by Alan Doss

from passblue.com

The World Bank’s Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ... assesses progress toward the goals established by the UN in 2015. Covid is worsening the outlook. According to the World Bank, “The economic effects of COVID-19 may have pushed more than 100 million more people into extreme poverty — the first significant increase in this measure in decades.”

Fortunately, the goals remain a globally accepted set of aspirations that can guide countries to a sustainable, equitable future — even in the pandemic and in the recovery.

This was evidenced by a survey of global opinion commissioned in conjunction with the UN’s 75th anniversary. The survey indicated strong support for the SDGs, especially among young people, as well as for multilateral approaches to global problem-solving.

Nevertheless, much of the commentary around the anniversary was quite gloomy. Many commentators doubted the UN’s ability to tackle the big challenges of the 21st century.

Yet the backstory of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) — forerunners of the SDGs — and how they came about provides an encouraging experience that the UN can shape and achieve change, despite the prevailing orthodoxies.

Following on from the previous post, the results of the "Uplifting Leadership: inspiring; empowering; inclusive." webinar were discussed during the monthly Goodwill Meditation Group webinar. Mintze van der Velde of the Geneva Lucis Trust office provided the following reflections:

This year Lucis Trust and World Goodwill in Geneva, in the framework of the NGO-Alliance, sponsored the organising of a so-called side-event at the World Interfaith Harmony Week. I would like to take the opportunity of this webinar to talk about three things:

What does World Goodwill do at the United Nations in Geneva and what is the NGO-Alliance?
What is the World Interfaith Harmony Week?
How did the event go?

UN WORLD INTERFAITH HARMONY WEEK (FEB. 1-7)

ZOOM PANEL EVENT FEB 1: 

Uplifting Leadership: inspiring - empowering - inclusive

Every year, on the first week in February, countless faith organisations from around the world join with the United Nations to observe World Interfaith Harmony Week. There is a full schedule of events taking place as well as information about the Week's history, background and vision at www.un.org/en/observances/interfaith-harmony-week and worldinterfaithharmonyweek.com/

This year World Goodwill and Lucis Trust, together with other NGOs from the Geneva-based NGO Alliance on Global Concerns, are sponsoring a ZOOM Panel discussion to be held on February 1st, 14:30 UTC / 9:30am EST. The theme will be: Uplifting Leadership: inspiring; empowering; inclusive. Presenters include: May East;  Susan R. Madsen; Robert Gass (tbc); Aftab Omer (tbc).

It is a core part of World Goodwill’s work to shine a light on the idea that the path towards cooperation is written into the DNA of humanity – whether we like it or not it is our spiritual destiny to transit from a competitive age to a cooperative age. This is a process that is underway. The only question is time - how many generations will it take before cooperation becomes the dominant pattern in international relations?

The suggestion is that as a species, humanity, is on an initiatory path; that all of us together, as a unit, are undergoing what has been referred to by some writers as a Great Turning in the orientation of human identity, human thought, human spirituality and human action.  What begins with a reorientation of energies and thoughts expresses itself in relationships – all dimensions of relationship from the subjective to the objective; the vertical to the horizontal; the inner to the outer.