On Friday, June 17, under a tall white tent on a well-manicured lawn in front of the William D. Walsh Family Library at Fordham University, community advocates from around the world and a panel of high ranking global leaders engaged in a dialogue about how best to develop the world.

The Local-Global Leaders’ Dialogue highlighted the Community Commons, an event co-hosted by Fordham, the United Nations Development Program-me (UNDP) and several other agencies, which brought 150 community leaders from 44 countries to the university’s Rose Hill campus in the Bronx from June 16-18.

Attendees and organizers said the Commons — organized and brought to Fordham by a group of seven Fordham graduate students — allowed grassroots activists from remote areas all over the world to create valuable networks, exchange ideas and, in a change from past Community Commons, present their development policy suggestions to those with the power to actually implement them.

“In past Community Commons, the focus has really been on celebrating prior successes,” said Nancy Gillis, the Fordham graduate student who brought together the organizing team. “This event had as its purpose to come up with specific policy recommendations.”

Gillis, who attended three of the previous six Commons, said that a lack of focus on policy recommendations prevented the past events from having any sort of long-term impact.

On June 20, a group of attendees announced their recommendations at a press conference at U.N. headquarters. At the top of the list was a suggestion that local communities play a leading role in planning and implementing the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG).

Other recommendations included a global learning fund to allow communities to share ideas and fund pilot projects, the creation of community task forces at the global, national and local levels to strategize, review progress of MDG implementation, and more dialogues about partnerships that would enhance community access to finance, technologies, information and markets.

Conference attendees nominated Gladman Chibememe, chairman of the CHIBEMEME Earth Healing Association in Zimbabwe, to present the three-day conference’s policy recommendations to the Civil Society hearings of the Millennium Review Summit at the U.N. General Assembly in a five-minute speech on June 24.

The opportunity for exposure to global leaders, which Friday’s dialogue provided, was a rare chance for many of the community leaders in attendance, some of whom had trekked for days by foot, train and finally plane just to attend.

Friday’s global leader panel featured Shoji Nishimoto, assistant secretary general of the United Nations and director of the UNDP Bureau for Development Policy; John Robinson, director of international conservation for the World Conservation Society and Jan Bojo from the World Bank in Washington, D.C.

“[The panel members] are the working horses of these programs,” said Maria Cleofe Bernardino, executive director of the Palawan NGO Network, Inc. in the Philippines. “This is a great opportunity for us. By coming together we can have a voice.”

Bernardino was one of the attendees nominated by her peers to speak before the panel, and she used her two minutes at the microphone to challenge the efficiency and effectiveness of World Bank and UNDP policy.

Her speech, which drew loud applause and cheers from the audience, emphasized a complaint shared by many attendees: There is not enough community involvement in development policy implementation.

The U.N. and other aid agencies “come and stand around just like white elephants,” said Joyce Kores, of GROOTS Kenya. “We want to come here and train them.”

Almost every speaker asked for more “bottom up” involvement in policy decisions on the part of affected communities, as opposed to the top-down implementation of policies from foreign agencies.

In response to these challenges, Assistant Secretary General Nishimoto told the audience: “I am here to be trained.”

“This is part of our listening to people. We are sincere,” said Bojo, who will write a report based on his experience which will then be used as one of many reference tools when future World Bank policy decisions are made.

That Fordham University hosted an event that might lead to changes in international development policy was very exciting for Nancy Busch, dean of the Graduate School of Humanities and Sciences at Fordham.

“This is the first time that students have initiated something with the potential impact of this conference,” Busch said.