St. Olaf student visits United Nations as global conference delegate

Inspiring, overwhelming and heartbreaking.

That’s how St. Olaf student Allanah Carron described her weeklong visit as a delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in New York City in March. Carron, who is from Suriname, a small country located on the northeastern coast of South America, attended the global conference as part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s International Women Leaders scholarship program.

As one of the youngest members of LWF’s delegation at the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women, the sophomore said she was inspired to find so many other women facing the same struggles in her home country. On the other hand, she said she was overwhelmed by statistics that predict that millions more women will be food insecure by 2030.

“Some of the statistics about world hunger are heartbreaking,” she said during an on campus interview last week.The

quantitative economics, whose second majors include sociology and anthropology with a concentration in International Relations, explained that a key goal is to work on fighting systems that favor the empowerment of men.

Although Carron said overturning society’s system of marginalizing, minoritizing and controlling the lives of others particularly women, was “exhausting and difficult,” many of the sessions she attended at the conference were empowering.

She said being around women from all over the world who are facing similar challenges truly strengthened her to keep fighting. “This work reaffirmed that I am not alone, even if it feels like that sometimes.”

Also attending the conference were government officials from nations around the world including diplomats, ministers and presidents. Talking one-on-one with the Zimbabwe ambassador was good practice, she said.

To psych herself up before the conference sessions started, Carron said every morning she’d listen to Alicia Keys’ song “Empire State of Mind.”

“It was interesting to see all the politicians and know that often that’s where change happens,” she said. “There’s so much bureaucratic red tape. To fund programs that help change women’s lives, we need money to fund programs so that we don’t go sliding backwards.”

After finishing two finals and a few class projects, Carron plans to head to Suriname for the summer break. She said she’s looking forward for a break from her five oncampus jobs that include building assistant, cook, student sustainability ambassador, concession seller and SOAR leader.

“Sometimes it feels discouraging like there’s no hope,” she said. “But we can’t stop trying to implement policies, even when it is hard to keep going. There will be change.”

Carron wrote in a post-convention blog that her main takeaway from the conference was to focus on establishing and strengthening effective policies and systems of accountability that improve the status of women at all levels.

“We do not have to reinvent the wheel,” she said. “It has already been invented but we can and should tweak it to improve it to fit the world we are trying to create — a world we have never seen before.”

Carron explained the conference was deeply inspiring, but painful and beautiful all at once. “I met politicians who are practicing their ‘right’ of willful ignorance of the problems in their countries. But I also met many strong and inspiring women. It was truly an adventure that I loved participating in.”

She said that everyone worldwide can make a difference, since out individual actions can cumulatively serve to maintain existing forms of inequity and serve to dismantle systems of oppression.

“If we remain unwilling to do serious individual, institutional, and structural work, our path toward a more equitable future will stagnate and our goals will remain out of reach,” she said. “Together we can make this new world whatever we want it to be, a world in which justice, dignity and equal access to resources is the standard for all, rather than a privilege for the few.”