WORKSHOPS

During the past two years of mostly online gathering, virtual conferences and briefings have become the lifeline for global civil society and the UN DGC associated NGOs. Civil society leaders to whom the GNEC owes much, including Margo Lazaro, Jeffery Huffines, Dr. Judy Kuriansky, Richard Yep, Scott Carlin, Holly Shaw, Levi Bautista, C4UN, an informed and caring UN staff … and too many others to mention now, have in many ways used their online presentations to ‘democratize’ the UN.  The GNEC hopes to recognize their contributions further and will continue to promote their workshop sessions, in all forms.

NGO enthusiasm for conducting live workshops during the 68th Civil Society Conference in Salt Lake City in August 2019 was outstanding, with over 200 different organizations applying for inclusion in the program. A bitter-sweet note is that this was our final, pre-pandemic gathering while simultaneously, never had so many individual NGOs been able to participate in organizing their own meetings at an Annual Conference. The size of the Salt Palace Conference Center in Salt Lake City made this possible and gave the NGOs opportunities to share information and best practices and to develop partnerships to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

Since its inception in 1962, the GNEC, and NGO DPI previously, have a proud history of partnering with UN DGC, and DPI previously, at their request. GNEC has participated in and in some cases led aspects within the Planning Committees for each major UN civil society conference since their inception – the work of this body has primarily been to prepare all aspects of the workshops and exhibits while also being major content and volunteer service contributors to most other aspects of each event.

During the year, numerous workshops are organized by GNEC – or produced as platform hosts by GNEC for others – to address issues we hope are important to our constituents. One of the most popular GNEC workshops held yearly is the Communications Skills Workshop designed to help NGOs find increased success in the field.