The UN 70th Committee of the UNA SF Bay Area Council of Organizations Meeting, March 26, 2014 at the Unitarian Universalist (UU) Church at Franklin and Geary - Notes
This is going out to both the UN 70th and the Core Collaborators subgroups via InterMix.
Thanks to Liz Cormier of UU’s UNO chapter, we were able to meet in the Kincaid room at the church for free. In future we will need to pay something, but it will be less expensive than at the AAACC. In attendance were:
Liz Cormier of UU UNO
Roger Eaton COO Co-chair
Sandy Eaton of UNA-SF
Stephen McNeil of AFSC
Tom Ray (Trilight)
Takashi Tanemori of Silkworm Institute
Eliz Weinberg COO Co-chair
Brian Webster of Results
As a first step towards getting a delegation together to meet with Charlotte Shultz, San Francisco Chief Protocol Officer, we decided we would send a smaller delegation to one or the other of a couple of contacts in the SF Mayor’s Office that Eliz is cultivating. The idea will be to get advice from the City about the directions we are looking at and to discover exactly what the City is planning at this point, if anything.
Trilight suggested we need to put together a one-pager to take with us or send ahead to that meeting at the Mayor’s Office, so the rest of the meeting was directed towards discussing what we should mention as directions we intend to take the UN 70th Celebration. This was adopted as the plan and the following items will be mentioned on the one-pager.
1) We will ask about meeting Charlotte Shultz and if she was the right person to see about getting a UN Charter Plaque on the outside of the War Memorial as part of the renovation. Also we want to ask if the UN Flag could fly at the War Memorial. There was mention of a previous controversy where the UN Flag was disallowed at the War Memorial. I was not able to confirm this in a quick internet search.
2) We are planning a major celebration on Oct 24th 2015 at the War Memorial - provided that the building is indeed available then. We have reserved the date, presuming the restoration work goes as plan on the building.
3) Eliz has already been to the Civic Center downtown central library. They have space on the sixth floor where staff will work with SF organizations to set up exhibits. We will need to put together a team.
4) We want to bring in the hotels that housed delegates to the 1945 Charter conference. The Fairmont tops the list. We need to contact the Fairmont and see if they would be interested to host a fundraising event for UN 70th.
5) We will celebrate UN 69th at the UU church where some 475 people can be accomodated in the Sanctuary. Liz Cormier will speak with the new pastor to make sure we have the OK. This will be our practice run for the 70th. Gillian Sorensen of the UN Foundation might be a good speaker.
6) The downtown library has a StoryCorps in the sixth floor where people can go two by two and tell their stories - http://storycorps.org/san-francisco/. We will put the word out to recruit those who have stories about the United Nations - many of them in their home countries other than the U.S. - to come in and tell their story. If we are lucky maybe someone who is 85+ years old will have a story about the events of 1945 at the War Memorial or the Fairmont.
7) We will sponsor an NGO Conference in October 2015. There are two possibilities. Eliz has a contact in New York who is plugged into the national UNA-USA COO and to the UN Department of Public Information (DPI). The DPI has a large annual NGO Conference. It is possible that for 2015, the conference might be scheduled in San Francisco. Eliz suggests putting together a delegation to go to New York Aug 27-29th for the DPI/NGO conference on climate change to push for the 2015 SF NGO Conference with the DPI. She and Takashi plan to attend and are looking for others to go with them. Also, we will want to connect with Ramu Damodaran of DPI. However if the 2015 big event in SF does not happen, then we will go ahead and aim for a smaller NGO conference to discuss the Post-2015 Development Goals as they will apply to San Francisco. If we have the smaller event, Stephen suggested the Hall of Flowers in GG park or the UCSF Conference Center in Mission Bay would both make good locations.
8) Brian Webster has four items to contribute - he will email them in. One of them is of particular interest since it involves the banner that UNA-SF uses for its Facebook page and would be a great “coup for the COO” if we could be the catalyst. Back in 2009, then Mayor Gavin Newsom helped put together a proposal for a UN Global Compact Center to be built as part of Hunter’s Point Redevelopment. This proposal is still on the books but has not been funded. Brian has an idea we might be able to put together a proposal from the US Network for Global Compact which has three of the top four Steering Committee members here in the Bay Area. The point is that we would love to have a UN office here in San Francisco. There is more than one possible location. More coming from Brian.
We will need a calendar of events for October 2015. Again we set up a test run for October 2014. This will require a committed volunteer.
In other items of interest, Stephen McNeil has offered to help with fundraising. Roger Eaton has prepared a grant proposal to go into Google Impact Challenge, San Francisco Bay Area: https://impactchallenge.withgoogle.com/bayarea2014/. Possible grant of $500,000. Long odds, of course. The proposal suggests a two phase course for UNA SF Bay COO: a) UN 70th followed by b) a push beginning in November 2015 to have the Post-2015 goals implemented fully in the Bay Area, all underpinned by UNA-SF’s Gender Crosstalk InterMix facility. The grant proposal was modified after input from the meeting where Brian and Trilight questioned the importance of InterMix in the proposal and from Victoria Jones who suggested the COO itself should be the centerpiece of the proposal, not the UN 70th/post-2015 goals/InterMix. The revised version can be accessed here. This will go out Monday. Eliz has forwarded the proposal to Mary Francis Wain for comment, but it may be too close in for her to get to it. Comments welcome. Wish us luck!
Task list:
Roger: come up with UNA SF Bay Area COO stationery.
Eliz and Roger: firm up an appointment at City Hall
Brian: email details about his four ideas for UN 70th.
Liz: Talk to new Pastor about UN 69th in October, 2014.
Stephen: Contact Doug Merritt and Victoria Jones about fundraising (Roger will create fundraising subgroup on InterMix)
Tom: use these notes and the new COO stationery to put together a one pager for City Hall.
Next meeting: in three weeks, Wednesday, April 16, 6:00pm venue tba. This follows Tuesday, April 15th Core Collaborators meeting at UU Church.
--Roger Eaton
415 933 0153
rogerweaton@gmail.com
