HLPF 2025 Reflection by Sarah Redikopp

I am so grateful to have been able to contribute to our shared report! It is especially meaningful for me to share my skills with the work of the Mary Ward Centre as I discern my own vocation, and a joy to use my “researcher muscles” for the first time since finishing my PhD. My work on this included some consulting on methodology and analysis, background research, and writing/editing.

Attending the high-level political forum at the UN was a profound experience and an unexpected gift. At the opening session, the President of ECOSOC urged attendees to consider “our obligations to one another” in achieving the sustainable development goals. Throughout our days in New York, I found myself returning to our obligations to one another in Christ, and how these obligations invite us to service, to self-giving love, and to radically different ways of being in relation with one another.

Our report highlights that girls and young women continue to experience sexism, racism, ableism, and other kinds of discrimination in workplaces, and that there is a serious gap between the existence of anti-discrimination and anti-violence policies and their everyday implementation. Part of mending this gap entails cultivating ways of relating to one another that are rooted in the inherent dignity of all persons. But to get here, people need means of living in dignity. This includes access to meaningful work and wages that are commensurate with inflation, and a stronger social and communal safety net: robust and well-funded education, healthcare, childcare, green spaces, nourishing food, and more. Achieving gender equity in Canada is only possible through a radical shift in the social order, both in the material organization of everyday life, and in how we encounter and relate to one another.

Sarah Redikopp

#Canada #Justice #UnitedNations #SDGS #GenderEquality #2030 #HLPF