PassBlue
non-governmental organization
PassBlue is an independent, US-based digital publication that monitors and reports on activities by the United Nations. It was founded in the fall of 2011 as a project of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the City University of New York. PassBlue moved to the New School, a private university, and is now under the fiscal sponsorship of the Institute for Nonprofit News.
The term PassBlue is a play on the diplomatic passport known as laissez-passer ("let pass"), a blue travel document used by UN officials on missions and issued by national governments and world institutions during wartime and other periods to allow officers to travel to specific areas. PassBlue does not have an official association with the UN.
History
In its 2013 description of PassBlue, the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies said on its website:
"The articles and essays are written by top UN journalists, who include Barbara Crossette, a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times and UN correspondent for The Nation; Irwin Arieff, who covered the UN, the White House and other assignments for Reuters; Helmut Volger, the editor of A Concise Encyclopedia of the United Nations; and Dulcie Leimbach, former editor of UNA's The InterDependent and "A Global Agenda: Issues Before the UN" and an editor/writer at The New York Times for more than two decades."
In 2015, PassBlue was financed primarily through the Carnegie Corporation of New York, with other grants from the Samuel Rubin Foundation, the Feminist Majority Foundation, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation as well as individual donors. PassBlue has also received funding from the Open Society Foundations "To support The New School's project PassBlue expand their operational capacity to serve as a watchdog media site on the UN and related foreign affairs institutions."
PassBlue is also supported by the Wallace Fox Foundation, Pinkerton Foundation and other charitable institutions, as well as by thousands of individual donors.
PassBlue has been led since its founding by Dulcie Leimbach, who serves as editor of its articles, and Barbara Crossette. Its managing editor is John Penney. It has engaged hundreds of writers for its publications since its founding.
Citations
The Arkansas Collegiate Model United Nations cites PassBlue among its curated "resources for competing in Model United Nations conferences and understanding basic issues of global governance."
The Johnson County United Nations Association in Iowa has a web page of curated resources it says provide information on "topics of interest to the UNA-USA" and recommends PassBlue as a resource for independent day-to-day updates on the work of the United Nations.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “PassBlue” as non-governmental organization. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as non-governmental organization. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q127798327. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2011, 2013 and 2015.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “PassBlue”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow PassBlue primary sources, PassBlue archive and PassBlue research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “PassBlue”?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “PassBlue” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.