Tim Brodhead Visits Sauvé House For Tea Talk

On March 15, the Sauvé Scholars had the distinct pleasure of welcoming Mr. Tim Brodhead as a Special Guest for a Tea Talk.  Mr. Brodhead has had a long and distinguished career, including serving the last 15 years as President and CEO of The J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, Canada’s largest private foundation.  He also recently joined the Sauvé Foundation’s Board of Directors.

Mr. Brodhead is an incredibly warm, sincere, and brilliant man.  He understands, with immense depth and breadth, the relationship between various dimensions of our world – e.g., the environment, economics, military, politics, culture.  He is also a social innovator nonpareil.  Through his career, he has tackled in Canada and abroad, many of the challenges our world has had to confront.  This was a wonderful Tea Talk.

Mr. Brodhead began his remarks by asking each of us what we thought was the biggest challenge facing our generation.  Our answers included: AIDS, extreme poverty, climate change, genocide, lack of empathy, and ‘passive activism’.  

Mr. Brodhead impressed upon us the urgency to make our societies more resilient, by which he meant one that is more inclusive to its most marginalized elements, and that uses social innovation as a way of tackling critical challenges.

In the context of developing solutions to these challenges, he drew an interesting distinction between charity and philanthropy.  He described charity as instinctive, not calculated.  He said the impulse for charity is rooted in two of our most natural emotions - empathy and compassion. He explained that there would always be a need for charity.  However, he viewed philanthropy as a more deliberate and strategic development of solutions and deployment of resources to social problems.  In this context, he explained that money is only a facilitator – not a cause – of social change.

Mr. Brodhead also noted that we are now less engaged in, and less willing to trust, institutions (e.g., government universities, churches, foundations). Instead, we want more responsibility and independence. And our political system is sclerotic -- unable to adapt or compromise.   As an American, I could relate.

Despite all these challenges our world is facing, Mr. Brodhead concluded by presenting a positive way forward.  He defined citizenship as contributing and belonging to the collective.  He said that participation gives us an identity as part of the community.  While government has traditionally occupied much of this space, it is pulling back, and does not have to do all of the things we expected in the past.  Therefore, he said, we need to rethink government because people need to be more engaged.  We need to develop a different value system, we need to be more engaged citizens, and we need to drive social innovation through creative problem solving.  How we shape this value system, and its related institutions, is critical to meeting our future challenges.