Children First: UNICEF Speaker Series Thursday, February 4, 2016
Children First Speaker Series Co-Chair Barbara Eisenson, Board Member Janet Green, Brian Meyers of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, and author Adam Fifield.
You can view footage of this event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtIh43B7wc8&feature=youtu.be
Recently, at the Hampshire House in Boston, we welcomed Adam Fifield, a journalist and writer, for the third event in this season’s Children First UNICEF Speaker Series. Providing each guest with a signed copy of A Mighty Purpose, his new biography of Jim Grant, head of UNICEF from 1980 -1995, Adam painted a vivid picture for all of us of the visionary, obsessive, controversial, and inspiring leader. While now unknown to many outside of humanitarian and development circles, Grant had a profound effect on the delivery of life-saving services to children around the globe, saving, in the encomium of Nicholas Kristof, “more lives than were destroyed by Hitler, Mao, and Stalin combined."
Daring to challenge bureaucracies and accepted practice, Jim Grant initiated the “child survival revolution,” a movement that continues to make dramatic strides to this day. Through improved access to lifesaving vaccines, rehydration packets and basic medicines, Grant showed that all countries in the world can save their children. His negotiations with leaders both admired and reviled, including some of the most terrible despots in our time, demonstrate both his remarkable focus on saving the lives of all children and his creative, effective powers of persuasion.
Adam described, in humorous detail, the difficulties of working for a man who was always late, did not sleep, was constantly on the move, and who asked the IMPOSSIBLE, of himself, AND of everyone around him. He also shared several anecdotes from the book of moments when UNICEF employees working with Grant could not believe the audacity, and the brilliance, of the man.
As someone who has read the book (and who also did not know of the story of the incredible Jim Grant), I can attest that the book is an inspiring, uplifting, informative and very quick read. To learn that Grant’s dying wishes and hopes--as he lay dying of cancer in 1995—were still focused on saving the children of the world and convincing President Clinton to sign the Convention on the Rights of the Child, reveal Jim Grant for the hero he certainly was, and continues to be…in the work of UNICEF and saving children.
Written by Children First Speaker Series Co-Chair Barbara Eisenson
