To all delegates, staff, and members of the NCSC community,

The NCSC Secretariat stands in solidarity with the Black community and the Black Lives Matter movement after the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and countless others due to police brutality. We recognize and firmly protest the injustice in the racist systems of oppression that have perpetuated inequality and suffering for decades within the Black community. 

Words mean nothing without action. As a conference and a community, we pledge to work with Georgetown University resources to ensure every NCSC staffer has received diversity and sensitivity training, dedicate specific sections of our background guides to delineating sensitive and potentially problematic areas of discussion, and expand our in-conference reporting forms to better address issues of race-based discrimination and microaggressions. In coming  years, we hope to redouble our efforts to ensure that NCSC’s committee slate authentically represents the diversity of the international system and the issues and individuals of which it is comprised.

These steps alone do not come close to being enough; however, we hope that this is the beginning of change, increased awareness, and dialogue about racism, not just within the Model UN environment but within ourselves, the communities around us, and the systems that rule our country. 

In addition, we encourage you to look into, support, and donate to the following resources and organizations:

Resources and Ways to Take Action (Compiled by Chase Leito): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KX4vB7LF-pRaH2mBAoA6PfTGL6D86XJ0VrixZL9-4YU/edit.

Anti-Racism Readings (Compiled by Zachary Varricchione): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1olRz-BUWVoiTuRJfgWBK7tBM5ins_uhB.

NCSC defines itself as a conference that tasks future leaders in the fields of international relations and global business with addressing the critical security questions of the past and present. We believe that security starts with equality and basic human rights; we hope that our programming reflects this truth this year and in the years to come.