After a number of years, we have decided to completely redesign our website. For us it is an important tool to explain what we do and to give reasons for the choices we make every day. We feel that it is important to do this at a time when so many things are happening around us that have to do with the issue of development.   

The conclusion of COP26 has brought even more attention to the issues of climate change, sustainability, the role of the 'international community' and multilateralism.

We must respond to the challenges of change and, beyond debate and the clash between vision and pragmatism, we are now aware that what will happen in the coming decades will transform our societies regardless of whether the processes of change succeed or fail.

We see before us a great potential for building better societies, but also the risk of reinforcing injustices and inequalities between societies, communities and individuals that have the resources and capacity to adapt, and those who will simply suffer these changes.

How does CISP's action fit into this context? We thought to adopt a slogan that we feel describes particularly well what CISP is and how it seeks to understand its own identity and way of working. The slogan is Rights, Facts, People.

 RIGHTS

At a time of great transformation, rights are the foundation upon which to build the promotion and evaluation of the effects of actions that we want to foster change. When talking about fighting climate change or promoting the adaptive capacities of our societies, the issue of justice remains paramount. If investments and changes promoted to tackle climate change exclude the poorest areas and people, the right to development and the well-being that everyone must share, the conditions for new crises and conflicts will be created.
Faced with conflicts and fragile institutions in much of the world, we are perhaps now at the lowest point in the international community's drive to make its voice heard in a coherent manner. Countless analyses underline the extent to which these are precisely the contexts in which the targets of the 2030 Agenda seem most distant and unattainable.
To us, putting rights as the foundation of our actions means focusing our attention on those who lose out due the transformations underway, and towards situations of crisis and marginality in order to respond to the needs that are in front of us.

 FACTS

In the history of CISP we have always tried not to lose sight of the concreteness of our actions in response to needs and the deep understanding of the contexts in which we operate. In particular, we have always tried to understand the situation and the interests of those communities for which it is more difficult to find a place in international agendas. It is crucial to place our action within collective objectives, but it is also crucial to be able, as organisation, to answer the question: have we been able, through our actions, to contribute positively to improving the quality of life of the people and communities who should benefit from them?
Facts also means giving an account of what we do and its effects on those who have given us the resources to operate and to the communities to whom those programmes are directed, making every effort so that effects are clearly measured and communicated.
This means providing those who want to know us with information on how CISP works and what its operational structures, principles and mechanisms are.

PEOPLE

Attention to the communities in which we operate means understanding the experiences and visions of those who should benefit from our assistance. We start from the idea that our actions can have an impact if they favour and enhance the investments and energies of those communities.
CISP is the people who form it and comprises of colleagues of many different nationalities, mostly from the countries in which we operate.  Together we share a professional ethos of quality and competence that we make available to our beneficiaries who are the reason for our work.
We try to explain all this also through our new website.