WORK WITH THE UN
INTRODUCTION
Peace Child’s work with the UN began before Peace Child was even born: composer, David Gordon’s brother, Yusuf/Cat Stevens, had been a UNICEF ambassador in the 1980's and that family connection was enough to get David, at least, treated like royalty in the corridors of the UN.
It wasn’t enough to get Peace Child to meet James Grant, Director of UNICEF, when Peace Child director, David Woollcombe, visited the USA in November 1981: the government of Hungary felt that it was not UNICEF’s business to involve children in peace-making, so Jim Grant was forced to call the meeting off. However, the connection was made, and Jim became one of Peace Child’s biggest supporters, appearing as a Special Guest in a Peace Child show in Noordwijk, the Netherlands in 1990!
Our work with the UN really began when we brought our Soviet-American cast to New York in 1986 on the first US-Soviet Youth Cultural Exchange. As luck would have it, Chase Manhattan Bank was sponsoring a big fun run for New York Charities the day after we did our performance at the Riverside Church: Stevie Wonder, Danny Kaye and many other celebrities were there, and they invited the Peace Child cast along to sing a couple of their songs – along with the massed choirs they assembled:
There-after – for doing that show, for the UN Year of Peace Launch Concert in London, and for completing the breakthrough US-Soviet tour of Peace Child, we were awarded a UN Peace Messenger award. Sadly, the certificate was lost after the US office closed down – but we have this photograph of David Woollcombe receiving it on the International Day of Peace 1987:
It was at that Concert for the New York Fun Run that Jim Grant (UNICEF) and Noel Brown (UNEP) gave us the little Green Book on Environmental Education and asked our kids what they thought of it. “Not much!” was their answer. It was “boring” – and had none of the stories or pictures that would make them want to pick it up, let alone read it. The result of that conversation was the Children’s State of the Planet Handbook, thence to Rescue Mission : Planet Earth – the Children’s Edition of Agenda 21. Following the mega-success of that publication, UN staff were keen to engage us in discussions about: “What could Peace Child do for the UN’s 50th Anniversary??” It turned out, we could do this book:
A Children's History of the Past, Present and Future of the United Nations
It was funded by the UN 50th Department’s budget. Though this came with some editorial constraints from the UN 50th Anniversary Committee, the young people had a great time working with the UN staff legends, Karina Gerlachand Zohreh Tabatabai - researching the UN of the past and Present, and imagining what a UN of the Future might look like. Their conclusions resonate today as we think about how we can bring the UN out of its current, marginalised and beleaguered state:
From then on, Peace Child International was bound at the hip to the United Nations. It organised the first Youth meetings at the UN’s newly set up Centre for Sustainable Development which became the UN’s Major Group for Children and Youth (MGCY.) It took delegations of youth to the Rio+5 and Rio+10 meetings in Rio de Janeiro and Johannesburg South Africa respectively. Jim Grant had said at the launch of the Rescue Mission Children’s Edition of Agenda 21 in 1994 that Peace Child International should prepare Children’s Editions of all major documents because, as he said, “If a child of 14 can understand what we’re getting at, there’s a pretty good chance the rest of us will as well.”
We did our best to fulfil that request – preparing children’s editions of the Global Environment Outlook, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and doing our own update on progress with the implementation of Agenda 21 entitled, Rescue Mission 2002. All of these books had introductions by senior UN Officials. We also did children’s editions of the UNDP Human Development Reports, including a digest of the 1st ten reports which we called, Sustainable Human Development – probably the hardest book for our kids to deliver. We wanted to call it: Investing in Happiness – which might have made it more light-weight, but perhaps a bit more accessible for that 14-year old audience.
We achieved full ECOSOC Consultative Status with the UN in 1997 – and started doing our quadrennial reports to the UN’s Civil Society Section. This brought into the New York-based UN Bubble – a community of committed peacemakers but whom our young volunteers found a bit detached from the world that most other mortals inhabit. They deal in deserts of dusty acronyms, mountains of bureaucratic / diplomatic “procedures” that are entirely foreign to most young people. Some youth do get the “UN bug” and bury themselves in the rule books, and you find them, wandering through the UN corridors, some in dickie-bow ties, speaking with extraordinary confidence at meetings, and generally behaving like diplomats-in-waiting. The young people of Peace Child couldn’t be dealing with such people, dismissed them as: “Youth in ties”!
But – they played their role – we played ours. We engaged UN Officials in our World Youth Congresses – and we attended theirs. We registered over 300 Youth Delegates for the Rio+20 conference in 2012. We also endlessly promoted new UN Slogans – like “See Youth as a Resource – Not a Problem” – which came out of the Youth Caucus for the Johannesburg Rio+10 Conference.
However, we couldn’t disguise the fact that our young people were getting increasingly dis-illusioned with the UN and, when 295 of the 300 youth delegates we had registered for Rio+20 walked out of the Conference in disgust at the way that UN Officials were railroading the Outcomes, there was nothing we could do to stop them. It was a good reaction to a terrible process, mis-managed from the outset by the UN. It built on the disenchantment felt by the delegation we took to the Copenhagen COP in 2009.
The United Nations Office in Geneva, Switzerland
The Peace Child Performance “The Future We Want” – Grande Salle of the United Nations
But we never gave up on the UN: it is our best – perhaps our only – chance of saving Life on Earth – and future generations from the scourge of war! So we came back and performed the climate change version of Peace Child for the Green Cross 20th Anniversary in the Grande Salle of the UN Office in Geneva. The performance was, by any standards, a triumph. UN Staff loved it – and it made a big impact on the young people doing it and the audience it attracted. Although Peace Child International would never again register kids in their hundreds for UN conferences (we only registered one for the Paris COP two years later) – the Founders and trustees of Peace Child International still believe passionately in the need for a strong, coherent UN to helped national governments deliver the policies required for the survival of the human family on our planet. The appointment of the UN Secretary-General’s 1st Special Envoy for Youth in January 2013 was a wonderful affirmation of the empowerment of young people for which we had been fighting. The development of the World Bank-funded / UNICEF-run, Generation Unlimited, in 2018 was further evidence of changing attitudes to youth sweeping through the UN. By 2019, we were back at the UN, planning something spectacular for the UN’s 75th Anniversary.
With Patricia Rogers, Chair of the London and South-East Region(LASER) UNAs + UNA-UK, Peace Child helped advance this Agenda with what became our UN75th Anniversary Festival, exploring the question: What Next for The UN? Just as we started planning our Festival in early 2020, COVID struck – and everything had to go online. From a planning perspective, this was no bad thing – as we could all sit at home and meet via zoom. But – the physical Festival became increasingly impossible and, by Summer 2020, we had a plan for a week-long Festival with 5 days of seminars on Security (- food security, health security, environmental security, digital security and physical security) – culminating in a Festival Concert celebrating heroes and heroines of the UN and imagining what the UN of the Future might look like. That process has continued and – ultimately – caused Peace Child International to spin off its hugely successful West African Youth Led Development programme, the Be the Change Academies. Because day-to-day international development was incompatible with the push for UN reform that Peace Child International, increasingly, felt it its duty to pursue.
According to a UNICEF study, young people aged 15-24, are much more likely to identify as global citizens than people over 40, especially if they live in cities and use the internet on a daily basis.
The Internet has wiped out borders for young people; Google Translate makes foreign languages no obstacle to understanding, and the idea of being part of a global family is, as it always was, very attractive. So, we feel it is a perfect time to promote the idea of global citizenship and global cooperation to solve global crises, like the Climate Emergency and all the other emergencies that are lining up down the corridors of life this generation is going to have to navigate. That is what the latest version of Peace Child seeks to explore. And we must strengthen our partnership with the UN to make it to happen.
Watch this space for developments!