Topics: Coalition Building [1]
Understanding Voices of Humanity
What makes Voices of Humanity [2] special? Imagine if Facebook could list the top-liked posts from the last 30 days with selection by gender and age? That is what Voices of Humanity does that is different.
There are six Voices of Humanity: the Voice of Women, the Voice of Men, the Voice of Youth, the Voice of Experience, the Voice of Wisdom and the Voice of Humanity-as-one. Top-rated messages from these six voices of humanity will be extremely likeable in the Facebook sense but more than that, because love, wit and spirit are what everyone appreciates, we can expect the six voices of humanity to be consistently kind, intelligent and upbeat. Everyone with an interest in global issues will read the top-rated messages and be influenced in a positive way, giving rise to a surprising, ever changing global consciousness that will underpin a sustainable world.
The peaceful transition to a sustainable world requires global trust and cooperation between the nations and religions. We love our nations and our religions, and won’t give them up, so in this shift to a larger sense of unity, we need to be thinking how we can motivate the nations and religions to be willing partners. Dare we imagine a collective voice of America and of Russia, India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine? A voice of Islam and of Christianity? It might seem a foolish project, but when we realize that the nations and religions are being unified and strengthened within the context of a unified humanity, then the true genius of the Voices of Humanity project becomes apparent. It is by supporting the nations and religions that we motivate them to be willing partners in the unification of humanity.
Voices of Humanity encourages holistic thinking. As an example, United Nations supporters generally concentrate on particular issues: climate change, education, health and so forth. The interaction across the issue silos gets lost to the detriment of all the issues. The Voices of Humanity “Together and Apart” feature overcomes the silo effect by alternating between 1) each issue electing its own messages, and 2) supporters of all the issues together electing messages to represent the holistic view across the silos.
Gender and age equality is built-in to Voices of Humanity. It is no exaggeration to say this will amount to a new social contract.
Voices of Humanity supports bottom up networks. Are you interested in the intersection between #sdgs and #nuclear_disarm? No problem. Create your own “SDGs and Nukes” network. Everyone who is a member of both the #sdgs community and the #nuclear_disarm community is automatically a member of the new network you just created. When you go to the network, you see only messages tagged for both communities and written by those who are a member of both communities.
Last but not least, Voices of Humanity is nonviolent action oriented. A prominent “Nonviolent Action” button reduces the forum list to only those messages hashtagged #nvaction. While in Nonviolent Action mode, all newly posted messages are automatically hashtagged #nvaction.
Putting it all together, Voices of Humanity uses crowd-source technology (voting on messages) to give women, men, youth, middle-aged and seniors each a collective voice. Empowered with the gift of speech, these great divisions of the human race will join together with humanity-as-one to weave a tale of love and wit. Through this new lens we will come to see ourselves as the intelligent, generous and capable species that we are, giving us the trust and confidence we need to cooperate on pressing global matters.
Bringing the Goals of the UN Home to San Francisco
Organize Locally, Connect Globally. The Voices of Humanity San Francisco based team aims to persuade the SF Board of Supervisors to pass a resolution establishing a UN Goals Advisory Committee that will develop detailed proposals how the goals of the UN may best be supported / implemented by the City. The resolution will cover each of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), human rights, CEDAW, nuclear disarmament and world peace, with a blanket clause covering all the other goals of the UN. See our new sfungoals.org [3] website. And please like the facebook page [4] that goes with it.
The plan is to build a civic / academic / business / government coalition for a “collective impact” project to get the resolution passed. Voices of Humanity will provide the needed “continuous communication” tool and the team will build the coalition from the ground up, all the while looking for a “backbone organization” to partner with and grant money for outreach staff.
The SDGs are coming down to the city level in any case, so our efforts are very likely to succeed. That success will generate much good will and momentum for a second stage to the project as our coalition transforms itself into the new San Francisco UN Goals Advisory Committee. Then the real work will begin.
An app for Voices of Humanity will be used to have a Together and Apart conversation between supporters of each of the UN Goals. See directly below for more about Together and Apart. Monthly meetups will bring in new team members. For a more about this new VoH initiative please see the article Using Collective Impact to Bring the Goals of the United Nations Home to San Francisco [5].