Carol Cone:
I'm Carol Cone, and welcome to Purpose 360, the podcast that unlocks the power of purpose to ignite business and social impact.
The next series of Purpose 360 episodes were taped in person on site at the One Young World Summit that was held in Montreal this year. For those of you who are not familiar with One Young World, I hope that these conversations will get you very, very excited to follow them online because they are making terrific impact around the globe. At the conference, there were nearly 2,000 changemakers. And you have to apply to get accepted to this amazing event. And some leaders at the conference say, "You know, it's harder to get into this conference than it is to get into Harvard." Wow. The young ambassadors represented 190 countries, and you should think of this like the Olympics for changemaking. Also in attendance were leaders across the board, around the world. Think older individuals like myself, who have worked in the field for so many years helping to make change.
Today I am honored to have a brilliant gentleman who spent over 15 years of his life really promoting the importance of refugees having a full life in the countries that they're moving to. And we're going to talk about this, but Per Heggenes, welcome to the show.
Per Heggenes:
Thank you very much, and thanks for having me.
Carol Cone:
It's my pleasure. First I'd like to, Per, talk about your background in terms of the various roles, and then you're also on some boards because that is how you've gotten to be at the One Young World Summit.
Per Heggenes:
Yes. And I'm very excited about being on the One Young Board simply because we get to meet with so many super smart, engaged, passionate young people who are hell-bent on changing the trajectory and what's going on in the society right now.
Carol Cone:
And that sounds like that's very part of your personal ethos and soul. Why is that?
Per Heggenes:
Because I see that particularly at the issue of climate change, we are about to destroy these planets, and that's going to have traumatic consequences for the next generations. And we have very little time left to turn things around and make sure that we can preserve the planet and make it actually livable for the next generation. The planet will take care of itself. You don't need to worry about that, but it might not be livable for human beings.
Carol Cone:
Yes, and I don't think we can all go to Mars either. So [inaudible 00:01:58] these young people are amazing with their ideas and their connection-making and their solutions. So let's just talk about your previous role just a bit as you were CEO of the IKEA Foundation, and I know you're very proud of that, and the focus of that then leads into your current passion and commitment.
Per Heggenes:
Yeah. Actually, I'm proud of the founder of IKEA, who decided to take the company, the very successful company IKEA, and give it to a foundation and make sure that all the profits that comes out of this successful business is either reinvested in the company or used for philanthropy.
That's the only way the money can be used, and that means that as long as IKEA is successful, the foundation can continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on helping people in the Global South to a better life.
Carol Cone:
And you said it was 1982 when that structure was created.
Per Heggenes:
It was in 1982, yes. And the company was much smaller at that time.
Carol Cone:
Smaller but incredibly successful today. And very much as I asked you was there anybody else in the world that's done that? And we have to give a hat tip to Yvon Chouinard and what he's done with Patagonia, which is wonderful, but that's 2024 when he did it.
Per Heggenes:
Clearly a company that's also very passionate and very socially-focused and very environmentally-oriented and committed. And that's what you see with IKEA as a business as well. I often say that what IKEA business is doing is more important than what the foundation is doing, but sometimes we can be complementary. And we've seen a couple of good examples of where we have been complementary, the foundation and the company, in driving social change in society.
Carol Cone:
And can... And the foundation had very specific focus. I know that we have this term at Carol Cone ON PURPOSE called Focus is Your Friend. And I know that it was very thoughtful. Can you talk about the focus in terms of what you were concentrating on and then some of the impacts you've had?
Per Heggenes:
So the focus from the founder was to help improve the lives of children and youth living in the Global South. He felt that the Northern Hemisphere could take care of itself, and the Global South needed help. And he wanted people who have not had or will not have the opportunity to come to IKEA and buy the great products for a great price that they also benefit from some of the success of the company. So that's why he set up the foundation and made sure that a good part of the profits sort of on... of the company would go towards helping people to a better life.
So children and youth was the focus. Now, in the early days, we worked a lot with child rights organization with providing healthcare, providing education to children in the Global South. But then, at some point, we decided that there might be a way for us to be more impactful in what we do. So we rethought our strategy and basically decided that what we're going to do is we're going to focus on the two biggest threats to children's future in the Global South.
And we defined those two threats as being climate change on one hand and poverty on the other hand. The work we do, and we did over the last 10 years, was really focused on mitigating climate change, which, of course, needs to happen in the Global North because that's where all the carbon emissions are, and that's where we need to change dramatically in order to get where we need to get on the trajectory to net-zero.
And at the same time, we worked on poverty in the Global South, which means working on helping create jobs, building the economy, helping people to a better life. And in everything we did, we tried to look at how can we do this with a dual impact, an economic impact for the people there, and environmental impact in terms of what we did. So when we focused on entrepreneurship, for example, entrepreneurship would be in the green space. So we would do waste management, recycling management, which is a huge business opportunity in the Global South.
We would do regenerative agriculture because if you want to work on income generation in the continent like Africa, for example, 70% of all the people work in farming, so smallholder farmers. So you need to drive agriculture in a way that is good for nature and good for the individuals. And finally, a lot of the focus we had was on providing access to energy. I mean, 600 million people in the world have no access to energy or very limited access to energy. And without access to energy, you can't build an economy.
Carol Cone:
Right, exactly. And can you share with our listeners one or two programs or subprograms that you are just really so proud of?
Per Heggenes:
I'm very proud of the work we've done in the refugee space, and I can come back to that, but as I often say, if we can't fix the climate problem, everything else we do is going to mean less... be less important because we want to have a livable planet for the next generations. So as we believe as a foundation that business have a very important role to play in this. This is not about the UN and government setting regulation and targets. This is about getting people on the ground, getting businesses to change how they operate.
So an example of what we did was about two years before the Paris Climate Summit in 2015, so beginning of 2014, we brought the seven leading NGOs, Climate NGOs, that focus on business together and said, "Okay, let's work together. Let's collaborate to find a way to get the best possible result and outcome from the Paris negotiations." And the Paris negotiations, as you know, came out with a very concrete commitment to net-zero by 2050.
Out of that came the establishment of something called the Science Based Target Initiative, which is basically a standard and an organization that helps businesses understand how can you maximize your carbon reduction in your type of business and then verify the targets that have been set and then monitor that. And Science Based Targets Initiative has been a huge success and is now being used by thousands so global companies around the world. And that had not [inaudible 00:08:48] in the light of day if it hadn't been for the funding from IKEA Foundation for the first seven years.
Carol Cone:
And it's wonderful to bring so many powerful groups together but to get them to collaborate-
Per Heggenes:
Exactly
Carol Cone:
... versus their own interests.
Per Heggenes:
Well, also, you need to create a level playing field here. So that's very important in business of course. And that's what we did with the Science Based Target Initiative because everyone can measure up against the same standard, and these standards aren't created by governments or the EU. There's a lot of work that needs to be done by philanthropic organization to invest in development of tools of standards.
Carol Cone:
Right.
Per Heggenes:
And also holding companies and governments to account, making sure that they live up to their promises because, as I said, we have very little time left. We have no time to lose. We need to push.
Carol Cone:
Right, right. I just want to shift for a moment. When you're on... You're on the board at One Young World. How long have you been on the board, and is there an initiative or two that you can talk about that you're very excited about?
Per Heggenes:
I've been on the board for about three years, and what really excites me is that this is the largest organization [inaudible 00:10:08] organizing young leaders. 17,000 young leaders have been through this organization. They communicate among themselves to share ideas. They develop solutions to the problems that we have, and the excitement and the engagement by these young people is very different to what you see in society overall.
I think these are unique people in many ways who are working in their local communities and their countries around the world to drive the different developments that are needed to protect the oceans, protect the environment, protect the forests, reduce carbon emissions, ensure that we can actually succeed in what we need to do to get to net-zero.
And that sort of excitement, that sort of enthusiasm, passion is very unusual to see, but we see it here every day. The conference is just full of these people who explain what they do, what their ambitions are, and their ambitions are not to make much more money. The ambition is to make a difference and have the feeling that they make a difference for the world and make a difference for their own community.
Carol Cone:
It's very exciting. We've had actually a number that we've interviewed and we will air for our listeners. Let's talk about one of your favorite topics and that's refugees and giving them a better life. So where did that passion that you have for refugees come from? And then, can you talk about the current situation because there's so much migration happening all around the globe for various reasons? So let's just... that's the big questions, but let's just start. Where did you get the passion for refugees?
Per Heggenes:
Like so many things in life, it was a coincidence in the that when I started out as CEO of the foundation, I had no clue what I was doing because I had no background and experience in philanthropy and I was a business person. And the founder of IKEA, I think, was excited about having a business person to run the foundation and not somebody else. Also, somebody who can understand his very strong focus on values and principles, which underpins everything IKEA does. And it's not the company that puts the values on the wall. It's a company that used the values every day to underpin their decisions.
So I met somebody who was... who worked for the High Commissioner for Refugees, and I got interested in it, and I thought, "Okay, this is an area where hardly any foundation, this is 15 years ago, engages. But this is a group of people that are struggling to make a living and struggling to make a new start in life." And I thought this might be good for IKEA and IKEA Foundation to engage with because typical for IKEA is they do this kind of stuff that others don't do. They don't replicate what others do. So I started looking into this, and I started working with the High Commissioner for Refugees.
And it became also clear to me that when you see these settings, the largest refugee-hosting countries in the world is not in America or in Europe. It's in the Middle East in Sub-Saharan Africa. That's where you find the most refugees in small and middle-income countries. And I saw that they would be placed in camps with no rights to work, no rights to move around, no rights to government services, and basically sit idle and do nothing. And when you know that the average refugee sit in a camp for more than 20 years. As a business person, I said, "This is a total waste.
How can we work to get these people engaged to use their skills, their knowledge, their interests, their work capacity to actually go from being dependent on aid to actually becoming self-reliant and restarting their life?" Because the only thing a refugee is actually looking for is not the benefits or support. They're looking for a new start in life because they were forced to flee. They didn't flee because they thought life would be better somewhere else. They fled because they couldn't stay where they are because of conflict or increasingly because of climate change and the impact of climate change.
Carol Cone:
Right. And so, there have been some successful immigrant settlement programs around the globe. And I'm wondering, have you been engaged with any of those? Did you help to shape any of those, or would you just like to call them out and explain what they look like?
Per Heggenes:
Well, I have focused most of my time on working in the refugee-hosting countries in the Global South to use that expression. And in the Global South, it's really about trying to look differently upon a refugee/host community setting and look at this as a way to use international resources to drive economic development because economic development will probably take them to a different place than they are today, and that's more sustainable over time instead of putting in aid year after year after year. If you take the discussion to the north, to Europe, and to North America and to Canada. We are in Canada today, right.
And Canada is probably the best example in the world of successful refugee integration policies. The way they do it in Canada is more effective than it's done in any other parts of the world. But we tend to think about refugee and immigration as a problem that we need to solve, but it's not a problem we need to solve. It's the situation we need to manage. And if we manage this properly, it can be an opportunity. And I give you an example of that. If you look at Europe, right now, it's a population of 450 million people. We have a fertility rate. It's probably around 1.5, 1.6. We have an aging population.
And for us to keep the same workforce level that we have today in 2024 in 2050, we will have to import 60 million people because we're not giving birth to the number of people that are needed to replace the people who retire. So if we would be smarter about how we actually take advantage of the immigrants that are coming to the country, we can integrate them into society and make them productive into society, help them provide value to society, and at the same time, what we do is give them a new start in life, which is the only thing they're looking for, a new start in life because they were forced to flee where they came from.
Carol Cone:
Right. And so why has Canada been so successful?
Per Heggenes:
Canada has very strong government policies for how they integrate what we call resettled refugees. These are refugees that didn't come to Canada illegally but are selected in different parts of the world to come to Canada. Secondly, the uniqueness of the Canadian program is they engage society.
Families can come together and adopt the refugee family, which means that not only do the refugees get the financial support to get a new start in Canada, but they get the social support and the social interaction because there are three or four families who have committed to actually make this family successful in their new start in the Canadian life.
Carol Cone:
That's brilliant.
Per Heggenes:
It's a brilliant system, and it's being increasingly replicated in other parts of the world because it's proven so successful.
Carol Cone:
But think about being inclusive and welcoming and... to strangers that don't speak the language and barely have anything, if anything, with them.
Per Heggenes:
There's a tendency as, you know, to stigmatize refugees and immigrants or people who come to the country seeking to live off of benefits. And if not, getting into crime. There's probably not much more crime among our immigrants than are about... among our own people. It's just it gets focused like that in the media, and that prevents proper integration because you have this scapegoat mentality. So I think we need to change the narrative around refugees and migrants and also understand that refugees are, by definition, people who are entitled to protection according to 1951 Convention.
These are people who have been prosecuted in their own countries. Then that's the minority, all the people. The majority of the people are immigrants looking for a better economic life, but that's not because they didn't want to stay where they are. That's because they couldn't make a living. And that's where climate change comes in, because climate change has made it very difficult in many parts of the Global South to actually farm the land, for example.
Droughts are made impossible to farm the land. Some of that can be mitigated or through climate adaptation. You provide irrigation systems, for example. That requires energy. So that means we need to provide access to energy. So there's a lot we can do to adapt to a better pattern. That's not going to change anytime soon. But at the same time, in many areas, there won't be possible for people to stay, and therefore, they move because they're forced to move.
Carol Cone:
Right. I don't know if you've thought about how AI might be applied to refugee situation in terms of perhaps matching individuals and jobs and regions and communities.
Per Heggenes:
AI has a huge potential, of course, like any dramatic change in technology, and it's just a question of how we use it and how we use it purposefully. AI doesn't have a conscience, so we have to get the AI the conscience, right.
Carol Cone:
Right. I don't know. We just had an article published in Fast Company today from my firm, which is about what is the power of purpose in an AI-driven world. And we basically said that people have humanity and AI can give you lots of solutions, but humans will still be part of the equation.
Per Heggenes:
We'll have to be. I think when you get old, you don't want to be treated by robots, right.
Carol Cone:
No, no, not at all.
Per Heggenes:
As we have an increasingly large elderly population, we will need a lot of people in the service area. But go back to AI. I think AI has a huge potential to, for example, in the health sectors, provides remote diagnosis for people where they have no access to a doctor overnight. It has maybe potential to assess people living in poverty with no access to finances and where access to some capital would be what they need to start a new life and to build their own personal wealth.
I think there are a lot of opportunities where people living in poverty, it's very expensive to live in poverty. As you know, it's expensive to be poor, whereas everything is more difficult. Everything is more expensive, and you don't get off to a start because you don't have access to the capital that we take for granted. So I could think of AI being used in a way that you don't look at creative worthiness only on the basis of your asset, but you look at it in a more sophisticated way.
Carol Cone:
Okay. What sort of guidance do you want to give to the young people that have come to One Young World in terms of their future, their passions, and such?
Per Heggenes:
Stay true to your passion and keep going. Because when you look at climate change, the biggest existential threat to humanity, I think of this as me being the part of the first generation that every time... any time at all felt the impact to climate change, right. But I'm also the last generation to do something about it. And we are not pushing hard enough in my generation.
So we need young people to remind us of that and not only push us on the political level on the business level and make sure that the changes go faster but also provide their thinking, their creativity, their innovative minds to find new solutions to the problems that we have.
Because it's not like we don't have the solutions to climate change. We have most of the tools that we need, but are always possible to develop new and smarter and more efficient tools. And I see a lot of energy and excitement, enthusiasm, and ideas from these young people who come to the One Young World conferences.
Carol Cone:
So it's almost like we need a shark tank to have our billionaires and maybe some government people that have funds and that they get exposed to these amazing young minds.
Per Heggenes:
True. And philanthropy can play a very important role in this because philanthropy can do one thing that no other organizations can do. Philanthropy can take risk, can fail, and it has no consequences.
Carol Cone:
That's right.
Per Heggenes:
So philanthropy should be there at the early stage of development of new models, new tools, innovations, then capture the evidence and do the job to make sure that a future investment and the future scaling is less risky than it is at the outset. We can take the risk at the outset and then others can scale it to a different level. And that's how we basically try to focus at the IKEA Foundation in the 15 years I was there.
Carol Cone:
In terms of any companies because we have C-suite individuals and senior executives listening into our podcast, in terms of your incredible experience with the IKEA Foundation, as well as your exposure to One Young World delegates, what would you like to say to those leaders?
They have money, they have position, but what kind of guidance would you like to give to them? They're not Yvon Chouinard. They're kind of the laggards at this point. What do you think you should tell them?
Per Heggenes:
I think it's important to realize that if you're smart about it, you can be a social changemaker and profitable at the same time. I think there are companies that have shown that taking a strong social responsibility, especially in there where they actively engaged. It's just a company like Unilever, for example. And Paul Polman, when he was the CEO there, he demonstrated that you can make money for the shareholders at the same time, do the right thing, and you can be a driver and a leader in climate change as well as circular economy.
All the things that companies need to think about in order to get to the net-zero target that they need to. And if I look at IKEA, IKEA has been doing a leadership role in some of the different areas year after year, partly because they think it's good for business and partly because it's in their values and in their structure to actually think like that. It's just the way they think about the world and think about themselves and their own role in society.
And if more companies will do that, I think they will be equally successful, simply because young people today, who are the future customers, it matters to them who makes the products that they are consuming. It matters to them who makes the food that they're consuming more than it did maybe for the previous generation. And companies will not be successful and competitive in the future unless they also pay attention to that side.
Carol Cone:
Well, I want to thank you on behalf of Purpose 360 and on behalf of just having the world work for all of your amazing efforts. So thank you, Per, and thank you for being on the show.
Per Heggenes:
Thank you for having me talking about these very exciting opportunities that we actually have to make a better work.
Carol Cone:
This podcast was brought to you by some amazing people, and I'd love to thank them. Anne Hundertmark and Kristin Kenney at Carol Cone ON PURPOSE, Pete Wright, and Andy Nelson, our crack production team at TruStory FM. And you, our listener, please rate and rank us because we really want to be as high as possible as one of the top business podcasts available so that we can continue exploring together the importance and the activation of authentic purpose. Thanks so much for listening.
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