GSBTB speaks at the UN headquarters in New York

We had the great honour of presenting GSBTB’s work at the United Nations Headquarter in New York. Invited was a panel of civil society leaders who shared their experiences and challenges regarding the topic of “strengthening intercultural dialogue through knowledge sharing”. We were in good company of super cool women from Saudia Arabia, Bosnia, Egypt and US working on fantastic initiatives under very different (and sometimes difficult) circumstances in their parts of the world (obviously, it very rarely happens at the UN that it’s a women-only panel and the moderator even joked about this).

One of the the main challenges several people in the room raised was the difficulty of measuring the importance and impact of intercultural and interreligious dialogue type of work and that very often you don’t see the importance of it until it’s too late due to extremely rapid polarisation, radicalization – such as in the case with the Bosnian speaker Velma, whose NGO is still working with healing the trauma from the war in the Balkans in the 90s, and that faced by those who have lived through an actual genocide, such as the one in Srebrenica (for which the 11th of July marks their official remembrance day).

Thanks United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) for the opportunity to share our work!