Jim Yong Kim to Discuss Goal of Ending Extreme Poverty with Religious Leaders

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Press Contact: Beatrice Mora
Office: (212) 678-8950
Email: bemora@jtsa.edu



March 14, 2016, New York, NY

In 2014, World Bank President Dr. Jim Kim invited faith based organization and religious leaders to discuss ways to work together to achieve the goal of ending extreme poverty worldwide by 2030. In 2015, the United Nations member states voted to include ending extreme poverty as the first Sustainable Development Goal for the next fifteen years. President Kim joins us to discuss the moral imperative of ending extreme poverty and the role that religious communities can play in achieving it.  

The event will take place Wednesday, April 6, 2016, at 7:00 p.m., at Union Theological Seminary, 3041 Broadway (at 121st Street), in New York City.

Karenna Gore, director of the Center for Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, will moderate. The respondents are Sarah Sayeed, senior advisor in the Community Affairs Unit of the Mayor’s Office of New York City, and Ruth W. Messinger, president of American Jewish World Service (AJWS), the world’s leading Jewish organization working to end poverty and realize human rights in the developing world.

Admission is free, but reservations are required. Please arrive 15 minutes early and bring photo ID.

This event will be livestreamed, at no charge, beginning at 7:00 p.m. JTS invites synagogues and other Jewish communal organizations to hold a public screening of this outstanding program.

Jim Yong Kim, MD, PhD, is the 12th president of the World Bank Group. Soon after he assumed his position, the organization established goals to end extreme poverty by 2030 and to boost shared prosperity for the bottom 40 percent of the population in developing countries. Before joining the World Bank Group, Kim, a physician and anthropologist, served as president of Dartmouth College and held professorships at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. In 1987, Kim cofounded Partners in Health, a nonprofit medical organization now working in poor communities on four continents.

The lecture is cosponsored by JTS’s Milstein Center for Interreligious Dialogue, Union Theological Seminary, and the Riverside Church.