Civil society groups nudge and cajole world leaders from the sidelines of United Nations week

NEW YORK (AP) — As the meeting of world leaders kicked off at the United Nations on Sunday, across Manhattan on an elevated park that runs along old rail lines, throngs of people streamed through a “climate science fair” showcasing work on nature, food and the energy transition.

The Emerson Collective funds the nonprofits, advocacy organizations and companies at the fair and brought them all to town as counterprogramming to the U.N. General Assembly. The annual convening this year amounted to a shaky demonstration by nation states that they can still work together to solve the world’s compounding crises.

“The U.N. and so many of those meetings, they are critical, but they are happening behind closed doors. And they’re very future looking, future facing and commitment based,” said Gabe Kleinman, a partner at Emerson Collective, which is billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs’ philanthropy and investing organization. Kleinman said that in contrast to the U.N. events, the science fair was open to all and highlighted solutions for climate change that the organization thinks could be impactful right now.

The fair is part of a crush of events every September that unfold on the sidelines of the official high-level meetings, where nonprofits, advocates and fundraisers mingle and lobby world leaders, billionaires and funders — and plan their next steps with each other.

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They gather in mostly elite spaces — in marble tiled rooms, under glass chandeliers, with snacks of fresh raspberries and glass bottles of sparkling water — to get their messages to the people with their hands on the levers of power.

It’s a push and pull of influence games and negotiations with very high stakes.

“I’ve been doing this work for 40 years. I have never seen a world where we are faced with so many crises and not just so many crises, but also crises that are increasingly protracted,” said UNICEF deputy executive director of partnerships Kitty van der Heijden.

The number of people who need humanitarian assistance has ballooned from 63 million in 2012 to 367 million, including 183 million children, as of March 2024, UNICEF said.

Van der Heijden said she hopes the private sector and philanthropy will become even more involved in the multilateral system to meet the needs of children. Philanthropic money in particular can be more flexible, longer term and take on more risk than public funding, she said.

But philanthropic dollars won’t ever match the resources that governments can leverage.

To that end, billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates called on nations to fully fund the vaccines alliance GAVI and invest in reducing malnutrition, especially among children at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s annual Goalkeepers event that tracks progress toward global development goals.

In a ceremony on Monday that featured Grammy-winning musician Jon Batiste performing in a gold sequin suit, the foundation honored Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for his work during his first term lifting millions out of poverty and significantly reducing malnutrition among children.

“I think it’s commendable that executives like you create a foundation.” said da Silva, addressing Gates while on stage. “But what will effectively solve the problem of extreme poverty is not through a foundation’s donation, which is important, but through public policies.”

To follow the political commitments made by nation states, organizations like the antipoverty nonprofit Oxfam brought in technical experts to New York. They tracked changes word by word over multiple drafts of a pact that countries agreed on coming into a special two day gathering, the “Summit of the Future,” where they recommitted to the Sustainable Development Goals, including gender equality, that were set back in 2015.

Rebecca Shadwick, a policy and advocacy lead for Oxfam International, said one change that civil society groups advocated to get into the final draft was a commitment to “achieve” gender equality rather than to “accelerate the achievement of gender equality.” While civil society groups have no formal role in the negotiations, they see themselves as partners in the development of the goals. Practically, nonprofits play a major role in actually realizing these promises, which are significantly off track.

Funders who prioritize efforts to combat gender-based violence gathered at the Free Future 2024 conference last week, hosted by the Ford Foundation, whose headquarters around the corner from the U.N. are built around a large indoor garden.

They described constant and urgent demands for support from feminist organizations around the world. Abigail Erikson, chief of the UN Trust Fund, said her organization received $1.5 billion in requests for funding this year, while having only $13.5 million to grant out. Her fund is dedicated to addressing violence against women and girls.

“It’s overwhelming,” Erikson said, though she thinks of the potential if that demand was funded. “Imagine if we had the money flows for that, the same way that the money is flowing to the anti-rights movement.”

Elsewhere around town, money did flow. Under a soaring arched ceiling held up by stone pillars, the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency convened ministers to announce $350 million in new funding for family planning and health services. As a part of that pledge, the British hedge fund billionaire Sir Chris Hohn announced a $100 million commitment to UNFPA through the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, of which he is founder and chair.

Describing contraception and support for women to make their own choices about when and if to have children as a “best buy” in development, Hohn said it was “stupidity” and a lack of empathy keeping governments from fully funding the work of the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency.

Those sentiments — among the panel discussions, keynotes and one-on-one meetings, which start early and extend late — are what civil society groups want world leaders to hear, not just for the future of their groups, but also the people they serve all over the world.

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Associated Press writer Eléonore Hughes contributed from Rio de Janeiro.

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