Bill Clinton is not afraid of commitment

One of the unique aspects of the Clinton Global Initiative—and CGI’s press materials beat you over the head with this—is that it’s very much about results, not just talk. The way it works is this: CGI members, some 1,300 of whom are here in New York today, make a commitment to a concrete initiative, and the Foundation holds their feet to the fire. If you don’t fulfill your commitment (and 12 CGI staff members are at your beck and call for assistance), you essentially get voted off the island, and aren’t invited to the next annual meeting. Some 174 of 631 commitments have already been fulfilled since CGI began in 2005. Seventeen CGI members weren’t invited back last year, and five people didn’t make it for the 2007 annual meeting.

I was really curious to find out who hasn’t delivered, so I asked Clinton’s communications director to name names. “We don’t want to be the philanthropy police,” he said, but admitted that it would be possible to figure it out by process of elimination. The trick, however, is that not all commitments are for just one year, so it’s not easy to do so.

And now, making a commitment is not just for bigshots: You, too, can make a commitment at CGI’s new Web site, MyCommitment.org. This morning, Clinton mentioned Kiva, a “Web 2.0” site that allows people to make one-to-one micro-donations to people around the world, and MyCommitment.org looks very similar. No word yet on whether failing to meet your commitment gets you into trouble with Bubba.