Spotlight on CLAL
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Religious Communities Come Together to Support Millennium Development Goals
By Judy Epstein, Director of Public Affairs
In June, CLAL, as a founding member of the Consultation on Interfaith Education, will organize and co-sponsor a special consultation, bringing together a wide range of American religious leaders and representatives from NGOs to focus on the Millennium Development Goals campaign. Led by Michael Gottsegen, Ph. D., CLAL Senior Fellow, the consultation will look at how America's religious communities might work together to facilitate the achievement of the Goals. The event will be held at the United Nations.
The Millennium Development Goals, adopted in September 2000, express the unanimous commitment of the member states of the United Nations to cut global poverty in half by 2015. Nations of the world pledged themselves to achieve eight goals that include eradicating extreme poverty and hunger; achieving universal access to primary education; reducing child mortality; improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; and ensuring environmental sustainability. The eighth pledges that the most developed countries - the United States and the members of the European Union - dedicate the equivalent of 0.7% of their annual GDP to development assistance by 2015.
“Achieving these goals is profoundly congruent with the principle of human solidarity and the highest ideals that are espoused by most of our religious traditions,” said Dr. Gottsegen. “We are inviting religious influentials to come together because as leaders, they are well positioned to use their agenda-setting power to turn the nation's collective attention to these critical issues and to ensure that the ensuing national conversation possesses the appropriate moral urgency.”
The consultation will address the religious significance of individual goals and the broader principles of global solidarity and equity that underlie the campaign as a whole, paying close attention to how these they appear when considered in the light of the various religious traditions. Questions on what religious leaders can do to mobilize their own religious communities will be addressed.
Next September the world's political leaders will gather together at the United Nations for a special session of the General Assembly to consider whether we are on track to meet the goals by 2015. It is already clear that, at the current rate of progress, the goals will not be met, unless the richest countries summon the political will to allocate the financial resources and to support the trade-friendly policies that achieving the goals requires. The U. S. still lags behind almost all the other countries, currently allocating only about 1/5 of the 0.7% of annual GDP, which it has pledged to provide.
“The consultation builds on CLAL’s leadership role in convening inter-faith conversations,” said Dr. Gottsegen. “As part of the mission of tikkun olam, we are working with the inter-faith community to look at our country’s commitments and take action on important real world goals.”
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