One Voice Summit; My Experience

  1. Rohan Chalise

One Voice Summit in a brief was a summit intersecting the issues of Environment and Sexual Reproductive Health. We had an amazing participation from all over the United States and 4 different countries. I was a single Nepalese throughout the conference so missed our Nepalese folks!

We started the conference by showing the linkage between SRHR and Environment. Then, different session on the policy, environment toxin, SRHR, Advocacy, etc.! (Some of them were so boring that I was literally sleeping during the session.) We also watched a documentary where there was a story of Nepali women. Basically, we were given training for the advocacy day to lobby capitol hill. Advocacy day was awesome! We were lobbying in Capitol hill for a specific ask and that was to abort “Sequestration”. Sequestration has been very common word in U.S. for few weeks now. United States Government is planning to reduce 8% on the current budget towards healthcare (which includes SRHR), foreign aid (funding to UNFPA, USAID), Social Security, etc.!

So, I and one of my other friends had meetings with two democrats and a republican! both of the democrat was already against the fiscal cliff. So, it was kind of a general meeting where we talked about our personal things rather than the ask. They were so supportive that we didn’t have to say anything else! However, meeting with a republican was bit challenging as he was in favor with the fiscal cliff. So, we had a hard time convincing him about the adverse effect of sequestration. Nevertheless, we were able to make him think a little bit more on the issue! So, it was a productive meeting.

Hence, with a positive note we ended the OVS and made it a success.

Missed Nepali folks there! :)