The following message was sent by Liz Cormier to be posted to the UN 69th Committee. It will go out only to the committee members, not to the full COO list.
Our next meeting to plan the 69th anniversary of the United Nations will be July 10th at 6pm in the Stebbins room of the Unitarian Church. You will be sent a complete agenda closer to the meeting date, but thought it might be helpful if committee members started thinking about certain issues prior to the meeting.
We have a rough plan as to the Sunday events.. The plans are for the Sunday Church service to have a UN theme. Our new minister John Behrens will be selecting someone to speak f rom the pulpit. It is possible that he might ask someone from our group to do a reading or something of that nature. In the past the minister and the music director plan the music. They have always selected appropriate music.
Following the service there will be a lunch and a program in the Thomas Starr King and Martin Luther King rooms. We have not decided on who will be serving the lunch, but it was decided to charge around $10 and hopefully there will be some profit A speaker has been arranged (her donation request of 100 dollars hopefully will not be a problem for us to contribute.)
We have been planning that the attendees would eat while the speaker is talking, but maybe we should give that more thought as perhaps the commotion and noise created by getting the food and eating might be distracting for the speaker and the audience. Also is it rude to be eating while someone is trying to give a speech?
Oh, I should mention that the theme of the afternoon program is Human Rights. The speakers talk will be on the UN and Human Rights and the plan is to have break out groups following her talk which will explore a single human right. These groups will each have a facilitator. At the next planning meeting we will decide on how many break out groups we want to have and some of the logistics regarding placement of the tables and how many people at each of tables. It is hoped that committee members will come to the meeting with suggestions of 2 or 3 human rights issues that they feel would be interesting and timely to discuss.
We would also ask that you think of someone who could facilitate a discussion of the human right--even ask a potential facilitator if he would be willing to participate if we decided on this plan. Roger is also thinking that the facilitators that are chosen should be members of groups that might be potential members of COO. For example I am thinking of asking an immigration lawyer who is a leader in a gay refugee organization to be a facilitated as she might be interested in being a COO member. Commitee members who want to facilitate a break out group are encouraged to let us know.
If you have comments or questions regarding this information call Roger or Liz.
