Today we want to share some news from Landesa, which was in the Sunday New York Times. In a big story on urbanization in China, the main article included a quote from Landesa staff. It presents China’s rush to urbanize as unsustainable and explains the devastating impact on farmers. The article was the most emailed article on their website and received more than 500 comments.

The South China Morning Post features an op-ed by Landesa making the link between land rights and environmental sustainability. The piece does a great job of painting a picture of the scale of the environmental problem in China.

A Businessweek article, like the New York Times piece,  relied on Landesa’s China team and talked to them about their perspective and insights.

Above, watch Landesa’s new video, made in alliance with USAID and Stories of Change, a partnership between the Skoll Foundation and the Sundance Institute. Finally, read an essay by Landesa Founder Roy Prosterman on how to help Myanmar’s rural poor.

US2020 Signs New Partners Tata Consultancy Services and HP at Clinton Global Initiative’s “CGI America” Event

Last week at CGI America, a nationwide gathering hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative, President Clinton announced that US2020, a new initiative chaired by a Skoll Awardee that aims to engage one million science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) professionals by the year 2020, will launch a city competition to increase the amount of STEM mentoring in communities nationally. New US2020 partners were also announced at the event, including Tata Consultancy Services and HP.

“We need these one million volunteers to ensure that we’re going to have students take the courses” that will inspire and prepare them for STEM careers, said President Clinton.

Joining current US2020 Founding Leadership Partners Cisco, Cognizant, and SanDisk, Tata Consultancy Services and HP will collectively work towards US2020’s goal of mobilizing one million STEM professionals to mentor students by the year 2020. Through an online matching platform, US2020 will help place STEM volunteers into high impact mentoring opportunities with top nonprofits working across different grades, settings, and delivery models. As more companies join this effort, their early leadership will help catalyze a culture shift in which mentoring becomes the new normal for STEM professionals, much like pro bono work is in the legal profession.

US2020 and its corporate partners are taking strides to strengthen the STEM career pipeline for traditionally underrepresented students by connecting them to professionals in the field who will serve as mentors and teachers. These skilled volunteers will bring subjects to life and provide engaging moments of discovery to students through real-world, hands-on projects and academic coaching facilitated by nonprofits like The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF), Citizen Schools, and others. Ultimately, these students will have access to career opportunities they might never have considered and will help fill the STEM jobs of the future that will keep the country economically competitive.

To push the US2020 effort forward, the initiative and its partners launched the US2020 City Competition with President Clinton during the closing plenary of CGI America. The strategy will select and support between three to five cities that propose plans to mobilize STEM volunteers through partnerships with leading science and technology businesses. The chosen cities will be offered $1 million or more in cash and in-kind support to bring together businesses, nonprofits, city governments, and local philanthropies around a coordinated effort to spark the minds of students across their communities.

The US2020 City Competition is inspired by other successful awards and strategies, including the Obama administration’s Race to the Top and Investing in Innovation (i3) competitions, X PRIZES, and the Ashoka Changemakers and Carnegie Corporation’s “Partnering for Excellence” Competition.

“We believe it is essential to offer engaging learning experiences with STEM professionals to students who need their support and the opportunity for cities to utilize their STEM workforce to educate and prepare the next generation of STEM professionals,” said Eric Schwarz, co-founder and CEO of Citizen Schools and Executive Chairman of US2020.

The demand for STEM skills in the workforce is projected to increase and outpace the number of students working towards a STEM profession. Students of all levels, particularly girls and underrepresented minorities, receive little exposure to opportunities and experiences with STEM experts. A recent study from Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program found that STEM jobs are a major economic driver across the U.S. with 20 percent of all jobs in the country requiring a “high level of knowledge” in at least one STEM field.

“To succeed on tomorrow’s world stage, students must today have a solid foundation in STEM and be fluent in the technologies that will power the global economy of the 21st Century,” said Surya Kant, President of TCS’ North America, UK and Europe operations. “TCS is proud to bring not only our technological expertise to this effort, but also the passion and commitment that our employees have in lending their talents to positively impact their communities, across the country and around the world.”

Tata Consultancy Services is a Founding Leadership Partner of US2020, providing more than $500,000 in cash and in-kind support. Tata Consultancy Services will be the lead partner in developing US2020′s web-based matching technology to connect STEM mentors with high-quality volunteer placements. HP is also joining the US2020 initiative as a Founding Member. Both Tata Consultancy Services and HP are aspiring to get 20 percent of their STEM workforce mentoring students by 2020.

“HP’s aim is to enable the next generation of leaders and innovators to leverage their full potential in an IT-driven world. Our employees have been working with Citizen Schools for many years as part of our commitment to offering skills and time,” says Gabi Zedlmayer, Vice President Sustainability and Social Innovation at HP.

In partnership with founding Fortune 500 companies Cisco, Cognizant, and SanDisk and founding partners AfterCollege, Citizen Schools, CodeNow, HotChalk, National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, and TEALS, US2020 has pledged to work over the next few years to recruit hundreds of additional education non-profits and school districts that will commit to high standards in STEM mentoring, common and transparent metrics, and efforts to scale high-quality placement for STEM mentors in both school day and extended day, extended week, and extended year settings.

Today we are cross-posting a blog by Daniel Jensen of Mercy Corps’ Global Envision, focusing on our partnership with Mercy Corps and USAID. Here it is:

In Para, Brazil, farmers are turning a profit and the government is on track to slow deforestation thanks to local nonprofit Imazon, which got them to work together.

By 2003, Brazil was on the verge of an environmental catastrophe. As its economy expanded, cattle ranchers needed more land to graze their livestock, and few laws prevented them from burning down thousands of square kilometers of untitled land in the Amazon, causing vast environmental damage. In the worst regions, like Para, widespread poverty meant that stopping deforestation was at the bottom of the government’s list, despite massive efforts by groups like Greenpeace and Imazon.

A wave of environmental laws passed by the federal government from 2004 to 2008 seemed to complicate things for local governments and economies, even as deforestation rates fell. Many municipal governments couldn’t fully meet government targets under the new regulations but faced economic sanctions if they didn’t. A beef embargo prevented farmers from selling their meat to mainstream supermarket chains like Carrefour and Walmart if their municipality ended up on a blacklist for failing to reduce illegal deforestation to government-mandated levels. The government confiscated herds and sawmills from the law’s offenders. When Paragominas, a municipality in Para where Imazon worked, was placed on the list, 2,300 jobs and all the municipality’s federal agricultural credits disappeared within a year.

Imazon found itself helping save the local economy. It created a training program for the local government to learn how to use satellite technology to track deforestation. Since most of the affected land wasn’t titled, Imazon also helped farmers formalize their land titles and trained them in improved farming techniques, like rotating crops and limiting overgrazing, to make their land more productive and reduce the need to cut down more rainforest.

It worked. Farmers trained in better methods required less land to turn a profit, so they cut down fewer trees.

In just a few years, Imazon’s program in Paragominas helped to reduce illegal deforestation by more than 80 percent. When farmers in Paragominas implemented Imazon’s training techniques, most saw their incomes increase, even as they stopped clearing additional land. Inspired by the success of the program, the state government decided to launch its own Green Municipalities Program in 2011, essentially promoting Imazon’s collaborative approach in Paragominas at a state level. Now, more than 94 of Para State’s 143 municipalities have signed onto the Green Municipalities Program, and both the state government and Imazon are straining to meet the demand.

However, a new breakthrough came when Imazon attracted the attention of the Investment Innovations Alliance, a new partnership between Mercy Corps, USAID and the Skoll Foundation. This April at the Skoll World Forum, the partners announced their first grant of $3.4 million, complementing an earlier $2.6 million from Skoll. The funding will support Imazon to scale the successes in Paragominas across the state of Para. The project has ambitious goals, as the government has promised to reduce deforestation by 80 percent over the next seven years. By systematizing the training process, the Alliance hopes to leave the state government capable of responding to the growing demand from farmers and municipal governments who have seen Imazon’s programs work in Paragominas.

The question is how Imazon can show their methodologies work. Mercy Corps will help Imazon to test its approach in 10 municipalities serving as guinea pigs, drawing from its own network of experts in impact analysis.

But Imazon’s biggest success may be its ability to get locals on board with its ideas. 94 municipalities have already signed on to reducing deforestation through the Green Municipalities Program, and Cameron Peake, Mercy Corps’s director of social innovations special initiatives, says she’s impressed at how the nonprofit has persuaded the local farmers and government that environmental sustainability, economic growth, land rights and good governance can actually go together.

And that achievement, for one, is too valuable to put a number on.

For those of you who watched “The Revolutionary Optimists” film, you’ll be thrilled to know “the amazing, awe-inspiring accomplishment of the Prayasam youth since the film has come out: the city finally dug a clean water line to their community, after neglecting to do so for 35 years.”

Those are the words of co-filmmaker Nicole Newnham, who with Maren Grainger-Monsen, made the film as part of our Stories of Change.

If you missed it in theaters, the film airs Monday on PBS. (Check your local listings for time).

“The Revolutionary Optimists” draws us into the world of two 11-year olds with no access to clean drinking water, a girl forced to labor inside a brick kiln, and a teenage dancer on the precipice of choosing child marriage to escape from her abusive family. From these fragile lives, lawyer turned change-agent Amlan Ganguly mines the strength and vision to build a most unlikely revolution. The film follows Ganguly and 4 children from Kolkata’s poorest slums on an intimate journey through their adolescence. Together they fight seemingly insurmountable odds to build a better future for themselves and their community, challenging the notion that marginalization is written into their destiny.

“The youth and their parents galvanized a movement – based on the children’s community mapping and data collection around water – for a clean drinking water line,” Newnham said. “When we originally finished the film, the end said, ‘The children are still waiting for a drinking water tap.’ Amlan held a screening in Kolkata for the government and press. Within just a few weeks, the digging of the water line had begun.  This is a result of Amlan’s 15 years of dedication to working with the youth of this community, and to Prayasam and the children’s tenacity and bravery!”

“We have been so grateful to have been part of the Skoll Foundation/Sundance Stories of Change initiative; making the film as a part of this supportive network has helped us immeasurably,” said Newnham.

Today, Skoll Foundation CEO Sally Osberg is serving as a discussion leader at Annenberg Alchemy Gold, a collaborative of 30 Los Angeles-area grantmakers dedicated to strengthening the Los Angeles nonprofit sector. She is focusing on capacity building that can scale impact. Alchemy Gold is a learning collaborative and unique opportunity for philanthropy practitioners that’s  strategic and comprehensive, and offers a venue for dialogue and problem-solving. Partners convene quarterly to learn from experts (such as Sally Osberg) in capacity building around fundraising, leadership development, board governance and other topics. They also engage in facilitated conversations and identify best practices, methodologies, and tactics to increase the sector’s effectiveness and impact. In the photo above, she’s with Annenberg Foundation Director of Operations Sylia Obagi. Learn more: http://www.annenbergalchemy.org/programs/alchemy-gold/what

I just returned from Brazil, where I visited partners in the Amazon states of Para and Mato Grosso.  Before I get into the nitty-gritty, let me reflect on the big picture regarding the State of Para in Brazil.  Para is clearly undergoing a dramatic and deep transformation.  Only a few years ago, Para was a place I was afraid to travel to, a place where organized crime ruled and assassins were available for hire almost openly.  It was known as the wild west of the Amazon—more so than any other place in the Amazon (the size of the continental US).  Quite a few environmental or human rights activists had been killed or threatened.  This is where in 2005 Sister Dorothy Stang was murdered in cold blood for standing up for the poor.

Today, more than half of the private lands are registered with the state and monitored, and organized crime has less of a stranglehold.  In place of lawlessness and fear, one feels a real sense of pride emerging alongside a booming economy and increased governance.   Para is not like it was in 2005; Para is not like it was 5 years ago.  Para isn’t even like it was one year ago.

This has been an eventful trip, and quite a synergistic convergence of the Skoll Foundation investments in the Green Municipalities Program, the Amazon Corridors and the AVINA Amazon program.  The timing of the trip coincided with a three day visit to the municipality of Alta Floresta in the state of Mato Grosso, where AVINA partners are working with a group of municipalities to develop a sustainable municipalities strategy similar to the Para Green Municipalities Program.  This is one of the pillars of our strategy for the AVINA partnership 2.0—bringing green municipalities approaches to other regions.  In addition to municipal and NGO leaders from Bolivia and Ecuador, Beto Verissimo of Imazon was there to share more about the Para Green Municipalities Program as well as an official from the Para municipality of Altamira.  And Vasco van Roosmalen of the Amazon Corridors project was also there to learn and discuss bringing the strategy to the state of Rondonia and the Munde-Kwahiba corridor.

But equally important was a visit to the Green Municipalities Program in Para.  For this trip I considered a visit to visit the municipality of Paragominas, but instead chose to visit a municipality that is having a more difficult time—one where things aren’t all going well.  Paragominas is the municipality that is the model for the Green Municipalities Program where Imazon, with the support of others, intervened to turn one of the highest deforestation municipalities in the Amazon into a model of sustainable development with a strong economy and local governance. But I wanted to see a municipality that was in the midst of difficulties with the transition.  I ended up in Thailand, kind of.

After two days of air travel from California, I arrived in Belem, capital of Para.  The next morning at 6am, I headed out to visit the municipality of Tailandia–ie Thailand–with Andreia Pinto, Imazon’s executive director.  One of the early settlers to the region called his huge ranch Thailand–meaning to refer to a heavenly tropical paradise.  The name stuck.  A tropical paradise it never was and certainly never became.

Tailandia is not huge—a bit bigger than Rhode Island and smaller than Delaware.  Yet only 5 years ago it had 160 sawmills operating in it.  The vast majority of the logging was illegal.  Criminal gangs controlled much of the local economy.  In 2008 a large team of elite federal troops descended on Tailandia and confiscated the equivalent of 500 truckloads of illegally logged wood.  The raid was dramatic and very public, grabbing international attention.

The federal government used Tailandia as an example—showing their willingness and capacity to crack down hard on illegal logging.  Most people in Tailandia already didn’t trust the federal government. After that raid their bitterness increased.  The raid and subsequent enforcement by the federal government for the most part shut down the local economy in Tailandia, which at that point was mostly dependent on illegal logging.  The federal government put Tailandia on the blacklist of municipalities with high deforestation, and cut their access to federal funds and loans.  Unlike Paragominas, which has since been removed from the blacklist, Tailandia is still on it.  There is clearly a distrust of the federal government and outsiders. So that is where I was headed.

On our way out of Belem, I heard a radio commercial for the Green Municipalities Program targeting private landowners.  The message was clear: “Produce without deforesting. Begin to see this as good business.”  This tagline is on many of the state’s Green Municipalities Program public materials.  The five hour drive gave me plenty of time to learn from Andreia about how the Green Municipalities Program is rolling out in Tailandia.   I noticed many road checks where federal officers were checking all commercial vehicles.

When we finally arrived in Tailandia we met with the technical team that works with the municipal “office of science, technology and environment.” This team of ten had been trained by Imazon and was in the process of registering each of the properties in the municipality, licensing businesses, and enforcing local regulations (mostly by fines).  The team members were all from Para but not from Tailandia, young and dedicated.  Registering properties enables Imazon and the state to monitor deforestation, among other things.  The team is working closely with the municipal government and the local landowners to help move the municipality toward legality and governance, with the intention of getting the municipality off the government blacklist. In order to be removed from the blacklist, municipalities must reduce deforestation to below 40 square kilometers per year, and have at least 80% of private property lands registered.  Tailandia’s deforestation has dropped to about 20 square kilometers per year, and 76% of the private property lands are registered.  The team is close—they only need another 4% to reach the criteria for being removed from the government blacklist.

I asked why they were not able to get the next step for registering landowners—enough registered landowners to go over the 80% threshold and be removed from the blacklist.  It took some prodding because the team needs to be careful, but it turns out there is a small group of large landowners that are holding out, with little intention of registering their lands.  Even though the majority of the landowners in Tailandia are now operating within the law and have registered their lands, these few are holding the entire municipality back.  Although it seems like there should be peer pressure to comply and allow the municipality to be removed from the blacklist, the team suggested that all the other landowners are afraid of them.   The situation is complicated—which was a frequent reply to my many questions.

See the Imazon’s April report on Tailandia here. You’ll notice that they call out specific locations where deforestation took place.

Imazon’s map of Tailandia showing properties, forested land (green), deforested land (pink) and reforested land (orange—mostly palm oil plantations).

After meeting with the technical team Andreia and I visited a local rancher who is a former heard of the rural producers union and active in municipal politics. He proudly showed off his new rotational pasturelands ranching methods. This experimentation on rotational pastures is something I saw a few times over, including in Mato Grosso later in the trip.  Only a few years ago one didn’t see much of this in Brazil.  The rotational methodology allows more head of cattle per hectare and keeps the soils in improved condition so that after a few years the land is not degraded forcing the cattle rancher to move elsewhere.  Cattle ranching is the leading cause of deforestation in Brazil.  The way most ranchers in the Brazilian Amazon raise cattle degrades the land rapidly. After the land degrades cattle needs to be moved to new pastureland—often by deforesting new areas.

This is one of the drivers of the boom-bust economy destroying the Amazon, and the pattern that the Green Municipalities Program is in the process of breaking.  Seeing ranchers lead the way experimenting with soil management was encouraging.  Brazil’s new low cost loans for low carbon agriculture is also beginning to take off—another encouraging sign.Today there are about 40 sawmills operating in Tailandia, all with forest management licenses, and reportedly operating for the most part within the bounds of the law.  The local economy is changing, and is no longer dependent on deforesting.  The municipality has seen significant investment in palm oil – with huge plantations covering much of the northern part, all on lands already greatly degraded.  This has helped diversify the economy, making it less dependent on logging.

After a brutal 5 hour drive back to Belem, my first day in Para came to an end.  The next day I met with Justiniano Netto, the State Secretary of the Green Municipalities Program, a prominent new position in the State of Para government.  I asked him about the landowners in Tailandia who are holding the process back.  He said he is aware of the situation and that there are steps the State of Para can do to encourage them to register—starting with the simple step of calling them on the phone.  A call from state officials often can spur people into action.  This combination of top down and bottom up approach they have found to work well.  Only two years ago almost no properties were registered in the State of Para; now over half of them are.  Things are changing quickly and those that don’t come along voluntarily are being prodded strongly.

Justiniano also told me about some other strategic moves they have been making at the state level, including some steps to close legal loopholes.  This is yet another sign of the massive transformation underway in Para—as it shifts from one of the world’ greatest sources of forest carbon emissions from deforestation and wild west with limited governance, into a modern rural economy with strong governance and little deforestation. It is all happening now. It is a different place than it was a few years ago, and the change continues rapidly.

In 2006, An Inconvenient Truth opened the world’s eyes to climate change and sparked a worldwide conversation that continues today.

In the seven years since the film’s release, the world has seen a nonstop succession of new studies, reports, discoveries and headlines that have underscored just how urgent a threat climate change is to our planet.

For the film’s seventh anniversary, we ask, “What do we know now that we didn’t know then?” to keep the spotlight on this evolving and accelerating threat.

In a brief YouTube video recently released, Vice President Gore invited people to join the Science on G+ Community and share ideas to mitigate climate change. And tomorrow, Gore and Skoll will engage with Google+ users on the topic in a live Google+ Hangout on Air on June 11 at 2 p.m. EST / 11 a.m. PST. You can RSVP for the event here so they can send you a helpful email reminder.

One of the reasons we’re so excitied to celebrate the film’s anniverary is because An Inconvenient Truth has had such a huge impact on the climate change conversation and the movement to help mitigate global warming’s impact on our planet.

Five million people worldwide went to see An Inconvenient Truth in theaters, and the film won two Academy Awards in 2006 for Best Documentary and Best Original Song. The film has since been translated or subtitled into 32 languages. And 100 percent of Participant Media’s profits from the film were donated to the Alliance for Cliamte Protection.

More than 180,000 copies of the Inconvenient Truth curriculum were downloaded, and five countries—England, Scotland, Germany, New Zealand and the Czech Republic—plus British Columbia, incorporated it into their secondary schools’ coursework.

Oh, and Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In Washington, President Obama has created an Assistant to the President for Climate and Energy, and the State Department now has a Special Envoy on Climate Change.

At least 150 bills supporting climate action to some extent have been introduced since 2006.

You can RSVP for the Google+ Hangout on June 11 right here.

News from Tostan:

June 8th, 2013 was a historic day for 30 communities from the Koulikoro region in Mali. Many representatives from these Bambara communities – including women, men, young children and teenagers gathered in the village of Fégoun near the banks of the Niger river to publicly declare the abandonment of female genital cutting (FGC) and child/forced marriage in their communities. The declaration is the result of decisions made in each community that these practices were harmful to the general wellbeing of community members. Community members discussed the effects of these traditions using new information on health and human rights gained through Tostan’s Community Empowerment Program (CEP), with classes led in local languages from 2010 to 2013 in partnership with Project Muso Ladamunen and Sini Sanuman.

Traditionally, communities in Mali have been resistant to abandon these practices. The latest figures put the prevalence rate for FGC at 85.2% (DHS 2006) and for child/forced marriage at 71% (PRB May 2011) in the country. The recent confusion due to the 2012 coup d’état and war in the north have also complicated efforts by NGOs working on this and other long-term projects seeking sustainable change.

However, little of these complications were evident at the declaration itself. With hundreds of community members gathered together, many of whom were related or had not seen each other in a long time, the declaration took on a celebratory air. In addition to singing and dancing at the declaration and the celebrations the evening before, participants put on a play during the event which showed an individual family having discussions which led them to decide not to cut their daughters – a scene which had played out recently in hundreds of community members’ households.

Diarra Awa Sow, a member of her Community Management Committee’s (CMC) social mobilization team in the town of Koulikoro and the mother to three young girls – aged seven, five and one – was able to convince her family to abandon FGC after sharing with them some of the harmful effects the practice can cause. “I’m very happy today” she said at the declaration. “We were all on the path to continue the practice, but now we have changed course.”

Awa, as she is usually called, was inspired to share what she had learned with everyone in her community after talking with her family. Through the CEP, she learned all about the difficulties women face where she lives, and hoped that through sharing this information, things could improve. Awa is dedicated to ensuring the public declaration has a lasting effect – “I am a part of this community, and I know that I am not going to cut my daughters. I hope that my example will show others that they don’t need to do it either.”

The public declaration in Mali was the first in the country by communities who had participated in the Tostan CEP, and follows another major public declaration by 92 communities in Guinea. Next weekend, on the Day of the African Child, 242 Pulaar communities in the region of Kolda in Senegal and 40 Mandinka communities in The Gambia will also publicly declare their abandonment of female genital cutting and child / forced marriage.

Yesterday, Sally Osberg spoke on “Giving Back” featuring Moderator Lesley Stahl and panelists Cathy Isaacson and Paula Zakaria. Here’s the press release:

On June 6, 2013 in New York, hundreds of influential men and women in media, business, politics and entertainment gathered at The Huffington Post’s first-ever women’s conference, “The Third Metric: Redefining Success Beyond Money and Power,” to discuss a more humane and sustainable definition of what it means to be successful.
The Conference was hosted by Arianna Huffington, president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, and Mika Brzezinski, co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Panel discussions included topics such as Leadership and Wisdom, Wellness and the Bottom Line, the Connection Between Giving Back and Well-Being, and Millennials Leading Us Into the Future, among others.

Speakers included Jill Abramson, Candice Bergen, Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, Katie Couric, Adrian Grenier, Today weekend host Erica Hill, Valerie B. Jarrett, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, Institute for Mindful Leadership founder Janice Marturano, Sen. Claire McCaskill, Rep. Tim Ryan, Joe Scarborough, CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, George Stephanopoulos, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior and Ali Wentworth.

During the conference, Huffington and Brzezinski announced that $1.3 million was raised for women-focused nonprofits in the RaiseForWomen Challenge, a six-week global fundraising competition. The winning organization, Global Fund for Eating Disorders, raised $240,000 to expand their programs and research related to eating disorders significantly. The RaiseForWomen Challenge was created through a partnership between The Huffington Post, Half the Sky Movement, The Skoll Foundation and CrowdRise, in an effort to spotlight women who are changing the world. More information can be found at www.raiseforwomen.com.

Below are quotes from The Third Metric Conference.

Sally Osberg, Skoll Foundation President and CEO: “Giving back always sounds to me like you’re paying a debt. What about just giving?”

Jill Abramson: “It isn’t the stress that is bad for you, it’s the need to learn how to deal with that.”

Candice Bergen: “I am all for expanding the third metric as I understand it — re-expanding it to focus on your quality of life, time spent with your family and with your kids — that seems to be vitally important.”

Mark Bertolini: “When your work defines what your work-life balance is, you’ve lost control.”

Mika Brzezinski: “We all need to have a true, honest conversation, about not only the challenges we face, but how we can help each other.”

Katie Couric: “I think probably one of the reasons [Arianna] wanted to do this, is because we’re all so busy, stressed, anxiety-ridden, on this hamster wheel of life. And, so many things are resonating with me — just going through the motions of the day, and getting through, and then falling into bed completely exhausted. And looking at your days and thinking, is this really how I want to live my life?”
Bill George, Harvard Business School professor: “If you don’t have an introspective practice, I don’t know how you’ll be a successful leader.”

Adrian Grenier: “As a recovering celebrity, I was for a long time pursuing the American dream … that makes it seem like you have it all … It’s about humbling myself and asking what can I learn from others.”

Arianna Huffington: “We all have this place in us, a place of strength, harmony and wisdom, but most of the time we don’t live there … How can we course-correct faster? How can we encourage each other to live in that place more?”

Dr. Mark Hyman: “If you really knew what was happening to you when you’re stressed, you would freak out. It’s not pretty… Get acquainted with your pause button.”

Valerie B. Jarrett: “Find a boss that accepts your life. And make time for your family.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill: “When I found myself divorced with three young children as the elected prosecutor of Kansas … I had to appear absolutely invincible day in and day out. That’s when I had my meltdown moment … That’s when I started searching for those moments of renewal.”

Daphne Oz, Co-host ABC’s The Chew: “I’m such a believer that the world sees you the way you see yourself.”

Rep. Tim Ryan: “Maybe George Stephanopoulos, or some of these guys, need to put [a conference] together for men.”

Joe Scarborough: “I am actually driven to the ground right now… I’m so stressed out my teeth hurt. So I’m here to learn.”

George Stephanopoulos: “I’ve been meditating for years. I haven’t missed a day since the day I started. It’s the equivalent of a couple hours more sleep … I wish my kids would meditate.”

Padmasree Warrior: “Two years ago, I found I was working all the time — entire Saturdays and Sundays — to the point where I wasn’t being creative and felt like I was not making the right decisions … Now, for 24 hours every weekend, I stay away from technology almost completely… I’ve actually found that helps me when I get back into work to be more thoughtful, and I truly believe that feeding your creative soul is really important to being more analytical.”

Ali Wentworth: “When I’m well-rested, I do better work, I don’t make mistakes. I think I’m a better wife, I’m a better mom. I think across the board, I’m a better person.”

Videos, photos and more information about the Third Metric Conference can be found here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/third-metric

Today, Sally Osberg is speaking at the Third Metric women’s conference at Arianna Huffington’s New York City home. At 5 p.m. EST, the winners of our Raise for Women contest will be announced. Then, the panel, called “Giving Back,” will commence, featuring Moderator Lesley Stahl and panelists Cathy Isaacson, Sally Osberg, Jill Van Den Brule and Paula Zakaria.

Read the live blog at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/06/third-metric-live-blog-updates_n_3391377.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000008 and follow the conference on Twitter at #thirdmetric. See photos at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/05/third-metric-conference-photos_n_3391525.html?ir=Healthy+Living&ref=topbar#slide=2539064