CSD Day One - the story so far...
At the moment I'm sitting in the Vienna Cafe, located in the basement of the main UN building. It's really smoky down here since this is international territory and domestic non-smoking laws don't apply! Lots of the diplomats and delegates seem to like having a quick cigarette and coffee between meetings and lots of the most important discussions in the UN are famed to take place around these times.
It's been a busy day. Our first Youth Caucus meeting took place from 10-11 and there was a great turnout, with lots of new young people who couldn't make it to the Blast event on Saturady. We started out with a quick introductory game before getting some more information on what's coming up.
One of the most important tasks was to sort out who is going to sit in the "Children and Youth" seat at the Themed Discussions today and tomorrow. As I said before, it's vital for there to be a young face at every meeting to give us a visible presence in this event. People need to know we're here and they need to take notice.
An important part of getting people to take notice will be media outreach. After the Caucus meeting ended at 11, gatherings of smaller groups were convened in the cafeteria/restaurant area upstairs to discuss specialised issues. It was great to see lots of participants taking an interest in being part of the media group and we had a very productive general discussion about possible strategies.
We then split up into smaller subgroups. The "Action" team will organise creative ways to generate media exposure, with possible publicity stunts to get journalists' attention. A recent major youth meeting in Montreal apparently received a lot of attention, including in the New York Times, so we're going to try and use some of the same methods. I guess the main problem is that the CSD isn't anything more than a discussion with stakeholders - no binding declarations are produced and therefore no real hook for reporters. So it's going to be down to us to generate the headlines and that's where the creativity of youth will come in.
The other groups are working on logistics and the general message of our media campaign. It's going to be very important for everyone to be presenting the same case; we don't want people saying different things in articles or anything like that. Logistically, this will also be quite complicated to organise - the three small groups will have to work closely together but so we'll need good channels of communication at all times.
It's been a busy day. Our first Youth Caucus meeting took place from 10-11 and there was a great turnout, with lots of new young people who couldn't make it to the Blast event on Saturady. We started out with a quick introductory game before getting some more information on what's coming up.
One of the most important tasks was to sort out who is going to sit in the "Children and Youth" seat at the Themed Discussions today and tomorrow. As I said before, it's vital for there to be a young face at every meeting to give us a visible presence in this event. People need to know we're here and they need to take notice.
An important part of getting people to take notice will be media outreach. After the Caucus meeting ended at 11, gatherings of smaller groups were convened in the cafeteria/restaurant area upstairs to discuss specialised issues. It was great to see lots of participants taking an interest in being part of the media group and we had a very productive general discussion about possible strategies.
We then split up into smaller subgroups. The "Action" team will organise creative ways to generate media exposure, with possible publicity stunts to get journalists' attention. A recent major youth meeting in Montreal apparently received a lot of attention, including in the New York Times, so we're going to try and use some of the same methods. I guess the main problem is that the CSD isn't anything more than a discussion with stakeholders - no binding declarations are produced and therefore no real hook for reporters. So it's going to be down to us to generate the headlines and that's where the creativity of youth will come in.
The other groups are working on logistics and the general message of our media campaign. It's going to be very important for everyone to be presenting the same case; we don't want people saying different things in articles or anything like that. Logistically, this will also be quite complicated to organise - the three small groups will have to work closely together but so we'll need good channels of communication at all times.
posted by Frederick at 19:00
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