UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
HONORARY CONFERRING
Tuesday, 3 September 2019 at 5.30 pm
TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR MAEVE HOULIHAN, Director of UCD Lochlann Quinn School of Business on 3 September 2019, on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa on PHILIP R BERBER.
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President, Graduates, Colleagues, Honoured Guests
We are together here in this place to look back and look forward and to celebrate a very significant day in your personal story and that of your family. Always know that this is no small moment. In the end, College is about ideas, and the people that you meet and friendships that you make. It’s about how you begin to think about the world and yourself in it. Above all it’s about planting the seeds of your future self and your sense of possibilities.
For most of us it’s really hard to imagine a future self.
Our award of honorary doctorate today is to somebody who perhaps for many will represent just how expansive and potential filled those possibilities are. At the Quinn School we are deeply serious about our commitment to enterprise and entrepreneurship, and to business, society and sustainability. We strive to build understanding that what we do has an impact, and consequences, and it matters. We’ve asked you to think about things though a global lens, and to be informed critical and creative thinkers and doers, problem solvers and people with the capacity to connect, collaborate and contribute
It’s a deep honor to welcome Philip Berber and his family here today. Philip embodies all of that potential in a proven form. The headlines are that Philip Berber is an Irish-born, Texas-based technology entrepreneur, now engaged in philanthropy, international aid, social entrepreneurship and impact investing.
But more personally, Philip is someone who like you today graduated from this place, on a day like today, just 40 years ago.
Upon completing his BComm, Philip relocated to London where he held positions in the marketing departments of Ford, Avon Cosmetics and Bausch & Lomb. In 1988, Philip founded Financia, his first start-up which was bought in 1991 by Frontier Financial. In 1993, he joined GK Capital and then left in 1985 to form his own company CyBerCorp, an electronic brokerage group. In March 2000, CyBerCorp sold for $488 million to the Charles Schwab organization. The sale allowed Philip to develop his plans for a new model of philanthropy and international aid.
He and his wife Donna built a family foundation called A Glimmer of Hope. Focused on Ethiopia, A Glimmer of Hope provides Humanitarian Aid and Microcredit initiatives.
‘Glimmer’ begins with dialogue - asking village communities what they want and need. Since 2001, it has funded more than 3,000 projects and positively impacted the lives of more than 1.5 million people in the areas of water & sanitation, education, health care, enterprise and agriculture. The majority of these projects are about getting clean water to villages and specifically about breaking the cycle of poverty that begin with girls having to walk miles to collect water every day instead of getting to school.
Partnering with local communities on long-term change is the heartland of this work is about and it’s important for all of us to see that that is not always about ‘somewhere else.’ Philip brings his mindset of conscious capitalism to his own community, just this week writing in an Austin newspaper about homelessness and the impact of a housing first solutions. These are issues that that many of you work on and care about too - and we are so proud to see student social enterprise in Ireland thrive, through organisations like Food Cloud and 1000 minds and with the co-worker car-sharing scheme MLN developed by your BBL class mate Manal Mukhtar.
With entrepreneurship at his core, Philips’s latest venture is Enable Impact, a marketplace for early and growth stage direct impact investments, helping entrepreneurs raise capital for socially positive ventures.
At the launch of UCD Moore Centre for Business yesterday, I had the privilege of hearing Philip speak, sharing just how grounded and communal that perspective is. Words like conscious capitalism and social impact investing are terms Philip uses with confidence, credibility and authority. We realise now more than ever, the power of business for good, the weight of demand from customers and citizens for doing business mindfully and differently, and the urgency and capacity for business to be the change we want to see in the world.
Philip has shared his success so that others may benefit, being slow to take credit, but quick to act where he sees the capacity to influence positive change. When many years later the School of Business trying to do things differently, Professor Philip Bourke approached Philip Berber and discovered that two things had especially shaped that possibility for him– his experiences being part of our very first enterprise modules with Professor Frank Roche, and his strong and deep friendship with fellow class mates including the late Colm O’Reilly, Jerry Breen and many more. So it is that at UCD Quinn School of Business, the Berber Atrium is named in his honour and we have a Berber Family Chair of Entrepreneurship. So Philip’s journey and experiences have in part shaped your journey though some of the spaces you have occupied and the opportunities you’ve had while with us. Thank you, Philip, for that, and for all that connects us, in the circle of growing, gaining and giving back.
Philip and his wife Donna and their family have built an exceptional life and worked to use those opportunities to benefit many. We are very mindful that they join us at a very special time in their family life to with the arrival of their first grandchild, granddaughter Finlay.
We are proud of Philip’s achievements, in business, his care for his fellow human, and his drive as a force for good in the wider world. And as all of you imagine your future self, in all the forms it takes for you, I wish all of that to all of you too.
I am proud to call on the President of UCD Professor Andrew Deeks to award the Degree of Honorary doctorate.
Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,
Praesento vobis hunc meum filium, quem scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneum esse qui admittatur, honoris causa, ad Gradum Doctoratus Scientiae; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.