A Day In The Life of A WAGGGS UN Delegate...
Having reached the hotel at nearing 1am last night, I was surprisingly awake by 5am (having slept on the plane) and kick started the day with some tweets for WAGGGS' #MDGRally. There's 100 weeks left in the scope of the MDGs and the rally aims to raise awareness of the ongoing work on them. Join in on social media.Then 7.30am rolled around and time for our delegation breakfast meeting. We talked about the day ahead confirmed who was going where and what letter we needed to pick up what pass to get there. Entry to the UN site isn't too bad until Sunday - though still requires a lot of confirmation letters to be printed! From Monday, the high level segment begins when ministers and heads of state will be milling about. So your average jo representing a youth organisation will have a much harder time getting in.
I headed off to pick up my grounds pass at 9am - they're still using my photo from my first CSW in 2011 which was an awful photo where I look rather ill. Then I collected a secondary ticket from another location and made it onto the UN Grounds. Having met up with various people from the Major Group on Children and Youth (MGCY, the collective organising group of children and youth is sustainable development processes), I made it to the conference room for the 20th and final annual session of the Commission of Sustainable Development. This is a platform that was set up in 1992 by the outcomes of the first Rio conference on the Environment and Development. Based on the outcome of the Rio conference I attended in 2012 it is now being wound up, to be replaced by the High Level Political Forum that will begin next week as the new UN mechanism for moving forward on sustainable development.
The session was a great lesson in public speaking. I remember the engaging ones and haven't a clue what others said. My highlights were (obviously) the youth speeches - short, sweet and to the point - as well as a retrospective video on the work of the CSD to date, and some great points raised by Barbara Adams (you can read her report here). Overall the sentiment is that the engagement and participation of civil society groups is key to achieving sustainable development - the test will be whether the new forum delivers that.
In the afternoon I headed to the Youth Blast session, run by the MGCY to give a little training and orientation to any young people attending the General Assembly. I saw many familiar faces from Rio, and as many again new ones. I found it really informative to undertake a group timeline activity - each contributing our knowledge on the past, present and future of development processes to a colourful timeline. I then participated in discussions around communication, though with a warm and stuffy atmosphere it was clear we were all beginning to flag.
Working in marketing, I've never found a perfect solution to communication. It's either too much or too little, wrong method or medium. It all depends on the audience. We outlined a few ways we thought the MGCY could improve its own communication to be more transparent and easier to engage with, because, right now, it's a daunting prospect for someone new to the concepts to try and get stuck in through the email listserve.
We finished the session with a group photograph, and even though I know how valuable the socialisation time is, I couldn't face a trip to the bar with the other youth, so have retreated to eat some dinner, write this blog and desperately try to stay awake for another delegation meeting at 9pm tonight.
Today has been a day of learning, a day of getting back into the swing of things, and a day of figuring out what I can achieve for WAGGGS, Girlguiding UK and myself from these days in New York. More on that tomorrow.
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