A message from CoNGO

Dear NGO leader,

May the new year bring peace and good health—to you and yours, and the planet.

The year 2023 that just passed was CoNGO’s 75th anniversary. It has been unlike any other year in our organizational life. We reached close to 4,000 of you who participated in our four global commemorative celebrations in Vienna, Bangkok, New York and Geneva, and the six global thematic webinars that explored a wide field of topics. We ended the celebration in Geneva this past December by celebrating other 75th anniversaries—that of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, WHO, the ILO Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention, 1948 (No. 87), and CoNGO members World Council of Churches and the World Federation of Mental Health. We brought these events in four languages—English, French, Spanish and Arabic—a CoNGO commitment to linguistic diversity and language justice.

I will tell you more of these events in future stories. For now, I want to invite your attention to the upcoming UN Civil Society Conference which will be held in Nairobi, Kenya on May 9 and 10, 2024. CoNGO is one of four NGO groups the UN, through the Department of Global Communications, is coordinating with to plan for this conference. See more about the conference here.

For now, please consider nominating yourself or someone you know who fits the requirements for the conference co-chairs and conference planning sub-committee chairs.

I hope you have read the announcement sent toward the end of last year by the UN about this. The deadline of the nomination is Jan. 10.

I look forward to greater collaboration with you and your organization this year.

Best regards,
Liberato Bautista
CoNGO President

05 Jan, 2024