New Community Institutions for Enabling Sustainability
by Cameron Neil

I was invited to participate in a 40 person roundtable in Canberra in June this year on considering and creating new community institutions - and a related movement - for more easily and rapidly enabling sustainability in Australia.

The roundtable was organised by the Nature and Society Forum (www.natsoc.org.au), following writing by NSF members Stephen Boyden and Bob Douglas that identified a possible gap in the Australian social landscape that was holding back rapid local adoption and community involvement in realising a vision of 'Healthy People on a Healthy Planet".

The purpose of the roundtable was to bring together a selection of eminent minds in the Canberra region to consider whether there was a gap and an opportunity to create an important new phenomenon that could accelerate sustainability uptake and the required cultural and economic shift in communities.

Discussion during the roundtable, held over a Friday night meal and a Saturday, was robust, wide-ranging, grandiose and hopeful, but also realistic about the challenges, and the immediate and potentially painful impacts of climate change, peak oil, and poor health on our communities. There were some disagreements over timescales, which also related to methods. Some participants had a strong interest in seeing these new 'institutions' and a related movement averting environmental catastrophe and collapse associated with climate change, peak oil, degredation of ecosystem services, etc. Rapid development and implementation was therefore necessary.

Others, such as myself, saw the value of these new institutions as 'life boats' and 'beacons' for new ways of living that would become increasingly necessary as the environmental issues began to impact on people's lives and people were looking for solutions. Their value was in building community resiliency and knowledge, in enacting local deliberative and democratic processes where members of the community were empowered to dream about the world they wanted for their grandchildren and to take action now to create that world. The timescales for us became longer and there was greater emphasis on community involvement, ownership and participation.

Despite such differences, there was clear support from the roundtable participants for the coalescence of a new movement, grounded in physical institutions in communities, which would seek to become centres for engagement and participation of all people in creating a more sustainable future.

At the conclusion of the roundtable, a smaller group was tasked with taking the idea forward. A number of proposals and drafts of outcome documents have been circulated to us all via email and progress is now being made on piloting these SEE-Change Centres in Canberra.

For more detail on the above, a transcript of the roundtable, the outcome statement, and various other bits and pieces, including an FAQ, are available here: www.natsoc.org.au/html/SEE.htm.

What Kind of World We Wish to Leave Behind
By Sam Daley-Harris

The world stands at a crossroads. One path leads to the end of poverty by 2025. On this path, extreme poverty is cut in half and the other Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are achieved by 2015, goals set by more than 180 heads of state and government at the UN Millennium Summit in 2000.

But if we are not vigilant and committed, we could easily follow a second path, and see only limited change to the harrowing realities faced by far too many people on this planet: one billion people living on less than US$ 1 a day; 100 million children of primary school age not in school; and 29,000 children under the age of five dying each day from largely preventable malnutrition and disease. Which course will we take?

The Microcredit Summit Campaign leads the way toward the first path, toward the end of poverty. Our compass is the Campaign’s new goals for 2015: 1) reaching 175 million of the world’s poorest families with microcredit, affecting 875 million family members and 2) ensuring 100 million of the world’s poorest families rise above the US$ 1 a day threshold, lifting some 500 million family members out of extreme poverty. These new goals will be launched at the Global Microcredit Summit 2006 to be held in Halifax, Canada, November 12-15, 2006.

The microfinance movement was created by development revolutionaries, people who broke the rules of banking and overcame the failures of international development. They offered tiny, uncollateralized loans to poor, illiterate women and successfully reached and empowered the very poor through self-sustaining institutions, something international development still struggles to do.

Several months ago Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus shared the Bank’s most recent statistics with me. That same night I had an opportunity to offer a toast and used the statistics he had shared. I toasted the 70,000 beggars, as the bank now offers $10 loans to beggars to help them purchase items to sell so they might leave begging. I toasted the 200,000 village phone ladies, because even though GrameenPhone has 7 million phone users in the cities, they also have 200,000 women in rural areas that use their cell phone as a business. The women need a photo voltaic cell to charge the phone because there is no electricity in most of the villages. I toasted the six million clients because the bank just served its six millionth client. And I toasted the 30 million family members because with five in a family, six million clients affects 30 million family members.

Two months later I received the most extraordinary e-mail from Fazle Abed the Chairman of BRAC in Bangladesh, another of the microfinance leaders who will be coming to Halifax in November. BRAC has 4 million microcredit clients affecting 20 million family members. BRAC also has more than 30,000 BRAC schools, one-room schools for 10 and 11 year olds who never made it to first grade—catch up schools really. In his book The End of Poverty, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs marveled at the fact that the BRAC clients he met only had one or two children, yet 30 years ago Bangladeshi rural women typically had six or seven children, a profound change in attitude and behavior. Two years ago BRAC received a $1 million prize from the Gates Foundation for its work in health. Bill Gates visited BRAC last December and was quoted in The Washington Post as saying his visit with the BRAC microcredit clients was “like a religious experience.”

I sent out an announcement recently about continuing my work as Director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign and expanding my work with RESULTS, the citizens’ lobbying organization I founded 26 years ago that’s focuses on creating the political will to end hunger and the worst aspects of poverty. I mentioned that I will turn 60 this year and wanted to make the best use of the next ten years of my life. This is what Fazle Abed, the founder of BRAC, wrote me in response:

“I have just received your note regarding the announcement of upcoming additional responsibility you will be taking up as you turn 60 this year. Since I reached the more mature age of 70 couple of months ago we will certainly need to talk at the earliest opportunity as to what kind of world we wish to leave behind for the future generations and what we could accomplish in the remaining time allotted to us.”

Isn’t this the question we should be asking: “What kind of world we wish to leave behind for future generations” and isn’t it such an honor to have this kind of conversation with a person like Fazle Abed or with your colleagues in IYPF?

Sam Daley-Harris is founder of RESULTS, an international citizens’ lobbying organization committed to generating the political will to end hunger and the worst aspects of poverty and is director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign.

For more information see www.microcreditsummit.org and www.results.org.

Protesters from St. Petersburg to Auckland demand immediate action on climate change

ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA - The Group of Eight industrial nations approved at their recent meeting a statement on "Global Energy Security," which allocates billions of dollars for nuclear energy infrastructure and oil extraction.

The G8 statement on global energy security advocates nuclear energy as one way to address global climate change, yet environmental activists warn that nuclear energy cannot be considered a favourable way to reduce carbon emissions. Nuclear reactors are dangerous, extremely expensive, take many years to build, and require massive government subsidies. Activists would like this funding to instead be used to quickly reduce carbon emissions through energy efficiency measures, development of renewable energy sources, and restoration of damaged wetland and forest ecosystems.

In coalition with protests in St. Petersburg alongside the G8 meeting, international demonstrations occurred on July 14 and 15 in numerous cities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Venezuela, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Germany. The protests included large "banner drops" in multiple cities, protests of coal and oil companies, and rallies at the U.S. embassy in London and U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman's home in Washington, DC. In Maracaibo, Venezuela, indigenous peoples protested the destruction of their water and way of life by open coal pit mines.

"The G8 countries represent just 15 percent of the world's population but they produce 45 percent of all human emissions of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas," said Ethan Green of Rising Tide North America, a group that publicized the July 15th protests against Climate Change and the G8 in the United States. "Poor, indigenous and environmentally vulnerable communities should not bear the brunt of the global climate change that the richer countries are creating."

"The majority of the world's top twenty oil companies are based in G8 nations and enjoy "open door" policies with their governments. It's no surprise that these companies are the biggest polluters," said Mike Hudema, Independence from Oil director at the human rights group Global Exchange. "In addition, the G8 already gives over a hundred billion dollars in subsidies to nuclear developers, yet refuses to subsidize safer sustainable alternatives - like wind, water, and solar power. The politics of energy security are, at this point, more based on the pork barrel than on science. This plan makes no ecological sense."

The shortsightedness of the energy policy has also been corroborated by a joint statement released by the G8's own top scientists on June 14. Scientists urged the G8 to heed its own Gleneagles recommendations and pursue sustainable energy growth, in response to the increasing threat of the climate crisis. Read about it here: www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L14523354.htm

A coalition of youth groups from all 6 continents recently circulated a statement to the G8 on the need for clean energy alternatives. They say that the youth will have to bear the burden of today's unsustainable energy policies.

The statement is available at www.globalexchange.org/war_peace_democracy/oil/3983.html (IYPF’s CEO, Cameron Neil, was a signatory).

A previous press release about this statement is available here: www.globalexchange.org/update/press/4037.html

Biodiveristy Edition – July 2006 Newsletter
Download it from www.iypf.org/news.htm#latest.

Hi everyone. Welcome to the July 2006 newsletter, with our focus on biodiversity & ecological sustainability. This follows on the heels of our June Environment & Sustainability theme, to coincide with World Environment Day. We felt like it was a ‘natural’ (pardon the pun) fit to flow these two in to each other … and from here to next month’s theme of Indigenous Issues. The indigenous focus reflects a shift from the natural world to the social and cultural. September will look at peace and conflict (very very important given recent events), October will look at Poverty, and November and December will tackle Consumption, Waste and HIV & AIDS. We look forward to enabling you to share about your activities, research, programs, events, experiences and opinions on these topics throughout the rest of 2006.

In our Biodiversity & Ecological Sustainability feature, there are articles looking at market mechanisms for preserving biodiversity; details of a project being initiated in Benin to link biodiversity conservation, job creation and preservation of culture; efforts to oppose genetic modified seeds due to their threat to farming, livelihoods and the environment; and an article about a possible new social institution movement in Australia to facilitate greater local engagement in sustainability issues. Quite diverse.

In other news, there is more follow up on fair trade and development with an exciting new initiative in the EU and an insightful discussion about the opportunity presented by ‘sustainable products’ for developing countries and their economic development. We are also very excited to feature an inspiring article by Sam Daley-Harris, Director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign, on the power of micro-credit to transform peoples lives and a call for us to determine the kind of world we want to leave behind.

We live in turbulent, sometimes violent, times. As young professionals wired in to the information flows of the world’s news services, we see more, hear more, have access to more than any generation before us. We can see the death and destruction, the suffering, the tragedy, beamed in to our living rooms or on to our computer screens. I don’t know about you, but sometimes it all seems like too much. Its easy to forget how much hope there is in the world, how many good and amazing things are happening out there – stuff that doesn’t sell advertising and doesn’t make it on to the wires.

Over the next month, I encourage you to tell these stories of hope and courage, whether they are your own or others. Draw on some of the stories here in this newsletter. Find others. Share them. We need these stories to nuture our own hopes and dreams, and to inspire others, so that we can continue to work hard for the future we want to see, to hand over to the future generations. A better world for current and future generations is what the IYPF is all about.

Cameron Neil
CEO, IYPF
cameronneil@iypf.org


In This Edition

IYPF News
- Board Column, Strategy Column, Seeking Implementation Team Members
Member Activities
- Environmental Success
- Bangladesh NGOs Join UNGAID
Partner Activities & Events
- YES Kenya 2006
- Young Professionals Alliance
- G8 Energy Plan Contested
IYPF Communities
- Globalisation, Fair Trade, and Sustainable Products
- Poverty and Micro Credit
Biodiversity & Ecological Sustainability
- Biodiversity Banks on the Market
- SEE-Change Centres
- Biomimicry
- Opposition to Terminator Seeds
- Biodiversity and Wealth Creation in Benin
Opportunities & Resources
What Is IYPF
How You Can Help


Download it from www.iypf.org/news.htm#latest.