A Farewell Message to the Global Greens from Keli Yen

This October I’ve stepped down as Global Greens Convenor, am happily welcoming Bob Hale and Gloria Polanco as the new Co-Convenor team, and am embracing another form of activism: motherhood to two new members of our Global Greens family, Amor and Renn ! 🙂

Reflecting on my eleven years in various Global Greens roles: locally in Green Party Taiwan’s international secretariat, regionally as Convenor of the Asia Pacific Greens Federation (APGF), politically representing APGF in the Global Greens Coordination, as a GG employed Coordinator, and finally as GG Convenor, the insight I want to leave you with is:

Fortunately Green political views are increasingly mainstream – climate change and sustainability are recognized as the ultimate issues of our time, while democracy and social justice are being advanced by people everywhere. Therefore, winning elections is less about convincing people to agree with our values, and more about convincing people that we are an organization capable of managing the issues.

Our Internal Condition

The success of our actions as change-makers depends less on what we do and how we do it, but more on our internal condition – in other words, the quality of our relationships. A genuine heart connection with others is the powerful bridge between someone intellectually agreeing with our politics and actively advancing it. A heart connection means compassion, taking care of one another and embracing our diversity; both within the Greens movement and across society. In practice that means learning with and building up one another, forming alliances and even dialoguing with opponents.

To win elections parties need to be skillful at understanding, communicating and cooperating with diversity. I urge you to use the Global Greens as an essential training ground for building these skills! The Greens movement in Asia, Africa, Americas and Europe have diverse cultures and contexts, yet we must learn to live and work together for our common good. The more skillful we are in constructing solidarity amongst differences internally, the more success we’ll have electorally.

Within our enormous global movement we already have all the resources we need to achieve our goals, we just need to organize ourselves to use them! How do we use the potential of our shared mission and resources, human creativity, know-how and activism? The Global Greens organization is dedicated to strengthening the Green political movement by facilitating answers to that question. We do this by cultivating systems of communication and cooperation that enable us to be more efficient and effective. Because GG is the global organization of the Greens community our capacity is derived entirely from our collaboration.Working together is sometimes not easy, but the quality of our relationships, both internally and externally, is the essential resource needed to achieve our goals.

Build the Organization

My call to action is to build our Green organizations to think and act globally and locally at the same time. 

How can we make each meeting become an example of the global sustainability and solidarity that we seek to achieve? 

How can my local action be made even more impactful by connecting and cooperating with our global movement? 

Sustainability and Green politics requires us to innovate and change the way we think and do things. What in our Green organizations needs to change to truly reflect the global reality that we want?

My vision of a successful Global Greens is a vibrant community of mutual support among every part of the movement – among individuals and organizational groupings at every level. At our 5th congress we need to have a realistic and practical deliberation that unifies our vision of what a successful Global Greens organization is, how it operates, and what we the Members of this community are going to do to turn our expectations into reality. Get involved in the Global Greens, the future belongs to those who build it.

I love the Global Greens because it expands the field of possibility beyond my individual self, it elevates my voice by uniting it with others, it takes me places I never imagined I’d go and creates beautiful friendships which make the world a better place. I look forward to continuing my work developing and growing the Global Greens organization in whatever way I can.

Thank you all for your friendship and partnership in this movement. Onwards!