Oaktree attends the UNDPI conference

If you noticed the Oaktree Twitter feed going a bit wild this week, it’s because a bunch of us had the pleasure of attending the United Nations Department of Information (UNDPI) conference at Melbourne’s Exhibition Centre.

The theme, “Advance Global Health: Achieve the MDGs” was chosen to refocus our efforts on achieving goals 4, 5 and 6: “reduce child mortality”, “improve maternal health” and “combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases”.

Basically, the conference was to act as a precursor to the MDG summit that will be held in New York later this month. The idea being that the NGO community would band together and find innovative ways to put health MDGs back on the map (currently they are the goals that are least likely to be achieved by the 2015 deadline).

Did the conference actually achieve this?

I’m not sure. The large contingent of Oaktree delegates managed to cover a lot of ground and attend most of the speaker sessions and workshops. But by and large, the reports I got from my colleagues sounded the same.

People in Oaktree found the sessions informative and enjoyed hearing from experts; but found it frustrating that there was no forum to discuss the things we’d just learned. There were plenty of networking opportunities, but no space where we could collaborate with our new contacts. And there were so many NGOs in attendance who wanted to push their own agendas that it was easy to feel like we couldn’t produce concrete outcomes. By the end of the conference you could hear an audible groan from the Oaktree peeps every time a delegate got up during a roundtable, ignored the expert debate that had just occurred, and hijacked the microphone to exclaim, “Learn Esperanto!!”

With that said, the youth session run on day two of the conference was wildly successful. I’m not just saying this because one of the speakers was our own Nick Allardice. The four speakers (Nick, Alice Bleby, Alischa Ross and Chris Varney) eschewed the customary panel discussion and divided the session into four groups where we could workshop our ideas for achieving the health MDGs.

I found Chris Varney’s (former UN Youth Representative) workshop particularly inspiring – the thirty or so people involved were taken through a hypothetical scenario aimed at breaking down generational barriers in the aid sector. The young people in the room were asked to put themselves in the shoes of a 40 year old manager in the aid sector and the older people were asked to take on the persona of a youth volunteer. Together, we nutted out the barriers that stop us from working together effectively, and came up with practical solutions.

It was useful to identify the different things that older and younger people bring to the table. This might sound naive, but having been in the youth sector for so long, I hadn’t properly thought about the qualities that skilled older people possess: experience, wisdom, a focus on accountability, and an outcomes-based approach.

Similarly, the lady who was sitting next to me (who was in her 60s) told me that she felt reinvigorated by the qualities that young activists have: optimism, innovation, technological awareness and stamina.

The workshop ended on a great note, and the participants hung back well into the lunch break to exchange contact details and make plans to collaborate again. Everyone agreed that all of our ideas would be useful in achieving the MDGs.

Well. Almost all of them. Naturally there was one gentleman who stood up and told us that the best way to halve extreme poverty by 2015 would be for “everyone to learn Esperanto.”

Patsy Niklas is Oaktree’s Communications Director