Issues
Banking in Developing Countries
In the United States, we couldn’t imagine life without close by ATMs and banks. When we need our money, we need it now. Well, the situation is not the same in developing countries. Most of the time, people have to walk for miles before they find a teller machine. They risk becoming the victims of fraudulent individuals who can give hem the wrong exchange rate, and also risk having to carry large amounts of money for a long period of time.
Banking is important. We think about setting up programs and finding ways to save countries. What we rarely think of, however, is strengthening the access to formal banking systems.
UNA-GP works on finding ways to increase awareness on the issue, and on finding ways to alleviate the situation.
Control Small Arms Trade
Food Security
UNAGP wants to ensure hunger prevention and establish a more equitable food distribution. To do so, it focuses on urban farming and community gardening. The organization wants to make sure that poor people are fed but also trained to feed themselves in the future.
One of the Millennium Development Goals is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. Recognizing that these two factors are interrelated only emphasizes the need to feed an help the poor. Something has to be done and the UNAGP is aware of it.
Human Rights
International Criminal Court
Nearly 65 years after the Nuremberg judgment of 1946, the world has yet to achieve a reliable system for assuring that perpetrators of society's worst offenses -- genocide and crimes against humanity -- are held to account. The ICC was intended to achieve such a system, but even supporters of the Court are ambivalent about its record to date, given that it has yet to complete its first trial, and that its most celebrated indictees -- Sudan's president Omar al-Bashir and Joseph Kony, the notorious Ugandan leader of the Lord's Resistance Army -- are still at large. Plans to implement a system of victim reparations remain unfulfilled, as is the intention to help strengthen judicial and other institutional capacities of member states, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, so that they can take the lead in prosecuting their own cases.
While the court is still young -- and some of its problems can be traced to non-cooperation by individual states and other political factors beyond the ICC's control -- at this point, the court's track record cannot match those of the more focused tribunals that prosecuted war-crime perpetrators in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone
UN Millenium Development Goals
Universal Ban on Landmines and Cluster Munitions
Projects
Advocacy to end all Wars in the US
Dear Fellow PA UNA Members,
As US troops and civilian casualties mount in Iraq and Afghanistan, we may feel that all our work to end the wars is futile.
We must tell Washington we are sick of the wars, sick of the death, sick of the bloodshed.
Attached are the contact points for the President, Vice President, Cabinet members, and every member of the House and Senate from Pennsylvania - last month I faxed letters to all of them, a version of the letter is at www.cis.upenn.edu/grad/documents/obama.pdf.
Tell the President, Cabinet and our legislators the wars must end. However futile it may seem, Washington needs to hear our voices and we need to be heard.
Sincerely,
Mike Felker
UNA GP
Veterans for Peace
mfelker@cis.upenn.edu
AMERICAN ENGAGEMENT CAUCUS IN CONGRESS
There is an active movement under way in congress to establish a pro-UN group that pulls members from both parties. Please see our website for more details about this exciting development. Write or call your congress(wo)man to urge joining the caucus.
Global Nursing Club of Philadelphia
Mission
The mission of the Philadelphia Global Nursing and Health Journal Club is to strengthen the knowledge of local nursing students, (and their faculty and their older peers) about issues surrounding global health, specifically the future of nursing in a globalized world and the future role of nursing in the delivery of care, the prevention of diseases, the optimalization of equity in the quality of life of the world's citizens and how to prepare yourself and organize the profession across borders . We will review a wide range of material, multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional, and "absorb" critically recent global health research publications and proposals; we will invite frank conversations with activists, faculty and peers who work in the field. We will foster network building among nursing students interested in global health and promote collaboration to increase access to healthcare globally.
Goals:
Create leaders in global nursing.
Support a city wide network of students, practitioners and faculty interested in global nursing
Seek solutions to the current brain drain in nursing, and ameliorate abhorrent imbalances in nursing care
Increase knowledge about the processes and content of current global health research and ongoing projects in the global nursing community
Foster a relationship between international organizations and student nurses
Follow the link below to join the journal discussion group