From 1993 to 2003, Ms. Sorensen also served as Assistant Secretary-General on appointment by Secretary-General Kofi Annan and earlier on appointment by Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Ms. Sorensen will discuss UN efforts to promote international partnerships to combat poverty. Download the FLIER for posting.

Thursday, April 12, 2007
Goucher College
Merrick Hall, Dorsey Center
1021 Dulaney Valley Road
Baltimore, MD 21204

Guest Panelists

• Jessica Walker Beaumont: Trade Specialist with American Friends Service Committee, New York
• Cherri Waters: Chair of the Development Policy Unit, Interaction. Coordinator of the International Development Concentration of the Masters of Science in Foreign Service Program at Georgetown University
• Nisha Thapliyal: Assistant Coordinator, IMF Project. Action Aid International USA. Post-doctoral research assoicate at the University of Maryland

For more information on all of the speakers, please view the bios below. A public discussion will follow the presentations.

This Event is Free and Open to the Public.

This event is sponsored by The United Nations Association of Maryland, The League of Women Voters of Baltimore County, and Goucher College. The event is partially supported by a grant from the Millennium Campaign and the League of Women Voters Education Fund.

Directions

Goucher College is located on Dulaney Valley Road, Towson, Maryland, about eight miles north of the center of Baltimore. A campus map is available for download in Adobe PDF format from the Goucher website. For directions to the campus, please refer to the following Google Map. Motorists approaching Goucher College from any direction are advised to take the Baltimore Beltway (I-695), leaving it at exit 27A-Towson (Dulaney Valley Road south). The college entrance is on the left, one-half block from exit 27A.

Speaker Bios

Gillian Sorensen

Gillian Sorensen is Senior Adviser at the United Nations Foundation. She has had a long career working with and for the UN. Since l993, she served as Special Adviser for Public Policy for Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then as Assistant Secretary General, head of the Office of External Relations for Secretary General Kofi Annan. She was responsible for outreach to civil society including NGO’s and worked closely with diplomats, academics, parliamentarians, religious leaders and others committed to peace, justice, development and human rights. She is an experienced public speaker and often represented the World Organization in this country and abroad.

Ms. Sorensen earlier served for over 12 years as New York City Commissioner for the United Nations, head of the City’s liaison office with the world’s largest diplomatic community, on appointment by Mayor Edward I. Koch. Her responsibilities related to diplomatic security and immunity, housing and education, and other cultural and business contacts between the Host City and over 30,000 diplomats.

Gillian Sorensen is a graduate of Smith College and studied at the Sorbonne. She has been a Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government (Institute of Politics) at Harvard University. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Women’s Foreign Policy Group.

Jessica Walker Beaumont

Jessica Walker Beaumont is the Trade and Debt Specialist for the American Friends Service Committee's (AFSC) Peacebuilding Unit. Jessica is the national coordinator for AFSC's Trade Matters program, working to ensure that trade systems are evaluated not simply on their contribution to economic growth, but also on their impact on the lives of people - especially the most vulnerable populations. Jessica also serves as a policy analyst for AFSC's Life Over Debt campaign calling for 100% debt cancellation for African nations. As a Master’s in Public Administration graduate from Columbia University's School of International Affairs program in 2002, Jessica created her own concentration in Trade and Globalization Policy studying with Nobelist Joseph Stiglitz and others. Jessica has worked on trade issues since 1993, beginning with research and activism around the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). She was an accredited NGO delegate to numerous international conferences and ministerial meetings including the World Trade Organization (Cancún, MX 2004 and Seattle, WA 1999), UN Finance for Development (Monterrey, MX 2002), UN Habitat II for Sustainable Development (Istanbul, Turkey 1996), and UN Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, China 1995). Jessica also attended the Africa Social Forum (Lusaka, Zambia 2004) and the World Social Forum (Porto Alegre, Brazil 2003). Prior to AFSC, she worked at MDRC, a domestic policy think tank while interning at the United Nations Development Programme with the Senior Advisor on Inclusive Globalization.

Cherri Waters

In the past, she served as the Vice President for International Programs at Lutheran World Relief, worked in 15 countries, directed the TransAfrica Forum, and worked on Capital Hill.

Nisha Thapliyal

Ms. Thapliyal has researched and worked with education rights movements in Brazil, South Africa, and India. She has a PhD in International Education Policy from the University of Maryland and an MA from the Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai, India. Her remarks will focus on the IMF project and the impact of IMF policies on the ability of developing countries to meet the UN's Millennium Development Goals. "The objective of the IMF Project is to widen public debate on macroeconomic policies" and "to increase civil society support for...congressional oversight of IMF loan programs so that borrowing governments in the Global South will have greater leeway to adopt policies which could enable them to...achieve the Millennium Development Goals."