Thru Novel Lenses! New Vision New Perspectives New Ideas New Directions For the New World! Futuring Sustainable Development in the Post Pandemic Planet From Pre School to Policy Making
Youth Elderly Post Pandemic Planet Resistance Project: With COVID-19 social distancing, gaps between generations expands as elders become high risk group. GloCal redress actions bridging intergenerational divide.
The new COVID-19 threat is not just a health pandemic but a socio-cultural, economic and political one as well. It is upturning the way of life of the world, leaving many sectors grasping for foundation.
Futuring it may mean that many communities may have to turn inwards towards their own knowledge, skills, experiences, tools and resources to meet their needs. Join the Global Local Caribbean GloCal COVID Post Pandemic Planet Challenge, FEDs Any Age, Any Interest, Any Community. Stimulating actions and education in preparation for the Post Pandemic Planet. Tips, Tools, Tests, Templates. Sign on at www.krisrampersad.com and stay tuned for more #GloCalFEDsCOVIDChallenge#GloCalFEDs#GloCalPostPandemicPlanetChallenge#GloCalPostPandemicPlanet#KrisRampersad
We’re short on time as Dr Kris Rampersad and I meet at Normandie Hotel to chat. After a quick photo shoot with Elise Romany, we have just 45 minutes before she is due at the National Museum to open an exhibition by
LeRoy Clarke, ‘Eye Hayti …Cries…Everywhere.’ That’s far too short a time to chat with someone whose CV in media, cultural heritage and development work weighs some 50 pages heavy as a writer, researcher, media strategist, lecturer, journalist, founder, publisher, sustainable development, advocate and more.
Despite the time frame, Dr. Rampersad is as cool as they come. She orders a cup of tea, Earl Grey, black with no sugar as I cling to my third cup of coffee for the day and she starts, “Tea, is an ancient ritual in all our cultures, you know? It is my pick me up. I get less than four hours sleep, you see.” Then she moves straight to the subject at hand: “Do you know that I was one of the founding journalists of Newsday?” It’s a fact that I did know once but forgot. She doesn’t mince words: “Many of the new journalists forget or do not know, like much of our society has little interest in heritage. Newsday started in a social climate not unlike what we have today: tremendous negativity in the news. Then, it was driven by public outcry for more balance, with more positives even with rising crime.Today that outcry seems to have died and we just accept and relish and even revel in the blood and gore. We are losing our social conscience because we have done little to try to protect or retain it. Newsday came on the scene as ‘the good news paper’ and I was titled ‘the good news reporter’,” she reminisced, laughing.
“Our first cover story, which I wrote in September 1993, was ‘5000 Lives Saved’ (by the local suicide hotline). Think about it – a headline for such a story would normally read ‘5000 Attempted Suicide.’ My journalism was already taking on that character to impact the social conscience; that news and media should know its social responsibility to proactively shape the national character, not just report or react to it and that was the thinking that drove the founders of Newsday. But it didn’t last long. A few months in, the paper ran a crime story and its readership jumped beyond what its good news was attracting. The executives reversed the paper’s direction to what Newsday now is,” she says.“If we are lamenting the deterioration of our social conscience today, we are only reaping the whirlwind for not having invested in what it would have taken to change public orientation and outlook, not just react to it.” As negative as it all sounds, Dr Rampersad exudes energy, optimism and hope. “Social change doesn’t happen overnight, and it is not unattainable. That belief drives everything I do. But it is a collective responsibility. Positive change requires investments, risk-taking and resources.”That conscience about the long term, that we are only here for a short time as custodians not just as consumers, she notes, is what is missing from our society today.
Though she prefers not to be labelled an academic, much of her time is spent in intensive research, not just behind a desk, but interacting, collecting oral stories of peoples and cultures, visiting museums and piecing together stories couched within artefacts and she has accumulated and documented audiovisual materials and interviews from over two hundred cities in more than fifty countries across the world, and supplementing and comparing this with other materials.
“This means very little to most, but I have the only full length intimate video interview with Senior Counsel Dana Seetahal, but who’s interested, eh? No one ever took the time to try to find what made a woman who was giving so much to our society tick. Whatever interest there was in her horrendous death has just moved on to the next unsolved murder statistic.”
She is also active on the range of social media as well: LinkedIn,Facebook, Twitter and her own blog. “As much as there are negatives, the new technologies place the world at our fingertips. It’s a tool, to be used, negatively or positively, and for a child consumed with curiosity and a thirst for knowledge, who grew up barely able to afford books, for me it makes everyday Christmas,” she laughs. “It allows me to piece together connections about us; about our place here in the region, in the Americas, in the world that no one knows!”
Dr Rampersad was recently appointed chair of the National Museum and Art Gallery, a position that she says, was thrust on her for articulating the need to transform “such core national institutions which now exist only as shells of what they should be, pawns of power play and bureaucratic wrangling.” She explains, “It’s a sad indictment on all of us that our museum should be in the state that it is when a museum is the pulse and soul of a nation’s character and identity. We need to ask ourselves where our focus really is as a nation. I get shocked looks when I say that the same kind of dedicated attention and investments it took for us to develop our oil industry is needed for the cultural heritage sector, there’s no two ways about it; so when the oil dries up – and we are told we have, what, less than two decades – we would have a developed parallel economy in the heritage and its satellite sectors. Look at the developed world, this has been at the social and economic centre of those societies since time immemorial. It is not about what’s left or falls out of national and corporate and education budgets,” she says. “It requires proactive and conscience intervention.”
Speaking of heritage, she delivers a radical thought-provoking notion as we chat. “Look at our ancestry – we are not children of slaves. We are not children of indentured labourers. We are children of societies with magnificent cultures and traditions that have traveled across the seas to build this new and magnificent society,” she leans forward, emphatically, “which I firmly believe is second to none in the world: and I have seen plenty, eh!” She adds, “You want a good sound bite? We should also remove the word ‘Tolerance’ from our national watchwords; just as we need to redesign our National Coat of Arms. It contains elements that have nothing to do with us. We as a people are not about tolerance – the way we function as a society, the way we celebrate together; how we party, according to David Rudder. It should be dropped. And then we can try to start dealing with politics,” she laughs harder.
No doubt much of this global thinking comes from actually being a global thought-leader. Her work has transformed the globe in no small way. A working proposal from her computer and her networking skills to celebrate “Women as Agents of Change” has been used not only by our Government, but moved through the Commonwealth and OAS and onto large swathes of the world as well.
The model of engaging people to activate plans for change she developed in her hands-on work with communities across the Caribbean through inter-American institutions, UNESCO, the Commonwealth and others, is being used across the spectrum to get bureaucracies and decision-makers to understand that their plans and actions should be about people. That brings no monetary rewards, but, “it is about legacy,” she says.
To read the continuing story about Dr Rampersad and hear her viewpoints on what she has to say about the challenges facing our first female Prime Minister as well as the upcoming general election and our nation’s way forward, log on to our website www.newsday.co.tt or check us out at Newsday Womans Weekly on Facebook.
Follow Dr. Rampersad online on Facebook where you can also check out ‘LiTTscapes’ or via Twitter (@krisramp) and through her blog Demokrissy (kris-rampersad.blogspot.com)
Related Links: https://krisrampersad.com/
http://www.newsday.co.tt/womens_weekly/0,208014.html
https://goo.gl/Ni2dof
https://goo.gl/tDiT57
https://goo.gl/yTbLqX
https://goo.gl/458X94
https://goo.gl/9e32Bv
Inaugural Address at 194th session of
UNESCO Executive Board, Paris, France
Dr Kris Rampersad, Trinidad and Tobago Representative on UNESCO
Executive Board 2013-2017 at the 194th Session of the UNESCO Executive, Paris,
April 2014
Dr
Kris Rampersad, Trinidad and Tobago Representative on the UNESCO
Executive
Board (centre) co-chairs with the UK a joint sessionof the
Finance and
Administration and Programmes and External Affairs Committee
during the 194th session of the UNESCO Executive Board in Paris.
Photo
Courtesy Kris Rampersad. All Rights Reserved
Greetings on behalf of the
Government and People of Trinidad and Tobago who welcome, admire, respect and
support the Director General’s initiatives to reform and restructure UNESCO and
her intensive drive to use soft diplomacy which we believe is crucial to significantly
impact the post-2015 agenda as we transition from priorities of the Millennium
Development Goals and consolidate the gains of them through more focussed
Sustainable Development Goals.
Trinidad and Tobago pledges its commitment to
engaging in this process of futuring the operations of UNESCO to remain
relevant and responsive to a global environment of dynamic and effervescent
change. It is an environment that is demanding greater inclusivity. It is placing
increasing pressure for erasure of barriers of geography, age, ethnicity,
gender, cultures and other sectoral interests, and in utilising the tools
placed at our disposal to access our accumulate knowledge and technologies
towards eroding these superficial barriers.
In this context, we believe that the work of
UNESCO remains significant and relevant and that UNESCO is indeed the
institution best positioned to consolidate the gains of the past towards
carving responsive and relevant paths to progress that address the needs of
generations to come. Foremost among these seems to be combating the ennui and
disenchantment at failed and failing macro political, institutional and
bureaucratic formulas, systems and structures in favour of more glocally
(global-local) focussed initiatives that emphasis and value empowerment of individuals,
communities and civil society to explore their full potential.
Certainly there is much more that needs to be done
to particularly better utilise new technologies in making our work here at
UNESCO more effective and more relevant.
We reiterate the call made by the Trinidad and
Tobago Minister of Education to the Director General at the last General
Assembly, that UNESCO, along with its focus on other disadvantaged groups as
women and children in general, take a lead role in championing actions
throughout the United Nations system that would directly impact and bring in to
the mainstream the estimated 30 percent of the global population of special
needs children who are still severely marginalised and handicapped by current
existing systems in education, culture, science and information.
We support our colleagues speaking on behalf of
strengthening the culture initiatives having regard to the direct benefits this
is having from the work done in our societies where for many the main sources
of income and survival reside in leveraging their talents and skills as the
counter to the haemorrhaging of national resources, by exploitative, corrupt
and ineffective systems and practices. We endorse the culture-centred development drive that
recognises not just intercultural linkages but also cross sectoral links.
At the same time, we particularly commend the
drive to synergise and harmonise sustainable actions in biocultural diversity
and acknowledgement of the intrinsic interplay between physical, mental and
emotional cultural spaces and the potential to either erode, or energise these through
use of scientific understanding and technologies.
In this regard, we believe compilations as the
2013 Creative Economy Report could achieve greater depth were it to more fully
explore the cross-sectoral cost-benefit analysis of the co-relation between the
creative and cultural sectors and other out-of- the-box-areas - as the economic
value of social and culturally inclusive practices on political stability for
instance – an area of analysis that is sadly lacking and could provide the
data, if not ammunition, needed by UNESCO in pursuit of its motto of building
peace in the minds of men and women.
As such, we look forward to deepening of UNESCO’s
intersectoral increasing drive to promote multisectoral partnerships, and
collaborative mechanisms through cross institutional and cross regional
platforms, including with other institutions of the United Nations.
It is in these contemporary areas of UNESCO’s
focus, including its now developing perspective on Big Ocean Sustainable States
(Boss) – the informal rebrand of SIDS - Small
Island Developing States posited at the last General Conference - that we in
the Caribbean believe we can draw the greatest strength, given our evolution
from a history of fragmentation, violence, migration and marginalisation.
The Caribbean Sea at once connects and separates
us from all the regions of the world. It presents to the UNESCO community beyond
the hard politics of power and dominance, a living example for survival and
resilience that endures despite and through a history of genocide of
indigeneous peoples, slavery, forced indentureship, and migration.
Such resilience is represented in the survival of
religious and cultural practices, habits and beliefs: the vibrant celebrations
that range from pre-Columbian festivities of the Mayans, Incas, Tainos and
others to the evolving festivities of migrated peoples: the Garifuna and Rastafari
from oppressed African heritage; and others transposed from the East – the resilient
Ramleela, Chinese Dragon festivities, and their evolving fusions in our
cuisine, music, dance, drama, our Carnivals and steelpan, reggae, zouk and
chutney. All of these present significance to UNESCO ideals of peoples, who
beyond conflict and tensions, are finding ways to celebrate their migrations,
cultural contact and shared occupation of our natural environment.
Yet, our space is at the same time, severely
endangered by the risks of climate change and sea level rise, deforestation, poor
land use practices and pollution and other development challenges.
We believe that the UNESCO mechanisms in science,
education, information and culture can be more effectively used to bridge these
divides, and to help us to further explore, capture and harness these
experiences for the benefit of building peace in the minds of men and women
Even
as we admire the creative initiatives of the Director General to balance a
shrinking budget in challenging financial times, we pledge to work with her for
further rationalisation, while we particularly look forward to better
engagement and more equitable treatment of the countries of the Caribbean. We form
part of the Latin American and Caribbean UNESCO region, and represent almost 40
percent of the votes from this region, but not an equivalent allocation of UNESCO
resources. In its programme of restructuring, we would also
suggest that UNESCO look at ways of redressing of imbalances in its institutional
structure and mechanisms of field and national offices in our region where of
12 offices in the region, only one – located in Kingston - serves the 13 member
and four associated members of CARICOM.
We assure you of our commitment and support to the
Director General’s goal of making UNESCO more relevant and more effective.
I thank you
Dr
Kris Rampersad, UNESCO Executive BoardApril
2014
