Thinking For The Future

Day three of my little (big) New York adventure, and the theme for today is definitely 'thoughts for the future'. It was a reversal of my expectations of the day really, with an event I thought wasn't going to tell me much being really informative, and an event I thought was going to be great, being very uninspiring.

WAGGGS Delegates Hard At Work At The UN

The Post-2015 Roadmap

This morning, Mitch, Fezile and I set out early to pick up tickets for a couple of events inside the UN today. With the High Level events (the ones with ministers and heads of state in attendance) starting tommorrow you can definitely see the security stepping up in and around the UN area and these tickets to certain events are becoming crucial for entry.

I wasn't expecting a lot from the first event of the day - a stakeholder briefing about the potential sustainable development goals - because other members of the delegation attended the first half of this two part briefing on Friday and gained little from it. But I was wrong. Ambassador John Ashe, the current President of the General Assembly, attended and gve us some real insight into what he is doing to guide the intergovernmental stage of the negotiations on the Post-2015 agenda (I think my next blog might be a glossary of terminology - sorry for the jargon!).

We also heard about several different digital tools currently in use to gather civil society voices including: www.worldwewant2015.org , www.sdgseinventory.org , and http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org. On hearing about this my mental cogs started whirling, thinking about how we can get more girl guides and girl scouts involved in giving their grassroots perspectives on creating the world we want. We also heard about events that I think it will be important for the WAGGGS post-2015 amassadors to try and influence. John Ashe is organising a high level event on Women, Children and Civil Society (We're all three at once!) and there's a session of the committee looking into the possible sustainable development goals where they will talk about gender and youth in Feburary 2014. Two critical points at which we can get our messages heard.

Drained/Inspired

As the briefing overan we moved quickly to the second event, skipping lunch as the UN cafeteria was closed, and we arrived at the Trusteeship Chamber to an announcement that no food or even water is allowed to be consumed in the room. So that put us in a really drained mood ahead of the session.

There were some interesting points raised in the speeches of various panelists but after a lot of repetition of messages over 2 hours and with stomachs rumbling we gradually left to go to other meetings and to find lunch.

I returned to our hotel and switched on the live stream of the Social Good Summit (using the tag #2030NOW). I think in 10 minutes I was more inspired than I had been in those 2 hours of civi society speeches. I want to watch more, but that might have to wait for when I am back in the UK. I caught a presentation on 4 different ways that mobile phones are being used to address malaria followed by the start of a discussion about volunteering. You should check it out here.

Having fed back on today in our evening delegation meeting, we looked ahead to tommorrow. I have several interesting meetings with different people and groups and I'm particularly looking forward to an event in the evening called 'Millennial Generation Factivists'. I think that combined with the ideas from today will help me shape what I want to do back in the UK after this event.