‘Chair of the Secretariat of the Huairou Commission honored at World Habitat Day’

Washington, D.C. October 5th, 2009

	Jan Peterson, Chair of the Secretariat of the Huairou Commission

Jan Peterson, Chair of the Secretariat of the Huairou Commission, will be awarded the prestigious UN Habitat Scroll of Honour award at the World Habitat Day celebrations in Washington, D.C. on October 5th, 2009. The event takes place from 9 - 11am at the National Building Museum. UN Habitat stated, "It was our unanimous opinion that you should receive the award for championing the rights of grassroots women and their movements for better human settlements." The Obama Administration will host the official celebrations for World Habitat Day this year.
 

The conferral of this award demonstrates an increasing recognition of the importance grassroots women's movements for development practice and policy. The most prestigious human settlements award in the world, it seeks initiatives or individuals that demonstrate impact, sustainability, transferability and innovation in the areas of social, economic and political development, including issues such as security of tenure, environmental conditions, crime reduction and community involvement in governance decisions, Peterson joins a distinguished cohort of Scroll of Honour recipients ranging from heads of state to municipalities to other leaders of grassroots movements, such as Sheela Patel of Slum Dwellers International, Caroline Pezullo of GROOTS International and Maite Rodriguez of the Women and Peace Network. Every year since 1989, UN Habitat has awarded up to fifteen individuals or initiatives.

Jan Peterson has championed the recognition and support of grassroots women's leadership in community development for over thirty years. Her work as the founder and Chair of the Huairou Commission developed out of years of experience with grassroots organizations and civil society in the United States, as a founder of the National Congress of Neighborhood Women and also as Associate Director in the Office of Public Liaison in the White House under the Carter Administration. She then went on to participate in founding GROOTS International. In 1995 during the 4th World Women's Conference in Beijing, she founded the Huairou Commission in collaboration with other global women's networks and then Executive Director of UN Habitat, Wally N'Dow.

Peterson has led the effort to incorporate grassroots women's groups and their community development priorities into the global women's movement. Likewise, her work has influenced the human settlements movement and UN Habitat in its work to include grassroots women's leadership and a gender perspective in its work and priority setting.

The Huairou Commission is a global coalition of networks with women's organizations in 50 countries and with partners ranging from UN agencies to research institutions. The Huairou Commission leads four thematic campaigns: Governance, AIDS, Resilience to Disaster, and Land and Housing. In each campaign, the Huairou Commission develops and promotes grassroots tools and methodologies with its grassroots member organizations and partner institutions for peer learning, research, constituency building, and collective advocacy to influence policies from the local to global levels. This collective work has claimed space for grassroots women to speak for themselves, contributing to the agendas of policy-making institutions and civil society organizations both in their local governments and in UN meetings and other global decision-making forums.

Peterson will participate in World Habitat Day with a delegation of women leaders from grassroots organizations and NGOs from Uganda, Jamaica, Peru and the U.S. On the following day, October 6th, the Huairou Commission will co-sponsor an affiliated event,"Grassroots Women and Affordable Housing- Creating Sustainable Communities" in Washington, as that will showcase the struggles and strategies of grassroots women from around the U.S. related to their claiming, gaining and maintaining affordable housing and secure tenure over land. It is co-sponsored with the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty and NeighborWorks America.

The Huairou Commission is a recipient of the MDG3 fund from the Dutch Government, and it sustains ongoing partnerships with institutions such as Cordaid and the Swedish International Development Agency.

World Habitat Day 2009 One-page Schedule