By Giovanna Mingarelli

CEO of M&C Consulting, MC2 and MC3 Inc., and Board Chair of Global Dignity

I am delighted to be back in Ulaanbaatar for the first time since 2013. The country has changed – it’s become beautiful with many new buildings. I see the millennials (population between the ages of 25 and 40) are empowered and doing many projects, including the Global Shapers Hub. I had the great pleasure of meeting the Global Shapers Hub’s team this morning as part of the Global Dignity workshop, for which I am here. I was invited to Mongolia to represent Global Dignity in my capacity as both the board chair for the international organization and the Canadian chair.

Global Dignity is a non-religious, non-political, non-profit organization committed to empowering children in kindergarten to grade 12 with dignity in 80 countries. Every year, we impact 1 million youth around the world, offering free training materials and resources on our website and organizing activities from 20-minute workshops to half-day schoolwide plenary sessions, as well as events and concerts. Our purpose is for everyone to lead a dignified life. What that means is for everyone to recognize and respect their own value and to recognize and respect the value of others. When we do this, it builds confidence, it builds love, and it builds trust. And when we have trust, we have greater productivity, positivity, cooperation (both locally and internationally), and most importantly, it brings peace. Trust brings peace, and we are in a critical time in the world where we need more peace.

I am thrilled to be in Ulaanbaatar today and facilitating this workshop along with my colleagues Ganhuyag Chuluun Hutagt, the CEO of Ard Financial Group (Ard) and the country chair for Global Dignity in Mongolia, and our esteemed guests and participants. One of the things that we discussed during the workshop was the ongoing Unite Kindness social media campaign that Global Dignity developed in May 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The campaign was designed to empower young people so that they can feel a sense of empowerment during a time of distress, with lockdowns happening because of COVID-19. We wanted them to be able to share their acts of kindness on social media, to feel like they were a part of a global community of people that were engaging and taking action in their communities, and not to feel like they were on their own. The campaign is technologically enabled by a combination of AI-powered chatbot technology and aggregation software that pulls acts of kindness from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and showcases all the acts of kindness across 40 different kindness campaigns worldwide on the Global Dignity website at globaldignity.org/unitedkindness.

Our goal for Unite Kindness is to reach 1 billion acts of kindness in the next three years. It’s a big goal, but it’s possible. Since we started the campaign, we’ve reached 2.6 million acts of kindness. We’re very excited today to announce that Ard will also help us take this campaign one step further as we begin our rollout in Mongolia. Ard is going to sponsor 100,000 USD in the form of ArdCoin towards acts of kindness that people will complete. For every act of kindness that a young person does for the campaign, Ard will be giving 1 ArdCoin and the value of that coin will be donated to Global Dignity in return, which creates a new kind of crowdfunding using a cryptocurrency. This is a new model of charitable, philanthropic donation by a company. We’re very excited about this and grateful for Ard’s generosity in allowing us to continue the campaign and grow it outside current parameters.

In addition, Canada celebrated our first National Kindness Week in the third week of February this year. This is legislation that was brought into effect in June of this year, making Canada the first country in the world to celebrate one week of kindness where the government has legislated that all companies, organizations and individuals exchange resources and tools and engage in activities that promote greater kindness because it is a matter of health and well-being of all Canadians to do so. And so, we launched the campaign in Canada locally. That was our first local engagement of the campaign. We’re now rolling the campaign out internationally through city-based launches. Mongolia is going to be the next country that we launch the campaign in. We’re also in discussions with officials in London, the UK and soon, in Italy.

In addition, I spoke about the "Future of Work" as part of the Mongolia Economic Forum on April 8. This forum was the original reason I was invited to Mongolia back in 2013 and a reason I came back this time. I was pleased to join this discussion and share some insights from Canada about the Canadian government’s entry into the gig economy through our technologically-enabled platform, Talent Cloud, for which I’m an external advisory board member. Canada is making an effort to include gig-based contract work into the government that allows for policies such as vacation pay and so on that’s never been seen before in a government. I shared about this at the Mongolia Economic Forum.

Finally, in my capacity as the founder of M&C Consulting Inc., I’m also very excited to share that our partnership with Ard has deepened on this trip. My company has been working with Ard since last spring when we partnered to support Ard extend their company into North America, starting with Canada. After going through quite a lot of stakeholder interviews, focus groups and introductions to local partners, Ard is already becoming a known force in Canada, particularly in Eastern Canada, where we plan to start out the rollout of the company. This will be in partnership with my companies, MC2 and MC3, that build software and services with social impact technology, particularly AI-powered chatbots, for social acts that support ESG campaigns in workplaces and governments and for the public. We hope to integrate ArdCoin into our technology in North America as well, seeing that it is one of the most popular cryptocurrencies in Asia at this time and it’s seen as such in North America. We’re very excited to continue this partnership and relationship with Ard and deepen the economic relations between Mongolia and Canada. Currently, mining products are the primary import and export for our countries and this partnership adds a very interesting fintech and cryptocurrency element to our relationship.