A very good evening to everybody here at Ritz Carlton, and also to our friends and partners joining us online. Congratulations to everybody, we all survived Philanthropy Asia Summit 2021, the inaugural one.
Let me start by thanking Minister Tan See Leng, Minister for Manpower, second minister for trade and industry, for joining us today, we are really honoured.
We are honoured to have delegates joined us today from the regional and global philanthropic community. This includes the private sector, non-governmental and social sector organisations, healthcare and educational institutions, impact investors, and governments.
On behalf of all our lead partners, may I take this opportunity to express our sincere appreciation to the speakers and panellists for their valuable contribution to the inaugural Philanthropy Asia Summit, without which it cannot be conducted.
Our deepest gratitude to those who had travelled here from overseas and placed your confidence in working together with us as we open up our borders, to connect in-person and live with this global pandemic.
A special thanks to all our Lead Partners, CTA Partners, CTA Champions and every organisation, team and persons for your openness, and I’ll say a leap of faith, to explore and path find different models of how we organise this event and also the various calls-to-actions. This is the first time we are doing this. I think you will agree with me that as we conclude this Summit, the work is just beginning. As purpose driven organisations, we are focused towards delivering impacts and outcomes to make this a better world for all of us. In the near term, these big hairy audacious goals (BHAG) may seemed out of reach, the tasks too onerous. It can be, but I believe there is a “core theory of success”, and this is centred around building quality, trusted relationships and quality actions.
This “core theory of success” is advocated by leading system thinker Daniel Kim of MIT and I quote - “As the quality of relationships rises, the quality of thinking improves, leading to an increase in the quality of actions and results. Achieving high-quality results has a positive effect on the quality of relationships, creating a reinforcing engine of success” – Daniel Kim.
It is also through trust, partnerships and a clear central focus on actions that we conceive this inaugural Philanthropy Asia Summit.
Today our partners’ unveiled six calls-to-action centred around three focus areas, three themes: inclusive education, climate action and sustainable communities, and pandemic security. Our partners bring together credible and impressive track records. As a recap, from this year 2022 onwards as well, we will be collectively working on: mangroves, waste management, reading through digital and literacy tools, high touch high tech, scientific preparedness, and also community innovations in pandemic security.
These six CTAs offers us an opportunity to kick-start a new journey to make an impactful difference.
Over the long run, we hope to build a partnership for the common good, to uplift communities, to protect our planet; and hopefully we may increasingly find greater opportunities to collectively “give voice, give time and give money” to more good causes.
As we wrap up today’s event, the work for the next Philanthropy Asia Summit 2022 and calls-to-actions has started. May I invite you to save the date for 30 September next year for the second Philanthropy Asia Summit, and we can meet again as part of the Singapore Season, and hopefully the return of the Singapore F1 Night Race.
Thank you again for your generous support. Keep in touch, we are not too far away in this digital world and we look forward to seeing you again. Thank you very much and have a great evening ahead.