GPB Meets with the United Nations
Rita & Cathy's Meeting with United Nations Alliance of Civilizations
In February of this year, Executive Director Rita Ezenwa-Okoro and Global Play Brigade Founder Cathy Salit met with His Excellency Mr. Miguel Ángel Moratinos, the High Representative for the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) in New York City. The UNAOC’s motto is:
"Many Cultures, One Humanity," UNAOC embraces and promotes cultural diversity, religious pluralism and mutual respect.
Their website states:
As our world faces a global human crisis, as the pandemic exposed deep-seated inequalities, we are reminded every day of our common fragility and our interconnected fate. There is no alternative to standing together in unity and solidarity in inclusive societies.
The meeting came about after The Global Play Brigade submitted a proposal for collaboration with the United Nations organization. In the proposal, we shared:
The Global Play Brigade (GPB) is a part of an international movement that practices and promotes play and performance as a fresh and powerful approach to social change, civic and community engagement, and conflict resolution. We use the transformative power of play to foster human development, hope, and new possibilities for our world.
We offered a number of different ideas for how we might be able to collaborate together, including a co-sponsored experiential global conference for NGOs and CSOs to learn first hand about the bridge building possibilities through play, along with several other ideas.
The conversation with Mr. Miguel Moratinos and his colleagues was fun, and fascinating. They asked many questions about what we meant by play, what our playshops looked like, who our thousands of participants were, our history and how we trained facilitators, etc. Initially the ideas that were shared for possible collaboration were small; maybe GPB would present at one of their upcoming conferences. Or, perhaps we would train some of their NGO leaders.
But then Mr. Moratinos changed the course of the conversation.
He said (and we paraphrase here):
We need to do something BIG together. The world is in a monumental crisis, and we have to go forth with radical, innovative and big ideas to make a difference. That’s what I want from a GPB and UNAOC collaboration. So let’s come up with a concept paper and some revolutionary plans that can really help us create peace, collaboration amongst nations and peoples. If play can help us do that – let’s go for it.
Of course Rita and Cathy said, GREAT, that’s what we’ll do. And so, back at “headquarters” we convened a marvelous group of Brigadiers from around the world, dubbed the “Going Big Ensemble”, and we have been hard at work designing a wide-ranging, creative and BIG collaboration between our two organizations. More to come soon!!!
