Happy New Year to our CAPA Community,
This year, we decided to reach out to all of you at the beginning of the year to share with you some important programs and work that was accomplished last semester and to offer you a series of newsletters this winter looking forward to Spring term and the year ahead.
This past Fall, our Public Policy Forum led by Senator Brian Campion and American historian, Eileen Scully, was an enormous success. Former Senator Patrick Leahy and Marcella spent five days with us and not only led one of our forums, but taught a class in CAPA, met with high school students and had many informal conversations with staff, faculty and students. We learned so much from him and the many guests who worked with him and for him during his many years serving the Senate. We got to see how democracy works in our government at all levels; in foreign policy, in Congress, in the state of Vermont and locally. We are so honored to name the CAPA Public Policy Forum after Senator Leahy. Many of our students became encouraged about democratic structures again, and we created a new model for civic education that combines readings, projects and engaging with practitioners of democracy: legislators, government officials, public policy makers and community activists. We appreciated so much those of you in our local community that attended these sessions.
We also hosted Steven Hail, a leading economist from Australia, who taught a weekend class, called, "Rethinking Capitalism. The course focused on the economic dimensions of the dual challenges of mitigating catastrophic climate change and addressing the persistent, growing inequalities that provide fertile ground for authoritarian regimes that threaten democracies everywhere. We are exploring future collaborations with Steven and his colleagues as well as ecological economists at the University of Vermont.
In December, myself, Provost Maurice Hall, Associate Director David Bond, faculty member John Hultgren and four students, Ade Byron, Mia Jay-Patchirate, Peace Kalomba and Rodrigo Diaz attended the Conference of Parties (COP 28), the climate conference held in Dubai where over 180 countries participated. I was brought by the country of Nigeria, through the African Centre for Climate Action and Rural Development that is leading, along with a network that I co-founded in 2018, the Transboundary Water In-Cooperation Network (TWIN) www.transboundarywater.org and the Center for Capacity Building at University of Colorado, a new Convention on Conserving the River Deltas for the United Nations (UNCCRD). The official unveiling happened at COP 28, led by the Nigerian and Pakistani delegations. Students participated in a demonstration for DeltasUNite (UNCCRD) in the Green Zone at COP 28. CAPA will continue to work on the operationalization of this project in the coming year. We all believe that this Convention has the potential to really help some of the largest populations around the world with the impacts of climate change.
