What does Grace Kelly say about using your voice for social change?

I am not naturally a public speaker on causes — my Irish father did not raise a daughter to march in the street — and I have always preferred the quiet work to the loud declaration. I think this is a temperamental matter as much as a political one, and I would not press my preferences on a woman of a different generation who finds the megaphone more useful.

But I will say this. From the day I became Princess of Monaco, I considered it my responsibility to use the position for purposes larger than the social calendar of the Palace. I served as President of the Monaco Red Cross for twenty-six years — not in name only, I attended the meetings, I read the budgets, I visited the hospitals. I founded the Princess Grace Foundation for young Americans in the arts, because I knew exactly what a single scholarship had meant to me in New York in 1947 and I wished to give that hour back. I worked quietly on behalf of the Académie de Danse Classique, the Garden Club, the breast-feeding initiative which the medical profession at the time rather wished I would not mention in public. None of it was glamorous. All of it mattered.

This is the model I would commend. Pick the cause you can actually affect. Do not spread yourself thinly across forty banners. Choose one or two. Attend the meetings, read the documents, learn the names of the staff, write the cheques personally, and do not telephone the press before you do the work. The voice that changes things is not necessarily the loudest. It is the one that is still speaking on the matter forty years after the fashionable have moved on.