CSD Day Three
I guess one of the random highlights of the day was finding an unexpected drinks reception in the UN lobby. We went upstairs from the dungeon-like basement to discover free beverages, a jazz trio and lots of well-dressed people socialising happily.
Apart from that, I finally got my hands on a camera and was able to start filming. TakingITGlobal kindly lent me a Sony handheld and it's a relief to begin at last. Shame about the other days, but there was plenty of other stuff going on to be occupied with.
A few people also formed a new Youth Delegate lobbying group, which will work on trying to increase the number of delegations containing a national representative of young people. At this CSD, there are seven official Youth Delegates from five countries, all of which are in Europe. That's not a great number. At the WPAY review we had over 50 - it should really be more than this for every UN event.
One of the best ideas we had was creating a "WANTED" poster for Youth Delegates using silhouettes of a girl and a boy. Hopefully that will be ready for later this week. Another method was entitled the 'Schnipsel Campagne' - a German name. We thought of a few funny advertising slogans for Youth Delegates and will print these on small slips of paper ('Schnipsel' is the German word for this), which will be distributed all over the UN General Assembly building. A few of our phrases were:
Feel 20 years younger - get a Youth Delegate!
Do you need a new face? Get a Youth Delegate!
Craving for something fresh? Get a Youth Delegate!
Want to spice up your delegation? Get a Youth Delegate!
Do you feel empty inside? Get a Youth Delegate!
We had about 10 overall and will get them printed soon. The idea is to hopefully make people laugh when they read the slips, so the idea of getting a Youth Delegate will stick in their minds and they will consider it.
Today was also a great day for the Youth Caucus as a whole. A "Multi-stakeholder Dialogue Session" (great UN name) took place in the morning and every CSD Major Group was entitled to make a statement. The Children and Youth speech was read by our Nepalese delegate Sudyumna Dahal and was actually one of the shortest of the lot - a very good thing in my opinion. A drafting group had been working tirelessly since Monday to perfect the text and it went well.
Sud told his story of the successful mini-hydropower project in some detail and that was a great start. He then moved on to talk about the North American Campus Climate Challenge and the Ghanaian Youth Employment Summit irrigation project I heard about first on day one. Really amazing stuff - hopefully we can get some of these case studies into the CSD Matrix document.
Something else I did was attend a side event being run by UNESCO on the theme of sustainable development education. It wasn't exactly the most interactive event ever, but some of the content was interesting. Speakers from Germany and Manitoba in Canada spoke about programmes they're working on and the results they've achieved. At the moment we're in the UN Decade of Education on Sustainable Development, so member states should be counting this as a priority.
One thing which happened in that room really struck me. It wasn't any of the presentations or speakers, but something which happened later on in the short question and answer session. A lady from UNICEF who works on water development schemes stood up and told us all about some of her recent projects, which included a productive forum for Mexican schoolchildren at a recent event there. The host from UNESCO was evidently interested to hear about this and said they should speak afterwards about how to work together in future. OK, it's good for this to happen, but why hadn't something like it ever been done before?
The UN has innumerable different branches, each with its own confusing acronym, and a reputation for being notoriously disorganised. I'd never witnessed it so directly before though and it was a bit of a wake-up call. If this organisation is to progress, there will need to be better channels of communication between its organs to enable more joint working towards common goals.
On Monday when the media people broke up into smaller teams, a "creative expression" group was formed. Their job was looking into ways to liven up the UN, giving the Youth Caucus a visual presence and getting people to notice what we were doing. Their action for today was incredibly successful. The idea was to create a giant world map and loads of little origami windmills, cheesily named "Windmills of Change", then get people to write their name and country on the fins and pin them to their country if they were in support of action on climate change.
After a couple of hours the map started looking awesome, as you can see above - great work!
Apart from that, I finally got my hands on a camera and was able to start filming. TakingITGlobal kindly lent me a Sony handheld and it's a relief to begin at last. Shame about the other days, but there was plenty of other stuff going on to be occupied with.
A few people also formed a new Youth Delegate lobbying group, which will work on trying to increase the number of delegations containing a national representative of young people. At this CSD, there are seven official Youth Delegates from five countries, all of which are in Europe. That's not a great number. At the WPAY review we had over 50 - it should really be more than this for every UN event.
One of the best ideas we had was creating a "WANTED" poster for Youth Delegates using silhouettes of a girl and a boy. Hopefully that will be ready for later this week. Another method was entitled the 'Schnipsel Campagne' - a German name. We thought of a few funny advertising slogans for Youth Delegates and will print these on small slips of paper ('Schnipsel' is the German word for this), which will be distributed all over the UN General Assembly building. A few of our phrases were:
Feel 20 years younger - get a Youth Delegate!
Do you need a new face? Get a Youth Delegate!
Craving for something fresh? Get a Youth Delegate!
Want to spice up your delegation? Get a Youth Delegate!
Do you feel empty inside? Get a Youth Delegate!
We had about 10 overall and will get them printed soon. The idea is to hopefully make people laugh when they read the slips, so the idea of getting a Youth Delegate will stick in their minds and they will consider it.
Today was also a great day for the Youth Caucus as a whole. A "Multi-stakeholder Dialogue Session" (great UN name) took place in the morning and every CSD Major Group was entitled to make a statement. The Children and Youth speech was read by our Nepalese delegate Sudyumna Dahal and was actually one of the shortest of the lot - a very good thing in my opinion. A drafting group had been working tirelessly since Monday to perfect the text and it went well.
Sud told his story of the successful mini-hydropower project in some detail and that was a great start. He then moved on to talk about the North American Campus Climate Challenge and the Ghanaian Youth Employment Summit irrigation project I heard about first on day one. Really amazing stuff - hopefully we can get some of these case studies into the CSD Matrix document.
Something else I did was attend a side event being run by UNESCO on the theme of sustainable development education. It wasn't exactly the most interactive event ever, but some of the content was interesting. Speakers from Germany and Manitoba in Canada spoke about programmes they're working on and the results they've achieved. At the moment we're in the UN Decade of Education on Sustainable Development, so member states should be counting this as a priority.
One thing which happened in that room really struck me. It wasn't any of the presentations or speakers, but something which happened later on in the short question and answer session. A lady from UNICEF who works on water development schemes stood up and told us all about some of her recent projects, which included a productive forum for Mexican schoolchildren at a recent event there. The host from UNESCO was evidently interested to hear about this and said they should speak afterwards about how to work together in future. OK, it's good for this to happen, but why hadn't something like it ever been done before?
The UN has innumerable different branches, each with its own confusing acronym, and a reputation for being notoriously disorganised. I'd never witnessed it so directly before though and it was a bit of a wake-up call. If this organisation is to progress, there will need to be better channels of communication between its organs to enable more joint working towards common goals.
On Monday when the media people broke up into smaller teams, a "creative expression" group was formed. Their job was looking into ways to liven up the UN, giving the Youth Caucus a visual presence and getting people to notice what we were doing. Their action for today was incredibly successful. The idea was to create a giant world map and loads of little origami windmills, cheesily named "Windmills of Change", then get people to write their name and country on the fins and pin them to their country if they were in support of action on climate change.
After a couple of hours the map started looking awesome, as you can see above - great work!
posted by Frederick at 23:00
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