The Conduit’s flagship conference Climate and the Future of Health returns on 22 June. TBT network tickets are available at £199 – a saving on the full price of £350 – using code CFHTBT at checkout. Register here.

Not many people can say they watched Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu navigate one of the most complex political processes of the 20th century; Paul van Zyl can. As Executive Secretary of South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he had a front-row seat to what purposeful leadership under pressure looks like. He’s been putting those lessons to work ever since – most recently as co-founder of The Conduit, a global collaborative impact community based in London, where entrepreneurs, activists, investors and policymakers come together not just to discuss the world’s biggest challenges, but to find their solutions. 

HF: The Conduit is such a unique space. How would you describe what The Conduit does?

PVZ: The Conduit is a community of changemakers and an impact community. We offer perhaps the most interesting program of content and convenings in London, almost 200 talks a year, four major conferences. We also have a capital arm – Conduit Connect – that allows people to invest in impact businesses. And we actively build our community around the issues we care about – climate, health, economic inclusion, education, democracy, human rights. People here are biased towards action and the connections that we build intensify that action. 

HF: It sounds like that’s the engine of The Conduit – people coming together to create change. It’s fantastic.   

PVZ: Solutions are at the core of it too. If you spend 10 percent of your time describing the problem, you can spend 90 percent asking: “what is the solution?”  

We see it as an antidote to the present politics – so much time fighting about the problem or who’s to blame, and not enough talking about solutions and how to implement them.
   
The story is so often: I’m going to blame immigrants or inequality or the climate crisis. Some of those I think are real problems; others aren’t at all. But the crux is, once you’ve pointed to a problem, you sketch out plausible solutions to address the injustice or grievance, perceived or real. 
 
The solution is always much harder, but it reveals whether you’re just a snake-oil salesman peddling anger, division and grievance – or if you’re actually working on something intended to change people’s lives.  

HF: What is the importance of having a space in London – why did you want to have something physical and permanent?   

PVZ: One alternative is to engage online. I’m an avid reader of news content, analysis, narrative. It’s profoundly necessary and indispensable, but it’s insufficient to undertake system change. Somebody in the world has to pick up the bat and act.  

We use the convening power of The Conduit to spur people to act. That means sitting down, building coalitions, carefully identifying problems, creating the kind of intimacy, trust, joy and camaraderie that comes from people being in community with each other.
  
There’s currently a big debate about banning social media for people under 16. Social media has been accurately described as the great fragmenter of our politics, of creating a post-truth world. Of course, bringing people together physically doesn’t necessarily counteract that. You can bring people together in mobs that become exercises in thuggery. But if you bring people together with the right kind of content and the goal of focusing on solutions, you can spur them to act in positive ways.   

HF: There are some echoes there of a healthy local church. What I like about The Conduit, and especially the vision you’re describing, is you’re convening people from different walks of life. 

PVZ: You’re exactly right. There are many advantages to secular ways of thinking, but what you risk losing is purpose and community. The old bonds of civil society were religious institutions. Sport still does it. Unions used to do it, parent teacher associations, youth clubs, but they’re fraying. All the agencies of civil society have been corroded.   

There’s a body of thought that Covid accelerated the corrosion of how we would gather, because we fell out of practice; separation was enforced and we never recovered. So finding ways of bringing people back together is really important.    

HF: I was encouraged to see The Conduit hosted Israeli and Palestinian peace activists together. I have been to both Palestine and Israel, and I’ve similarly sat in a room with Israeli and Palestinian families who both lost someone in the conflict. How do you create space for some of those very difficult, nuanced conversations?    

PVZ: Certain topics are difficult, divisive, even explosive – but of such global and civilisational significance that to not have them would be deeply irresponsible.   

It’s a false trick of the light, because those conversations are being had all the time. Israel and Palestine are profoundly in the news. It has a nexus to what’s happening in Iran. It spills over onto our streets, into university campuses and politics; it’s everywhere.   

The choice becomes: you can be silent and allow the current discourse to be the currency for how we converse, or you can join the conversation. And from that, frame these issues in a constructive way.   

I’ve worked in human rights and peace building for 30 years. I’m very clear that our institutional approach to Israel and Palestine is: what will it take to build a just and lasting peace? It has to be just, lasting, and peaceful. Yet those three things are often in tension with each other.  
 
Those speakers you mentioned embarked on a global tour to explore what they have in common, and talk about peace – its powerful, radical and transformative nature. I would rather have that conversation than have people shout at and blame each other from their echo chambers.   

There are people who have suffered unimaginably, with strong views and may be hurt and offended by some of the views expressed by either side. But I’d rather that over prolonging a conflict which destabilises the world, impacts our global welfare and leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Discomfort in conversation is a better thing if it’s in the framework for trying to achieve a just and lasting peace.

HF: How do you bring people together in this polarised context, if you’re going into a conversation with someone who has an opposite view?     

PVZ: Let’s take flooding in the Greater Manchester area as an example. Reform voters are constantly angry about it – yet continue to vote Reform, despite how they undermine net zero initiatives and seek to abandon climate measures.  

From the outside, this makes no sense. But looking from their perspective – without patronising or a top-down gaze – being flooded impacts your life. Insurance premiums rise, house values fall. It impacts your mental health. Things aren’t getting better, and nobody’s offering a real solution. So, you channel your frustration somewhere that at least reflects it back to you.
  
The Conduit’s approach: go to the ground, meet the affected communities, not as technocratic top-down bureaucrats, but to listen. The UK is going to experience extreme wetness followed by extreme dryness over the next 30 years. Flooding is likely heading towards £10billion of damage. It’s a major, existential physical risk. The answer is natural flood management: wetlands that absorb water when there’s too much and release it when there’s too little. They improve water quality, sequester carbon, and promote biodiversity.   

We kept hearing about pilots. A pilot here, a pilot there. I’m incredibly fatigued by the graveyard of pilots. Instead we asked: what would it take to scale this? That’s why we established FloodAction, a 70-organisation coalition, identified the financing, and started thinking, not at pilot level, but at catchment level.   

It’s about not preying on people’s anger, not exacerbating division – but being on the ground, listening, and fashioning solutions that actually change lives. 

HF: That’s wonderful. Do you have some more examples of the work that’s being done at The Conduit?     

PVZ: The UK has just experienced two weeks of extreme heat. We’re working on a two-year programme with the Wellcome Trust, and a conference on the first day of London Climate Action Week, focused on Climate and the Future of Health. 500 leaders will be at The Conduit to look at the impact of the climate crisis on human health, deduce the negative impacts and find solutions.
   
Take extreme heat, which does terrible things for human health. We study major cities’ solutions – Freetown, Jakarta, Bogotá, Mexico City, Phoenix, Miami – find the best examples, aggregate and implement them: reflective paints, urban wetlands, cooling corridors, increased shade, sustainable urban drainage, batteries, solar and air conditioning. Do the ones that make most sense in a local context but learn from global experience.

HF: What is The Conduit considering for the future?      

PVZ: We’re having a real moment in London. Our activities are blossoming; the community is growing. The question is: how do we take that precious sense of optimistic, community and solutions-oriented gathering – built to address the climate, economic and democratic crises – and bring that same energy somewhere new?  
 
We’re in active conversations in Berlin. There’s a real opportunity in the US. But we’re not interested in arriving like a spaceship, planting a flag and hoping for the best. What we need is for the local community to say: this resonates with us. And then we build from the bottom up.