Submitted by crinadmin on
Sven Winberg, 63, is a co-founder of CRIN and an honorary member of the Management Team. He retired from his role as Senior Adviser in the Secretary-General’s office at Save the Children Sweden earlier this year. Sven began his career as a teacher, and became the director of education at a teacher’s education school in Stockholm, Sweden, before coming to Save the Children Sweden in 1988. In a way, I have always been teaching. The thing I have been most interested in is creating a bridge between theory and practice. People are sometimes too eager to get things done, and they want to act faster than they should. People need to use the knowledge available before they act. That doesn’t mean that acting is not important, but it should be on the basis of knowledge. After all, there is so much good work that has been done on child rights – we must take advantage of it. This is especially important for the people who don’t have the money to do the research themselves. That is why I find CRIN so important. At the teacher education school, I was always interested in how students would apply the theory to practice once they left. I actually have an unfinished PhD on connecting theory and practice in pre-school education. But once I started writing the thesis, I had three children, had to build a house and so forth, and so life took over. We had to convince people that working to the CRC was a good idea. When I first came to Save the Children, it was towards the end of the drafting process for the CRC. My boss Thomas Hammarberg realised that the CRC could make a real difference for child-orientated organisations. Our organisation shifted focus. We had to convince people this was a good idea, and that we may have to drop some of the things we were doing before. It was a very interesting process. I realised that one of the main challenges was to define the concepts within the CRC, both from an analytical and research point of view. That was my interest in CRIN. CRINMAIL was originally an open list where anybody could contribute and put what they wanted on the mailing. After a while, we decided that the mailing was so important that it would be better to have professionals moderating the content. From the beginning the basic idea was that members should be both suppliers and users of information. It was also important that people from the South who may not have access to the internet could get information by email. It has been a wonderful development – to see how CRIN has come to be the main source of information for children’s rights – well known, reliable and respected. In terms of the future, it is important that the information available is that which is at the top of the agenda in terms of child rights. It is a matter of the information becoming more targeted, and more directly useful for advocacy purposes. Information needs to be delivered that will make a difference. One of the biggest challenges for child rights is finding language and a way of expressing child rights at all levels. The basic ideas behind the CRC must be understood, and they must be brought alive. We have to apply the CRC to all fields, and to make it part of everyday life and work.