Clinton: There's my foundation, and there's the CGI [Clinton Global Initiative], where we try to get other people to come together and make their commitments. For three years, we have had a focus on climate change and empowering people to escape poverty. The first year, we dealt with governance—which is a huge problem in developing countries, just having the capacity to do this—and religious and racial reconciliation. Last year, we added health care, explicitly, and then talked about the governing challenges in these four areas. This year, we're going to have some special panels on reconciliation, but we're going to add education, because I think that these educational venues are the best way to promote reconciliation. At least that's been my experience. We've got 130 million kids in the world who never go to school and others who go to schools without adequate educational materials or without trained teachers and facilities, and it would be really inexpensive compared to any war you can name to put all these kids in school and give them teachers and materials and do what needs to be done. In a poor country, even one year of schooling adds ten percent per year to one's earning capacity. So that's how we do it.

In my foundation, we have some core projects: We work on HIV and AIDS. In 25 countries, we work on setting up the health systems and helping train people to run them. And now in 38 other countries, we sell our medicine for the lowest prices in the world. Then we have a development initiative that operates in Rwanda and Malawi. We are trying to go into very poor rural areas and figure out whether we can set up mechanisms that will allow people to double per-capita income in a shorter amount of time. If so, we hope to have a model that we can just basically impart to other places, either directly through my foundation or others can take it up, but we'll have a proven comprehensive model for helping people to work themselves out of poverty. Then we have a climate-change initiative, which involves some American cities and 40 of the largest cities around the world, plus some partner cities where we're going to use the kinds of things we did in the AIDS project and in the development project to help cities quickly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in a way that is profitable and creates jobs, instead of being burdensome. Those are the main things we're doing around the world.

At home, our major initiatives [concern] childhood obesity and its attendant consequences of exploding rates of diabetes. I'm very excited about what we're doing; we're pretty active there. Then, there's an urban enterprise initiative, where we try to help small businesses in Harlem. And we try to help all the people we can to qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit for lower-income working people. We're now starting an initiative that I'm really excited about to try to help the 28 million Americans who actually earn a check every two weeks but don't have a bank account, so they're not in the financial mainstream of America. They go with these paste-up places; they borrow money at exorbitant interest rates. There are now more of these places in America than there are McDonald's franchises. So we're going to try to lead a movement, a national movement, to integrate lower-income working people into the banking system in positive, not negative, ways. So those are the things we do here. I do other kinds of things as they come up, like I did the tsunami project with former president Bush, and the Katrina project. We're still active in the Katrina area; Laura is particularly active there. We've saved a little of our money, and we're still trying to help New Orleans, in particular.

In 2001, when the earthquake hit the Indian state of Gujarat, I was asked by the prime minister to organize American Indians to help rebuild hundreds of villages, which I did do. We set up a separate foundation called the America-India Foundation, which I still serve on the board of but only in an honorary capacity. They've done wonderful work. They've gotten thousands of Indian-Americans to contribute money to rebuild schools and homes and hospitals and to promote livelihoods, [money] for development for great Indian crafts people [who then sell their work] in American department stores. They have internet marketing, and they send young Indian Americans over there to do internships, and they've got their own AIDS projects there. They've really done a great job.

But I take stuff as it comes up. I try to keep enough space. When 9/11 happened, Bob Dole and I raised money to try to guarantee college scholarships for the children and spouses of everyone who was killed and disabled. But my core projects are the obesity and urban enterprise projects in America and the AIDS project and the development project and the climate-change project in the world. And the Global Initiative, which I like because it enables me to get other people into doing what I'm doing in a systematic way.

CNT: How did you arrive at these objectives?

Clinton: I talked to people, but I decided among them myself. The Clinton Global Initiative was totally sort of an inside job. One of the people who works for me suggested it, because we go to Davos every year. We try to go every year—I do—and some of our people go, and we try to support them, and it's really big. I think it's done a lot of good in terms of educating global business leaders about the challenges facing the world. But I've found people get really frustrated at those things if they're really serious people, because they want to do something. So this friend of mine—I mean this young man who works for me—he says, well, you ought to have one of these meetings at the opening of the UN, because we could do a shorter one, but we have a unique ability to attract world leaders because they'd be here for the UN, and then we could bring other people to New York successfully. I said no, I don't want to do that. What I want to do is have a meeting where everybody who comes knows before they come that they have to make a commitment to do something by the time they leave. And I want us to help them find something they feel good doing. And then I want us to keep score. I said, if we did this, let's just plan to do this for a decade and see what happens after that if I'm still alive. But I think if you can actually get high-powered people to come together—wealthy individuals, foundations, NGOs for developing countries, political leaders—and you'd have this mix of people to really work on figuring out what you could do about these problems. Then you'd ask people to make a commitment, and you'd hold them to it but also help them to meet their commitment. I think we could make a huge difference if we did it for ten years. That conversation led to everything that's happened since.

On the AIDS thing, I was active in something called the International AIDS Trust with Nelson Mandela. It was important for the first couple of years after I left office, because we went around and drummed up support for more money for AIDS from basically bilateral donors. But by 2003, you had the Bush AIDS program passing, and you had the Global Fund on AIDS, TB, and malaria. The biggest problem was not so much money as the cost of the medicine and the absence of the health infrastructure. So I was asked to deal with that. And the minute I was asked, I knew it was something that needed to be done, because I could see that the money was going to come in at greater levels but it wouldn't be enough unless we had health infrastructure and affordable medicine.

NBC News video Clinton maintains powerful presence Sept. 5: Bill Clinton talks about his new book, the power of reconciliation, Rwanda, and the 2008 election. Today show

The childhood-obesity initiative came because of my heart problems. The American Heart Association asked me to do something, and I had to decide what I wanted to do. I thought that the childhood obesity slash diabetes epidemic in America was the worst problem we had on the health-care front. So that's how I fell into that.

The development initiative happened because I met a Scottish billionaire named Tom Hunter who was interested in doing something in Africa. I was frustrated going into these countries where I was helping with AIDS and I couldn't help them with economic development, and I thought I knew a lot about it. And I knew he did. So we got into that because we wanted to see—since we knew we'd never be as big as the Gates Foundation or anything like that—so we wanted to see if we could develop a replicable model that would help people work their way out of poverty.

So that's how I got into each one. The story's slightly different how I entered into each one. The urban enterprise initiative I got into by interviewing small-business people in Harlem because I wanted to be a good neighbor. I said, what do you need? And we worked on getting people qualified for the Earned Income Tax Credit in America because I had doubled it when I was president. I knew how many kids—it had taken millions of children out of poverty. But I was appalled by how hard it was to qualify for. I realized that every year, even in New York City alone, there were over a hundred thousand people who were eligible for it but didn't claim it because they couldn't figure out how to work their way through the tax system. So that's one I decided on my own to do.

The banking initiative is one that Trooper Sanders, who works for me, had urged me to take out because he's out there in the community with the people and he sees what a problem this is all over America.

But we try not to do everything. There's a lot of things we're asked to do that we don't do, because I don't want to be like an army that outruns its supply line. Basically, we try to tax ourselves to the maximum every year, so I have to work like crazy to finance these things and to get the talent necessary to do it. But we try not to go over the line. So no matter how hard we work, we'll still fail, because we're trying to do more than we can do. That's the sort of knife edge we try to operate on, with greater or lesser degrees of success.

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