My personal experience with Hurricane Sandy was hardly life-changing. In preparation, I bought liters of bottled water, stocked up on beans, filled my tub and pots full of water, and locked myself in my Brooklyn apartment with a friend waiting for nature's wrath to pass. When it was all over, it turned out my only inconvenience was a lost internet connection for about eight hours. 

Other New Yorkers were not so lucky. 

Hurricane Sandy is responsible for 41 deaths in New York City, 2.19 million power outages, destruction to over 305,000 homes, and an estimated $32.8 billion in repair and restoration costs. Residents of the City that Never Sleeps saw Lower Manhattan living in darkness for a week, flooding and subsequent paralysis of the 24-hour subway system we are so proud of, and devastation in parts of Staten Island, Queens, and Brooklyn, including a fire that destroyed the homes of 100 families. As often happens in disasters, Hurricane Sandy has brought together the many different enclaves of this city and its people, for the common cause of helping heal and rebuild this urban metropolis that we all call home.

“I want people to know that care is about humanity. It’s about people’s welfare. It needs to be realized as an important tool in fighting HIV and AIDS. ”

 -Violet Shivutse

At the 2012 International AIDS Conference, a top-down, business efficiency model dominated the discussions, taking women and communities most affected by the pandemic out of the picture- a potentially catastrophic ‘tide turning.’  Despite their significant contribution, documented through evidence-based research, a number of myths circulated surrounding the role of grassroots caregivers in linking to decentralizing healthcare systems.

Huairou Secretariat Program Associate Regina Pritchett analyzes the gains toward women's empowerment achieved at the Sixth World Urban Forum, and offers a glimpse of what challenges lie ahead. 

One by one, each participant stepped into the circle to introduce herself to the group, stating her name and where she came from, then pausing to allow her introduction to reverberate through translations into five different languages. The patience required to get through even the introductions of the fifty-five participants demonstrated the commitment of each woman towards transcending differences in culture, language and even generations present in the room.  A landmark event for various reasons, this Women's Multi-Stakeholder International Academy hosted by Huairou Commission & GROOTS International brought together participants from a total of twelve different countries to contribute to the discussions about women's contributions to sustainable urban development. 

And so began the three-day Multi-Stakeholder Academy at the University Federico II in Naples, Italy, a city with its own challenges, that demanded recognition of the merging socioeconomic issues of north and south countries in our present day. Aptly so, the women were prepared to enter this space for discussion to consolidate the ideas among grassroots community practitioners, academics, urban planners and NGO's. They aimed to prepare a defined agenda to assert at the Sixth World Urban Forum, the global urban conference organized by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), which would immediately follow the Academy.

New York, NY - Violet Shivutse of GROOTS Kenya, Jhocas Castillo of DAMPA in the the Philippines,and Haydee Rodriguez of the Cooperative Union Las Brumas in Nicaragua arrived in New York last week to attend the first UN Women Global Civil Society Advisory Board Meeting, which convened on Wednesday, October 10 at UN Headquarters in New York. The advisory group,  according to UN Women's Executive Director, Michelle Bachelet, has the objective to "play an important consulting role, and provide strategic perspectives on advocacy on gender equality and women's empowerment and on UN Women's thematic priorities."