August 2008 Archives

PUBLIC CONVERSATIONS WITH TODAY'S BOLDEST VOICES

Issue No. 1. Summer 2008: Stephen Lewis

We were willing to go after Myanmar and the junta on human rights, we went after Sudan for the behavior in Darfur, we went after Iran for incipient nuclear technology... [but] not a word about the loss of life to AIDS in South Africa. That's what I call an astonishing failure of leadership... 

Hello and Welcome to Talk to the Future, a online digital magazine featuring  Public Conversations with Today's Boldest Voices.

 My name is Anne-christine d'Adesky, your producer and host. I'd like to introduce you to our magazine and why I hope you'll be as excited as I am about the people, conversations, ideas and actions we can take to address some of the big global problems we face today to secure a better future. I'm interested in positive change, in solutions and progress. I'm starting with global AIDS and public health for the first issues, but I'll be looking at cross-cutting topics that intersect to impact our collective future.

I want to look and talk outside the box. For example, if Steve Jobs were AIDS Czar, what new technology might be using to help solve global AIDS? How does climate change affect AIDS? As we look at solutions to global problems, what's working and what are our next steps? That's what we're going to discuss here at Talk to the Future.  But first, a behind the scenes trailer, designed to keep things light before they get too heavy...

Serious but Entertaining...
 
As you'll see from the little Promotional Trailer I've prepared here, it would be great to have a lot of time and money, and big production budget and major media backing to launch my magazine, but, well,  I don't - at least not yet (smile).  Talk To The Future is more Lo-Fi, what I call 'a Rough Guide, Charlie Rose-meets-Anderson Cooper' approach to digital TV journalism. Enjoy!

Click here for ACD's Promo Trailer: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4294388642053111604

Don't forget,  when you're done, go have a look at the rest of our magazine - the more serious, but still entertaining conversations with our smart, creative guests.  I hope you'll consider joining the conversation, too. Tell me what you think of the guests, and what they had to say, who you'd like to hear from, what other brilliant or engaging voices or ideas deserve the spotlight. You'll find the Leave A Comment box below the videos, right here on our website.
 
And please, share our magazine with others. On our website  we've provided some basic resources and information  about our guests, topics and importantly, what you can do to make a difference.  We'll  keeping adding and improving as we go. Email me at: talktothefuture@gmail.com.

Thanks for tuning in!

Anne-christine

Talk To The Future is a new global multimedia magazine featuring in-depth, video 'public conversations' spotlighting pioneering individuals whose ideas, programs or visions represent a way forward on critical global problems we face today.

Host Anne-christine d'Adesky talks with her guests about the programs and projects that they are most excited about, how they view their own role, and how we can apply promising solutions or field successes to have a greater impact today and on the future. She's willing to get up close and personal, and debate subjects with her guests. The result: a magazine of voices that is entertaining, lively, informative, and sometimes provocative -- offering the voices, stories and experiences of passionate individuals living passionate lives - and commited to social change.

Tune in here to hear her talk about why she launched Talk To The Future, what she hopes to cover, and what's ahead for the magazine. Click on:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6384369650865465550

More about our Pilot Issue Theme: Global AIDS.

Our pilot issue spotlights important voices and topics in global AIDS, and is launching in time for AIDS2008, the biannual International AIDS Conference, held this year in Mexico City, Aug. 3-8.

GUESTS & TOPICS:

Our pilot issue features a conversation with a very special guest: the visionary and outspoken Canadian leader Stephen Lewis, the former US Envoy on AIDS to Africa. He talks about what he learned on the job, what hasn't happened in AIDS but could, and what he's most excited about as he continues pushing global leaders to greater action on this great pandemic of our time.

Other guests include:

● Paula Donovan, who launched AIDS-Free World with Stephen Lewis, and is a women's rights advocate with long experience working at the UN. , Paula and Stephen are pushing for creation a new UN Agency for Women - an ambitious vision.

● Heal Africa, in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo. We present a visit to the Heal Africa fistula clinic and program, which represents a bright spot in the ongoing tragedy of war in the Congo and a successful model for others hoping to help survivors of wartime sexual violence.

●Our special additional feature is a preview trailer of Lisa F. Jackson's award-winning film 'The Greatest Silence.' Her film features the voices of women rape survivors in the Congo, the men who perpetrate wartime rape, and the brave actions of a Congolese policewoman and her dedicated staff as they try to advocate for justice to address these sexual crimes.

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WE'D LOVE YOUR FEEDBACK ON OUR PILOT ISSUE - AND FUTURE ISSUES:

We'd love to hear your thoughts on the conversations we are featuring in our pilot issue. You can directly post your comments for each video after viewing them. And please -- let us know about other guests and subjects you'd like to see features in Talk To The Future.

LEARN MORE & GET INVOLVED: We've included more information about our guests and topics on this our website (go to "Guests & Topics"), and information about how you can Get Involved. We've got story resources and links to key actors, information and campaigns that are worth checking out. Join us! Take an action today!

ADD YOUR VOICE TO A GROWING COMMUNITY: You're invited to add your voice to the growing global community of men and women working for social change at PulseWire.net, a global portal that is creating a global community focused on sharing their stories, resources and experiences. You can find information about our partner and fiscal sponsor, World Pulse Media, and World Pulse Magazine and PulseWire. Go to the section "Partners & Allies."

Thank You!

Thank you for tuning in to our debut "pilot" issue of Talk To The Future. Don't forget to sign up to receive our next issue (click on the 'Subscribe to our newsletter' button on our home page - right side), and tell a friend or two if you like what you're watched, heard or read.

As they say in Swahili, Asante Sana - Thank you very much!

Anne-christine,

Anne-christine d'Adesky,

Producer & Host

For the past few years, Canada's Stephen Lewis has captured our global attention and become a media darling in the process, a man possessed with an Obama-like gift of oratory and fiery inspiration, and a moral compass on AIDS. As the former UN Special Envoy to Africa on AIDS, Lewis played the role of a candid Cassandra, publicly warning his bosses about the dire consequences of what he called the UN's 'abject failure' to provide leadership in the epidemic.

His willingness to push the envelope and speak out on controversial issues -- for example, denouncing South Africa's President Mbeki's denialism of HIV and AIDS -- gained him millions of fans, but a share of enemies too, especially within the UN 'family.' "You must understand that I was biting my tongue all the time" Lewis says frankly of his stint as Envoy.

He's also been that rarest of birds: an outspoken feminist man who's called men and women leaders to the carpet for their failure to deliver on the needs of women globally. He refers to petty in-fighting inside a male-centric UN like someone who's one of the family yet still cares --which he was and does, serving as Deputy Director of UNICEF from 1995-1999.

Today, Lewis and his colleague Paula Donovan have set up a new international advocacy organization, AIDS-Free World, pursuing a grand vision he began championing while Envoy: the creation of a new UN agency for women.

"I saw what wonders could be achieved when you have a UN agency engaged in an issue, and when you have the money," he says, explaining the vision. "UNICEF has $2 billion dollars. It became clear that, if we were able to fashion an agency for women, the same thing would happen." He's also convinced that a radical pinking of the UN is just the deep fix needed to make the system more effective in delivering social change at many levels, across many sectors.

"Nobody's done anything for women," says Lewis frankly, with familiar exasperation. "What do I have to say? There has been no movement on women within the United Nations for more than 60 years except in tiny little microscopic increments interventions that amount to nothing. The High Level Committee recommended an international agency for women because they felt the response to women had been abysmal. . So there is no argument for those who would argue for the status quo."

To watch and listen to the full conversation with Stephen Lewis, click here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5770044231

For more from Donovan, listen to the conversation at: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8438861272315837390

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More Choice Words from our video conversation with Stephen Lewis...

"Look, the UN is the single most powerful vehicle on the ground. It has the people, it has the ear of government, it has a lot of money, it has spectacular access in so many ways, it has huge knowledge... It can draw consultants from anywhere, on any issue. If it gets leadership from the center, you could have turned this epidemic around. If there weren't so many wilting recalcitrants watching what was going on, you could have made a much greater impact...

"I'll give you one example... through all of the years of Thabo Mbeki's denialism in South Africa, all of the years of lunatic, I mean really almost psychotic behavior of his minister of health, while hundreds of thousands -- millions of people were being infected and dying of AIDS, the UN offered not one word of criticism at the highest levels. Not a word. It's unbelievable."

"I must say...one of the things we were able to do as we traveled was to bring the people living with AIDS into the mix much more forcefully than would otherwise have been the case. I talked to presidents about them, and cabinet ministers about them, and represented their views which they conveyed to me and made them feel they had an honest-to-God advocate within the UN system, which perplexed them greatly, since they didn't often have that kind of access to the UN system."

"You can't really be an adequate women's advocate under the circumstance and hold a high level position in an organization [the UN] that has betrayed women over all these years - it's just too difficult to pull off. People should be resigning on all fronts in protest at what has not been done for women."

New York -- Paula Donovan has long had a dream - and today she is pushing it forward, and finding new allies among former skeptics, while shaking things up. After working for years at the United Nations on women's issues and causes such as breastfeeding, she teamed up with her friend and ex UN-colleague Stephen Lewis, to launch a new international advocacy agency, AIDS-Free World. The duo have alsoe proposed a bold vision: a new UN agency for women, one with major financial and political clout.

"The primary goal is reparations -- repairing the United Nations," Donovan explains. "It was a very male-dominated world back in the 1940s and it was acceptable to have a structure consider the needs and rights of men that didn't pay any attention to women. The concerns of women are simply not on the table."

"Right now the combined entities in UN that deal with women have roughly 200 million," she explains., "The UNIFEMs.. and others... these are the dedicated women's entities -- if you put all those together, it still wouldn't equal the operating budget for UNICEF in Ethiopia."

So why, if the UN is a chauvinist dinosaur system that fails women so spectacularly and for so long, would she have us dreaming of a radical UN reform?

"It's counterintuitive--there's no doubt about it," she admits, laughing. But about the UN, she says pragmatically, "You can't live with it and can't live without it. Without this enormous facilitator that is the UN, you're just working in your isolated pockets."

"I'm convinced that a lot of ways the UN doesn't work and doesn't function in a lot of areas is because it's a dinosaur operating in the 21st century," Donovan adds," and I'm convinced that having a women's agency would change that - and that's the only hope I have for the UN actually."

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More Choice Words from our video conversation with Paula Donovan:

"As people listen to the basic argument and the premise that we are making a better UN by having a women's agency--it's not simply, you know, 'justice and fairness, and it's our turn' - it's really that anyone who has any up close relationship with the UN knows that it needs to be fixed. And when you pose that this might just be a very fast, very efficient, effective way to fix it, the argument is resonating." - Paula Donovan

"We have to have for women what we have for men, which is basically whatever sector you are looking at, has a male perspective and a male setting of priorities and a male determination to fulfill the needs and goals that males care about. We need to rush toward that goal -- we can't go incrementally toward that goal."- Paula Donovan

"[We] made the argument that said, 'You can reform every part of the United Nations structure and you still won't get anywhere because it won't reflect the world.' And we got a lot of positive response from the High Level panel. They came up with their final recommendations, and chief among them was that United Nations needed to revamp itself and become an institution that does reflect that."

Brief Bio about Donovan: Paula Donovan has spent two decades involved in health, economic, and social policy in developing countries. In the early '90s, she worked at UNICEF and ran their global advocacy campaign for breastfeeding. She late served as chief aide to UNICEF's deputy executive director, then East and Southern Africa's Regional AIDS advisor for UNICEF, and spent four years on the job in Kenya.

For more about Donovan and AIDS-Free world, a full bio and links, go to "Guests & Topics."

Goma, DRC -- The long and brutal war in the huge, mineral rich Democratic Republic of Congo has been raging since 1996, and has claimed more lives than any war since World War 2. Meanwhile, a shadow 'War within a War' has targeted women and children there. As in neighboring Rwanda, mass rape, often involving weapons, is being used as a weapon of war, one that is also spreading HIV/AIDS to the survivors. The horrific pattern of rape in the Congo is staggering and historic in its scope. Last year alone, in one province of eastern Congo alone, some 42,000 women were estimated to have survived rape, according to Global Rights.

But that story - the story of horror and sexual violence - is only one chapter in the lives of the Congolese women and children who are survivors of rape there. The story many are focused on today is recovery - an effort to heal from brutal attacks that damage their bodies and scar their reproductive organs, as well as their mental health, their ability to work or take up their former lives. In Goma, a city on the eastern border where many refugees have fled the war, a steady stream of women and children have trickled in from across the country seeking surgical operations for their wounds of rape. The Heal Africa clinic there treats fistula - tears or ruptures of the reproductive organs caused by brutal rape. Today, the number of women getting surgeries every week remains steady; so does the waiting list of women seeking an operation that may be repeated several times before their bodies completely heal. Some never do. Others are so traumatized they can never return home.


"The crisis today remains very urgent," says Heal Africa Program Director Lyn Lusi. "We have mobile units going out every week to try to find women who are trapped behind the front lines of the fighting, to bring them back here. The level of rape remains very high, and we are doing everything we can to reach them, but with the fighting it's not safe and it remains difficult. Still, we are making steady progress. But it's really the women who are amazing, who have the strength to recover and help each other. That's the story that is encouraging - how, despite the horror that they've endured, they are committed to building a better future here in the Congo."

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More Choice Word from our visit to Heal Africa:

"It's really the women of the Congo who are amazing, who have the strength to recover and help each other. That's the story that is encouraging... how, despite the horror that they've endured, they are committed to building a better future for themselves and their families and their country." - Lyn Lusi, Program Director, Heal Africa, DRC.

An important new film by Emmy-award winner and documentarian Lisa F. Jackson.

Congo -- The story of war and rape in the Congo, and the struggles of women there to survive and rebuild their lives, has been captured in a new film, 'The Greatest Silence,' by documentary filmmaker Lisa F. Jackson of Jackson Films. Her film takes a very intimate approach to the story of war and rape in the Congo when Jackson reveals that she, too, is a survivor of rape. In sharing her story with women in the Congo, Jackson takes her audience closer into the lives and suffering - and healing -- of Congolese women and their communities.

The film also gives voice to the perpetrators of rape. Jackson ventures into the bush to briefly interview young men inducted into a brutal bush war who openly reveal why they rape and what they think of their actions.

"The Greatest Silence" has already won a Sundance 2008 Special Jury Prize: Documentary. It is serving as a tool for advocacy by groups worldwide who are mobilizing to help end the war in the Congo. Jackson has appeared before Congress to push US and global leaders to take urgent and meaningful action to stop the use of mass rape as a tool of war in the Congo, to help protect Congolese women and children suffering ongoing rapes, and to seek emergency medical and HIV care justice for survivors of wartime rape.

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Special thanks to Lisa F. Jackson and Jackson films for permission to preview the trailer of 'The Greatest Silence.' For information, or to buy or rent the film, go to: thegreatestsilence.org or visit jacksonfilms.com.