Jeffery Huffines is a longtime civil society advocate at the United Nations whose work centers on strengthening and democratizing the UN system. He served as Senior Advisor to the UN2020 and Together First campaigns, which promoted the 75th anniversary of the United Nations as an opportunity for stocktaking, review, and reform of the institution. That work is the subject of his Mondial article on the UN at 75. From 2009 to 2019 he was the UN Representative in New York for CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, and from 2011 to 2016 he served as an organizing partner of the NGO Major Group, helping coordinate civil society engagement around Rio+20 and the Sustainable Development Goals. Earlier he represented the U.S. Baha’i community at the United Nations, where he chaired the NGO/DPI Executive Committee, the official liaison between UN-associated NGOs and the UN Department of Public Information. Based in New York since the 1990s, he has been a leading voice across coalitions including the American NGO Coalition for the International Criminal Court, the Committee of Religious NGOs at the UN, and the Tripartite Forum on International Cooperation for Peace. His advocacy has focused on human rights, sustainable development, civic engagement, global governance reform, and inter-religious cooperation.
