GSA: Exchange of letters between the new GSA Leadership Team and the Editors at News & Views

Dear colleagues and senior friends,

Thank you so much for this mail, detailing the excellent work you do for and with UNICEF retirees and current staff. It is amazing how you could do so much, as volunteers! Well done!

We sincerely appreciate all of you and salute your years of sacrifice for the realization of the rights of children. Every UNICEF staff ought to work with a consciousness that retirement is not a handicap nor a bottleneck to continuous service to the cause of children. We believe that that, in itself, could be reassuring for those close to retirement and could propel all of us to determine to live productive post-retirement lives, as you all obviously do.

We would surely continue the partnership that GSA has maintained with you and further stimulate mutually beneficial engagement between your group and staff across countries and regions.

Jay has informed our team that he knows about UPGI. We shall do our best to spread that knowledge and consciousness to other places and work at stimulating increased discourse and interface between your group and serving staff.

Please feel free to let us know how we can perform better. And like Carina has done, do not hesitate to flag potential areas of collaboration that we may be unaware of.

We are proud of you all and look forward to continuous partnership with you.

Kind regards



Noma




Dear Noma, June and Vridhagiri

We at XUNICEF News & Views (N&V) want to extend our sincere congratulations to you on your recent election as next leaders of the Global Staff Association for 2020 and 2021. We wish you all success in your new roles and thank you for willingly taking up the many responsibilities attached to your new offices. We look forward to working closely with you, as we did GSA's outgoing team who have been outstanding partners for XUNICEF throughout their time in office.

Carina Prakke has recently written to you, Noma, about the roles the XUNICEF network and its retiree members play in supporting UNICEF´s mission and keeping the retiree community in touch with each other and with UNICEF globally. We at News & Views (N&V) are the information sharing platform for XUNICEF. We are currently approaching the conclusion of our second year of publishing our quarterly newsletters and our first year of publishing on the web. So far this year our website has been viewed by over 2,800 users and we have over 13,000 page views.

N&V's website (xunicefnewsandviews.blogspot.com) includes daily news and correspondence shared by our members. We also send out by email a quarterly newsletter and weekly or bi-weekly news updates. Although our main audience consists of UNICEF retirees, we place no limitations on who can be on our distribution list, other than that they that they consider themselves part of the UNICEF family, i.e. that they have a current or past close association with UNICEF's work, Thus we include current staff who are approaching retirement, spouses of retirees, staff and retirees of national committees, former consultants and holders of SSA or STC contracts. Like XUNICEF itself, we charge no fees and we are a completely volunteer publication.

One priority for us is to ensure that before retirement, any staff who want to stay in touch with the UNICEF family - both locally and globally - will know how to do so. In cooperation with the outgoing GSA leadership team, we have urged UNICEF country offices and national staff associations to reach out to the retirees in their country. Sadly, many country offices still have no consolidated list of former staff, let alone their email and physical addresses. We hope that UNICEF country offices will recognize the enormous and largely untapped resource available in the former staff living in their country.

As you likely know, India has been a leader in establishing a formal organization of UNICEF retirees (UNICEF Pensioners' Group India or UPGI). Other countries such as Bangladesh, Panama, Guatemala, and Senegal have informal retiree associations, often as parts of a wider UN retiree association in the country. We will appreciate any help you can give in improving the flow of information back to us from these groups to their respective country offices and national staff associations. This ties to our desire to include more articles written by our subscribers on local issues and in UN languages other than English. Naturally, we also appreciate any flow of information back to us from GSA itself.

Separately we have sent you copies of our News Update for the period 17 to 21 November. Below you will find a link to our latest quarterly (September) - our Arts & Artists edition of our newsletter. The next is due in late December and will focus on CRC@30.

We will welcome any suggestions you may have on how we could improve our publications in the future.

Once again, sincere congratulations and best wishes for the coming two years.

The Volunteer Editors at XUNICEF News & Views


Leila Bisharat
Nuzhat Shahzadi
Droeen Lobo
Ian MacLeod
Sree Gururaja
Foaud Kronfol
Gianni Murzi
Tom McDermott