The goals of the UN are the best scaffold we have for bringing the world together.

The Goals of the UN: a Strategy for Nuclear Disarmament

• Success for nuclear disarmament requires a massive global movement based on a sense of togetherness that respects diversity.

• The goals of the UN are the best scaffold we have for bringing the world together.

• The existence of nuclear arms proves we live in an us vs them world, and in such a world the nuclear armed nations see their nuclear arms as necessary protection. Nuclear weapons feed on themselves.

• Nuclear arms are also a stumbling block for all the other goals of the UN. The origin of the metaphor is the biblical prohibition against putting a stumbling block before the blind. In this case, the supporters of the other goals of the UN are blind to the fact that nuclear weapons promote distrust between the nations making it impossible for them to cooperate as they must to achieve the goals.

• Outreach to supporters of the other goals of the UN is a smart move in that it begins building that sense of togetherness that respects diversity. We can open the eyes of the supporters of other goals to the way nuclear weapons underpin the distrust between the nations that blocks all the goals, including nuclear disarmament itself.

• The cities do not have nukes and they are the target, so they are in favor of nuclear disarmament. They are also in favor of the other goals of the UN including the SDGs, Human Rights and Peace.

• Therefore at the city level, the nuclear disarmament movement should a) forge a local alliance for all the goals of the UN and b) persuade city hall to officially adopt all the goals of the UN. See https://sfungoals.org/draft-resolution.

• We begin with San Francisco where the UN Charter was signed in 1945 and where fourteen TPNW nations have consulates.

• Then by networking the cities everywhere we can get a great start on building a global sense of togetherness that respects diversity.

The Goals of the UN: Across the Silos

• Supporters of each UN goal communicate with each other far more than with supporters of other UN goals.

• To be sure, there is a growing understanding that the goals of the UN are intertwined and that it does make sense to communicate across the silos.

• But when it comes down to it, there is never money or time enough to spare. The simple truth that focus is required for success triumphs over the complex truth that cooperation is needed across the silos. 

Voices of Humanity (VoH) online forum

• VoH is designed to build a kindly, intelligent and upbeat global consciousness. The same design will also work well for Bringing the Goals of the UN Home to San Francisco and then for a global cities network. See https://voh.intermix.org.

• Useful features include
  a) an overall list of posts
  b) communities each with its own list of posts
  c) voting on messages
  d) messages can be sorted by date, value, interest, approval and controversy
  e) winning posts tend to be kindly, intelligent & upbeat – that’s what people appreciate
  f) break out any list by gender or age or combination of gender and age
  g) voting results pages: overall and for each gender and age with adjustable date range
  h) built in ability to mark one’s posts as nonviolent action oriented
  i) ability to change the geographical level from city to province to nation to planet earth
  j) built in community lists by nation, city, religion, disadvantaged community, and UN Goal
  k) together and apart conversations for nations, cities, religions, UN Goals and more

• A VoH app has been in the works for over a year, and is expected before summer 2023

• What is missing:
  a) ability to handle massive volume at the national or global level
  b) bottom up networks to handle intersectionality
  c) much more thorough user experience fixes
  d) distributed hubs - aka peer to peer
  e) relationship to AI
  f) protection against scammers, hate mongers and the like

An important detail: Voices of Humanity Together and Apart conversations

• The VoH Conversations feature handles the across-the-silos problem for the UN Goals.

• Applied to the nations and religions, it supports the separate national and religious identities in a structure that also supports our common humanity.

• Participants in a conversation can choose to participate in the Together mode or the Apart mode and they can switch between modes at will.

• In Together mode, messages are posted by and rated by any participant regardless of silo, nation or religion. Only the messages posted in Together mode are listed.

• In Apart mode, the participant’s silo, nation or religion determines the contents of the list. Only messages posted by and rated by participants from the same silo, nation or religion are listed.

• Top rated messages written from new moon to new moon in the Together mode are sent to all conversation participants at each new moon.

• Top rated messages from each of the silos, nations, religions written from full moon to full moon in the Apart mode are sent to members of those communities at the full moon.

• The default mode upon entering a conversation is Apart if the moon is waxing, and Together if the moon is waning. 

• The phases of the moon are used because these are natural and are shared globally.

• Conversations are also available for the Genders and the Generations. A specially structured conversation about Middle East Peace is in the works.

Bringing the Goals of the UN Home to San Francisco - how do we do it?

• We build a civic/academic/business/government coalition to persuade the SF Board of Supervisors to pass a Resolution creating a San Francisco UN Goals Advisory Committee.

• The purpose of the SF UN Goals Advisory Committee will be to develop detailed proposals on how the goals of the UN may best be implemented and/or supported by the City and County of San Francisco.

•  A draft of the Resolution is available at https://www.sfungoals.org/draft-resolution.

• The A-team Plan - We will recruit a largely women's A-team to do the outreach needed to build a San Francisco civic, business, academic and government coalition to underpin the new UN Goals Advisory Committee. The aim will be to find volunteers from each of the eleven San Francisco Supervisor districts, and for each district to have at least one volunteer from a marginalized group such as disabled, lgbtq, minorities. The A-team’s outreach to the city Supervisors is key to success. Our pre-pandemic outreach to the Supervisors had a good response, so we can be hopeful.

• The A-team Plan - To begin, we will hire someone with good connections here in San Francisco to help us recruit a small core team of at least three persons able to commit 5 to 10 hours a week for outreach to build the A-team. The A-team itself will focus initially on outreach to the city Supervisors. Once we have strong supervisorial support, then we will shift towards bringing in the other coalition partners. That is the plan, but we need self-starters for the A-team, which means the team may well develop other ideas, and that is OK.

• For more see https://www.sfungoals.org/projects

• Truth is though that we have not made any real progress yet toward recruiting the A-team. We need the app and are hoping a usable version will be ready in May.

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