On September 26 the FCV participated in the meeting for the exchange of good practices in international cooperation organized by the International Catalan Institute for Peace-ICIP, in the Sala Martín el Humano Museum of History of Barcelona, devoted to the systems for the implementation of the objectives of sustainable development of the United Nations and, more specifically, its objective number 16, which regards promoting fair, peaceful and inclusive societies and the 17, which concerns revitalizing the global alliance for development sustainable.
The heads of the international government agencies of Murcia, Castilla la Mancha, Valencia, Cantabria, the Canary Islands and Catalonia, together with the director of the Office of the High Commissioner for the 2030 agenda of the Government, and experts from the CIDOB Foundation (Barcelona) and the University Institute for Development and Cooperation (Madrid) shared information about the programs they carry out, the challenges they encountered and the efforts of the respective governments, internally, to coordinate with local and regional authorities, state , European and international, as well as the role played by the same ODS in the configuration of public policies of international cooperation and to what extent they require changes and new awareness, education, management, evaluation and management efforts.
The meeting also included ICIP directors, the Catalan Agency for International Cooperation and representatives of civil society, such as the UNHCR and the public administration, the head of the Office of Europe and of the International strategy of the Diputació de Barcelona.
In a relaxed atmosphere, as a result of the small number of participants, Lluc Martí, coordinator of the program ‘Voices for Peace’, made 3 brief contributions to the debate, responding to one of the questions on how to eliminate the different forms of violence, emphasizing the need to prioritize and assume responsibilities to remove the violence in educational centers and mentioning the utility and relevance of a whole set of knowledge towards education for peace which, despite its lack of formal education, they are valid to prevent and fight against different forms of violence, such as knowledge about conflict transformation or nonviolent communication.
In relation to one of the great challenges to achieve relevant results in the global goals marked by the ODS, participation, the number of young people who participate (as well as the quality of their participation and the diversity of people who participate) in awareness-raising activities, solidarity, transformative in all the issues that are addressed by the ODS, which consists in devoting all educational efforts to provide theoretical knowledge (in subjects such as education for citizenship in university and grade studies), the suggestion was to change and, instead of talking about educating to participate, talking about ‘participating to form’, since the need are not the skills (knowledge) needed to participate, but rather to have the interest, the motivation and the opportunity to do it, achieving concrete results what, in our opinion , is much more fruitful and consistent with reality and much more useful to advance in the ODS with a greater participation of the society as a whole.