Raise awareness in your city - organize a World Habitat Day 2008 event

World Habitat Day provides an excellent opportunity to highlight key human settlements and urban issues. We would like to thank all our partners who in past years have organized awareness raising activities on the day. We published the celebrations that took place around the world in 2007 on our website which receives millions of visitors per year, and in the World Habitat Day report that reaches over 25,000 key partners.

This year, we again call on our partners in central government, local government, civil society the private sector and the media to take part in organizing activities to raise awareness and stimulate debate on the important theme of Harmonious Cities.

Guidelines
As a guide, here are some of the activities that you can help organize:

1. Use mass media, particularly newspapers, radio and television, to draw attention to World Habitat Day celebrations. If possible, issue press releases, display posters, organize press conferences, and broadcast video and audio spots.
2. Draw attention to the problems and issues on this year’s theme, particularly environmental sustainability, equity, gender parity, pro-poor growth and participatory governance through press articles, radio and television documentaries and panel programmes with policy makers, government officials, academics, journalists, other professionals, and community representatives.
3. Organise public information campaigns, and use popular theatre to create awareness of the problems and issues.
4. Use the occasion to publicize, reward and demonstrate tangible improvements in urban safety and social justice, particularly urban crime and violence, forced eviction and insecurity of tenure, as well as natural and human-made disasters in your community.
5. Organize competitions to find solutions to human settlements and urban problems. Essay and painting competitions help create awareness of the World Habitat Day theme in schools and colleges.
6. Organise fund raising, recreational or entertainment activities like football matches, or concerts, and use the proceeds to upgrade and extend services for poor communities.
7. Encourage postal authorities to issue special World Habitat Day stamps.
8. Education authorities in collaboration with local and national authorities can encourage the introduction into the school curriculum of teaching programmes about these challenges.

UN-HABITAT support
To support city and country-level activities, UN-HABITAT will compile an information kit including a poster, short video on the theme, and other promotional materials for your use in planning your World Habitat Day event.

Let us publish your event
Please let us know if you wish to organize a local awareness-raising event by sending an e-mail to whd@unhabitat.org providing as many details as possible about the event. And once World Habitat Day is over, please provide us brief details of media coverage and photographs if possible. We will post these on the World Habitat Day page of our website www.unhabitat.org, which receives millions of visitors and include them in the final World Habitat Day report, which is sent to all our partners. Thank you for your continued support.