The Center for Global Development celebrated its fifth anniversary last week with a reception, program, dinner and dancing at the Embassy of France for 500 people, including many of the Center’s friends and supporters, board members and staff.
Guests watched a new movie, The Center for Global Development: Independent Research and Practical Ideas for Global Prosperity with four examples of the Center's work and received copies of CGD@5, a 36-page color report on the Center's many activities.
"It's hard to believe that this organization is just five years old," CGD board member and program master of ceremonies David Gergen marveled as he looked out at a standing-room-only audience that included congressmen, senior U.S. officials, ambassadors, international civil servants, scholars and development practitioners. "This is the A List of the global development community," he said.
The Center's research and policy work focuses on improving rich world policies and practices to make globalization more development friendly.
Gergen, who served as an advisor to four U.S. presidents, said that CGD had earned a reputation as a "think tank plus" that not only produced timely, rigorous research on pressing issues, but effectively advocated on behalf of the proposed solutions in order to move ideas to action.
CGD founding chairman Edward W. Scott, Jr., a former senior U.S. official and successful technology entrepreneur, recalled how his longtime interest in helping to improve the lives of poor people in the developing world became focused on policy issues when he saw a documentary about developing country debt on television late one night.
Scott said that his wife, Cheryl, was a key influence because she used the Internet to gather information about the debt relief movement that helped to lead him back to Washington. He also thanked several Washington policy experts whose advice led him to Nancy Birdsall, CGD's founding president. These included C. Fred Bergsten, the executive director of the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics, which housed the Center during its first few months. 
Scott said that the Center had succeeded "beyond his wildest dreams" in providing research and practical ideas to benefit the world's poor majority. "CGD was not established to be a sandbox for economists. It was not established to produce papers or books. It was established so that people who are less well off than we are could lead a better life," he said.
Birdsall noted the increasing focus on the rich world's impact on developing countries in the past five years and said that the Center has played a role in "raising the bar of what can be done in the rich world to make people in the poor world better off."
"We are a very small organization, a little place, and we would not have been able to accomplish any of this without so many friends," she said. She thanked in particular CGD funders who, she said, share a vision of how the Center's work could help to make the world a better, fairer place. The Center's supporters share a common interest in "making a difference in how the whole system works," she said.
The program ended with a 15-minute film with four examples of how CGD's work is making a difference: an Advance Market Commitment for vaccines; the Commitment to Development Index; debt relief for Nigeria; and independent research on bilateral aid programs, such as the U.S. Millennium Challenge Account.
After dinner, guests mingled at a dessert buffet and danced to music by Orquesta La Leyenda, a popular Washington salsa band. 
The gala was sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Master Sponsor) and by Bill & Paula Clapp, Covington & Burling, LLP; Development Alternatives Inc.; Forum One Communications; International Center for Research on Women; Susan Levine; Thomas F. "Mack" McLarty, III; Peter G. Peterson; and Pauline Yore.
Honorary sponsors were Sen. Joseph R. Biden, Jr.; Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton; Sen. Christopher J. Dodd; Sen. Chuck Hagel; Carla A. Hills, former U.S. Trade Representative; Rep. Jim Kolbe; Sen. Barack Obama; John Edward Porter, former U.S. Representative; Colin Powell, former Secretary of State; and Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes.