⚡ Taco Tuesday
Good morning! It’s Tuesday, which is only Monday in disguise. This newsletter is a little sobering, so go out and treat yourself to a taco later.
The Climate Crisis has been getting a lot of attention lately, which makes us extremely excited about how the world can organize and tackle major systemic problems. Yesterday, we shared our thoughts from the Climate Strike and Social Good Summit in NYC, among other things. Check it out here.
For this newsletter, we did want to shed light on other topics that are currently getting a little less attention.
State of global migration
US: Trump’s campaign against illegal immigration remains strong, but morale among the Border Patrol has fallen. Initially a largely invisible force, they were brought into the spotlight when Trump entered the White House and have recently been under attack for their seemingly cruel detention practices. This shouldn’t be a surprise - the US stood alone in refusing to sign a UN agreement focused on reminding countries to change their child detention practices. The agreement highlighted the requirement to “protect and respect the rights and best interests of the child at all times, regardless of migration status.”
UK: On the other side of the Atlantic, U.K.’s top courts rules that Boris Johnson acted unlawfully in suspending parliament for five weeks. Boris Johnson’s campaign began with his desire to promote a pro-nationalist agenda and remove the UK from the EU. He has just hit his biggest wall yet.
Zooming out: A new report by the International Rescue Committee indicates that the world’s refugee population is not present in the Sustainable Development Goals.
Less than one-third of country SDG progress reports mention refugees
No country is reporting on refugee socio-economic data
No country is reporting on refugees’ progress toward the SDGs
David Milliband, President and CEO of the IRC, asked for more concrete action to support this population:
“Leaders meeting this week need to fess up to the scale of the challenge not bask in self-congratulation. There need to be concrete steps of course correction or more people will be left behind … What we are seeing in these figures is further confirmation of a longer-term rising trend in the number of people needing safety from war, conflict and persecution”
As of June 2019, 70.8 million people are forcibly displaced around the world. We have a long way to go.
Measuring gender equality in media
SeeHer, a global movement for gender equality in advertising and media, has launched GEM Influencer, a tool that gives brands the ability to quantify how well female celebrities perform as role models for women and girls. Rather than looking at followers, likes, and shares, GEM Influencer has designed a Gender Equality Measure, which uses an algorithm to identify the level of gender bias in ads and programming. It measures the top 100 influencers across actors, musicians, athletes, and more.
Modi’s award gets slammed
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation intends to give Narendra Modi, the Indian Prime Minister, their Global Goalkeeper Award today. According to the Foundation, this is a "special recognition that celebrates a political leader who has demonstrated their commitment to the Global Goals through impactful work in their country and/or globally.” The award is supposed to honor his efforts to accelerate universal sanitation in the country.
However, this award Modi has been widely criticized. Yesterday, 37 development academics and practitioners wrote a letter challenging the award for a few reasons:
Things haven’t really changed: “While Modi has brought the issue into mainstream political discourse, evidence suggests there remains a massive gap between the rhetoric and reality of the achievement of universal sanitation under his watch. Open defecation still prevails, alongside problems concerning sustainability and equity, especially for sanitation workers, and rights-based access.”
Modi’s overall human rights record: “During his time as Gujarat chief minister and India’s prime minister, inflammatory hate speech, vigilante nationalism and violent acts against Christians, Muslims and women have been widespread. Freedom of speech and the right to dissent is under fire. Activists and critics have been jailed, killed and accused of being anti-national.”
These critics are not necessarily blaming him for directly driving these problems, but they are suggesting that Modi has “reacted with either silence or a delayed and weak response.”
Jenn Hyman, Founder of Rent the Runway
“So an impetus for launching Rent the Runway Foundation was the need to democratize the fundraising landscape—fifty percent of the venture capital should be going to women because we’re fifty percent of the population. Entrepreneurs are able to change the course of the conversation, and if we’re only going to fund a certain type of person—a white man who went to Harvard or Stanford who grew up in a blue state, in a city, in an upper class family—the diversity of ideas that we need to really change the world are not going to be there.”
Rent the Runway Foundation: Rent the Runway’s co-founders, Jenn and Jenny, felt fortunate that they had been able to overcome the barriers in women’s paths to entrepreneurship and wanted to give back to the next generation of female founders. In 2015, just five years after founding Rent the Runway, they launched the Rent the Runway Foundation to put their lessons and experience into action.
UNGA Events: Check out all the amazing events happening around the UNGA Assembly in New York City! Many of them are public, so if you have time, we definitely recommend checking them out.
How to Build a Global Community in a World of Nationalism?: What could globalists learn from the powerful sense of belonging that nationalism has created? Faced with the injustices of the world's economic and political system, what should a responsible globalist do?
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