 Hi, good afternoon. I was waiting for that. Actually, I've been excited all day long for this event, which is a very exciting and important event, and I was calm all day long until I got in the room, and I noticed that former bosses are here, former senior colleagues, former and current champions of women, peace and security for decades. And so I got a jolt of nervousness about it. This truly is a great event today. So good afternoon. Welcome to the United States Institute of Peace. My name is David Yong. I'm the new Vice President here at USIP for Applied Conflict Transformation. The Applied Conflict Transformation Center develops and tests innovative approaches to peace building. USIP itself was founded in 1984 as a bipartisan act of Congress. Founded by the likes of Senator Spark Matsunaga of Hawaii, Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon, both served with great valor in World War II, and both came out of that experience, and the experience of their public service, knowing in their hearts and in their minds that they wanted to create an Academy for Peace, an Institute for Peace in the United States. It would be co-equal to those that served our soldiers so well. So they did so in 1984 and President Reagan embraced their United States Institute of Peace Act. Since that time, USIP has served local peace builders on the ground all around the world. We provide tools and training to local peace builders to give them the knowledge they need to prevent their conflicts and when their conflicts become violent to resolve them. So today we're assembling to discuss inclusive peace processes, mobilizing men as partners for women, peace and security. We're happy to co-host today with the initiative our secure partner and Ambassador Don Steinberg, who leads that important initiative. For those of you following on the webcast, welcome to all of you. You can follow us on social media at USIP and also hashtag inclusive peace. So please add your tweets to our program today. So why inclusion in peace process? For at least a decade or two now, the international community has coalesced around the concept that peace is based on inclusion. Whether it's the 2011 New Deal for greater engagement in fragile states, whether it was the 2012 UN Secretary General report on peacekeeping and peacebuilding, the 2015 UN review of peacebuilding architecture, or the more recent UN World Bank publication on pathways to peace. All of these documents, important documents at their core have the idea that peace is based on a legitimate social contract between state and society. And such a contract, we believe, can only be borne out of an inclusive peace process. It's not just on principle, we believe that. It's also based on empirical evidence. A leading scholar, Desiree Nielsen, has analyzed 83 peace agreements and she concluded that when civil society is included in an inclusive way in peace agreements and peace processes, the risk of peace breaking down is reduced by a full 64%. Therefore, peace processes provide an opportunity to create this new social contract between state and society, to put societies on a foundation of legitimate politics. So, as we go forward, truly resolution 1325, that historic resolution on women, peace and security, really began the conversation about inclusive peace processes more generally. We now approach its 20th anniversary of how women can be agents of change in peace processes. So, particularly with the bipartisan creation of the Women, Peace and Security Act of 2017 in the United States, USIP has since bolstered its work in women, peace and security. Just to give you some examples, we're working on a range of WPS projects, including in Kenya, to advance women's roles in countering violent extremism. In Colombia, we're working to support women mediators in Afghanistan to promote women's participation in electoral processes. Also, at the institute, we make sure to include gender perspectives all across our programming. It's not just a secondary issue or an add-on for us, but it's a core central issue to inclusive peace. I'd like to salute my colleagues, Kathleen Kinist and Rotucci, for leading our work in women, peace and security. Also, our gender team has produced a new tool called Gender Inclusive Framework and Theory, codenamed GIFT, and it's truly a gift to our community working on women, peace and security. It's broken down, as you see, you can download it on the web into three, this framework into three concepts, the first being women, peace and security, generally, the second, an intersecting identities approach, and third and finally, the peaceful masculinity approach. The last, of course, is directly relevant to our discussion today. So I'd like to introduce our keynote speakers today. We're very honored to be hosting them. First up to the podium will be the Honorable Ed Royce, who recently retired as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He was instrumental in the passage of the Women, Peace and Security Act of 2017. He's been a champion for many decades on human rights and women's empowerment globally, and we salute him for his service and congratulate him for all that he achieved in our field. Next up will be Ambassador Milan Revere. She equally has been truly in the vanguard of the Women, Peace and Security movement globally. Currently, she is executive director of Georgetown University's Institute for Women, Peace and Security. Before that, she served in the Obama Administration as the first U.S. ambassador for global women's issues. And of course, she was the champion in the early 2000s of the Vital Voices Global Partnership, and served in many capacities when that was a government project and afterwards as a project in civil society. So thank you to all. Thank you for being champions of Women, Peace and Security, and I invite to the podium Chairman Royce. David, thank you very much. It's good to be with you. First, before we unleash men on this project, there are certain precautionary steps that we really must take. Men can carry legislation on women's issues, but don't have them write it. That would be my first point. There are 5,000 years of recorded history where men are making decisions without the input of women as co-equal partners, and something keeps being left out of the documents, like the right to vote, inherit property from mom, things like that. It's like trusting men alone with a channel changer. For the rest of the family, it will not necessarily be time well spent. In my experience, the best strategies for empowering women are those plans designed by women. By way of example, six years ago as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, I had a sense of where I wanted to go to drive this project, but a hazy sense of directions. So at some point it made sense to me to get women out of the back seat and put them behind the wheel and buckle up. And I wanted to thank my team here. I wanted to thank Amy Porter, my former Chief of Staff, if you'd like to stand for a minute. And Marie Speer, thank you, Marie, and Jessica Kelch and Nelmini Rubin for passage of the Women, Peace and Security Act, the Protecting Girls Access to Education Act, the Girls Count Act, and the Women Entrepreneurial Economic Empowerment Act or the WE Act, along with a series of women-focused initiatives aimed at Africa. These bills included women in the process of conflict resolution and in the process of peacekeeping, and helped leverage them onto the police forces abroad so that rapes would be reported and would be prosecuted. They included scholarships for women and girls in patriarchal societies and they directed governments to register girls at birth for equal standing in court and equal standing in terms of admission to schools. They included bills to tackle human trafficking, forced child marriage, and female genital mutilation. It was women who drove the process, who developed the hearings, women who testified, women who wrote the legislation. The outcome of the hearings and the legislation to turn the focus of foreign policy toward the protection of the most vulnerable women and girls was then supported by men. The second point is that it was kept bipartisan. There was no time or patience to allow it to become a wedge issue, and when a senator tried in either party to put a hold on a bill, Jessica would go down and hunt Ivanka Trump or Nita Lowy out and ask them to talk and reason to the senator, and they did so in no uncertain terms, and it worked. Lastly, they appealed to the typical congressman to look at the problem from the standpoint of the world his own daughter would be facing, which had a way of getting his rapt attention. On this sorry planet, one in three women will experience violence in her lifetime. We have greatly lessened the mayhem in societies which have struggled to confront female discrimination and exclusion, but those are the numbers worldwide and they leave us stunned. So the perspective needs to come from the experience of women. In this case, women testifying before the committee and women like Maria Alexandra Ariaga, senior advisor to futures without violence. I appreciate Alex's contribution to linking security of women and security of states. A book which I recommend to all of you, I'm sure Alex has some copies that she could send you, and she has spent her life thinking and acting on global human rights issues. Her work toward futures without violence has depended on her engagement with champions of human rights across the political spectrum, not just on the left or on the center or on the right. Across the spectrum with a bipartisanship that gets results, like Alex, keep it nonpartisan, and like Alex, pound away at the facts. We need to work hard to maintain that. And because I feel compelled to integrate this list, let me mention Tom Sheehy and Ambassador Don Steinberg. Don is always most quotable when you've got him at full throttle. Here's Don, compare those societies that respect women and those that don't. Think about societies that empower women and protect women in vulnerable situations. Those societies are far less likely to be trafficking in people or drugs or weapons. They don't tend to send off huge amounts of refugees across borders or oceans. They don't transmit pandemics. They don't harbor terrorists or pirates and frankly they don't require American troops on the ground. Don't tell me that there is no relationship between national security and empowerment of women. There's a one-to-one correspondence. So Don is sort of, or the mystically is the statesman who saved Greek civilization with his persuasive advice. But I very much appreciate his continuance in driving that message. Ambassador Don Steinberg took tremendous risks in Angola 20 years ago to try to end that bloody civil war. And so did Tom Sheehy who's with us in Angola and in Congo and in Liberia where he helped to bring justice. Tom Sheehy who has lived and worked in Africa and used to be the staff director for the committee is now helping the US Institute of Peace and I appreciated their intellectual backing for the Women in Peace and Security Act. So how else do you get to men? Because that's the topic I was asked to comment on here. Most men have a rough sense of justice in them. Tell them that you would end the impunity of warlords like President Charles Taylor who used boys as child soldiers and girls as chattel and asked men to help end that kind of impunity. Tell them how women in civil society in Liberia were critical in keeping the peace process on track after Taylor was hauled before the International Criminal Court and the Hague to face justice. Justice for organizing tens of thousands of rapes and killings and amputations. Explain to men that the warlord was then replaced by the election of a woman president. Ellen Johnson Searle who kept the peace and served as a role model to women. Tell them that if concerned men can make that kind of change happen in Liberia men can help women quill anarchy and mayhem anywhere. Explain to men that dollars spent on prevention are more efficient than millions spent on response. And take one to see Charlie Wilson's war on this subject. Explain to men that for neo-nazis to jihadists there is a common thread among most of those who have committed terror. They either as children have been exposed to domestic violence or inflicted domestic violence on others as young men or they've done both. Apparently it leads to depression and to put it mildly deficiencies in empathy and then in some to contemplating making a bomb in your mother's kitchen. And so explain to men that the underlying discrimination against women and the impunity for violence against women with all of the hell that comes out of it requires that we recruit men and boys to change social norms on this planet. Alex is right about that. Ladies ask them to enlist in your effort. Just don't promote them to a rank higher than yours. Thank you all very much. Well hello everybody and thank you David for the introduction. It is such a pleasure to be here with all of you for this important discussion because so many of you have done so much to advance this agenda. Thank you Chairman Royce, not only for your words today but for your leadership on the Women, Peace and Security Act of 2017. You in many ways exemplify this topic that we're addressing. But I also want to thank you for your great skill in taking that talent pool of women who worked in Congress with you and unleashing them so they can help advance progress for women as they did but they did it in tangent with your leadership. So that was a very important contribution, needless to say. And the law today that in many ways is an example to the world if we can implement it well is an important tool to advance the common cause that brings us together and we will surely need to engage more good men to ensure its full implementation. I too want to thank ambassadors Don Steinberg who is devoting himself to mobilizing men as partners for Women, Peace and Security. How many of us have quoted his experience in the Angolan peace process? I know I have countless times because it's such a powerful example for why we need inclusive peace processes, why we need women's agency for sustainable peace and what happens when that lesson is not learned. It was a life changing experience for Don and he has been an evangelist for women's participation in peace building ever since. And for all of us he's been an extraordinary role model of male leadership on this issue. I am personally grateful to him because when I was serving as ambassador on global women's issues he was the deputy administrator at USAID. He was a key leader in drafting the United States National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security and he was a critical partner in supporting United States leadership on these issues. He often joked that I said nice things about him because he gave me a lot of money. But the reality was that we were able to achieve a great deal to support women's peace building activities through the agency of USAID and what Don was able to make happen. If we want to prevent conflicts and build lasting peace wherever war, violence and instability are a threat we must empower women as full and equal partners. And as the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and those subsequent resolutions show us the strong linkages between the agency of women and peace and security in all of its aspects. We can sadly agree as we are gathered here that progress is nowhere near what it should be. Almost 20 years since the adoption of Security Council Resolution 1325. And as the Secretary General of the UN has acknowledged, the participation of women in peace processes remains limited. It's a dismal record. Conflicts continue to have a devastating impact on women and girls and their marginalization is both a cause and effect of conflict. The numbers of women in peace operations is stagnant. Clearly there is a gap between the established frameworks and the reality. Progress I fear will continue to be inadequate unless men play a greater leadership role as partners in this process. And this is part of our call to action today. During my time at the State Department I found my colleagues to be generally supportive. To be sure it was clear that this was a priority at the highest levels. That makes a difference. A policy commitment from the top that's the role Don played at USAID is essential and impactful. We had to demonstrate that women's participation in peace building was not just a women's issue. But one that mattered as it greatly does for all of society. It mattered for peace and security. And it has to be released from the silos of that category women's issues. Moreover, it had to be integrated into all aspects of our diplomatic efforts in conflict affected states. That meant our work in Afghanistan, in the DRC, in Sudan, in Colombia, in Myanmar. It wasn't that narrow category of women, peace and security. It was including this in everything we were doing in the ways that made sense in our overall diplomatic work. Too many places to name where a gender lens still needs to be applied for greater effectiveness. And yet it is still too often absent. And certainly not understood to be relevant. I remember so well a desk officer in one of the country's conflict affected countries seriously affected. And I had just gotten a hauled in, I should say, by the Congress saying, why aren't we doing more about X, Y and Z? And when I asked the team to come together, the first thing the desk officer said to me, what the heck does this have to do with women? And that's part of what we're still struggling with, to understand how this is so critical to achieving the goals we all want to see achieved. We need to better understand how our diplomatic efforts are reinforced by development efforts and related to our military actions. That synergy is essential. I felt too that we needed to provide examples of good practices. Oftentimes our embassies would say, we want to be engaged, but tell us how to do this. And those specific examples of how they can make a greater difference were very important in their executing their missions. Because there is often a view that this is a nice thing to do, but really not necessary, not strategic. It continues to be important to document that evidence-based case that makes actions of women in peace and security so compelling. But data also requires the political will to act on the data. And political leadership, as we all know, is still largely male-dominated, hence why we have all come together. We need to recognize, and this is something I came to see very strongly, that self-interest is one of the strongest motivating forces. And how to demonstrate that in order to get greater engagement for decision-makers, we have to, they have to see the connection between women peace and security and their own effectiveness in achieving their policy goals. Engaging male leadership makes a difference. And we have examples of many men we've mentioned several already in this room who have been engaged, but we need far more at all levels of society and across all sectors to achieve a truly inclusive peace process everywhere that it matters. It matters when senior diplomats like Ambassador Princeton Lyman, whose last post was U.S. Special Envoy in Sudan and South Sudan, when he recognized and acted on the need for women's participation. So many times he would say to me, we need to do more with the women. He knew that without women's voices, without women organizing for peace, the prospect for true peace would remain elusive. And it's too bad Princeton didn't live long enough to see the leadership role that the Sudanese women have played in bringing down the longtime dictator, Omar al-Bashir. Princeton clearly contributed to that outcome. It matters when military leaders like retired General Allen remind us that no society has ever successfully transitioned from being conflict-ridden to a truly developing society unless women are part of the mainstream. Their leadership in demonstrating the operational effectiveness of women's participation does matter. It matters when Dr. Dennis McQuiggy champions women who have endured unspeakable sexual violence in the DRC and is vigorously leading global efforts for reparations. It matters when the U.N. Secretary General commits to naming more women mediators and underscores the necessity of their inclusion. It matters when the former U.K. Foreign Minister William Hague led an initiative to prevent sexual violence and conflict and even put this issue on the G7 agenda when people, his peers, questioned why he was doing that, a government that commitment that continues to this day. And it mattered when President Trudeau launched a major initiative to increase women's meaningful participation in peace operations. And when U.N. envoy on Afghanistan and later Syria lobbied his ministerial colleagues at a donor conference on Afghanistan to have them put the needs of Afghan women at the top of their commitments. And it mattered when the Colombian peace process chief negotiator, Humberto de la Callea, supported women's full participation in the peace process to try to bring an end to a 50-year struggle. You get the picture. This does matter. And we have to find every way possible to enhance these efforts to mobilize men as partners. It could not be more important. How much longer will the world exclude women who are every day taking risks for peace and making peace on the frontline? Inclusive peace processes can no longer be an option. They are a necessity. Women and men working together for peace and security. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Don Steinberg and I am so grateful to Chairman Ed Royce and Ambassador Riviere for their inspiring comments to open up our program here today. I'd also like to thank the US Institute of Peace, our secure future, Strategy for Humanity and many other groups who have brought us here today in part to launch in DC the Mobilizing Men as Partners for Women, Peace and Security Initiative. You know, here in Washington we talk a lot about crises. But I believe that there are few that are more menacing or urgent than the crisis we face in our international global security system. When 70 million people around the world are left homeless by seemingly intractable violence. When countries on every continent, Syria, South Sudan, Yemen, Myanmar, Ukraine, Venezuela and more are aflame in conflict with no end in sight. When women in Afghanistan legitimately fear that the progress they've made over the last 20 years will be sacrificed on the altar of a false peace with the Taliban, then yes, there is a crisis. And it requires nothing less than a wholesale reordering of our male-dominated global security network. Mobilizing men as partners for women, peace and security brings together more than 100 organizations and individuals who know from our personal experience that the leadership, empowerment and participation of women and other civil society groups is essential to preventing and resolving deadly conflict, to building stable, prosperous and just societies, and addressing our most important international challenges. We are men and women from the Defense, Diplomacy, Development and Civil Society communities. We are generals, we are ambassadors, we are government ministers, NGO leaders, UN officials who have pledged to use our connections with other global policy makers to communicate these messages. But equally important, we pledge to open doors in particular for grassroots women from conflict-affected countries who are fully capable of speaking for themselves with unique authority and credibility. We ally with, we listen to and we learn from each other under the watch words, nothing about us without us. A quick origin story, if I might. Our roots go back a few years to a WPS program that Melanne organized at Georgetown. She lined up a panel that included herself, which would have been good enough, but she also had Secretary Clinton. She had Undersecretary of Defense, Michelle Florenoi. She had Ambassador Samantha Power and some old guy from USAID, don't remember his name. There was a huge audience there, about a thousand people, and as we left the stage, Secretary Clinton turned to me and said, Don, where were all the men? I looked back and out of the thousand people, there were probably 80 men. And so we discussed the sad truth that while men continue to dominate the global security network, they're missing in action, or actually missing in in action on the WPS agenda. And we decided to do something about it. We got early support from the Innovative Foundation, our secure future. We brought in allies from the International Civil Society Action Network, that's Sonam runs. We brought in Promundo Inclusive Security, and I'm so delighted to see Swanee Hunt in the audience who has been such a leader in this area and will speak to us at the reception following this activity. We also brought in the Carter Center, UN Women Interaction, the Georgetown WPS Center, the Women's Refugee Commission, and others. And we came together in New York about a year ago, and we hoped to launch the initiative at that point. But as we talked, it was clear that we hadn't resolved some basic issues. And I want to say that over the course of the last year, we have had full consultations with more than 100 groups to address these questions. Is our goal simply a utilitarian desire to have better peace processes and more durable and lasting peace? Or are we equally committed to a rights-based approach, seeking to change gender dynamics between men and women in the economy, the political system, the social system, and the security structures? How do we make sure that men don't seek to dominate or supplant women's leadership? And yes, we've been known to do that. But instead, learn how to be allies and partners and supportive backbenchers. Can we use this initiative to strengthen grassroots organizations, ensuring them equal access to the corridors of power? And finally, should we focus as well on other groups marginalized by other identity factors, whether that's disability or displacement or sexual orientation and gender identity, recognizing the power of intersectionality? So we went back to the drawing board, and after a year we released our charter and guiding principles this March with the United Nations at the International Peace Institute in New York City. Again, our goals over the course of the next two years are very simple. First, use our connections and access to leaders of global institutions, governments, and beyond to press broadly for engendering peace processes. Second, engage with leaders of a few specific processes, and we're in the process of identifying exactly which ones those are, but we're likely going to be engaged in Afghanistan, Colombia, South Sudan, Cameroon, and Yemen to ensure they draw on women and other marginalized groups as leaders, as planners, as implementers, and as beneficiaries of their programs. Third, serve as a watchdog to ensure that the UN Security Council resolutions, 1325 national action plans, UN and other regional peace missions, and national laws like the one that Chairman Royce was so important in getting past, the Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017 are fully implemented. And finally, we will stand shoulder to shoulder with activists on the front lines of conflict, helping strengthen their institutions and enhancing their personal security, because we all know that the most dangerous profession in the world is a woman peace builder. We hope that you'll join us. At the end of this program today, our Secure Future Director, Sahana Dharmapuri, will say a few words about how you can engage with us. For now, I'd like to finish with just one last thought. There have been impressive changes in international norms and practices since the Beijing Conference a quarter century ago that Milan was so important in driving forward, but we can't measure our success by how many Security Council resolutions we pass, by how many national action plans exist, or even how many women are part of peace processes. Instead, let's measure our results by whether peace processes bring a just and lasting end to conflict, by whether women and other marginalized groups can fully develop and contribute their talents to the well-being of their societies, and by whether violence ceases to be the default setting for disputes in war zones, in communities, and in domestic settings alike. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Don, for outlining the contours of the initiative. I'm particularly very excited about this initiative because I do deeply believe that for the inclusive agenda to advance, we really need a broad base of support, so we owe it to ourselves to continuously think through the various contributions that different identities, different groups, can bring to bear. So our panelists today will help us dig a little bit deeper into the role that male allies can play in support of the women peace and security agenda. I'm pleased to be joined here by three panelists. I'm not going to go deep into their bios who have those sheets outside, but they will help us shed light on the value add of this initiative. Just to introduce you briefly, Sanam Andalini, you are leading women's partner organizations, we're painstakingly, working on these issues day in and day out. We also are joined by Dean Peacock, who has been considerable time exploring the role of men and gender dynamics and power relations. And we are also welcomed by Ambassador McGahn, who we welcome your insights into the questions and experiences of policymakers, most recently in the military environment. So Sanam, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit more about your recent efforts working with women, particularly at the grassroots level. To make peace processes more inclusive. What mean charge do you give to them? And then as a follow up, what are your thoughts in relation to the initiative today on how men can be of assistance to ICANN partners? What are some dos and don'ts that you would offer them? Thank you, John. It's great to be here. Thank you very much. Yeah, can you hear me? Thank you very much. It's great to be here with you today. Thank you very much for inviting me. I want to take it back a little bit. I started in this field in 1996, and my first job was meant to be as a speechwriter. I ended up being a ghostwriter for a book from my boss, who of course was a man, of course. But it was interesting because as I went through that process of writing about conflicts and contemporary civil wars and so forth, it was very frustrating to have literally my voice and my words stolen by somebody else. But one of the things I realized, I was young enough to be able to say, you know, I get to research and I get to learn from this process myself. So it was at the end of it, I came out thinking, it's fine, my name is in tiny font and in terms of, but I got a lot out of it as well. In terms of male allies, when we were mobilizing to get Resolution 1325, Ambassador Choudhury from Bangladesh was really the first person who listened and engaged with us. And over the years that I've done this work, I have to tell you that I've had more success and genuine sort of in-depth understanding from our male colleagues in the rest of the world than actually in Western countries. So I just want to, it's an interesting thought. And I think it's because if you're from Nepal or Afghanistan or elsewhere, you have understood what war does to your societies. And whereas when we're sitting out here, it's very easy to bestow our empowerment on the people out there. So this conversation is very, very important because we do need folks here. And I've been on the standby team at the UN, you know, involved in Somalia negotiations. I've done visits to Cantonments and so forth. So I've seen what it's like to be on the one hand trying to advocate at the highest levels and at the same time working at the grassroots levels. And it's a perception issue that we need to change here that folks out there in the world, Afghanistan, Yemen, et cetera, especially women peace builders, need empowerment. They don't need empowerment. My colleagues, I have a network that we spearhead in 38 countries of local women-led organizations. On any given day, my colleagues in Pakistan, Nigeria, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, you name it, they're negotiating with the Taliban and Boko Haram and others. They are more courageous and brave than I think most of us in this room. They know what's going on on the ground. They have a really strong sense of analysis and the trends. We need to listen to them, right? We don't need to empower them in terms of, you know, making them feel confident. They have the confidence, but we actually need to take, listen to what they're telling us. So that's one thing. What we've done at ICANN is that not only we've provided a space for solidarity for these folks to learn from each other and also elevating in the global level and bringing them into the policy spaces. But we've actually started a fund. We've now given over $2 million of grants between $3,000 and $80,000. Women peace builders are the most cost-effective, most impactful people in the world. Full stop. We don't need more money. We just need more money in the right hands. And so that's what we've been doing with our fund. And then when it comes to the peace process story, we, over the many, many years that I've been doing this, where it used to be why women, then we got to how women, how do we get inclusion and gender. So we've now been producing, through our Better Peace Initiative, a series of animations and tools that literally say this is how you do gendered ceasefires. This is how you do gendered decentralization of governance and so forth and explain why it matters and what benefit it has. And I'll end with kind of three messages if you want. So number one, it's not about empowerment. It's actually about enabling and opening the doors of access that people have. That's the first thing. Walk in with us. Don't walk ahead or behind or close the door, but walk in with us. And this is why it's been so important working with Dawn on this. Secondly is recognizing that this agenda, I mean from the beginning when I started this, I didn't have an issue with recognizing personally my own equality. I'm like, of course I'm equal. I come from a very strong family of women who used to question the equality of men to them. So that's my background. But it's recognizing that we are in this to fight for peace so that neither our girls nor our men and boys have to go and fight and maim and kill or be killed and be maimed and traumatized. This is about peace for all of us. And in every single piece of work that my partners do or the work that we've done at the UN level, Resolution 1820, I tried to put in the term men and boys into the language of the resolution as victims of sexual violence. It was taken out. Nobody stood up for men and boys as victims of sexual violence. It's taken us 10 years to get there finally. So it's women have always fought for their men and boys and it's always been about everybody. So this agenda is really about that. And then finally, let's recognize that this is all about power. So often people say, oh, you know, women aren't at the table because it's their culture. If it was culture, Afghanistan would look very different to Colombia. It's about power, right? So to put that argument aside. And secondly, and when I was working in Somalia, I said to my UN colleagues, instead of calling these, you know, these discussions power sharing where the men get around the table and somebody becomes president and somebody becomes, I don't know, minister of this, why not call it responsibility sharing? Because if you're trying to bring peace to Somalia in the middle of famine, you want to be minister of finance, okay, finance, getting food to people and finance, getting the water sort of that. So shifting our own narratives and this is really very much what women and as a feminist lands we bring to the, we change the discourse, we change the way business is done. And it needs, yeah, we need the men to walk with us and alongside us and we really need them to be recognizing that this isn't just about rights and empowerment and equality, it's about changing the paradigm of peace and security. Thank you. That was very helpful. Dean, over to you. You've been engaged extensively on redefining the role of men in combating violence and inequality. Can you tell us more about how you think males can be most supportive of the women, peace and security agenda? What does that support look like? And do you have any recommendations for us on the approach and why is that approach important? Great. Thank you very much. And thanks for the opportunity to be here. It's a tremendous honor. I flew in yesterday from Cape Town in the process of moving into a new home and a new job so it's very, very exciting to be here and to have this be one of the first events that I'm speaking at on behalf of Primunda. I speak here really in two capacities. A senior advisor for global advocacy at Primunda, a new position as I mentioned, and as part of the Global Men Engage Alliance, for those of you who don't know the Men Engage Alliance, it's now active in about 70 countries around the world with strong country networks in about 40, mostly in the global south, in Africa, Latin America, Asia. And the work that the Men Engage Alliance does is mostly local grassroots work. It's work like that of the organization I used to be with in South Africa, a sunk agenda justice where we have done lots of work to hold government leaders to account. So we have taken politicians to the equality court as women and men demonstrating very clearly that when men say misogynist things like Julius Malema did in the run up to the 2009 elections where he said the women who had accused Jacob Zuma of rape had in fact enjoyed the night. And it was really about positioning masculinity and male political leadership in a particular way. So we together with women's rights organizations took him to the equality court, and the equality court forced him to issue a public apology on national television and to pay money to a battered women's shelter. And so the work that Sonke has done, we did it recently in the run up to the local elections in 2017 and again now in 2019, a group called Black Land First had put out a call for the killing of white people and they really emphasized the importance of killing white women. And so we worked with a range of women's rights organizations to again hold that political party to account. And so the work of the Men Engage Alliance is a mix of those kinds of initiatives and more kind of grassroots community education and community mobilization work. And it's really important work and I'll talk about it a little bit more in a moment. But part of what I find so exciting about this meeting and your initiative is the fact that you're able to and in fact reaching men in positions of power. Mostly the organizations that are doing work with men and boys at the grassroots level struggle to gain the ears of the people sitting in this room, ambassadors, important people who hold really critical positions on the hill here. And so I want to just really commend you for the work that you're doing to work with men in positions of power. And I think we don't want to be naive about that either. We exist in a moment where power is deeply contested and we just saw the elections in Europe, a moment of great polarization, if you don't mind me saying so, a moment of great polarization in your country too. And I think we saw some of that play itself out in the recent passage of Security Council Resolution 2467 where the urgency and the attention to women's rights and violence against women and girls in conflict settings was on the table. There was a momentum, a drive amongst women's rights advocates to make sure that we had a resolution that ensured that women had their rights met, including their rights to sexual and reproductive health and rights, including access to safe abortion in the wake of sexual violence and conflict. And of course that was challenged. So on the one hand we have a resolution that was powerful, that as Sunam mentioned for the first time recognizes the importance of engaging men, has a strong emphasis on prevention, names the arms industry in ways that are unusual and actually names the private sector, the extractives industry for the role that they often play in conflict. And so, you know, really, really important, but contested, there is no mechanism to ensure the monitoring of that, which was a key demand of women's rights activists. And of course the language on section reproductive health and rights was much softer. It's a victory nonetheless. But what I think is really important as we talk about the ability to engage men in positions of power is that we recognize we exist in a moment of tremendous polarization and that we hold those men accountable in the same way that small organizations in the global south are attempting to hold political leaders who undermine women's rights accountable. And so, I'm really excited to be here and to know that that's part of your agenda. I was asked to speak concretely about some of the things that we have learned about engaging men and boys and I'm going to turn to that in the short amount of time I have left. So I think, you know, I'm going to speak about four things. The first is to really understand better what is the reality of men and boys and how we work with that to mobilize change. Brahmando has led and worked with the International Center for Research on Women. The International Men and Gender Equality Survey which has now been done in over 40 countries around the world. And it's given us really important data about men's lived realities, men's experiences, men's relationship to the issue of gender equality. And I want to focus just on two issues that I think are coming out really, really clearly. The one is we're seeing inequalities, men's work stress and lack of work being a major driver of conflict around the world. Men joining rebel groups, men joining fundamentalist groups, partly because they are not able to live up to the contemporary standards of manhood. They don't have jobs, they're not able to support their families. So I think part of our agenda is figuring out what do we do structurally around chronic unemployment, structural unemployment. So that's the first thing. The second and it's data that's coming out more and more clearly all the time is that's been referenced in a number of the preceding speeches. Young men who have been exposed to violence at home both on their own bodies and have witnessed violence against their mothers far more likely to use violence. We've seen that in the mass shootings here in the US. The profile of many of those men is that they have witnessed violence and they use violence against their partners. So we as Pramunda are working with a range of international partners to figure out how do we really do something with what we now know. So if we know that young men's exposure to violence is a major driver of men's radicalization, men's use of violence, what concretely are we doing? Where are the international funding streams to address violence against children, children's exposure to violence? At the moment, frankly, in most countries around the world, even though we know this, there's very little available to help young people deal with the trauma of having been exposed to violence. So first point is I think we need to do the research and we need to translate that research into practice. The second piece is, you know, I think the important work of supporting local actors, the sorts of organizations that are part of the men's engage alliance to do the on-the-ground work that builds a community environment, a community culture where men respect women's rights. And there are lots of great evidence-based programs that show we can do that in program time. We can achieve significant shifts in men's attitudes to women within a year to two years if we have the right kind of programs in place. And then I'll conclude by saying, I do think a part of our work has to be the work of women and men together holding men accountable. That's using our international human rights instruments. It's making sure that we've got strong criminal justice systems and it's holding our political leaders accountable. I'll close by reiterating what most of the speakers have said. The work to engage men as partners must be done in a manner that's accountable to women's rights organizations and to women's rights must be supportive of women's leadership. And we don't always get that right. And when we get that wrong, I think there's appropriate pushback and so to really reiterate that clear plea that this work must be accountable to women's rights organizations and movements. Thank you very much. Great, thank you, Dean. Great, and let's move to you, Ambassador McGahn. Can you give us further insights on how you became on-board tactics or messages do you use to bring others on board? You've worked in the diplomacy space and now more in the defense environment, the range of policymakers. Tell us a little bit more about your experiences. Well, thank you for that question. When Don invited me to today's event, I thought about it for a while and I wanted to focus on what could I say that was just a little bit different. How did I become mobilized? At the end of your career is actually something that begins in the early stages. My bio pretty much lists a lot of assignments, but I think probably the most defining assignment I had was my service in 1989 at the United States Mission to the United Nations where I was the action officer and speechwriter for Ambassador Judy McLennan who was the first ambassador, ambassador or rank person to the commission and status of women. At that time we were promoting the inclusion of women into senior levels at the United Nations and by the way that work still remains to be done. But one thing struck me about that work at that time is that the lack of diversity and inclusivity at our own mission and actually throughout the UN in this time was the only way to understand fully how Frederick Douglas felt at Seneca Falls. But what really bothered me more so than anything else was that the convention of wisdom and state at that time was that if you pursued such self multilateral issues that your path to promotion was limited and that you really needed to deal with hard issues. And that said and being a contrarian I decided to follow a quote, another avanation by Frederick Douglas. He said that the life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful and virtuous. To me that meant that promoting human rights and we all know that women's rights is human rights, seeking gender equality and protecting vulnerable populations was a pretty good basis for a national security and as I advanced through my mid-level of my career and that's something for all of the young people to understand that again mobilization begins as you go through your career. It's a lot easier to get things done when you're an ambassador but it's a lot tougher to convince the public affairs officer that we need to send the first Aboriginal Australian women to the United States on the international business program. It's a lot tougher to include women's groups when you do election monitoring in Kenya. It's a lot tougher when you're trying to protect as a mid-level officer vulnerable population refugee populations. It's a lot easier when you're an ambassador. But I did find that as an ambassador you got to do the one thing that you couldn't do you got to say I believe and people will listen to you and by the time I made it to National Defense University right on the heels of President Obama's executive order on the National Action Plan which was undergirded by Secretary Gates's follow-on order. I began to convince the U.S. military that we need to look at including elements of women peace and security in our operational thinking and planning doctrines. That mission success was critical to understanding how the elements of women peace and security can be included in overall strategic planning. And you know what we got an inviting audience from the United States military because they began to understand that moving away from the general nomenclature to understanding how to mobilize women peace and security led to mission success. That opportunity and National Defense University suddenly launched my senior career in women peace and security and fortunately I was actually adopted by our secure future to be a member of their board but again as we go through the next round of questioning I can give more details but I really wanted to understand that that's not something that begins at the end of your career it starts at the beginning it's an ongoing process it means that you have to be sometimes a little bit different you have to stand up and say this is not really just a contest over philosophy but really it's an engagement over the proper uses of resources and implementation of proper programs and you can make that difference. Again Don, thank you for bringing me to this event but I really want to understand that mobilization is an ongoing process and for those who in the room who don't know this Frederick Douglass died in 1895 I know there's some in Washington who don't understand that but I just point that out but there's ongoing relevancy to the work that we do Thank you Well thank you for those concrete recommendations and experiences if you have any comments on each other's points let us know but in the meantime I do want to move to a question and answer we've got about ten minutes for that so there are microphones going around now you can also weave your additional comments into the questions take one back there we've got a few up here okay I guess I'll go first hi no please go ahead we're going to take three at a time if that's okay okay my name is Mariana Prado I'm a recent graduate from Georgetown University studying conflict resolution and focusing on gender so my question is from an intersectional perspective how do you get meant to engage also with LGBTQ rights issues in the gender umbrella especially since in many societies masculinities are so hetero I'm going to go first thank you go on up here hi Karen Ryan from the Carter Center thank you for this important event the question I have has to do with Afghanistan right now women just as we're meeting today Afghan women have gathered to talk about how they can get themselves included and assert a fair process a good effective process can I ask the panelists what can we do today and this week and next week to get through to the US delegation that we need US leadership European leadership UN leadership to make sure the women who are very well organized right now to get them and Yemen as well Afghanistan and Yemen we have a real opportunity right now to do that could we do something today let's get one more over there my name is Pazma Iqbarze from Afghanistan I have a question which is based on a theoretical perspective from an article by Chakravarty Spivak she talks about epistemic violence which means that women are divided of setting narratives and discourses for themselves and they have the rare agency if we see in both critical in every critical juncture in post 2001 and even in peace process talks and these reconciliation process women are sidelined somehow even if we look at yesterday's 100 anniversary of diplomatic relations between Afghanistan and Moscow women were not there the presence was only a single women who is highly corrupt every single person knows this Fosya Kofi and there was no other person in there and the second is that we have so many women and peace council but like in the name of Asila Wardak Habiba Saraj these women are not being heard they have a very rare presence how will this work and a patriarchal and a conservative society is not a sudden work to be done it needs a gradual effort to be taken great thank you okay let's go to the panellists to respond to those three questions who would like to start Sanam you'd like to take the Afghanistan question from two sides in the sound point from the states we have the women peace and security act we can pender ladder saying we need a hearing on the implementation of the WPS act vis-a-vis the US's involvement in Afghanistan this has got nothing to do with the Taliban and what the Afghan government wants or doesn't want this is about the US having a law and whether we are a country a rule of law and whether we're going to implement and abide by our own laws and if we don't the world is watching so this is a real moment and I would add to it on the question of Iran as well with the drums of war beating as we all know so this is and we tomorrow let's have a hearing tomorrow next week whenever let's make sure that the US delegation is meeting the Afghan delegation we have made sure that the Afghan delegation of women have money to be able to travel wherever they need to travel they have the reason they are prepared so this question you know every society has patriarchies and oppressive patriarchy and also openness I think Kentucky and Alabama are very different places to New York and Massachusetts as we've just seen in this country one of the things that we've been doing and again it's women leading the effort in Afghanistan we've supported for the last three years with a total grant of about $35,000 in three years in actually enabling them to talk about their fears and vulnerabilities and experiences of living through war and it's the program has been designed she works with imams she works with district leaders she works with young people she's now mobilized over 600 men they've created a men's network and they have transformed their own communities and their own literally the spaces women's participation in the political process and their own obligations because those imams and so forth can back back point for point anything that the Taliban has to say so there are men there and I think the issue is we know that men want to be good and so channeling the good in the guys is really one of the strategies that we see our partners developing and we've been supporting them do that because I don't think that we should be thinking that men are all hetero whatever toxic masculinity stuff which the most toxically masculine violent men when you start talking about what they're worried about or what they want for their children it opens up a whole space of engagement and I think that there's scope to bring out the humanity as well if I can add to that from 2000 to 2002 I was deputy director of the office of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh so that sort of made me president of creation and then in 2002 was to make the situation regarding Afghan women central to our policy in Afghanistan we were trying to integrate women's issues into our overall policy approach and not make women's issues peripheral what we have to avoid I think for the sake of an expediency is somehow reach an agreement and abandon those same core values that we have moving beyond Afghanistan I know we can do that for example when I was in Fiji one of my principal tasks was to get Fiji off military sanctions because of the coup and return them to peacekeeping operations however at the same time I made it clear to the coup government that the leaders of the opposition were largely women's groups and if there were ever any instances in which the violence that was perpetrated upon women at the beginning of the coup occurred again I assured Fiji's leaders that they would never see another peacekeeping mission and at the same time I also nominated for Fijian women to receive the State Department's International Women of Courage Award the point that I'm making is that we cannot abandon the centrality of women's issues and the overall integration of those issues into our policy goals once we do that if we do that rather we will find ourselves in a situation that you just described in which we're playing catch up we're suddenly behind the curve and everything that we've worked for up to that point suddenly gets abandoned for expediency and I think the message that has to be sent out that women's issues will not be abandoned for the sake of expediency I appreciate the question as well Karen and I was also involved at the creation including at the Tokyo Conference in 2002 and then I went with Milan 10 years later to the Tokyo Conference on Afghanistan where we both marked the success we had achieved and Secretary Clinton backed by Milan got the entire international community to agree that unless there were provisions for women's empowerment in the development plans we would hold back our assistance it was one of the first times we've ever done that and so I personally feel very strong commitment here and let me assure you Karen that we are engaged Sanam didn't mention that she and others including I think yourselves brought a great group of women here to Washington from Afghanistan a few months ago to make exactly those points especially on the hill we had meetings at the US Mission to the United Nations and with our ambassador there where we made these points we've been communicating quietly because at times it requires a quiet communication as well you can name and shame a lot and I love doing that but I also love that quiet communication and I want to stress that last point in 2008 to 2010 I was the foreign policy advisor for the elders that group of Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi and Grasa Michelle and Desmond Tutu and very frequently their meetings would be very quiet they would go and talk to senior leaders presidents and prime ministers and generals and say you're blowing it here and the other thing that they would do is they would bring along with them younger in most cases women who would make the same points as well and they would as Sonam was saying walk in together not a question of here's this young woman you should listen but here's this person who really knows what's going on on the ground and you should listen so I would not mind if we did something even more aggressive today and we can talk about that at the reception whether there's a statement we should be issuing or whatever from this group as well just very briefly on the question of LGBT and other degrees of marginalization I have always found that the compounding of marginalizations leads to some very frightening experiences if you're a displaced person you have certain vulnerabilities if you're a displaced person who's a woman you have other vulnerabilities an older displaced woman a lesbian displaced woman who's older from an indigenous population it just multiplies and you can actually see it in the likelihood of being subjected to sexual violence I've always believed for some reason that the easiest and I know this is going to sound strange the easiest entry point is through women once you establish the notion that you need community participation in the peace process then you can say oh by the way we don't know what's going on with displaced people we don't know what's going on with disabled individuals we don't know what's going on with LGBT communities we need them as well and having demonstrated by having women in the room who know what's going on and can inform the process it facilitates the possibility of bringing those other groups in thank you let's move to one more round you can weave your comments in if that's okay it's just in the interest of time let's do one more round of questions so a little bit of this I know we have our closing too the overflow oh yeah we could check that as well okay let's go oh you've got the mic let's go to you hi there everyone thank you so much for your comments today I'm Stephanie Klein I'm a mediator and a facilitator my question is your movement for mobilizing men I'm sure that it can reach a lot of men you've given some great examples my question is what about the women I'm sorry what about the men who you can't reach what about the misogynist out there I worry that a movement such as this is going to hit roadblocks when it runs up against men who do hold very serious misogynist views not only at the level of national decision makers but also the everyday misogyny that women who are working in this fashion at the grassroots level or wherever how do we confront this misogyny who is best to confront it men or women or do we confront it together and how let's go to here and back there thank you my name is Faripa Parsa George Mason University I'm also founder of a non-profit organization being powered university women to become leaders I have a question to Sanam I think it's very important you mentioned that women are empowered and they don't need to be empowered then so can you explore about so when you listen to them so what is the main or biggest challenge and how can we support them because that is the issue we want all of us to support thank you thank you my name is Augustin I'm a graduate student of American University in the program of international peace and conflict resolution and I'm interning with tragedy assistance and program for survivors I have a question anyone can take care of it with regards to policy as far as I'm concerned inclusive peace and gender equality and I want to ask what has been done with regards to making precise making sure that precise gender inclusive languages included in policies concerning peace processes and making sure that it's well inclusive of both the men and the women the old and the young because I believe particularly with patriarchal societies these languages specific languages can help to drive the understanding of gender equality and inclusivity in peace processes great thank you let's go Dean did you want to take a step at that first one and then over to Sinom yeah so your very important question what do we do with the men who are resistant to change who are misogynist in various different ways perhaps two different directions there we have worked with men who are seen as being very resistant to gender equality in lots of different settings and I'm thinking particularly of the work that I did at at Sunka Gender Justice working with traditional leaders religious leaders from very conservative religious communities and men in communities generally who at first encounter you know fit the description of what you were describing and I think my first point first response would be I've learned to feel actually quite optimistic about our ability to shift men in grassroots communities and you know in some of the ways that Sinom was describing to open up a conversation about you know what was it like to grow up in a patriarchal family yourself what was it like to witness violence perpetrated by your father against your mother what was it like you know in community settings role models lots and lots of men cannot identify male role models and we can work with them to say okay the pain that is so evident in your response to this question is surely not something you want to reproduce within your own family within your own community and so I've learned to feel quite optimistic and often see that optimism be in fact you know quite accurate in terms of expectations of changes including when I worked for many years in San Francisco with perpetrators of violence men who had come in recalcitrant you know unapologetic about their violence asked them to talk in a little bit more detail about their own childhoods have them go through a list of the violence that they've perpetrated and in the thousands of intake interviews I did at a place called men overcoming violence in San Francisco I can remember only one or two who said that they felt good about the violence most of them answered that they felt ashamed that they felt horrified by what they had done now I don't want to be Pali Anayesha naive about it either many of those men went on to perpetrate violence again right and so there is also and this is the second part of their response an urgent need for accountability a criminal justice system that you know holds men accountable who use violence and in the wake of the OJ Simpson case here the passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994 things changed and we've seen levels of domestic violence go down in this country significantly as a result of those changes in law and in the legal environment the way the courts function so there does need to be a strong accountable policy response so I think it's both of those now last point I'll make men change when the world around them changes as well and so when we extend expanded parental leave when men are involved in the lives of their children early on they're much less likely to use violence they're much more likely to stay involved in the lives of their children and there are a range of important policy shifts that I think can contribute in meaningful ways to men embracing far greater gender equality so you know I as I say remain very very optimistic about the possibility of change I wouldn't do this work otherwise great thank you Sinom I think I'm going to give you the last word but if there are other burning final statements okay we'll get two more burning final statements from Don and Ambassador but over to you Sinom just to keep in mind we're a little bit behind so we'll wrap on the LGBTQ question when we 20 years ago when we saw and pushing back on reproductive healthcare and then when we heard women saying there's violence and Salafis are coming in and they're just you know they're attacking women and so forth and we said this is violent extremism this is this is a phenomenon we were essentially the attitude was that's violence against women that's culture right but that violence against women is exactly the major security threat that the world faces today so it's metastasized and become terrorism and all these problems it's the same with LGBTQ violence against LGBTQ communities these are early warning these are the people who are really at the front lines of seeing what's happening feeling it hearing it seeing it we have to care and listen to them and their strategy so I just want to put that on the table on the question of how do we empower women or what is it that you know empowered women how do we challenge how do we support them the way that we're doing it right now is number one affirming to them that they actually exist in their work matters being a peace builder as Don said is one of the most dangerous jobs one of the hardest jobs in the world whether you're at the grassroots in any of the countries that I mentioned or frankly here I get the most horrific threats on Twitter when I say no war with Iran and I get it from supposed human rights activists Iranian human they're all bots and whatever but it's not pleasant to be told you're going to be hanged right that's the kind of threats that that peace activists get physical on and so we provide a space where it's solidarity and affirmation for their work but more than anything else they are invisible people don't believe that my partners exist and I'm like these are like invisible superheroes out in the world that nobody knows exists because we're so used to saying we want to empower women right so that's why I'm saying we have to change this course and that's why it's so important for them to be brought for people to meet them for policy makers and for senators and others to actually see what it means to be an Afghan woman peace maker and have them at the table they have women have all the right solutions they've been getting detainees out of detention far more than the UN has right so it's really changing the visibility factor and then on the misogyny question I totally agree with you I think that when we engage men and provide them with a space they don't want to say that they most of the people I've talked to don't want to admit that they've committed violence they think it's shameful right so we have to shift the paradigm but we need to give a safe space for them to actually engage in the discourse and positive male role models are really critical we don't have many I asked a Liberian fighter once who's a role model in your community he thought and he thought and he thought and I said maybe President Obama he had to come all the way here in his own community not the priest not the teacher not the doctor not the nothing so this is a real issue and I think that we need to actually go back to the history in terms of what it meant to be men you know men used to have to be able to dance and write diplomatically and as well as sword fight or whatever it was now it's become you know you can sit and have a beer and I mean there's a shift in terms of masculinity as well that we need to be thinking about thank you yes final comments I think also we should not forget the importance of legal frameworks the women pieces security act of 2017 gives us the the basis of a legal framework for structural changes in institutions that are required to carry out women peace and security we now can also look toward resources program implementation personnel policies and maybe I'll just end where I began if you make it difficult for men not to get promoted because they did not follow the new guidelines then perhaps you'll get different behavior and one final thing men will be able to see the success of these programs because as I've always said to Sonana we don't need to do research we need to use the resources that we have to create our own data and that data will prove that the programs are successful and that therefore we can carry out the goals that we're trying to achieve and men will carry them out so three quick points on the question that you were just addressing I have seen so many permundo programs in the field that are so effective in this area I've seen one man who can fess that he beats his wife because he was powerless and couldn't get a job and the only model he had was his father who when he would get angry would beat his mother and that was the model and then he joined one of the permundo groups started listening to women and the impact that it had and he told us in a group that he looked down at his baby son and said this pattern stops with me and he's been on the straight and narrow ever since I have a very different approach as well which is based on the Martin Luther King quote I can't make that white racist love me but I can sure stop him from lynching me and that is yes, the hearts and minds will come I believe in the arc of justice in the world but I also believe the behavior is very important and if there is behavior that is misogynist you can get rid of that you can get rid of it in the ways that you know Steve was just saying we did that at USAID where we said you cannot be promoted to the position of a mission director unless you have a record of having been an inclusive, equitable and diverse leader and we denied a couple of promotions very publicly on that basis and so you communicate that message your question on words and language is very important and I don't have the time to address it here I will say that I believe in firm repetition of language because the phrases get in people's minds and so the phrase nothing about them without them you know my friends at USAID used to make fun of me because it was like I'd go to the bathroom and they would I'd come back and they'd say oh Don did you tell anybody nothing about them without them in the restroom but we can maybe talk about that after this program the last thing I wanted to do was to thank two people who are in the room right now Kathleen Kurnetz and Steve Steiner both who brought this institution into a new era of focus on these issues and without them I don't think we'd be here today and we certainly in the global community would not be as cognizant of these issues so thank you Kathleen and Steve okay thank you so let me wrap this panel up and then we'll hand it over to Ambassador Barton just a couple of phrases that we heard opening doors and walking through those doors with them the importance of understanding men's reality the role of men in holding each other accountable recognizing that these are not soft issues the value of being able to make statements like I believe the value of quiet communication so let me hand it over to Ambassador Barton to give us a concluding remarks, yeah please come up and we can head down and then to our partner One Earth Future for the final remarks and then on to our reception Ambassador Barton you served in several roles at UNHCR USUN State Department and USAID so we look forward to hearing your remarks as you played several roles with several colleagues in mobilizing their action great well thanks very much I know one of my jobs is to make this concise I'll try to see if we can save 15 minutes by reversing time as much as possible but I do think that there are two jobs here to do one is to just highlight a couple of the ideas and words that I've heard and sitting here and joining you I expected to hear inclusive expansive and creative need for change it's obvious we're not that successful it's the hardest work on earth and there's plenty of room for improvement and I think those were really well stated but I also heard the idea of insistence and how insistent we have to be that it's just no matter what you have done and whatever we've written and the practices and our own good role modeling and whatever that if we're not insistent we're not likely to be successful it's a word that is maybe a little dated but then I also heard redemptive and principled and we've got to be counted and seen and we have to bring our words and these laws into life and clearly our behaviors matter so those are all some of the really powerful ideas that I think bear repeating briefly but we have to live them and the second thing I thought I'd do is I'm always concerned with how we take big ideas and policy and practice and our best intentions and turn it into actuality and that's by far the hardest and we've got many many many great examples but I just thought since it really does come down to not just those of us who are powerful in foreign capitals where we have and we come from countries that have all the advantages that the United States has but it still comes down to the places and the people of these places and I just thought I'd quickly mention three things that really have come to mean a lot to me in terms of making change possible and encouraging it being catalytic of and giving partners every chance to succeed and the first one is to really make sure that we do a much much better job of getting to know the people of the place first and just the most basic questions that will clearly bring out the inequalities and the gender issues in a way that we can't possibly appreciate just until we get to a place so immersing ourselves in those local people and getting to know them is clearly I don't think you can go anywhere without that the second one that I would mention today and I'm just going to mention three is focus on youth most of the countries we're working on 50% plus are under 25 and we still have a chance to shape behaviors a better chance to shape behaviors than you do teaching older dogs new tricks so I think that we really want to emphasize that and finally I really like the idea of popularizing the ideas and changing the narratives and using the readily available in almost every country communications packages and opportunities that are there we I was at the State Department we did a lot of this work with Milan and others but we were really able to help bring the first independent women's radio station in Syria to life now we didn't come up with the idea there were obviously women who were doing it possible for them to get to the next step so I just think that they're the if you're going to take on social norms you have to absolutely change how people are talking and thinking about these things and clearly American television has been for all of its flaws has been a major contributor to our really rethinking most of the gender equality issues that we have made so much progress on in the last few years so it's a pleasure to have this very this semi-last word and it's always a pleasure to work with Don thank you for what you're doing Don thank you for your vigilance in this matter your insistence is welcome and I hope that we can all step up and be the partners that you want so that our role modeling will bring these these issues to life in this country we have a long way to go and I'm not sure we're going in the right direction but I'm sure that with the energy of this particular room if you all take it to the barricades we can probably reverse some of the trends that we're suffering through right now thank you very much I'll keep this very short because we have a wonderful reception following the panel event as you might know my name is Sahana Dharmapuri I'm the director of Our Secure Future Women Make the Difference we are a program of One Earth Future Foundation based in Colorado and we're really pleased and delighted to have been able to partner with USIP and others to bring this panel together and have this discussion beginning the launch of mobilizing men partners I really want to express my appreciation first for Ro Tucci and Rachel and Lexi Van Busskirk from our team at Our Secure Future for making the event possible from doing the work behind the scenes and then of course our delight and gratitude for all the panelists and all the speakers we have such a distinguished group of speakers today to share their experiences and begin this conversation very much view this as a beginning I also would like to take the lead from Ambassador McGann and say I believe that actually the greatest gift of feminism to the world is to ask questions and to challenge what is and I think that is what we have started to do today and it's the beginning of the conversation and there is much more important work to be done but it couldn't be a more important and crucial time to start doing the work together and one thing I would like to underscore is that something all the panelists said is we have to do this in partnership and collaboration men and women across the aisle we can't solve this problem alone it has to be together so if anyone is interested in this room and getting involved with mobilizing men as partners we do have a lot of information on our website oursecurefuture.org there is the charter which please read it please sign it please comment on it myself you can speak to myself or Lexi van Bosker who is in the back if you raise your hand we can definitely give you more information about other ways to participate in this I would like to also mention a poll that we participated in with our partner at WASL with Sanam's group and World Pulse asking women around the world how do you define security to again talk about how can we change the conversation, change the narrative of what we think about security and how we can achieve it so thank you very much for being here today thanks to our partners and everyone in the audience for being so engaged and enjoy the reception please there's, there, hello there's also some mugs from there's also