I want to thank everyone for showing up and wanting and choosing to be leaders for a new and progressive agenda towards gender equality and intersectional justice. In times where we are constantly on the defense in multilateral spaces, it is so crucial to create new spaces for setting progressive agendas. And I'm so grateful that so many leaders are standing up and are coming together to make this possible

There are many things that I'm excited about when thinking of the Action Coalitions. The focus on inclusion, the focus on accelerating implementation by creating new models of working and cooperating, bringing the local level to the international level and not just the other way around. 

And of course, I'm particularly excited about the focus of youth and youth leadership and proud and happy that we achieved to have youth leaders in each Action Coalition leadership structure. Youth will play an essential role in the success of the ACS and for shaping the ACs. This is an important step to more meaningful youth engagement, including us in decision making and giving us the power to truly shape this process. A step from “for to “by” And I want to thank everyone who supported this and made it possible.

I’m excited that we head into this work with many different stakeholders being part of the process. My biggest hope for this work is, that we don’t see each other on opposite sides, but maybe as part of the same feminist movement. Just because we work in different sectors doesn’t mean our “stakes” need to be different. Maybe our common “stake” is achieving Gender Equality by 2030.  When we talk about the feminist movement, we often think of CSOs, but what if the feminist movement now exists throughout all sectors: governments, international organizations, private sector, academia, media, etc, that come together to create a feminist future with intersectional justice. 

And to finish I want to highlight something that came out of the Paris Design Sprint: HOW we do our work in the Action Coalitions is as important as WHAT we do. Personal transformation of selected leaders, relational transformation between stakeholders - shifting our perspective from ego to eco-system awareness, awareness that we are all part of the same system and only if we work together, we can change it and we can make it better.