Date: June 30, 2022

As-salam wa alaykom. Masa-el kheir. Good evening from Beirut.

I would like to begin by thanking the IRF Summit leadership, co-chairs, and speakers who have made this year’s convening happen. I would have loved to be with you all tonight.

Thank you very much for this deeply humbling and invigorating moment of recognition.

I come from the club of head down and do the good work. Recognitions, awards, and ceremonies are not muscles I am used to stretching. I am honored to be amongst such a courageous and committed group of awardees. Congratulations… and if you have my bad habit of rarely stopping to smell the roses, rarely taking in a victory and living that special moment, may I take this moment to deeply encourage you to do so, because we are tonight amongst friends and peers and it is most certainly a night to celebrate. I will attempt to take my own advice in this regard.

Next year will mark ten years since I co-founded The Zovighian Partnership with my father. Our mission was to become the go-to social investment platform that visionaries, agencies, and governments would commission to study, strategize, prototype, and intervene in some of the most complex human environments in the Middle East. Based between Beirut and Riyadh, I took on this mission with a vision to see a safer, kinder, and more peaceful Middle East for all.

I quickly discovered that whilst our business is in the business of not just doing good, but doing great, doing great on behalf of others was not going to be enough for our region. This is why in 2015, my team and I established the ZP Public Office so that we could serve the communities and cities in crises where we could make a significant positive and long-lasting impact. In many cases, the underserved, the hurt, the victims of oppression, the prisoners of state-led criminality, the survivors of genocide have very important magical powers in common:

They are community and so can survive in ways that can still honor their values and live by their moral codes
They are grounded and so can be the authentic co-decision makers of their futures
They are wise and so can be teachers and it is on us to be their students

So it becomes on us to make sure they have a life worth living. And you develop a business model that is so coherent with your values such that peace and business cannot be separated: the bigger the business, the bigger the capacity and imagination to bring peace to all.

This award goes to three communities who have adopted us over the last few years:

The Lebanese people and guests living within our borders who are being held hostage by a criminal state reinforced by criminal individuals
The people of Artsakh who today are victims of a renewed manifestation of the Armenian Genocide
The Yazidi people who have been tragically displaced, killed, and almost forgotten since the genocide perpetrated by Da’esh began

Lebanon, Artsakh, and Sinjar teach us the lesson we wish humanity never needed to learn: that evil can preside over good. If this is not a safe space to call out Hezbollah, pro-Syrian forces, and institutionalized abuses of power in Lebanon. If this is not a safe space to call out Azerbaijani President Aliyev in Artsakh. If this is not a safe space to call out Turkish President Erdogan, then where is it safe to do so? And when will we get to have these critical overdue and very loud conversations?

We are gathered here tonight, celebrating the rare moments when greatness did get to conquer. But we have so much work to do, for those special cases have yet to become our world order.

Haider Elias from Yazda receiving the IRF Award on behalf of Lynn Zovighian

May I invite my Yazidi brother, Haider Elias, co-founder and president of Yazda, to come up on stage and bring this award back with you to Sinjar. I would like to close my remarks to you tonight by inviting you - the incredible brains, hearts, and souls gathered in this room to join me in Lebanon, Artsakh, and Sinjar so that we can look humanity in the eye and make clear that no one, no one will be left behind.

Thank you again, and good night.