What Is Actually Yours to Do?
UNGA and Climate Week are built around urgency. There are problems to solve, people to meet, initiatives to support, organizations to fund, ideas to pursue, and seemingly endless opportunities to contribute.
For people who have built their lives around making a difference, the instinctive response can be to do more.
But in a world that seems to need everything, how do we decide what is actually ours to do?
Many of us are accomplished human “doings”: leading, building, funding, connecting, advocating, organizing, and solving. The ability to act is often what brought us into this work in the first place. But purpose is not necessarily found by adding another commitment to an already crowded agenda. Sometimes it requires getting clearer about where our particular gifts, passions, experience, relationships, and influence can make the most meaningful contribution.
This session creates space for that question.
Using Ikigai, or “reason for being,” as one lens, participants will reflect on the intersection between what they care about, what they are good at, what the world needs, and where they are uniquely positioned to contribute.
The conversation will also go beyond what we do to consider who we are while doing it. What kinds of work give us energy rather than simply consume it? Which opportunities are genuinely ours, and which are we taking on because the need exists and we feel capable of responding? What might we need to stop doing to create space for a more meaningful contribution?
Amid a week dominated by what urgently needs to happen in the world, this is an opportunity to ask a different question: not simply “What needs to be done?” but “What is mine to do?”
What to expect
A thoughtful, facilitated conversation rather than another session to absorb information.
Participants will use individual reflection, conversation, and exchange with people from different sectors, geographies, generations, and roles to examine where their own sense of purpose meets the needs and possibilities around them.
The diversity of the room is part of the exercise. You may discover that someone working on an entirely different issue is wrestling with the same question, has a perspective you need, or holds a connection that could help turn an emerging sense of direction into action.
The aim is not to leave with a longer to-do list. It is to leave with greater clarity about what belongs on it.
Who this is for
This session is for leaders, funders, practitioners, entrepreneurs, advocates, and other changemakers who spend much of their lives responding to what the world needs and would value space to reflect on where their own contribution, energy, and sense of purpose belong within that work.
What you will get out of it
Space to reflect on your own role amid the urgency and possibility of UNGA week
A practical lens for considering where your gifts, passions, experience, and influence intersect with what the world needs
Greater clarity about the difference between what you could do and what may actually be yours to do
Meaningful conversation with people whose experiences and perspectives differ from your own
New connections that could help turn personal clarity into purposeful action