Global Forum 2016
The 2016 Fortune/Time Global Forum will bring together an invitation-only group of distinguished participants, including global business leaders and select invitees from the Time 100 list of the world's most influential people. Participation is limited and invitations are non-transferable.
The 21st Century Challenge: Forging A New Social Compact
In an age of disruption and turmoil, Pope Francis calls on the “noble vocation” of business to help create a more inclusive and humane economy. Even as free markets have lifted billions out of poverty—with business “stimulating and developing the immense resources of human intelligence”—too many have been left behind. This Forum offered an historic opportunity for Fortune 500 and Time 100 leaders to engage with the Pope to forge a new social compact for the 21st century.
Click here to read recently published coverage Time editorial coverage in connection to the Forum, and here to see Fortune’s coverage of the Forum.
Inspired by the Pope’s pleas for more and better jobs, broader prosperity, and lasting ways to lift the poor, the Forum was a solutions-based conversation aimed at encouraging transformative actions and an economic system that both promotes growth and spreads its benefits more broadly.
Forum attendees engaged with subjects including technology and jobs, global health, food and water, commitment to communities, energy and the environment, and financial inclusion—each representing critical elements related to poverty alleviation and in need of urgent attention. By bringing together global business and NGO leaders to address these challenges the Forum focused on ways the private sector can be a driving force in ending poverty and creating a more sustainable world for all.
The 2016 Global Forum gathered business leaders from the world’s largest companies, members of the Time 100 list of the world’s most influential people, and a cross section of leaders from NGOs, non-profits, organized labor and religion.
“If we want security, let us give security. If we want life, let us give life. If we want opportunities, let us provide opportunities. The yardstick we use for others will be the yardstick which time will use for us.”
–Pope Francis to U.S. Congress, September 2015