The Power To Lead 2013 SWF Ray Suarez, Gro Brundtland, Vera Cordeiro, Mary Robinson & Lydia Wilbard
Speakers
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Former Prime Minister of Norway and Deputy Chair, The Elders
Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway, served as Director General of the World Health Organization from July 1998-2003. From 2007-2009, she was the UN Secretary-General`s Special Envoy for Climate Change. Dr. Brundtland has served on the UN Secretary-General`s High Level Panel on Global Sustainability since its launch in August 2010. As Deputy Chair of The Elders, she contributes her wisdom, independent leadership and integrity to tackling the world’s toughest problems, with the aim of making the world a better place.
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National Director, Tanzania,
CAMFEDLydia Wilbard is Co-Director of Camfed Tanzania and Co-Founder of the Tanzania chapter of Cama, the pan-African network of educated young women supported by Camfed. Lydia has been central to Camfed Tanzania’s programme of support to 310,512 children and young women, and is a specialist in gender, education and health with a Masters in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University. A leader and role model, Lydia grew up in rural Tanzania and has personally overcome the barriers to women’s empowerment.
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Chair of The Elders, The Elders
Mary Robinson was elected Irish President in 1990 and served for seven years as a principled and transformative leader who fought for equality and women’s rights throughout her time in office. A firm believer in dialogue and reconciliation, she broke taboos by being the first Irish head of state to make official visits to Britain, as well as regularly visiting Northern Ireland. As UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997-2002), Mary Robinson became renowned as an outspoken voice dedicated to investigating and exposing human rights abuses across the world.
Mary Robinson has been a member of The Elders since the group was founded in 2007 and was appointed Chair of The Elders in November 2018. She has travelled to the Middle East several times with The Elders to encourage peace efforts and support Israelis and Palestinans working for peaceful coexistence; visited the Korean Peninsula to help ease tensions between North and South Korea and learn more about North Korea’s chronic food crisis; joined an Elders' delegation to Côte d'Ivoire to emphasise the importance of reconciliation following widespread civil conflict.
Mary Robinson also founded The Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice. Its work from 2010-2019 meant climate justice went from being effectively a taboo topic to being an approach to climate decision-making and action that is people-centered, rights-informed and fair.
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Freelance Journalist, Individual
Ray Suarez is co-host of the weekly radio program "World Affairs," presented by the World Affairs Council of Northern California and KQED FM. He has just completed an appointment as the McCloy Visiting Professor of American Studies at Amherst College in Massachusetts.
Suarez has hosted programs for Al Jazeera America, PBS, and NPR. He has authored three books, "Latino Americans: The 500-Year Legacy That Shaped a Nation"; "The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America"; and "The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration." His series of interviews with historian Howard Zinn has been collected for a new volume from New Press this year, and he contributed a chapter to "The Good Fight," a collection of writing from historians and activists on the long struggle for equality in the United States.
During his years at the PBS NewsHour, Suarez was the lead correspondent for coverage of global health challenges, filing a vast array of stories from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, from the H1N1 pandemic in Mexico, to fighting HIV-TB co-infection in Southern Africa, to broadening vaccine access in Nicaragua, eliminating a major cause of child death.
Earlier in his career, Suarez was a Los Angeles correspondent for CNN, a reporter in London and Rome, and an editor and producer for ABC Radio News in New York. An active Episcopal layman, Suarez is a member of the governing body of Washington National Cathedral, the Chapter. He holds a BA in African History from NYU, an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and 15 honorary doctorates from colleges and universities across the US.
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Vera Cordeiro
FOUNDER & CHAIRWOMAN OF THE BOARD
Dara Institute - Health & Human Development
Dr Vera is an MD General Practitioner and the Founder and Chairwoman of the Board of Instituto Dara (formerly Associação Saúde Criança). With over 20 years of work at the Lagoa Hospital, she was the founder of the Psychosomatic Department.
Dara Institute is a social organization with a pioneering methodology to promote the wellbeing of socially vulnerable families, creating positive long-term impact as verified by researchers at the Georgetown University.
She is a fellow and member of the Ashoka World Council, leader of Avina, Social Entrepreneur of the Schwab Foundation and the Skoll Foundation awardee.
