Jeddah Meeting on the Messengers of Peace Initiative

Messengers of Peace – Meeting in Jeddah May 28 – June 2, 2012

The Saudi Scout Association invited a number of important Saudi stakeholders initiative to spend some time to review progress to date in the Messengers of Peace initiative.  Business leaders, academics, representatives form different Ministries and a number of youth organizations joined youth members of the Saudi Scouts and representatives from a number of NSOs, WOSM and the to share their concerns, questions and ideas.

The main issues raised were as follows: 

• The role and image of Scouting throughout the world – the meeting helped to clarify why Scouting was such a strong force for good, and an ideal place for the Messengers of Peace initiative – thanks to its values driven leadership, its global network of locally based groups and its proven volunteer force.

• The stewardship of the funding of this important initiative – it is the largest grant of its kind and the first time anything like this has been tried – therefore the stakeholders were pleased to see the systems of management of the funds and the governance controls in place.

• The collective impact of the projects supported by the fund was a focus for a lot of attention – but when the meeting heard that in fact the funded projects were only a tiny percentage of the overall projects carried out by scouts under the MOP initiative, their impression changed.  With the new web platform, which will count the results of all these projects under MOP, this impact was higher than any one had imagined.

All these questions were welcomed by the representatives of World Scouting and will form the basis of a new communications strategy for MOP in the coming weeks and months.

Look on scoutmessengers.org in August for the result!