Blue Chip Foundation
and
VII Association seek to amplify the voices of local people and staff of
MVP . We chose four of the fourteen Village sites which span across 8 countries in the poorest regions of Subsaharan Africa. By giving the individuals involved a chance to tell their stories, a greater consciousness of the diverse capacities of the project can be developed. The awareness generated by the project will create a dialogue about environmental, social, health and human rights issues that are of urgent concern. The ambition is to affect civic dialogue and seek further solutions to pressing problems that still remain in the villages as we transition to
SDGs .
The project will enable an effective and broad reaching communication campaign to a world wide audience from policy makers to school children through collaboration with media and cultural organizations and using social media worldwide. The most successful initiatives of MVP have already been scaled up, and it is the hope of the Blue Chip Foundation that our unbiased documentation will inspire other communities and governments to implement some of the practices.
The three core goals of sustainable development —ending poverty, ending exclusion, and protecting creation—demand the activation of universal ethical principles including human dignity, social justice, the common good, and shared well-being. As Laudato Si’ demonstrated, common ethical concerns of the major world religions helped the world to adopt common goals for our “common home,” most notably the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Yet this initial synergy among religious, social, and political leaders needs, for its full realization, a renewed orientation of values and ethics in relation to seven unprecedented challenges:
We face, as well, a eighth, age-old challenge: restraining impunity in the public and private sectors. We experience today a global epidemic of corruption, abuse and arrogance of power in all social strata that weaken the sovereign power of the people and participatory democracy. There is also the repeated failure of political leaders to relinquish power on constitutional timetables.
These challenges are pressing for each of the great religions across all geographic regions. The new project on
Ethics in Action
will bring together a select group of religious leaders, academics, business and labor leaders, development practitioners, and activists, to identify values and ethical approaches to the eight challenges just outlined. The group will analyze the relevant and crosscutting social teachings of the various religions in a joint effort to discern the global values and principles capable of solving our contemporary challenges and overcoming the “globalization of indifference.”
The group will work over three years, beginning in late 2016. It will meet at the
Casina Pio IV , headquarters of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (PAS) and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (PASS), drawing on the academicians of the PAS and PASS together with invited specialists for each of the eight topics. The group will aim to produce a set of significant recommendations for
Ethics in Action : ways to apply ethical principles and values shared across the major religions to support solutions to the major global challenges. The group will not aim for technical or policy solutions to these great challenges. Rather, it will focus on the underlying ethical principles and values absolutely needed to mobilize the human spirit to find liberating solutions to these great challenges in the defense of human dignity and liberty, the promotion of the common good, social justice, and shared wellbeing in true solidarity.
Blue Chip Foundation focuses on alleviating extreme poverty through economic, educational, and social enterprise initiatives in support of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)