

-Elizabeth Scharpf, Founder and Chief Instigating Officer of she: sustainable health enterprises

If I were to begin writing about these incredibly inspiring speakers, I would need more than a blog post and wouldn’t even know where to begin. From hearing from Ken Banks and how his simple yet ingenious software allows citizens in developing countries to take ownership of their elections and monitor them safely for greater and better accountability, to Elizabeth Scharpf and how she fell into her current role as founder of an organization that provides for and empowers women in the developing world to begin their own sanitary pad franchises allowing them to stop missing what on average adds up to 5 years of school or work in their lifetimes, to Joshua Viertel’s talk on his plans to create a just, fair, and healthy food system in this country with Slow Food USA. Josh- you’re my hero. Are you hiring? No but seriously-- can I PLEASE come work for you??

If you missed this amazing conference, by far the best I have ever attended, you can hear and see all of the sessions via this link provided by All Day Buffet, The Feast’s host. Attend a virtual conference for a day and listen to these incredible, inspiring, and empowering social entrepreneurs and how they changed and are still changing the world for the better. To sign up for next year’s conference, click here. 

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead

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