:: Gillian Caldwell | Architect of Peace

Armed with a BA from Harvard and a jurist doctorate from Georgetown, Gillian Caldwell is an attorney and filmmaker who has spent the better part of the last three decades passionately committed to the cause of human rights. Caldwell is the former co-director of the Global Survival Network, where she led a two-year undercover investigation into the trafficking of women from Russia into the sex trades of the newly formed free states of the just-disintegrated Soviet Republic.

In 1992, in the wake of the infamous Rodney King beating, Caldwell teamed up with musician Peter Gabriel to form WITNESS, an independent non-profit that uses the power medium of video to expose human rights around the world. By providing video cameras to people around the world, WITNESS enabled them to use video and online technologies to expose human rights abuses and create change.

Caldwell's work with WITNESS garnered much praise, including a Rockefeller Foundation Next Generation Leadership Award, a Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship Award, and was named a special partner for Ashoka's Innovators for the Public program in 2003.

A tireless crusader, Caldwell soon turned her considerable energy to the area of the environment and helped form 1Sky in 2007. As founding campaign manager, Caldwell oversees 1Sky's mission to be a collaborative campaign aimed at bringing hundreds of diverse organizations together. These groups, with interests of all kinds-environmental, social justice, youth, health, humanitarian, and faith, band together under 1Sky to demand a single set of policy objectives-the 1Sky Solution-to reduce global warming pollution, re-power America with 100 percent renewable energy, and to create five million new green jobs in the process. To date, 1Sky has brought together 425 organizations and has a combined force of 164,000 citizen advocates. Caldwell's efforts with 1Sky have garnered her the Skoll Foundation's Social Entrepreneurship Award in 2007.

Quotations

"This challenge presents one of the greatest opportunities we've ever had as a species, to come together around a cause of extremely common concern and get it right. I think the future's bright if we pull together, but we have to do it now and we have to do it with purpose and intensity."

References

1Sky:

WITNESS: