Hi Kristen and everyone else new to D4Y,

Welcome to the Deliver for Youth (D4Y) list-serve! 

It is good to know White Ribbon Alliance shares the goals of D4Y, and we are all eager to find ways to work together.  Kristin's message reminded us that we have a lot of new members of the list, 75 to date, and wanted to take this opportunity to explain what it is and what is happening over at FCI.

This list grew out of the Youth Advocacy Working Group at the Women Deliver conference in London last October: www.womendeliver.org.  As part of the D4Y project, this list serve is the place to learn and share information about youth advocacy and maternal health, especially as they link in with broader issues and movements in health, rights, development, and social justice, especially for women and girls.

FCI currently coordinates the list, and sends a monthly bulletin with member news and resources.  Importantly, we have decided to phase out this yahoo groups list-serve and rely solely on the e-mail list-serve of which you are all already subscribed. You will be receiving the next monthly bulletin at the end of this week.  If you have any news, updates, stories to add to the next bulletin, please send them to Naomi, nsorkin@..., by this Thursday, March 6, 2008.

The list itself is unmoderated, and we only ask that people be respectful and tolerant.

 Over at Family Care International, the organizing partner for the Women Deliver conference and the on-going initiative, we have been developing a global and country-level advocacy project that includes a mapping component.  Like Kristen, we  would like to know - where are the young people within the maternal health movement?  And how to we help facilitate meaningful youth participation?

We are endeavoring to work with young people to create tools to advocate effectively about maternal health issues and simultaneously working with the maternal health community to infuse their work with the voices and experiences of young people and focus on investing in young people as a crucial component of maternal health.  To this end, we have been consulting with advocates within and outside this group and have submitted abstracts to the AWID conference and the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City for workshops to further explore this.  We plan to build on the materials created at WD and generate powerful messages that better link young people to the maternal health community.

All of this work has been and will continue to be guided by the Deliver for Youth Advisory Group, comprised of members from the youth advocacy working group at Women Deliver representing organizations including Youth Coalition, Advocates for Youth, and UNFPA.  We have not yet formalized the terms of this group and welcome new members.  Please write Naomi directly if you are interested.  We would like to convene a meeting of this group this summer so please consider this as a possibility.

To review prior messages on this list-serve, please write Naomi directly nsorkin@....  They include many calls for assistance similar to Kristin's message; we appreciate the opportunity to reiterate them now.

All of the best,

Naomi and Vanessa