Tony Blair, British PM from 1997 until 2007 was the man who made social enterprise government policy in 2002. He was still PM in 2006 when our proposal for business for social benefit, to transition children from institutions to loving family homes, was introduced to the government of Ukraine as a 'Marshall Plan' strategy. Childcare reform was one of 4 major components.
It was a cause in which no public funded agency could offer support and yet managed to shift the needle on childcare policy which resulted in increased levels of foster care. Many had died in care through malnutrition,
Blair Mandelson and Byers would show up there later. Not to support us, I hasten to add, but to befriend Ukraine's oligarchs
Earlier I described the experience of speaking out to a world which turned a blind eye and a deaf ear
“Excuses won’t work, particularly in light of a handful of oligarchs in Ukraine having been allowed to loot Ukraine’s economy for tens of billions of dollars. I point specifically to Akhmetov, Pinchuk, Poroshenko, and Kuchma, and this is certainly not an exhaustive list. These people can single-handedly finance 100% of all that will ever be needed to save Ukraine’s orphans. None of them evidently bother to think past their bank accounts, and seem to have at least tacit blessings at this point from the new regime to keep their loot while no one wants to consider Ukraine’s death camps, and the widespread poverty that produced them..”
The cost was considerable, especially to my colleague whose life was lost in the process. He worked alongside and was assisted by Maidan activists, who discovered his body in 2011.
At Davos last month, we see the Davos Philanthropic Roundtable chaired by Tony Blair opening with ab introduction by the oligarch who hosts it and is a donor to Tony Blair's Faith Foundation tell the world that he's never been more worried about the future of his country.
Tony Blair goes on to speak about business for social benefit as if we and the children who perished for the want of it,never existed.
If this has become a matter of a global elite talking the walk of practitioners. of a former PM building his reputation on those who've perished, can we trust any of the rhetoric?.