After months of work, documentation and thorough analyses we are more than
delighted to share with you that starting with the 7th June 2023 GEYC has been
granted by the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) the special consultative
status. You might be asking WHAT is ECOSOC and what does the special
CONSULTATIVE STATUS entail?
First thing first,
ECOSOC is the
principal organ that coordinates the economic, social, environmental and
related work of the United Nations specialized agencies, functional and
regional commissions. It works as the central forum for discussing
international economic, social and environmental issues, and for formulating
policy recommendations addressed to Member States and the United Nations
system.
The
CONSULTATIVE STATUS
is an accreditation framework where both the UN and the NGO sector benefit
from. The UN is more connected with specialists and experts from different
international NGOs that have more hands-on experiences and competencies on
different subjects.
As you might already have been familiar with, GEYC activities are focused on 4 areas of activities (we call them "portfolios"):
- Democracy and Human Rights,
- Digital,
- Entrepreneurship and Employability,
- Sustainability,
What's in it for the GEYC Community?
- it will get the chance to represent the GEYC Community's voice and youth voices in general at different international UN conferences in New York, Geneva or Vienna.
- it will get more connected with the local UN entities and work closely together to put in place certain side events.
- it will have the opportunity to expand the network and bring more value to the current focus areas an departments.
- it will create oral and written statements with different occasions to highlight the expertise on different topics.
- it will have the possibility to attend different sessions organized by the Human Rights Council and better understand and disseminate locally how human rights can be more respected and protected.
"Our UN Special Consultative Status application process was started in January 2021 by my colleague Raluca Dumitrescu, the former Head of Sustainability at GEYC. It was indeed a lengthy process, but fortunately this month we received the final confirmation from the United Nations and this brings us eventually closer to the UN Agencies. In the past 4 years, we have been working with several agencies such as UNICEF, UNFPA, ITU, UNECE and UNESCO and GEYC's activities have been tailored closely to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals - SDGs, each portolio is contributing to 5-6 SDGs." (Gabriel Brezoiu, General Manager and Acting Head of Sustainability)
GEYC is an organization in Special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council since 2023. Keep an eye on what will happen next as part of the organization's consultative status with the UN: