The Journey to the UN Global Governance Forum - Join us September 16 & 17

I hope you are well, in these most challenging times. We’ve crossed paths through the years, so you’re aware of my longstanding determination to advance meaningful change and build events, programs and partnerships that will generate substantive conversations, inspire change, and create long-term impact.  Although my journey has its roots in Connecticut, it has flourished well beyond, particularly in Colorado and in New York at the United Nations.

I am immensely proud to share with you, and invite you to attend, an unprecedented milestone gathering that will take place just days from now –the UN75 Global Governance Forum on September 16 & 17, virtually, of course.

I have the privilege of serving as Project Director of this landmark initiative, as my company, Partnerships for Social Change, was selected to provide the organizational framework. We are utilizing the Innovation in Partnerships Methodology that I developed, informed by my work organizing and leading innovative events and initiatives through the years, especially through my work with One Earth Future and  which many friends, colleagues and associates have been involved with and helped to succeed.

The UN 75 Global Governance Forum - Designing a Roadmap to The Future We Want, The UN We Need - seeks to promote a more inclusive and effective United Nations through dialogue and recommendations that better harness the ideas, capabilities, and networks of both state and non-state actors for achieving the UN’s commitment to peace, sustainable development, human rights, and a stable climate.  Registration is now open, you can register here.  There is no charge; simply indicate “Forum Attendee.”  

There will be an array of distinguished and thought-provoking speakers and participants, representing diverse demographics, perspectives and points of view.  We will convene more than 300 stakeholders from civil society (including youth), scholars, policy entrepreneurs, UN system bodies and Member States, the private sector, and philanthropic institutions to honor the principles of multilateral cooperation upon which the UN was founded, and to look ahead.

Among the co-chairs of the initiative, which began earlier this year with a series of international conversations organized around four thematic pillars, are Ban Ki-Moon, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Director-General of the World Health Organization and Madeleine K. Albright, former United States Secretary of State.

As someone who has seen first-hand my own journey to this pivotal convening, I welcome you to be part of it.  Your thoughts and observations, as always, are also welcome.

Innovation in Partnerships

It has been over a year since I left One Earth Future as the Director of Global Events and returned to my consulting firm, Maureen Connolly Management, Inc, DBA: Partnerships for Social Change. I have continued as a consultant to One Earth Future as well as the Director of a new program initiative: Partnerships for Social Change: Making a Business Case for Peace.

Building on the success of the original Innovation in Partnerships series, we have extended our focus to engaging the private sector in “win-win” opportunities to do business responsibly, contribute to sustaining peace and achieve the 2030 agenda.

We will launch our pilot initiative in November will produce six events per year until 2030.

Please read the concept note and contact us for further information.

IIP logo.png

“There are compelling reasons to support the SDGs and business has great ambitions to do so. Best practice and process on ‘how to’ is limited though – a gap in the execution that has the potential to slow engagement. So, how can business fast track its thinking and turn the complexity of the global goals into business as usual?”

Malcom Preston, PwC Sustainability Leader in Making it your Business: Engaging in the SDGs.

OVERVIEW

There is an urgency to engage the private sector in countries under stress, including in conflict and post conflict situations. In order to leave no one behind, opportunities need to be developed in countries that need it the most and are often ill perceived as too risky.  We are providing a space for the start of meaningful partnerships. We are creating an ongoing platform where the private sector, governments, UN agencies and stakeholders can engage with countries in these circumstances.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development includes a call to revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development, including through multi-stakeholder partnerships that mobilize and share knowledge, expertise, technology and financial resources toward achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  The Sustaining Peace resolutions make a similar call for inclusion of stakeholders in the peace and prevention processes. Moreover the Pathways for Peace joint report between the UN and the World Bank recommends to “Engage non-state actors in platforms for peacebuilding and strengthen incentives for civic engagement.” The question is how?

This workshop series is designed to create the catalyst to engagement through a greater understanding of the potential opportunities to do business responsibly, contribute to sustaining peace and achieving the 2030 agenda.  

When considering the linkage between peace and sustainable development the potential for multi-stakeholder collaboration needs to be strengthened.  One issue hindering effective cross-sectoral collaboration in this area is an understanding gap regarding the cultures and communication approaches used by UN communities, civil society organizations, and private sector actors.  Each of these communities interacts with issues of peace and conflict in a different way, with greater or lesser comfort with different orientations to the discussion. The result is that attempts at cross-sectoral partnerships may flounder as the different communities’ lack clarity on how they can partner effectively.

Private sector decision-makers lack clarity regarding their company’s strategic value in promoting peace, which results in a lack of understanding of how to engage in sustaining peace initiatives.

  • Private sector decision-makers tend to base their strategic decisions on their existing expertise and culture, situated in the context of their chosen field of endeavor and business goals.

  • Inconsistent communication/language among the private sector, civil society, national governments and UN officials often leads to confusion about the private sectors’ actual or potential strategic value and capacity to promote peace.

  • The private sector is viewed only as “donor” instead of active participants in promoting peace.

  • Public policy is not always based on consultations with private sector and civil society so to better address their needs.

  • There is a perception issue and an absence of trust among these different communities.

UNIQUE VALUE PROPOSITION

An iterative workshop series to design strategies and facilitate partnerships of all kinds among the private sector, governments, UN entities and civil society to further new and existing peace initiatives aimed at Sustaining Peace and achieving the 2030 Agenda.

  • Facilitate knowledge transfer between governments, private sector and civil society.  

  • Provide a platform for engagement between governments, private sector and civil society to catalyze partnerships.

  • Provide an ongoing structure for the new partnerships to advance from words to action.

  • Identify public policy obstacles and key factors needed to ensure an enabling environment.

  • In the long-term: track, measure, and report SDG progress from these emerging partnerships by following up on the activities/ partnerships that continued after the workshop.

 PILOT WORKSHOP

The pilot workshop will develop the “win-win” language for partnerships between the private sector and peace promoters.

This workshop will focus on “how to make the ask” to engage with the private sector to develop innovative, coherent partnerships to support the alignment of business interests and investments with the Sustainable Development Goals.  All too often, both sides of the public-private divide are interested in engaging in activities that promote security and development, but the partnerships are hampered by a lack of understanding about who and how to approach in order to develop collaborative work.  Specifically, this workshop will promote a greater understanding among member states, private sector, CSO, and UN actors about how each party approaches issues relating to sustaining peace and the SDGs, particularly Goal 16, and what this implies for how to communicate about potential projects.  The results will be communicated outside of workshop participants through a brief report (following the Chatham House Rule) laying out key conclusions.

The workshop will last approximately 3 hours and include no more than 30 participants, drawn as equally as possibly from business, CSO, and UN entities involved in peacekeeping, peacemaking, peacebuilding.  Participants will be invited to participate under a strict policy of non-attribution.

Instead of a panel, the format of the workshop is highly interactive. It is based on a “World Café” model that encourages small-group discussion with a variety of actors (countries, private sector and civil society in the same table).

After a brief opening presentation laying out previous research and the current state of engagement between the government, private sector and civil society, participants will break into small groups to respond to a case study to identify the starting point orientations from the different angles (e.g. how would a government/private sector/civil society react to a natural disaster?). This exercise would be a warm-up to help us understand the different approaches and contexts taken.  Next, participants will discuss language used by actors in this area and discuss how some terms may be more problematic within different communities. Finally, whole-group discussion will review the conclusions of the small groups to generate a collective discussion. The whole group will also engage with what these conclusions mean for actors interested in approaching other sectors for partnerships and engagement and generate recommendations for how to best execute these approaches.

Goals for the table discussion:

  • Establish starting point for each person (government, private sector and civil society)

  • Address vocabulary differences between private sector and the UN community

  • Develop potential partnership projects or examples of “how to make the ask”

The pilot workshop will be held in New York, Mid-November 2018 and combine examples of potential themed workshops for future event.

The Innovation in Partnerships: Making a Business Case for Peace workshops for 2019 include:

  1. Blended Finance – Working with Impact 2030 and PASO Colombia, the Colombian Government and private sector investments to develop partnerships aimed at achieving the sustainable development goals.

  2. Education – From Digital Education to building schools, funding training and workforce development, this workshop will focus on private sector engagement with education in-country.

  3. Technological – Working with technology companies to harness the technology revolution for social good, we will convene potential projects based on common goals of countries, companies and civil society organizations.

  4. Nobel Laureates/Peace Jam – This special Innovation in Partnerships: Making a Business Case for Peace workshop will focus specifically on raising funds and or directing services to projects of the Nobel Peace Laureates working with Peace Jam, a Non-profit organization working with Nobel Laureates to mentor youth.  This high visibility program will focus on the in-country projects of the laureate with the private sector and country triads formed to move their projects forward.

IIP graphs.jpg

Maureen Connolly Management, Inc maintains the exclusive rights to reproduce, distribute, display and modify the Innovations in Partnership© work indefinitely. The content of this document, and the presentation of it, includes original ideas and concepts protected under U.S. intellectual property laws.


Events For Social Change

We spend a great deal of time and money planning and implementing events, convenings, and forums, but often at the end we wonder what we truly accomplished and although we made good connections, delivered our ideas, and generated dialogue – What Happens Next?

One Earth Future is an Operating Foundation that implements systems to deliver Peace through Governance.  As our 7 programs work on varied programs from illegal fishing to piracy, women, peace and security to post-conflict rebuilding in Colombia, we host many events and technical meetings to advance our programs work and build our networks.  As the Director of Global Events for One Earth Future, I was tasked with helping to elevate our programs to a new level of impact while developing our brand as world class conveners . 

The focus of all of our event designs began to follow a new formula that was integrated into each event design and program strategy.  Consulting with each program director we began to develop strategies that used the convening as the catalyst for social change.  Our discussions included the following assessment:

  • Why are you doing this event?

  • What does your program hope to accomplish (short and long-term objectives)

  • Is the event designed to achieve goals? (speakers, breakout groups, attendees)

  • Does the theme and narrative drive the agenda and desired outcomes?

  • What do you want people to think, do, or say after this event?

These questions helped us to extend the impact of the event beyond the event itself to commitments to action and communities of practice that moved the program agenda full circle to ongoing activities.

This seems like a simple equation but events often fall short as they stop developing at the implementation and planning stages.  Our event strategy goes far beyond the event itself and helps to deliver on new program initiatives such as:  Investment in Somalia, fisheries development on the east coast of Africa, post-conflict development in Colombia.  We begin with determining who needs to be in the room, how they are brought into co-creation and new idea generation, and what will happen moving forward.  This type of event strategy then went beyond the programs to building our brand as an organization beyond the individual programs.

After my first year at One Earth Future, we began to look towards using events to bring us from our current state of technical meetings to a program that focused on the unique value proposition of all the programs under the One Earth Future umbrella.  Our strength has always been multi-stakeholder collaboration and we have been extremely successful in putting systems in place that reduce violent conflict, especially in Somalia.

As we look to celebrating our 10 year anniversary, under the leadership of our founder, Marcel Arsenault and our President, Larry Sampler, we began to look at our global impact as an organization.

The Innovation in Partnerships series was launched in 2017 with the International Peace Institute in NewYork.  We looked a unique convening that would be developed at the intersection of the SDG Global Goals and the One Earth Future programs.  Each event is designed as in the World Café style, working in small groups to answer a series of questions that would lead to changes in mindset and behavior as new partnerships are recognized and new opportunities to make progress on the goals realized in future action.

Three key ingredients have led to tremendous success with our Innovation in Partnerships series:

  1. Tables are curated to include people who may not always talk face to face in a casual, non-threatening gathering. e.g. fishing industry ceo’s with ambassadors and fisheries experts/ngo’s.

  2. The event in Chatham House rules (no attribution, media or streaming) to the conversation.

  3. The event coincides with a larger SDG initiative that the outcomes of the discussion will benefit. e.g. Innovation in Partnerships SDG 14 was hosted by the Swedish Ambassador who then included the industry reps and the OEF Secure Fisheries Director in the SDG 14 high level conference on Our Oceans.

The outcomes were measurable and impactful:

  • One Earth Future was included in ongoing UN high level policy work around illegal fishing.

  • We built social capital (developing social networks built on trust and cooperation for the social good).

  • Our Foundation name was introduced as high level conveners of UN Missions, Industry CEO’s, and experts.

As a result of the event, four industry representatives are now part of the SDG 14 working group,  OEF Secure Fisheries program leadership are involved as part of the community of practice engaged in progress on specific targets of SDG 14 – to reduce illegal and unregulated fishing. 

This series will continue with SDG 16: How To Measure Peace? SDG 12: Illegal and illicit mining, SDG 8: business in Fragile States.  We will continue to develop new events as our programs develop and we realize the opportunities for growth and impact.

Recognizing the potential of events as a real catalyst for social change is a game changer as we continue to scale our work, collaborate with new partners, and build capacity and efficiency into event operations.  A carefully designed event that leads to collaboration and collective action at an intersection that addresses many levels of interest is needed more than ever as our global goals call for new innovative partnerships committed to progress.