It was the eighth Skoll forum, and the eighth I have been lucky enough to attend. Like my visit to India a few years ago, it was a love/hate experience. It was a complete nightmare trying to get access to the event, even though the SocialEnterpriseLive team wanted to blog, video and generally spread the Skoll learning as widely as possible to our 20,000-strong network. But when we eventually managed to penetrate the ivory tower and secure a ticket (only for two of the three days, mind), I was lucky enough to spend my time there in awe of most things and people that I saw and heard â Jeff Skoll himself, photojournalist Nick Danziger, Vagina Monologues creator Eve Ensler, singer Annie Lennox, ex-Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and Rockefeller Foundation president Judith Rodin, to name just a few.
The experience was punctuated with periods of anger and frustration at the exclusivity, mutual backslapping, cheesiness and cliquey love-ins that accompany this event each year. Itâs amazing how much social good you think are doing if you throw lots of cash at it. And itâs always amazing how much Skoll ignores the best examples of UK social entrepreneurship sitting on its doorstep. But remove my cynical side and mostly, I was â as always â comprehensively inspired by the richness of the content, the conversations, the commitment and, this year, also the campaigning that Skoll convenes and curates so brilliantly.












