When we deny the poor and the vulnerable their own human dignity and capacity for freedom and choice, it becomes self-denial. It becomes a denial of both our collective and individual dignity, at all levels of society.

My whole life has been spent with people who have taken every knock in the world. No advantages. Yet they greet you with a big smile, they give you what they have, and they keep coming back. They are the fighters.

What we call people so often distances us from them, and makes them little.

For too much of history, we've viewed the world's precious resources - both environmental and human - as things to extract, to make the most of in order to maximize their potential.

I think I still have a great sense of adventure and trust, and am surprisingly idealistic given all the horrible things I've seen since I was 25. I think how I have changed is that I have a much deeper understanding of the dark forces in the world, of power.

I was encouraged to break all the rules but to take the best of philanthropy, the best of investing, and the best of development finance, and experiment with new ways to create this venture capital model of using philanthropy to back patient capital investments, and then build solutions that were measured in terms of the kind of impact and change they were making on people's lives and in the world, not just on the financial return.

The time for change is now.