The focus of this track is on the physical, cognitive and socio-emotional development needs of children to ensure their capacity to trust and grow to be resilient adults. Throughout this track, we will investigate the challenges faced by children living under conditions of stress – be it poverty, abandonment or violent conflict, and learn which interventions can prevent, mitigate or address the potentially lasting effects of toxic stress.

Identity politics – wherever pursued – can cause untold damage, exploiting fear and resentment, targeting the weak, tearing apart societies, even leading to the breakdown of civil and political order.  While there may be short term political gain in an appeal to our darker side, when prejudice and politics combine the longer term loss can be a state’s capacity to govern and assure human security. This track will explore opportunities for advancing pluralism – allowing groups to maintain their cultural identities while living side by side in a shared society. And we will look at how to identify and resist identity politics when it rears its head. We will consider the ways philanthropy and civil society are working to advance and preserve pluralism in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the United States.  Finally, we will ask what it takes to be an empowered citizen advancing these values.

In many countries, political actors motivated by prejudice, resentment and malicious cupidity have undermined the critical role pluralism plays in society. Civil society, however, has the power – and the obligation – to redefine how our institutions govern our societies and ensure equal access to justice, prosperity and peace. This track will explore the ways that civil society organizations and individual leaders have risen to the challenge of civic engagement and restored trust in governance.

This track will delve deeper into a discussion of the unique relationships of trust that philanthropies have enjoyed – and the ways in which trust might be strengthened or weakened as philanthropies make increasingly bigger bets, invest in knowledge generation and seek to sustain social movements. We’ll discuss their role in contributing to the field of knowledge and the ways they hold themselves to account, generating data and demonstrating results. Finally, we will explore the growth of organized philanthropy in the Global South, and ways knowledge is shared among philanthropists across societies and continents, including between those GPF members from the Global North, and leaders and founding members of GPF affiliates in the Global South.