Sam Daley-Harris

Sam Daley-Harris Director of Microcredit Summit Campaign, a project of RESULTS Educational Fund, is an international citizens' lobby dedicated to creating the political will to end hunger and poverty. There are 100 RESULTS groups in the U.S. and 40 more in six other countries.

In 2007, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus said: "... no other organization has been as critical a partner in seeing to it that microcredit is used as a tool to eradicate poverty and empower women than RESULTS and RESULTS Educational Fund's Microcredit Summit Campaign."

Sam Daley-Harris is also founder of the Microcredit Summit Campaign, a project of RESULTS Educational Fund. Daley-Harris organized the February 1997 Microcredit Summit held in Washington, DC. The Summit was attended by more than 2,900 delegates from 137 countries and launched a campaign to reach 100 million of the world's poorest families, especially the women of those families, with credit for self-employment and other financial and business services by 2005. At that first Summit then-US First Lady Hillary Clinton said, "I am thrilled to see such a turnout for this Summit which is one of the most important gatherings we could have anywhere in our world." The goal of reaching 100 million of the world's poorest families surpassed in 2007.

Daley-Harris is author of Reclaiming Our Democracy: Healing the Break Between People and Government, about which Jimmy Carter said, "[Daley-Harris] provides a road map for global involvement in planning a better future."

Daley-Harris received The Temple Award for Creative Altruism from the Institute of Noetic Sciences (1995), the Caring Award from the Caring Institute (1997), the Innovator Award from the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University (2003), the Elliott Black Award from the American Ethical Union (2003), and the Susan M. Davis Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grameen Foundation (2007).

In 2010, Ashoka founder Bill Drayton wrote, "Sam Daley-Harris is one of the certified great social entrepreneurs of the last decades. After building RESULTS, he is the person more than anyone else who has brought microcredit into focus across the world and precipitated action. One of his mechanisms has been a series of global microcredit summits. I think these are the first such UN-like events not run by the UN, or by any government for that matter."

At the beginning of 2012 Daley-Harris will step down from his position at the Microcredit Summit Campaign and Launch the Center for Citizen Empowerment and Transformation (CCET). CCET will work with leaders of organizations to create structures of support that empower ordinary citizens to take extraordinary action toward ending poverty, cleaning up the environment, building local economies, or bring peace to the world.

Mr. Daley-Harris has degrees in music, played percussion instruments in the Miami Philharmonic for 12 years, and is a songwriter. He is married and lives in Princeton, NJ, with his wife Shannon, who is an ordained Presbyterian minister and a consultant with the Religious Affairs Division of the Children's Defense Fund. Their son Micah was born in May 1998 and daughter Sophie was born in May 2001.

Visit their Web sites to learn more about RESULTS and the Microcredit Summit Campaign.