Director of Lucis Trust & World Goodwill in Geneva, Mintze van der Velde, opens the World Goodwill Seminar at UN Headquarters in Geneva, October 28, 2016

Goodwill is one of the most basic spiritual qualities of the human being and the great untapped resource at the heart of every human community. This energy is potentially a powerful force for social change – yet its power remains largely unrecognized and underutilized. World Goodwill fosters understanding of this energy and the role it is playing in the development of a new humanity.

It is the thoughtful, planned action of networks of goodwill that is driving the response to all the problems of our age: from poverty, poisoned race relations, migration and refugees and environmental destruction through to sentimental spirituality, despair in thinking about the future, and the crises of materialism and selfishness. People of goodwill from all cultures, faiths and professions are creating, through their words and actions, a new world where sharing, cooperation and right relations are taking root and spreading. Never before in the history of the planet has goodwill been so active.

To bring in the new day and the human well-being which is our birth-right, we need a deeper sense of reality based on spiritual values, and a new perception of humanity as a unit of divine life within an ordered and purposive universe. It is difficult for modern man to conceive of a time when there will be no racial, national or separative religious consciousness present in human thinking.  It was equally difficult for prehistoric man to conceive of a time when there would be national thinking and this is a good thing for us to bear in mind.  The time when humanity will be able to think in universal terms still lies far ahead but the fact that we can speak of it, desire it and plan for it is surely the guarantee that it is not impossible.  Humanity has always progressed from stage to stage of enlightenment and from glory to glory.  We are today on our way to a far better civilisation than the world has ever known and towards conditions which will ensure a much happier humanity and which will see the end of national differences, of class distinctions (whether based on  ancestry or financial status) and which will ensure a fuller and richer life for everyone.

Huffington Post Blogger,Alex Ratcliffe, reviews World Goodwill's Seminar at the United Nations in Geneva.

Just days before the election, on 28 October 2016, I attended a seminar amidst the salubrious surroundings of the Palais des Nations, Geneva, “the capital of peace and freedom”. The topic of the seminar, which attracted 150 people from a wide range of backgrounds, professions and nationalities, was: “World Good Will, Ethical Responsibility and the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations”.

The keynote of the seminar in Geneva was that we can make development sustainable, but it requires global cooperation and global accountability, the partnership of governments, private sector, civil society and citizens alike to recognize the urgency and put plans in place with an eye to future generations. But, it was emphasized, this action implies the need for social and political will, and behind that is, and must be, a willingness for the greater good as opposed to individual agendas. ...

For three days, from October 17 – 20, over 30,000 people from around the planet gathered in the city of Quito, Ecuador, to envision future possibilities for the cities of the world. Ten thousand people including national politicians, urban planners and thinkers, and representatives of business and peoples’ movements came from outside of Ecuador. Around 400 city mayors attended the ‘Cities Olympics’.

World Goodwill has supported the work of the United Nations since the inception of the UN. On Friday, October 28, 2016 World Goodwill will, for the first time, host a meeting at UN Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. The theme is From Intellect to Intuition : The Ethical Responsibility of the Sustainable Development Goals. The following day, Saturday, October 29, the focus on the theme From Intellect to Intuition will continue in Geneva with a seminar at another location in the city. There will also be seminars on this theme in London and New York on October 29. 

Two important global Summits were held at UN Headquarters in New York last month:

• The UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants
• The Leaders’ Summit on the Global Refugee Crisis.

So what did the Summits achieve? Inevitably, those who were hoping for some radical breakthrough that would reform a broken refugee system in the midst of crisis were disappointed. 

But there were significant achievements. The New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants unanimously agreed at the UN Summit provides a set of principles around which countries can cooperate in developing a more coordinated and comprehensive response to the needs of refugees.

Pledges at the Leaders’ Summit, if fully implemented, would almost double resettlement places for refugees, increase humanitarian aid for refugees by $4.5bn, provide education to 1 million more refugee children and improve access to legal work for a further million adults. The Guardian commented that while there was disappointment after the Monday Summit, the mood changed on Tuesday, with 18 developed countries announcing plans to increase legal access for refugees, 17 developing countries pledging to increase refugees’ access to education, and 15 claiming that they would take various measures that could help to expand refugees’ access to work.