In his new book, Big Bets: How Large-Scale Change Really Happens, Rajiv Shah makes the case that it is realistic to hold optimism for the future.
Drawing on lessons learned while working on issues ranging from a famine crisis in East Africa to the 2014 Ebola epidemic, Shah conveys strategies for driving change in Big Bets. And he underscores the advantages of ambitious actions that can attract support, collaboration, and new ideas, even from unlikely stakeholders.
When meeting with students, particularly those in high school, on his book tour, Shah found that “people are yearning for a message that is grounded in the idea that we can still do big things together.”
In addition to examples outlined in Big Bets, Shah believes that the new Periodic Table of Food Initiative—which brings together a team of experts from a broad range of academic disciplines as well as leaders from the technology, philanthropy, and nonprofit sectors—represents this possibility. The initiative’s implementation of groundbreaking scientific research, the expansion of impact through a cohort of fellows, and engagement with young people “are the reasons we should be optimistic,” he argues.
“Making innovation, science, and progress available to everybody can change the face of humanity and bend the curve towards justice, towards equity, towards opportunity for all,” Shah says.
Listen to the full conversation with Rajiv Shah on Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg by clicking HERE to hear more about Big Bets, drivers of a global debt crisis, and how scientific inquiry can change people’s sense of what is possible.
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Photo courtesy of Kasturi Laxmi, Unsplash
