What Do You Stand To Lose?

How do you create a movement? How do you galvanize a community to come together for a common cause, especially when they are killing each other? Start with women.

Leymah Gbowee changed the course of history by bringing together women from the most diverse, tribal ethnic groups in her country of Liberia. Wearing white t-shirts as a symbol of peace, Leymah organized a peace movement, deliberately only with women, and eventually brought an end to the second civil war.

Harold Evans, a renowned journalist, joined her in a conversation at the Columbia Social Enterprise conference the day that she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She spoke eloquently of fear and the cost of social change. We all feel fear, and sometimes we let it overwhelm us. For Leymah, fear set in when she was just fourteen and the war consumed her country. Only at the age of thirty-one did she find her voice and her purpose—it was then that she realized that she had nothing to lose and everything to gain to step up and make a change for her country. And she found that the women around her were fearless, willing, and able to drive a movement for peace.

Leymah says that no one can teach you how to overcome fear. You have to understand it and live it in order to push past it. To do so, ask yourself, what do you stand to lose? What have you lost so far? And what will you gain if you jump into the fray? As social innovators, fear—fear of failure, of isolation, of risk—can be consuming. Perhaps weighing these simple questions can help us overcome them.

Listen to the full conversation and share with us what resonates with you most.

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