The Tartan

United Nations Foundation President and CEO Elizabeth Cousens joined Heinz College professor and former Ambassador Sarah Mendelson Wednesday, April 9 as a guest speaker for the fireside chat “Advancing Multilateralism in a Challenging Geopolitical Era.” 

Cousens and Mendelson’s discussion is the third and latest entry in the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management’s speaker series “Challenges and Opportunities to Sustainable Development in the United States and Beyond.”

Cousens began by detailing the U.N. Foundation’s origins and its relationship to the U.N. “The U.N. Foundation was created in 1998 by media entrepreneur Ted Turner, the founder of CNN,” Cousens said. “[Turner] believed that international cooperation was indispensable in an interconnected world. And he believed that the United Nations in particular, was a singular essential institution to make all of that practical and real and to stand up for those values.”

When the United States failed to pay its dues to the U.N. — adding up to “about a billion dollars” in appears in 1998 — Turner had been angered as “he thought the U.N. deserved a little bit better than that, particularly from a country that had the most to do with creating it in the first place.” Consequently, “he surprised quite a few people by going to a benefits dinner in New York for the U.N. Association of the United States and announcing that he was giving a billion privately, which was the same amount that the US was in debt.”

However, Cousens explained that “it turned out that you couldn’t, as a private individual, do that in those days. And so they created the foundation, initially, as a channel for that gift.” Cousens emphasized the precedent that this set: “The Gates Foundation wasn’t created yet. The Giving Pledge hadn’t started yet. So he was the kickoff to that new generation of philanthropy among high net worth individuals who really wanted to do purposeful things with their money.”

Cousens described the roles of the U.N. Foundation. “One is we … raise money for the U.N. itself. And, to date, we’ve granted about $1.7 million into the U.N. system over time. We also do a lot of work outside the U.N. system, adjacent to the UN, to support U.N. causes. A lot of that we do by incubating or speeding different initiatives … And then the third thing we do is we engage publics, both in the United States and globally, to build awareness and support for the U.N. and its work.”

The U.N.’s 2025 Agenda

When asked by Mendelson about the U.N.’s plans for 2025, Cousens described it as a “calendar of big moments and activities.” 

One of these “big moments” is the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, scheduled for June 2025 in Spain. 

In light of “financing requirements [being] so much greater than they’ve ever been” in the world economy, Cousens committed that “there’s been a lot of innovation in thinking about how to so-called ‘crowd’ in other forms of capital for public investment.” 

Cousens also mentioned the Climate Conference of Parties, scheduled for November 2025 in Brazil. Because of “new pressures on climate action,” such as the “acceleration of the climate emergency” and “defection from the climate regime of countries” like the U.S. and Argentina, Cousens observed that “a lot of eyes are on Brazil to kind of to hold the line and to try to renew commitments.”

Cousens then discussed the unexpected success of the Commision on the Status of Women, which occurred in March 2025 and is “one of the biggest events on the U.N. calendar,” bringing together women and “thousands of advocates” from around the world in New York.

“There was every expectation that it would be really rougher-going,” Cousens said. “People were worried about visas, about travel restrictions. They were worried about, obviously, the backlash to gender equity in lots of forms that’s happening around the world.”

However, the event was in fact “one of the almost record-breaking in attendance,” Cousens stated. “I think it had a depth of engagement, because people realize how much is really at risk. And they got an agreed political declaration, also under Saudi chairmanship. So it just adds a little secret sauce to the complexity of the politics this year.”

Cousens also took a moment to talk about the “broader moment” that the U.N. is focusing on this year: “I think the broader moment is — it sounds histrionic to say it — but I think it’s not remotely an exaggeration to say that everything the U.N. is, everything it does, everything it stands for, is up for grabs.” 

Cousens explained that this was due to the U.N. “[having] been under a lot of pressures for a long time,” both “as an institution” and “as a set of values,” with this pressure being “accelerated and accentuated by the shift in posture of the United States.” 

The UN80 Initiative, in honor of the U.N.’s 80th anniversary, was launched by the Secretary General of U.N. in response to this pressure, as a ”continuation of reform and efforts he had been trying to push for a long time now, under the pressure of tremendous disruption and crisis.”

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Cousens and Mendelson discussed the status of the U.N. SDGs and misconceptions surrounding them in light of the Trump administration’s “public disavowment” of the initiative.

Cousens mentioned that she was “a little bit less surprised for a couple of reasons,” citing the “weaponization” of the SDG symbol as an “emblem of conspiracies” in Latin America and Argentine politics, with people questioning, “‘whose goals are they, anyway?’”

Cousens clarified the intention of the SDGs: “On a very simple level, they represent the aspirations and interests that you could say are relevant to most people, in most places, most of the time. In some fashion, they give you a shared vocabulary for talking about that.” Cousens continued, “[The SDGs] try to overcome generations of economic dysfunction, where you have an economic model that externalizes sustainability and it externalizes social equity and other kinds of social goods. And the SDGs are an attempt to essentially internalize those into your economic and development model.” 

Cousens noted the misconception that the SDGs are a “North-South development agenda,” mentioning that it “has been very hard for even the advocates of the SDGs in the U.S. government and elsewhere to break up with [that] idea.”

Cousens then spoke about the “voluntary” nature of the SDGs, stating “there’s no enforcement around any of this.” 

Referring to the Trump administration, Cousens stated that “it’s definitely gratuitous to have to disavow [the SDGs] on some level; there’s no power to them other than what you want them to have.” 

The U.S.’s current stance has exacerbated the state of jeopardy that the SDGs are in: “Well before these recent developments, there were only 17 percent of the targets that were met by last year. So they’re already in trouble.” Cousens noted that the “earliest stirrings” that the U.N. would likely not be able to meet the SDGs by 2030 began sometime before the 2024 U.S. election.

As such, Cousens believes that the priority of the U.N. should not be to “negotiate another goal framework,” but to figure out how to achieve existing goals. 

“These goals are great. There’s really almost nothing you can imagine that should be in them,” Cousens said. “But what we really need to get better at is working on why they’re so hard to get done.”

Cousens discussed potential solutions. “We did succeed to get a provision where you wouldn’t consider a goal or a target achieved unless the lowest quintile of a given population had achieved it; so to bake into your metrics for achievement, inherently, a kind of progressive/equity dimension.” 

Another solution to the problem of achieving existing goals was a “constituency seat” format in diplomatic negotiations, popularized during the Obama administration. Member countries would share constituency seats, helping to “defang” groups like the U.S. and UK that “usually dominate negotiations at the U.N. that make them very hard to problem-solve around.” Significantly, it also meant that smaller countries “had more voice” in negotiations.

U.N. Fiscal Crisis and Dependency on the US

In addition to denouncing the SDGs, the Trump administration also pulled funding “overnight” from the UN; Cousens described the consequences as “calamitous,” especially given the U.N.’s fiscal dependency on the U.S.

Cousens pointed to the $800 million out of $1.3 billion lost in emergency food assistance from the World Food Program that morning. Cousens also mentioned how the non-U.N. agency, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), where she spent four years, has been “decimated.” 

Another initiative impacted was GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, which “bundles funds to invest in immunization” to support GAVI-eligible countries; Cousens described it as “one of the most important and influential innovations of the last generation of multilateral effort.” 

Cousens referred to the return of measles, bringing up the possibility of the return of other preventable diseases like polio and tuberculosis.

“There are lots of reasons to critique the degree to which the United States has underwritten so many things in the world. Something creates dependencies that aren’t always healthy. It creates undue influence that many complain about,” Cousens said. 

“But if you yank it away overnight, it creates an absolute cataclysm. So you have U.N. agencies who have lost 40 to 50 percent of their funding overnight.”

“There’s so much that’s been put at risk,” Cousens said. “The U.S. has been this underwriter of so much of what everybody else can do in the humanitarian arena; that’s just harder to do when you take that out of the equation.”

Youth Empowerment

To dispel the “doom and gloom,” Mendelson asked Cousens about the “role of youth in the multilateral framework” and how to “make sure that the next generation is empowered … to care about this.”

“The core of the U.N. is basically an intergenerational promise,” Cousens replied. “So if you come back to that core idea, you can’t do your job in and around the U.N. without thinking early and often about future generations, young people now, young people in the future.”

Cousens pointed to the Next Generation Fellows program created by the U.N. Foundation, in support of the Secretary General’s “manifesto” for his second term. 

“We recruited a cohort of fellows, and we asked them to give them some support and tools to go and talk to young people around the world and produce their own recommendations” in the form of a parallel or shadow report.

Mendelson brought attention to an op-ed written by Carnegie Mellon Africa student Rose Kimu, with it being “a letter to an AI summit in Rwanda last week.” Mendelson remarked that “it’s a lovely articulation of … the importance of having young people at the table,” particularly women and girls.

Concluding Thoughts

“Anything that you can do at the community or local level, I think is disproportionately impactful,” Cousens said. 

“It’s just closer to what is real and meaningful to people. And so I think we’re seeing that politically, and obviously that’s an economic and social dimension too.” Cousens continued, “I do continue to think we don’t work hard enough at looking at the impediments. And so I think we have to have much more honest conversations about where the blockages are to progress. 

“Some of it’s about interests. A lot of it’s about interests,” she said. “A lot of it is about inertia.”