SMC Inspirational Day 2024 – Creating space for hope & change

Welcome to the SMC Network Inspirational Day 2024!

As part of the annual Membership Days, we are inviting SMC:s member organisations and their strategic partners globally to a digital day for inspiration, networking and dialogue. The theme is Creating space for hope and change – the role of civil society in times of global stress and we want to shed light on what we can do together to work for hope and change in a time of multiple and overlapping crises.

The Inspirational Day will take place on 30 January 2024, 10:00-16:00 CET, digitally on Zoom. There will be two sessions 10-12:00 am (CET) and 2-4 pm (CET) to avail partners from different time zones to join. It is possible to join only one of the sessions, but we recommend those who can to join both as they build on each other.

Session 1 will give us a “Global overview – The state of democracy and civil society space” with keynote speakers from International IDEA (Ms. Adina Trunk, Chief of Staff to the Secretary-General) and the World Council of Churches (Rev. Dr. Kenneth Mtata, Director of Public Witness and Diaconia). We will also have representatives from Sida, the Middle East and Asia, to give their perspectives and share their key hopes and challenges for 2024.

Session 2 will focus on ”Why faith matters” for civil society actors working for hope and change. We will have two TED Talks with Rev. Fred Nyabera (Director of End Child Poverty, Arigatou International) and Ms. Annika Andersson (Regional Program officer Latin America, WeEffect).

After this there will be so called “Digging deeper” seminars where you can choose between two thematic streams:

a) Democracy and the Freedom of Religion or Belief

b) Environment, Climate change and Resilience.

In both of these streams we will go deeper trying to understand the role of faith in our work for sustainable change, especially how to manage situations where the democratic civic space is restricted.