WILPF Project to Education about the United Nations

WILPF members in Geneva have access to a digital video camera and propose to make use of it to create materials for WILPF UN education, and for WILPFers to use as they educate about the UN.

The United Nations

WILPF members support the United Nations because we see it as an indispensable organization to maintain and build peace. We want to see this world institution strengthened to enable it to deal with the increasingly complex global problems. Do the reforms adopted by the General Assembly go in this direction? If not, what must we do as members? The answer is important and increasingly so. Only with a good understanding of what is happening in the UN can we give informed opinions and participate in useful actions.

This One Page Paper sets out a WILPF education project about the UN. It is proposed, in the first place, to develop a model workshop on video/DVD with an accompanying set of supporting resource documents on the United Nations. Based on the model workshop WILPF and the accompanying resources materials, sections and branches develop their own live workshops, bringing the UN to members, neighbours, campuses, and so on.

What is envisaged is an informal and internal WILPF product that provides raw material and suggestions for how WILPFers may inform themselves, and inform others about the work of the United Nations and its importance to us all. The sub-sections of the DVD and accompanying guide packet include:

• The vision of a United Nations and the drafting of the UN Charter

• How governments work at the UN – why being informed and pressuring your government on the national level matters and makes a difference

• What are the fundamental elements of the UN, what changes or what additions would be useful to make, what can be deleted? How the different bodies function and how they relate to one another: the General Assembly, the Security Council the Secretariat, the different programs and the NGOs and civil society generally?

The project has minimal financial implications – we have a camera, we have editing software, and we have volunteers interested in creating this resource (the undersigned).

The costs would be (a) duplication of the DVD and production of the resource pack b) distribution), some staff time in assisting with the development, production and distribution of the materials.

Submitted by Edith Ballantyne and Felicity Hill

Geneva, August 2006