Welcome to 2017 – CISV’s year of Human Rights!

2017 is CISV’s year for Human Rights. Throughout the year, we will bring you ideas, discussion pieces, materials and resources to help you to explore, educate on, and take action toward Human Rights in your Chapter or Programme. If you’re interested in contributing, contact the team.

Each year, CISV International puts the spotlight on one of our four educational content areas. This year we focus on Human Rights. What are they? Do we fully understand what they mean and how they affect our lives and communities? How do they connect to Active Global Citizenship? How can we educate and empower people to take action in this area?

Big questions!

Over the course of this year, we’ll be tackling these questions and more, with the aim of getting CISVers around the world to think and talk about Human Rights, in your Chapters, in your programmes, and in your communities at large. In other words, in 2017 we want to give CISVers an extra boost to educate and inspire action with regard to Human Rights.

But where to start?

At the most basic level, Human Rights are a set of principles concerned with fairness and equality among people. They identify the most essential freedoms and entitlements we have as human beings. They describe the free and safe life that all people, everywhere, should be able to live.

Sounds fairly simple. But in practice, out in the world, Human Rights are anything but simple.

This is because, ultimately, Human Rights are an idea, created by humans. And humans are complicated creatures. Any person’s ability to have and enjoy their Human Rights depends on other people respecting those rights. And this gets complicated! Because: what happens when one person’s rights clash with another person’s? Whose responsibility is it to protect and ensure our Human Rights? What happens when Human Rights are violated? How can we, as citizens, advocate for our own and each other’s rights?

Complex, right? While Human Rights can be a challenging topic to get one’s head around, it’s also incredibly interesting and tremendously important. It’s an area that every Active Global Citizen should be aware of, and able to think critically about, whether you are aged 11 or 111.

Meet the team that will lead the 2017 Human Rights Campaign

The team behind this year’s campaign will strive to bring you inspiring and useful resources, ideas that help you put focus on Human Rights throughout 2017. We’ll do that through blog and social media posts that bring together the best materials from within and beyond CISV. We’ll post articles, activities, resource guides, videos and links to other organizations doing great work.

If you want to follow, here are three things you can do:

• First, bookmark this blog and check back often. We’ll post new stuff every few weeks.
• Second, follow CISV International on Facebook and Twitter. We’ll post updates there too.
• Third, let us know what you hope to see. Drop us a line at human.rights.2017@cisv.org

In our next post, we’ll dig into the challenge of defining Human Rights and give you some tips on learning how to introduce and explain the topic.

Yours,
The 2017 Human Rights Team