New Working Groups Push Commitments From Talk to Term Sheets
Of the buzz of events and forums that fill New York during UN General Assembly week and Climate Week, the Clinton Global Initiative has long stood out as distinctly action-oriented - offer a preview of what "action-oriented" now looks like in practice.
Since its founding in 2005, CGI has asked attendees to arrive not with pledges of goodwill but with Commitments to Action: specific, measurable partnerships designed to address a pressing global challenge. Two decades on, that model has produced more than 4,300 commitments from across business, philanthropy, and government, made in partnership with over 13,000 organizations - work that has reached over 500 million people in more than 180 countries.
At this year's meeting, that tradition continued with the launch of more than 100 new Commitments to Action. But the headline shift wasn't the count, it was the format. For the first time, CGI built its 2025 Annual Meeting around Working Groups: facilitated sessions of roughly ten participants apiece, pairing front-line workers, policy experts, foundation donors, and NGO representatives to work through specific problems in real time, under the theory that a ballroom of experts given a narrow enough question will leave with something more durable than a communiqué.
The results suggest the format did what it was designed to do, turning conversation into "term sheets". Out of the Innovative Finance Working Group came a partnership between Kiva Microfunds and corporate foundations to launch a new social enterprise fund of at least $10 million in 2026. The Health Working Group turned its attention to using AI to close systemic gaps in chronic care, and one project to emerge from the session will expand maternal telehealth access in Zimbabwe. In the Education Working Group, the Clinton Foundation's Too Small to Fail initiative and UnidosUS used the session to explore a pilot program, planned for three U.S. cities in 2026, that would extend early-learning resources to immigrant families. And the Human Rights and Democracy Working Group ranged across accelerating women's democratic participation and defending LGBTQ+ rights, developing ideas that stretched from civic education programs for at-risk youth in Northern Ireland to anti-authoritarian initiatives elsewhere.
By at least one account from the sidelines, the model's value showed up in unplanned ways as much as scheduled ones. Organizers reporting on last year's meeting pointed to a hallway conversation between a global antipoverty nonprofit and a hospital in Zambia where fifty-some babies are born daily to a single incubator, warmer, and resuscitator- as the kind of connection the Working Group structure was built to produce.
Whether the format holds up as CGI returns in future years remains to be seen. But for a convening that has always measured itself by what gets built rather than what gets said, this year's Working Groups look like a meaningful next step - turning the ballrooms of the New York Hilton Midtown into something closer to a negotiating table than a stage.
Comments