Originally published on the CGS blog on September 21, 2011.
For the last two and a half days I have been attending the Social Good Summit at the 92nd Street Y in New York City (on the Upper East Side). The event is a collaboration between the United Nations Foundation, Mashable and Ericsson (the CEO of whom I leave the Summit with a rather large crush on), a unique partnership of a large scale non profit, a social media expert and a ground breaking mobile company. The conference focused on highlighting individual and small group actions that have made significant changes to save the world. I’ve been live tweeting my experiences and I can barely contain my excitement during some of the panels (i.e. Connecting the Unconnected: 43 million Displaced People Around the World) – but it calls into questions something that was asked of Ted Turner in the very 1st session: is the UN still relevant?
In my next few blog posts I’ll try to answer this question. My first, gut reaction is to the people I’ve been speaking with here – what’s relevant are UN Agencies, unfortunately, a lot of people don’t relate UN Agencies (like Commission on Refugees, World Health Organization, UNICEF) to the actual United Nations body. Here at GlobalSolutions.org we like to say that the United Nations can only be as much as the members of it allow it to be – that might be true, in fact I believe it is – but does the truth matter if no one believes it? And what does this mean for the cause of advancing responsible international cooperation through international institutions here in the United States.
