Conference Presentation, Panel
Act Now! Making Culture a Force for Change
- Cultural and creative industries are projected to become a dominant form of global soft power, enabling exponential business growth and profit generation aligned with moral conscience while fostering matriarchal values to address global challenges.
- Leveraging artist platforms with authenticity and data-driven "factivist" approaches is expected to generate significant social change, with specific plans to collaborate with 30 social justice organizations and utilize long-tail campaigns to reach an "event horizon" of impact.
- Technology development, particularly video content on platforms like Facebook, is anticipated to skyrocket audience reach, with the potential for a single high-end two-minute climate video to engage 400 million girls.
- Activism is predicted to supersede parochial concerns, requiring a level of mobilization comparable to World War II to combat climate change, which is attributed to animal agriculture accounting for 45% of climate change, 75% of antibiotic resistance, and 90% of rainforest deforestation.
- Health outcomes are expected to be significantly influenced by dietary shifts, with claims that animal agriculture results in 50% of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes cases.
- Gender equity is identified as a critical driver of economic and social performance, with a projected 30% to 50% female board representation acting as a tipping point for better performance and consensus, alongside data linking progressive female policies to higher GDP and happiness indexes.
- Future growth strategies include expanding the "Change My World Now" platform to connect children globally, promoting the "Super Soul 100" feature in OWN Magazine monthly, and continuing the best-selling "Mackenzie Blue" series for at-risk readers.
- Regional cultural shifts are expected within Saudi Arabia via the 2030 Vision to permit expanded entertainment and creative industries, with changes anticipated to occur through sustainable, step-by-step progress and value shifts extending to the UAE and other regions.
- Marketing approaches will increasingly rely on influencer and guerrilla tactics to engage youth culture and the "alternatives" tribe, while efforts to foster creativity in children aged six to eight aim to counteract the decline in imagination observed between ages two and 20.
- Political action and public awareness are expected to drive policy changes, such as making paid family leave an election-year issue potentially passed by major political figures, while global adoption of small meaningful acts by 1.1 billion children is modeled to create a blueprint for global transformation.
- Risks include collective human self-destructive behavior, the potential for countries with oppressive female policies to remain war-torn with low GDP, and the urgent need to address the destruction of the planet through immediate, large-scale cultural and technological interventions.