His first foray into Geneva’s civic life was as president of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry from 1989 to 1997. At a time when the city was facing economic stagnation and low morale, Ivan launched Genève Gagne in 1993, an initiative that invited businesses, institutions, and residents to rediscover and celebrate Geneva’s strengths. It was civic pride turned into action—and it worked.

That instinct for bringing people together never left him.  Taking over the Fondation pour Genève in 1998, he turned his attention to what he saw as one of the city’s most persistent blind spots: the gap between Geneva’s international community and its local one.  He had met people who had lived in the city for years, never having been invited into a Genevois home, never having learned a word of French. Similarly, Genevans knew almost nothing about the organizations housed in the huge buildings across town.  “In Geneva, you also meet the whole world,” he says, but someone had to build the bridges. That became his mission.

What emerged was a program of encounters and connections designed to make Geneva’s two communities visible to each other. Studies later showed that the average stay of foreigners in multinationals and international organizations in Geneva was around twelve years, far longer than most people assumed and definitely long enough to build meaningful relationships. The Fondation pour Genève provided him with a structure to foster this exchange and integration.  Those same years brought him into close contact with some of the great figures of international Geneva.  Ivan counts the late UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, as a close friend and ally in his quest to make La Genève Internationale shine.

But Ivan doesn’t want to dwell on the past. He is laser-focused on what he sees as an urgent project for Geneva’s future: the Portail des Nations, a veritable hub for learning about multilateralism, designed to bring the work of the UN to life. Accessible to the public on the grounds of the UN, without the barriers that make the Palais des Nations feel remote to most Genevans, it offers a sixty-minute immersive experience built around a simple idea. “From the minute you wake up in the morning until the last second you fall asleep in the evening, there are hundreds of things that happen to you that are being decided in Geneva by the international organizations.”

This conviction is not new. As early as 2015, to illustrate the point, he commissioned a bus decorated by the Genevan cartoonist Zep, which travelled to 43 Swiss cities, telling the story of a child waking up in the morning. Every moment of that child’s day—from breakfast to school to bedtime—was somehow affected by a decision made by an international organization in Geneva. It was a radical idea: that this small city and the institutions it houses, are woven into the fabric of daily life around the world. Today, Ivan believes, it is more important than ever that people understand this connection.

He is realistic about the immense pressure the UN system is currently under: the funding cuts, the political turbulence, the withdrawal of key member states, all pointing towards the need for a reset. But he is not despairing. You can’t replace the UN, he says. It remains the only organization with 193 countries around the table. What the Portail des Nations can do is shift the conversation away from the UN as an organization associated only with crisis, and toward something more honest about the daily, invisible work it does for all of us.