Glendon’s John Holmes Memorial Lecture looks at role of NGOs

United Nations advocacy director Steve Crawshaw will give Glendon’s 2009 autumn John Holmes Memorial Lecture, talking about “Making an Impact: The Role of Non-Governmental Organizations in a Changing World”, on Tuesday, Nov. 17, at the Glendon campus.

Left: Steve Crawshaw. Photo courtesy of Human Rights Watch.

The lecture will start at 7:30pm and will take place in 102 Glendon Manor, Glendon campus.

Crawshaw joined Human Rights Watch as the London director in 2002 and became the organization’s United Nations advocacy director in 2006. Before joining Human Rights Watch he worked for many years as a journalist with The Independent, including as its Germany bureau chief, chief foreign correspondent and foreign news editor. Stories he covered included the east European revolutions, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Balkan wars. Crawshaw studied Russian and German at the universities of Oxford and Leningrad.

He is the author of Goodbye to the USSR: The Collapse of Soviet Power (Bloomsbury Publishing, 1992) and of Easier Fatherland: Germany and the Twenty-First Century (Continuum Publishing, 2004). He is also co-author of the forthcoming Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity and a Bit of Ingenuity Can Change the World.

The annual John Holmes Memorial Lecture at Glendon honours the late John W. Holmes, officer of the Order of Canada, Canadian diplomat, writer, administrator and professor of International Relations at Glendon from 1971 to 1981. Holmes was a tireless promoter of Canada at home and abroad, in political, diplomatic and educational circles. He also participated in the founding of the United Nations and attended its first General Assembly in 1945.