The people changing the world

It's very easy to compile a list of the historic figures who have changed our world for the better. The 20th century, like every era before it, was shaped by a series of great heroes – the likes of Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King – who dared to stand up for what they believed and, in doing so, succeeded in sweeping the world along with them.

It's much harder, however, to compile a list of the people currently changing our world for the better. Who exactly are the Gandhis of tomorrow? Where are the men and women who will one day be seen as the heroes of 21st-century history?

In truth, today's world can seem a depressing place. Newspapers and TV screens bombard us with stories of the arrogance of government, the brutality of war and the collapse of communities. In this relentless mix, it can feel impossible to identify people who offer hope for the future.

This week, however, a remarkable event will take place in London which attempts to bring inspiring individuals to the fore. The third annual Be The Change conference, to be held over three days at Central Hall in Westminster, will bring together a host of influential activists and opinion formers from across the globe, along with a range of prominent speakers, including George Monbiot, Bianca Jagger and Jonathon Porritt.

Their aim over the three days of the conference – for which The Independent is official media partner – will be to provide delegates with ideas about what they might do to combat the pressing issues of our times. In particular, this year's conference aims to address global warming and to establish what the world can do to fight it.

Through the experiences and personal stories of a selection of activists working in a wide range of fields, the event aims (as its name suggests) to enable the ordinary people among its several hundred delegates to, quite literally, "be" the change.

Its opening on Thursday will also mark the culmination of an extraordinary journey. From humble beginnings in 2004, when it was founded by a group of business leaders frustrated by the failures of governments, Be The Change has spawned a rapidly growing international movement. The name was inspired by one of Gandhi's most repeated aphorisms: "You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

Each of the three annual conferences, which have grown in size each year, has focused on a pressing global issue. This year's conference will be the launch of a book telling the stories of 28 of the most inspiring individuals connected to Be The Change.

The book was compiled by Trenna Cormack, a writer who first attended the event in 2005. "While I listened to all these tales of passion, optimism and determination, I thought, 'This is brilliant! There should be a book about this,'" she says. "Then I realised that I shouldn't wait for someone to do it. I should be the change myself."

Some of Cormack's subjects are famous – such as the Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai – but many are little-known people who simply decided quietly to do something for their communities. They include a South African who set up sub-Saharan Africa's first free university; the daughter of an imprisoned Nigerian president campaigning for women's rights in her country; and a former clothes designer leading a one-man crusade to bring big business to account over climate change.

A quality that unites all the individuals – many of whom are profiled on the following pages – is fearlessness. Some began their personal quests after a sudden moment of anger or frustration at what they saw around them, others after suffering great personal hardship. Having lost her legs in the 7 July 2005 terror attacks on London, Gill Hicks quit her job and became an ambassador for Peace Direct. "There is so much we can do for each other, " she says. "Let's not wait for a tragedy to do that."

Yet, while we may marvel at the ambition and optimism of these people, the aim of the Be The Change movement is not simply to impress. Instead, it aims to challenge. According to Cormack, the people in her book are not just a collection of one-offs who beat the odds and stood up for what they believed in. They are also people we ought to follow. "What's so inspiring when you meet these people is that they're just normal people, like you or me," she says. "And if they can do it, there's no excuse for us any more."

Trenna Cormack's book Be The Change is published on Thursday this week by Love Books (£12.99). To order a copy for the special price of £11.69 (free P&P), call Independent Books Direct on 0870 079 8897 or visit the website www.independentbooksdirect.co.ukThe Be The Change 2007 conference takes place from Thursday to Saturday this week at Central Hall, Westminster, London SW1. Independent readers can receive a £10 discount for each day by entering the promotion code "Ind1" into the booking page at www.bethechange.org.uk

Jo Wilding
Circus impresario

Jo Wilding has been to Iraq several times, but when she returned in 2004, she wanted to do something that would bring a smile to the faces of the thousands of children whose lives had been ripped apart by the war. So she bought a travelling circus to the streets of Baghdad

"I first went to Iraq in August 2001. Then I went in February 2003 and when the war started a few weeks later, I was going into hospitals, interviewing civilian casualties, and taking witness statements from them. I wrote damage and medical reports and just tried to build up as full a picture as possible.

"Back in the UK, I saw someone with a great big bubble blower at a festival, making huge bubbles. I was already planning to go back to Iraq, so I said, 'Right, I'm taking one of those with me.' I had these grand ideas of a travelling big top and trapeze rig and funfair. I had to slightly scale down my grand ambitions, but a friend of mine said, 'Yes, that's a great idea.'

"The circus toured for three months in 2004. There were four of us going anywhere where there were children – schools, orphanages, youth centres. We even held it in the street to begin with, when things were a bit safer. We would turn up, put on a bit of face paint, get into our costumes and then do a show and then play games with the kids and spend some time with people."

Clive Stafford Smith
Lawyer

Clive Stafford Smith is a human-rights lawyer who specialises in defending prisoners on Death Row in the US, and has defended Guantanamo Bay detainees. In 2004, the Supreme Court agreed with him that the Guantanamo detainees had the right to have their cases heard in a US court.

"My work is a matter of bringing power to the powerless. It strikes me that there are some things that are just simple, black and white. And everything is black and white when it comes to the death penalty. It's an incredible privilege to be able to get up every day and go out there and help people. I've had six clients who've been executed, and that's tough. But it's exponentially tougher on the poor guy who's getting executed. You can spend your time racked with guilt, or you can get on with it.

"We sued George Bush in February 2002. It was three of us – me, Joe Margulies and the Centre for Constitutional Rights. We were suing the most powerful person in the entire world – and he lost. I think that's fantastic. We've beaten him. The US Supreme Court said that George Bush could not hold these people beyond the rule of law."

Taddy Blecher
Educationalist

Taddy Blecher joined the Community and Individual Development Association, which taught in South African townships, and founded sub-Saharan Africa's first free university.

"We wanted to prove that you could take somebody who, at 12, had been sniffing glue, and that individual could become a chartered accountant, a merchant banker, a stockbroker, and that they could be a well-adjusted human being.

"We wrote a letter to 350 schools in three provinces and asked them to send us their top-three brightest kids, who could never afford to go to university, and we would give them a world-class business degree for £25 for the year. Over five months, we ended up getting 3,500 applications.

"Today, we've been going for seven years, and about 3,500 graduates have come through our programmes. Those students between them are now earning 154m South African Rand in annual salaries – about £11 million. If you take net present value of those earnings over a 40-year period, it's about R4.5bn (£370m) going into the hands of the poor over the next 40 years."

Wangari Maathai
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Wangari Maathai has spent decades campaigning for democracy and environmental issues in Kenya and began the Green Belt Movement, which aims to provide her countrymen with food and firewood. In 2004, she received the Nobel Peace Prize.

"When I first started, I just wanted to see a countryside covered with green vegetation. I don't like to see the soil exposed unless it's absolutely necessary, because when you expose the soil, you expose it to soil loss. I went about achieving that by organising women into groups and then into networks. They produced the seedlings from seeds. They talked to their neighbours and encouraged them to plant them on their farms. Then we moved to public lands, like schools, and now we are into the forested mountains, which have been degraded.

"The first steps were really just to talk to women and convince them that we could do something about some of the issues they were raising: they didn't have firewood, they didn't have clean drinking water, they didn't have adequate food. A tree brings transformation within a very short time, especially in the tropics.

"It's not as if you can change everything. There are certain things that you may feel you can't change, but it's also true that you can start with something very small. You can start with your own lifestyle and influence other people. You need to love it so that you can stay with it, because you don't change things overnight."

Katie Alcott
Entrepreneur

Alcott founded Frank Water in 2005. Every litre of Frank Water sold in the UK provides 200 litres of clean water in the Third World. More than 20,000 people have benefited from its work.

"At the time we started the business, the bottled-water industry in the UK was taking off. There were lots of articles about it, and there just happened to be lots of articles about world water issues as well. These two things came together. All the water companies were run by big companies who notoriously have poor reputations for things they do in developing countries, so it seemed like a perfect opportunity for people who drink bottled water to buy something that was giving something back.

"One of the best things about Frank is going to India and seeing the results, and meeting the villagers. We've helped them to have clean water and seen the effect that has. It's incredible.

"Last year, we had the most amazing welcome. I saw someone I'd taken photos of the year before, which we had on our website and postcard. He saw himself on the postcard, carrying this massive bowl of water on his head from the desert. He looked so much healthier this time. It was an amazing feeling."

Jeremy Gilley
Filmmaker

Jeremy Gilley made a documentary about his efforts to bring about a global day of ceasefire and non-violence, and founded Peace One Day. In 2001, the member states of the United Nations adopted his global day of non-violence, and 21 September became Peace Day.

"I really wanted to make a film about peace, and my research led me to realise that there was no day of peace. That's when I had my idea: could I make a film about trying to establish the first ever day of peace on the planet with a fixed calendar date?

"Very quickly I realised that the United Nations had the structure to be the foundation for a moment of global unity. Very early on, I started writing to the UN, as well as every government, every intergovernmental and non-governmental organisation I could think of, and all the Nobel Peace laureates.

"I was invited around the world to meet key individuals like the Dalai Lama, Oscar Arias, Mary Robinson and Kofi Annan. They supported the idea. The campaign was launched in 1999, and the UN resolution was passed in September 2001. The UN said that 100 million people were active [in peace-making] on that date this year. We thought that about 27.6 million people were active in 2006. If it continues this way, we predict that by 2012 about 3 billion people will be aware of the date – that's almost half the world."

Paul Dickinson
Campaigner against climate change

Dickinson left a career in design to investigate climate change. He created Carbon Disclosure Project, which asks companies to declare their emissions and responses to climate change. The findings are freely available on the internet.

"In 2000, I had become convinced that climate change was something I was going to be condemned – or blessed – to work on for the rest of my life. I made contact with Tessa Tennant, the founder of the environmental investment movement in Europe in 1988.

"She and I took the view that there are 100 people who, if you could get them in a single room, could stop climate change. Those 100 people are the heads of the 100 largest fund-management institutions, who collectively control more than 60 per cent of the shares of all the world's companies. That's the idea behind the Carbon Disclosure Project; 71 per cent of the world's largest companies have sent an answer to our questionnaires, and those answers are available on our website."

Mel Young
Homeless World Cup organiser

Mel Young is the founder of The Big Issue in Scotland. In 2001, he co-founded the Homeless World Cup.

"In 2001, I was having a beer with a friend, Harald Schmied. We figured we could make up a language for homeless people that only they could understand. Then we said, 'Well, there is an international language, it's football'. So I told my friend, 'Well, we have a team in Scotland at the Big Issue, some of the sellers.' And he replied, 'I have the same in Austria.' So I said, 'OK, we'll be Scotland and you can be Austria and we'll play each other, and we'll win!' By the end of the evening we'd created the Homeless World Cup.

"By the end of the next night, we had other countries taking part and, in 2003, we held the first Homeless World Cup, in Graz, Austria. A little time after, we decided to find out what had happened to the players. We found that 77 to 80 per cent of them had made a change in their lives. They'd been so motivated by this experience that they'd found jobs, and got themselves into houses."

Jonathon Porritt
Environmentalist

Porritt, a former director of Friends of the Earth, founded the charity Forum for the Future, which advises organisations on sustainable development.

"I want to see people acknowledging the need to co-create a future with the natural world. I start at that level because I've become convinced that unless we change our mindsets in that sort of way, then a lot of the behaviour change which is going on at the individual and community level will wither.

"Forum for the Future is the biggest part of the transformative work I'm involved in. The idea was to work with people's positive energy regarding their relationship with other people and the natural world. I say, 'working with positive energy', as much of my time as a green activist had been spent working with people's negative energy: with guilt about the terrible things they were doing to the world; with fear at the prospects for themselves or their children; and anger at the fact that the planet was being trashed. A young activist coming into the scene today has a choice: they can go into campaigning organisations that will take on the wrongdoers, or they can go into a whole host of organisations that are about bridge-building.

"We work alongside sustainability champions to challenge them, empower them. I'm interested in the relationships between people, the environment and economy – hence my belief that sustainable development is the big idea that can sustain the weight of political response we now need."

Hafsat Abiola-Costello
Women's rights campaigner

Hafsat Abiola-Costello founded the Kudirat Initiative for Democracy (Kind), which works to empower Nigerian women. Her father won the country's presidential election in 1993, but was jailed. He died in prison just before his release. Her mother was assassinated in 1996 after campaigning for her husband's release.

"Kind was born when my mum was assassinated. She was killed in the course of trying to bring about political change. We'd had decades of military rule. My father, through a democratic election, won the presidential election, but the military ruler decided that he wanted to continue to rule the country. So they put him in prison, and my mum became an activist.

"She began to organise demonstrations. As her profile increased, the military decided that this pro-democracy issue was a problem, and that putting its leaders in jail wasn't resolving [it]. So instead of putting my mum in jail like they'd done with my dad, they assassinated her.

"I decided to create an organisation that would participate in the movement for democracy in Nigeria. The vision was an Africa where women and youth were equal participants in shaping the continent's economic, social and political development.

"At first, our focus was on building the pro-democracy movement and restoring democracy. That happened in 1999, and then we decided that within that remit, women's participation is crucial, so we should work to help female leaders in Nigeria. That's what Kind had been doing since."

Craig Kielburger
Charity founder

Kielburger was 12 years old in 1995 when he heard about child labour for the first time. He backpacked around south-east Asia, meeting children working in factories and hearing their stories. With 11 classmates, he formed the child labour charity Free the Children.

"I grew up in Toronto. For me, poverty was something that you saw either in the city downtown, or you saw it on the news. I read an article on the front page of the Toronto Star: 'Battled child labour, boy, 12, murdered.' It sent me on a journey that would forever change my life.

"I remember trying to sit down with my parents and I started by saying that I wanted to take two months off school. I said that I wanted to go through India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand and Nepal, researching child labour.

"My Mom said, 'Craig, we love you very much, but you're 12. You can't take the subway by yourself. So no, you can't go to India by yourself.'

"But every morning, I kept asking the same question, until finally she said, 'You're not allowed to ask again, unless you already have half the money in the bank, and you can prove that you'd be safe. Then we'd talk about it.' I started shovelling driveways to save up the money. Then I found a chaperone – a 25-year-old student from theUniversity of Toronto – to go with me.

"While we were travelling, by luck, the prime minister of Canada and a Canadian trade delegation of 250 business leaders were in Asia at the same time. I ended up holding a press conference with two freed child slaves. Since then, a small group of concerned students has rapidly expanded."

Gill Hicks
Survivor of the London bombings

Gill Hicks was on the Tube in London on 7 July 2005 when a suicide bomber blew up her carriage. She lost both legs. She left a high-flying career to become an ambassador for the charity Peace Direct.

"Things can change in the click of a finger. That, for me, is what experiencing the bomb was like. I was very, very close to the suicide bomber. However, where I'm fortunate is that I survived, and I have a life.

"For everything to be so normal, and then changing to something so surreal and unimaginable – that was a very powerful reminder of the fragility of life. For me, my innocence was gone that day. For 45 minutes, I waited to be rescued. I sat there waking up to the real possibility of death. I chose to survive.

"What I'm interested in is how peace can be broken down. I find the many definitions of peace fascinating. Perhaps peace could start at home. Maybe that's the contribution we could all make. Someone somewhere is feeling the effects of something you said or did. It's beyond government responsibility. There's not one single body that can 'fix it'. It is up to all of us."

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