This article is part of KrASIA’s partnership with Collision.
- Mark Ruffalo, the co-founder of social equity organization The Solutions Project, said more needs to be done to support organizations led by women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups.
- “Our country has been built on this for more than 244 years, with racism as a mandatory part of a thriving economy.”
- Ruffalo joined Gloria Walton, CEO, and president at The Solutions Project, for an interview with Radhika Jones of Vanity Fair at the 40,000-attendee online conference Collision.
“When I think about justice, I think of acknowledging the harm that’s been done”
Walton discussed the rights of justice the US was founded on and how these values have not been reflected in the treatment of marginalized communities across the country. She also spoke about the role of government in changing this system and funding enterprises led by marginalized communities.
“I live in a white supremacist system that puts me above anybody else. It was hard to hear those truths.”
Ruffalo acknowledged the social biases that have given him an in-built advantage in life and stated that he co-founded The Solutions Project to help change things.
“We need to acknowledge the harm we’ve done to the environment”
Walton discussed the aim of The Solutions Project is to use this form of social justice to empower real change in how we treat the environment and to attempt to slow the effects of climate change.
“We need to change the conversation about environmentalism – change the approach that environmentalism has taken for the last 30 years – because it has been ineffective.”
Ruffalo added that The Solutions Project was founded to bring renewable energy to more communities and encourage those who can afford to adopt more sustainable lifestyles.
“I’m never going to do disposable travel ever again. My priorities have changed radically.”
Radhika Jones added that stories about climate change are being distilled the further down the chain of media they go, to the point where stories at a local level are totally lost.
About Collision:
When Collision, North America’s fastest-growing technology event, moved online, the pivot to host thousands of attendees online was coined by The Sunday Times as a “pretty big experiment.” For the second year in a row, Collision will host attendees online on its proprietary software. After hosting 32,000 attendees at its first online event in June 2020, the Collision platform was called “the stunning future of online events” by Digital Trends. This year, the platform will host more than 40,000 attendees for the three-day conference.
About Web Summit:
Forbes says Web Summit is “the best tech conference on the planet”; Bloomberg calls it “Davos for geeks”; Politico, “the Olympics of tech”; the Guardian, “Glastonbury for geeks”; and, in the words of Inc. magazine, “Web Summit is the largest technology conference in the world.”