The New Humanitarians: Inspiration, Innovations, and Blueprints for Visionaries (Social and Psychological Issues: Challenges and Solutions)

The New Humanitarians

Recent Titles in Social and Psychological Issues: Challenges and Solutions Albert R. Roberts, Series Editor Finding Meaning in Life, at Midlife and Beyond: Wisdom and Spirit from Logotherapy David Guttmann

The New Humanitarians Inspiration, Innovations, and Blueprints for Visionaries Volume 1 Changing Global Health Inequities

Edited by Chris E. Stout, PsyD Foreword by Mehmet Oz, MD

Social and Psychological Issues: Challenges and Solutions Albert R. Roberts, Series Editor

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The new humanitarians : inspiration, innovations, and blueprints for visionaries / edited by Chris E. Stout ; foreword by Mehmet Oz. p. cm. — (Social and psychological issues: Challenges and solutions, ISSN 1941–7985) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–275–99768–7 ((set) : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–275–99770–0 ((vol. 1) : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–275–99772–4 ((vol. 2) : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–275–99774–8 ((vol. 3) : alk. paper) 1. Philanthropists. 2. Humanitarianism. 3. Charities. 4. Social action. I. Stout, Chris E. HV27.N49 2009 361.7'4—dc22 2008020797 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2009 by Chris E. Stout All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008020797 ISBN: 978–0–275–99768–7 (set) 978–0–275–99770–0 (vol. 1) 978–0–275–99772–4 (vol. 2) 978–0–275–99774–8 (vol. 3) ISSN: 1941-7985 First published in 2009 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10

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To all of those profiled herein and to all of those they help—you are all heroic.

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Contents

Foreword by Mehmet Oz, MD

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction by Chris E. Stout 1: From an Idea to Action: The Evolution of Médecins Sans Frontières Kevin P. Q. Phelan 2: Unite For Sight Jennifer Staple

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3: Achieving Social Goals through Business Discipline: Scojo Foundation 45 Jordan Kassalow, Graham Macmillan, Miriam Stone, Katherine Katcher, Patrick Savaiano, and Annie Khan 4: Sustainable Sciences Institute: Developing Scientific Capacity to Address Public Health Needs Worldwide Josefina Coloma, Eva Harris, and Martine Zoer

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5: Institute for OneWorld Health: Seeking a Cure for Inequity in Access to Medicines Victoria Hale

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6: Sustainable Transformation of Communities: The Jamkhed Experience—“We Have Done It Ourselves!” Shobha R. Arole and Raj S. Arole

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7: International Center for Equal Healthcare Access: Defeating the Developing World’s Dependence on Perpetual Western Charity in the Field of Healthcare Marie Charles

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8: Flying Doctors of America Allan Gathercoal, Teresa Bartrum, and Myron Panchuk

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9: Caring for Torture Survivors: The Marjorie Kovler Center Mary Fabri, Marianne Joyce, Mary Black, and Mario González

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10: International Center on Responses to Catastrophes Stevan Weine

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11: International Trauma Studies Program Jack Saul

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12: Center for Health, Intervention, and Prevention Jeffrey D. Fisher

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13: REMEDY William H. Rosenblatt, Teresa Bartrum, and Myron Panchuk

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14: Center for Global Initiatives Chris E. Stout

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Afterword by Keith Ferrazzi

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Series Afterword by Albert R. Roberts

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About the Editor and Contributors

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Index

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Foreword: Honor Roll

From the time I first met Chris after our election as fellow Global Leaders of Tomorrow in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting, I was impressed by his remarkable insight and diligence. Over the years, we have collaborated on various health-related projects, and we have shared profound sadness over many global tragedies. Now Chris has embarked on a daunting challenge—that of compiling a Who’s Who, or Honor Roll, of worldwide humanitarian organizations. Chris has taken his proverbial golden Rolodex of contacts and friends and compiled an impressive list that represents the “best of the best” in global human service organizations. Although Chris made his admittedly “biased” choices by going to the founders he already knew, he has nevertheless highlighted some of the best in the world–some well known, some almost unknown—but all that represent a sampling of the finest. Each is a testament to the power of the human spirit in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges and deficits. All the familiar bromides are absent from The New Humanitarians. Though it would be tempting to wring our collective hands at the enormity of the proverbial “world-going-to-hell-in-a-hand-basket,” The New Humanitarians is a totem of real inspiration. Chris has highlighted organizations that favor results over standard protocol in accomplishing their work. Those herein are doing the difficult—not by following in other’s footsteps, but by forging new paths and finding new solutions to mankind’s humanitarian needs. The time has come for them to collectively tell their stories—a daunting task, but that is something Chris has experience with. Someone once remarked that the core issue with Nazi Germany was not that there was a Hitler, but that there were too few Schindlers. The New Humanitarians gives us all hope that there is a new generation of Schindlers across the globe, and our imaginations can show us the differences they will make for the future. Mehmet Oz, MD, MBA

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Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I want to thank all of the people involved in the organizations profiled herein. Many people would not be alive or function at the levels they are without your vision and passion. Period. Full stop. It is your zeal that has so inspired me to publish these books. My thanks to each of you for taking the time to craft what has become this set. I am fortunate to call each of you my friend, and the world is blessed to have you. I also must apologize to those who lead organizations that are not included herein. It is a function of time and space—not having adequate amounts of either. Nevertheless, I hold a great and abiding respect for all of those working in the so-called humanitarian space. The world is in your debt. Debbie Carvalko is my publisher extraordinaire at Praeger/Greenwood. Without her pitching my proposal, this project would not have been made into the reality that you are holding in your hand. She was a valued collaborator in the shepherding of the production of the manuscripts to final production. Debbie, you are amazing. I was fortunate to gain valuable help in organizing, interviewing, and writing with a valued set of graduate student assistants: Annie Khan, Teresa Bartrum, Stephanie Benjamin, Mark Zissman, Valaria Levit, and Donald Bernovich. I would like especially to thank Patrick “Skully” Savaiano, who from the start displayed not only a keen sense of organization of the myriad of complexities that this project involved, but also demonstrated a wonderful balance of professionalism blended with a hip, e-mail-savvy communication style with some of the most prominent leaders in the humanitarian space. This is an incredible feat by an incredible person—tip-o-the-hat to you, Skully. And I would also like to particularly thank Myron Panchuk, who served as a fantastic resource and intellect to this project. I owe you my friend. It was my mother who modeled rather than lectured about the importance of helping others. She provided me with an inspiring example that I can only hope to be able to mimic for my children. Thanks, Mom.

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The support of my wife, Karen, is always invaluable, whether I am writing or not; and she was especially helpful in her ever-sharp review of many of the first drafts of what now appear herein, as well as tolerating my innumerable, longwinded, overly animated discourses about so many of the incredible stories and works of those profiled. Both of my children, Grayson and Annika, were valued partners in the early production steps of helping me stay organized with the chapters and whatnots of such a project. They were willing and able freelancers who could perforate pages as well as offer critique on some of my more complicated sentence-structuring problems. I thank and love you all. Chris E. Stout Kildeer, IL

Care to do more yourself? Please do! Here’s how . . . 1. Visit CenterForGlobalInitiatives.org for more information on projects you can be a part of. If you don’t see something you think you can help with, e-mail me at [email protected] and I may be able to connect you to another organization that can help, or we may be able to initiate work. 2. Consider suggesting The New Humanitarians to others and start a viral buzz! Think of all your contacts who may be interested in this book. If you go to www.Praeger.com and search for “The New Humanitarians” you can print a downloadable flyer for the book to give to interested others. You can also email the Praeger link to interested others as well as the CenterForGlobalInitiatives.org. 3. Inquire if your local or university library has The New Humanitarians in its collection, or on order. If you recommend it to them, they may add it and others can read it as well. 4. Request a presentation at your local college, university, public library, high school, church, mosque, synagogue, book seller, coffee shop, service organization (Rotary, Lyons, etc.), or book club by e-mailing a request to [email protected] or by calling 847.550.0092, ext. 2. 5. Request an interview by a broadcast, cable, or Internet television program, radio, newspaper, or magazine reporter. Media kits are also available by request to [email protected] or by calling 847.550.0092, ext. 2.

Introduction Chris E. Stout

Welcome to a trip around the world. You will travel to six continents, led by men and women of various ages and backgrounds. Be warned: you may go to some fairly desperate places, but they all have a seed of hope. You will not be traveling as a tourist, but rather as an activist with more than three dozen organizations— each one incredible. Each chapter is a story, a story of need, of response, and of accomplishment. They are all at once different, but yet the same as being an inspirational account demonstrating the power of the individual triumphant over the challenges of poverty, illness, conflict, or a litany of injustices. My friend, Jonathan Granoff, President of the Global Security Institute, said of the project that it is a counter to the pervasive “pornography of the trivial” that infects much of what is in print these days. I suspect he is correct. As a sad postscript but powerful testament to the seriousness of the work done by those profiled herein, a few days prior to this manuscript being sent in to the publisher, I was speaking with a representative with Médecins Sans Frontières who told me that three of their staff had been killed in a conflict zone in northwest Africa. My heart sunk on this news. Although I know such things happen—and with much more frequency than I usually let myself believe—I was more honored to get the stories of these heroic organizations out to a broader audience. In these three volumes, readers will learn about individuals who have created organizations that: • • • • •

Break up human trafficking rings and teach citizens how to intervene in other injustices Go to conflict areas and put themselves at risk to end the conflict Help ensure elections are just Go to active war zones to administer emergency medical care Provide training and loans in order to empower people out of poverty

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• • • • • • • • • • • •

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Create a new language and then put it to use in developing education and job training programs Work to stop nuclear war and curb the development of weapons of mass destruction Create an ingenious for-profit organization that supports the not-for-profit work Solve a problem of medical supply shortages in the developing world while also alleviating medical waste problems in the developed world Export social services training into self-sustaining programs Create project-based trainings in order to increase capacity for global projects Treat immigrant and refugee survivors of torture in a culturally competent manner that is encompassing and holistic Help boys conscripted into being child soldiers adapt to a normal life Create the first not-for-profit pharmaceutical company to help in the battle of neglected diseases Advance education for girls where it is almost unheard of Integrate urban environmental design with democracy, civic participation, and social justice Bring the philosophy of “it takes a village to raise a child” to formative elementary school years, blend cultural heritage, and inspire students by mobilizing parents, teachers, and young adults Connect experts from a range of fields to work together on problems such as curing and preventing infectious and epidemic diseases, analyzing the risks of science and technology breakthroughs, and designing enforceable global health and environmental policies

CONTEXT FOR THE PROJECT In developing my own nascent organization, the Center for Global Initiatives (profiled herein), I came to realize that there are many successful, groundbreaking models that already exist worldwide, but there really isn’t a blueprint or a how-to on the subject. Although this is most likely due to the uniqueness of the organizations and their leadership examined herein, as well as their idiosyncratic approach to conducting their work, it is my hope that these volumes will provide readers a unique behind-the-scenes glimpse of the organizations and offer incredibly valuable insights, present insider experiences, and give advice that few would ever have access to from one organization, let alone from more than forty of the best-of-the-best. I went about the selection process via the people I know. I met some in Davos at annual meetings of the World Economic Forum, or perhaps at a TED conference (back when Richard Saul Wurman still orchestrated them), or a Renaissance Weekend, or by being a co-nominee in the Fast Company Fast-50, or goodness knows where. I did not apply any scientific methods or algorithms to seek out the

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most cost-efficient organizations, those with the most stars on Charity Navigator, or those listed in a Forbes table. I was totally subjective and biased. I left my scientific method in the lab because I have been fortunate to have worked with some of the most innovative humanitarian organizations in the world, or to have collaborated with their incredibly talented founders/directors. In fact, it is my experiences with these extraordinary people that led to my idea for this book project. There are many wonderful, long-standing organizations that do important work, but I found that many of the organizations I was working with were newer and, honestly, a bit more edgy. Many have more skin-in-the-game. These founders were on the ground and doing the work themselves, not remotely administrating from a comfortable office miles or a continent away. But don’t let my capricious favoritism prevent you from researching the many, many other fantastic organizations that exist throughout the world. In fact, I hope this book may cause you to do exactly that. (I suppose I could have tried to get a book deal to compile the Encyclopedia of New Humanitarians, but I will leave that to someone with way more spunk than I.) Though many of us are content in helping various causes by writing checks of support or perhaps even volunteering, the individuals profiled herein preferred to actually start their own organizations—to enact their passionate interests. So therein was the idea that crystallized the concept for this New Humanitarians project. I wanted to find out what makes these new humanitarians tick and how their brainchildren worked. Now, through this three-volume set, readers can, too. From Braille Without Borders and Witness, to Geekcorps and ACCION, humanitarian groups are working worldwide largely in undeveloped countries to better people’s lives. Whether they are empowering people with schools for the blind, intervening in human trafficking, giving the underserved access to technology, or helping individuals work out of poverty, the men and women of these innovative organizations offer their tremendous talent to their causes, along with great dedication and, sometimes, even personal risk to complete their missions. The work of these groups is remarkable. And so, too, are the stories of how they developed—including the defining moments when their founders felt they had to take action. This project features a sampling of humanitarian groups across various areas: medicine, education, sustainable development, and social justice. These new humanitarians have been very successful with on-the-ground guerilla innovations without a lot of bureaucracy or baloney. They are rebels with a cause whose actions speak louder than words. They have all felt a moral duty to serve as vectors of change. I did not want to be the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Changing the World or Humanitarian Aid for Dummies, but I did want to canvass the organizations whose founders I know personally and have had firsthand experiences with, as well as showcase others who are recognized pioneers, and have them describe in their own words where they gained their original idea, or what the tipping point was that so moved them to create their own organizations. I hope readers

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may gain not only inspiration, but also actionable approaches that are based on the real-world experiences of those profiled if they, too, care to take action. Many of those appearing herein already hold world renown, so I hope this project will give readers the chance to learn the answers to questions rarely answered publicly, such as “How did you first get funding? Did you have false starts or failures? How creatively do you approach opportunities and obstacles—be they organizational or political? How do you create original solutions? What would you do differently today or what do you know now that you wish you knew then?”

COMMON DENOMINATORS Even though the approaches of all these organizations are different, they do share a number of commonalities. At the time they formed their entities, each organization was novel in its approach to dealing with the problems it was addressing. The organizations were not restricted by past ways of thinking or acting. They created innovative approaches to produce something that was real and actionable from a concept and a vision. They developed practical approaches to solutions, some complex, some elegant, all robust and lasting. They were provocative. They were unhappy or unsatisfied with approaches others were using, and decided: if you can’t join ’em, beat ’em. And they did just that—they cleared their own trails to sustainability for their organizations for the benefit of others. They also either have a global reach or are at least not bound to the North or the West. These are “young” organizations with an average organizational age of fifteen years, with the majority being founded ten or fewer years ago. Thus, they are new enough to demonstrate generalizable methods to help readers in their own development of their work, while demonstrating sustainability and viability of their model and approach. Simply put, it is my goal to have this set of books demonstrate how these organizations make a difference. Each of them has taken an approach to their life and work by living like they mean it. While there is the essence of the power of one, it is one for all. The organizations profiled in this three-volume book set differ in many other ways as well. Some have been recognized with many awards and accolades (MacArthur “Genius” Award recipients, fellows of institutes or think tanks, etc.), whereas others are newer or have such a low profile or are so remote as to not be picked up by any radar. I like that diversity. Some have incredible budgets and others almost none, but they all do amazing things with what they have. And with the increased exposure gained from being in this book set, they may be able to gain more people’s awareness. For example, Braille Without Borders is an organization created in 1998 by Sabriye Tenberken and Paul Kronenberg when they left Europe to establish the Rehabilitation and Training Centre for the Blind, a preparatory school for elementaryschool children in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). Before the center was

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opened, blind children there did not have access to education. These children were stigmatized outcasts who held little hope for integration or much of a future. Although there are many governmental and nongovernmental organizations that have set up eye clinics for surgery or eyeglasses, there is a large group of blind people that cannot be helped by these clinics. The center was created for them. If this wasn’t challenge enough, those in the TAR had no written form of communication. There was no Tibetan version of what many blind individuals use to read, known as Braille (invented in 1821 by Frenchman Louis Braille). So, of course, Sabriye invented a Tibetan script, or Braille if you will, for the blind. This script combines the principles of the Braille system with the special features of the Tibetan syllable-based script. Impoverished countries worldwide account for nearly 6 million preschool and school-age children who are blind, and 90–95 percent of them have no access to education. Braille Without Borders wants to empower blind people in such countries so they can set up projects and schools for other blind people. In this way the concept can be spread across the globe so that more blind and visually impaired people have access to education and a better future. It is people like Sabriye Tenberken and Paul Kronenberg and all of those herein who are taking the kind of action that William Easterly pines for in The White Man’s Burden—they are interested in results and they deliver. They offer smallscale results that make a large-scale impact.

STRUCTURE Readers will find that some of the chapters are authored by the founder or current leader of the organization profiled. Other chapters are the result of an interview. I wanted this book to be thematic and structured, but I also wanted to provide a wide berth for every organization to best tell its story. Thus, for some it is literally in their own voice, first-person. In other instances interviews were conducted and a story unfolds as told by the founder or current leader, the de facto coauthor. I had established a set of standard questions that could be used as a guide, but not as a strict rule-set. I told every organization’s leader that he or she could follow them or ignore them, or to choose whatever was appropriate. I was very pleased with the result. That is, most chapters cover similar thematic aspects— how they started, how they manage, and so forth. But I think I have been able to steer clear of the chapters looking like cookie-cutter templates with simply different content sprinkled in the right spots here and there. It was my hope to create a set of guidebooks, not cookbooks, and I hope you as a reader will enjoy a similarity between chapters in their construction, but great variability in their voice and creation. I asked authors to sketch the background on their centers or organizations, when they started, canvass their history to current day, provide a description of their

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model, indicate how large they are, what type of corporate structure (non-for-profit, university based, etc.) they have, what metrics they use to track productivity or how they measure success, and biographical information about the founder. I also had a set of curiosities myself: Where did the idea came from? What was the inspiration/motivation for the starting the organization? Was there “that one incident” (or the first, or the many events) that so moved the founder to no longer “do nothing” and take action. I felt that reading about specific cases or vignettes of groups or individuals who were helped would give a finer grain as to outcomes and impacts of such organizations. But I also wanted to learn how these organizations defined success. I think readers will be not only pleased, but inspired. I hope that readers will have their own passions sparked and have their desire to know (and perhaps, to do) more increased. Organizing the chapters was a bit of a challenge. As you will see, there is much overlap between their activities, and many somewhat defy an easy categorization (which I like, actually), so I did the best I could to make what I hope readers will consider to be reasonable groupings. Or, perhaps this will at least cause readers to look at all three volumes! And now, it is with great pleasure (and awe) that I introduce the new humanitarians. VOLUME 1: CHANGING GLOBAL HEALTH INEQUITIES Médecins Sans Frontières/Founded in 1971 I was in Geneva when I first met Doris Schopper, a physician who was involved in the founding of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), and she was an incredible person filled with energy and stories. As readers will find, this chapter provides a frank and transparent description of the chaos involved in the nascent years of MSF—quite the shift to the Nobel Prize–winning organization and operation of today. Médecins Sans Frontières is an independent humanitarian medical aid agency committed to two objectives: providing medical aid wherever needed, regardless of race, religion, politics, or sex, and raising awareness of the plight of people it helps. Unite For Sight/Founded in 2000 If you ever want to feel inadequate, just look up Jennifer Staple. While most of us were struggling to get through undergraduate school, Jennifer, while at Yale, formed what has become an award-winning global enterprise doing incredible work. The organization’s model serves as an inspiration regarding the power of making and acting upon connections. Unite For Sight implements vision screening and education programs in North America and in developing countries. In North America, patients are connected with free health coverage programs so that they can receive an eye exam by a doctor. In Africa and Asia, Unite For Sight volunteers work with partner eye clinics to implement screening and free surgery programs.

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Scojo Foundation/Founded in 2001 In the small world of global efforts, I read a piece by Jordan Kassalow, OD, MPH, and I called him while he was at the Global Health Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, serving as an adjunct senior fellow. We had a wonderful conversation, and I have referenced his keen points on the deadly reciprocity of illness and warfare in subsequent talks I have given. He and Scott Berrie went on to found the Scojo Foundation. Their mission is to reduce poverty and generate opportunity through the sale of affordable eyeglasses and complementary products. Scojo Vision Entrepreneurs are low-income men and women living in rural villages who are trained to conduct vision screenings within their communities, sell affordable reading glasses, and refer those who require advanced eye care to reputable clinics. Sustainable Sciences Institute/Founded in 1998 I tell people that Eva Harris, PhD, could make a lab out of a Jeep and that she is the spiritual cousin of MacGyver. I have read her seminal book, A Low-Cost Approach to PCR, and though not a biologist, I was astounded. We first spoke on the phone some years ago about the possibility of collaborating on a project together, and my astonishment continued. She developed the Sustainable Sciences Institute (SSI) and holds a mission to develop scientific research capacity in areas with pressing public health problems. To that end, SSI helps local biomedical scientists gain access to training, funding, information, equipment, and supplies, so that they can better meet the public health needs of their communities. Institute for OneWorld Health/Founded in 2000 I first spoke to Victoria Hale, PhD, after she and her attorneys had been meeting with Internal Revenue Service attorneys to convince them that the Institute for OneWorld Health was indeed a NOT-for-profit pharmaceutical company. We were looking to collaborate on a pharmacogenomic project in which my Center would do the “R” of R&D and she would work on the “D,” or development. We first met face-to-face in Geneva at the World Economic Forum headquarters. Today, the Institute for OneWorld Health develops safe, effective, and affordable new medicines for people with infectious diseases in the developing world. Jamkhed (aka Comprehensive Rural Health Project—CRHP)/Founded in 1970 Shobha Arole, MD, came looking for me in Davos at a World Economic Forum Annual Meeting. I will never forget that, in our conversation, I presumed she needed help with getting some doctors to Jamkhed, but she quickly, and ever so kindly, told me that she was in the market for students so she could help train

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them before they developed their bad habits. And she and her father, Raj Arole, MD, are doing so, and quite successfully. Their Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP) was started to provide healthcare to rural communities, keeping in mind the realities described above. It developed a comprehensive, community-based primary healthcare (CBPHC) approach. CRHP is located at Jamkhed, which is far away from a major city and is typically rural, drought-prone, and poverty stricken. One of the main aims of the project is to reach the poorest and most marginalized and to improve their health. In reality, perhaps not everyone in the world will be able to have equal healthcare. However, it is possible to make sure that all people have access to necessary and relevant healthcare. This concept is known as equity, and it is an important principle of CRHP. Health is not only absence of disease; it also includes social, economic, spiritual, physical, and mental well-being. With this comprehensive understanding of health, the project focuses on improving the socioeconomic well-being of the people as well as other aspects of health. Health does not exist in isolation: it is greatly related to education, environment, sanitation, socioeconomic status, and agriculture. Therefore, improvement in these areas by the communities in turn improves the health of the people. Healthcare includes promotive, preventive, curative, and rehabilitative aspects. These areas of integration bring about effective healthcare. International Center for Equal Healthcare Access/Founded in 2001 I met Marie Charles, MD, MIA, in Quebec City at a Renaissance Weekend. I listened to her presentation on her Center’s work, and I knew I had found a kindred spirit. In fact, at the time of this writing, it is looking promising that we will be working collaboratively together in Cambodia. Marie founded the International Center for Equal Healthcare Access (ICEHA), which is a truly remarkable nonprofit organization of 650+ volunteer physicians and nurses who transfer their medical expertise in HIV and infectious diseases (>7,000 aggregate manyears of human capital) to colleagues in more than twelve countries in the developing world. Rather than perpetuating a continued dependence on Western charity, this creates a sustainable system that allows these countries to provide healthcare to their own patients at the highest possible standards and yet within the existing resource limitations. As an interesting but crucially important sidenote, the recipient developing countries themselves shoulder the major share of the program implementation costs, giving them a true sense of proprietary pride, value, and ownership as opposed to “receiving charity.” ICEHA turns the paradigm of international development on its head. Flying Doctors of America/Founded in 1990 Allan Gathercoal, DDiv, and I have been through a lot together—stuck in Nairobi, stuck in Burundi, bribing airport officials with lighters in Hanoi to bring medicines in, working in Bolivian prisons together; and, most recently, we met in

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Cambodia. Allan is the founder of Flying Doctors of America, and his organization runs short-term medical/dental missions to the rural regions of Third World countries. Marjorie Kovler Center of Heartland Alliance/Founded 1987 I’d speculate that Mary Fabri, PsyD, spends more time some years in Rwanda than in Chicago. She goes to where the needs are, and when in Chicago, the needs are at the Marjorie Kovler Center, where she is director and one of the clinical co-founders. The Kovler Center provides comprehensive, community-based services in which survivors work together with staff and volunteers to identify needs and overcome obstacles to healing. Services include Mental Health (individual or group psychotherapy, counseling, psychiatric services, and a range of culturally appropriate services on-site in the community), Health Care (primary healthcare and specialized medical treatment by medical professionals specifically trained to work with torture survivors), Case Management (access to community resources, including tutoring, ESL, food, transportation, special events), Interpretation and Translation (bridging cultural and linguistic barriers in medical, mental health, and community settings), and Legal Referral (referral and collaboration with immigration attorneys and organizations). International Center on Responses to Catastrophes/Founded in 2002 Stevan Weine, MD, is a renaissance kind of guy. He can gain impressive NIH grants and awards while also writing about Alan Ginsberg and Bruce Springsteen (and take time to coauthor and present with me as well). I have had the pleasure of traveling to all sorts of places with Steve and meeting a fascinating group of activists, scientists, and intellectuals, all the while listening to some great music. He is a mentor, a role model, and a good friend. He also is the founder of the Center at the University of Illinois–Chicago, whose primary mission is to promote multidisciplinary research and scholarship that contributes to improved helping efforts for those affected by catastrophes. International Trauma Studies Program/Founded in 1997 It was Stevan Weine who introduced me to Jack Saul, PhD, and took me to visit Jack’s International Trauma Studies Program (ITSP), now at Columbia University. Jack’s perspective is that recent natural and human-made catastrophes have highlighted the need for a multidisciplinary approach to the study, treatment, and prevention of trauma-related suffering. So, at New York University in 1997, he founded the original program. It is now a training and research program at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. The program has been enriched by the participation of a diverse student body, ranging from mental health professionals, healthcare providers, attorneys, and human rights advocates,

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to journalists and media professionals, academicians, oral historians, and artists. Students and professionals are given the opportunity to develop and share innovative approaches to address the psychosocial needs of trauma survivors, their families, and communities. ITSP offers a dynamic combination of academic studies, research, and practical experience working with trauma survivors in New York City, the United States, and abroad. Center for Health, Intervention, and Prevention @UConn/Founded in 2002 Jeff Fisher, PhD, invited me to his Center at UConn, and I had the flu. I would not have missed such an opportunity for the world. You see, the University of Connecticut Psychology Department’s Center for Health, Intervention, and Prevention (CHIP) creates new scientific knowledge in the areas of health behavior, health behavior change, and health risk prevention and intervention. CHIP provides theory-based health behavior and health behavior change expertise and services at the international, national, state, university, and community levels. REMEDY/Founded in 1991 REMEDY, Recovered Medical Equipment for the Developing World, is a nonprofit organization committed to teaching and promoting the recovery of surplus operating-room supplies. Proven recovery protocols were designed to be quickly adapted to the everyday operating room or critical care routine. As of June 2006, the REMEDY at Yale program alone had donated more than 50 tons of medical supplies! It is estimated that at least $200 million worth of supplies could be recovered from U.S. hospitals each year, resulting in an increase of 50 percent of the medical aid sent from the United States to the developing world. Center for Global Initiatives/Founded in 2004 The Center for Global Initiatives (CGI) is my baby. It is the first Center devoted to training multidisciplinary healthcare professionals and students to bring services that are integrated, sustainable, resiliency based, and that have publicly accountable outcomes to areas of need, worldwide, via multiple, small, context-specific collaboratives that integrate primary care, behavioral healthcare, systems development, public health, and social justice. The word “global” is not used herein as a synonym for overseas or international, but rather local as well as transnational disparities and inequities of health risk and illness outcomes. The Center seeks to eschew the many disconnects between separation of body/mind, physical/mental, individual/community, and to offer a synthetic model of integration. CGI’s philosophy and approach is always that of a collaborator and colleague. No West-Knows-Best hubris. Perhaps the most important aspects of the Center for Global Initiatives are the simplest: it serves as an incubator and

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hothouse for new projects; it helps to nurture, grow, and launch those projects as self-sustaining, ongoing interests; and after a project has taken hold, it serves as pro bono consultant to help those now managing the work with whatever they may need—materials, medicines, case consultation. About 90 percent of all CGI’s projects have come about as a result of being invited to do the work. As best can be done, depending on the project, CGI seeks to blend primary care, behavioral health, and public health into an ultimately self-sustaining, outcomes-accountable, culturally consonant result.

VOLUME 2: CHANGING EDUCATION AND RELIEF Braille Without Borders/Founded in 1997 Sabriye, Paul, and I used to joke about how we were likely the poorest attendees in Davos at the World Economic Forum. And in spite of our modest bank balances, I can tell you that they were two of the most powerful of the movers and shakers there. Braille Without Borders wants to empower blind people in these countries so they themselves can set up projects and schools for other blind people. In this way the concept can be spread across the globe so other blind and visually impaired people have access to education and a better future. Room to Read/Founded in 2000 I heard John Wood talk about his post-Microsoft adventure of founding Room to Read. His brainchild partners with local communities throughout the developing world to establish schools, libraries, and other educational infrastructure. They seek to intervene early in the lives of children in the belief that education is a lifelong gift that empowers people to ultimately improve socioeconomic conditions for their families, communities, countries, and future generations. Through the opportunities that only an education can provide, they strive to break the cycle of poverty, one child at a time. Since its inception, Room to Read has impacted the lives of over 1.3 million children by constructing 287 schools, establishing over 3,870 libraries, publishing 146 new local language children’s titles representing more than 1.3 million books, donating more than 1.4 million English language children’s books, funding 3,448 long-term girls’ scholarships, and establishing 136 computer and language labs. Global Village Engineers/Founded in 1992 Chris Shimkus is a good guy and a good friend with whom I first connected in Geneva at the WEF Headquarters. He took one of those proverbial leaps of faith and left his “day job” to devote himself to the work of Global Village Engineers (GVE). GVE is a volunteer corps of professional engineers supporting the local capacity of rural communities in developing countries to influence public

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infrastructure and environmental protection. Its engineers choose to volunteer their skills to ensure the livelihood of these communities by building long-term local capacity, especially in situations of disaster prevention and rehabilitation and the need for environmental protection. They believe that infrastructure will best serve communities when they have the capacity to become involved from project inception through construction. Governments and project sponsors often do not invest in communicating basic facts to the community about design, construction, and maintenance. The mission of Global Village Engineers is to find these facts and develop the local capacity to understand such facts. Common Bond Institute/Founded in 1995 I first met Steve Olweean, PhD, in an airport in Oslo—or was it Helsinki? We were on our way to St. Petersburg to the conference he founded. That conference was a lightning rod of connections with people I continue to work with around the world, from Sri Lanka to Tel Aviv, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg of what Steve does. He founded the Common Bond Institute (CBI), which is a U.S.-based NGO that grew out of the Association for Humanistic Psychology’s International (Soviet-American) Professional Exchange. The Professional Exchange was initiated in 1982 as one of the first Soviet-American nongovernmental human service exchanges. CBI organizes and sponsors conferences, professional training programs, relief efforts, and professional exchanges internationally, and it actively provides networking and coordination support to assist newly emerging human service and civil society organizations in developing countries. Its mission is cultivating the fundamental elements of a consciousness of peace and local capacity building, which are seen as natural, effective antidotes to small-group radical extremism and large-group despair, as well as to hardship and suffering in the human condition. To this end, enabling each society to effectively resolve and transform conflicts, satisfy core human needs within their communities, and construct effective, holistic mechanisms for self-determination, self-esteem, and fundamental human dignity and worth is the purpose of their work. SWEEP/Founded in 2004 The Jane Addams College of Social Work, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Addis Ababa University (AAU), The Council of International Programs USA (CIPUSA), and a network of nonprofit agencies are engaged in an exciting effort to develop the first-ever master’s degree in social work in Ethiopia, through a project known as the Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership, or SWEEP. The undergraduate social work program at AAU was closed in 1976, when a military regime ruled the country. Now, with a democratic government in place since the early 1990s, the SWEEP project is working in collaboration with AAU’s new School of Social Work and nongovernmental agencies in Ethiopia to develop social work education and practice.

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CUP/Founded in 1997 The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) makes educational projects about places and how they change. Its projects bring together art and design professionals— artists, graphic designers, architects, urban planners—with community-based advocates and researchers—organizers, government officials, academics, service providers and policymakers. These partners work with CUP staff to create projects ranging from high-school curricula to educational exhibitions. Their work grows from a belief that the power of imagination is central to the practice of democracy, and that the work of governing must engage the dreams and visions of citizens. CUP believes in the legibility of the world around us. It is the CUP philosophy that, by learning how to investigate, we train ourselves to change what we see. Endeavor/Founded in 1997 Linda Rottenberg, who co-founded Endeavor, is a Roman candle of energy, enthusiasm, and brainpower. I met her through the World Economic Forum as a Global Leader of Tomorrow. She is amazing at delivering on what’s needed in creatively intelligent ways. Endeavor targets emerging-market countries transitioning from international aid to international investment. Endeavor then seeks out local partners to build country boards and benefactors to launch local Endeavor affiliates. ACCION/Founded in 1961 ACCION International is a private, nonprofit organization with the mission of giving people the financial tools they need—micro enterprise loans, business training, and other financial services—to work their way out of poverty. A world pioneer in microfinance, ACCION was founded in 1961 and issued its first microloan in 1973 in Brazil. ACCION International’s partner microfinance institutions today are providing loans as low as $100 to poor men and women entrepreneurs in twenty-five countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in the United States. Invisible Conflicts/Dwon Madiki Partnership/Founded in 2006 I just met Evan Ledyard at a talk I gave at Loyola University in Chicago, and he introduced me to the work he has done with an incredible group of students. Invisible Conflicts is a student organization that sponsors the education, mentorship, and empowerment of twenty Ugandan orphans and vulnerable children. A twenty-one-year civil war in northern Uganda, between the government and a rebel faction called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), has led to the forced displacement of over 1.7 million people into internal refugee camps. To support their rebellion, the LRA abducted more than 30,000 Ugandan children, forcing them to be sex slaves and to fight as child soldiers. Because of these atrocities, all

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of the DMP-sponsored children live in squalid conditions in and around the many displacement camps. Because life around these camps is marked by poverty, hunger, and little or no access to education, an entire generation of children find themselves denied a childhood and a chance to succeed in life. BELL/Founded in 1992 Building Educated Leaders for Life, or BELL, recognizes that the pathway to opportunity for children lies in education. BELL transforms children into scholars and leaders through the delivery of nationally recognized, high-impact after-school and summer educational programs. By helping children achieve academic and social proficiency during their formative elementary-school years and embrace their rich cultural heritage, BELL is inspiring the next generation of great teachers, doctors, lawyers, artists, and community leaders. By mobilizing parents, teachers, and young adults, BELL is living the idea that “it takes a village to raise a child.” Hybrid Vigor Institute/Founded in 2000 I first met Denise Caruso at a TED Conference. She was just stepping down from her position as technology columnist at the New York Times, just before the tech bubble burst. Smart gal. I was immediately smitten by her intellect, and in subsequent emails and conversations, she agreed to help me in the pondering of my nascent ideas for my Center as she was building her Institute in the form of Hybrid Vigor. The Hybrid Vigor Institute is focused on three ambitious goals: (1) to make a significant contribution toward solving some of today’s most intractable problems in the areas of health, the environment, and human potential, both by producing innovative knowledge and by developing processes for sharing expertise; (2) to develop new methods and tools for research and analysis that respect and use appropriately both the quantitative methods of the natural sciences and the subjective inquiries of the social and political sciences, arts, and humanities, and to establish metrics and best practices for these new methods of collaboration and knowledge sharing; (3) to deploy cutting-edge collaboration, information extraction, and knowledge management technologies, so that working researchers from any discipline may easily acquire and share relevant work and information about their areas of interest. Our Voices Together/Founded in 2005 Marianne Scott and I had a wonderful conversation one Sunday night that I will never forget. Without repeating it, I do want to say I was touched by her humanity in a very powerful and lasting way, and I knew then that she needed to be represented in this project. Our Voices Together holds a vision of a world in which the appeal of lives lived in dignity, opportunity, and safety triumphs over the allure of extremism and its terrorist tactics. The people of this organization see

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a future where terrorist tactics are not condoned by any community worldwide. They understand that to achieve this, trust must be built on mutual trust and respect around the globe. They recognize the vast potential in engaging the United States in diplomacy by connecting communities. To this end, they promote the vital role of people-to-people efforts to help build better, safer lives and futures around the world. Geekcorps/Founded in 1999 Ethan Zuckerman has a wicked sense of humor, and he is not afraid to use it. I last saw Ethan in Madrid at an anti-terrorism conference, and we spoke of wikis as a solution to a puzzle I was working on about Amazonian medical services. How obvious. Ethan is the founder of Geekcorps, which has evolved into the IESC Geekcorps, which is an international 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that promotes stability and prosperity in the developing world through information and communication technology (ICT). Geekcorps’ international technology experts teach communities how to be digitally independent: able to create and expand private enterprise with innovative, appropriate, and affordable information and communication technologies. To increase the capacity of small and medium-sized business, local government, and supporting organizations to be more profitable and efficient using technology, Geekcorps draws on a database of more than 3,500 technical experts willing to share their talents and experience in developing nations.

VOLUME 3: CHANGING SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Witness/Founded in 1992 I first saw some of the work of Witness at the Contemporary Museum of Art in Chicago, and I was quite disturbed and moved by the images I saw— which was the point. I then contacted Gillian Caldwell of Witness about this book project, and I got the distinct impression that she wondered “who is this guy, and is he on the level?” So, with some emails back and forth, and the good timing of the WEF Annual Meeting, where she happened to be going, I gained some street cred with her as I’d been an invited faculty, gone to Davos a number of years, and knew Klaus Schwab, who had also written the foreword for one of my other books. Then she let me into the tent, and I am very glad she did. Witness does incredible work by using video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. It empowers people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change. It envisions a just and equitable world where all individuals and communities are able to defend and uphold human rights.

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The Community Relations Council/Founded in 1986 I worked on a three-volume book set (The Psychology of Resolving Global Conflicts: From War to Peace, Praeger, 2005) with Mari Fitzduff, PhD, and I had no idea of the violence she was exposed to in Belfast as a child growing up there. Now it makes perfect sense as to her development of the Community Relations Council. Its aim is to assist the people of Northern Ireland to recognize and counter the effects of communal division. The Community Relations Council originated as a proposal of a research report commissioned by the NI Standing Advisory Committee on Human Rights. The Community Relations Council was set up to promote better community relations between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland and, equally, to promote recognition of cultural diversity. Its strategic aim is to promote a peaceful and fair society based on reconciliation and mutual trust. It does so by providing support (finance, training, advice, information) for local groups and organizations; developing opportunities for cross-community understanding; increasing public awareness of community relations work; and encouraging constructive debate throughout Northern Ireland. Amnesty International/Founded in 1961 Amnesty International’s (AI’s) vision is of a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards. In pursuit of this vision, AI’s mission is to undertake research and action focused on preventing and ending grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity, freedom of conscience and expression, and freedom from discrimination, within the context of its work to promote all human rights. AI has a varied network of members and supporters around the world. At the latest count, there were more than 1.8 million members, supporters, and subscribers in over 150 countries and territories in every region of the world. Although they come from many different backgrounds and have widely different political and religious beliefs, they are united by a determination to work for a world where everyone enjoys human rights. PeaceWorks Foundation and OneVoice/Founded in 2002 Daniel Lubetzky is one of those incredible people who turn on a room when they enter it. He does so not with bravado and brashness, but rather with a quiet power that captures those around him. He is a compelling person with a compelling mission. He founded OneVoice with the aim to amplify the voice of the overwhelming but heretofore silent majority of Israelis and Palestinians who wish to end the conflict. Since its inception, OneVoice has empowered ordinary citizens to demand accountability from elected representatives and ensure that the political agenda is not hijacked by extremists. OneVoice works to reframe the conflict by transcending the “left vs. right” and “Israeli vs. Palestinian”

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paradigms and by demonstrating that the moderate majority can prevail over the extremist minority. Although the needs and concerns of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples are different—Israelis wish to end terror and the existential threat to Israel; Palestinians wish to end the occupation and achieve an independent Palestinian state—the vast majority on each side agree that these goals are achievable only by reaching a two-state solution. OneVoice is unique in that it has independent Israeli and Palestinian offices appealing to the national interests of their own sides with credentials enabling them to unite people across the religious and political spectrum. It recognizes the essential work many other groups do in the field of dialogue and understanding, but OneVoice is action oriented and advocacy driven. It is about the process and demanding accountability from its members and from political leaders. A peace agreement, no matter how comprehensive, will be ineffective without populations ready to support it. The focus is on giving citizens a voice and a direct role in conflict resolution. Nonviolent Peaceforce/Founded in 1998 Nonviolent Peaceforce is a federation of more than ninety member organizations from around the world. In partnership with local groups, unarmed Nonviolent Peaceforce Field Team members apply proven strategies to protect human rights, deter violence, and help create space for local peacemakers to carry out their work. The mission of the Nonviolent Peaceforce is to build a trained, international civilian peaceforce committed to third-party nonviolent intervention. Peace Brigades/Founded in 1981 Peace Brigades International (PBI) is an NGO that protects human rights and promotes nonviolent transformation of conflicts. When invited, it sends teams of volunteers into areas of repression and conflict. The volunteers accompany human rights defenders, their organizations, and others threatened by political violence. Perpetrators of human rights abuses usually do not want the world to witness their actions. The presence of volunteers backed by a support network helps to deter violence. They create space for local activists to work for social justice and human rights. Witness for Peace/Founded in 1983 Witness for Peace (WFP) is a politically independent, nationwide grassroots organization of people committed to nonviolence and led by faith and conscience. WFP’s mission is to support peace, justice, and sustainable economies in the Americas by changing U.S. policies and corporate practices that contribute to poverty and oppression in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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Southern Poverty Law Center/Founded in 1971 Throughout its history, the Center has worked to make the nation’s Constitutional ideals a reality. The Center’s legal department fights all forms of discrimination and works to protect society’s most vulnerable members, handling innovative cases that few lawyers are willing to take. Over three decades, it has achieved significant legal victories, including landmark Supreme Court decisions and crushing jury verdicts against hate groups. Human Rights Campaign/Founded in 1980 After having served as a federal advocacy coordinator on the Hill for the American Psychological Association for twelve years, and at the state level even longer, I have come to know and very much appreciate the twists and turns of law making and the body politic. I have also come to know and respect the impressive work of those in the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). They have evolved from battling stigma to being a political force to contend with—no easy task in the Beltway or on Main Street USA. The Human Rights Campaign is America’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) equality. By inspiring and engaging all Americans, HRC strives to end discrimination against GLBT citizens and realize a nation that achieves fundamental fairness and equality for all. HRC seeks to improve the lives of GLBT Americans by advocating for equal rights and benefits in the workplace, ensuring that families are treated equally under the law, and increasing public support among all Americans through innovative advocacy, education, and outreach programs. HRC works to secure equal rights for GLBT individuals and families at the federal and state levels by lobbying elected officials, mobilizing grassroots supporters, educating Americans, investing strategically to elect fairminded officials, and partnering with other GLBT organizations. Global Security Institute/Founded in 1999 Back in the late 1990s, as a member of Psychologists for Social Responsibility and living in Chicago, I was asked to represent that organization at a meeting called Abolition 2000. The goal of that group was to have abolished nuclear weapons by 2000. I had the chance to meet its founder, the late Senator Alan Cranston, and I was smitten. That movement evolved into the organization Jonathan Granoff now leads, known as the Global Security Institute (GSI). It is dedicated to strengthening international cooperation and security based on the rule of law with a particular focus on nuclear arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament. GSI was founded by Senator Alan Cranston, whose insight that nuclear weapons are impractical, unacceptably risky, and unworthy of civilization continues to inspire GSI’s efforts to contribute to a safer world. GSI has developed an exceptional team that includes former heads of state and government, distinguished diplomats, effec-

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tive politicians, committed celebrities, religious leaders, Nobel Peace laureates, disarmament and legal experts, and concerned citizens. Search for Common Ground/Founded in 1982 I first had the pleasure of meeting Susan Marks in Davos at a breakfast meeting in which we were to co-facilitate a discussion. I could not keep up with her! She had us all enthralled with her perspectives and experiences, and I was astonished. She and her husband John started the Search for Common Ground as a vehicle to transform the way the world deals with conflict: away from adversarial approaches, toward cooperative solutions. Although the world is overly polarized and violence is much too prevalent, they remain essentially optimistic. Their view is that, on the whole, history is moving in positive directions. Although some of the conflicts currently being dealt with may seem intractable, there are successful examples of cooperative conflict resolution that can be looked to for inspiration—such as in South Africa, where an unjust system was transformed through negotiations and an inclusive peace process. Project on Justice in Times of Transition/Founded in 1992 Mari Fitzduff introduced me to Timothy Phillips in the context of working on this project, and needless to say, I was taken aback by their work. The Project on Justice in Times of Transition brings together individuals from a broad spectrum of countries to share experiences in ending conflict, building civil society, and fostering peaceful coexistence. It currently operates in affiliation with the Foundation for a Civil Society in New York and the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University. Since its creation in 1992 by co-chairs Wendy Luers and Timothy Phillips, the Project has conducted more than fifty programs for a variety of leaders throughout the world and has utilized its methodology to assist them in addressing such difficult issues as the demobilization of combatants, the status of security files, police reform, developing effective negotiating skills, political demonstrations, and preserving or constructing the tenets of democracy in a heterogeneous society. Through its innovative programming, the Project has exposed a broad cross-section of communities in transition to comparable situations elsewhere, and it has contributed to the broadening of international public discourse on transitional processes. In recent years the Project has conducted programs that have helped practitioners and political leaders strategize solutions in a variety of countries and regions, including Afghanistan, Colombia, East Timor, Guatemala, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, Palestine, and Peru. Exodus World Service/Founded in 1988 Heidi Moll was cheering my son and me on last fall in a five-kilometer run that was a fundraiser for Exodus World Service and other agencies. I first came to

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know of their refugee work via a church we used to attend, and it was remarkable. Exodus World Service transforms the lives of refugees and of volunteers. It educates local churches about refugee ministry, connects volunteers in relationship with refugee families through practical service projects, and equips leaders to speak up on behalf of refugees. The end result is that wounded hearts are healed, loneliness is replaced with companionship, and fear is transformed into hope. Exodus recruits local volunteers, equips them with information and training, and then links them directly with refugee families newly arrived in the Chicago metropolitan area. It also provides training and tools for front-line staff of other refugee service agencies. In addition, Exodus has developed several innovative programs for use by volunteers in their work with refugees. International Institute for Sustainable Development/Founded in 1990 The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) contributes to sustainable development by advancing policy recommendations on international trade and investment, economic policy, climate change, measurement and assessment, and natural resources management. By using Internet communications, it is able to report on international negotiations and broker knowledge gained through collaborative projects with global partners, resulting in more rigorous research, capacity building in developing countries, and better dialogue between North and South. IISD is in the business of promoting change toward sustainable development. Through research and through effective communication of their findings, it engages decision makers in government, business, NGOs, and other sectors to develop and implement policies that are simultaneously beneficial to the global economy, to the global environment, and to social well-being. IISD also believes fervently in the importance of building its own institutional capacity while helping its partner organizations in the developing world to excel.

LET’S GET GOING I hope you enjoy learning more about these amazing individuals and their work. I certainly have enjoyed working with them and in completing this remarkable writing project. They all have the common denominator of changing people’s lives, and isn’t that truly the way to change the world?

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From an Idea to Action: The Evolution of Médecins Sans Frontières Kevin P. Q. Phelan

Today, Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) is one of the world’s leading independent humanitarian medical aid organizations, responding to the emergency medical needs of people affected by armed conflict, natural disasters, and such medical catastrophes as malnutrition, malaria, AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), kala-azar, other neglected diseases, and epidemic outbreaks of meningitis and cholera. MSF is an association with individual sections in nineteen countries and thousands of members. Each year, MSF doctors, nurses, logisticians, water and sanitation experts, administrators, and other medical and non-medical professionals depart on more than 4,700 aid assignments in more than seventy countries. They work alongside more than 25,800 locally hired staff to provide medical care. Before December 20, 1971, though, MSF was just an idea. On that day, a group of French doctors (Xavier Emmanuelli, Marcel Delcourt, Max Recamier, Gérard Pigeon, Jean Cabrol, Jean-Michel Wild, Bernard Kouchner, Pascal GrelettyBosviel, and Jacques Beres) joined several medical journalists (Raymond Borel, Vladan Radoman, Gérard Illiouz, and Philippe Bernier) at the Paris offices of the medical journal Tonus to form the organization. Some of the doctors had worked from 1968 to 1970 in Biafra, a region of Nigeria torn apart by a brutal civil war, on behalf of the French Red Cross. Others had volunteered in 1970 to treat the victims of a tidal wave in eastern Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Independently, these groups discovered—the first during a war, the second during the aftermath of a natural disaster—the shortcomings of international aid as it was then configured. By forming MSF, this core group intended to change the way humanitarian aid was delivered by providing more medical assistance more rapidly and by being less deterred by national borders during times of crisis.1

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The New Humanitarians

Throughout the next several decades, MSF hewed close to its basic, founding ideas, but it would learn by doing and adapt to the changing international environment, struggling to refine its response to crises and exploring the place and role of humanitarian action.

MSF IN THE 1970s: ROOTS, FIRST ACTIONS, AND COMPETING VISIONS Activist Underpinnings In addition to their medical training, many of MSF’s founders were active in left-wing, anticolonial, and activist causes during France’s turbulent 1960s. Bernard Kouchner was an ex-militant from the Communist Students Union, while Xavier Emmanuelli, an anaesthetist, was a member of the French Communist Party. Later influential members also shared these political leanings, including Claude Malhuret, a fiercely left-wing student from Cochin University Hospital, known in May 1968 as the “Red college,” and Rony Brauman, a former Maoist militant from Cochin and a graduate in tropical medicine. Soon after the heavily televised revolt of May 1968, far more disturbing images were brought to the French public. For the first time, television broadcasted scenes of children dying of hunger. The southern Nigeria province of Biafra had seceded. The territory was surrounded by the Nigerian army, and the Biafrans, victims of one of the very first oil conflicts, were decimated by famine.2 Red Cross Roots3 MSF’s creation was also partly the culmination of a trend initiated ten years earlier by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), a trend that was itself a response to the work of Red Cross societies. During the early part of the twentieth century, humanitarian emergency aid was provided primarily by the Red Cross movement. But the effectiveness of its actions was compromised by slow transport facilities and cumbersome administrative and diplomatic formalities. In times of war, the ICRC intervened. Its main role was to make sure that the belligerent nations complied with the Geneva Conventions providing for the protection of and assistance to prisoners and civilians in time of war. Until the beginning of the 1960s, the Geneva-based ICRC carried out its duties without sending medical units to battle sites. It took the multiplication of civil wars in the developing world after the era of decolonization (Katanga in 1960, Yemen in 1962, Biafra in 1967) to prompt the ICRC to add medical assistance to its roster of help. These new conflicts were much harder on the civilian population than earlier wars because of food blockades, and because guerrilla and counter-guerrilla strategies caused massive flows of refugees and put large numbers of internally displaced persons in very precarious circumstances.

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The ICRC began its emergency medical efforts by sending out a few doctors, whom it hired temporarily for renewable, three-month terms. These doctors were recruited by the national Red Cross societies. During the summer of 1968, the ICRC offered the French Red Cross (FRC) the opportunity to run its own independent medical mission in Biafra. The FRC accepted readily, particularly since its acceptance enabled the French government to support the Biafra secession without too much compromise. From September 1968 until January 1970, under extremely dangerous circumstances, the FRC managed to send some fifty doctors to Biafra. For many, the conflict over Biafra meant the discovery of the “Third World,” of a little-known conflict, and of the inability of humanitarian action to solve crises of enormous proportions. The Biafran war, which ended in 1970 with the Nigerian government’s victory and the deaths of 1 million people, clearly revealed the shortcomings of the Red Cross in responding to emergencies. Speaking Out as a Defining Characteristic of MSF: The Myth and Reality of Biafra4 During the war in Biafra, some of the future founders of MSF opposed ICRC strictures in providing assistance. In return for access, particularly to the POWs who are at the heart of its mandate, the ICRC typically promises that its findings will remain confidential. Thus, ICRC personnel take a reserved public attitude toward the events they witness during an assignment. In addition, the ICRC interpreted neutrality in such a way that its intervention on any part of a country’s territory required the approval of the central authorities. This essentially placed ICRC’s aid to a break-away region such as Biafra at the mercy of the Nigerian government. Several doctors defied this prohibition by organizing a “committee against the Biafran genocide” as soon as they were back in France—less to make the public aware of the plight of the Biafran population than to denounce the political sources of this conflict, which were too often hidden by the journalistic accounts of the war. By dropping their apolitical stance, though, the French doctors gave legitimacy to the rebels’ secessionist cause. In the media, the doctors offered sensationalist accounts, speculated wildly about death tolls, and invoked the Holocaust and genocide to describe the situation. The doctors’ one-sided denunciations of the Nigerian government also led them to overlook serious rebel abuses, such as their refusal to accept aid that transited through Nigerian federal territory, which amounted to starving their own people to publicize their cause as victims. These actions unwittingly played into the hands of the rebels and their supporters, chief among them the French government, which hired a PR firm to generate publicity for the rebellion. But this new wave of doctors was haunted by the passivity of the ICRC during World War II when confronted by the Holocaust, and wanted to avoid at all costs the sense that aid organizations were abetting the ultimate crime.

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The New Humanitarians

This activity attracted a group of approximately fifty people who were persuaded that conflicts such as Biafra would happen again and needed to be anticipated. Thus, the Biafra veterans began meeting once a month to share and refresh their memories. In 1970 they organized the Groupe d’Intervention Medical et Chirurgical d’Urgence (Emergency Medical and Surgical Intervention Group, or GIMCU), in the hope of setting up an independent association specializing in providing medical emergency assistance free from the administrative and legal constraints facing the ICRC. At the same time as the conflict in Biafra, another group of doctors in France formed at the initiative of the medical journal Tonus. In 1970 Tonus’ editor, Raymond Borel, had spoken on television about the distress of tidal wave victims in eastern Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and the lack of French doctors at the site of the disaster. On November 23, 1970, he published an appeal in the columns of his journal to establish an association: Secours Medical Français (French Medical Relief, or SMF). Doctors responded to Borel’s call to action for many reasons: a bad conscience in the wake of the disturbing television images; the feeling that France, because of its history, had a duty to cooperate with decolonized countries; or simply the desire to get away from routine medicine and benign pathologies in order to practice presumably more useful medicine under more stimulating conditions. In 1971 MSF arose from a merger of GIMCU and SMF. The notion of témoignage, or speaking out, coupled with appeals to the mass media became an integral part of MSF’s concept of modern humanitarian action. Ironically, though, until 1977 MSF actually forbade its members to talk about what they had witnessed during their missions, despite an early record of opposition to the ICRC’s reserved policy. This silence was intended as a strong symbol of political neutrality as well as a strategic posture to ensure its ability to perform “border-free” operations, since it was thought that no state would accept the presence of overly garrulous doctors on its territory. Bernard Kouchner explained this as concession to the Tonus doctors.

MSF’s First Interventions5 MSF was formed as a nonprofit organization according to the 1901 French law “Associations de loi.” MSF would legally be a group of people “who have come together to act” (associés pour agir) and who would participate in the ownership of the organization. Members would essentially be former field staff, and the majority of the board, including the president, would be elected from and by the association members. MSF’s creation coincided with an era of increasing air transport, electronics, and satellites, and with the growing perception of the world as a global village. These factors made it possible to intervene increasingly rapidly at disaster sites. The instantaneous visibility of disasters and conflicts on television made it less

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Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is a private international association. The association is made up mainly of doctors and health sector workers and is also open to all other professions which might help in achieving its aims. All of its members agree to honor the following principles: Médecins Sans Frontières provides assistance to populations in distress, to victims of natural or man-made disasters, and to victims of armed conflict. They do so irrespective of race, religion, creed, or political convictions. Médecins Sans Frontières observes neutrality and impartiality in the name of universal medical ethics and the right to humanitarian assistance, and claims full and unhindered freedom in the exercise of its functions. Members undertake to respect their professional code of ethics and to maintain complete independence from all political, economic, or religious powers. As volunteers, members understand the risks and dangers of the missions they carry out, and make no claim for themselves or their assigns for any form of compensation other than that which the association might be able to afford them. Figure 1.1 MSF Charter

and less acceptable either to do nothing or to offer only a confused effort at emergency assistance. From its beginning, MSF hoped to benefit from the experience of its “Biafran” firebrands and the infrastructures (offices and secretariat) of its Tonus group. But the first steps were difficult. Between 1971 and 1976, MSF was more like a pool of doctors at the disposal of large development aid organizations than a truly independent medical emergency organization. Its budget was limited to a few hundred thousand francs, and its assignments, with a few exceptions, were not independent: in Nicaragua after the 1972 earthquake, for example, and Honduras after the 1974 hurricane, the doctors actually traveled with the French military. For lack of resources and experience, these early and limited interventions were highly ineffective. MSF remained a very small organization in the 1970s for several reasons. First, it consisted exclusively of volunteers, each of whom was employed outside MSF. In the circles of established international organizations, the MSF volunteers were considered amateurs and medical tourists. Second, MSF’s members refused to ask for charity from the public or to “sell” humanitarian services as a commercial product, a policy that was not conducive to growth. MSF flourished for the first time from 1976 to 1979. A 1976 war intervention in Lebanon in a Shi’ite neighborhood encircled by Christian militia, and a free advertising campaign offered by an advertising agency in 1977, gave MSF an

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identity as an organization that dealt with dangerous emergencies and its first public recognition. MSF was of interest not only in France but also in the United States, largely because the American press reported on the actions of the French doctors in Lebanon. Despite its interventions during a widely reported war and the fruits of an advertising campaign (including one ad proclaiming with hyperbole that there were “two billion people in our waiting room”), in 1978 there remained a large gap between the association’s reputation in France and its actual impact. And despite its strong showing in the media, the organization’s existence was more symbolic than operational: it sent out only a few dozen doctors per year. Competing Visions Lead to a Split Throughout the 1970s, many of the physicians sent out by MSF returned from their aid assignments content with the experience, but frustrated by lack of adequate means with which to treat their patients.6 Many drew broad conclusions that medical effectiveness was not at the heart of MSF’s concerns. There was constant improvisation in the way humanitarian missions were selected and carried out: for Kouchner and his allies, MSF’s strength resided in its informality, in its capacity to generate indignation and attention by carrying out symbolic missions in places that journalists and politicians could not reach. Kouchner argued that when people were dying by the hundreds, a team of doctors, however competent they may be, cannot really make a difference, and that building MSF into a structured organization would only further the illusion that they could. In 1977 Dr. Claude Malhuret, sent by MSF to work for a year with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in a Cambodian refugee camp in Thailand, returned to Paris with an experience shared by many others. Deeply critical of Kouchner, he argued that MSF needed to develop an independent structure to deploy multidisciplinary teams and to give them appropriate medical and logistical means in order to be effective in the field. “We are doctors,” he said, “and if we organize ourselves and become a medical organization, we will really be useful.”7 The opposition between these sharply contrasting visions about the very identity of the organization came to a head, and the outcome continues to shape MSF’s evolution today. In 1978 Malhuret was elected president of MSF during the annual general assembly, and in 1979, a bitter dispute over MSF’s participation in an initiative by leading French intellectuals to send a boat to rescue Vietnamese refugees in the South China Sea culminated in a split. Kouchner, who was part of the committee that launched “a boat for Vietnam,” saw this as a spectacular way to unite the most influential French thinkers— Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron, who had often been at odds—in a common cause to shine a spotlight on the problem. Although they did not underestimate the media and symbolic impact of this initiative, for the refugees and MSF, Malhuret and Emmanuelli disputed its technical

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legitimacy: they considered a single ship—whose very presence encouraged people to flee—insufficient to receive the refugees. In an article titled “A Boat for SaintGermain-des-Prés,” Emmanuelli went further in denouncing the ship as a selfserving stunt to give Parisian intellectuals a good conscience, when the plight of refugees around the world called for sustained commitment and practical action. In the 1979 MSF General Assembly, Malhuret’s call to transform MSF into an effective medical organization, including by compensating volunteers who took on six-month assignments, defeated Kouchner’s warning of MSF’s impending death at the hands of “bureaucrats of charity.”8 Kouchner and his friends left MSF and went on to found Médecins du Monde/Doctors of the World, with key objectives intended as a rebuttal of MSF’s new direction: “to denounce the intolerable and work without any compensation.” Efficiency, pragmatism, and professionalism, though, would be the watchwords of the team formed by Malhuret, Francis Charhon, and Dr. Rony Brauman, who transformed MSF in the 1980s and set the groundwork for its current actions and focus.

MSF IN THE 1980s: EFFICIENCY, PRAGMATISM, PROFESSIONALISM, AND THE LIMITS OF HUMANITARIAN ACTION IN THE CONTEXT OF THE COLD WAR The Refugee Camp Factor The multiplication of refugee camps at the end of the 1970s accelerated the growth of MSF after 1978 and defined MSF’s main fields of intervention. Although the global refugee population remained stable between 1970 and 1976, it doubled between 1976 and 1979, from 2.7 million to 5.7 million. It doubled again between 1979 and 1982, settling at 11 million people until 1985. This increase was caused by a spike in the number of conflicts in the Southern Hemisphere after 1975, fueled largely by the reemergence, after the era of decolonization, of old national antagonisms and ethnic rivalries, as well as the fact that the East-West confrontation had moved out of Europe. At the same time, the Soviet Union began to increase its influence in several developing countries, profiting from 1975 onward from the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and the instability brought about in southern and eastern Africa because of the Portuguese decolonization and the fall of the Ethiopian Negus. The Soviet expansion fueled a number of conflicts in Angola and Mozambique between pro-Soviet regimes and counterrevolutionary guerrillas, as well as in the Horn of Africa. There, Somalia and Ethiopia began to fight in 1977 over control of the Ogaden region, an Ethiopian territory inhabited mostly by Somalis. In addition, the 1975 communist takeover of Indochina led to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of boat people and other refugees to Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Meanwhile, ethnic and religious minorities in Eritrea and Lebanon began or continued civil wars to obtain their independence or more power. Millions of people were packed in camps along the borders of these warring

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The New Humanitarians

countries, often under very poor sanitary conditions. Although the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) assumed responsibility for the refugees, and built and supplied camps, it had tremendous difficulty finding medical personnel willing to work in these areas. MSF saw the increasing number of refugee settlements in the world as a fertile field of action. In contrast to the UNHCR, MSF did not lack doctors. In the second half of the 1960s, the French job market had been flooded by doctors from the baby-boom generation who did not have to repay their student loans (as they did in the United States) and who often had had their first taste of the “Third World” during their military service. Many general practitioners of this generation were experiencing an identity crisis. Faced in their daily practice with benign pathologies that did not interest them and unsolvable problems that they could only refer to specialists, many of them were tempted to practice what they saw as a “more authentic” form of medicine in the developing world. From 1976 to 1979, MSF aided Angolan refugees in the former Zaire; Somali refugees in Djibouti; Saharan refugees in Algeria and Eritrea; and, above all, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees in Thailand. Initially, MSF offered modest help to the American humanitarian organizations that had already been on the scene for over a year (particularly the International Rescue Committee and World Vision). Yet the French doctors sometimes questioned the motivations of the organizations for which they were working, suspecting them of acting as much for political objectives (anticommunism) and religious reasons (proselytizing) as for humanitarian goals. During this period, MSF gradually expanded its operations in Thailand, slowly replacing the American organizations, which began to withdraw from the refugee camps as the memory of the Vietnam War began to fade. In December 1979, MSF also sent 100 doctors and nurses to the Cambodian border. Logistics Revolution and Creating Medical Guidelines and Protocols The transformation of MSF in the 1980s was prompted by a realization of how ineffective and poorly adapted the organization was in responding to the large-scale refugee movements and camps. The nature of the humanitarian and medical challenges posed by large refugee camps led MSF leaders to turn to public health. In addition to delivering primary health care and carrying out medical consultations, the importance of implementing vaccination campaigns and providing water and sanitation became apparent. This diversification of activities that had to be carried out on a large scale prompted organizational transformation in several ways. To begin with, improving the health of refugees required skills beyond those of the medical doctor, and this led to the constitution of multidisciplinary teams with other medical professionals including nurses, midwives, and lab technicians. But perhaps the key innovation that would revolutionize MSF’s work was the “invention of the logistician.” The first full-time logistics man-

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ager, the pharmacist Jacques Pinel, began to see the importance of logistics during an aid assignment assisting refugees on the Thai-Cambodian border in 1980. Following his experience, Pinel returned to Paris to work with other logistics and medical experts to develop a sophisticated inventory of medical and field supplies. Given the nature of MSF’s activities, the first logistical priority was the pharmacy: improving the way drugs were ordered, supplied, stored, and managed. This led to the development of standardized “kits” that included selected drugs and medical materials adapted to a particular situation, such as the now widely used 10,000 patients for 3 months’ kit. Logistics were also essential in other aspects: from the most basic such as organizing the accommodations and food for the medical teams, to more program-related activities such as the delivery of water in the medical structures or the building of latrines. The realization that strong logistics was the backbone of any effective aid operation further led to the constitution of specialized “logistical centers” in Europe that tested, purchased, and warehoused all items necessary for a medical humanitarian mission, a list that expanded over the years to include radio-telecommunication material, computers, and vehicles. Epidemiological measures of effectiveness adapted to refugee camp settings, such as a target mortality rate of less than 1 person/10,000 people/day, emerged as program objectives. To reach these objectives, MSF developed protocols and guidelines in order to guide volunteers in carrying out medical work in contexts far different from the ones they were used to. In the 1980s, MSF produced a great number of medical guidelines, ranging from the now ubiquitous Essential Drugs and Clinical Guidelines to those dealing with sanitation, the priorities in refugee health, and responding to cholera outbreaks. These books helped standardize the medical response and served as training tools for volunteers. Survival and Growth The increasing number of programs throughout the 1980s required guidance and support from headquarters. The early days when practicing doctors would volunteer to spend one afternoon a week in the office to undertake a range of support activities were over. Permanent staff was hired to organize and supervise field operations. Over time, specialized functions beyond program support were developed—human resources management, communications and fundraising, financial oversight and accounting—as headquarters grew. For MSF, a critical development was international expansion beyond the original French organization. In 1980, Belgian doctors who had been in the field with MSF created their own organization. This occurred with the support of Paris, which saw the creation of MSF-Belgium as a positive extension into a country with strong human resource and fundraising potential. For legal reasons however, MSF-Belgium was set up as an independent organization. The Belgian group soon developed its own dynamic: it ran its own programs, and its interpretation of

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The New Humanitarians

MSF’s mission sharply contrasted with that espoused in Paris. Policy differences culminated in an open split and a failed attempt by MSF-France to strip MSFBelgium of its name in 1985. Other MSF national sections were then created—MSF-Holland, Switzerland, and Spain—in the mid to late 1980s, all of which ran their own programs. In practical terms, this meant that it was possible for five MSFs to be in one country sharing the same name but running distinct programs. While the diversity of approaches allowed more ground to be covered, it also created issues of internal coordination. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a next phase of organizational development. In some countries, such as Sweden, sections were created at the urging of doctors from that country. In other countries, offices were set up under the aegis of existing MSF sections. All of the MSF sections were formed as private, nonprofit organizations with different legal structures depending on the country in which they were formed. Several of these new entities, though, were associations in line with the spirit of MSF’s original founding. The intent of opening an office in the United States, as well as in other countries such as Japan, Australia, Canada, Sweden, or Hong Kong, was primarily to tap into the resources required to support growing field programs. Private funding in particular was a key consideration in this organizational expansion. These “partner sections,” which today number fourteen, were designed as support offices that would not run field programs.9 Over the years, MSF has also helped to create several affiliated organizations that are devoted to pursuing specific areas of research in the field of emergency medicine and relief. In 1986 in Paris, MSF created Epicentre, a group of epidemiologists charged with epidemiological research and evaluation of the work of MSF and other aid organizations. Today, MSF and Epicentre are often called on to monitor, diagnose, and control outbreaks of diseases, such as cholera, meningitis, and measles. In short, “professionalization” at MSF originated from the goal of developing field programs that would be more effective and better adapted to the needs of the populations the organization intended to serve, particularly refugees. Multidisciplinary field teams and the creation of specialized and permanent functions at headquarters were means that were considered necessary to make progress toward that end. MSF’s further organizational development, particularly the setting up of offices worldwide to expand human and financial support, was an additional step in the same direction. The process and ensuing result has led to unforeseen consequences in organizational terms, particularly the large degree of interdependence between nominally independent entities. Humanitarian Aid in the Cold War: On the Side of Freedom? Although MSF’s experience in refugee camps was critically important in defining its role and responsibility, it also led to reflection about humanitarian aid in Cold War. Many of the leftists who founded MSF began to realize that

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most of the refugees in the world were fleeing “socialist” or “communist” regimes. For Rony Brauman, it became apparent that “defending human rights and humanitarian principles required criticizing totalitarianism and defending democracy.”10 The French section of MSF even created a short-lived think tank called “Libertés Sans Frontières,” devoted to publicizing what was felt to be the root causes of the massive humanitarian crises of the 1980s: namely, totalitarianism and the lack of freedom. During this period, the group also organized a conference to critique “third-worldism,” a doctrine that placed blame on Western neocolonialism as the fuel for many wars. But taking a firmly anticommunist stand was no guarantee of avoiding misjudgments similar to those the original founders had made in Biafra. In their 1979 March for Cambodia, which staged a public protest on the Thai border demanding access to Cambodia, Malhuret and Brauman denounced “famine” in Cambodia based on the terrible shape of tens of thousands of refugees arriving in Thailand after the Khmer Rouge genocide. In reality, the refugees MSF treated were not representative of the situation for the Cambodian population, but were rather Khmer Rouge fighters and civilians who had been used as slaves. In Phnom Penh, Viet Nam had replaced a regime of terror with a dictatorship that stoked rumors of possible famine in order to receive international aid funds. The few international groups allowed to work in Cambodia were severely restricted, and the new regime manipulated incoming aid to gain international recognition. The famine never occurred. In 1980 in Afghanistan, MSF ran clandestine cross-border programs to provide medical and surgical care for civilians affected by the Soviet invasion. Bringing their medical supplies on risky donkey caravans from Pakistan with the “mujahideen” resistance, MSF teams spent a year working in medical outposts in rural, isolated parts of Afghanistan before making the trip back. Keen to hear eye-witness accounts, the U.S. Congress invited MSF to testify for the first time, but it became clear that the primary objective was less to understand the medical and humanitarian conditions faced by the Afghan people than to denounce the Soviet occupation. More Harm than Good? Confronting the Diversion and Manipulation of Aid The drive toward professionalism and efficiency allowed MSF to respond more quickly and effectively to crises around the world. As the organization grew in size and capacity, though, it faced more complex political situations and confronted the limits of humanitarian action. In particular, the group was forced to ask this question: when do humanitarian organizations do more harm than good? Nowhere was this question more acute than in Ethiopia. As a famine raged in 1984, the Ethiopian government began a policy of forcibly relocating hundreds of thousands of people in the country from areas most affected

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The New Humanitarians

by the drought to more fertile regions. When MSF assisted with the first transfer, it saw no reason for criticism. But it became clear over time that the transfers had two nefarious aims: (1) to weaken the guerrilla movements in the north (in Eritrea and Tigre) by removing their grassroots supporters, and (2) to place these populations in villages in order to bring them ideologically in line with government policy. Under this scheme, humanitarian aid actually became a trap, used to attract vulnerable villagers and blackmail them into going along with the program. By early 1985, the transfers became more authoritarian and violent. MSF members witnessed roundups of the hospitalized, and noticed that no efforts were made to keep families together. Many persons died during the transfers. The areas where people were forcibly relocated to frequently had inadequate facilities or assistance, while the Ethiopian authorities established food quotas in Addis Ababa. Furthermore, the transfers diverted many resources from the MSF rescue operations. After lodging many fruitless protests with the Ethiopian authorities, MSF decided in November 1985 that, regardless of the consequences to its ability to remain in the country, the organization could no longer remain silent. If it did so, MSF could appear to be condoning the brutality of these transfers, already responsible for more deaths than the famine. The presence of a host of aid organizations in Ethiopia made it less difficult for MSF to denounce the transfer practices in public and enabled MSF to take the risk of expulsion. In explaining this position, MSF operations advisor, François Jean, wrote that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) must not help “fund a lunatic project of social transformation.”11 A few days after officially calling for a halt to the transfers, MSF was expelled from Ethiopia. MSF immediately briefed the media on the diversion of aid, used to oppress instead of help. A few days after MSF’s expulsion, the European Economic Community and the United States decided to make further aid conditional on the discontinuance of these forced population transfers. Thus pressured, the Ethiopian government announced in early 1986 that it would cease its resettlement programs. The experience in Ethiopia continues to echo within the organization. No longer could the humanitarian act be considered good in and of itself. Nor could humanitarian actors simply be content with developing technocratic proficiency without a deeper understanding of political developments. Rather, MSF needed to practice a humanitarian action that valued self-criticism and admitted the limits of what it could accomplish in the face of forces using means—blunt or subtle, crude or sophisticated—to manipulate and divert assistance. Such a critical and reflective stance would be needed for the crises in the decades ahead. This experience was seminal for MSF. No longer was témoignage only about denouncing perpetrated crimes. Rather it was anchored in analysis about the responsibilities of aid agencies themselves—the impact, both positive and negative, of their presence and their work, which can reach the extreme of aiding and abetting crime. Since Ethiopia, MSF has been confronted with a handful of extreme situations, where abstaining from providing aid has been seen as preferable to intervening, either because the minimum conditions for ensuring that victims would benefit

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from the assistance did not exist (Iraq under Saddam Hussein, North Korea) or because the negatives outweighed the positives, as when aid was used against the interests of its intended beneficiaries (Rwandan refugee camps in Zaire and Tanzania, see below; Rwandan refugees in Zaire 1996). In North Korea in 1998, MSF felt leaving the country was preferable to continued action despite urgent medical and nutritional needs. After years of trying to negotiate to have free access, to independently assess the needs, to bring humanitarian assistance to those most in need, and to monitor its aid, there was a clear government policy to restrict and limit effective assistance, making it impossible to deliver aid in a principled and accountable manner. The government refused to acknowledge an emergency and would only allow structural support to rebuild the national pharmaceutical industry. At the time, MSF also called on all donor governments to review their aid policies toward North Korea to ensure more accountability and impartiality in delivering aid.

MSF IN THE 1990s: RESPONDING TO GENOCIDE AND MILITARY-HUMANITARIANISM LEADS TO AN INTERNAL CRISIS Kurdistan, Somalia, and Bosnia—The Promise and Pitfalls of “Humanitarian Intervention” The collapse of the Cold War’s ideological divide brought hope of a quick end to what were seen as “proxy wars” throughout the Third World. Instead, a newly unified “international community” under the aegis of the UN was faced with the transformation of persistent wars in places such as Afghanistan and Angola and the eruption of new conflicts from Bosnia to Somalia. As MSF increasingly deployed in the midst of these wars, it found itself confronted with the novel doctrine of “humanitarian intervention,” in which Western governments used military force ostensibly for humanitarian purposes. The selective application of the doctrine would range from abstention in the face of genocide (Rwanda) to “humanitarian war” (Kosovo). After overcoming profound internal divisions over its response to the Rwandan refugee crisis, MSF emerged from the decade with few illusions but a reinforced conviction about the value of independent humanitarian action. In 1991, what President George H. W. Bush termed the “new world order” was inaugurated when a thirty-seven-nation-strong military coalition, duly endorsed by the UN Security Council, expelled Iraqi forces that had invaded Kuwait the year before. As the war was ending, hundreds of thousands of Kurds—with memories of massacres at the hands of Saddam Hussein’s army still fresh in their minds—fled toward the border with Iran and Turkey. Returning from an assessment mission in late March 1991, MSF’s Dr. Marcel Roux spoke in vivid terms of the catastrophic situation of the Kurds, traumatized and fearful of further Iraqi atrocities, isolated in the mountains, and in dire need of shelter, food, and medical care. The UN Security Council adopted Resolution 688, which opened the way for a U.S.-led military operation that would both drop

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The New Humanitarians

food to refugees on the border and establish a “safe zone” in Northern Iraq to facilitate their return. Operation Provide Comfort was the first manifestation of the phrase coined by Bernard Kouchner, now France’s “Minister for Humanitarian Affairs,” as “right to intervene” (droit d’ingerence). This was a call for military intervention to protect and assist civilians at risk preferably with, but if need be without, the consent of the state on whose territory it would take place. While MSF mounted its largest ever relief operation on the ground—combining its French, Dutch, and Belgian sections, sending seventy-five cargo planes in ten days, and bringing supplies to the mountains by truck—the U.S. air force preferred to conduct airdrops. Xavier Emmanuelli, one of MSF’s founders leading the field operations, was shocked at what he felt was a “show” mainly done for the cameras: planes were used even though trucks could reach the affected areas. Eventually, the massive relief operation and especially the establishment of a “safe zone” secured by a credible military threat defused the crisis and allowed the Kurds to return to their homes. For many in MSF, though, there was a bitter aftertaste in what they saw as the hypocrisy of major powers that allowed the crisis to unfold before taking action in the name of humanitarian morality. It would also give a flavor of things to come. At the same time, far from the media spotlight, a devastating crisis was unfolding in Somalia. After the ouster of the dictator Siad Barre in January 1991, internecine rivalry erupted between the rebel groups that had toppled him. Fierce fighting in the capital, Mogadishu, divided the city, caused thousands of casualties, and displaced countless more. MSF was one of the few organizations, along with the ICRC and Save the Children-UK, which managed to maintain a presence in the war-torn city, providing surgical services in highly insecure conditions. People in distress congregated in towns searching for food due to the combined effects of war and drought, and famine spread throughout southern and central Somalia. Providing assistance during this massive crisis was extremely difficult. Anarchical violence and the absence of any system of social order extending to foreigners in Somalia compelled MSF (and other organizations) to use armed guards, a “necessary evil” whose costs would become increasingly apparent. In time, MSF teams would have a small militia on hire to protect their travel and work, fuelling the “war economy.” But the benefits of MSF’s surgical and nutritional programs in this massive crisis overrode these concerns. MSF and other organizations, including the ICRC, attempted to publicize the Somali emergency. Ironically, as the famine was already receding from its peak of early to mid-1992, the United States launched Operation Restore Hope in the waning days of the Bush administration. The UN Security Council authorized the U.S.-led coalition to use all necessary means “to establish a secure environment for humanitarian relief operations in Somalia as soon as possible.”12 In December, U.S. marines staged a dramatic landing on a Mogadishu beach—already secured by UN forces—for the waiting TV crews and journalists.

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Whether the U.S.-led coalition, operating under a “shoot to feed” policy, helped turn the corner by increasing relief supplies or whether only few people remained to be rescued is still debated. In any event, by early 1993, the worst of the famine was over, but Somalia’s conflict over power and resources was not. The United States and its allies became embroiled in the war in the name of promoting political reconciliation. Soon, insecurity increased, U.S. forces fired at hospitals, and Somali forces captured and killed eighteen U.S. soldiers in October 1993. MSF activities in the former Yugoslavia began in 1991 with an evacuation of the wounded from Vukovar, then under siege. For the next several years, MSF ran surgery programs, distributed medical supplies and drugs to hospitals and clinics, operated mobile clinics, and worked in refugee camps throughout the region. MSF also implemented a comprehensive mental health program in several areas because of the intense traumas experienced by the population. MSF and other aid organizations were confronted with serious dilemmas of ethnic cleansing, and the events in Bosnia represented the culmination of the “humanitarian alibi,” or the use of humanitarian aid to avoid making political decisions. First, the UN force was mandated to strictly protect humanitarian convoys, not populations. Then, the UN set up enclaves that were supposed to be UN “safe havens” for populations under assault. But MSF directly witnessed a massacre during the Bosnian Serbs’ attack on Srebrenica on July 11, 1995, which led to the deportation of approximately 40,000 people and the execution of an estimated 7,000. Twenty-two local members of MSF’s personnel and approximately 10 of the sick and wounded were also executed. The fall of the “safe haven” occurred in the face of NATO and UN paralysis, and would lead MSF to be actively involved, years later, in efforts to establish who had been responsible in France and Holland. For MSF, as for other aid organizations, these three interventions ended the illusion that the “international community” would effectively take the side of victims and protect them from imminent danger. Instead, MSF recognized how humanitarian aid was used as a fig leaf to hide political inaction, or break the promise to protect civilians. Rwanda—Genocide, Then the Hijacking of Aid International powers abandoned Rwanda during the genocide in 1994, and humanitarian organizations were powerless. MSF managed to maintain a presence in Kigali at the height of the killings with a group of medical staff working with the ICRC to transform the ICRC compound into a hospital. Another MSF team worked at the King Faycal Hospital under UN military protection. These interventions helped save several hundred people, but were futile overall. Patients were slaughtered soon after they were discharged, or in ambulances as they were being transferred to the hospital. In Butare, MSF international personnel were powerless as their Rwandan colleagues were executed in the hospital. In fact, most of MSF’s Rwandan colleagues, except for a handful of heroic exceptions, could not be evacuated and were killed. Humanitarian aid in this situation had been rendered

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meaningless. The situation led to MSF’s belated, yet unprecedented, call in June 1994 for military intervention to stop the killings, coining the phrase “doctors and nurses cannot stop genocide.” No effective military intervention occurred except for the Operation Turquoise by the French army in southwestern Rwanda, serving as much to protect the flight of the genocidaires as to protect remaining groups of Tutsi from genocidal onslaught. Following the Rwandan army’s defeats at the hands of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the authorities responsible for the massacres orchestrated a mass exodus, first in late April into Tanzania and then of more than one million people into the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire) in early July. The crisis continued to escalate when a cholera epidemic broke out in the refugee camps of eastern Congo, prompting the largest intervention in MSF’s history. It soon became clear, though, that those responsible for the genocide were creating a climate of fear in these massive camps, with the genocidaires being bolstered by international relief operations that in turn strengthened the iron grip they maintained over the refugee population through the distribution of humanitarian relief. There was also growing evidence that the refugee camps located right on the Rwandan border were becoming training bases for members of the “interahamwe” militia and the former Rwandan armed forces (FAR), which had not been separated from the refugee population. Aid workers became increasingly outraged that they were turning into unwilling accomplices to the perpetrators of genocide. A few months after the camps were established, MSF was divided on what do to—some felt MSF should leave and denounce the situation, while others felt that MSF’s role was to provide medical services to vulnerable refugees, particularly women and children, while carrying out communication and advocacy to try to improve the situation. The sharp debate was thus not about the analysis of the camps’ nature, but rather about MSF’s responsibility, and three main positions crystallized. The French section took the drastic step of halting its aid operations at the end of 1994 in Zaire and Tanzania rather than participate in what it considered a perversion of humanitarian action, as assistance was propping up leaders intent on “finishing the genocide.” The Belgian section decided to carry out “humanitarian resistance,” aiming to undermine the clout of the leaders through its program implementation, for instance by providing information to refugees about returning to Rwanda in a way that undercut propaganda from the leaders. These efforts “managed to reduce the quantity of aid resources that were diverted to the military.”13 The Dutch section focused on its maintaining medical services, which it complemented with reports and “silent diplomacy.” In late 1995, all had come to the conclusion that the situation was entrenched and untenable, and finally decided to leave. Chantilly: Internal Crisis and Back from the Brink The division among MSF sections about how to respond to the dilemma posed by the Rwandan refugee camps in Zaire and Tanzania was serious and profound. It resulted in an international process of reflection to attempt to resolve these

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differences and come to a common understanding. After a series of meetings, leaders of various MSF sections eventually agreed on a definition of what MSF stands for, aims to achieve, and the key principles it follows. While placing “medical action” in “crisis periods, where the very survival of the population is threatened” first and foremost, the Chantilly Principles also made témoignage—from raising public awareness to the possibility of openly criticizing and denouncing—an “indispensable complement” of MSF’s medical action, putting an end to the debates about “silent diplomacy.”14 Organizational rules were created as well as the goal of being 50 percent privately funded in order to maintain an independence of action. At this time, MSF also created an International Council (IC), regrouping all nineteen board presidents as the highest international policy-making forum. The IC instituted a moratorium on the opening of new sections, and decided on the transformation of all sections into “associations” according to France’s “Association de loi” of 1901. This was done for reasons of principle as well governance. The associative spirit gave former field staff a democratic voice within the movement and ownership over MSF’s direction and decisions. The governance structure put a premium on programmatic legitimacy, with leadership that was constituted of people who have carried out the core responsibility of designing and implementing medical humanitarian programs. The Chantilly document states: “The commitment of each volunteer to the MSF movement goes beyond completing a mission; it also assumes an active participation in the associative life of the organization and an adherence to the Charter and Principles of MSF . . . the associative character of MSF permits an openness towards our societies and a capacity for questioning ourselves.”15 The agreement at Chantilly also established an international office based in Brussels (today it is in Geneva.) It has a small staff led by the international secretary, and it orchestrates collaboration in areas such as pharmaceutical validation, quality control, medical guidelines, financial reporting, and representation and advocacy toward the UN or other international and national bodies. Chantilly having brought MSF back from the brink, attempts were made to solidify the reaffirmation of the organization’s international character through concrete collaboration. One was to organize a concerted emergency response system with a single operational leader for the whole of MSF. Although a few major programs, such as a mass meningitis vaccination campaign in Nigeria in 1996, were implemented, in the end, all of the sections agreed that MSF’s reactivity was best served by the diversity of approaches among sections. Nobel Peace Prize—An Ambiguous Recognition As the twentieth century came to a close, MSF’s work gained recognition from the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. Some felt that it offered hope for the recognition of independent humanitarian action. In his acceptance speech on behalf of the organization, Dr. James Orbinski, president of MSF’s International Council said, “Humanitarian action is more than simple generosity, simple charity. It aims to

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build spaces of normalcy in the midst of what is profoundly abnormal. More than offering material assistance, we aim to enable individuals to regain their rights and dignity as human beings.”16 But the recognition was ambiguous at best. MSF was keen to distance itself from having the Nobel Prize misconstrued as a triumph of the idea of military “humanitarian interventions” waged in the name of humanitarian ideals or motives. In Kosovo, NATO had used MSF data as one of the justifications for its military campaign, while other aid organizations were becoming “subcontractors” to the Western nations waging the war. Increasingly uneasy about humanitarian action being co-opted in a war effort, MSF took further measures to assert its independence.

HUMANITARIAN ACTION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Medical Catastrophes: Struggling to Respond to HIV/AIDS As the global HIV/AIDS pandemic raged throughout the 1990s, MSF was forced to reexamine the limits of its humanitarian action and what constituted an emergency. By 1999, HIV/AIDS had laid waste to millions of lives in villages, towns, and cities throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The sick were arriving at MSF clinics and hospitals in increasing numbers, only to be told they had a deadly disease and that nothing could be done. Debate had been going on within MSF for years about how to address the needs of people living with HIV/AIDS it was seeing in its field hospitals. Treatment on the scale needed seemed impossible. The magnitude of the problem dwarfed what one aid organization could handle, while the sophisticated, lifelong, daily regimen— based on the technologically heavy model of diagnosis and care implemented in European or North American hospitals—was ill suited for the remote, sometimes war-ravaged, infrastructure-less settings where MSF worked. The cost of the drugs ($10–$15,000 dollars per patient per year in 2000) could never be afforded by ministries of health, let alone by most people living with HIV/AIDS, and the longterm commitment needed to sustain treatment programs went far beyond the usual scope of a medical organization geared toward responding to acute crises that required immediate, but short-term, action. Doctors and nurses continued to return from their aid assignments frustrated and angry that they could do little for their patients who were dying in catastrophic numbers. As obstacles to treatment seemed intractable, many MSF aid workers tried to integrate a variety of prevention programs or treatment of opportunistic infections into their projects in the mid- and late 1990s. But the pandemic spread with no end in sight. As the 1990s drew to a close, frustrations over the impotent medical response in the face of rising death tolls boiled over, and many within MSF began to push for solutions. MSF’s HIV project in Thailand began in 1995. As elsewhere, this largely consisted of providing palliative care and treatment for opportunistic infections. In Thailand

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a large network of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHAs), health professionals, and other NGOs had been fighting for better care for PLWHA, including having TB care provided in district hospitals so patients could be treated closer to home. In Europe a group of MSF doctors and nurses were in the early stages of forming a campaign to help overcome obstacles such as high prices and patent restrictions preventing field doctors from providing life-saving medicines to their patients. They contacted Dr. Wilson, the medical coordinator of MSF’s Thai program, and in turn linked the team up with a number of experts and activists. With coalitions building within Thailand and worldwide, HIV/AIDS treatment was soon possible. Since the Thai health care system functioned well, the team decided to work within Ministry of Health structures, and began a treatment program in a district hospital on the outskirts of Bangkok. In 2000 Dr. Wilson became one of the first MSF physicians to provide ARV treatment. The subsequent project relied heavily on the involvement of PLWHAs, which would become a hallmark of successful HIV/AIDS treatment programs throughout the world. Halfway across the world in 1999, Dr. Eric Goemaere and his colleagues were trying to open a treatment program in South Africa. The country had the world’s highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS, and people living with HIV/AIDS took an active, and growing, part in community efforts to address the epidemic. After a project site outside of Johannesburg was blocked by government health officials at the end of 1999, a clinic in Khayletshia, a sprawling slum near Cape Town, gave Dr. Goemaere some dilapidated space to set up. The team felt strongly that the only viable solution was to rely on generic versions of the medicines, most likely from manufacturers in India and Brazil. Overcoming patent barriers to using generic medicines would be another hallmark of successful treatment programs. In the seven years since generic competition emerged, the price for ARVs has dropped to a much more affordable level—less than US$150—and has allowed for more massive scale-up of programs throughout the world. The first patient was put on treatment in Khayletshia in May 2001. Over the next six years, MSF drastically scaled up its treatment programs, and by the end of 2007, MSF was treating more than 100,000 people living with HIV/AIDS— including more than 7,000 children—in more than thirty-two countries. While still barely a drop in the ocean of needs, international efforts have been growing as well. New obstacles have arisen, though, including a dangerous shortage of healthcare workers contributing to the inability of many countries to scale up HIV/AIDS programs. The experience in trying to respond to HIV/AIDS led MSF to incorporate responding to medical catastrophes into its self-defined mandate. Access to Essential Medicines Campaign For years, there was growing recognition in MSF that medical staff faced major problems trying to treat their patients. This was not just a technical issue, but also

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a political one. Medicines were inaccessible to poor people living in resource-poor countries because they did not represent a market for the pharmaceutical industry nor a political constituency. Lack of access to ARVs was the most egregious example, but others multiplied. The production of a useful drug for treating meningitis, oily chloramphenicol, had been abandoned because no other uses had been found. The same held true for eflornithine, which proved effective in treating human African trypanosomiasis, also known as sleeping sickness. Every day in the field, doctors and nurses were forced to make choices that conflicted with medical ethics, such as rationing treatments or not providing ARVs. In 2000 MSF, led by Dr. Bernard Pécoul, launched the Access to Essential Medicines Campaign to understand and overcome select obstacles, hoping to obtain the medicines needed to transform medical practice in the field. The campaign would focus on patients in MSF programs, but advocate for solutions that would also benefit others. The campaign was critical of donation programs from the pharmaceutical industry, and pushed for generic production to lower prices through competition. It also called for greater public involvement in R&D as private incentives would not stimulate research where no market existed. Analysis of price issues pushed MSF to learn about areas far from its core expertise: for example, how patent protections (TRIPS) were included in international trade agreements as an obligation for countries wanting to join the World Trade Organization, or how generic production was threatened in countries such as India that had not issued patents on pharmaceuticals. MSF and others pushed for the public health safeguards included in TRIPS to be effectively used to increase access to medicines. MSF confronted international policies detrimental to public health and access, often linking with and supporting national activists, as in the 2001 South Africa court case. MSF used the proceeds from the Nobel Peace Prize to support this new Access to Essential Medicines Campaign as well as to fund a working group to investigate how best to spark research and development into diseases neglected by most of the pharmaceutical industry. This working group led to the creation of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), which today is an independent organization led by Dr. Pécoul, of which MSF is a co-founder, along with several publicsector research institutions mainly in endemic countries (Brazil, India, and Kenya, in addition to the Pasteur Institute). DNDi fosters collaboration both among developing countries and between developing and developed countries, focusing on needs-based, field-adapted research to develop new treatments for neglected diseases such as human African trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, visceral leishmaniasis, and Chagas disease. No to “Coherence”—Independence of Action In Angola in 2002, following a negotiated surrender of UNITA after the death of Jonas Savimbi, MSF responded to the discovery of starving populations emerging from war zones throughout the country. MSF struggled to expand nutritional and

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medical programs to deal with the emergency at a time when the UN was focused on negotiating with the Angolan government for a comprehensive approach, not just assistance but also disarmament and the creation of a political process. The UN did not push the humanitarian imperative independently, and put pressure on MSF not to break ranks, resulting in a serious delay in providing assistance. The humanitarian failure in Angola was part of a trend that had begun a decade earlier in which international interventions increasingly combined political, military, and assistance programs under one umbrella. In several instances, the UN led robust peacekeeping operations that subordinated relief efforts to broader political aims. MSF was skeptical of the trend, as the very essence of humanitarian action is to provide aid without conditions, and many within MSF felt that impartial assistance would take a back seat to other concerns. MSF’s field experience confirmed these fears. In Liberia in the late 1990s, the UN peacekeeping force bombed MSF convoys. In Sierra Leone, as well, the UN and international organizations withdrew from the country to protest the RUF/AFRC takeover, in effect creating a situation of collective punishment. The Henry Dunant Center called this “one of the most shameful episodes regarding international humanitarian action in modern times.”17 Only MSF, ICRC, and Action Against Hunger stayed. This trend of associating humanitarian aid with broader strategic goals was intensified in the “global war on terror” launched in response to the terrorist attacks on New York City in 2001. Recent wars waged by Western powers put forward a variety of objectives for taking military action, such as restoring peace, democratic political order, and economic development. Relief operations in these contexts have aspects of propaganda and public relations, both in the war zone and at home, in helping to depict the overall mission as altruistic or humanitarian. United States–backed coalition forces have consistently sought to further U.S. military and political ambitions by using aid to “win hearts and minds” and gather intelligence. It has always been difficult to work in war zones. Humanitarian principles such as impartiality—providing aid based on need alone, without any kind of discrimination—and neutrality—the refusal to take political sides—help aid workers navigate between warring groups, gain acceptance from all groups, and help reduce security risks while delivering much-needed assistance in volatile and sensitive environments. By definition, humanitarian assistance is a suspect activity in many contexts. In MSF’s experience, the most effective way to gain acceptance and a measure of trust in conflict settings is to have a very clear and transparent humanitarian identity to defuse suspicion and to provide quality medical care to build support. It is, however, never a guarantee. Given the overt attempts of Western-based military interventions to enlist humanitarian aid, MSF has taken steps to remain independent and distinct. MSF denounced several of the coalition’s attempts to co-opt humanitarian aid, particularly dropping “humanitarian” food packets during the initial aerial strikes in Afghanistan, calling aid workers “force multipliers,” and distributing leaflets that

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conditioned aid based on civilians providing intelligence about the Taliban and al Qaeda. Because of such actions, MSF’s fear was that the provision of aid would no longer be seen as an impartial and neutral act, thus endangering the lives of humanitarian volunteers and jeopardizing the aid to people in need. Despite these efforts, some radical groups may never see MSF or other groups as strictly humanitarian and may continue to target aid workers and civilian groups, especially in situations involving Western military intervention. “MSF does not object to militaries building village clinics or offering medical help. But these are legal obligations under the Geneva Conventions, not humanitarian assistance,” wrote Dr. Rowan Gillies, the president of MSF’s International Council in 2004. “People in crisis deserve to have access to impartial, independent humanitarian aid based on needs alone, without regard to military political objectives. In the ‘war against terror’ all factions want us to choose sides. We refuse to choose sides, just as we refuse to accept a vision of a future where civilians trapped in the hell of war can only receive life-saving aid from the armies that wage it.”18 Aid Workers Face Increasing Risks As aid has moved from the periphery to the center of war zones and the multiplication of actors, aid workers face increased exposure. In 1989 a missile destroyed an Avions Sans Frontières airplane in Sudan, killing two MSF members on board. In 1990 an MSF logistics expert was assassinated in Afghanistan, and in 1997, an MSF doctor was murdered in Somalia. The organization faced kidnappings in Colombia, Ingushetia, and Sierra Leone as well as grave security concerns in the former Yugoslavia, Liberia, Chechnya, Rwanda, and Congo (former Zaire). In July 2004 in Afghanistan, MSF closed all medical programs in the aftermath of the killing of five MSF aid workers in a deliberate attack on June 2, 2004, when a clearly marked MSF vehicle was ambushed in the northwestern province of Badghis. Five MSF colleagues were mercilessly shot in the attack. This targeted killing, the government’s failure to at first arrest the primary suspects and then credibly prosecute them, as well as declarations by the Taliban claiming responsibility and threatening further attacks made it impossible for MSF to continue providing assistance to the Afghan people. MSF is not alone. More than thirty aid workers had been killed in Afghanistan since the beginning of 2003. The association of aid with broader political and military goals has heightened the likelihood that aid workers will become targets and will be attacked. “MSF, as a medical humanitarian organization, provides unconditional assistance to people in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world based on needs alone, regardless of political beliefs or relations with any military or political groups,” said Nicolas de Torrente, executive director of MSF-USA in 2004. “When warring parties do not respect the integrity of impartial needs-based humanitarian action,

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aid workers are put at serious risk. In the end, the result is that people do not get the aid they badly need.”19 The kidnapping of Arjan Erkel in the northern Caucasus and its aftermath highlighted the increasing dangers aid workers faced in several conflict zones and the willingness of many armed groups and governments to undermine legal protections shielding civilians and aid workers alike from violence during war, as set down in International Humanitarian Law (IHL). “Since 1994, 15 humanitarian aid workers have been abducted in the Caucasus including four MSF aid workers,” said MSF program officer Patrice Pagé in 2003. “The violence towards civilians is clearly extending to humanitarian aid workers.”20 Arjan Erkel was held for twenty months. Afterward, the Dutch government sued MSF in a Swiss court—they wanted to recoup funds they had paid as ransom after having negotiated with Russian security services. In March 2007, a Swiss judge ruled in MSF’s favor, a judgment that was upheld by a higher court in March 2008 after the Dutch government appealed the initial verdict. Especially troubling in this episode, though, was the Dutch government’s argument that it does not have any specific obligations related to Arjan Erkel’s status as an aid worker—in their view, he was no different than an employee of a private company. Private Funding Helps Maintain Independence of Action Responding on the basis of need and reducing security risks for teams are two of the reasons why MSF has insisted on building and defending the independence of its medical humanitarian action. It is impossible to act independently, though, without the resources to do so. MSF took a strategic decision in the mid-1990s to move away from institutional and government funding. Today, it relies on the general public for well over 80 percent of its operating funds. The remaining funds come from international agencies and governments. The organization counted more than 3.3 million individuals, foundations, corporations, and nonprofit organizations among its donors worldwide in 2006 for $714 million of income. The organization continues to exert significant effort at building unrestricted, stable, and diverse revenue sources. This independence of funding is critical to a rapid response, flexibly, and innovation. Political and other interests can sometimes drive government funding decisions, and MSF does not want to be considered as implementing agents, or “subcontractors,” for government interventions. If MSF relied primarily on government funding, for example, it would not have been able to start ARV treatments for people living with HIV/AIDS. Relying on media-driven private funding has its drawbacks as well: neglected crises without media coverage do not generate donations, while highly exposed crises can sometimes lead to an overreaction in response. Following the tsunami that devastated many parts of South Asia in 2004, MSF was able to set up medical clinics in Aceh, Indonesia, within seventy-two hours. MSF quickly realized, however, that emergency needs in the region would be limited, and that the local

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response, particularly in Sri Lanka, was significant. Faced with a massive, unprecedented, spontaneous outpouring of support, MSF decided to stop accepting earmarked funds within days of the catastrophe. MSF asked donors to “de-restrict” their gifts. Nearly all of them agreed to do so, while the others were reimbursed. This allowed MSF to have sufficient resources to respond to other crises, most notably a nutritional crisis in Niger, where MSF teams effectively treated nearly 70,000 severely malnourished children. “In 2006, MSF undertook over 9 million medical consultations, and hospitalized almost half a million patients,” said Dr. Christophe Fournier, president of MSF’s International Council.“For this work and commitment to remain constant, the massive support we receive from individual donors worldwide remains crucial. It allows us to preserve our humanitarian identity and to maintain our independence to make decisions about where and how we will work, guided by the needs of our patients and independent from any power other than the medical-humanitarian imperative.”21 Treating Victims of Today’s Armed Conflicts Beginning with its intervention during Lebanon’s civil war in the 1970s, the commitment to treating victims of armed conflict has been central to MSF’s work throughout its history. MSF has moved from the periphery of conflicts in refugee camps to try to be closer to the violence directly and indirectly affecting civilians. The number of internally displaced persons has been increasing as borders become closed to those trying to flee war, as in the DR Congo. Many conflicts today are also in urban areas, as in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Mogadishu, Somalia; and Port Harcourt, Nigeria; in these locations, MSF has tried to offer more comprehensive services, including surgery for victims of direct violence, physical rehabilitation, and mental health services for trauma victims. One of MSF’s largest operations has been in the Darfur region of Sudan. A brutal, scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign in 2003 and 2004 left tens of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. For the next several years, hundreds of international MSF staff and thousands of Sudanese personnel brought aid to people in North, South, and West Darfur as well as to hundreds of thousands of refugees in Chad. Security conditions have deteriorated over the last several years, with armed groups fragmenting and banditry becoming rife, putting at risk humanitarian aid to hundreds of thousands of people. In Iraq, there are specific operational dilemmas. In order to provide critical medical and surgical care to victims of the violence there, it is necessary to reach them quickly, which means providing appropriate services as close as possible to where the violence is occurring. However, it is precisely those violence-affected areas that are the most unsafe for patients and for medical personnel, particularly for international staff. MSF has taken two different approaches to deal with this dilemma in order to support medical personnel inside Iraq who are dealing with the bulk of casualties.

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One is trying to provide medical supplies and training from Jordan to Iraqi medical staff still on the front lines. The other is to provide care to patients in more stable and safe environments. The MSF project in Amman, Jordan, attempts to help rehabilitate stabilized Iraqi patients who require complex orthopedic, maxillo-facial, or plastic surgery services. While the project does provide hands-on care to Iraqi patients, it faces a number of limits and challenges such as administrative or political barriers to entering Jordan and lengthy treatment. MSF is also trying to help Iraqi doctors who are still working in the country despite the threats they are facing. Both approaches, while important, have serious drawbacks. “In the worst war zone of the new century, international assistance is absent on the ground,” said Christopher Stokes, secretary general of MSF International. “In contrast, the deployment—albeit fragile and often threatened—of over one hundred MSF international aid workers in Darfur is a painful reminder of the impotence of humanitarian aid agencies. The struggle to assist victims of conflict is not one MSF can abandon, but it will be a long, hard struggle to achieve a real operational space in Iraq.”22 Critical Reflection Leads MSF to Treat Victims of Sexual Violence What is an effective humanitarian aid operation? How can we improve the aid we provide to victims of armed conflict? Questions such as these often confront aid workers in the course of their work, and struggling to answer them helps MSF strive to improve its emergency medical care. A culture of reflection led MSF to critique its operations during the civil war in Congo-Brazzaville 1998–2000, which illustrates the risk that policy “lenses” can lead to pressing medical needs being neglected.23 During an intervention that assisted displaced Congolese returning to Brazzaville in dire nutritional and medical condition, a large number of women who had been assaulted and raped did not receive appropriate care. Although the field team was aware of the severity and extent of the problem, it focused its limited means in a tense security environment on nutritional assistance. The people in headquarters also did not devote sufficient attention to the issue, and did not move to ensure adequate care was provided, in particular, post-exposure prophylaxis against HIV/AIDS. The reason was largely that sexual violence was then not considered a policy priority in conflicts. In fact, it is largely the experience garnered in Congo-Brazzaville that has resulted in sexual violence becoming a key concern of MSF’s in all conflict settings, along with the development of specialized medical and psychological approaches and tools. By 2007 the treatment of sexual violence victims had been integrated into most of MSF’s interventions. At the Bon Marché hospital in Bunia, capital of the Ituri region in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example, MSF teams treated 7,400 rape victims over a four year period, thus revealing the brutal targeting of women in that war.

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The Need for Innovative Medical Tools There is an urgent need for innovative medical tools adapted to the conditions faced by people in resource-poor settings. Tuberculosis (TB), malaria, HIV/AIDS, sleeping sickness, Chagas disease, kala-azar, and many other diseases have been all but abandoned by the current for-profit research and development system. The drugs to treat TB, for example, all date from the 1960s even though the most widely used TB diagnostic test was invented in the 1880s. When an innovative medical tool is adapted to people’s needs in resource-poor settings, the result can be stark. The innovative three-in-one fixed-dose combination ARV created by an Indian generic manufacturer, for example, has allowed the scale-up of treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS. MSF also began an innovative nutritional program in the vast, landlocked West African nation of Niger adapted to the needs of severely malnourished children, who are mostly poor and from rural areas. Based in large part on the provision of new therapeutic ready-to-use foods (RUF) such as BP 100 or Plumpy‘nut, the vast majority of malnourished children can now take treatment at home, under the supervision of their mothers or other caregivers, instead of in a hospital.24 The value of this approach became most evident in 2005, when a nutritional emergency ravaged impoverished families throughout rural parts of the country. MSF teams successfully treated nearly 60,000 severely malnourished children during the crisis. In previous nutritional crises, MSF and others could reach only a fraction of those in need because of the limitations inherent in the tools available at the time. The famine in southern Sudan in 1998 produced mortality rates that in some areas equaled or exceeded those reported in Ethiopia during the crisis of 1985. MSF encountered catastrophic levels of malnutrition and mortality in Bahr el Ghazal, with more than 100 people dying every day in some areas. Although MSF was late in responding to the initial signs of the crisis, teams quickly set up throughout the region and were able to treat thousands of children. “Before, we wouldn’t have been able to treat nearly as many children,” said Dr. Milton Tectonidis. “Angola in 2002 was MSF’s last big nutritional response that did not include outpatient care, and we treated 8,600 children. So it’s a huge difference. Therapeutic foods should be considered an essential medicine and not just during emergencies. I don’t think we can go back again.”25 Since outpatient treatment based on RUF proved so effective the previous two years, MSF decided in 2007 to provide a modified version as a supplement to the staple of the daily diet for young Nigerian children in the hopes of preventing severe malnutrition in high-prevalence areas. Initial results have shown great promise.

The “La Mancha” Process and Challenges Ahead Nearly forty years after its creation, both MSF and the international environment in which it works have changed significantly. In 2006 the group

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undertook a consultative process to reflect on its roles and responsibilities, to define a common ambition among its various sections, and to clarify issues of internal governance. The “La Mancha” process, as it was known internally, is emblematic of MSF’s emphasis on critical review and an effort to learn from successes as well as failures. The resulting text serves as a companion to the original MSF Charter and the more recent Chantilly Principles, and was written to help guide MSF in the years ahead. Concerning MSF’s social mission, La Mancha reaffirmed that the core of the group’s work would continue to be responding to emergency medical needs arising from conflict or medical catastrophes. Top priority should also be given to improving the effectiveness, relevance, and quality of operations. Speaking out to highlight and confront political responsibilities would remain central to MSF’s identity, but the group would refrain from proposing global solutions. MSF would, however, be committed to transparently documenting its results and exposing obstacles that could contribute to a response that can benefit others. There will be an effort at consensus in public positions, but not at the total exclusion of minority points of view. And because of the disillusionment with international efforts to “coherently” respond to crises, MSF would stress the independent and humanitarian nature of its work. Organizationally, La Mancha strengthened MSF’s international governance and reaffirmed its international, associative character. Few colleagues from the countries where MSF works were present at the La Mancha conference, but they made their voice heard. There was a strong consensus that MSF had failed to integrate national staff appropriately, and that urgent action was needed to address this shortcoming in the years ahead. The transformation of MSF from an idea to a single section in France to today’s international network in nineteen countries has been profound. This interdependence has enabled the continued expansion of field operations by providing much-needed human and financial resources. Mutual accountability and active transparency will be key elements as MSF moves forward. For the people who make up the organization, maintaining creativity and innovation as the group continues to grow with strong public support will require a major commitment. As future transformations are inevitable, the culture of debate and participation that helped MSF adapt in previous years will help guide its members as they provide emergency medical assistance to people struggling to survive crises around the world.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) Founders: Xavier Emmanuelli, Marcel Delcourt, Max Recamier, Gérard Pigeon, Jean Cabrol, Jean-Michel Wild, Bernard Kouchner, Pascal Greletty-Bosviel,

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Jacques Beres, Raymond Borel, Vladan Radoman, Gérard Illiouz, and Philippe Bernier President of U.S. Board of Directors, & President of Officers of the Organization: Darin Portnoy, MD, MPH Mission/Description: Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an independent international medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural and man-made disasters, or exclusion from health care in more than 70 countries. Each year, MSF doctors, nurses, logisticians, water-and-sanitation experts, administrators, and other medical and non-medical professionals depart on more than 4,700 aid assignments. They work alongside more than 25,800 locally hired staff to provide medical care. In emergencies and their aftermath, MSF provides essential health care, rehabilitates and runs hospitals and clinics, performs surgery, battles epidemics, carries out vaccination campaigns, operates feeding centers for malnourished children, and offers mental health care. When needed, MSF also constructs wells and dispenses clean drinking water, and provides shelter materials like blankets and plastic sheeting. Through longer-term programs, MSF treats patients with infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, sleeping sickness, and HIV/AIDS, and provides medical and psychological care to marginalized groups such as street children. MSF was founded in 1971 as the first nongovernmental organization to both provide emergency medical assistance and bear witness publicly to the plight of the people it assists. A private nonprofit association, MSF is an international network with sections in 19 countries. Website: www.doctorswithoutborders.org Address: 333 7th Avenue, 2nd Floor New York, NY 10001-5004 Phone: (212) 679-6800 Fax: (212) 679-7016 E-mail: [email protected]

NOTES 1. Section adapted from Rony Brauman and Joelle Tanguy, “The Médecins Sans Frontières Experience” (http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/volunteer/field/themsf experience.cfm). 2. The MSF Adventure, a documentary by Anne Vallaeys and Patrick Benquet (2006). 3. Section adapted from Rony Brauman and Joelle Tanguy, “The Médecins Sans Frontières Experience” (http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/volunteer/field/themsf experience.cfm).

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4. Section adapted from Rony Brauman and Joelle Tanguy, “The Médecins Sans Frontières Experience” (http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/volunteer/field/themsf experience.cfm). 5. Section adapted from Rony Brauman and Joelle Tanguy, “The Médecins Sans Frontières Experience” (http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/volunteer/field/themsf experience.cfm). 6. Anne Vallaeys, Médecins sans Frontières: la biographie (Paris: Fayard, 2004), pp. 150–55. 7. Vallaeys, p. 248. 8. See Rony Brauman and Joelle Tanguy, “The Médecins Sans Frontières Experience.” 9. The exception is MSF-Greece, which was created with the intention of running field programs. It did so for a number of years before being expelled from the MSF movement in 1999 over its stance during the Kosovo crisis. MSF-Greece has been reintegrated within MSF in early 2005, but its operations have been folded under the authority of MSF-Spain. 10. See Rony Brauman and Joelle Tanguy, “The Médecins Sans Frontières Experience.” 11. Francois Jean, From Ethiopia to Chechnya: Reflections on Humanitarian Action, 1988–1999 (New York: MSF, 2008), p. 23. 12. U.N. Security Resolution 794, December 1992 (http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/ UNDOC/GEN/N92/772/11/PDF/N9277211.pdf?OpenElement). 13. Fiona Terry, Condemned to Repeat (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 201. 14. Who Are Médecins Sans Frontières?, MSF Internal document (1997). 15. Who Are Médecins Sans Frontières? 16. Nobel Lecture by James Orbinski, Médecins Sans Frontières, Oslo, December 10, 1999 (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1999/msf-lecture.html). 17. Henry Dunant Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, “Politics and Humanitarianism Coherence in Crisis?” (February 2003), p. 11 (http://www.reliefweb.int/ rw/lib.nsf/db900sid/RURI-6N4RYU/$file/politics%20and%20humanitarianism.pdf? openelement). 18. Dr. Rowan Gillies, Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2004, p. A13. 19. Nicolas de Torrente, “Our Distress and Grief are Compounded by Outrage”: On the Killing of Five MSF Aid Workers in Afghanistan (June 2004) (http://www.doctors withoutborders.org/publications/ideas/opinion_nicolasdetorrente_06-04.cfm). 20. Patrice Pagé, presentation at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (September 2003) (http://www.ushmm.org/conscience/analysis/details.php?content=2003-09-15). 21. Dr. Christophe Fournier, MSF International Activity Report (2007) (http://www. doctorswithoutborders.org/publications/ar/report.cfm?id=2382). 22. Christopher Stokes, MSF International Activity Report (2007) (http://www.doctors withoutborders.org/publications/ar/report.cfm?id=2383). 23. Marc le Pape and Pierre Salignon, eds., Civilians under Fire—Humanitarian Practices in the Congo Republic 1998–2000 (n.p.: MSF/L’Harmattan, 2002). 24. Community-Based Management of Severe Acute Malnutrition: A Joint Statement by the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme, the United Nations Standing Committee on Nutrition and the United Nations Children’s Fund (May 2007). (http://www.who.int/child-adolescent-health/New_Publications/CHILD_HEALTH/ Severe_Acute_Malnutrition_en.pdf). 25. Milton Tectonidis, MSF Voices from the Field (August 2005) (http://www.doctorswith outborders.org/news/voices/2005/08-2005_niger.cfm).

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Unite For Sight Jennifer Staple*

Unite For Sight is the only organization that has been able to give free treatment in this settlement since I have been on this refugee camp, and right now there are people coming all the way from Liberia here for help from Unite For Sight. Many of our patients have returned to Liberia with the good news about Unite For Sight in the refugee camp in Ghana. —Karrus Hayes, President of Unite For Sight Chapter at Buduburam Refugee Camp

The question I have always asked myself is “what would have happened to all these people who have benefited from Unite For Sight programs had the organization not come to their aid?” It is likely that many would have perished in their agony. —Dr. James Clarke, Crystal Eye Clinic, Unite For Sight Partner Ophthalmologist in Ghana

There are an estimated 45 million blind people and 135 million visually impaired individuals worldwide.1 The World Health Organization (WHO) indicates that 90 percent of people who are blind live in developing countries, and 80 percent of blindness is curable or preventable.2 The major barriers to eye care in developing countries include education and awareness, expense, distance and transportation, and poor quality of services by untrained or under-trained doctors. With 45 ophthalmologists, Ghana has one of the highest number of ophthalmologists in Africa: there is approximately one ophthalmologist for every 59,146 people. Liberia, in contrast, has only a handful of ophthalmologists for the entire *The author is grateful to Buduburam Refugee Camp resident Karrus Hayes’s work as her research assistant for this chapter.

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population of 3.5 million. In the United States, there is one optometrist or ophthalmologist for every 5,000 people,3 with an estimated 59,146 eye doctors for the population. Yet, despite the prevalence of doctors in the United States, we know that more than 40 million people remain uninsured and medically underserved in general health care. Countries such as Ghana and Liberia, with many fewer ophthalmologists, cannot meet the eye care needs of the majority of the population. Further complicating the lack of eye care professionals is the fact that poor patients in rural areas are usually unaware that their blindness may be curable or preventable. Even those aware of eye care services will often not pursue treatment because of fear or expense. Quality eye care and innovative outreach programs are vital in order to achieve the Vision 2020 goals of the WHO and the International Agency for Preventable Blindness. With a mission statement of “The Right to Sight,” Vision 2020 seeks to eliminate avoidable blindness worldwide by the year 2020.4 Eight years ago, I founded Unite For Sight, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that improves eye health and eliminates preventable blindness. I founded the organization when I was a sophomore at Yale University. During the previous summer, I had worked as a clinical ophthalmology research associate in Connecticut. While interacting with low-income patients, I learned about eye diseases that could have been prevented by early medical intervention. Their poignant stories made me recognize the need for community programs to promote eye health, motivating me to found Unite For Sight. What started with a single volunteer has now grown to a force of 4,000 volunteers worldwide, who are dedicated to targeting the more than 36 million people with undiagnosed and untreated cases of preventable blindness, including those suffering eye damage as a result of atrocities committed against them. In April of each year, Unite For Sight volunteers from throughout the world, as well as others among the general public who are interested in global health, convene for Unite For Sight’s annual Global Health Conference. The goal of the conference is to exchange ideas across disciplines—from international service and public health to microfinance and international development—about best practices to achieve global goals in health and development. The Unite For Sight conference has become a key to continuous enhancement of the organization’s eye care programming within the context of international development, social entrepreneurship, and global health. Unite For Sight works with eye clinics worldwide that previously have attempted to provide free cataract surgeries and other eye care services in their community, but have been precluded from doing so by lack of staffing and funding. Unite For Sight’s model is unique among global health and volunteer organizations in that it involves local and visiting volunteers who serve as support staff to eye doctors in the field. Additionally, Unite For Sight provides grants to its partner eye clinics to hire local ophthalmic nurses, optometrists, translators, and coordinators to assist in remote, rural village outreach programs. The clinics’ eye doctors diagnose and treat eye disease in the field, and surgical patients are

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brought to the eye clinics for surgery. The Unite For Sight-sponsored patients receive surgical care in the same facilities as the private patients, who are able to pay for their own surgeries. To ensure that all patients receive high quality care, Unite For Sight monitors the postoperative outcomes of patients receiving eye care through its programs with partner eye clinics. The goal of Unite For Sight is to create eye disease-free communities and to achieve the Vision 2020 goals of the World Health Organization and the International Agency for Prevention of Blindness. Since Unite For Sight’s international launching in 2004, its programs have provided services to more than 600,000 people worldwide, and a total of 19,000 sight-restoring surgeries are anticipated by the end of 2008. The Unite For Sight model coincides with the World Health Organization’s Vision 2020 strategy that aims to eliminate preventable blindness by the year 2020, which is as follows: 1. Creating professional, public and political awareness of: a. the magnitude of blindness and visual impairment; b. the fact that at least 75% can be prevented or cured using existing knowledge and technology; c. that existing interventions for cataract, refractive errors, vitamin A deficiency, onchocerciasis, and trachoma, are some of the most cost-effective in healthcare. 2. More efficient use of existing resources and mobilising [sic] new resources for the development of eye care services. These resources come from a variety of sources including Ministries of Health, NGOs, private, and corporate sectors of society. 3. Implementing comprehensive eye care services at the “district” level (population varies from 100,000 to 1 million) involving human resource development (eye care teams with different cadres of staff), and infrastructure development (facilities, equipment, and consumables). These services should be sustainable and equitable. 4. Prioritising [sic] available resources on control of the avoidable causes of blindness and visual impairment in that community. This will vary from country to country and even from district to district in some countries.5

Sasikumar et al. conducted an analysis during 1998 of eye screening camps for 90,000 people in an area of 190 square kilometers in Kolenchery, Kerala, India. The researchers reported that while 20 percent of those who attended the camps had operable cataracts, fewer than 10 percent reported for surgery at the base hospital. Reported barriers included “lack of escort, fear of surgery, socio-economic reasons, adverse media reports of isolated failures in eye surgeries.”6 Unite For Sight’s model aims to reduce these identified barriers by providing patients with transportation, education, and financing for their surgeries. A previous cataract patient at Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana said, “Unite For Sight is popular here because of the dedicated services it gives to the community. This is something that many of us cannot comprehend since we have been here as refugees. No one has ever come over here to pay for patient treatments and transport them at the same time to the eye clinic for their treatment. This is wonderful thing that we have seen and led from Unite For Sight.”7

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Since Unite For Sight’s international launching, its programs have evolved into a standardized model at thirteen eye clinics worldwide, which have provided eye care to more than 600,000 people thus far, including thousands of sightrestoring cataract surgeries and other types of eye care to thousands more. The global programs are based in rural villages and urban locations, as well as in refugee camps. Unite For Sight’s volunteers make a significant, meaningful, tangible impact in the lives of children and adults. The volunteers immediately see the joy on people’s faces when their sight is restored after years of blindness. In addition to helping the community, volunteers are also in a position to witness and draw conclusions about the failures and inequities of global health systems, as well as the impacts of atrocities. The experience broadens their view of what works, and what role they can have to ensure a health system that works for everyone and that leaves no person blind in the future. Unite For Sight believes that anyone can become part of a global solution. Walid Mangal, a medical student and Unite For Sight volunteer in Chennai, India, wrote: The satisfaction of giving the gift of sight back to someone who was practically blind is immeasurable. For the first time in over 10 years, a frail and elderly female villager was able to see her reflection in the mirror. She stood up and walked out of the hospital without the help of the nurses, holding a small plastic bag filled with her life belongings, close against her green sari. This memory I will never forget. It was at that point that I realized the significance of why we were there and what we had done. We made a difference.8

In addition to their generous donation of time and energy to Unite For Sight’s programs in developing countries, the volunteers also fundraise for the eye care programs. The fundraising efforts of Unite For Sight’s volunteers provide poor patients worldwide with free eye care and sight-restoring surgeries. Each cataract surgery costs $50 on average, so every dollar raised makes a tremendous impact on the lives of children and adults. Jaci Theis, a recent Unite For Sight volunteer in Ghana, wrote about her fundraising and volunteer experience: In the surgery room, people were prepped and operated on at amazing efficiency, as the surgery itself took but seven minutes. Seven miraculous minutes was all it took for people to get their sight back. A miracle not only for them, but an eye opener for me, for I had fundraised enough money for 57 of these people to have this chance to regain their sight, a chance they would not have had without the financial support of Unite For Sight. My experience in Ghana was nothing short of amazing. Not only did I get a hands-on experience in the medical field as an undergraduate, but I realized how preventable blindness can be in many developing countries—so preventable that I, a mere college student, could change 57 lives.

Additionally, these fundraising efforts help create public awareness about global eye care needs. In addition to a network of volunteer fundraisers, Unite For Sight also receives donations from individuals, organizations, and corporations.

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ESTABLISHING EYE CARE PROGRAMS WHERE THERE WERE NONE There are hundreds of communities worldwide that are in need of eye care. In Tamale, Ghana, Dr. Seth Wanye is the only ophthalmologist for 2 million people in the entire region. Prior to a partnership with Unite For Sight, Dr. Wanye often went months without providing a single cataract surgery because the community members could not access or afford eye care. Unite For Sight volunteers now work with his ophthalmic staff to assist with screening outreach programs, ophthalmologist volunteers participate with Dr. Wanye to provide training and surgery, and Unite For Sight provides necessary equipment and also funds all of the eye care expenses for the patients. Since Unite For Sight’s partnership began with Dr. Wanye and the Eye Clinic of Tamale Teaching Hospital, more than 40,000 patients have been screened in rural villages, and thousands have received sightrestoring surgery sponsored by Unite For Sight. Ten hours away from Tamale is Buduburam Refugee Camp. In January 2005, Unite For Sight established an eye care program at this camp in Gomoa, Ghana. This 120-acre camp, located one hour from Ghana’s capital city of Accra, was established in early 1990 by the government of Ghana to host a population of Liberian refugees fleeing the civil war in Liberia. Today, the camp has a total population of 77,398, which includes 42,398 resident refugees from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Ivory Coast, as well as a Ghanaian villager population of 35,000. Buduburam has a total of 19,000 children, including 15,000 students and 4,000 children who are unable to attend school because of financial or other barriers. Although there are forty-eight primary and junior secondary schools with 13,700 students, the camp includes just three high schools with a total of 1,300 students. Prior to January 2005, eye care had never been provided at the refugee camp. Even today, health care at the camp continues to be scarce. Initially, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) provided assistance to the massive influx of Liberian refugees by implementing assistance programs, accommodations, health services, education, food distribution, and sanitation. In June 2000, though, UNHCR withdrew all services from Buduburam and instead encouraged repatriation after the elections in Liberia during 1997. In June 2002, however, when the political situation in Liberia worsened, UNHCR returned humanitarian aid to Buduburam.9 Currently, there is one health center at Buduburam with a single primary care physician for the entire population. Patients requiring primary care pay a nominal fee for the doctor’s services. Specialty care such as ophthalmology, however, is not provided at the small clinic. Like all Unite For Sight programs, this program at Buduburam originated from an urgent community need. Karrus Hayes, a schoolteacher at the refugee camp, learned about Unite For Sight while searching for health care resources on the Internet. He contacted Unite For Sight, which then worked with Karrus and other members of the community to establish an eye care presence at the refugee camp. Dr. James Clarke, ophthalmologist and medical director of the Crystal Eye Clinic, who is also a member of Unite For Sight’s medical advisory board, leads the program locally. Crystal Eye Clinic is a private clinic in Accra, Ghana, which has been

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devoted to service outreach programs for years despite very limited resources and staffing. A partnership with Unite For Sight to assist with regular community eye care programs and funding for surgeries was immediately a mutually beneficial affiliation. By the first day Unite For Sight’s volunteers had arrived at Buduburam, hundreds of people had already signed up to receive eye care screenings. Patients presented with cataracts, glaucoma, corneal opacities and scarring, macular scarring, and a range of other ailments. As patients continued flooding into the eye clinic, Unite For Sight’s volunteer team trained the local refugees to assist with the vision screenings so that they could help identify patients requiring diagnosis, treatment, and surgery at Crystal Eye Clinic. Karrus, the teacher who originally had contacted Unite For Sight, was appointed the leader of the local Buduburam Refugee Camp chapter of Unite For Sight. He mobilized a large contingent of dedicated, motivated, and dependable volunteers to assist with the daily Unite For Sight activities. Over the course of six months, Unite For Sight’s volunteers from the United States, Canada, and Europe trained staff of the local chapter to provide the screenings without the need for outside aid from international Unite For Sight volunteers. By September 2005, the local chapter had taken the lead in the eye care program and has continued daily screenings at the refugee camp. Margaret DuahMensah, an eye nurse at Crystal Eye Clinic, visits Buduburam Refugee Camp regularly to diagnose and treat patients, and also to identify those requiring advanced treatment and surgery by Dr. Clarke at his eye clinic, which is located two hours away. In addition to training the local chapter’s volunteers to provide daily vision screenings, Unite For Sight’s international volunteers also implemented a trainthe-trainer program for teachers in the refugee camp’s schools. Teachers learned basic visual acuity testing and participated in seminars about eye health and infectious disease so that they could recognize potential eye disease or vision problems among their students as well as to be introduced to Unite For Sight’s classroom curriculum. Additionally, the teachers learned about the important distinction between visual deficiencies and learning disabilities. After completing each level of training, the teachers participated in graduation ceremonies and received certificates. Today, the local refugees continue regular educational workshops for children and teachers at the settlement. A recent one-day workshop brought together teachers from five elementary schools and three junior high schools, as well as health workers, at Buduburam to learn about the causes and prevention of blindness.

THE TRAGEDY OF BLINDNESS AT BUDUBURAM When Unite For Sight first began its work at Buduburam Refugee Camp, the urgent need was immediately apparent. Many patients presented with blinding cataracts that could be removed with sight restored after a short, fifteen-minute operation by Dr. Clarke. Mr. and Mrs. S., for example, were both blind from

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cataracts before Unite For Sight began its programs. Mr. S. had surgery on one eye in February 2006, and the other eye was operated on during April 2006. His wife had been blind for years and had tried herbs in her eyes, hoping that she would recover her sight. However, her condition only worsened. As she reported in 2006, “When I was completely blind, I was myself being useless because I never got the respect of my family. I felt like just dying and leaving this earth, the fact is that there was pain always in my heart. Blindness is hell. I am happy today because I am back to life.” Mrs. S. had her first eye operated on during February 2006, and the patch was removed the next day. After she came out of the surgery room and was able to see for the first time in eighteen years, she said, “I can see the television light and God’s creations, oh my God! You are great!” When she returned to Buduburam Refugee Camp from Crystal Eye Clinic, she said, “Is this the camp? I can see many people passing by now, and can see what the refugee camp is like.” When she returned home, she shouted, “I can see my family again, my husband, children, and my grandchildren. I have never seen them before! Oh God, I was in darkness and now you have used these people to recover my sight, praise be to the Lord God. I was dead, but I am now alive” (S., 2006). Beyond the predicted types of eye disease at Buduburam, there were also a multitude of other complicated eye diseases, many of which were uncommon in other locations where Unite For Sight works. The operable cataract rate at Buduburam was much lower than expected because of compounding traumarelated eye disease, including macular scarring, corneal scarring, and uveitis. Unfortunately, when patients have these conditions, removing cataracts will not improve their vision. These conditions, which were mostly caused by physical abuse in Liberia prior to arrival at Buduburam, are infrequent in other nonrefugee settings where Unite For Sight works. Macular scarring was found to be caused by an unusual form of abuse that has received little, if any, documentation. The rebels in Liberia forced scores of people to stare at the sun for long periods of time. If they looked away from the sun, they were immediately shot.10 This form of abuse resulted in blindness because staring at the sun causes severe, irreversible retinal damage and macular scarring. Complicated eye conditions resulted in a low operable cataract rate of 2.6 percent at Buduburam Refugee Camp. Thirtyfive percent of those with inoperable cataracts had corneal scarring, 14 percent had macular scarring, and 14 percent had uveitis.

ATROCITIES AND BLINDNESS Thousands suffered human rights abuses by the rebels when civil war began in Liberia during 1989. The victims experienced brutal killings, mass rape, torture, and limb amputation. Survivors fled to neighboring countries, with the majority escaping to Ghana, where Buduburam Refugee Camp was established. Thousands of additional refugees were forced to flee when civil war again broke out a decade later in 1999, when warlord Charles Taylor led the atrocities. In total, since 1989, 250,000 have been killed11, and 200,000 have been displaced

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from Liberia, 80 percent of whom are children and women who had witnessed and endured atrocities.12 The refugees at Buduburam in Ghana suffered crimes against humanity, resulting in physical and emotional scars. In 1992, rebels forced a fifty-seven-year-old Buduburam resident to look at the sun for over two hours. “I could not see anything very clear, everything was looking dark to me, and when the breeze hit my eye, I could feel so much pain,” she said. “I therefore got the knowledge that I lost my sight due to my eye being exposed to the sun.” She continued: It all started in 1992 when rebels entered our village. They forced us to beat a truck of seed rice with our hands. We were all given mortar and pestle to beat the rice. We started from the morning hour, and one was not allowed rest as we continued. Many of our hands got cut, blood running down from our hands, and could no longer hold the pestle to continue the beating of the rice. We were no longer efficient on the job. One of the rebels came close to me and said, “Why are you standing?” And we answered there was sore all over our hands, we could no longer beat the rice, but they said for us complaining was the act of wickedness. Therefore, they were left with no option but to start beating us all. And they later put us all in a dark room till night and we slept there. The next morning, we were brought outside, placed under the sun and asked to open our eyes directly to the sun. Afterward we should tell them how the sun operates in the sky. We should be the first scientists from Africa that have studied the sun. We spent the whole day looking at the sun. If anyone tries to remove or close their eyes, they will be killed. There was a 32-year-old young lady that was killed since she refused to look at the sun. When evening came, one of their commanders came into the village, and when he saw us, he asked his men what was going on. And they told him that we have refused to beat the rice. He was also angry, but when he got close to us and asked, we all showed our hands. When he saw it, he commanded his men to allow us to go and take our bath that the next day we would continue the beating of the rice. We all moved toward the riverside to bathe, but when we got there, one of the ladies said we have to leave this place, if not we will be killed one day. We all therefore took the risk to escape, and we did. And later came to Ghana. Since that time, my eyes started suffering.

An 80-year-old woman at Buduburam was physically beaten by rebels in Liberia in 1991 because of her tribal background. Now permanently blind, she experienced physical trauma to her eyes when she was forced to stare at the sun. Likewise, another patient at Buduburam was beaten in 1990 and experienced problems with his eyes immediately thereafter, as he describes: When the rebel[s] entered our town, that was some minute[s] after 9 AM and we were all in the door. They were firing the gun in every direction, and after a few hours, the firing ceased and we were asked to come out of the houses, and we did. We came out with our hands on our head, and we were asked to sit down. They were moving from person to person, and when they reached me, they asked where is the money you got? I answered there is no money. But they said that if I don’t bring the money, they were going to kill me. I started crying, begging because they have already killed two people. I was very much afraid and asked them to please

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allow me to live. One of them said let’s kill me, but another said that I had to suffer first. I remember one of them hit me with the gun, and everyone started beating me with the gun. One of them asked for a cup, and it was given to me. They asked me to urinate into the cup with the gun in my ear, and I did. They therefore gave it to me to drink, and I drank it. In that process, one of my brothers got up and said we have done no wrong, why are you treating us like this? The word did not end from him, and he was shot. I was then ordered to be tied, and they did and placed me in the middle of the town with facing the sun. They also placed a rock in my mouth, and they started urinating on me in my face and my mouth. I was placed in the sun for over five hours. While undergoing that pain, there came a firing from the government troops, and they left us running to the direction they came from. When the government troops reentered the town, they untied me and others, and they asked us to go behind them, and we did. When I got untied, the only person from my family was my daughter, who was found in the house by the army. We were taken to the government control area, and we later moved across into Ivory Coast where we lived over four years before coming to Ghana.

For these and countless other patients who suffered torture and abuse, Unite For Sight is not able to provide any treatment that will improve or restore their vision. Some patients, however, are able to receive sight-restoring surgery for eye complications caused by torture during the war. Many people with physical abuse to the eye develop trauma-induced cataracts. If patients do not have any other type of complicating eye problems related to the trauma, then cataracts can be removed to restore their sight. A nineteen-year-old man became blind when he was living as a refugee in Ivory Coast. He had been hit in the right eye during the Liberian civil war and had no access to treatment. As time went by, he started experiencing periodic blindness and finally lost his sight in 1999. While he was in Ivory Coast, he met another refugee who had received sight-restoring surgery from Unite For Sight; this refugee advised him to go quickly to Buduburam Refugee Camp for an evaluation by Unite For Sight. He arrived at Buduburam and had his sight restored in June 2006 by Dr. Clarke. Karrus explained that the patient considers his recovery of sight a miracle. “He said that he has been considered as a disabled person, and no one had regard for him as a human being. There were a lot of struggles he underwent. He felt rejected by others, all of his friends he knew never had interest in him when he got blind.” After his surgery, he asked Habib (another refugee at Buduburam who volunteers daily for Unite For Sight) to write something for him to read, and he read it without making any mistakes. The patient then said, “Today my life is changed. I am no more disabled. I can see clearly and do everything others do. I am sure I will be respected by my fellow men again. May God bless Unite For Sight and all their team volunteers and donate; they have made me proud and have brought me back to the world of life” (Habib, 2006). A sixty-year-old woman at Buduburam Refugee Camp has a similar story. She had been beaten by rebels in Liberia in 1990 because she refused to relinquish land that she owned. Later, during the war, she was attacked by those wanting to claim

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the land. It was not until years later that she was able to have her vision restored. She tells her story: One morning, I went to buy goods in a waterside market, and the rebel took control of the area in my absence. On my way back home, there were so many people in the street running toward the city center, but since I left my children behind, I decided to rush back to get my children to move to a safer zone. Before reaching to my house, I saw groups of neighbors, but I could not see my children. I was asking at the same time I saw a lady who told me that rebels had entered our house and there was a gun fire there. But I tried to go there by all means to get my children when I got at the back of the house watching carefully before moving closer. I just heard from my back, “Put your hands on your head and move forward. If you want to run away, it’s up to you.” He used the word God [and said that] today you will either lose your land or your life. Right away, I was hit with the gun from my back and felt my face on the ground, and he stepped on my back and started calling his friends. And one of them gripped my hand and started dragging me toward the front of the house. My nephew’s dead body was lying there, and all my children were on the ground without clothing, with their faces down. They said now your nephew is dead, we want you to celebrate over his death by dancing, singing, and asking for mercy. One of them slapped me in the face and others started kicking my face side. My daughter was ordered to get up and bring pepper from the house, and she was then told to mix the pepper, and she did. They took it and urinated inside and gave it to me to drink. When I was drinking it, they took it from me again and told me to lay down on the floor with my face up. Before I could try to do so, three men threw me down. One sat in my chest, one held my head and the other one put pepper mixed with urine in my eyes. They held me forever so long at the same time, peppering me till it got finished. I fought and cried till I got very weak and helpless. One of them said they wanted to remove my eye. He took the belt and started beating my eye. Within that process, darkness covered my whole eye, and it was very painful. I could no longer realize anyone nor expose my eye to light. He asked should I lose my life or the land? I said my land. They brought a written statement that I no longer in need of the land, that I have finally turned it over to the brother. I told them to allow my daughter to bring it for them and let her write for me since I could not see anything now. My daughter brought the deed and gave it to them, and she made the document that as of that date, all property was now for the brother, but not for me. I put my thumbprint on the document and turned it over to them. And we were released and asked never to come back to our house. We were able to find our way to the neighboring country Guinea. The only thing I was using in my eye was sugar water, there was no medication. Until I came to the Unite For Sight eye clinic where I had surgery and now can see.

ENTREPRENEURIAL SKILL BUILDING AND MICROFINANCE AT BUDUBURAM REFUGEE CAMP Unite For Sight not only eradicates blindness and eye disease, but we also boost incomes through entrepreneurial skill building. We developed an educational scholarship fund that enables the children of blind patients to attend school. We

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also work with blind patients and women to develop small businesses so that they can support their families. The residents of Buduburam Refugee Camp have very little money, and many barely earn enough money to feed their families. A blind man named A. is one such individual, and Unite For Sight worked with him to start a water-selling business at Buduburam. A. is a very shy, quiet man, who always looks at his feet when he speaks. He shuffles his feet in the dust when he walks because he has very low visual acuity as a result of a permanently blinding condition called retinitis pigmentosa. This eye disease is incurable even for the most well-equipped eye clinics in the developed world. Born in 1965 in Monrovia, Liberia, A. is married with four children of his own, in addition to caring for his brothers’ three children. A. was well educated and taught math until January 1990, when fighting in Liberia forced him, his wife, and their baby daughter to flee to the Ivory Coast. He was safe in that country and began to teach math again, unaware that several of his remaining family members had stayed in Liberia and had faced torture and death. He served as director of an education project until war erupted in the Ivory Coast on September 20, 2002. Rebels targeted the Liberian refugees in the Ivory Coast, forcing A. and his family to flee to Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana. There, reunited with two brothers and one sister, he learned that his father and siblings had been killed in the war years earlier. His father, a popular local businessman, had been removed from his house early one morning in June 1990. He was arrested and jailed for selling rice to rebels, although it is believed that the true reason for his arrest was his tribal affiliation and ethnicity. When local supporters appealed for A.’s father’s release, he was taken out of the jail, and shot and killed in front of the supporters. A. was one of the first patients to arrive at the Unite For Sight clinic at Buduburam Refugee Camp. His retina appeared speckled with yellow, black, and red spots, indicating the genetic condition retinitis pigmentosa. A. was devastated when he was informed by the ophthalmologist that his condition was untreatable. He asked to speak privately with Julie, Unite For Sight’s Ghana program coordinator. Looking down, he quietly asked Julie how he would study if he could not see. He also explained his family situation. He could not afford to support his family of thirteen people. They all lived in a small, eight feet by ten feet room and could not afford food. Julie said she had never felt so helpless; she wanted to cry for him. Julie immediately developed a plan to help A. generate an income for his family: he would sell purified water at the refugee camp. For A., Unite For Sight purchased a freezer, voltage regulator, cooler, extension cord, water sachets, and electrical current registration. With his water-selling business established, A. has been able to better support his family. Unfortunately, his sight will never be restored without a medical breakthrough. In addition to working with individuals such as A. to create small local businesses, Unite For Sight also promotes the financial success of communities by linking them to world markets. One hundred percent of the proceeds to Unite For Sight directly fund eye care expenses at Buduburam Refugee Camp, thus helping

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the program to become locally sustainable. As female heads of household with limited or no income, several women were invited by Unite For Sight to participate in a unique microenterprise program. The women create beautiful, vibrant jewelry and eyeglass cases at Buduburam Refugee Camp, and they earn an income when Unite For Sight purchases jewelry and eyeglass cases. Unite For Sight then introduces the jewelry and eyeglass cases to world markets through sales on the Internet and at universities.

CONCLUSION The provision of eye care is often overlooked in communities worldwide, from suburban North America to refugee camps in Africa and Asia. Although many are aware of a myriad of atrocities endured by refugees throughout the world, few are aware of the abuses to the eye, or the consequences of blindness. As a result of its remarkable volunteer force of refugees at Buduburam Refugee Camp, as well as the work of Dr. James Clarke and Margaret Duah-Mensah of Crystal Eye Clinic, and more than forty international volunteers who provided training for the local refugees during the first six months of programming in 2005, Unite For Sight is making a profound difference in the lives of thousands of patients at Buduburam Refugee Camp. With the election of a new president of Liberia in 2006, refugees at Buduburam are beginning to move back to their home country. Unite For Sight hopes to provide eye care to thousands more at Buduburam before they return to Liberia. Unite For Sight encourages students, youth, eye care professionals, and physicians to become social entrepreneurs and join forces to prevent blindness in their local communities, as well as in communities abroad. Unite For Sight’s rapid expansion and program enhancement has occurred because of several important steps that were taken to build the organization. First, I took advantage of established networks to grow the organization. Unite For Sight expanded its chapters and international programs by linking with existing networks, including eye clinics, university organizations, medical school dean’s offices, international health networks, and nonprofit organizations. The next important step in the organization’s development was to create a welcoming website and informative e-newsletter to increase effectiveness in recruitment, fundraising, training of volunteers, and working with communities. I continue to spend much of my time communicating with our partners and volunteers, as well as contacting and recruiting new volunteers. The website is a useful way for people to learn how they can become part of a global solution to improve eye health. The website also has significantly expanded to provide extensive training for the more than 4,000 volunteers who have joined Unite For Sight to provide eye care services in their local community and abroad. We devote much of our effort to educating and training our volunteers, who are the heart and soul of Unite For Sight. All volunteers traveling abroad view Unite For Sight cultural competency and eye health training videos, study the Unite For Sight online Eye Health

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Course, and complete a final exam; complete required reading and videos about professionalism, international volunteerism, and community eye health; pursue training with eye doctors in their home communities; and receive additional training by the partner eye clinic abroad. This prepares the volunteers to best assist the eye clinic’s staff in the field. In addition to serving as support staff at eye clinics worldwide, the volunteers are also vital to the organization’s fundraising capacity. The volunteers encourage friends and family to donate for eye care programs abroad. This network of volunteer fundraisers also helps promote public awareness about global eye care needs and ways that the general public can become involved with implementing a solution. Possibly the most important advice for anyone interested in developing a nonprofit organization is to be dedicated to the continuous enhancement of programs. One should focus attention on listening carefully to the needs and advice of local communities and partners because their advice is crucial to the sustainability and effectiveness of an organization. Acknowledgments Unite For Sight is especially indebted to Dr. James Clarke and Margaret Duah-Mensah of Crystal Eye Clinic, as well as the leaders of Unite For Sight’s chapter at Buduburam Refugee Camp: Karrus Hayes, Habib Kamara, and Joseph Muhlenberg. Each selflessly devotes every day to preventing blindness and restoring sight. Additionally, two of Unite For Sight’s previous international volunteers from the United States, Julie R. Harris, MPH, PhD, and Valda Boyd Ford, MPH, RN, MS, are directly responsible for establishing a sustainable, long-term eye program at Buduburam Refugee Camp. Their dedication and leadership were invaluable to the community and to Unite For Sight.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Unite For Sight Founder and/or Executive Director: Jennifer Staple Mission/Description: Unite For Sight is a nonprofit organization that empowers communities worldwide to improve eye health and eliminate preventable blindness. Local and visiting volunteers work with partner eye clinics to provide eye care in communities without previous access, with the goal of creating eye disease–free communities. In North America, patients are connected with free health coverage programs so that they can receive eye exams by doctors. In Africa and Asia, Unite For Sight volunteers work with partner eye clinics to implement screening and free surgery programs. Website: www.uniteforsight.org

The New Humanitarians

44 Address: 31 Brookwood Dr. Newtown, CT 06470 E-mail: [email protected] Phone: 203-404-4900 Fax: 203-404-4975

NOTES 1. World Health Organization (1997), Global Initiative for the Prevention of Avoidable Blindness,_WHO/PBL/97.61 (Geneva: WHO, 1997). 2. Ibid. 3. Low Cost Eyeglasses: The Problem (http://www.lowcosteyeglasses.net/stuck.htm). 4. Vision 2020: The Right to Sight (http://www.v2020.org). 5. A. Foster and S. Resnikoff, “The Impact of Vision 2020 on Global Blindness,” Eye 19 (2005): 1133–1135. 6. S. Sasikumar, N. Mohamed, and S. J. Saikumar, “Cataract Surgical Coverage in Kolenchery, Kerala, India,” Community Eye Health Journal 11 (1998): 7. 7. Interview at Buduburam Refugee Camp, June 23, 2006. 8. http://uniteforsight.org/image/walidmangal.jpg. 9. Saah Charles N’Tow, “How Liberians Live on the Camp at Buduburam in Ghana,” The Perspective (http://www.theperspective.org/2004/june/buduburamcamp.html). 10. Human Rights Watch, Easy Prey: Child Soldiers in Liberia (http://www.hrw.org/reports/ 1994/liberia2/). 11. BBC News, Country Profile: Liberia (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/country_ profiles/1043500.stm). 12. Abdullah Dukully, “Rights-Liberia: War Threatens Survival Of Children,” Inter Press Service, (http://www.aegis.org/news/ips/2003/IP030415.html).

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Achieving Social Goals through Business Discipline: Scojo Foundation Jordan Kassalow, Graham Macmillan, Miriam Stone, Katherine Katcher, Patrick Savaiano, and Annie Khan

When we first started thinking about how to address the challenge of providing reading glasses to the millions of people across the globe who need them, we knew we had a steep hill to climb. Countless organizations start out with similarly ambitious ideas but often fail to implement them properly to form a sustainable, effective business model. Although we continue the climb that began when we started six years ago, we know we have developed a truly innovative social enterprise with great promise for success. Our customers around the world—in India, El Salvador, Guatemala, Bangladesh, and Ghana—have seen huge transformations in their lives because of a simple pair of Scojo Foundation reading glasses. Who could have imagined that a simple pair of reading glasses could have such an effect? Well, we did. We saw that this basic and critical tool was unavailable to most in the developing world, and we sought a market-based solution to this problem—a solution that would not create a dynamic of dependency, but would empower individuals to transform their lives. Before starting our first program, we researched, studied, and tested our programs inside and out. We believe that it is Scojo Foundation’s responsibility to provide a product and service that is of the highest quality for our customers. For too long, the global economy has failed to recognize the power and influence that people living on only a few dollars a day can have. Scojo Foundation is working to change this perception by providing simple pairs of reading glasses to our customers and training new, determined Vision Entrepreneurs to sell our products. We know it is possible to empower the poor in developing countries because we have witnessed this transformation in the people we serve: the Scojo Vision Entrepreneurs and their customers.

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BACKGROUND, MODEL, AND SIZE OF SCOJO FOUNDATION Scojo Foundation derived its name as a composite of the first letters of the names of co-founders Dr. Jordan Kassalow and Scott Berrie. The organization began in 2001 with a six-month pilot program in India and was officially incorporated one year later in New York. Our goal is to reduce poverty and generate opportunities for our customers and our Vision Entrepreneurs through the sale of affordable reading glasses in the developing world. As we age, almost all of us will lose our ability to see up close. But for the more than 700 million people living in poverty who don’t have access to reading glasses, the loss of near vision can mean the loss of livelihood. For tailors, electricians, goldsmiths, and others whose precarious working lives depend on their ability to see up close, the lack of access to reading glasses can have disastrous economic consequences. A pair of low-cost reading glasses, long available in every drugstore in the United States, can restore their vision and double their productivity, yet this simple, life-changing product has not yet made its way into the hands of those who live on less than $4 a day. Committed to employing market-based solutions to solve this global issue, Scojo Foundation developed a replicable, scalable, microfranchise model. Crucial to our model are our Vision Entrepreneurs. These low-income men and women are trained to conduct vision screenings within their communities, sell affordable reading glasses, and refer those who require advanced eye care to reputable clinics. Each Scojo Vision Entrepreneur receives his or her own “Business in a Bag,” a backpack that is branded with the Scojo logo and contains twenty to thirty pairs of reading glasses in four different styles and five different powers of magnification. Also included are three different styles of sunglasses and other accessories such as cleaning cloths, cords, and cases. These backpacks are sales kits containing all the products and materials needed for vision screening, sales, data collection, and marketing. This backpack is the cornerstone of the microfranchise owned by each of our entrepreneurs. With blueprints for success, Scojo Vision Entrepreneurs run profitable businesses, earning more than twice their previous daily income on each pair of glasses sold. Through the sales of these glasses, our entrepreneurs help us to create a sustainable business model. By employing a marketbased model rather than by giving away glasses for free, we are able to become increasingly self-sustaining while creating sustainable jobs for local entrepreneurs. Recognizing the massive numbers of people in need of reading glasses, Scojo Foundation also teaches Franchise Partners, or partner organizations with existing distribution networks, to reach the rural poor and add our Vision Entrepreneur model to their own operations. Partnering with these established programs makes it possible for Scojo Foundation to impact more people in a shorter period of time and bring us closer to our goal of providing glasses to all 700 million people in need. We support our Franchise Partners by providing the tools, knowledge, and products they need to successfully implement Scojo microfranchises, adding both profit and social value to established programs. Scojo Foundation currently works with nearly thirty Franchise Partners, from small nongovernmental organizations

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(NGOs) to large multinational corporations, in India, Bangladesh, Ghana, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Paraguay. Thanks to our Franchise Partner model, we are able to greatly expand our reach and impact without building up our own costly infrastructure. Our reading glasses are sourced from China, where the price-to-quality ratio is the most attractive, enabling us to deliver our products anywhere in the world for approximately $1.50, including the cost of transportation and customs duties. Through this process, Scojo Foundation is able to make reading glasses affordable, fashionable, and available to people in need. Today, we support over 1,000 Vision Entrepreneurs, we have sold more than 85,000 pairs of reading glasses, and we have referred over 80,000 people for advanced eye care.

TRAINING FOR SCOJO VISION ENTREPRENEURS In order for our social business model to succeed, Scojo Foundation must ensure that our entrepreneurs are effectively trained. Our training process focuses on several areas, including business management, marketing, inventory sales figures, and vision screening. We teach business skills in accounting, marketing, and sales. Training lasts three days, with two days devoted to learning in a classroom setting and one day spent in the field shadowing an already-established entrepreneur. Our training process empowers our entrepreneurs with the knowledge, skills, and confidence they will need in the field. Scojo Foundation maintains an organized system of training and support for our entrepreneurs in order to increase their chances of success. Teams of two or three full-time Vision Entrepreneur training and identification managers work at the district level to identify prospective Vision Entrepreneurs and provide them with initial training before handing them off to their district coordinator. Based in each region, district coordinators meet with each individual entrepreneur twice a month—once to restock inventory and collect payment for glasses sold, and once for additional training and support. Every quarter, regional groups of Scojo Vision Entrepreneurs come together to discuss their past experiences and share new ideas they may have to improve their systems.

FEMALE EMPOWERMENT One of the most important aspects of Scojo Foundation’s mission is our focus on empowering women. Research shows that women are much more likely than their male counterparts to invest in their children’s education and health, thereby promoting further positive development. However, we have faced several obstacles that have made our focus on women challenging. For example, in rural India, women are not supposed to travel on their own, which is a key component of our sales model. Thus, Scojo Foundation decided to train male entrepreneurs as well as females, and we often train teams of husbands and wives and mothers and sons

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so that they can travel together as pairs. Our network in India is thus a mix of men and women working together, while in most of the other countries in which we work, our Vision Entrepreneurs are mainly women.

CONCEPTION OF SCOJO FOUNDATION Before co-founding Scojo Foundation, Dr. Jordan Kassalow spent time as an ophthalmology student participating in missions for Volunteer Ophthalmic Services to Humanity (VOSH). In these missions, doctors would provide eye exams, glasses, surgeries, and other ophthalmic needs to low-income people in countries that did not have such services. Dr. Kassalow noticed, however, that these missions were geared toward more complicated conditions and did not cater to the most common and ubiquitous eye care problems. Of the people who need eye care service, 36 percent need treatment for presbyopia, a natural condition caused by the aging of the eye, in which the eye has difficulty focusing on nearby objects. The lack of basic services to treat presbyopia, which simply requires nonprescription reading glasses, inspired Dr. Kassalow to make a difference. Through his early experiences providing reading glasses to those in need, Dr. Kassalow realized the tremendous effect this service could have. On one particular trip to Mexico, Dr. Kassalow’s passion for providing low-cost eye care on a massive scale was transformed from a dream to reality. Dr. Kassalow provided a woman who hadn’t been able to read her Bible for years with a pair of simple drugstore reading glasses. Overcome with gratitude, she returned the next day to give Dr. Kassalow twenty chickens to thank him for reviving her sight and changing her life. He knew right then that if he could help millions of people just like her to see, he could change the world. It was at that moment that Scojo Foundation was born. Scott Berrie, Dr. Kassalow’s business partner, also recognized that an opportunity was in place to create a socially responsible company that could work to support Scojo Foundations efforts. Together, they created a for-profit company called Scojo Vision LLC. The company sells fashionable reading glasses to high-end department stores, and 5 percent of the revenue generated by Scojo Vision LLC is donated to Scojo Foundation. Scojo Vision LLC has been sold, but the purchasing company continues to give 5 percent of its Scojo New York line to Scojo Foundation.

SCOJO FOUNDATION MEASURES OF SUCCESS Scojo Foundation measures its success by monitoring three main areas. First, we keep close track on the number of glasses that are sold worldwide by our entrepreneurs, as well as the number of customers Scojo Vision Entrepreneurs screen before making a sale. Initially, an entrepreneur had to screen eight people to sell one pair of glasses, but that ratio has since improved to three to one thanks to our improved sales and marketing techniques. Secondly, we track the number of entrepreneurs who remain active salespeople, as compared to the number of

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entrepreneurs who have been trained since inception. Finally, Scojo Foundation tracks the number of clients we refer to hospitals and clinics for more advanced eye care. This is a critical component of our system since it allows us to provide a service to those with more serious eye conditions by connecting them to partner eye care hospitals offering free or low-cost care. It also reduces the burden on the eye care system by funneling only those who require a doctor’s attention to more advanced care facilities. BENEFIT TO OTHERS At the core of our mission is the desire to benefit the greatest number of people possible. Scojo Foundation knows that the customers who wear our reading glasses have benefited tremendously. Their productivity has increased, their earnings have increased, and they are better able to invest in their families. In our line of work, we also challenge the flawed assumptions that the poor do not want a product or service that is of value, that they do not have the right to choose as a regular consumer, or that they do not care how they look or how they feel. All people want to be offered choices, and it is exactly this dignity of choice that we offer to our customers. For example, of the four styles of glasses we offer, 85 percent of our customers choose to buy our second most expensive product. This is quantifiable proof that the poor care about the quality and style of the products they are purchasing. It is an empowering experience for anyone to have the ability to choose. SUCCESS STORIES Noel Flores Alvardo (age sixty-four), Atiquizaya, Ahuachapan, El Salvador Noel came to a mini-campaign organized by local Vision Entrepreneurs in El Salvador with the assistance of his daughter and a broomstick he used as a cane. He was completely blind in his right eye, and the sight in his left eye was rapidly deteriorating. During his vision screening, the Vision Entrepreneurs immediately realized that Noel needed treatment far beyond reading glasses. The Vision Entrepreneur was able to refer him to the local clinic and organize transportation for him to get there. At the eye clinic, Noel was seen by a board-certified ophthalmologist and was diagnosed with glaucoma. Both the consultation and the medicine Noel was prescribed were given to him free of charge. Ultimately, this intervention prevented him from going completely blind. Vijaya Laxmi (age fifty-three), Andhra Pradesh, India Vijaya Laxmi is a seamstress in the rural Tandur district of Andhra Pradesh, India. Six years ago, her shirt-making business was her primary source of income. She would sew an average of ten shirts per week, bringing in an income of $8. As presbyopia set in, it became all but impossible for Vijaya to thread a needle or do

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the necessary detailed work that her profession demanded. She began to rely on her granddaughter for help, but was alone during the daylight hours when her granddaughter was at school. As her output diminished, the stores where Vijaya sold her shirts began to source them elsewhere. She did not know of any place to purchase glasses locally, and she could not afford to take the day-long trip to Hyderabad to seek help. Vijaya then learned of a woman in her village selling eyeglasses through Scojo Foundation’s rural distribution initiative. Vijaya went to her to have her eyes checked and bought a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses. Since then, Vijaya Laxmi has begun sewing again and is once again earning a living. She finds the glasses comfortable to wear and also uses them to perform everyday household tasks without requiring the help of her family. Scojo Foundation was able to help Vijaya reclaim her livelihood. Don Felipe (age forty), Nebaj, Guatemala* A little over a year ago I was making a visit up to Nebaj to see how things were going. Night after night I noticed that a small Ixil man with huge glasses would come into El Descanso, the restaurant in Nebaj we support, and sit and pretend to read the old English language magazines that we have for clients. It struck me as odd for two reasons: one, he looked like a bug with his giant glasses, and two, it is rare that a farmer from Nebaj can read, especially Newsweek magazine. So I asked the manager who this man was; he told me that he was Don Felipe, the newest guide of Guias Ixiles, a small trekking business that we support. Don Felipe, who is a wonderful man, did very well with the tourists and was able to make a decent living as a guide. However, we did start to receive some complaints from clients: they loved his tours but noticed that he could barely see. At this time we, Soluciones Comunitarias, were not yet involved with Scojo Foundation and did not know what could be done, but things did not look good for Don Felipe. One day, we sent Don Felipe out with two tourists on an easy day’s hike. The tourists arrived back in Nebaj about an hour before Felipe, who had gotten himself lost. We felt that something had to be done about his vision if he were to continue working. Luckily, right around this time, we began working with Scojo Foundation and an eye care clinic called Visualiza, in Guatemala, to work out a referral system for our Vision Entrepreneurs. We sent Don Felipe for an exam. They discovered that Don Felipe had been born with cataracts and had never been able to see correctly; because he had been born into extreme poverty, he had never had an eye exam as a child. The doctor told him that he would probably be completely blind within the next couple of years if he did not do something about it. They recommended two minor surgeries, one on each eye, to remove the cataracts (at a cost of Q500 per eye, about $65 each). *Text by George Glickley of Soluciones Comunitarias, Scojo Foundation’s Franchise Partner in Guatemala.

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Don Felipe decided to go forward with the surgeries. Imagine a man who has spent the greater part of his forty some odd years (Guatemalans often have only a vague idea of how old they are) seeing through a cloud. Now, for the first time, he could see the faces of his loved ones, the crops that he grows for food to maintain his family, and the mountains and forests where he lives and works. On his last night, he came to me, extended me his right hand, and in his best Spanish (Felipe’s first language is Ixil, a Maya dialect) told me this: “When you and Greg showed me the new glasses from Scojo and told me that one day I would be able to see the beautiful mountains that all of the tourists come to see, I would have never imagined that it would be possible. Thank you for giving me this opportunity. My life will be much better now, I can already tell. I cannot wait to get back to Nebaj.” Then, for the first time since we met, he actually looked me in the eye and shook my hand. And with that, he shuffled off to bed.

OVERCOMING FALSE STARTS AND OUR APPROACH TO OBSTACLES It is inevitable in starting an organization that one will confront obstacles. In order to continue growing in the face of these obstacles, we have had to create new and innovative solutions. We learned many lessons from our initial projects in El Salvador. Consistent with our mission, this project involved training lowincome women to start their own businesses selling glasses. Initially, the women were provided with the backpack of supplies that they rented for a monthly fee over a seven- to eight-month period. We made the faulty assumption that, by selling their glasses, the women would be able to pay off the loan and make a profit. Instead, we found that the women would not show up to the monthly meetings because they could not afford to pay the fee. As a result, a large portion of our inventory was not accounted for. To make matters worse, we were not selling many pairs of glasses, and we were not expanding as we had hoped. Essentially, Scojo Foundation had become a group of loan administrators, which diluted our efforts to distribute reading glasses. With help from our local partner, New Development Solutions, we changed our strategy to a consignment model, whereby we provided the supplies to our entrepreneurs at no cost, and they repaid us for the glasses that they sold. If the entrepreneurs were not successful in their business, or if it simply was not the right fit for them, they did not owe us any money. They would simply return the kit, and Scojo Foundation would not lose out on inventory. Another major problem we encountered was that we were too wedded to our business plans. Because we were starting something completely new and different, our business plans were nothing more than numbers and words on paper. Moving from our plans to reality was a very different story. Fortunately, we had hired smart, hardworking, motivated, and passionate people, who were able to transform these plans into systems that worked on the ground. We stayed flexible, and have remained an efficient and highly productive organization, impacting a great number of people with a limited number of employees.

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Scojo Foundation remains a “learning” organization to this day. We are relatively small and do not operate bureaucratically. Our decision-making process is decentralized, so each employee takes part in our businesses decisions. We also learned very early on to listen and learn from our entrepreneurs. As our agents in the field, the entrepreneurs have the best sense of our needs as an organization. For example, when Dr. Kassalow was in El Salvador visiting a project site, he noticed a Scojo Vision Entrepreneur selling sunglasses, even though Scojo Foundation was not providing its entrepreneurs with sunglasses at the time. The entrepreneur told Dr. Kassalow that she had received multiple requests from customers for sunglasses. Since she was unable to obtain sunglasses from us, she had purchased them on her own in order to make her customers happy. We learned from her and other Vision Entrepreneurs that sunglasses were an important product for many of their clients, and we began to manufacture them and offer them in our product line. Stories like these have taught us that it is essential to remain open and receptive to the ideas and desires of our employees, our staff, our Vision Entrepreneurs, and our customers. We faced another major obstacle in reaching our goal of getting our product to as many people as possible. It quickly became apparent that training each Scojo Vision Entrepreneur ourselves would take time, money, and bulky infrastructure. We launched our Franchise Partnership model as a creative solution to accelerate the scale of Scojo Foundation. In this model, we train local organizations with existing networks of health workers, microfinance borrowers, internet kiosk managers, or salespeople to plug our Vision Entrepreneur model into their existing operations. This has allowed us to expand rapidly and with little start-up capital across India and throughout the world. Looking back to our inception, we must also acknowledge that it has been difficult to sell our product rather than give it away. Yet, we are committed to market-based solutions to alleviate poverty. Programs such as ours create local jobs as well as set up long-term, sustainable distribution channels that enable people to get the tools they need to see and to work. We also believe that when a product is given away for free, people tend to value it less. Theoretically, we could go out and distribute millions of pairs of glasses for free, but we question the impact that would have. We would not be able to sustain ourselves as an organization, our customers would have no way of getting reading glasses in the future, and we would not be able to create employment for our entrepreneurs. Reading glasses are inexpensive, easy to transport, and make a huge difference in people’s lives, but getting them to people who need them is a major challenge. We have had to build the distribution channels from scratch to reach the rural poor. In the beginning, we assumed that training entrepreneurs to sell reading glasses would be an easier task than it was. The lessons we learned in the field are what really helped us progress as an organization. After testing our ideas in the field and learning from the challenges we faced, we determined that the Scojo Foundation recipe for success requires the following key components: a distribution channel to get the product into the market; entrepreneurs in the community to sell the product; a cost-effective, turn-key supply chain; the right

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staff to motivate entrepreneurs and ensure systems work smoothly; the right marketing and promotions material to make the customers aware of the brand; and finally, the systems to effectively monitor and evaluate performance.

THE NEXT STEPS FOR SCOJO FOUNDATION A 2007 highlight for Scojo Foundation was when President Clinton featured our work at the Clinton Global Initiative opening session, stating that Scojo Foundation’s work is “the sort of thing that the Clinton Global Initiative was designed to do—find ways to create new markets where you can actually empower people by creating a business and solve a big social problem.” Dr. Jordan Kassalow was called to the stage with President Clinton to represent Scojo Foundation and its partners in making the commitment to more than triple Scojo Foundation’s impact over the next three years. President Clinton has also praised the work of Scojo Foundation on national news programs, naming Scojo Foundation his “favorite commitment this year” on CNBC’s Power Lunch with Maria Bartiromo. On MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olberman, President Clinton stated that Scojo Foundation “will help hundreds of thousands of people and in the process create a whole new sector of the economy.” He also praised Scojo Foundation’s work on NBC’s Meet the Press with Tim Russert, ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, and Fox News’s On the Record with Greta Van Susteren. Our short-term goal is to execute Scojo Foundation’s five-year business plan. This plan outlines our long-term goals and objectives, the resources needed to achieve our objectives, and how we will execute our plans. We have tested and proved our model and are preparing for massive expansion. As of January 2007, we operated in nine countries across South Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Aside from our local networks managed from our offices in Hyderabad, India, and Santa Ana, El Salvador, all our expansion is through our Franchise Partners. In Africa, our pan-Africa arrangement with Population Services International (PSI) is making reading glasses available throughout sub-Saharan Africa. In 2007 we launched our Ghana program. In 2008 we anticipate launching several programs in Latin American countries, including Paraguay and Nicaragua. To date, Scojo Foundation and our partners have supported over 1,000 Vision Entrepreneurs, have collectively sold over 85,000 pairs of reading glasses, and have referred over 80,000 people for comprehensive eye care. We look forward to reaching hundreds of thousands more people in the coming years.

FOUNDERS Jordan Kassalow Dr. Kassalow currently serves as Chairman of Scojo Foundation, providing leadership, management, and expertise to its global operations. He was a cofounder of both Scojo Foundation and Scojo Vision, LLC. He is also the founder of the Global Health Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations,

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where he served as an Adjunct Senior Fellow from 1999 to 2004. Prior to his position at the Council, he served as Director of the Onchocerciasis Division at Helen Keller International. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for Lighthouse International and on the Medical Advisory Board of Helen Keller International. The recipient of numerous awards, including the Social Innovator of the Year award from BYU’s Marriott School of Management, The Aspen Institute’s Henry Crown Fellowship, and a Draper Richards Foundation Fellowship, Dr. Kassalow received his Doctorate of Optometry from the New England College of Optometry and his Masters in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University. In addition to his position at Scojo Foundation, he is currently a partner at the practice of Drs. Farkas, Kassalow, Resnick, and Associates. Scott Berrie Scott Berrie serves as President of Scojo Foundation, providing leadership in product development, marketing, and distribution. Mr. Berrie was a cofounder of both Scojo Foundation and Scojo Vision, LLC. Scott Berrie serves as vice president of the Russell Berrie Foundation and trustee with the Shalom Hartman Institute, PAX, and Helen Keller International. Mr. Berrie earned an MBA from New York University’s Stern Executive MBA Program. He also earned a Master in International Affairs and a Certificate in Middle Eastern Studies from Columbia University, where he was also a SIPA International Affairs Fellow. He served in the Israel Defence Forces.

Figure 3.1 Vision Entrepreneur Mercedes Queche conducts a vision screening at a sales campaign in Pastores, Guatemala. Courtesy of Scojo Foundation.

Achieving Social Goals through Business Discipline: Scojo Foundation

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Scojo Foundation Founders: Jordan Kassalow and Scott Berrie Senior Director: Graham Macmillan Mission/Description: Scojo Foundation’s mission is to reduce poverty and generate opportunity through the sale of affordable eyeglasses and complementary products. Scojo Vision Entrepreneurs are low-income men and women living in rural villages who are trained to conduct vision screenings within their communities, sell affordable reading glasses, and refer those who require advanced eye care to reputable clinics. Website: www.scojofoundation.org Address: 12 Desbrosses Street New York, NY 10013 Phone: 212.375.2599 Fax: 720.228.5188 E-mail: [email protected]

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Sustainable Sciences Institute: Developing Scientific Capacity to Address Public Health Needs Worldwide Josefina Coloma, Eva Harris, and Martine Zoer

It was the year 1988. Eva Harris was a young, recent graduate in biochemistry from Harvard University. She was set to enter the molecular and cell biology doctoral program at the University of California–Berkeley, with a fellowship from the National Science Foundation, and the next few years of her life appeared to be mapped out. Harris, however, aspired to make her degree meaningful to the world and decided to take a detour (1). Harris, who had been an activist while at Harvard, dreamed of bringing science out of the ivory tower and applying it to real-world problems. The only dilemma was that she had no idea how to accomplish her goal. “When you are a doctor, you have skills that are useful in the rest of the world. But how can you impact others when you are a scientist?” Harris wondered. Although she wasn’t sure how, Harris was driven to find out how to make science relevant and significant to the world. Since she wanted to apply her scientific background where it mattered most, Harris sought opportunities to work in the developing world. Harris looked for and found a sponsor in Tecnica, a now-defunct, Berkeley-based organization that sent technical volunteers, mostly computer scientists, to Nicaragua and South Africa, for two-week stays. Harris, however, wanted to volunteer for a few months and in the field of biology, and no one knew what to do with her. Eventually, she was placed in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, with the Ministry of Health (MOH) and at a plasma factory making critical supplies for soldiers at the front. Harris had never been to a developing country, and Nicaragua was not only the second poorest country in the hemisphere but was also in the middle of a war. Roosters ran wild, and power outages and material shortages were an everyday occurrence. Yet despite the situation, people somehow coped with life and embodied an amazing humanitarian spirit in the face of material constraints. Since Harris had been schooled at Harvard and trained in the best laboratories in Paris, Basel, and Boston, she felt totally unprepared to train the Nicaraguans, who had 57

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been running their country during a revolution under near-impossible conditions for almost ten years. Within a few weeks, however, Harris was teaching a daily course in technical English, giving a weekly seminar on biology, troubleshooting a test for endotoxins at the plasma factory, and helping work out a technique for identifying different strains of Leishmania based on the migration of proteins in gel. Leishmaniasis is a parasitic disease that is spread by the bite of infected sand flies and causes manifestations ranging from disfiguring skin and mucosal lesions to the fatal destruction of internal organs. It had become a major problem in Nicaragua because soldiers were fighting in the tropical forests in the north of the country, where the disease was prevalent, and then returning to the cities with numerous lesions. Harris worked with her Nicaraguan colleagues to search for a rapid and reliable way to detect and differentiate the strains of Leishmania causing the disease in order to trace their spread and determine which patients should be treated with the toxic, heavy-metal therapies needed to kill the parasite. The three months Harris spent in Nicaragua flew by. The experience was incredibly enriching and life changing. Not only was Harris moved by the urgency of the issues, but she was disturbed that there was so much research and knowledge in the developed world and so little in the developing world. Harris knew that somehow she had to bridge this gap. Meanwhile, she started her doctoral work at Berkeley with the conviction to return to Nicaragua. Prospective dissertation advisers knew that if she joined their labs, it would be under the condition that she would go to Nicaragua each summer to work on her vision of transferring scientific technology. Dr. Jeremy Thorner accepted this bargain, and Harris took on a project in his lab using yeast genetics to study the calcium-binding protein, calmodulin. The protein assay for leishmaniasis diagnosis with which Harris had been working while in Nicaragua was overly cumbersome and lengthy, so she searched for alternatives. She learned that a researcher at Yale University had developed monoclonal antibodies to Leishmania that might work in Nicaragua, so she set up a collaboration and returned the following summer to Nicaragua armed with the antibodies. Unfortunately, the antibody test did not consistently differentiate among the Nicaraguan forms of the parasite. At the same time, Harris had asked her Nicaraguan colleagues what scientific knowledge and techniques they wanted to learn and received the unanimous response of “molecular biology.” However, with the rudimentary conditions of the laboratories in Managua, combined with intermittent electricity and running water only two times each week, Harris doubted the feasibility of setting up classical molecular biology experiments. Thus, she found herself faced with an ethical dilemma: when people want to learn something but do not have the resources to carry it out, do you decide not to teach them, or do you teach them anyway, knowing that they will be unable to implement the knowledge? Both the Leishmania and molecular biology dilemmas were solved when Harris began working back at Berkeley with Dr. Cristian Orrego, a Chilean-born scientist who had been involved in the early days of the polymerase

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chain reaction (PCR) and had taught PCR detection of Leishmania in Peru. PCR, which at the time had just been invented and made available to researchers in the United States, is a technique in which a specific piece of DNA is multiplied millions of times until enough has accumulated to be visualized using simple detection methods. Harris was elated to find out that, in principle, PCR was straightforward enough so that it could be performed under rudimentary conditions. Orrego taught Harris the technique and helped her plan a five-day lab course in Managua on molecular biology, including an experiment on PCR identification of Leishmania parasites (2). Meanwhile, Harris called everyone who would listen looking for support. She managed to secure donations of equipment and supplies from Gibco/BRL, Roche, and Amersham, as well as a $5,000 grant from the New England Biolabs Foundation. In the summer of 1991, Harris returned to Nicaragua to teach PCR to twenty Nicaraguan scientists. A week before the workshop, she trained her Nicaraguan friend and researcher, Alejandro Belli, in the technique, and together they taught the workshop. They kept things as low-tech as possible. Rather than relying on kits, the participants made their own reagents; instead of using expensive thermocyclers to generate the temperature cycles to heat and chill the samples required for PCR amplification of the DNA target, they manually moved the samples back and forth between water baths at different temperatures. To avoid DNA contamination, they designated separate work and equipment areas for preparation of the PCR reaction mixture, extraction of DNA samples, and performance of PCR amplification, a concept that many laboratories, including Harris’s own at UC–Berkeley, still employ today (3). Despite the fact that there was hardly any running water and only intermittent electricity in the laboratory in Managua, the workshop participants were able to manually amplify Leishmania DNA. It was a moment that will live in Harris’s mind forever. When the course participants and instructors saw the amplified DNA for the first time, they were stunned and extremely excited, all vying to look through the goggles and get a glimpse of the brilliant DNA bands. That moment was an epiphany for Harris: by understanding the principles of advanced technologies, it was possible to deconstruct and rebuild them under existing conditions anywhere in the developing world (4). By using PCR, they had been able to differentiate strains of Leishmania on-site—something that had never been accomplished or dreamed possible in a Nicaraguan laboratory. It was extraordinary to discover that it was actually feasible to demystify and break down this sophisticated technology under rudimentary conditions and apply the findings to local infectious disease problems.

THE AMB/ATT PROGRAM After the initial success, Harris organized and conducted a second Nicaraguan course in 1992, expanding the application of PCR to detection and typing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Vibrio cholerae, and malarial parasites, among others.

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Also in 1992, while presenting the Nicaraguan experience at a conference in Cuba, she met Josefina Coloma, an Ecuadorian who at the time was completing her graduate studies in microbiology and molecular genetics at UCLA. Coloma was interested in bringing molecular biology skills to her native country, and so they decided to conduct the next workshop in Ecuador. After fifteen years, Coloma and Harris still work closely together both at UC–Berkeley and at the Sustainable Sciences Institute (SSI). Together, they managed to secure supplies and equipment donations as well as some funding from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. The course, which took place in Quito in 1994, taught twenty Ecuadorian scientists how to use PCR to detect and characterize endemic pathogens, and was a great success. As it turned out, the course was very timely since a cholera epidemic had recently spread from Asia to Peru and Ecuador. As a result of the course, workshop participants started to apply PCR to endemic health problems in their country, including tuberculosis, Leishmania, cholera, and dengue virus. The following year, Harris and Coloma returned to Ecuador to teach another workshop that included epidemiology and grant-writing skills in addition to laboratory work. Things really took off when Science magazine published an article about Harris’s technology transfer work (1), a novel concept in the early 1990s. Everything snowballed from there. Hundreds of people from all over the world wrote asking for workshops, articles, and presentations. The issues were so urgent and gripping that although Harris completed her dissertation on time and received her PhD in molecular and cell biology in 1993, she ended up canceling her postdoctoral appointment at Stanford University in order to focus on further developing the technology transfer/scientific capacity-building program instead. She felt she had made a commitment to numerous Latin American scientists interested in implementing molecular biological techniques for infectious disease applications in their countries and could not just turn her back on them to continue her scientific career. Dr. Nina Agabian, a parasitologist at the University of California–San Francisco, invited Harris to join her molecular parasitology laboratory and gave her the opportunity to continue to organize more workshops in Latin America, expand the offerings to other countries, and further develop the program. Encouraged by her success as well as by her mentors and family, Harris created the Applied Molecular Biology/Appropriate Technology Transfer (AMB/ATT) Program in collaboration with her Latin American colleagues. The objective of the program was to adapt modern biomedical technologies to on-site conditions and train local scientists in their use for appropriate application to relevant infectious disease problems. The AMB/ATT Program was a three-phase program consisting of a series of hands-on workshops conducted on-site in countries with limited resources. Phase I facilitated the introduction of molecular techniques for diagnosis and environmental surveillance of locally prevalent infectious diseases; Phase II served to oversee the implementation of these techniques in molecular

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epidemiological studies and diagnostic programs; and Phase III fostered the use of molecular biology in relevant biomedical research and local public health applications. The basic principle behind the program was to take science to where the problem exists (5). Workshops were conducted entirely in the language of the host country, and instructors included local scientists and participants from previous courses. No previous training was required. AMB/ATT stressed an inexpensive, do-it-yourself approach to implementing molecular techniques, with an emphasis on having a solid understanding of the procedures and reagents. In addition, it taught simple but effective methods to avoid sample cross-contamination problems, as well as innovative solutions to overcome material constraints. Participants were provided with training in molecular technology, good laboratory practice, and the scientific method. Additionally, participants learned project development and grant-writing skills to aid them in obtaining funding for their projects and administering them independently (6). The first course in a given country catered to the needs of approximately twenty local scientists, who selected the pathogens to be detected in the workshop based on national infectious disease priorities. The courses began with morning lectures that discussed theoretical aspects of the molecular methodology and the epidemiological relevance of the organism under study. The lectures were open to a larger audience of scientists and students. In afternoon laboratory sessions, participants were divided into small workgroups, each of which executed the techniques discussed that morning. At the end of the Phase I workshop, participants interested in continuing on to Phase II proposed a pilot study applying molecular techniques to their work. Four to five groups of participants selected from the Phase I workshops, plus colleagues from their respective research units, were assembled into teams that designed the pilot study and collected samples for analysis in Phase II, which was conducted approximately one year later. The Phase II workshops were two weeks long and consisted of two main sections: the first section took place in the laboratory and involved the molecular analysis of the specimens collected in the pilot study; the second section entailed the design of a larger molecular epidemiological study and the development of a proposal for funding. Phase III served to assure the continuity and sustainability of the transfer process through workshops and ongoing collaborations. As part of the follow-up process, continuous communication was maintained between participants and instructors, who acted as informational resources and consultants (6). One of the program’s key objectives was to make the technology as appropriate and low cost as possible. This was accomplished by adapting the equipment and by simplifying the techniques themselves. Adapting technology to existing conditions is vitally important because the on-site infrastructure (including availability of water, electricity, materials, and reagents) varies from site to site and is very different from laboratories in the developed world (6). For example, during pre-course preparations for a workshop in Quito, Ecuador, course instructors were testing the manual amplification of the Vibrio cholerae toxin-encoding

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operon and were increasingly frustrated when all the water baths appeared to be broken and could not reach the temperature needed (92°C or higher) for the denaturation step of PCR. They then realized that at 9,000 feet above sea level, water boils at 89°C, and therefore no water bath in Quito was ever going to reach the desired temperature of 94°C. After some brainstorming, it was decided to add a layer of oil on top of the water bath to approximate a closed system, thus allowing the water to reach a temperature of 92°C and ensuring that the PCR would work (5). By conducting training courses under conditions that most closely approximate the true working environment of the participating scientists, problem solving is taught, and the possibility of modifying technologies and adapting them to local conditions is demonstrated. Understanding the fundamental principles and technical requirements of scientific methodologies leads to clever adaptations of equipment, the use of alternative techniques, the simplification of protocols, and a reliance on recycling (4). These conditions can foster some of the most ingenious innovations (7). After all, limited access to resources often forces researchers to be creative. Developing-country scientists have learned to improve and use common materials and simple tools instead of more sophisticated ones, thus finding solutions in everyday items, and adapting and converting protocols into lowcost approaches that are useful everywhere. An example of this creativity is the “blenderfuge” invented by Bolivian scientist Nataniel Mamani, which combines a blender, an aluminum bowl, and water-tap adapters to create a microcentrifuge. Another example is his “turntable shaker,” which transforms the circular rotation of a record player into a horizontal shaker for the lab (3). The AMB/ATT Program not only expanded on-site capabilities in less-developed countries to include molecular techniques, but it also fostered the immediate use of these techniques in relevant public health situations. The existence of on-site labs and personnel trained in molecular diagnosis and epidemiology provided immediate readiness to respond to healthcare crises, which is crucial when it comes to the diagnosis and control of infectious diseases outbreaks. An example comes from a Phase II workshop in Quito, Ecuador, where a patient with presumed leishmaniasis was admitted to the hospital at the workshop site. Since the workshop participants were at that very moment testing a number of PCR assays for the detection of Leishmania parasites in clinical samples, a biopsy from the patient’s lesions was included in the experiment. Results confirmed the presence of Leishmania DNA in the patient’s lesions and further identified the parasite as belonging to the Leishmania braziliensis complex. Interestingly, the classical methods used for immediate analysis of the same sample yielded negative results because of insufficient sensitivity of the techniques, even though the case was clinically and epidemiologically compatible with the diagnosis of leishmaniasis. AMB/ATT was the formalization of Harris’s vision of bringing science to realworld problems. And although the program was much in demand, it was completely virtual. It was Harris along with a group of dedicated volunteer scientists who devoted countless hours to adapting molecular techniques to developing

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country conditions, preparing protocols and reagents, recycling and washing laboratory supplies, and organizing and teaching workshops, all accomplished while they worked toward their own degrees or at real jobs. Another way to formalize the vision was to consolidate all the information and experiences that Harris had gathered in the first ten years of work in the form of a book. A LowCost Approach to PCR: Appropriate Transfer of Biomolecular Techniques was published in 1998 by Oxford University Press (3). The book describes Harris’s overall approach to technology transfer and scientific capacity building, using PCR as an example; it also serves as a detailed guide to implementing PCR as a practical and inexpensive approach for research and infectious disease diagnosis by developing country scientists. Although courses were taught in Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, apart from the occasional grant or donation, there was no funding to continue the program. Then one day in 1997, while Harris was on her way to a workshop in Bolivia, she got a call that changed her life. She had won a MacArthur Fellows Award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Like many others who receive this award, she did not even know she had been nominated until she received the phone call.

THE SUSTAINABLE SCIENCES INSTITUTE: THE EARLY YEARS The MacArthur Award, which is sometimes nicknamed the “genius award,” provided a real boost to the technology transfer program Harris had started almost ten years earlier. It was a public recognition of the importance of the work, and the unrestricted funds provided a means to continue with the initiative in a more formal way. As a result of the award, the Sustainable Sciences Institute (SSI), a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, CA, was founded in 1998. Harris and her colleagues had envisioned the formation of a nonprofit organization and had even chosen and registered the name in 1995, but until the MacArthur award, no funds had been available to jump-start the organization. In 1998 SSI finally became a reality. Like-minded colleagues, who over the years had contributed to the planning and teaching of workshops, founded SSI with Harris and became members of the original board of directors; they included Alejandro Belli, Christine Rousseau, Guy Roberts, Leïla Smith, Pratima Raghunathan, and Adil Ed Wakil. Starting a nonprofit organization to carry on the program was the realization of a dream. It was also a lot of work. The board of directors first created a vision as well as a core program. It was their aspiration that the SSI would improve the human condition by the appropriate use of knowledge, science, and technology. As such, SSI’s work is based on the premise that global health relies on biomedical scientists and public health workers who can recognize and resolve infectious diseases at the local level. SSI partners with promising researchers in developing countries, offering long-term assistance and mentoring to help them excel in their fields of research and make a difference in the health of their

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communities. It is SSI’s mission to develop scientific research capacity in areas with pressing public health problems. This mission is based on the understanding that developing-country scientists have the ability—and the responsibility— to confront and manage infectious diseases in their own countries, but simply lack the necessary tools. To work toward this mission, the core Scientific Capacity-Building Program, which is still in place today, was created based on the AMB/ATT model. The program’s main purpose is to transfer knowledge and technology to developingcountry scientists through in-country workshops, donations of equipment, and small grants for research projects. It is the program’s goal to build local capacity to research, diagnose, and control infectious diseases. In the short term, the program enables scientists and public health professionals in the developing world to address issues related to priority infectious diseases. In the long term, the program makes it possible for program participants to improve science education in their countries and to influence informed public health decision making, driving changes in the behavior of those responsible for addressing public health problems. The program has a four-prong approach to capacity building: workshops (both laboratory and scientific writing), small grants, material aid, and networking and consulting. The laboratory workshops develop participants’ laboratory and epidemiological skills and train them in the effective application of these skills to relevant infectious disease problems. The workshops take science to disease-endemic regions so that scientists can adapt techniques and study design to local conditions. Partner countries are selected based primarily on the level of interest of the developing country collaborators, the disease burden, and reliable in-country contacts. All workshops are participatory, hands-on, and conducted in the local language. Trainees include a broad range of scientists and public health professionals, from university faculty and students to Ministry of Health laboratory directors and technicians, to physicians and epidemiologists. To encourage South-South knowledge transfer as well as greater local ownership of the program, resident scientists are incorporated in the planning and teaching process. During each workshop, several participants are trained in SSI’s instruction theory and methods. These instructors-in-training take an active role in workshop management and organization, and often go on to teach future training workshops. The writing workshops develop participants’ manuscript- and grant-writing skills in order to broaden their scientific capacity to include additional necessary skills. The manuscript-writing workshops derive from the fact that the scientific community evaluates advancement and stature primarily by the number and quality of research publications a scientist has published in peer-reviewed journals (8). Developing-country scientists are, however, at a disadvantage: they often experience difficulty publishing because of a lack of technical writing skills, guidance in data analysis and manuscript submission processes, and access to scientific journals. The manuscript-writing workshops are designed to provide these scientists with the skills and tools they need to transform existing data into

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publishable material and increase the likelihood of a manuscript being accepted for publication in a reputable scientific journal. The workshops provide scientific advice, technical writing skills, and one-on-one tutoring from experts in the discipline. At the end of each workshop, each student is expected to have a solid first draft of his or her manuscript. In a similar fashion, grant-writing workshops provide participants with training in research proposal preparation in order to improve their chances of successfully competing for funds. The small grants program provides follow-up support or seed funds for meritorious research proposals to SSI trainees. The program recognizes the fact that financial support is vital to researchers in underserved areas of the world, where a small amount of money can make a big difference. A few thousand dollars can pay for supplies, the salary of a scientist, and/or cover the cost of a basic epidemiological survey at the community level. The program acknowledges the difference that seed funds can make by awarding small grants to promising scientists who have previously taken part in one or more SSI workshops. All recipients are selected after a rigorous review process during which proposals are evaluated by SSI scientific volunteers worldwide for public health relevance, scientific rigor, feasibility, and budget. Only those proposals with the highest merit receive funding. The material aid program provides developing country scientists and laboratories with the materials they need to perform research on infectious diseases. SSI has contacts with numerous U.S.-based institutions, companies, and universities that donate materials, supplies, and minimally used equipment or provide deep discounts and/or donations of reagents. The material is then sent to laboratories participating in the training program as well as to collaborators in response to their specific requests. For numerous scientists in resource-poor settings, these donations have been crucial for starting up their laboratories or have allowed them to continue with critical work. For many, SSI’s material aid program is the only means to access these goods. Over the years, SSI has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and material that might have otherwise gone to waste. Equipment supplied includes PCR machines, gel electrophoresis systems, microcentrifuges, power supplies, ovens, incubators, glassware, molecular biology reagents such as enzymes and nucleotides, and other essentials such as pipettors and general laboratory consumables. A final component of the core Scientific Capacity-Building Program is networking and consulting. This part of the program grew out of SSI’s dedication to providing continued support for its trainees. Scientists in developing countries often experience a sense of scientific isolation; to alleviate this situation, SSI serves as a constant resource for technical information and expertise for investigators in the developing world. In addition, SSI believes that in order to make a real and lasting difference in the lives in developing-country scientists, meaningful, farreaching, and ongoing support from partners in the more-developed countries is needed. The networking and consulting program meets this need by providing the scientists served with mentoring and support for as long as they need it. SSI

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maintains close contact with all trainees and provides them with scientific advice and information, referrals, information about funding sources, links to online journals and print editions, contacts with networking resources, laboratory protocols, and more. Finally, the program provides networking among scientists locally, regionally, and internationally, and between local researchers and relevant institutions such as the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the TDR/WHO, Netropica, the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), and the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) to foster dialogue, decrease scientific isolation, increase funding possibilities, and improve concerted efforts in handling outbreaks or epidemics within and across borders.

THE SUSTAINABLE SCIENCES INSTITUTE: A GROWING ORGANIZATION SSI was founded in 1998 and received 501(c)(3) nonprofit status in 1999. Like any new nonprofit organization, SSI started small and grew steadily each year. During its first year, funding was scarce, and there was no office. That same year, the six-member board of directors held regular meetings, created the bylaws, and hired the first employee: Executive Director Pratima Raghunathan. SSI also held a workshop in La Paz, Bolivia, on dengue, tuberculosis, leishmaniasis, and Chagas disease. The next year, the first annual newsletter was published, the website was launched (www.ssilink.org), an office was rented, a second employee was hired, and two more members joined the board of directors. In addition, SSI held a workshop in Guatemala City, Guatemala, on dengue, tuberculosis, and enteric bacterial diseases and awarded three small grants to two scientists from Colombia and one from Ecuador. In 2000 SSI established an advisory council, added three more members to the board of directors, and doubled the number of scientific advisors and organizational volunteers. SSI also held successful workshops in Burkina Faso and Venezuela. In 2001 three small grants were funded, workshops were held in Paraguay and Venezuela, a new employee was hired, and SSI moved to a larger office, while the number of volunteers continued to increase. In addition, a lab in Panama was fully equipped, and laboratories in Bolivia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Paraguay received shipments of material aid from SSI. During these early years, SSI was funded through small grants and individual donations. Then in 2002, SSI received a generous grant from the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation (www.vkrf.org), which allowed SSI to expand its core Scientific Capacity-Building Program. Thanks to the VKRF funds as well as matching funding and other donations, between 2002 and 2007, SSI held a total of twenty-one workshops in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, and Peru. SSI also awarded eleven small grants totaling $100,000 to researchers from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Pakistan, and Paraguay. In 2002 SSI established a new program in Egypt spearheaded by its vice-president, Adil Ed Wakil, focusing on hepatitis C virus (HCV). Egypt has the highest prevalence

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of hepatitis C in the world, estimated to be approximately 12 percent nationwide (9). Dedicated to sustainable research in the field of hepatitis C, the program fosters collaborations between SSI partners and Egyptian researchers, with the aim of improving Egypt’s ability to address the issues associated with this disease. The high infection rate is largely the legacy of treatment campaigns conducted from the 1960s to the early 1980s to control schistosomiasis (a parasitic disease caused by several species of flatworm) among rural populations (10). Because of the high prevalence of hepatitis C in the population, it is still being transmitted at unacceptable rates today through exposures such as dental procedures, injections, folk medicine, household transmission, and blood products (11). Given both the high prevalence and pervasive incidence rate, SSI’s hepatitis C program in Egypt is not only necessary but urgent. Since its inception in 2002, the program has provided local researchers with skills and resources to better combat the hepatitis C epidemic in their country. The program has four areas of in-country focus: (1) a small grants program that provides funding to young scientists who have submitted meritorious proposals on hepatitis research, (2) a fellowship program that fosters interinstitutional collaboration and provides supervised laboratory and epidemiology training for young investigators, (3) an information technology program that helps ensure that relevant peer-reviewed journals are more widely available to academic institutions and their scientists in Egypt, (4) a workshop program that organizes and conducts annual workshops on topics such as immunology, hepatology, writing scientific manuscripts, and preparing grants. The program’s first workshop was held in Cairo in 2002; since then, the program has held four more workshops, awarded sixteen grants, and supported seven fellows. The Technical Training Foundation (TTF) was a founding supporter of SSI and has been a steady and very generous supporter ever since. One of TTF’s primary goals is supporting educational endeavors that directly benefit underserved communities and populations nationally and globally. In addition, the foundation supports medical research, particularly related to liver disease and viral hepatitis. The dual role of SSI’s program of education and supporting hepatitis research in Egypt has garnered a long-term commitment from TTF, which is enthusiastic about SSI’s investment in young Egyptian scientists and interest in expanding both individual and institutional capabilities. Another exciting development occurred in 2004 when SSI became locally incorporated in Managua, Nicaragua, to administer a three-year, $2.3 million study—the Pediatric Dengue Cohort Study (PDCS)—on the epidemiology and clinical manifestations of dengue in children that paves the way for eventual testing of a safe tetravalent vaccine. Opening a subsidiary office in the country where Harris’s work began in 1988 and administering a study of this magnitude has taken SSI’s role in the developing world to a new level. Dengue is the most important mosquito-borne viral disease affecting humans, and dengue fever and dengue hemorrhagic fever/dengue shock syndrome have emerged as major public health problems, particularly in Southeast Asia and Latin America. An

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effective, tetravalent vaccine could dramatically improve the fate of millions of people who are affected by the disease. Recent studies indicate that by age ten, 90 to 95 percent of children in Managua have been infected with one or more of the four dengue virus serotypes, and up to one in four children in Managua is infected with dengue virus each year (12). The PDCS follows a cohort of 3,700 children aged two to twelve at high risk for dengue in Managua’s densely-populated, low- to mid-socioeconomic status District II near the Lago de Managua. The landmark study, a collaboration between the Division of Infectious Diseases at UC–Berkeley, SSI, and the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health (MOH), and supported by the Pediatric Dengue Vaccine Initiative (PDVI), brings together the Nicaraguan laboratory, epidemiology, and clinical sectors in an unprecedented collaboration, building scientific capability and infrastructure to a level previously out of reach. In 2006 the study, which was initially designed for three years, was extended for an additional three years. The study provides detailed and well-documented epidemiological data linked with biologic specimens from a pediatric population in a highly dengueendemic Latin American setting that are enabling numerous questions about the pathogenesis and epidemiology of dengue to be addressed. Recently, a parallel project emerged from the highly successful implementation of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the PDCS (13). This new project, funded initially by TTF, is an entirely local response to the urgent need to overhaul the vaccination and prenatal care system in Nicaragua, and is tailored to help resident scientists and healthcare workers meet this need. Nicaragua’s public health system is currently struggling to meet the goal of the Pan American Health Organization for 95 percent vaccination coverage of preventable infectious diseases by 2008, as well as the Millennium Development Goal of a three-quarters reduction in the maternal mortality ratio by 2015 (14, 15). Current efforts at providing vaccine coverage and prenatal care in Managua suffer tremendously from a lack of computerized registries and other inefficiencies. The new project is incorporating a number of technologies to streamline information flow and accessibility, improve the quality of data as well as the quality control procedures that are used, and reduce operational costs in Managua’s MOH health centers. As a first step, SSI’s informatics team, with direct input from the MOH, designed, refined, and implemented a new informatics tool, the Immunization System Database (SIPAI), to capture data during vaccination campaigns and routine immunizations, and enable real-time analysis. The SIPAI database allows automation of immunization data, generates comprehensive vaccine coverage information, and facilitates immediate decision making that impacts immunization indicators. In June 2007, the new database was launched, and 100 percent of the health centers in Managua adopted it after a training workshop conducted by SSI and the MOH; version 2 was implemented in October 2007, and routine reporting of immunization indices using SIPAI will soon be mandatory. In addition to the new digital registries at the health centers, new technologies are being piloted in two

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health centers in Managua with the goal of expansion to the entire health center network in the next few years. These technologies include personal data assistants (PDAs) for registries during vaccination campaigns in the field, unique identifiers for mothers and children to enable immediate access to files via the use of bar codes on vaccination cards, and global positioning devices (GPS) for geo-referencing children’s homes to facilitate field visits. The success of this initiative demonstrates the capability of SSI’s informatics team to implement information technology (IT) solutions for further improvements to the vaccination and maternal health systems. Since its inception in 1998, SSI has grown into a medium-sized organization with an annual budget close to $1 million; offices in San Francisco, Managua, and Cairo, Egypt; an eleven-member, highly involved board of directors; and a twelve-member, supportive advisory council. The main office in California has a staff of 6, while the office in Nicaragua employs 25 people and contracts over 100 specialized workers during field operations. As with any nonprofit organization, the organization’s reach largely depends on the availability of funding. Although building human capacity is not a priority for most international philanthropies and large donors, SSI has been fortunate to secure enough funding for its programs thanks to the loyal support of various foundations as well as individual donors—although it is indeed a struggle. SSI’s fundraising efforts have been boosted by the publicity it has received and continues to receive, as well as by the president’s and the vice-president’s ongoing and unwavering personal efforts to educate donors and the public about the importance and the impact of SSI’s work. Over the last twenty years, SSI and its precursor AMB/ATT have become world renowned for their pioneering work in scientific capacity building in developing countries. SSI is recognized as a model for technology transfer programs by global health agencies across the country and the world, including the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization, the Organization of American States, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Science Foundation, and most importantly, by developing country health workers and officials.

PROBLEMS ADDRESSED AND SUCCESSES ACHIEVED The driving force behind SSI has always been the demand for the organization’s work. The first time Harris went to Nicaragua in 1988, she was struck by the lack of resources available to her local peers in terms of equipment, supplies, training, funding, and technical advice. Knowing that the technologies and resources these scientists needed existed—but were unavailable where they were most necessary—inspired her to discover innovative approaches to bridge this gap (16, 17). Developing-country scientists face numerous challenges, from limited material and financial resources to poor physical and communication infrastructures. Because of ever-shrinking economies and national budgets, basic

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research is a luxury in most developing countries, and many scientists hold several other jobs. The lack of scientific careers, scientific tradition, institutional support, and collaboration within the local scientific community further aggravates the problem, along with the fact that available training is often operational in nature rather than research oriented (18). The importance of scientific research was emphasized by the Global Forum for Health Research report, which states that “strengthening research capacity in developing countries is one of the most effective and sustainable ways of advancing health and development in these countries and of helping correct the 10/90 Gap in health research” (19). The 10/90 Gap refers to the fact that only 5 to 10 percent of all global health research funding is directed to research on health problems that affect 90 percent of the world’s population. And although in recent years, a number of diseases (particularly HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria) have caught the attention of global funders, the research and diagnoses of many infectious diseases representing a large burden to developing countries around the world (including dengue, leishmaniasis, respiratory, and diarrheal diseases) continue to be severely underfunded. At the same time, infectious diseases are still the major cause for morbidity and mortality in the developing world, accounting for half of all deaths, a rate that is 80 percent higher than that in industrialized nations. As a result, there is a defined need in developing countries for local personnel trained to employ modern techniques to detect and study emerging and endemic infectious diseases and design appropriate interventions for their control (20). Latin America is a good example. Not only are infectious diseases the major cause of morbidity and death in the area, but the prevalence of HIV infection is on the rise. In addition, accelerating urbanization over the past fifty years has led to the appearance of “misery belts” around large cities. These settlements lack basic infrastructure and public services, and are therefore perfect sites for the proliferation of communicable diseases. The lack of capability in national health systems to rapidly and reliably diagnose these diseases only worsens the situation, which is compounded by poor epidemiological and clinical data that cannot be used to devise adequate health strategies and policies. In Latin America, as in the rest of the world, the progress of science varies from one country to the next. And so, despite their proximity and similar cultures, each country has achieved a different level of scientific capacity, with Brazil and Cuba in the lead followed by Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico, and trailed by the rest (18). SSI believes that the problem of infectious diseases requires a global solution because it takes only a day or two for a pathogen to get from one place on the planet to another. SSI is convinced that building scientific capacity in developing countries is necessary if we are to prevent the global spread of infectious diseases. In addition, SSI feels that it is important that all countries, especially those with high burdens of disease, have access to the necessary resources needed to control infectious diseases (17). Unfortunately, much of the work being done to address these issues in the developing world lacks an important component for building

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long-term effectiveness: researchers and health practitioners who are able to conduct their own research and establish their own priorities. Clearly, “parachute science,” in which investigators from developed countries merely collect samples, return home, and publish papers, is of no real use to scientists and citizens in the developing world. SSI’s working premise is that even in low-resource settings, the burden of infectious diseases can be reduced if there are basic resources along with an essential infrastructure that supports the use of low-cost interventions by appropriately trained personnel. Effective disease control is possible but will only become a reality when every nation, regardless of size, location, or wealth, has the capacity to recognize, prevent, and respond to the threats posed by infectious diseases. SSI works to facilitate this process. Since its inception, SSI has served over 1,000 scientists and health professionals from over twenty developing countries. SSI and its precursor program have held forty workshops, awarded more than thirty small grants, and supported seven fellows. In addition, SSI has sent hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of material aid to individual researchers and health centers around the world, and has provided ongoing networking and consulting support to numerous developing-country scientists. And although SSI is proud of the number of people it has served and continues to serve, the organization believes that numbers alone do not capture the true impact and importance of its work. In order to make a real and lasting difference, SSI focuses not only on the quantity of people reached but also on the quality of the interaction. Ultimately the organization’s ability to accomplish its mission lies in the success of its collaborators and trainees. Some successes resulting from SSI’s scientific capacity building efforts are as follows: •

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In Ecuador, the Instituto Izquieta Perez of the Ministry of Health implemented a new molecular biology laboratory following SSI’s guidelines and now uses SSI-taught techniques as part of the national diagnostic system. Implementation of this reference laboratory has boosted the accuracy and speed at which confirmation of clinical diagnosis of dengue occurs and has enabled the diagnosis of other diseases using similar techniques. After an unexpected epidemic of dengue virus in Paraguay in 2000, SSI-trained scientists implemented the methods they learned for the rapid detection and characterization of the virus in-country for the first time. Thanks to the subsequent close collaboration between the National University of Asunción and the Ministry of Health, an active surveillance system was established that led to the rapid identification of dengue virus serotypes, mobilization of mosquito control efforts, and containment of outbreaks for several years in a row. Only two weeks after SSI-trained Nicaraguan instructors had transferred molecular techniques for rapid diagnosis and typing of dengue in Peru, workshop participants learned about the first-ever outbreak of the disease in the capital city of Lima. The group collected ninety samples and performed the serological and molecular biology tests newly available to them. That same

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night they were able to confirm that the outbreak was caused by dengue virus type 3. The next day, the group released the information to health authorities, who as a result, were able to implement immediate control measures. SSI has fostered the creation of Centers of Excellence in Managua, Nicaragua; Guayaquil, Ecuador; Medellín, Colombia; Lima, Peru, and Panama City, Panama. Each center has established state-of-the-art laboratories supported by SSI and are now national or regional reference laboratories for research on various infectious diseases. In Managua, Nicaragua, where there was once a complete lack of research infrastructure and tradition, after twenty years of collaboration, SSI has helped build public health and research capacity that meets the highest international standards. SSI has also supported community-based programs aimed at the prevention and control of infectious diseases. Over the years, participants in SSI training programs have successfully published their work in both local and international peer-reviewed journals, significantly increasing the number of resident researchers that have been able to publish in scientific journals. In addition, most small-grant recipients have published one or more scientific articles as a result of their SSI-funded studies. SSI’s manuscript-writing workshops are not only very popular, but at least ten participants have published in peer-reviewed, international journals, and many others have published in local journals as a result. These encouraging results are partly due to the dedication of workshop instructors, who continue to work with the trainees for weeks or even months after the workshops have ended. In Egypt, several workshop participants who have attended the grant-writing workshops have used concrete skills learned there to obtain SSI grant proposals to study hepatitis. Scientists attending the manuscript-writing workshops have elevated their publications to internationally recognized journals that are widely read and highly respected. For example, Dr. Mohamed Kohla, a doctor from the prestigious National Liver Institute at Menoufiya University in lower Egypt, who published a review article on the pathogenesis of hepatitis C and coauthored two abstracts presented at the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases’ (AASLD) 2006 conference, based on his participation in an SSI manuscript-writing workshop. He has also written a paper on the lymphocyte phenotype in HCV patients. Three recipients of an SSI small grant have co-authored a paper titled “P53 Mutations in Hepatocellular Carcinoma Patients in Egypt” in the International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health. Additional small-grant recipients have published their results in acclaimed journals, including Carcinogenesis, Journal of Hepatology, and Gut.

LESSONS LEARNED AND THE ROAD AHEAD One of the reasons that Harris became a scientist was her attraction to the way the cell works. Harris sees it as a beautiful system that can be used as a model for human society. Within the cell, there is a feedback loop that functions harmoniously

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as all the elements work together for the greater good of the whole with unprecedented energy conservation. The cell reminds Harris of how the many principles we all dream about in a just human society are being played out in our own bodies (21). As a scientist, she believes she has the responsibility to use her knowledge for the greater good of society. These values are not only the foundation upon which SSI was created, but they continue to inspire the organization’s mission. SSI believes that if we are to foster a truly global scientific culture, mechanisms must be developed that encourage international collaborations. In this era of globalization, it is naïve to believe that infectious disease problems in developing countries do not concern all of us. Mosquitoes, viruses, and pathogens do not adhere to international boundaries. For both humanitarian and utilitarian reasons, we must mobilize our scientific resources to initiate true partnerships that enable global access to scientific knowledge, technology, and products. Over the years, SSI has learned to be flexible and creative. Its programs adapt to the times and the changing needs of its partners and audience. The manuscript-writing workshops, for example, arose from the need of past trainees who had accumulated and analyzed scientific data and felt illequipped to compile the results into coherent manuscripts for dissemination in the scientific world. Similarly, SSI has piloted a bioethics workshop, where participants learn about the ethical dilemmas facing researchers and gain relevant knowledge, enabling them to make decisions and/or influence local decision making regarding ethical issues that affect their research and communities. In addition, to fulfill the evolving needs of researchers and health personnel worldwide, SSI is currently developing new training modules. One of these training modules is a bioinformatics and sequence analysis module that focuses on ways to access available DNA sequences in public domain databases on the Web and on how to use specific programs for sequence and phylogenetic analysis. The module responds to the increased importance of genomics in diagnosis and monitoring of infectious diseases, and to the need for researchers in the developing world to have the tools in hand to track diseases in real time, understand their etiology, and contribute this information to aid in the timely control of epidemics and pandemics. Another workshop currently under development is a module on information and communication technologies (e.g., PDAs, GIS, barcodes, fingerprint scans, computerized registries, cell phones, voice-over-IP) for application in public health settings. This workshop concept has received great interest for its versatility, including application in clinical trials, optimization of community-based research studies, improvement of immunization efficiency and access to health services, and facilitation of compliance with quality control exigencies (e.g., good clinical practice and good laboratory practice) (13). The workshop module was inspired by SSI’s Nicaraguan colleagues, who have successfully implemented low-cost ICTs as part of the PDCS and routine work in the health center, hospital, and virology laboratory in Managua. One characteristic of Managua is that there are no street addresses. Locals typically give directions like “from where the Pepsi sign was [before the earthquake,

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Figure 4.1 Eva Harris (right) with a field team collecting samples from children participating in the pediatric dengue cohort study in Managua, Nicaragua. Courtesy of Alejandro Belli.

which took place in 1972], three blocks up [towards the sunrise, or East].” This makes it challenging to find any location easily. Luckily, high-tech equipment such as GIS, palm pilots, and barcode- and fingerprint-scanning technologies are proving very effective in this environment. These technologies have allowed local researchers to easily locate the nearly 4,000 children enrolled in the PDCS and keep track of their medical records. In addition, using the devices has enhanced the computer literacy and confidence of the health workers trained to use them. For the first time, health workers communicate by e-mail and Skype, and research is conducted on the Internet with the use of PubMed and other reliable search engines. As a spinoff, SSI is now partnering with the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health to help improve national childhood vaccination efficiency and reduce maternal mortality by increasing monitoring and access to prenatal health services. The Nicaraguan success story illustrates the far-reaching effect of SSI’s scientificcapacity building work, where long-term partnerships and ongoing support led to growth at the individual level, which over the years has translated to growth at the institutional level and eventually has impacts on a national level. SSI’s overall mission has not changed since the AMB/ATT program was first conceived twenty years ago, but the means by which SSI achieves its goals have evolved over time. Capacity building of human resources in a respectful and culturally appropriate manner is key to the success of SSI’s strategy, and the resulting partnerships, collaborations, friendships and trust engendered by the process have created a generation of young researchers and pubic health personnel in developing countries who have increased confidence and commitment to work of the highest quality. This empowerment has led to local researchers taking important initiatives, learning the language necessary

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Figure 4.2 Eva Harris (left) in her laboratory at UC–Berkeley with SSI scientific director Maria Elena Peñaranda (center) and SSI executive director Josefina Coloma (right). Courtesy of Jennifer Kyle.

to communicate relevant information to influence their leaders, creating lasting partnerships with researchers around the globe, and participating meaningfully in international projects and collaborations. SSI is thrilled to be a catalyst of change and looks forward to continuing to use science to make a difference around the world. Acknowledgments Many thanks to Maria Elena Peñaranda and Kara Nygaard for their excellent editorial assistance, tireless work, and deep commitment to making SSI’s mission a success. We are profoundly grateful to the countless volunteers and collaborators the world over who have partnered with SSI to enable science to make a difference in developing countries.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Sustainable Sciences Institute Founder: Eva Harris Mission: Established in 1998, Sustainable Sciences Institute (SSI) seeks to improve the human condition by the appropriate use of knowledge, science, and technology. The organization’s work is based on the premise that global health relies on biomedical scientists and public health workers who can

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recognize and resolve infectious diseases at the local level. SSI partners with promising researchers in developing countries, offering long-term assistance and mentoring to help them excel in their fields of research and make a difference in the health of their communities. SSI is in a unique position to respond to the needs of these scientists and health professionals because the organization has built its mission of developing scientific research capacity in areas with public health problems around the understanding that local scientists and health professionals have the ability—and the responsibility—to confront and manage infectious diseases in their countries, but that they lack the necessary tools. Website: www.ssilink.org Address: 870 Market Street, Suite 764 San Francisco, CA 94102 Phone: (510) 642-4845 Fax: (510) 642-6350 E-mail: [email protected]

REFERENCES 1. Barinaga, M. 1994. A personal technology transfer effort in DNA diagnostics. Science 266:1317–1318. 2. Harris, E., M. López, J. Arévalo, J. Bellatin, A. Belli, J. Moran, and O. Orrego. 1993. Short courses on DNA detection and amplification in Central and South America: The democratization of molecular biology. Biochem. Educ. 21:16–22. 3. Harris, E. 1998. A Low-Cost Approach to PCR: Appropriate Transfer of Biomolecular Techniques. New York: Oxford University Press. 4. Harris, E. 2004. Scientific capacity building in developing countries. EMBO Rep. 5:7–11. 5. Harris, E. 1996. Developing essential scientific capability in countries with limited resources. Nat. Med. 2:737–739. 6. Harris, E., A. Belli, and N. Agabian. 1996. Appropriate transfer of molecular technology to Latin America for public health and biomedical sciences. Biochem. Educ. 24:3–12. 7. Coloma, M. J., and E. Harris. 2004. Innovative low-cost technologies for biomedical research and diagnosis in developing countries. BMJ 329:1160–1162. 8. Coloma, J., and E. Harris. 2005. Open access science: A necessity for global public health. PLoS Pathogens 1:99–101. 9. Egyptian Ministry of Health and Population, 1999. 10. Frank, C., M. K. Mohamed, G. T. Strickland, D. Lavanchy, R. R. Arthur, L. S. Magder, T. El Khoby, Y. Abdel-Wahab, E. S. Aly Ohn, W. Anwar, and I. Sallam. 2000. The role of parenteral antischistosomal therapy in the spread of hepatitis C virus in Egypt. Lancet 355:887–891. 11. Habib, M., M. K. Mohamed, F. Abdel-Aziz, L. S. Magder, M. Abdel-Hamid, F. Gamil, S. Madkour, N. N. Mikhail, W. Anwar, G. T. Strickland, A. D. Fix, and I. Sallam. 2001.

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13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

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Hepatitis C virus infection in a community in the Nile Delta: Risk factors for seropositivity. Hepatology 33:248–253. Balmaseda, A., S. N. Hammond, Y. Tellez, L. Imhoff, Y. Rodriguez, S. Saborio, J. C. Mercado, L. Perez, E. Videa, E. Almanza, G. Kuan, M. Reyes, L. Saenz, J. J. Amador, and E. Harris. 2006. High seroprevalence of antibodies against dengue virus in a prospective study of schoolchildren in Managua, Nicaragua. Trop. Med. Int. Health 11:935–942. Avilés, W., O. Ortega, G. Kuan, J. Coloma, and E. Harris. 2007. Integration of information technologies in clinical studies in Nicaragua. PLoS Medicine 4: In press. United Nations. 2002. Millennium Project, Interim Report of Task Force 4 on Child and Maternal Mortality. WHO. 2006. Immunization Profile—Nicaragua. Dreifus, C. 2003. A conversation with Eva Harris. New York Times, New York, September 30. Harris, E., and M. Tanner. 2000. Health technology transfer. BMJ 321:817–820. Coloma, J., and E. Harris. 2002. Science in developing countries: Building partnerships for the future. Science’s Next Wave September 27. Global Forum for Health Research. 1999. 10/90 Report on Health Research 1999. World Health Organization, Geneva. WHO. 1999. Report on Infectious Diseases: Removing Obstacles to Healthy Development. World Health Organization, Geneva. Harry Kreisler. 2001. Conservations with history: Making science accessible. Interview with Eva Harris. http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Harris/harris-con0.html.

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Institute for OneWorld Health: Seeking a Cure for Inequity in Access to Medicines Victoria Hale

The top five infectious disease killers in the world are HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, respiratory infections, and diarrhea. None of these, not even HIV/AIDS, has received sufficient focus by the pharmaceutical industry to meet global health needs. Although these diseases have severe global social and economic consequences, very few effective treatments are available. Further, there are insufficient incentives for industry to invest in developing new safe, affordable, and effective treatments. Over 60 percent of the world’s population lives in the places where these infectious diseases are most prevalent: the tropics. These regions in the middle band around the globe—places such as sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent, South East Asia, and parts of Latin America—have high population densities, high poverty rates, and climates that are favorable for insects that transmit disease. Each year, millions of lives are lost to infectious diseases. Why, in the twenty-first century, is it that in some places people can get medical treatment for nearly any condition, or even for mere complaints, while in other places in the world, millions of children die from diarrhea? The reason is simple. The therapeutic drugs that exist today are produced by forprofit pharmaceutical companies. These companies operate according to a very strict business model that requires a certain return on investment to shareholders for any project undertaken. Adhering to this business model leads these companies to pursue drugs for wealthy countries, focusing on heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and so-called lifestyle drugs. These targets of opportunity are consistently more appealing than taking on the challenge of treating tropical infectious diseases. Between 1975 and 1999, out of 1,393 new drugs developed, only 13 were designed to treat tropical diseases. That is less than 1 percent, even though tropical diseases account for more than 90 percent of the worldwide disease burden. As a consequence, fully one-third of the world’s population lacks access to essential medicines, and in the poorest regions of Africa and Asia, this figure rises to one-half. 79

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More broadly, only 10 percent of the US$70 billion spent on health research worldwide each year is for research into the health problems that affect 90 percent of the world’s population. The idea behind the Institute of OneWorld Health (iOWH) is to look at this so-called 90/10 gap as evidence not only of past failure, but also of future opportunity. Without question, pharmaceutical companies need to make profits to make drugs. The research that goes into discovery, design, and testing for safety and efficacy is expensive. If we can find ways to redirect back to global health even a fraction of the intellectual property and human resources of the global pharmaceutical community, we can make a real difference. That is our aim. Today, iOWH has a staff of eighty, in offices in the United States and in India, with the scientific and policy expertise needed to identify new drug opportunities, produce a product development plan, and shepherd drugs through the regulatory approval process. iOWH also has an array of research and development partnerships that work with us to develop a range of products for a variety of diseases. And we have formed the partnerships we need to manufacture and deliver the medicines we produce.1

THE BEGINNING: “YOU HAVE ALL THE MONEY” Back in 2000, I was riding in a taxi and chatting with the driver, an African immigrant. He asked me what I did for a living. I am very proud of the work I do so I was happy to tell him that I am a pharmaceutical scientist. I was taken aback when he responded by breaking out into a fit of laughter. When he finally regained his composure, he remarked with a shake of his head, “You guys have all the money.” All the money, yes. But to what end? His comment crystallized the growing discomfort I had felt at the imbalance of resource allocation that was so evident in my chosen field of work. I recalled another moment of troubling introspection I had experienced not long before, when I was working at the Food and Drug Administration. I came across the fact that up to one in five children in sub-Saharan Africa does not live to see his or her fifth birthday. And each year in the developing world, 10 million people die from neglected diseases, diseases for which no effective treatments exist or are in development. After my taxicab epiphany, I had an increasingly difficult time keeping these numbers out of my head. The pride I felt in being a pharmaceutical scientist became overwhelmed by feelings of embarrassment at being part of an industry that was not taking full responsibility for the diseases of the world. I thought to myself, if there is anything that I can do personally to change things, how can I not do it? In further considering the problem, I began to wonder if it might be possible to take the profit imperative out of the drug development equation. Could I create a process for developing drugs, including testing them and getting them approved and manufactured, that would make them as safe and effective as any blockbuster drug, but affordable enough for the poorest of the poor? Is it possible to organize

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pharmaceutical development around the objective of human impact rather than profitability? I resigned from my position at Genentech and took two years to travel, reflect, and simply consider the parameters of the challenge. Traveling around the world was an eye-opening experience, helping me better define the questions in my mind and confirming my deep commitment to my pursuit. After a great deal of time and expense, I began to see a way forward. In July 2000, I founded the Institute for OneWorld Health (iOWH), an entirely new kind of pharmaceutical company.

THE EXPERIMENT: A NONPROFIT PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY The pharmaceutical scientists who work at iOWH share a belief that their work can change the world and save lives. Of the many possible paths one could imagine toward this goal, the one we have taken is the development of a sustainable, nonprofit pharmaceutical company focused on neglected diseases. It is not possible for a nonprofit pharmaceutical company to follow the standard big pharma business model. The big pharma model typically starts with basic innovations, science and discovery in the laboratory, and the exploration of educated hunches.2 When promising results are identified, they are taken through the lengthy and expensive process of drug formulation and sequential testing in Petri dishes, animals, and humans. Only 1 drug in 10,000 that is discovered actually makes it to clinical trials. Only 1 drug in 10 that makes it to human testing makes it to the market. Compounding the risk, of the few drugs that actually reach the market, 70 percent fail to recoup their R&D investments. In many cases, drugs are cast aside by standard, for-profit pharmaceutical firms for reasons having nothing to do with their potential to benefit people. For example, some drugs are simply not profitable in any known application. Others may not compete successfully with other known candidates as treatment for a given disease. Still others are discarded because they have unacceptable side effects for the population the drug will treat, even though the side effects may be acceptable for other populations. (For instance, a new antibiotic that causes sleepiness may be unacceptable for people who need to drive or go to work while taking the drug. But for a malaria patient or for a bedridden patient facing certain death from an infectious disease, sleepiness may be a perfectly acceptable side effect.) iOWH has sought a different path (Figure 5.1). For starters, we do not operate any of our own laboratories. Instead, we have pursued a strategy of networked innovation, with an emphasis on streamlining the traditional process of bringing drugs to market. We streamline in many ways, of which partnership is the most important. We partner with investigators in the public and private sectors to discover new compounds with potential for treating neglected diseases. We partner with for-profit pharmaceutical companies to try to find opportunities to match their castoffs— abandoned, discontinued, or no-longer-profitable drugs—with neglected diseases. And we partner with manufacturers, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and

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Figure 5.1 The funding model. Courtesy of the Institute for OneWorld Health.

local infrastructure service providers to manufacture drugs and deliver them to patients. Our core operations involve using our R&D experience to coordinate and collaborate with these partners and, most importantly, identifying the technological leads and securing the funding to create—and seize—opportunities to save lives. We also aim to streamline the clinical trials process wherever possible. This of course does not imply that we cut corners in terms of safety. Rather, if we don’t need to do as many trials—perhaps because our drugs do not compete with existing drugs—then we don’t. Finding a late-stage drug to take over the finish line enables us to get the most from our investments. Also, when we bring a drug to a developing country’s regulatory approval boards, we work with the agency to find the most straightforward path to satisfying the regulatory requirements that will prove safety and efficacy. Ultimately, we still have to do many studies, just as any other pharmaceutical company must do, and these studies can cost tens of millions of dollars. These costs have been one of the biggest challenges to our model. What replaces profit when you remove it from the equation? We account for success in human terms, and we value each life equally rather than weighting them in terms of ability or willingness to pay. We were working for the same global public health outcomes as philanthropic organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We were pioneering a new business model that groups such as the Skoll Foundation and Schwab Foundation were looking to foster. Philanthropic funds

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would be our main source of revenue, and capital would be put to work to achieve a social return on investment. But a shared sense of mission alone was not enough to persuade our current partners at the Gates Foundation and elsewhere to support us in the earliest stages of our development. What was required at the outset was a setting that would enhance our prospects for success, enabling us to overcome the scientific, financial, regulatory, and even political hurdles inherent in the development of drugs for neglected diseases. For OneWorld Health, that setting was Bihar, India. The disease was visceral leishmaniasis (VL), also known as “black fever” or kala-azar by those whom it afflicts.

MATCHING PROMISING DRUGS WITH NEGLECTED DISEASES Paromomycin is an antibiotic developed by Pharmacia (now Pfizer), which discontinued it in the 1970s because it was no longer profitable. This drug floated to the top of our list of drugs to treat neglected diseases because it had such great potential. It had been a very effective and safe antibiotic, so much of the expensive testing had already been completed. Moreover, an African researcher had discovered that paromomycin had a powerful effect on a disease called visceral leishmaniasis, a fatal disease for which safe, effective, and affordable treatment options were urgently needed. Consequently, Pharmacia granted the rights to paromomycin to the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO had put some efforts into using paromomycin to treat VL but ultimately abandoned the effort. VL is the second most deadly parasitic disease in the world. It is a devastating affliction. Caused by a parasite spread by a common insect in the tropics called the sand fly, the disease attacks the bone marrow and destroys the body’s ability to produce red and white blood cells. This leaves the patient extremely vulnerable to infection. Similar to AIDS patients, those with kala-azar almost always die of a side infection they simply cannot fight. I visited with patients suffering from kala-azar in Bihar, India, where it is most prevalent, although the disease is also common in Nepal, Bangladesh, the Horn of Africa, and Brazil. This region of India hosts the poorest of people, who have been without adequate nutrition for years of their lives. Those afflicted with the disease are emaciated except for their large bellies, where the parasite hides, enlarging the liver and spleen. Witnessing the consequences of this illness was an experience that marked me indelibly. In Bihar, a hundred million people are at risk for kala-azar. Approximately 1.5 million people are infected with the disease. There are 500,000 new cases and 300,000 deaths each year. Existing therapies are so expensive that families have been known to put three generations into debt to treat and save a relative. In contrast, the promise of paromomycin was a cure for kala-azar for significantly less money than current available treatments.3 Because my staff and I had experience with drug development and the regulatory process in various settings around the world, we entered into the project

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with full awareness of the obstacles that faced us in seeking to turn paromomycin into a drug for kala-azar, and getting it approved. Among the many obstacles, one had more to do with politics than science: it might be termed the “Constant Gardener” factor. The Constant Gardener, a novel by John le Carré, tells the tale of a multinational drug company that took advantage of the political vulnerability of a particular group of people in Africa to test a new drug with known adverse consequences. Precisely because the novel reflects aspects of reality and past experience, Western pharmaceutical companies seeking to test drugs on populations in poor places anywhere in the world are often initially received with suspicion. Lack of trust makes such projects difficult for the forprofit pharmaceutical companies—in some cases, simply infeasible. We also came to Bihar as outsiders. But we came with a goal not of increasing the value of shares, but of sharing the value of cures. With our public health mission irrevocably encoded into our nonprofit form of organization, we were able to overcome the “Constant Gardener” factor. The trust we cultivated over a period of time allowed us to move forward with our trials even in the challenging rural environments in Bihar. Reaching our initial goal—conducting clinical trials in Bihar for treatment of kala-azar—took four years. When at last, in 2004, I went to a hospital in India during a trial of our drug, the experience was exciting but also frightening. We had one chance to get this right and show that we could repurpose a drug to treat a disease the world had forgotten. To fail would in some ways be worse than not to have tried at all: potentially, we would discourage future efforts. Seeing patients treated with our drug suddenly sitting up, awake, aware, even hungry, provoked an indescribable feeling of elation. We submitted the drug to the Indian government for regulatory approval in 2006. In August 2006, Paromomycin IM Injection was approved by the drug controller general of India for the treatment of visceral leishmaniasis (VL), the medical name for kala-azar. The approval of Paromomycin IM Injection came less than three months after the submission of the application for approval, which was prepared by iOWH in collaboration with our partner, Hyderabad-based drug manufacturer Gland Pharma Limited.4 The drug is expected to be one of several tools for India’s National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme (NVBDCP), which aims to rid the country of VL by 2010. We also expect the drug will be used in disease control programs in other leishmaniasis-endemic countries. Our manufacturing partner, Gland Pharma Limited, will make the medicine available at cost—a significantly lower price than currently approved VL therapies. While we saw the approval of Paromomycin IM Injection for treatment of VL as a sufficient proof-of-concept for a nonprofit pharmaceutical model, the following months brought further validation of our work. In May 2007, the WHO announced the inclusion of Paromomycin IM Injection on their list of essential medicines. Then in June 2007, the New England Journal of Medicine published our Phase 3 findings, communicating to a broad audience within the medical community the particulars of the approach we had taken.

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THE PHARMACEUTICAL VALUE CHAIN For all the milestones we reached and the corresponding sense of accomplishment we experienced in 2006, we also ended the year facing a stark reality: it is one thing to develop and manufacture a drug that works, but it is quite another to get that drug to those who need it. As difficult as it is to discover a promising approach and then develop a drug, the final stage of delivering treatment can be the most difficult. Drug distribution must be done by local healthcare workers in local clinics. It involves getting the drug to the right places, storing it safely, and then administering it to people who have been properly diagnosed. In the case of kala-azar, our strategy of matching an orphaned drug to a neglected disease had worked, but it remained unfinished. As we sought avenues for addressing the challenge of delivery, we began to broaden our thinking about how to approach the challenge of reducing inequities in treatment. It became clear to us that, in order to have our desired impact, we would need to develop the capability to engage at multiple stages along the pharmaceutical value chain. In the case of paromomycin and VL, we started out in the late stages of research and development with our Phase 3 trials. Then we partnered with Gland Pharma Limited and the International Dispensary Association (IDA) for manufacturing. Last, we developed a plan to distribute and deliver those drugs to the beneficiaries, the people of Bihar. To test our plan, we opened a liaison field office in the city of Patna in Bihar, India, to oversee a Phase 4 pharmacovigilance and access program for the paromomycin treatment, which is administered as a once-a-day injection for twenty-one days. Working with principal investigators who are experts in the treatment of VL and with NGO partners, this Phase 4 program, initiated in November 2007, investigates the safety and efficacy of treatment with Paromomycin IM Injection in progressively more rural areas in Bihar. The first module of the program enrolled approximately 500 patients to provide additional safety data on the treatment. Over the course of the two-year trial, up to 1,500 additional patients will be included in two subsequent access modules that will extend the network of treatment facilities, providers, and related logistics systems into the most rural areas of Bihar. This is an innovative access model for administering Paromomycin IM Injection that uses an outpatient setting to diagnose and treat impoverished patients and advanced data transmission technologies for pharmacovigilance in the remote areas where VL is endemic. To deliver drugs to these remote and difficult-to-reach locations, iOWH is seeking to make use of existing infrastructure already put in place by NGOs. For example, there is an existing force of healthcare providers who provide women with prenatal care using a hub and spoke model to carry drugs from a central location to outlying destinations. If we partner with this NGO, we will train the clinicians and rural healthcare providers at local centers in the administration of the drug. The trial is an example of how iOWH extends its partnerships all the way to the village level. Indeed, our work would be nearly impossible without local partners and our in-country presence.

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Though establishing a distribution and delivery network is extremely challenging because of the unpredictable nature of these rural areas and the lack of services in them, this step is also the most critical of all those that iOWH takes in terms of its mission to save lives. Beyond the obvious effects of the drugs and their ability to cure patients, the very existence of the drugs can have a ripple effect in a community. It brings hope to family members who no longer face the choice between extreme debt and the loss of a family member. It also brings new knowledge and power to clinicians, who can now diagnose people, knowing that there is an accessible cure to their devastating disease.5 Our goal is to refine an effective and transferable access model, enabling us to save lives, bring social change to families and communities, and expand our reach beyond India into other regions burdened by infectious disease. If we are successful, this new product will build demand for new markets along the way. From the manufacturing center in Hyderabad to the bedsides of patients, this drug will create a demand for services to provide transport, delivery, and storage. Local communities become partners with iOWH by providing these services as well as medical care. When a local community becomes healthier both physically and economically, the result can be profound and far-reaching. In addition to effecting change in rural areas, projects in this part of our value chain (Figure 5.2) also effect positive change in the developed world by

Figure 5.2 Value chain. Courtesy of the Institute for OneWorld Health.

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addressing the emerging problem of what we call innovation pileup. There are many innovations coming from scientists and engineers who are developing new tools to prevent diseases and treat patients. But getting these drugs and innovations out of the warehouse and to the patient is often the most challenging part of the problem. When this problem is not tackled, these innovations pile up and become a burden and a disappointment that could, eventually, squelch the creativity of those scientists who invented them. By building channels for these innovations to flow through, iOWH can help prevent innovation pileup.

THE DOORS ARE OPEN Because we have sought a nonprofit approach to working with innovators to find treatments for neglected diseases, we have observed a change in the attitudes of our for-profit counterparts. In 2000 and 2001, when we first began talking with pharmaceutical companies about our vision for a different approach to drug development, the response to the pitch was skeptical, to say the least. We were asking these companies to surrender to us parcels of hard-won intellectual property. Even if they weren’t using the property, the request was bound to meet with considerable resistance—which it did. Over the past six years, the reception we receive has changed considerably. Pharmaceutical scientists within the conventional drug companies understand the challenge we are seeking to address and, more importantly, can see the value of the approach we propose. Some want to participate in iOWH during a sabbatical or through fellowships. Others offer themselves as resources to help guide us. Even at the corporate level, there is an openness and willingness to talk. We now have access to these companies. They want to know how they can contribute. Although less than a decade ago the doors of collaboration appeared to be shut, today they are open. The result of this turnaround is that it makes our search for the next matchup of an orphaned drug with a neglected disease that much easier. We have two more in the works already. These new partnerships hold the promise of producing therapies that will cure people afflicted with malaria—the most deadly parasitic disease in the world—and diarrhea. Our malaria program efforts fall solidly on the manufacturing and distribution links of the value chain. We are focusing on developing semisynthetic artemisinin, a key ingredient in the manufacture of first-line malaria treatments. The project involves a unique collaboration of representatives. OneWorld Health, together with synthetic biology innovator Amyris and leading pharmaceutical company Sanofi-aventis, have created the Artemisinin Project. Its aim is to create a complementary source of non-seasonal, high-quality, and affordable artemisinin to supplement the current botanical supply, thereby enabling millions of people infected with malaria to gain consistent access to lower-cost, lifesaving artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs). The partnership

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leverages new technology from Berkeley professor Jay Keasling and Amyris that allows an antimalarial drug precursor, artemisinic acid, to be manufactured using genetically engineered yeast. Keasling and colleagues first described this new technology in the April 12, 2007, issue of the journal Nature.6 Prior to that discovery, only plants produced the compound, making it an expensive and unreliable ingredient for a mass-produced drug. If it reaches commercial scale, this alternative source of artemisinin would supplement the supply that is currently extracted from the botanical source Sweet Wormwood plant (Artemisia annua) and produce enough artemisinin for ACTs to treat up to 200 million of the more than 500 million estimated individuals who contract malaria each year. This complementary source of supply would improve the availability of high-quality artemisinin derivatives to drug manufacturers and contribute to stabilizing the price of artemisinin-containing antimalarials to benefit patients and payers. The World Health Organization recommends using ACTs as a first-line treatment for malaria in regions where the usual first-line treatments for malaria are no longer effective because of increasing drug resistance. Malaria is responsible for more than 1 million deaths annually. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded OneWorld Health a five-year grant of $42.6 million in December 2004 to manage the research and development collaboration with Amyris and Dr. Keasling to utilize the techniques of synthetic biology to develop a new technology platform for producing artemisinin and its derivatives. Our diarrhea program falls at the other end of the value chain. It focuses on discovery. In 2006 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded us a US$46 million grant to develop wholly new treatments to complement traditional approaches for fighting diarrhea. Diarrheal diseases are a leading cause of death in children under the age of five worldwide, killing an estimated 2 million children each year. Typically, children die of complications from dehydration. Therapies exist that help rehydrate these children, but no effective therapy exists to stem the loss of fluids in the first place. Our efforts will focus on developing safe, effective, and affordable new antisecretory drugs that inhibit intestinal fluid loss. These novel antisecretory drugs will be deployed as an adjunct to oral rehydration therapy for the treatment of acute secretory diarrhea,7 which is responsible for nearly 40 percent of reported cases of diarrheal disease globally. During 2006, the iOWH Diarrheal Disease Program initiated several new collaborations, including one with BioFocus DPI, which will apply medicinal chemistry and early-stage drug development expertise to identify new antisecretory drugs, and one with the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research in Bangladesh (ICDDR,B), which will conduct pre-clinical studies. More recently we have entered into a collaboration with Roche. In this agreement, we will screen compounds from the Roche library to identify a potential new drug for the treatment of diarrheal diseases. (See Figure 5.3.)

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Figure 5.3 Proof of concept. Courtesy of the Institute for OneWorld Health.

BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY: THE MONEY CHALLENGE The business of creating new drugs is slow and expensive. It involves great diligence and care because of cultural and ethical considerations involved in treating patients with new medicines. We have proven that our model is effective, but not yet that it is sustainable. A critical challenge in our next stage of development will be to transition from exclusive reliance on philanthropic support to a model that combines grant funding with revenues through sales. With regard to philanthropic gifts and grants, we are increasingly aware of our need to develop a funding pipeline to support our product development at each stage. iOWH could, for instance, invest its funds in identifying good leads for the orphaned drug–neglected disease matchups with the most potential. We would then bring these leads and targets to outside funders that would help fund the development of the drug, and then enter into new partnerships to help manufacture and distribute the drug. With regard to sales, we have started to consider the applicability of a crosssubsidization strategy: sales of a product to those able to pay could help cover the costs of providing therapies to those unable to do so. Visceral leishmaniasis afflicts almost exclusively the poorest of people, but such is not the case with all neglected diseases. Malaria also affects the middle and upper classes. So does diarrhea. Similarly, a compound could be developed for the same indication in two regions of the world. This so-called dual-market approach has the potential to earn revenue and have public health impact. Of course, we did not create iOWH to be yet another revenue-maximizing drug company. Our nonprofit model enables us to fulfill our mission to make drugs that are not only safe and effective but also affordable and accessible to all. In order to do this important work far into the future, thus expanding our reach and impact, we must continue to seek innovative ways to grow and sustain the organization.

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NEGLECTED NO MORE The Institute for OneWorld Health is not the cure to global inequities of access to medicines. If it is part of the solution, it will not be because of what we are able to accomplish in isolation. Rather, it will be because others innovate at least as aggressively as we have sought to, by mobilizing resources, forming partnerships, affecting changes in policy, and creating new paradigms that work for the poor, rather than against them.8 My own belief, however, is that new technologies, creative organizational structures, and necessary realignments of incentives will be insufficient to bring about such change unless all are combined with one other essential element: moral outrage. When even a single life is wasted for want of a treatment that, if available, could be provided for less than the cost of a box of Band-Aids, we as a global community have failed. To address this failure will require an effort distributed across the globe, from village clinics to corporate boardrooms—and it will necessitate great humility and compassion. It may begin with the work of organizations such as ours in building awareness and creating new opportunities for action. But it ends only when neglected diseases, and the people they afflict, are neglected no more. Acknowledgments I am grateful to Jim Hickman, Ahvie Herskowitz, and Beth Doughterty for their assistance in writing this chapter. This case narrative appeared, accompanied by a case discussion authored by Wesley Yin, in Innovations, 2.4 (Fall 2007), as “Seeking a Cure for Inequity in Access to Medicines.” An earlier version of this chapter was published in Innovations: Technology | Governance | Globalization (ISSN 1558-2477, E-SSN 1558-2485), Special Edition for the 2008 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, The Power of Positive Doing, MIT Press, 238 Main Street, Suite 500, Cambridge, MA 02142-1046. © 2007 Tagore LLC. It is reprinted herein with permission.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: The Institute for OneWorld Health Founder/Executive Director: Victoria Hale Mission: Institute for OneWorld Health develops safe, effective, and affordable new medicines for people with infectious diseases in the developing world. OneWorld Health is a nonprofit pharmaceutical company. Website: www.oneworldhealth.org Address: 50 California Street Suite 500 San Francisco, CA 94111

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Phone: 415.421.4700 x 303 Fax: 415.307.7092 E-mail: [email protected]

NOTES 1. Innovations, World Economic Forum special edition, 106. 2. Davos, 2008. 3. “Seeking a Cure for Inequity in Access to Medicines,” Innovations, World Economic Forum special edition. 4. Innovations, Davos, 2008, p. 111. 5. Ibid. 6. Ro, Paradise, Ouellet, Fisher, Newman, Ndungu, Ho, Eachus, Ham, Kirby, Chang, Withers, Shiba, Sarpong, & Keasling, “Production of the antimalarial drug precursor artemisinic acid in engineered yeast,” Nature 440 (April 13, 2006), p. 940. 7. Ibid. 8. “Seeking a Cure for Inequity in Access to Medicines.”

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Sustainable Transformation of Communities: The Jamkhed Experience—”We Have Done It Ourselves!” Shobha R. Arole and Raj S. Arole

Large and diverse, India is a country of paradoxes. In spite of incredible growth in economy and business, 80 percent of the population continues to live on less than $2 a day (Population Reference Bureau, 2007). Women have held the highest political offices in the country, yet a large number of women still hold a low status in society and lack self-esteem. Although part of the world’s vanguard in information and computer technology, India still has persistently high rates of infant mortality, maternal mortality, and deaths from chronic and communicable illnesses, with some of the world’s worst health indicators, especially for the poor in rural areas and urban slums. Most health professionals, as well as the public, tend to believe that the solutions to India’s common health problems lie in well-equipped hospitals and highly specialized personnel who can provide “quality” care. Against this background, Drs. Rajanikant and Mabelle Arole founded the Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP), a community-based health and development program in Jamkhed, Maharashtra, India. Surmising that health is not limited solely to hospitals and curative services, the Aroles recognized its many other determinants. They believed that economic, environmental, nutritional, and social factors—issues such as the low status of women and the plight of the marginalized—influence health profoundly. The Aroles founded CRHP in 1970, and since then, it has become an internationally renowned, community-based health and development organization. Over the years, the project has affected and influenced national and international government health policy, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), faith-based organizations, and businesses engaged in social entrepreneurship. In 1975 the World Health Organization (WHO) published Health by the People (Newell, 1975), with a chapter on CRHP. This book was part of the process that led to the WHO/UNICEF conference held in AlmaAta in 1978, resulting in the AlmaAta Declaration on Primary Health Care as the means for providing “Health 93

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for All” globally. In 2001 the Schwab Foundation selected the Aroles as outstanding social entrepreneurs for their development of an innovative and sustainable model for health and development. CRHP currently serves a population of 1.5 million through its primary and secondary health care programs, hospital, and training center. A truly grassroots project, it strives to place health in the people’s hands. The Aroles started as pioneers in the field of primary health care, successfully demonstrating a truly sustainable model. As communities and project personnel have interacted to promote lasting change, disease patterns have shifted from primarily communicable diseases to mostly noncommunicable illnesses such as diabetes and hypertension. Both primary and secondary health care continue to be relevant to the issues faced today, and full community participation in the integrated approach to both prevention and cure remains a vital element of the project. With almost four decades of experience, CRHP has established itself as an organization committed to uplifting the poor and marginalized in relevant ways within the communities it serves.

TRANSFORMATION OF INDIVIDUALS AND COMMUNITIES CRHP has always been about people, community, and transformation. Lalanbai Kadam’s story is one example. One of CRHP’s first village health workers, Lalanbai was born into extreme poverty as a Dalit (“untouchable”) in the village of Pimpalgaon. As a child, she often went hungry because her family relied on their landlord’s discarded scraps for food. Lalanbai never learned to read and write because her parents could not afford to send her to school. Instead, she was married at age ten and was sent to live with her jealous and violent husband, who forbade her to interact with their neighbors. So intense was his envy that he even tried to kill her by attempting to throw her into the sea. After she became pregnant, Lalanbai was abandoned by her husband and left to raise her young son alone. When he was four, her son became ill with measles, which, according to the traditional beliefs, was caused by a goddess’s curse and could only be cured by a divine miracle. Denied food, water, and medicines in hopes of a miracle, his condition worsened and ultimately claimed his life. After this tragedy, Lalanbai was remarried to an elderly widower, who died soon after their marriage. She then returned to her parents’ village to take charge of affairs in her father’s home, but because of the stigma of caste and widowhood, Lalanbai was ostracized by her community. At this time, the leader of her village selected her to receive training at CRHP to become their village health worker (VHW). As an illiterate Dalit woman, Lalanbai was very unsure of her ability to learn and succeed in such a role. But throughout her training, she was treated with respect, working as an equal with women from all caste groups. When she began her work as a VHW, Lalanbai found that many people were resistant to interacting with a Dalit woman. But the self-confidence she gained through her training at CRHP allowed her to work past these initial

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difficulties. As the community began to recognize her skills, they began to see beyond her caste. By sharing her health knowledge, she worked hard to educate her village against the harmful superstitions and traditional practices that had killed her son. Lalanbai’s popularity grew so much that many people wanted her to become the village Sarpanch (leader). The current Sarpanch, afraid that he would lose to her in an election, asked Dr. Mabelle to persuade Lalanbai not to contest the election. Hearing this, Lalanbai laughed and said, “I already rule the hearts of the people of Pimpalgaon. Let him continue to be the Sarpanch! As I have changed, I have changed the world around me, even this backward village of Pimpalgaon, and this is the best reward for me.” In addition to being a leader in her village, Lalanbai has become an invaluable member of the CRHP community. She trains new health workers and serves as an important role model for poor women. She is also part of the training team for visiting health and development professionals and students who come to CRHP’s training institute from all over the world. Through her hard work and the training she received at CRHP, Lalanbai went from being a poor and marginalized Dalit woman to a treasured and highly respected member of her community, responsible for transforming the health of her village.

PREPARATION—THE AROLES’ EARLY LIFE Who were the founders and motivators behind this transformation, and where did it all begin? The son of schoolteachers in a rural area of Maharashtra, Raj Arole grew up understanding the intricacies of village life, including the subtle nuances of the caste system and its undergirding effect on society. At a time when women were hardly literate, his mother managed to become one of a few fully trained female teachers in the region. Amid such progressive values, Raj and all his siblings were well educated, but the real influence in his childhood years was his father. Although he was a teacher, Raj’s father spent much of his time helping poor students, providing for others, and generally engaging in social improvement. In this atmosphere, Raj had the opportunities to imbibe social values, realistically understand the socioeconomic setting, and help those less fortunate than himself. This ethos of concern for the poor became deeply etched in his mind. Raj’s determination to become a physician arose when a flood struck his rural hometown of Rahuri. Witnessing the deaths of close friends and neighbors in these bleak and disastrous settings forged his resolve to become a doctor. In Raj’s own words, “As a child, I grew up in a village and saw people suffering without a doctor. I myself had bouts of malaria, and the only person to treat me was a paramedic. I remember that my mother had a breast abscess and a simple village woman drained it. When I was twelve, there was a flood bringing with it an epidemic of plague. I saw many of my classmates semiconscious and in agony. That incident became the deciding factor and the real motivation for my desire to become a doctor.” Despite the challenges of rural Indian life, Raj set high

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standards for himself and studied at one of the best medical colleges in India, Christian Medical College, Vellore. During his time there, Raj met his life partner and wife, Mabelle Immanuel. In contrast with Raj’s childhood, Mabelle was sheltered at the theological seminary where her father was a professor; she had very little experience with the harsh reality of rural India. Interestingly enough, Mabelle’s father, who had dreamed of becoming a doctor for the poor, had the greatest impact on her throughout childhood. Inspired by his personal aspirations, Mabelle made that dream a reality. Both Raj and Mabelle grew up in families that instilled in them Christian values and a strong foundation in Christ. Their own personal commitment based on this faith enabled them to commit their lives to serve the poor and marginalized, and have a vision for healthy communities. Throughout their medical studies, the aspiring doctors never lost sight of the plight of the poor and marginalized; and they met many influential role models. Dr. Paul Brand, a surgeon working with leprosy, emphasized the need to demystify medicine. Much of his research and clinical work took place in small huts or mango groves. The renowned surgeon and physiologist Dr. Somerville also worked to make medicine accessible; he practiced real compassion for his patients, making himself available to them almost anywhere, even under a tree or in the bustling corridors of a hospital, wherever people could see him. Dr. Kutumbiah, a consultant for the president of India, insisted on making clinical diagnoses based on history and physical findings; investigations were used only for confirmation. His accuracy was astounding, especially to those who depended on expensive laboratory procedures. Dr. MacPherson, another physician, donated all of his salary to the welfare of his patients, saving money by eating in one of the cheapest student messes on campus. Such committed and compassionate role models reinforced the core values that inspired Raj and Mabelle to pursue the path that eventually led to the founding of CRHP. During their internship years, Raj and Mabelle grew closer and quickly realized that they shared the interest, commitment, and zeal to serve the poorest of the poor. In 1960 they married and embarked on their lifelong journey together. Working in curative-oriented mission hospitals in Maharashtra and Karnataka, they realized something was missing. Although they were providing quality clinical care, they wondered whether their work was really making a difference in the lives of the poor. Their quest to reach the population’s most vulnerable members enabled them to be open to change. What was happening to those who did not make it to the hospital, and why were they not coming? What were the reasons for the high rates of maternal and infant mortality in the region? Raj again shares his experience while at the mission hospital in Vadala: Once when I was traveling from Vadala to Salapatupur after finishing a clinic, I suddenly saw a shop with a large crowd around it. I realized that the shopkeeper was seeing patients. There were more patients waiting to see the shopkeeper than even I had seen on that day. I was indignant. After a while, I had a chance to speak to him.

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I asked him what he would do if someone had pneumonia, and he said he gave penicillin. Then I asked him what he did for diarrhea, and he said he gave kaolin (a prescription which was used in the 1960s). I began to realize that people in the villages are really interested and willing to learn, and they can take care of simple illnesses. That was the moment at which I developed the idea that people have the capacity to deal with simple yet vital aspects of health.

In search of answers, Raj and Mabelle drove to the villages and held clinics, gaining a basic glimpse into community life and social structure in the villages. Inspired by the American Dr. Hale Cooke, who worked alongside them, they looked deeper into these issues. As Fulbright scholars, the Aroles had the opportunity to complete their medical and surgical residencies in the United States and earn master’s degrees in public health at Johns Hopkins University. It was there that they were able to plan a comprehensive, community-based health and development project to be implemented in India. Professor Carl E. Taylor, their mentor at Johns Hopkins, was a source of inspiration and support throughout this process. He introduced his students to different systems of health care and encouraged them to learn from one another. Participants from Johns Hopkins–affiliated projects all over the world opened their eyes to the fact that learning does not only occur in university classrooms but also through village experiences. Knowledge comes not only from the mentor or expert but also from the community.

IN THE BEGINNING IN JAMKHED Upon their return to India, the Aroles planned to work in a deprived part of Maharashtra, where health care and socioeconomic development were rare and often primitive. At the same time, one of their main objectives was to work in an area of sufficient community interest and willingness on the part of the people to partner and organize for effective change. Shri Bansi Kothari, a political leader known for his zeal for social work, tracked down the two doctors during their mission to find such a place. Having known Raj and Mabelle even before their sojourn in the United States, he was eager to invite them to a village called Jamkhed, where the community would be receptive to them. The Aroles traveled remote and often incomplete, dusty roads on their way to meet various village leaders and their communities in the jurisdiction of Jamkhed taluka (subdistrict). Drought prone and lacking in socioeconomic development, the Jamkhed area indeed proved to be the right area in which to initiate an innovative approach to health care. The area was truly poverty stricken, with few resources and even fewer public health services. In the early 1970s, Jamkhed had a population of about 7,000. The village had no running water or electricity, and lacked not just motor vehicles but even a proper road. Surrounding villages and distant urban areas were nearly inaccessible. In this resource-deprived setting, the Aroles decided to set up a low-cost

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curative care center, and they initiated primary health care programming using a rudimentary understanding of community participation. This meant requesting the community to provide a place to run a clinic as well as adequate quarters to house the staff of the newly inaugurated CRHP. The community responded by providing a rundown veterinary hospital as the clinic site, and the second and third floors of a local merchant’s house for lodging. Joining the Aroles was an initial group of ten staff that included the stalwart and faithful ex-army nurse Helenbai (referred to as Akka), nurses, technicians, and paramedical workers. The staff stayed on the second floor. Raj and Mabelle, along with their two children, Ravi and Shobha, age three and ten at the time, lived on the third floor, sheltered only by three walls and a leaking roof. After the doctors purchased a secondhand Willy’s jeep with canvas doors, visits to the surrounding villages became possible. These visits uncovered the many layers of complexity in village social structure. Caste definition, discrimination, and the low status of women played major roles in precluding unity among a community. The practices of centuries etched the traditions of caste and position in the lives of the villagers. The poorest and the most marginalized were not even allowed to attend village meetings, and reaching them meant finding them separately from the general community. Diplomatically holding leader and high-caste meetings before their sessions with the Dalit community produced less bias and more balance in their understanding of the needs of the community as a whole. As medical professionals, the Aroles assumed that health would be a priority need in the communities. Surprisingly, most villagers identified water, food, and shelter as their biggest concerns, with health much farther down the list. Fully addressing the community’s expressed needs became the main thrust of the project, and it was upon these responses that all future success would be built. Poor rainfall resulting in the lack of water for agriculture and domestic use was a major issue. OXFAM and other agencies partnered to provide tube wells in nearly thirty villages, effectively providing clean drinking water for the masses. This one intervention had several far-reaching implications. Safe drinking water decreased the incidence of waterborne diseases and illnesses such as diarrhea, hepatitis, cholera, and typhoid. Furthermore, the tube wells were strategically placed in the low-caste sections of each village. This forced those from the higher castes to draw water in the low-caste areas. Mobility and intermingling of the caste groups was one of the first ways in which the rigid structure of the caste system began to deteriorate. Nutrition programs for children also increased flexibility among the castes. Children, who would normally sit according to their caste designation, now were subtly rearranged according to shirt color, outfit, or some other neutral designation. Simple interventions such as these brought about distinct and very important social change. The Aroles’ immediate response to the felt needs of the community left a deep impact in villages with a long history of exploitation. Most villagers found it difficult to believe that the CRHP team harbored no ulterior motive. Their

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commitment to and genuine interest in the needs of the rural poor built a relationship of mutual trust and an authentic understanding of community participation. But this did not happen overnight. Making regular and consistent contact with the villages, listening to the people, and facilitating appropriate interventions, all with patience and a sense of humor, were essential in order to move forward and maintain that trust. Raj and Mabelle, as medical doctors, were effectively able to address the curative needs of the people. This capability was significant, and their competence and professional skills became well known and much praised. As the large backlog of pressing medical problems in the population gradually eased, the Aroles’ credibility as physicians as well as the community’s receptivity to preventive and promotive health care increased significantly. The organization of large-scale medical and surgical camps for hundreds of people also did much toward achieving this goal. Before the end of the second year in Jamkhed, a Marwadi (business community) family generously donated five acres of land to build more permanent facilities—a hospital for CRHP and housing for its staff. This site became CRHP’s official campus, and over the last three decades, seven more acres have been added to the compound.

FLEXIBILITY AND INNOVATION—LEARNING FROM THE PEOPLE Initially, CRHP placed an auxiliary nurse midwife (ANM) in each village to take care of common health problems—maternal and child health, family planning, tuberculosis treatment and control—through daily home visits and clinics. But after a year-long trial period, the ANMs had not effected significant changes in public health or social conditions. Uncovering the reasons for the failure of this model enabled the Aroles to learn a great deal from this experience. The ANMs, largely from urban backgrounds, did not belong to the villages. They did not speak the villagers’ colloquial Marathi, nor did they feel comfortable living among them. They did not know the families or feel the same concern for the people as did those who were native to the communities. Most of the ANMs were young, unmarried women who felt awkward and timid when visiting homes and discussing delicate matters such as family planning. This apparent failure proved to be a stepping stone to an innovation, a revolutionary concept in the field of public health and community development. While discussing possibilities for alternatives with the communities, the Aroles toyed with the idea of training illiterate women from the villages to deal with common health problems. Both the villagers and the Aroles thought it was worth a try. A woman working with CRHP, Mrs. Joshi, liaised with the community. Adept at grassroots promotion of family planning, she, along with local community members, chose a number of women to be trained as village health workers (VHWs). The project’s openness and flexibility to try this new idea led to an incredible impact on health during the following years.

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The health worker training brought women of different castes from CRHP project villages to Jamkhed for two weeks to engage in health education sessions and personal development. For these illiterate women who had never left their homes or villages, the experience was new and shocking. They were used to veiling their heads with saris and identifying themselves only by caste or village or husband; for many, this was the first time they were introduced by their own names and acknowledged as individuals. It was also the first time in their lives that their daily activities were not controlled or dictated by men, either fathers or husbands. But the greatest challenge came in crossing the boundaries of caste. Cooking and eating food together, sharing rooms—these new and traditionbreaking ideas were initially difficult to comprehend. They wondered how they would survive at CRHP and normalize these new concepts. Drs. Raj and Mabelle tactfully allayed their fears. Taking the women to the medical lab, the doctors drew each woman’s blood and asked each woman to identify the samples according to caste. They were unable to do so. They could not differentiate their chest X-rays either, able to identify neither their own nor those of other castes. The ideas finally began to make sense. Reassured that the training would be beneficial, the women continued learning with greater enthusiasm. Those first weeks, however, were still difficult, filled with self-doubt and apprehension. One of the VHWs-in-training, Salubai, relates her experience: I was chosen to come to the classes. I was extremely afraid and wondered what would happen to me. I could not speak, and my mouth went dry. One of my colleagues, Lalanbai, had encouraged me to come. After the first visit to the center, I decided I wouldn’t go again. But Lalanbai encouraged me, and slowly the doctors and staff encouraged me. There were still times when I wasn’t sure of myself, but in time I gained confidence.

From those first two weeks of trainings through the present, CRHP has promoted personal development—instilling and building self-confidence, selfworth, faith, and values—in addition to nurturing a well-rounded understanding of important health and social issues. These foci set the cornerstones for the success of the VHW training. Today the VHWs continue to visit CRHP for weekly, on-going training and group interaction from noon each Tuesday to late afternoon on Wednesday. VHWs—AGENTS OF TRANSFORMATION The first twenty VHWs concentrated on particular priority health areas in their respective villages. These included maternal and child health (MCH), family planning, tuberculosis, leprosy, and waterborne illnesses. Working as parttime volunteers, these women would visit families and disseminate health knowledge throughout their communities. In return, CRHP provided support as the women initiated income-generating activities to improve the conditions of

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their families. But the VHWs name the tremendous pride and satisfaction from engaging in community development and improving their neighbors’ health as their greatest reward. Village members, transcending prejudice and mistrust, bestow profuse praise and respect on their VHWs, regardless of caste. This development is truly remarkable in a society so deeply entrenched in age-old traditions and practices. As a recognized and respected part of a health team that included doctors, nurses, and paramedical workers, the VHWs gained significant credibility and further improved their standing as health experts and valuable community members. Rural India, riddled with superstitions, fear, and skepticism of science, was in no way an easy place to practice modern medicine in the earlier decades of the project. Blaming many illnesses on curses and the wrath of gods, villagers often turned to magic and local Indian shamans and faith healers. The traditional practices of old women were followed without question or understanding. Much of the time, these practices and beliefs were harmful, contributing to high rates of infant, child, and maternal mortality. Changing the practices and beliefs of so many generations was an immense challenge. By providing quality curative care and medical services, the Aroles had convinced the villagers of their investment in the communities’ felt needs and their desire to eliminate suffering. Raj and Mabelle realized that lasting and sustainable changes in health could occur only if adequate time and energy were given to demystify health knowledge and set it back in the people’s hands, as through the VHWs. Innovative and culturally appropriate, the Aroles showed that illiterate women could use health knowledge and practices responsibly to transform the health of communities. It is the VHWs, in fact, who significantly improved health indicators and changed people’s quality of life. Improvement in health depends not on curative services but in changing knowledge, attitudes, and practices about illness and health. This change was not achieved through traditional Western medical education practices of hierarchical teaching and condescension. Rather, the initial years saw the health team listening to villagers and deciphering their beliefs and practices. Taking time to understand local attitudes facilitated the relevant introduction of alternative scientific knowledge, impressively effecting changes in health and social practices. The VHWs were skilled at sharing local proverbs, stories, examples, and metaphors to relate new concepts in understandable ways. As their health knowledge improved, they were able to create analogies between daily life events and scientific explanations for problems such as diarrhea, malnutrition, and disease. For example, unwatered plants quickly perish; children, too, can die of dehydration and need water as plants do to sustain life. Another example relates to a common folk tale that an infant needs to cross seven bridges. The VHWs developed flashcards depicting the building blocks for a strong bridge in the first year of life, among them things such as immunization, nutrition, and clean drinking water.

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THE INNOVATIVE HEALTH SYSTEM—DEVELOPING THE POTENTIAL OF PEOPLE The CRHP health program uses a modular and interactive three-tier referral system. At the grassroots level are the village health worker and community organizations such as the Mahila Mandals (women’s groups) and Tarun Shetkari Mandals (men’s groups). At the project level lies the training center and a fortybed hospital, providing low-cost, secondary care with round-the-clock emergency, medical, surgical, pediatrics, and ob/gyn. care. The mobile health team, consisting of nurses, paramedical workers, social workers, and occasionally a doctor, provides the intermediary link. The staff of CRHP has greatly contributed to the success of this model. Their flexibility, openness to new ideas, and willingness to work at any time have enabled the project to move forward and adapt to changing health and social conditions. Although salaries are meager, the high levels of satisfaction and motivation have kept most of the staff at the project for over thirty years, even after retirement. Many of them have likewise been transformed and actualized in ways they would once have thought unimaginable. Such change is reflected in the life of Mr. Moses Guram. Moses originally comes from Andhra Pradesh, a state on India’s eastern coast. His family was poor, and there was never enough to eat. As a young boy, he left home in search of a job and ended up in the city of Pune, 1,300 km away, with a job as a helper at Spicer College. He came to Jamkhed with the college team to help build the health center. After the building was finished, Moses wanted to stay; he had fallen in love with a young cook. He had only four years of formal schooling, but he had a strong physique, so he was given the job of night watchman. An industrious fellow, Moses helped the motor mechanics and also spent his time observing the X-ray technician and electrician. Since every worker is expected to share knowledge and skill with those who show interest, Moses soon learned how to operate the generator and understand electrical circuits. As he showed aptitude and interest, he acquired new skills. He went to Jaipur to learn how to make the Jaipur foot from the famous orthopedic surgeon, Dr. P. K. Sethi, who had developed a simple, low-cost prosthetic leg appropriate for the Indian lifestyle. Today, Moses is in charge of the workshop that manufactures artificial limbs, calipers, and other equipment for physically handicapped persons. He has traveled with a CRHP team to Liberia and Angola, and men from these countries have come to Jamkhed to learn from him. He reflects: “I was trusted, and knowledge was with me. I was nobody; today people call me ‘doctor.’ Many doctors and professionals take my advice. I have been associated with the manufacture of over 17,000 artificial limbs and calipers that were provided to needy people in the state of Maharashtra. Civic clubs organize camps; they invite me with the team to manufacture limbs. I see my picture appear in the newspapers. You cannot imagine the joy I get. Twenty-four hours a day I keep thinking of how to improve the prosthesis. How can I make the caliper simple and light enough that a small

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child can use it? I have a dozen young men, whom I have trained, working with me. I share all the knowledge I have with them and encourage them to be like me. My brothers and sisters are working in the Middle East and have often called me to join them. I tell them, ‘Money cannot buy the joy that I have in my work!’” With his wealth of experience and knowledge of the project, and as a native speaker of Telugu, Moses has become an essential part of the training team, working as an interpreter for hundreds of people coming from all over Andhra Pradesh—village health workers, auxiliary nurse midwives, and project managers, who regularly come to Jamkhed through the state government’s Society for the Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP) collaboration with CRHP.

VILLAGE TRANSFORMATION BY THE PEOPLE In many of the villages, forming men’s groups called farmers’ clubs proved easier in the highly patriarchal societies that made access to women difficult. Community groups are organized around the self-interests of the people. The men wanted to learn ways to improve agriculture and the care of their animals. Then, they began to recognize the interrelationships among health, nutrition, agriculture, economics, and eventually even women’s status. With this understanding, men slowly began to allow their wives to participate in Mahila Mandals, also organized around the self-interests of these women. Slowly, these groups gained momentum and, as they strengthened, addressed such issues as health, income generation, and social practices. The organization of participatory community groups and the impact of VHWs created a synergy that transformed the landscape for health and society in all project villages. Concerted community efforts at integration through the breaking of caste barriers and the improvement of women’s status were essential for making Health for All a reality. The experience of transformation spread to other villages by the people themselves, and thus primary health care became a movement in our area, encompassing 250 villages (300,000 people) within twenty years. An example from the village of Ghodegaon is instructive in demonstrating the dramatic change that has occurred since the project initiated its work there. Ghodegaon was one of the first villages to invite CRHP to work with it. A group discussion held in 1991 recounted the changes that had occurred in Ghodegaon, with reflections on the brutality and injustices of the past (Arole and Arole, 1994, 2003). Shahaji Patil, a local farmer and member of a farmers’ club, described his experience with positive transformation. “It was only twenty years ago [1971] that Ghodegaon was one of the poorest villages in this area. The hills were bare, and the fields barren. Every year the monsoon rain swept away the topsoil, leaving us the dry, parched earth full of gullies and eroded land. Few of us had enough water to cultivate the land. The social workers of CRHP understood that we could not have good health unless we had good

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agriculture. They helped us to come together. We forgot our caste differences and our social status. All of us, rich and poor, joined together, and we terraced and leveled the land. We built twenty-three dams and dug forty irrigation wells. We planted over 200,000 trees on the hillside and on our farms. We prevailed on the Government to give land to those who did not have any. Everyone in the village has land today. We got together and with CRHP’s help brought those barren lands under cultivation and so have enough food to feed all our children. There is no need to go out of the village in search of food.” For the previous fifteen years, Angadrao Gavhale, a Dalit, had been Sarpanch of Ghodegaon. He said, “Twenty years ago, we Dalits could not come to the center of the village. As a child, I could not go anywhere near the temple. Now I have built my house close to the temple. Yes, many changes have taken place. My family was landless, but today I have land and irrigated fields. I have planted an orchard and raised a plant nursery. Some of the Dalits now own choice land in the valley. Our children are healthy, and all the girls and boys in my community go to school. We all have land and have built good homes. Formerly we were made to live outside the village in thatched huts separated by a wall from the main village.” A high caste man interrupted, “Yes, today we all from different castes are sitting together, drinking tea and eating snacks. Traditionally we did not socialize with the low caste; rather, we who are twice born (high caste) have exploited the poor for centuries. We made them work day and night on our farms and often paid them with leftover food and grain. We would boycott them if they did not obey our orders.” “We Dalits would be simmering with anger and would take revenge in our own way. We used to poison your prize bullocks and cows,” replied Angadrao. Shahaji responded, “Then we punished you by burning your huts.” Then they all laughed together, remembering their actions; and in a more serious vein, Shahaji said, “Yes, the high caste often behaved like animals and treated the Dalits and other low castes in an unjust way. Now we have learned how to behave like human beings. Yes, we have our differences, but we have learned to respect and appreciate each other.” Shahaji continued, “Years of drought had left us frustrated. Every year half the young people of the village would migrate for a few months to sugarcane factories to keep their families from starving. Poverty and frustration led to drinking and gambling. There were twelve illegal breweries and a few gambling dens in the village. Anyone who came to Ghodegaon would see drunken brawls. People from surrounding villages also came to join in the drinking and have their luck with cards. It was a common sight to see men lazing around in the front square of the village. “Added to this misery was sickness. Children were emaciated; many had swollen limbs and potbellies. Many children died before they reached school age, and women died in childbirth because there was no doctor around. Wellto-do people went to the doctor in Jamkhed, but the poor depended on the devrushis (magicians). Then we heard that a doctor and his wife had come to Jamkhed to work in the villages. We invited them to Ghodegaon.” Yamunabai Kulkarni, the village health worker, animatedly spoke about herself and her experiences. “Twenty years ago it was unheard of for a

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Brahmin woman like me to sit with men or socialize with Dalit women. As a woman, I was confined to my home, and sometimes I worked on our ancestral farm. Now I am free and serving the entire village as a health volunteer. In the beginning, it was difficult for me to visit Dalit women and especially to deliver their babies. I have been a VHW since 1974. I have never been to school. I look after the health of the mothers and children. I have conducted over 550 [by 2007 over 800] deliveries and have not lost a single mother during this time. This village has about 250 couples, and 150 of them practice family planning. Many women have undergone sterilization, and some take oral contraceptives. I visit all the families in my village and follow up the children. “Ghodegaon was a different village before I became a VHW. Most adults suffered from guinea worm infection. We still have scars of this infestation on our ankles, knees, and backs. Now it is no longer a problem. We were superstitious and thought that most diseases were curses of a goddess. There used to be repeated epidemics of cholera. We used to sacrifice goats and chickens to appease the particular goddess. Cholera did not disappear. Now since I became a VHW, cholera is no more. Every year ten to fifteen children used to die in the village; now hardly a single baby dies.” One village woman said of Yamunabai, “Doctors only give medicine when people are sick. Yamunabai is more than a doctor to us. She has taught us simple home remedies for day-to-day illnesses like coughs, fever, and diarrhea. But more than that, she teaches us how to keep from falling sick.” “My friend here had leprosy,” said Kisanrao Sole, pointing to the man sitting next to him. “He lives next to me. We drove him out of the village because he had leprosy, but now we are not afraid of leprosy. He lives in the village again, and Yamunabai treats him like any other patient. In fact, all thirty-five of our leprosy patients are almost cured by Yamunabai. Some of them are active in the village. Their children are also married and settled in life.” Angadrao, the Sarpanch, talked about Yamunabai: “Ghodegaon people are healthy because of Yamunabai. She is very enthusiastic about her training and her work. One day she was returning to Ghodegaon from Jamkhed. It was raining hard, and the stream was flooded. With a baby in her arms, she was trying to cross the swollen stream, and she slipped and fell into the water. Both mother [Yamunabai] and baby were swept away by the strong current. A couple of men rescued them. They scolded her for leaving the house in the rain and endangering her own life and that of the baby. She replied, ‘My training has saved many lives in my village. For the sake of the village, I am willing to take the risk.’” Shahaji concluded, “We villagers have worked together, improved our farms and farm animals. This has ensured adequate and nutritious food. Clean water and sanitation have eliminated many illnesses. The whole village worked toward the removal of caste differences and have learned to treat women and girls as equals of men. We can proudly say that Health for All has become a reality in Ghodegaon. CRHP has shown us the way, and we have learned to work together for the betterment of our village. Now we do not need to depend on the Aroles or CRHP. As we continue to develop, we are not alone; scores of villages around Ghodegaon are taking part in this movement. Each village develops at its own pace, as some take more advantage of their new-found knowledge, and some do not.”

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Ghodegaon today is a model of sustainable health and development in action. The links between health and other spheres of life underscore the priorities in making Health for All a reality. Ghodegaon so impressed government and administrative leaders that it was recognized as an “ideal village” and awarded a cash prize to further develop services and infrastructure. Although there are many examples of successful development in villages like Ghodegaon, each has its own character and unique story to tell. Existing at varying stages of health and development, villages progress at different speeds, and they develop interventions and use the programs that best suit their own needs. While Ghodegaon’s farmers’ club was involved and active, in Kusadgaon it was the women’s groups that played a greater role in advancing community health and socioeconomic development. Kusadgaon’s vivacious and enthusiastic VHW, Sashikala, motivated the formation of a strong women’s group. This group not only improved the health of their families and community, but it also organized a broom-making business, which was a great benefit to their economic well-being. The women’s grasp of multisectoral relationships and interdependence brought not only tangible improvements in the health indicators of their community but also a significantly improved quality of life.

SUSTAINABILITY AND GLOBALIZATION Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the majority of CRHP’s work centered on community participation and development. Eventually, the older project villages became self-reliant enough to manage community-based programs with little supervision and assistance from CRHP. In 1989 a new project was developed in the tribal area of Bhandardara, six hours from Jamkhed. The purpose of this project was to demonstrate that grassroots workers, along with the help of a few social workers, paramedical workers, and volunteers from villages from the Jamkhed area, could promote primary health care in a different context and even without a hospital and infrastructure. This experience enabled the people to realize that healthcare can be provided by the people themselves, through spreading knowledge and changing harmful attitudes and practices. From 1990 to 1992, Raj and Mabelle were visiting professors of international health at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. There, they shared their experiences with students and colleagues. This time in the United States, and later in Italy as Rockefeller Fellows, also enabled them to write Jamkhed: A Comprehensive Rural Health Project (Arole and Arole, 1994, 2003). The three-year period during which Raj and Mabelle were abroad tested the sustainability of the project. With clinical experience gained in Bihar and the Himalayas of Uttar Pradesh, daughter Shobha, also a physician, was well prepared to assume the responsibilities of the hospital; she gradually moved into her current role as associate director of CRHP. Throughout this transition period, the staff remained steadfast and supportive of the project’s leadership and mission.

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Beyond mere sustainability of its work, the organization took on a new role as a model project for global health and development. In 1993 Raj returned to Jamkhed and continued the work with Shobha. Mabelle stayed on in the United States as health and welfare consultant for the United Methodist Church. During her three years in this role, she collaborated with Cathie Lyons and Nora Boots to promote community-based primary health care (CBPHC) in a number of countries throughout Latin America and Africa. This attracted a large number of international participants to the primary health and development courses taking place at CRHP’s training center in Jamkhed. Mabelle was invited to serve as UNICEF’s health and nutrition advisor in South Asia, a position she held from 1996 to 1999. Through this appointment, she was able to influence governments and policies, particularly in the area of women’s and children’s health. She traveled extensively throughout South Asia, inviting those she met to visit Jamkhed for a firsthand look at primary health care. During this time she also wrote two books: Voices of South Asian Women (Arole, 1995), on the plight of women in South Asia, and one on the impact of the religions of South Asia on women’s and children’s rights. As Shobha took the reins in clinical work and provided assistance in training at Jamkhed, Raj directed his full attention to the trainings and development of the project through collaboration with various government officials. Mabelle returned at intervals to help with training. All three shared administrative responsibilities and encouraged the staff to be conscientious in their community work. Since 2005, son Ravi also has taken on responsibilities. The Jamkhed Institute for Training and Research in Community Health and Population was established in 1993, with the support of DFID and Tearfund in the United Kingdom. Many visitors had suggested the creation of a formal training center in order to spread the Jamkhed model more effectively throughout the world. The initial diploma course included three months (now two months) in residence, with a two-week refresher after six to eight months in the field. Besides this course, electives, internships, and a one-month residential course for international medical, public health, and allied health students are held every year. In addition, short, custom-tailored courses for NGOs and government agencies are organized regularly. In order to cater to the needs of various groups, the curriculum is flexible, although the emphasis on comprehensive and holistic approaches to health is consistent. Incorporating practical approaches and field exposure, this initiative realized the goal of a community-based health and development training program. Since its inception, over 20,000 participants (villagers, project managers, policy makers, medical professionals, social and development workers, etc.) from across South Asia and from nearly 100 other countries have received training at CRHP. In the early 1980s, CRHP trained 2,000 VHWs for the government of Jamkhed’s district of Ahmednagar. The governments of various states such as Andhra Pradesh and the tribal districts of Maharashtra are now implementing the Jamkhed model on a large scale. Similar projects, incorporating the concepts of

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comprehensive primary health care, are working in various parts of India and Nepal. On an international level, people have taken back the knowledge, skills, inspiration, and hope they learned at Jamkhed and applied them to the diverse situations and circumstances facing their own communities. Governments, NGOs, and faith-based and private-sector groups have likewise been impacted by CRHP. Its holistic health approach, both grounded and concrete, establishes it as a global model for sustainable health and development. With the sad passing of Dr. Mabelle in 1999, Drs. Raj and Shobha and other CRHP staff have increased their involvement in training for primary health care, global health and development, personal development, and leadership skills. The majority of practical learning comes from the personal experience of CRHP’s staff, village health workers, and community members, who are in unique positions to serve as teachers and role models. This learning, in addition to the lessons from each other’s backgrounds and experiences, brings about a personal transformation in the students who come to Jamkhed. These highly motivated students are capable of truly serving their communities in a far-reaching and sustainable manner. One such student is Mr. Ramesh Khadka. Ramesh, a dental assistant from Nepal, was greatly interested in working in primary health care. After resigning from hospital-based work, he started a project known as Share and Care in Nepal, despite minimal financial security. A year later, his wife joined him, and with his team, he worked in the hill villages of Nepal. Applying the principles of comprehensive CBPHC and the Jamkhed model, his project became very successful. He also shared his experiences with other organizations, such as Future Generations in Arunachal Pradesh. Share and Care continues to send staff members to Jamkhed for training. Along with Mrs. Nora Boots, the health coordinator for Latin America of the United Methodist Church, Mabelle had visited various countries in order to help set up and train groups. A few years later, Shobha, along with a colleague, Ms. Kate Landuyt, was able to evaluate a number of these projects, particularly in Brazil and Bolivia. The success of an indigenous woman with only primary school education and no knowledge of Spanish was one of the inspiring highlights of this visit. Living in a remote and hilly part of Bolivia, this woman had managed to transform the health of her community to such an extent that her work was televised. She had spent three months in Jamkhed’s diploma course, during which time she had presented an impressively lucid and practical action plan that surpassed those of the more professionally experienced and educated classmates. A satellite-training center, directed by Ms. Lu Garcia, has now been developed in Latin America, and a number of Latin American projects advised by CRHP have become very successful in both urban and remote rural areas. Similar projects have been attempted in parts of Africa, but frequent political instability and constant conflict have stymied most efforts at CBPHC. In one of the positive programs undertaken in war-torn areas of Sierra Leone, Congo, and Angola, a team from Jamkhed taught local people to make artificial lower limb

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prostheses for landmine victims and other amputees. A group from Africa visited Jamkhed to learn the techniques for making these devices. More than 1,000 prosthetic limbs have been provided through these teaching programs.

MABELLE, IN MEMORIAM The year 1999 was a difficult one at CRHP. Mabelle was bravely battling a viral heart disease, and she passed away that September. In her memory, a women’s rehabilitation center was established at CRHP’s farm for victims of violence and stigmatized conditions. There, women living with HIV/AIDS, women with leprosy, widows, and women abused and forsaken by their husbands have a chance to transform and regenerate their lives through income generation, counseling, personal development, and medical care. Along with sustainable farming skills, they learn about management, livelihood, health, and development so that they are able to be empowered, independent, fully functioning persons. Through it all, the residents of this center are part of a supportive and caring social environment. The farm manager, Ratna, is a victim of HIV/AIDS. Barely clinging to life when she came to the rehabilitation center, Ratna is now a radiant and vibrant young woman who has become a model example of what can be achieved with inner strength and a caring environment. Below is a brief account of her life. Ratnamala Jaganath Chavan is a young, HIV-positive woman who, through the help of CRHP and the rehabilitation program on the farm, has been able to live a productive and fulfilling life despite her HIV status. Ratna contracted the virus from her husband. Soon after the birth of their child, Ratna’s husband became ill, complaining of stomach pains and fever. Despite much expensive medical treatment, his health did not improve, and he died after four months. Ratna’s eleven-month-old son also became sick and died soon after. Ratna herself was ill with a continuous fever, but she was not aware that she was HIV positive. After the death of her son, Ratna attended a health seminar in Mahijalgaon, CRHP’s subcenter, where she met Monica, a social worker, who recommended that she visit Jamkhed and meet Dr. Arole. The doctor listened to Ratna’s story, examined her, and agreed to provide her with treatment at no cost. She went to live and work on the Khadkat farm, starting at first with light work in the plant nursery. As she continued with therapy, she became healthier, through love and caring, nutrition, and early treatment of infections, and was able to start doing more active work. Ratna is currently receiving antiretroviral treatment through CRHP’s AIDS program, which helps to control her disease and keep her healthy. Although only twenty-five years old, she is now one of the farm’s most able and effective supervisors, helping to manage the workers and coordinate activities in the dairy, fields, and animal farms while assisting with various training programs. Ratna occasionally speaks to groups of high-risk or HIV-positive women about ways to become empowered and take protective measures.

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Ratna explains, “Now I am happy and keep myself busy in my work. I think my life is meaningful, and I help and comfort other girls working with me here.” Today Ratna is energetic and bright, epitomizing a person who lives an abundant and well-integrated life.

PRINCIPLES OF COMMUNITY-BASED PRIMARY HEALTH CARE There are certain principles derived from the work of CRHP that have a worldwide application, particularly for those interested in sustainable approaches to health and development. The ideals of equity, integration, and empowerment each carry a unique significance that captures the essence of comprehensive, community-based primary health care. Equity enables all people, particularly the poor and marginalized, to have appropriate health care. This may entail house visits to meet the needs of those most marginalized by social divisions and discrimination on the basis of caste, religion, or disease status. Rather than thinking of health only in terms of medical care and hospitals, equity includes a community-based approach that focuses on the family. Integration exists in various forms. The Comprehensive Rural Health Project is named this because it is truly comprehensive. Integration in healthcare combines prevention, promotion, cure, and rehabilitation, all of which are provided either at the grassroots level, with backup or referral to the health center. The integration of biomedical science with alternative health systems—particularly herbal, acupressure, and homeopathy—is employed when appropriate. Alternative therapies are applied only where there is adequate data or experience supporting their efficacy. Emphasizing that health does not exist in isolation, a third type of integration involves the multisectoral coordination of development activities. CRHP also incorporates integration in service provision, addressing together pregnancy, under-five care, leprosy, tuberculosis, family planning, and more, all according to the needs of the people. Health depends on far more than science and pathogens, hospitals and doctors—socioeconomic change, education and empowerment (particularly of women), agriculture, nutrition, environment, and sanitation all play crucial roles. Indeed, the social determinants of health often have the greatest impact upon individuals, families, and communities. In the same way that varied external factors comprise health, the synergy of mind, body, and spirit into a coordinated and complete whole acknowledges that human beings are more than the simple assembly of various systems. Health is a state of harmonious well-being, both personal and social. The promotion of holistic health through the incorporation of the arts, spirituality, and other humanistic perspectives further supports the principle of integration. Equity and integration are incomplete without the idea of empowerment. Empowerment means equipping individuals with the knowledge, skills, and personal development that will enable them to function to their fullest potential

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in society. In India’s rural areas and urban slums, the voiceless women and children, Dalits and tribals lack opportunities to rise from their state of marginalization. Helpless and bereft of dignity, they are not enabled to choose or decide, and consequently have little power of self-determination. Many do not even have enough food and suffer daily from injustices and inequalities, especially in healthcare and education. Empowerment of the marginalized is about gaining the dignity to live life as human beings endowed with spiritual worth and intrinsic value, free to make decisions and obtain the knowledge to escape the superstitions and harmful beliefs that dominate their lives. When this happens, they become positive instruments of change in their homes and communities, realizing the dream of Health for All in its broadest sense. To achieve this, empowerment must be contextualized by value systems that are constructive to the family and the society. The preceding examples reflect the way that the success of the work at Jamkhed lies in the realistic and practical application of these principles of equity, integration, and empowerment.

LESSONS LEARNED Some of the lessons learned by Drs. Raj and Mabelle over the first twenty years follow, in their own words (Arole and Arole, 1974, 2003): People are the key actors in health. Over 80% of disease prevention depends on individual and community action. It is important to recognize that, even in conditions of poverty, the sharing of scientific knowledge combined with the coping experience of people can bring about positive health. We professionals have to change our attitudes and need to share our knowledge in a way that poor people and the least educated can understand and make their own choices according to their needs. The knowledge should be shared in such a way that people are liberated and empowered with the ability to assess, analyze and act according to their needs and resources. Often our health education is oppressive and dictatorial without reference to people’s needs, resources, abilities and social circumstances. Planning health programs needs to have flexibility. We started out with a project plan where Auxiliary Nurse Midwives were the primary health care workers, but the village people thought otherwise and felt that a person from their own community should be chosen. Our project responded accordingly by shifting to the village health worker model. We had planned from the very beginning to spend 70% of our time in preventive services. But in order to prove our credibility and develop rapport, we had to modify this plan. Primary health care cannot stand alone; it needs the support of the health system. The VHW’s credibility depends upon the training and support she gets from doctors and nurses. A good referral system therefore needs to be in place. Health professionals need to recognize that non-medical interventions, such as safe drinking water, sanitation, good nutrition and caring practices, have a far

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greater impact on health than what professionals alone can provide. To achieve good health, it is also necessary to acknowledge and address socioeconomic issues, like the status of women and Dalits.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS Through the work of Raj and Mabelle Arole, their daughter, Shobha, and son, Ravi, the organization has scaled up dramatically since the 1970s when it was just a small project trying out an experimental, community-oriented model. Although there has been much achieved in primary health care, there is still much more to be accomplished. Shifts in disease patterns are gradually moving the focus from malnutrition and curable communicable illnesses (tuberculosis, leprosy, malaria, diarrhea) to congenital problems in children and manageable, noncommunicable diseases in adults, such as diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and now mental health. Primary health care is a dynamic process, and a community-based approach can and must be applied to these conditions as well. The VHWs already know how to take blood pressures, check sugar levels in urine, and screen for some types of cancer, and they are learning about mental illness. The support system of the secondary care hospital is improving. A new, fifty-bed hospital is currently being constructed (completed in April 2008), not to be an ivory tower but to cater more effectively to the current needs of the poor and marginalized while providing services for those seeking more specialized medical care. Since medicine is an art and not just a science, social factors, clinical examinations, and the patient-physician relationship are emphasized. The promotion of holistic health in its widest and broadest sense is the hospital’s aim. Today, Dr. Raj Arole is an NGO representative and consultant to the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), chaired by India’s prime minister. The NRHM has incorporated a number of elements developed in Jamkhed, including village health workers and community groups, and it is developing a nationwide plan for implementing this strategy throughout rural India. NRHM’s ultimate goal is to bring development and improvements in health care to the 70 percent of Indians who live in rural areas. The work of CRHP has had far-reaching implications and will continue to do so in the future. The project’s pioneering work in this field has contributed to the widespread practice of Jamkhed’s principles now, more than thirty-seven years later. There is a real need to spread holistic health and sustainable development while improving our environment to renew the rich resources that our Creator has given us. In a time of disorder, destruction, and violence, community-based health care, development, and environmental conservation are keys to restoring a fragile earth. The more holistic our approach, the more we will be able to see the restoration of peace and unity in ourselves, our families, our communities, and the environment that nurtures our social units.

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QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS WITH THE AROLES The following are views on various issues and discussions of pertinent questions with Dr. Raj Arole and Dr. Shobha Arole: •

What were the initial sources of funding and further funding?

When we were in the United States in the 1960s, we spoke to various people. At a convention of the Disciples of Christ in Indiana, there was a man who said, “We don’t know you well, but in faith we give you $20,000.” In the 1970s this seemed like a large amount of money, and indeed it could achieve much in the poverty stricken setting of rural India. Another church gave money to set up a clinic and a place for us to stay. Eventually the project collected a startup budget of $50,000. Once in Jamkhed, we tried to raise money by charging basic patient fees from those who could afford to pay, while providing charity care for the truly poor. Thirty percent of the money eventually came from the clinical work. Gradually, as more contacts were made, most donations started coming from personal contacts and later from churches and funding agencies in Europe and North America. •

How much financial sustainability is there now?

About 60 percent of our expenses are covered by patient fees and training tuitions. We are also developing various income-generating farm programs. At the same time, it is important to note that total financial stability is an ideal that may not be realistic when serving the destitute poor. There are very few organizations working with the poor and marginalized that can be truly self-sufficient without shifting their focus more toward the well off rather than the poor. Therefore, a certain amount of outside funding is needed for operating costs and new program startup costs. •

What kinds of measures are used to determine “success”?

There are a number of health parameters that are determined quantitatively, such as maternal mortality rate, infant mortality rate, immunization coverage, percentage of safe deliveries, and the prevalence of various diseases. In addition, there are parameters that measure socioeconomic development. Women’s empowerment can be measured by the way women assume responsibility and their status both in the family and the community. Many of these parameters are measured through qualitative studies. The beneficiaries in CRHP’s project villages also carry out periodic surveys with staff to monitor progress in terms of health and socioeconomic development. In training programs, one examines how trainees are influencing their own communities in health and socioeconomic development. Further indicators

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examine how state and central governments apply the CRHP principles in providing health care to poor and marginalized groups nationwide. •

What was the tipping point to move from concept to reality?

CRHP was among the very first organizations in the world to use and train illiterate women as health workers. From the experience of the first twenty VHWs, understanding how much they could learn and how effective they were in their communities in providing care and health education showed that these capable women were the key to the transformation of their villages. They drastically improved the health of women and children, and they brought about a significant reduction in communicable and chronic illnesses. Through their assistance, this concept was spread to other villages. This approach now works through different NGOs and government agencies in many states of India and many countries of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, and it has become an accepted international norm. The CRHP model is really based on prevention and promotion of holistic health, as compared to solely curative care. For example, in China the barefoot doctors were high school graduates who basically did curative work. In contrast, the VHWs are illiterate women and volunteers, who continue to work in a comprehensive way on a large scale. •

How are obstacles and opportunities met creatively?

A massive famine in the 1970s presented CRHP with an opportunity to conduct relief activities, child nutrition programs, immunizations, and massive health education in the communities. These efforts were based not just on giving people some help, but rather they were founded on immense community involvement, which was one of the first steps in developing community participation. This also provided a good opportunity to show that health and development are two sides of the same coin. There was a need for water for agriculture, and therefore environmental improvements, such as afforestation and watershed development, were also introduced. Social justice issues were dealt with, and therefore through these efforts what seemed to be setbacks turned out to be opportunities for primary health and development. •

How do you create original solutions?

By living with the people, sharing their life, and studying how they cope. CRHP has always kept the focus on the poorest sections of each community, realizing what we can do for them and what they can do for themselves. This focusing helps us to find universal solutions to common health and social problems. Being open to new ideas requires courage, but at the same time, we need to be critical of commercialized medical solutions.

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How can you scale up?

Working continuously and accompanying rural communities for the past thirty-seven years gives confidence to people and helps suggest solutions to the bureaucracy and those political leaders who are well intentioned and striving to achieve real change at the grassroots. Engaging in practical and continuous dialogue with people and, at the same time, refining the understanding of the poor as well as understanding the reality of poverty and the limited knowledge of people help us to scale up. We acknowledge that development is a dynamic, continual, and long-term process that will take years of effort. However, given adequate and appropriate support during the formative years of a project, the community can assume an ever-increasing role and responsibility for sustaining local health and development programs, with a gradual decrease in the involvement of the NGO. •

Where does your inspiration come from?

Inspiration for the Aroles and much of the staff has come from universal spiritual values and a deep-seated faith in following the example of Christ. •

What direction do you see for the future?

Convinced that health and development are inseparable, we will strive to conduct more development work, especially for marginalized groups and forsaken women, in the areas of environment, agriculture, health, and the development of healthy families through a holistic strategy. We will continue to use a comprehensive approach to health and development, and promote physical, economic, mental, social, and spiritual well-being for individuals, families, and communities. Holistically combining community development, health, and environmental issues to build interdependent public health ecosystems on both micro and macro scales is an alternative way to achieve peace and wholeness in communities throughout the world.

IN CLOSING Engage in constant dialogue with the people, not working merely for them but also with and among them. Although the government bears ultimate responsibility, we need to help people see what individuals and communities can do. Only then will you be able to see how the government programs and schemes can multiply with your efforts. Do not make programs and people, regardless of low income level, totally dependent on the government, but rather encourage selfreliance and unity.

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APPENDIX

Table 6.1 Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP), Jamkhed, India. Changes in Health Indicators (1971–2006) Year Infant Mortality Rate Crude Birth Rate Maternal Health • Antenatal Care • Safe Delivery • Family Planning Children under 5 • Immun. (DPT, polio) • Malnutrition (wt for age) Chronic Diseases • Leprosy (prev./1000) • TB (prev./1000)

2004

2004 India

1971

1976

1986

1996

1999

2006

176

52

49

26

26

24

62

24

40

34

28

20

20

18.6

23.9

14.8

.5% 7,000 aggregate manyears of human capital) to colleagues in more than twelve countries in the developing world. Rather than perpetuating a continued dependence on Western charity, this creates a sustainable system that allows these countries to provide healthcare to their own patients at the highest possible standards and yet within the existing resource limitations. As an interesting but crucially important sidenote, the recipient developing countries themselves shoulder the major share of the program implementation costs, giving them a true sense of proprietary pride, value, and ownership as opposed to “receiving charity.” ICEHA turns the paradigm of international development on its head. Flying Doctors of America/Founded in 1990 Allan Gathercoal, DDiv, and I have been through a lot together—stuck in Nairobi, stuck in Burundi, bribing airport officials with lighters in Hanoi to bring medicines in, working in Bolivian prisons together; and, most recently, we met in

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Cambodia. Allan is the founder of Flying Doctors of America, and his organization runs short-term medical/dental missions to the rural regions of Third World countries. Marjorie Kovler Center of Heartland Alliance/Founded 1987 I’d speculate that Mary Fabri, PsyD, spends more time some years in Rwanda than in Chicago. She goes to where the needs are, and when in Chicago, the needs are at the Marjorie Kovler Center, where she is director and one of the clinical co-founders. The Kovler Center provides comprehensive, community-based services in which survivors work together with staff and volunteers to identify needs and overcome obstacles to healing. Services include Mental Health (individual or group psychotherapy, counseling, psychiatric services, and a range of culturally appropriate services on-site in the community), Health Care (primary healthcare and specialized medical treatment by medical professionals specifically trained to work with torture survivors), Case Management (access to community resources, including tutoring, ESL, food, transportation, special events), Interpretation and Translation (bridging cultural and linguistic barriers in medical, mental health, and community settings), and Legal Referral (referral and collaboration with immigration attorneys and organizations). International Center on Responses to Catastrophes/Founded in 2002 Stevan Weine, MD, is a renaissance kind of guy. He can gain impressive NIH grants and awards while also writing about Alan Ginsberg and Bruce Springsteen (and take time to coauthor and present with me as well). I have had the pleasure of traveling to all sorts of places with Steve and meeting a fascinating group of activists, scientists, and intellectuals, all the while listening to some great music. He is a mentor, a role model, and a good friend. He also is the founder of the Center at the University of Illinois–Chicago, whose primary mission is to promote multidisciplinary research and scholarship that contributes to improved helping efforts for those affected by catastrophes. International Trauma Studies Program/Founded in 1997 It was Stevan Weine who introduced me to Jack Saul, PhD, and took me to visit Jack’s International Trauma Studies Program (ITSP), now at Columbia University. Jack’s perspective is that recent natural and human-made catastrophes have highlighted the need for a multidisciplinary approach to the study, treatment, and prevention of trauma-related suffering. So, at New York University in 1997, he founded the original program. It is now a training and research program at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. The program has been enriched by the participation of a diverse student body, ranging from mental health professionals, healthcare providers, attorneys, and human rights advocates,

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to journalists and media professionals, academicians, oral historians, and artists. Students and professionals are given the opportunity to develop and share innovative approaches to address the psychosocial needs of trauma survivors, their families, and communities. ITSP offers a dynamic combination of academic studies, research, and practical experience working with trauma survivors in New York City, the United States, and abroad. Center for Health, Intervention, and Prevention @UConn/Founded in 2002 Jeff Fisher, PhD, invited me to his Center at UConn, and I had the flu. I would not have missed such an opportunity for the world. You see, the University of Connecticut Psychology Department’s Center for Health, Intervention, and Prevention (CHIP) creates new scientific knowledge in the areas of health behavior, health behavior change, and health risk prevention and intervention. CHIP provides theory-based health behavior and health behavior change expertise and services at the international, national, state, university, and community levels. REMEDY/Founded in 1991 REMEDY, Recovered Medical Equipment for the Developing World, is a nonprofit organization committed to teaching and promoting the recovery of surplus operating-room supplies. Proven recovery protocols were designed to be quickly adapted to the everyday operating room or critical care routine. As of June 2006, the REMEDY at Yale program alone had donated more than 50 tons of medical supplies! It is estimated that at least $200 million worth of supplies could be recovered from U.S. hospitals each year, resulting in an increase of 50 percent of the medical aid sent from the United States to the developing world. Center for Global Initiatives/Founded in 2004 The Center for Global Initiatives (CGI) is my baby. It is the first Center devoted to training multidisciplinary healthcare professionals and students to bring services that are integrated, sustainable, resiliency based, and that have publicly accountable outcomes to areas of need, worldwide, via multiple, small, context-specific collaboratives that integrate primary care, behavioral healthcare, systems development, public health, and social justice. The word “global” is not used herein as a synonym for overseas or international, but rather local as well as transnational disparities and inequities of health risk and illness outcomes. The Center seeks to eschew the many disconnects between separation of body/mind, physical/mental, individual/community, and to offer a synthetic model of integration. CGI’s philosophy and approach is always that of a collaborator and colleague. No West-Knows-Best hubris. Perhaps the most important aspects of the Center for Global Initiatives are the simplest: it serves as an incubator and

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hothouse for new projects; it helps to nurture, grow, and launch those projects as self-sustaining, ongoing interests; and after a project has taken hold, it serves as pro bono consultant to help those now managing the work with whatever they may need—materials, medicines, case consultation. About 90 percent of all CGI’s projects have come about as a result of being invited to do the work. As best can be done, depending on the project, CGI seeks to blend primary care, behavioral health, and public health into an ultimately self-sustaining, outcomes-accountable, culturally consonant result.

VOLUME 2: CHANGING EDUCATION AND RELIEF Braille Without Borders/Founded in 1997 Sabriye, Paul, and I used to joke about how we were likely the poorest attendees in Davos at the World Economic Forum. And in spite of our modest bank balances, I can tell you that they were two of the most powerful of the movers and shakers there. Braille Without Borders wants to empower blind people in these countries so they themselves can set up projects and schools for other blind people. In this way the concept can be spread across the globe so other blind and visually impaired people have access to education and a better future. Room to Read/Founded in 2000 I heard John Wood talk about his post-Microsoft adventure of founding Room to Read. His brainchild partners with local communities throughout the developing world to establish schools, libraries, and other educational infrastructure. They seek to intervene early in the lives of children in the belief that education is a lifelong gift that empowers people to ultimately improve socioeconomic conditions for their families, communities, countries, and future generations. Through the opportunities that only an education can provide, they strive to break the cycle of poverty, one child at a time. Since its inception, Room to Read has impacted the lives of over 1.3 million children by constructing 287 schools, establishing over 3,870 libraries, publishing 146 new local language children’s titles representing more than 1.3 million books, donating more than 1.4 million English language children’s books, funding 3,448 long-term girls’ scholarships, and establishing 136 computer and language labs. Global Village Engineers/Founded in 1992 Chris Shimkus is a good guy and a good friend with whom I first connected in Geneva at the WEF Headquarters. He took one of those proverbial leaps of faith and left his “day job” to devote himself to the work of Global Village Engineers (GVE). GVE is a volunteer corps of professional engineers supporting the local capacity of rural communities in developing countries to influence public

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infrastructure and environmental protection. Its engineers choose to volunteer their skills to ensure the livelihood of these communities by building long-term local capacity, especially in situations of disaster prevention and rehabilitation and the need for environmental protection. They believe that infrastructure will best serve communities when they have the capacity to become involved from project inception through construction. Governments and project sponsors often do not invest in communicating basic facts to the community about design, construction, and maintenance. The mission of Global Village Engineers is to find these facts and develop the local capacity to understand such facts. Common Bond Institute/Founded in 1995 I first met Steve Olweean, PhD, in an airport in Oslo—or was it Helsinki? We were on our way to St. Petersburg to the conference he founded. That conference was a lightning rod of connections with people I continue to work with around the world, from Sri Lanka to Tel Aviv, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg of what Steve does. He founded the Common Bond Institute (CBI), which is a U.S.-based NGO that grew out of the Association for Humanistic Psychology’s International (Soviet-American) Professional Exchange. The Professional Exchange was initiated in 1982 as one of the first Soviet-American nongovernmental human service exchanges. CBI organizes and sponsors conferences, professional training programs, relief efforts, and professional exchanges internationally, and it actively provides networking and coordination support to assist newly emerging human service and civil society organizations in developing countries. Its mission is cultivating the fundamental elements of a consciousness of peace and local capacity building, which are seen as natural, effective antidotes to small-group radical extremism and large-group despair, as well as to hardship and suffering in the human condition. To this end, enabling each society to effectively resolve and transform conflicts, satisfy core human needs within their communities, and construct effective, holistic mechanisms for self-determination, self-esteem, and fundamental human dignity and worth is the purpose of their work. SWEEP/Founded in 2004 The Jane Addams College of Social Work, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Addis Ababa University (AAU), The Council of International Programs USA (CIPUSA), and a network of nonprofit agencies are engaged in an exciting effort to develop the first-ever master’s degree in social work in Ethiopia, through a project known as the Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership, or SWEEP. The undergraduate social work program at AAU was closed in 1976, when a military regime ruled the country. Now, with a democratic government in place since the early 1990s, the SWEEP project is working in collaboration with AAU’s new School of Social Work and nongovernmental agencies in Ethiopia to develop social work education and practice.

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CUP/Founded in 1997 The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) makes educational projects about places and how they change. Its projects bring together art and design professionals— artists, graphic designers, architects, urban planners—with community-based advocates and researchers—organizers, government officials, academics, service providers and policymakers. These partners work with CUP staff to create projects ranging from high-school curricula to educational exhibitions. Their work grows from a belief that the power of imagination is central to the practice of democracy, and that the work of governing must engage the dreams and visions of citizens. CUP believes in the legibility of the world around us. It is the CUP philosophy that, by learning how to investigate, we train ourselves to change what we see. Endeavor/Founded in 1997 Linda Rottenberg, who co-founded Endeavor, is a Roman candle of energy, enthusiasm, and brainpower. I met her through the World Economic Forum as a Global Leader of Tomorrow. She is amazing at delivering on what’s needed in creatively intelligent ways. Endeavor targets emerging-market countries transitioning from international aid to international investment. Endeavor then seeks out local partners to build country boards and benefactors to launch local Endeavor affiliates. ACCION/Founded in 1961 ACCION International is a private, nonprofit organization with the mission of giving people the financial tools they need—micro enterprise loans, business training, and other financial services—to work their way out of poverty. A world pioneer in microfinance, ACCION was founded in 1961 and issued its first microloan in 1973 in Brazil. ACCION International’s partner microfinance institutions today are providing loans as low as $100 to poor men and women entrepreneurs in twenty-five countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in the United States. Invisible Conflicts/Dwon Madiki Partnership/Founded in 2006 I just met Evan Ledyard at a talk I gave at Loyola University in Chicago, and he introduced me to the work he has done with an incredible group of students. Invisible Conflicts is a student organization that sponsors the education, mentorship, and empowerment of twenty Ugandan orphans and vulnerable children. A twenty-one-year civil war in northern Uganda, between the government and a rebel faction called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), has led to the forced displacement of over 1.7 million people into internal refugee camps. To support their rebellion, the LRA abducted more than 30,000 Ugandan children, forcing them to be sex slaves and to fight as child soldiers. Because of these atrocities, all

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of the DMP-sponsored children live in squalid conditions in and around the many displacement camps. Because life around these camps is marked by poverty, hunger, and little or no access to education, an entire generation of children find themselves denied a childhood and a chance to succeed in life. BELL/Founded in 1992 Building Educated Leaders for Life, or BELL, recognizes that the pathway to opportunity for children lies in education. BELL transforms children into scholars and leaders through the delivery of nationally recognized, high-impact after-school and summer educational programs. By helping children achieve academic and social proficiency during their formative elementary-school years and embrace their rich cultural heritage, BELL is inspiring the next generation of great teachers, doctors, lawyers, artists, and community leaders. By mobilizing parents, teachers, and young adults, BELL is living the idea that “it takes a village to raise a child.” Hybrid Vigor Institute/Founded in 2000 I first met Denise Caruso at a TED Conference. She was just stepping down from her position as technology columnist at the New York Times, just before the tech bubble burst. Smart gal. I was immediately smitten by her intellect, and in subsequent emails and conversations, she agreed to help me in the pondering of my nascent ideas for my Center as she was building her Institute in the form of Hybrid Vigor. The Hybrid Vigor Institute is focused on three ambitious goals: (1) to make a significant contribution toward solving some of today’s most intractable problems in the areas of health, the environment, and human potential, both by producing innovative knowledge and by developing processes for sharing expertise; (2) to develop new methods and tools for research and analysis that respect and use appropriately both the quantitative methods of the natural sciences and the subjective inquiries of the social and political sciences, arts, and humanities, and to establish metrics and best practices for these new methods of collaboration and knowledge sharing; (3) to deploy cutting-edge collaboration, information extraction, and knowledge management technologies, so that working researchers from any discipline may easily acquire and share relevant work and information about their areas of interest. Our Voices Together/Founded in 2005 Marianne Scott and I had a wonderful conversation one Sunday night that I will never forget. Without repeating it, I do want to say I was touched by her humanity in a very powerful and lasting way, and I knew then that she needed to be represented in this project. Our Voices Together holds a vision of a world in which the appeal of lives lived in dignity, opportunity, and safety triumphs over the allure of extremism and its terrorist tactics. The people of this organization see

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a future where terrorist tactics are not condoned by any community worldwide. They understand that to achieve this, trust must be built on mutual trust and respect around the globe. They recognize the vast potential in engaging the United States in diplomacy by connecting communities. To this end, they promote the vital role of people-to-people efforts to help build better, safer lives and futures around the world. Geekcorps/Founded in 1999 Ethan Zuckerman has a wicked sense of humor, and he is not afraid to use it. I last saw Ethan in Madrid at an anti-terrorism conference, and we spoke of wikis as a solution to a puzzle I was working on about Amazonian medical services. How obvious. Ethan is the founder of Geekcorps, which has evolved into the IESC Geekcorps, which is an international 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that promotes stability and prosperity in the developing world through information and communication technology (ICT). Geekcorps’ international technology experts teach communities how to be digitally independent: able to create and expand private enterprise with innovative, appropriate, and affordable information and communication technologies. To increase the capacity of small and medium-sized business, local government, and supporting organizations to be more profitable and efficient using technology, Geekcorps draws on a database of more than 3,500 technical experts willing to share their talents and experience in developing nations.

VOLUME 3: CHANGING SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Witness/Founded in 1992 I first saw some of the work of Witness at the Contemporary Museum of Art in Chicago, and I was quite disturbed and moved by the images I saw— which was the point. I then contacted Gillian Caldwell of Witness about this book project, and I got the distinct impression that she wondered “who is this guy, and is he on the level?” So, with some emails back and forth, and the good timing of the WEF Annual Meeting, where she happened to be going, I gained some street cred with her as I’d been an invited faculty, gone to Davos a number of years, and knew Klaus Schwab, who had also written the foreword for one of my other books. Then she let me into the tent, and I am very glad she did. Witness does incredible work by using video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. It empowers people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change. It envisions a just and equitable world where all individuals and communities are able to defend and uphold human rights.

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The Community Relations Council/Founded in 1986 I worked on a three-volume book set (The Psychology of Resolving Global Conflicts: From War to Peace, Praeger, 2005) with Mari Fitzduff, PhD, and I had no idea of the violence she was exposed to in Belfast as a child growing up there. Now it makes perfect sense as to her development of the Community Relations Council. Its aim is to assist the people of Northern Ireland to recognize and counter the effects of communal division. The Community Relations Council originated as a proposal of a research report commissioned by the NI Standing Advisory Committee on Human Rights. The Community Relations Council was set up to promote better community relations between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland and, equally, to promote recognition of cultural diversity. Its strategic aim is to promote a peaceful and fair society based on reconciliation and mutual trust. It does so by providing support (finance, training, advice, information) for local groups and organizations; developing opportunities for cross-community understanding; increasing public awareness of community relations work; and encouraging constructive debate throughout Northern Ireland. Amnesty International/Founded in 1961 Amnesty International’s (AI’s) vision is of a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards. In pursuit of this vision, AI’s mission is to undertake research and action focused on preventing and ending grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity, freedom of conscience and expression, and freedom from discrimination, within the context of its work to promote all human rights. AI has a varied network of members and supporters around the world. At the latest count, there were more than 1.8 million members, supporters, and subscribers in over 150 countries and territories in every region of the world. Although they come from many different backgrounds and have widely different political and religious beliefs, they are united by a determination to work for a world where everyone enjoys human rights. PeaceWorks Foundation and OneVoice/Founded in 2002 Daniel Lubetzky is one of those incredible people who turn on a room when they enter it. He does so not with bravado and brashness, but rather with a quiet power that captures those around him. He is a compelling person with a compelling mission. He founded OneVoice with the aim to amplify the voice of the overwhelming but heretofore silent majority of Israelis and Palestinians who wish to end the conflict. Since its inception, OneVoice has empowered ordinary citizens to demand accountability from elected representatives and ensure that the political agenda is not hijacked by extremists. OneVoice works to reframe the conflict by transcending the “left vs. right” and “Israeli vs. Palestinian”

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paradigms and by demonstrating that the moderate majority can prevail over the extremist minority. Although the needs and concerns of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples are different—Israelis wish to end terror and the existential threat to Israel; Palestinians wish to end the occupation and achieve an independent Palestinian state—the vast majority on each side agree that these goals are achievable only by reaching a two-state solution. OneVoice is unique in that it has independent Israeli and Palestinian offices appealing to the national interests of their own sides with credentials enabling them to unite people across the religious and political spectrum. It recognizes the essential work many other groups do in the field of dialogue and understanding, but OneVoice is action oriented and advocacy driven. It is about the process and demanding accountability from its members and from political leaders. A peace agreement, no matter how comprehensive, will be ineffective without populations ready to support it. The focus is on giving citizens a voice and a direct role in conflict resolution. Nonviolent Peaceforce/Founded in 1998 Nonviolent Peaceforce is a federation of more than ninety member organizations from around the world. In partnership with local groups, unarmed Nonviolent Peaceforce Field Team members apply proven strategies to protect human rights, deter violence, and help create space for local peacemakers to carry out their work. The mission of the Nonviolent Peaceforce is to build a trained, international civilian peaceforce committed to third-party nonviolent intervention. Peace Brigades/Founded in 1981 Peace Brigades International (PBI) is an NGO that protects human rights and promotes nonviolent transformation of conflicts. When invited, it sends teams of volunteers into areas of repression and conflict. The volunteers accompany human rights defenders, their organizations, and others threatened by political violence. Perpetrators of human rights abuses usually do not want the world to witness their actions. The presence of volunteers backed by a support network helps to deter violence. They create space for local activists to work for social justice and human rights. Witness for Peace/Founded in 1983 Witness for Peace (WFP) is a politically independent, nationwide grassroots organization of people committed to nonviolence and led by faith and conscience. WFP’s mission is to support peace, justice, and sustainable economies in the Americas by changing U.S. policies and corporate practices that contribute to poverty and oppression in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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Southern Poverty Law Center/Founded in 1971 Throughout its history, the Center has worked to make the nation’s Constitutional ideals a reality. The Center’s legal department fights all forms of discrimination and works to protect society’s most vulnerable members, handling innovative cases that few lawyers are willing to take. Over three decades, it has achieved significant legal victories, including landmark Supreme Court decisions and crushing jury verdicts against hate groups. Human Rights Campaign/Founded in 1980 After having served as a federal advocacy coordinator on the Hill for the American Psychological Association for twelve years, and at the state level even longer, I have come to know and very much appreciate the twists and turns of law making and the body politic. I have also come to know and respect the impressive work of those in the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). They have evolved from battling stigma to being a political force to contend with—no easy task in the Beltway or on Main Street USA. The Human Rights Campaign is America’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) equality. By inspiring and engaging all Americans, HRC strives to end discrimination against GLBT citizens and realize a nation that achieves fundamental fairness and equality for all. HRC seeks to improve the lives of GLBT Americans by advocating for equal rights and benefits in the workplace, ensuring that families are treated equally under the law, and increasing public support among all Americans through innovative advocacy, education, and outreach programs. HRC works to secure equal rights for GLBT individuals and families at the federal and state levels by lobbying elected officials, mobilizing grassroots supporters, educating Americans, investing strategically to elect fairminded officials, and partnering with other GLBT organizations. Global Security Institute/Founded in 1999 Back in the late 1990s, as a member of Psychologists for Social Responsibility and living in Chicago, I was asked to represent that organization at a meeting called Abolition 2000. The goal of that group was to have abolished nuclear weapons by 2000. I had the chance to meet its founder, the late Senator Alan Cranston, and I was smitten. That movement evolved into the organization Jonathan Granoff now leads, known as the Global Security Institute (GSI). It is dedicated to strengthening international cooperation and security based on the rule of law with a particular focus on nuclear arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament. GSI was founded by Senator Alan Cranston, whose insight that nuclear weapons are impractical, unacceptably risky, and unworthy of civilization continues to inspire GSI’s efforts to contribute to a safer world. GSI has developed an exceptional team that includes former heads of state and government, distinguished diplomats, effec-

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tive politicians, committed celebrities, religious leaders, Nobel Peace laureates, disarmament and legal experts, and concerned citizens. Search for Common Ground/Founded in 1982 I first had the pleasure of meeting Susan Marks in Davos at a breakfast meeting in which we were to co-facilitate a discussion. I could not keep up with her! She had us all enthralled with her perspectives and experiences, and I was astonished. She and her husband John started the Search for Common Ground as a vehicle to transform the way the world deals with conflict: away from adversarial approaches, toward cooperative solutions. Although the world is overly polarized and violence is much too prevalent, they remain essentially optimistic. Their view is that, on the whole, history is moving in positive directions. Although some of the conflicts currently being dealt with may seem intractable, there are successful examples of cooperative conflict resolution that can be looked to for inspiration—such as in South Africa, where an unjust system was transformed through negotiations and an inclusive peace process. Project on Justice in Times of Transition/Founded in 1992 Mari Fitzduff introduced me to Timothy Phillips in the context of working on this project, and needless to say, I was taken aback by their work. The Project on Justice in Times of Transition brings together individuals from a broad spectrum of countries to share experiences in ending conflict, building civil society, and fostering peaceful coexistence. It currently operates in affiliation with the Foundation for a Civil Society in New York and the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University. Since its creation in 1992 by co-chairs Wendy Luers and Timothy Phillips, the Project has conducted more than fifty programs for a variety of leaders throughout the world and has utilized its methodology to assist them in addressing such difficult issues as the demobilization of combatants, the status of security files, police reform, developing effective negotiating skills, political demonstrations, and preserving or constructing the tenets of democracy in a heterogeneous society. Through its innovative programming, the Project has exposed a broad cross-section of communities in transition to comparable situations elsewhere, and it has contributed to the broadening of international public discourse on transitional processes. In recent years the Project has conducted programs that have helped practitioners and political leaders strategize solutions in a variety of countries and regions, including Afghanistan, Colombia, East Timor, Guatemala, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, Palestine, and Peru. Exodus World Service/Founded in 1988 Heidi Moll was cheering my son and me on last fall in a five-kilometer run that was a fundraiser for Exodus World Service and other agencies. I first came to

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know of their refugee work via a church we used to attend, and it was remarkable. Exodus World Service transforms the lives of refugees and of volunteers. It educates local churches about refugee ministry, connects volunteers in relationship with refugee families through practical service projects, and equips leaders to speak up on behalf of refugees. The end result is that wounded hearts are healed, loneliness is replaced with companionship, and fear is transformed into hope. Exodus recruits local volunteers, equips them with information and training, and then links them directly with refugee families newly arrived in the Chicago metropolitan area. It also provides training and tools for front-line staff of other refugee service agencies. In addition, Exodus has developed several innovative programs for use by volunteers in their work with refugees. International Institute for Sustainable Development/Founded in 1990 The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) contributes to sustainable development by advancing policy recommendations on international trade and investment, economic policy, climate change, measurement and assessment, and natural resources management. By using Internet communications, it is able to report on international negotiations and broker knowledge gained through collaborative projects with global partners, resulting in more rigorous research, capacity building in developing countries, and better dialogue between North and South. IISD is in the business of promoting change toward sustainable development. Through research and through effective communication of their findings, it engages decision makers in government, business, NGOs, and other sectors to develop and implement policies that are simultaneously beneficial to the global economy, to the global environment, and to social well-being. IISD also believes fervently in the importance of building its own institutional capacity while helping its partner organizations in the developing world to excel.

LET’S GET GOING I hope you enjoy learning more about these amazing individuals and their work. I certainly have enjoyed working with them and in completing this remarkable writing project. They all have the common denominator of changing people’s lives, and isn’t that truly the way to change the world?

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WITNESS Gillian Caldwell

HOW THINGS STARTED Cecilia is a woman from the war-torn country of Sierra Leone. In front of a courtroom of people, Cecilia recounts how rebel soldiers mutilated and killed her son before beginning to bury her alive. She is one of the subjects of Witness to Truth, a video WITNESS produced with Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the country’s decade-long civil war—and a reminder of the enormous power of video to connect us with people who have experienced human rights abuses in places far away. I first came face to face with the power of images as a little girl living in New York City. My mother ran an art gallery in SoHo and our loft was adjacent to the gallery. One day a canvas appeared on our living room wall. It was a massive and very intense painting by Leon Golub featuring a mercenary government agent urinating on a political prisoner. The prisoner was lying on the floor with his hands bound and tied. There were several other agents standing by while the torture progressed, and one of them was staring at me—staring at him. It was as if he was challenging me to stop him. Golub made everyone who looked at his so-called mercenary series of paintings a “witness”—and left us wondering what we were going to do with the images that had been seared in our mind’s eye. Undercover Video Fast forward two decades to 1995, when I was working as a civil rights attorney in Washington, D.C. An acquaintance named Steve Galster had just returned from a trip to Russia and asked me for a few minutes of my time. I had no idea why he wanted to meet, but I agreed. Over a beer, he told me that he had been in the Russian far east for an environmental nonprofit investigating the Russian mafia’s involvement in the trade of Siberian tiger pelts when they offered to sell him 1

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The New Humanitarians

women. He was shocked and deeply disturbed. He asked if I would help him plan, execute and videotape an undercover investigation into the trafficking of women out of Russia for forced prostitution. I said I would do what I could after-hours at the civil rights firm to research the issue and figure out how to raise some money for the project. Two weeks later and better informed, there was no turning back. I resigned from my position at the firm and arrived unannounced at Steve’s office saying I was ready to get to work. I figured I could wait tables if necessary until we were able to raise the money we needed. Five months later, we had formed a dummy company called International Liaisons, specializing in foreign models, escorts, and entertainers. And we were in the midst of a frigid January in Moscow. By day we met with nonprofits focused on violence against women—and by night Steve used undercover cameras to film meetings with the mafia in which he pretended he wanted to start a business importing women into the United States to work as high-class call girls. One night, we went to the popular Night Flight club where there was known to be a brisk prostitution business. I did my best to dress the part (I doubt I was very convincing) and make connections with women who were willing to talk. Steve wore his undercover camera and did the same with significantly more success. It was a pretty intense experience, especially since we were living in the same apartment where a lot of the undercover meetings took place and were being filmed with hidden cameras. There was a drunken man who beat his wife next door, and a homeless woman with a pack of growling dogs (more like wolverines really), whom I often found in the stairwell late at night. But Steve and I managed to get ourselves back to the United States in one piece, with some very powerful footage in tow. Soon after our first investigation in Russia, we were introduced to WITNESS— a nonprofit organization that promotes the use of video in human rights advocacy—and they gave us a second Hi8 video camera to produce our film. After about eighteen months of filming and conducting other investigations in Russia as well as in Japan, Macau, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, and the United States, we made a film called Bought & Sold: An Investigative Documentary about the International Trade in Women. The film contained an unusual mix of grainy undercover footage of our transactions with the mafia, candid interviews with women around the world who had been forced into prostitution, and testimonies by human rights experts and counselors to help frame the issues. The film and its associated advocacy helped lay the groundwork for a Congressional resolution on trafficking, and subsequently for the U.S. Congress to pass the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and for the UN to approve a protocol against human trafficking. It was then that I realized how a few people with a camera and support from WITNESS could make a real difference in the world. This story is a good example of how video in the right context can often serve as the catalyst for the success of campaigns that have fallen under the public’s radar. Although there were several documentaries already made on human trafficking at the time, none had been used strategically in an advocacy context. And

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although several well-respected, international human rights organizations had been tackling the issue for years, none had injected their campaigns with a visual component. It was this potent combination of frontline advocacy and indisputable visual evidence that enabled us to receive widespread media coverage— including the BBC, CNN, ABC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post—and gain access to those in power to ultimately make a real difference. A critical ingredient to our campaign—and one that continues to be a central motivation in my work to this day—was our focus from the beginning on developing strategic alliances and collaborations. As a two-person team with no credentials or name recognition, and with a nonprofit fiscal sponsor devoted to marine mammal conservation, Steve and I knew that we needed to ally ourselves with other groups immersed in the issue to establish credibility. What this experience taught me early on is that it is important to learn and benefit from the work that other advocates are doing and find ways to reinforce each other. Instead of reinventing the wheel, capitalize on the strengths that each respective group can bring to a campaign and work together toward the same goal. Unfortunately, this collaborative spirit is all too rare in the nonprofit community, where groups are often in “competition” for resources or whose differing approaches to tackling the same problems get in the way of coalition building.

WITNESS PAST After the success of Bought & Sold, I was recruited to become WITNESS’s first full-time director in 1998. WITNESS was founded by rocker Peter Gabriel (originally with the band Genesis and now a long-time solo artist), who had come up with the idea in 1989 while on the Human Rights Now! tour with Amnesty International. Peter is widely recognized as one of the world’s most important and innovative musicians. His performances typically involve cutting-edge technological innovation, and he has demonstrated his commitment to human rights through his work with Amnesty and other groups. While on tour with Amnesty, Peter traveled to nineteen countries, where he met dozens of survivors of human rights abuses and listened to their moving stories of suffering and frustration. Some had been tortured or harassed; some had been denied basic rights to food, shelter, or freedom; and others had witnessed their loved ones murdered. In many of the cases, the perpetrators had gone unpunished for their crimes, and the stories were covered up, denied, and forgotten. The early 1990s were the days before technology and the Internet had the potential to connect even the most isolated people to the global community. Peter had brought along one of the first consumer video cameras to record the stories he heard on the tour. And it occurred to him that if we equipped these activists with their own cameras, they could share their experiences with the world and become empowered in their courageous struggles for truth and justice. Peter knew that moving images communicate with an immediacy matched by no other medium, and they inspire people to take action. What he also had the foresight to

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The New Humanitarians

see is that technology’s power to affect change can only be fully realized when the people who have the most to gain—those subjected to human rights abuses—can harness it for themselves. It was not until several years later that the broader public began to recognize this power. The tipping point came in 1991, when a bystander on a Los Angeles freeway used an amateur video camera to record the beating of Rodney King by the city police department, sparking widespread riots and galvanizing a worldwide conversation about police brutality and race. Peter was able to leverage this momentum to raise seed funding from the Reebok Human Rights Foundation, and WITNESS was born the following year as a project of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First). In 2001 we spun off as our own independent 501(c)(3) organization and set up shop in a loft in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan. We were an extremely lean operation back then, with only four of us (and a team of dedicated interns) handling everything from training our partners in the field to video production, media outreach, fundraising, and administration. To this day, my staff jokingly refers to my “inner administrative assistant” because of my impulse to hark back to these early days and do all the data entry myself. It was actually a very significant time in my professional development, since it gave me my second pass at hands-on experience with every aspect of nonprofit development.

WITNESS PRESENT We’ve all come a long way since then. Now in 2008, we have a staff of thirty and a budget of $4.8 million, and our offices take up nearly three floors of a building subsidized by the City of New York for arts and media organizations, based in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. Our mission also has evolved from our initial focus of providing video cameras to as many human rights groups as possible: we realized early on that a video camera is only effective if the user is properly trained. We provide our partners with hands-on training in the strategic uses of video and support them from start to finish in producing powerful videos to support their advocacy. And we broker relationships with political leaders, film festivals, and media makers to ensure targeted distribution of their productions. Working from an assumption that video and communications technology can and should be a tool for every human rights advocate, WITNESS has partnered with hundreds of groups in over seventy countries and on a broad range of issues spanning the spectrum of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights.

THE ROLE OF WITNESS WITNESS’s role is to complement the more traditional forms of advocacy being done by other human rights groups. The challenge of the modern human rights movement has always been to create accountability—independent, transparent, and enforceable mechanisms ensuring that human rights standards are

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maintained, and that citizens have a right to participate in civil society on equal terms. To stop abuse, activists traditionally rely on written documentation presented to the UN and other governing bodies, and on “official observers,” whose eyewitness accounts serve as verification of the experiences they witnessed. Although these techniques are essential to securing government accountability, video can serve as a powerful counterpart to written documentation, and WITNESS’s experience proves that it substantially magnifies the impact of our partner’s advocacy. Written reports also often fail to engage the broader public, whose awareness, concern, and action are essential to move human rights issues to the center of civic and public debate—a powerful platform for change. I can think of no more powerful example of this than the recent events at the Abu Ghraib prison. Although major human rights organizations—including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International—had released written reports on the abuse of Iraqi prisoners months earlier, it was not until visual evidence shot on cell phones by the perpetrators themselves surfaced that the public took notice and demanded accountability and reform. More recently, charges were dropped in the case of a bystander arrested for inciting violence at the Republican National Convention in New York after videotape surfaced showing the man simply walking down the street prior to the arrest. And for the first time, an eyewitness to the recent London terrorist bombings reported live to the BBC on his cellular phone from the underground “tube.”

A NEW STRATEGIC PLAN In 2003, after a year of much thinking and talking about how to maximize our impact and our strategy, we reinvented ourselves yet again to embrace a two-pronged approach to our mission. This entailed scaling back the number of intensive partnerships with human rights groups (our Core Partners) to no more than fifteen per year, allowing us to invest more time and resources into each, and launching a new program called Seeding Video Advocacy, which provides a basic introduction to video advocacy for hundreds of other organizations each year. Taken together, these two programs enable us to enhance both the depth and the breadth of our work, servicing the needs of the global human rights community in a much more strategic manner. So far our new approach seems to be working. In the past two years, we have seen more advocacy successes in our Core Partner campaigns than during the previous thirteen years combined, and numerous participants in our Seeding workshops have reported campaign successes using video. What unifies all this work is WITNESS’s role in it—providing strategic and technical support so that frontline activists dramatically enhance the effectiveness of their advocacy. WITNESS is deliberate about responding to needs expressed at the local level, rather than driving the conversation in terms of partnership choices from our New York office. We do not solicit groups with which to work; instead, local human rights groups approach us for partnership and must undergo a rigorous application process to be accepted into the program. Once a

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The New Humanitarians

partnership is formed, the partner leads the campaign advocacy agenda and video production efforts. This bottom-up or grassroots approach enables us to respond organically to emerging issues in the human rights landscape. The result is that marginalized groups that otherwise would not have a global platform for their campaigns can reach audiences with the power to make a difference. It also builds the capacity of these groups to drive their own advocacy long after WITNESS leaves the picture. We are beginning to develop relationships with social justice media groups in key regions where we work, which will in turn support other groups in their regions. What we are seeking is a multiplier effect that exponentially increases the leverage of WITNESS’s investment and leads to self-sustaining video advocacy initiatives over time.

NEW CONDITIONS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS PROMOTION It is unlikely that an organization such as WITNESS could have even come into existence until now. The human rights framework we rely on to do our work was only created in 1948 in the wake of World War II—and until recently, only a handful of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) existed to protect and promote human rights. Today, there are countless human rights defenders around the globe, and the rise of legal instruments and democratic states has led to an explosion of activity on the front lines. In this post-9/11 climate, where the U.S. government is facing declining global respect, the burden lies with the NGO movement to highlight human rights violations and influence the behavior of governments. Advances in technology have also fueled this grassroots transformation, making it possible for rights defenders to overcome communication barriers and alert the world to unfolding crises in ever more timely and efficient ways. These developments hold promise. But local organizations around the world still must fight overwhelming odds to advance the cause of civil society. Many WITNESS partners operate in locations without rights and the rule of law tradition, or where governments are too weak to enforce basic civil and legal protections. For some, societal conditions—poverty, starvation, and lack of education—create situations where the powerful can exploit children and adults as soldiers, sex slaves, or cheap labor. Others confront ingrained religious, cultural, racial, or gender biases that create entire classes of people who are not protected by law.

THE POWER OF STORIES Despite all these macro forces at work, the inspiration behind WITNESS always comes down to the individual stories. Our mission is built upon the art of storytelling, and a video is only as powerful as the stories it contains. This is what makes the medium arguably the most direct and visceral tool of communication we have to work with today, and what has always drawn me to video as a tool for advocacy. Take, for instance, the wrenching story of Neyra Azucena Cervantes.

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Neyra was a beautiful, sixteen-year old girl who disappeared on her way home from school in her home city of Chihuahua City, Mexico, in May 2003. Her body was later found. She had been raped and murdered, along with hundreds of other women in the region—a phenomenon termed “feminicide.” As if this were not enough for one family to confront, Neyra’s first cousin, David Meza, was then tortured into falsely confessing to her murder and spent three years in jail awaiting a trial that never took place. Thanks to an international campaign for his acquittal by our partner Comision Mexicana, which included the video Dual Injustice, produced with WITNESS, David was released in June 2006. Sometimes in our videos, the line between victim and perpetrator becomes blurred. In the video A Duty to Protect, we meet a girl named January who wears fatigues and recounts how she joined the army when she was ten years old. January is one of thousands of children who have been recruited as soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). They are taught to kill—adults, other children, sometimes even their own families—and are given drugs to numb their fear and conscience. As with many girl soldiers, January’s plight is made worse by the sexual violence she must also confront on a daily basis. In association with our partner AJEDI-Ka/PES, WITNESS screened and distributed A Duty to Protect to key International Criminal Court (ICC) officials in November 2005 in order to encourage the ICC to investigate and prosecute people responsible for recruiting and using child soldiers. In March 2005, an ICC commitment was secured, and Thomas Lubanga Dvilo from the DRC was arrested by the ICC for enlisting and conscripting child soldiers. Another story I cannot forget is that of Valdemir—a young Brazilian man who is essentially a modern-day slave, toiling in rural Brazil. In the video Bound by Promises, Valdemir describes how he was hired to load 130-pound logs onto trucks on a charcoal estate for sixty days straight, only to receive a $45 paycheck— one tenth of what was promised to him. When he complained, he was told simply, “A bullet from my shotgun is all you have a right to here.” Human rights groups estimate that there are currently around 25,000 men like Valdemir living a life of indentured servitude in rural Brazil. Driven from their homes and families because of the lack of other economic opportunities, these men often end up indebted to landowners and must work endlessly in an effort to buy back their freedom. Some die on the job. Others never see their families again. Bound by Promises is part of a major campaign advocating for an end to slave labor in Brazil, and was recently screened at the State Commission for the Eradication of Slave Labor, which consists of several state representatives responsible for designing local policies to eradicate slavery. To Get the Videos Seen As powerful as these and other videos are, they only have an impact if they get seen. WITNESS is continually looking for new opportunities to promote our videos and expand our audiences. In this sense, we are fortunate because

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The New Humanitarians

WITNESS represents the confluence of three forces—entertainment, human rights, and the corporate world—as represented by our three founding entities, Peter Gabriel, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, and the Reebok Foundation. This merging of very different sectors affords us the unique opportunity as a social enterprise to draw upon creative multisector initiatives, and on a growing team of high-visibility supporters to promote the issues addressed in our films. One of the creative ways we approach our work is through the strategic use of celebrity spokespeople who have demonstrated an increasing willingness to lend themselves to global human rights issues. They are instrumental to increasing WITNESS’s partner visibility and the impact of our work by lending their names and voices through narration of videos and by sponsoring benefit events. In 1996 Peter Gabriel, along with numerous other celebrities, participated in the VH1 Honors, a nationally televised event that honored WITNESS for its innovation. Since then, our videos have been narrated by actors including Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, and accompanied by music and audio introductions by such artists as Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Lou Reed, and Michael Stipe, among others. We have also been fortunate to have had some incredible musical artists donate performances at our annual benefit events. Recent artists include Paul Simon, Angelique Kidjo, Fred and Kate of the B-52s, Emmylou Harris, Nile Rodgers and CHIC, Philip Glass, Jackson Browne, and Suzanne Vega. The Academy Award–winning actress Angelina Jolie co-hosted our first major Focus for Change benefit dinner and concert in 2005, featuring our work in Sierra Leone. Angelina had gotten involved in our campaign earlier that year after we had met at the World Economic Forum in Davos. She accompanied me on a trip to Sierra Leone to present our video Witness to Truth to President Tejan Kabbah and urge him to support the implementation of key recommendations made by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Our second Focus for Change benefit was co-hosted by actor Gael Garcia Bernal, who discussed our ongoing campaign to end the forced displacement of millions of people in Burma over the past decade. He joined other celebrity guests, including Peter Gabriel and Tim Robbins, in signing a petition calling on the United Nations to pass its first-ever resolution on Burma; the petition was delivered to the office of the UN secretary general, with coverage of the event picked up by over sixty global newspapers. Our 2007 Focus for Change benefit was co-hosted by Peter Gabriel and Maggie Gyllenhaal, and featured performances by Jackson Browne and The Roots.

SUPPORTING THE WORK OF WITNESS These annual benefits have made a huge impact in helping us begin to diversify our funding portfolio, since the majority of tickets and tables are sold to individuals and corporations. Like many start-up organizations, our initial funding came mainly from the foundation world. Our seed grant from Reebok helped to

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leverage support from other funders after I came on board, including a range of donors such as the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Glaser Progress Foundation, and more recently, the Omidyar Network, Skoll Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, and Oak Foundation. We have also been supported over the years by a core group of committed individual donors and by some corporate sponsors. We also have a small but steady earned income stream through the sale and licensing of our video archive and the sale of fine art prints through an innovative project called Artists Support www.witness.org, which features collaborative works by international artists, including Kiki Smith, William Wegman, and Sebastião Salgado. Today, our portfolio is composed of 57 percent foundations, 15 percent individuals, 4 percent corporations, 9 percent earned income, 4 percent board of directors, and 11 percent in-kind goods and services, which includes all our excellent legal and design work, for example. This breakdown represents a healthy balance of support for our operations. However, we are continually seeking to diversify our support base to lesson our reliance on any one source of funding. After the early days of one-year grants, we have developed the track record to begin receiving multiyear grants from our long-time foundation donors (90 percent of which are earmarked for general operating support) as well as several matching grants for specific projects—both of which help to leverage new sources of funding. Our audited financial statements reflect our focus on maintaining a lean and efficient administrative capacity, consistently showing that for every dollar donated to the organization, 75 percent directly supports our programs, which is significantly higher than the industry standard of 66 percent. I must confess to wishing the allocation were 100 percent, but of course someone has to pay the bills, raise the money, and help staff navigate the health insurance system. We recently hired our first director of external relations, who will focus her efforts on major gifts and corporate sponsorship, and formed a seven-member committee of our board of directors to focus on fundraising and earned income. As a policy, in order to avoid any conflict of interest in doing our human rights work to hold governments accountable for their obligations, WITNESS does not accept any funding from the U.S. government. In 2006, in association with our investment advisors, we created a socially responsible investment strategy to ensure an ethical and transparent process for growing our small pot of reserves, which is critical to our institutional stability. This strategy focuses on both positive and prohibitive screenings of potential funds in accordance with our mission and organizational values.

EVALUATING PROGRESS We are currently working hard to manage our rapid rate of expansion. In the past four years, we have quadrupled our staff and budget, and within the past year alone, we have grown by approximately 20 percent. To keep pace with our programmatic growth and vision, we need more staff, and to manage our growing staff, we need a stronger infrastructure. In an organization our size, each staff

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The New Humanitarians

member added requires a new job description and a reassessment of the descriptions of other staff and their activities within the organization. New staff also require orientation to our culture, processes, and strategy. New staff integration, while ensuring that institutional memory is built by all staff as they work with us and preserved as they leave over time, is a continuing challenge in a rapidly evolving organization. As we have grown, we have seen the need for greater interdepartmental communication and organizational planning that is ambitious yet achievable; in other words, we have to slow down enough to think and talk things through with each other, and we have to be sure that our plans are flexible enough to accommodate the ever-present reality of important new opportunities that compete with existing ones for our resources and capacity. WITNESS conducts rigorous qualitative and quantitative evaluation of our programs to hold ourselves accountable to our board, partners, funders, and ultimately ourselves. Our meticulous focus on evaluation enables us to demonstrate “positive return on social investment,” as the new venture philanthropists who fund our work would call it. Sample metrics include the number of cameras distributed, videos produced, and trainings conducted; the activism our website generates; media coverage of our work; and, most importantly, impacts of our campaigns on changing policies and practices. We communicate our progress via monthly e-newsletters, monthly broadcasts of partner videos, and quarterly and annual reports that are also made available for download on our website. We borrowed an approach from the corporate sector when we launched our first biannual Performance Evaluation Dashboard two years ago. This document— named for its graphic resemblance to the dashboard of a car—provides a series of at-a-glance metrics to better quantify and qualify our results, set goals for the future, and improve our work. The data in the dashboards are carefully compiled through a rigorous analysis by departmental managers, and our approach is frequently cited as a model by other nonprofits and donors. The most innovative chart in the dashboard is the one we designed to measure the progress of our advocacy campaigns by assessing points for planned “outputs,” “impacts,” and “results.” In keeping with WITNESS’s nonproprietary approach, the dashboard is published twice annually on our website, and is available under a Creative Commons license so that it can be adapted for use by other organizations. Another key focus of our work and my attention has been the development of a solid group of management practices. Under the direction of our new deputy director (and note that we waited too long to make this hire as many organizations do), WITNESS recently conducted an organization-wide analysis of the key areas of our work from which we are seeking results. All our key goals and activities have been incorporated into five broad Key Results Areas (KRAs): (a) Training in Video Advocacy; (b) Generating Advocacy Impact; (c) Building an Accessible Human Rights Video Archive; (d) Expanding Awareness and Engagement in Human Rights; and (e) Developing Institutional Capacity. Our annual work plans are now organized around the KRAs, rather than departmental lines, which helps

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to reinforce everyone’s understanding of how their work contributes to the larger mission of the organization. Along with the KRAs, we have implemented a structure for ensuring that clear accountability and allocation of responsibilities are associated with each initiative untaken. DARCI (an acronym for Decision, Accountable, Responsible, Consultant, Informed) is an accountability matrix that provides a clear management structure for all activities within departments and across the organization. I was introduced to the KRA and DARCI models through an excellent leadership program offered by the Rockwood Leadership Program (see www.rockwoodleadership.org). We have also developed a detailed monitoring and evaluation plan in each department and across the organization to assess the impact of our work and adjust our plans as needed. We have both an annual and a three-year work plan and budget for the organization, and we conduct regular, focused reviews of our progress through weekly all-staff meetings, weekly departmental and interdepartmental meetings, bi-monthly organizational managers meetings, biannual staff performance evaluations and board of directors meetings, regular evaluations by participants in our Seeding Video Advocacy program of short-term trainings, annual performance evaluations by each Core Partner with the goal of an average mark of 4 out of 5, and written annual reports on all organizational activities. Although we still need to grow more in order to achieve the scale of impact we hope for, we are not pursuing a heavily bricks-and-mortar approach to scale. Instead, we have embraced decentralized models for adaptation and replication of our strategies. In addition to our website, built on the Joomla! open-source platform, and the use of Creative Commons licensing for our dashboards and Media Archive, we are employing a metaphorically “open-source” approach to our scaling initiatives. These initiatives include Seeding Video Advocacy, the free distribution of curricula and other resources for local use, an annual two-week Video Advocacy Institute providing an immersive introduction to video advocacy for social justice advocates, and the new Hub—our so-called YouTube for Human Rights which I will cover more in detail later. This nonproprietary approach to all our work demonstrates our commitment to disseminating the WITNESS methodology as broadly as possible to leverage systemic social change. We are continuing to improve our ability to be in two-way conversations with our stakeholders—not just the human rights groups we support with training and equipment, with whom we have always enjoyed a robust dialogue, but also broader audiences we hope to reach via new Web 2.0 strategies such as blogs, which can help engage volunteers, donors, and other advocates in our work.

USING GLOBAL COMMUNICATION FOR CHANGE To provide a summary of our trajectory over the past fifteen years, I would say that in WITNESS’s early days, our primary obstacles were sociopolitical in nature, while today they are largely technical and infrastructural. Throughout our history WITNESS has consistently taken risks in order to evolve. Just like

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The New Humanitarians

many other so-called social enterprises, we embrace the truth that the only thing constant is change, and are always growing and reinventing ourselves—guided by our founding mission and principles—to adapt to the changing landscape. The biggest challenge we currently face is how to capitalize on emerging technological opportunities to make sure that the people who potentially could benefit the most from these tools, specifically those living in the Global South, are not left out because of inequities in access. Communications media have changed dramatically in the fifteen years since WITNESS was founded. In the past five years in particular, the rise of digital technology has changed the entire way we communicate. In this globally connected world, there are expanding opportunities to reach broader audiences on the local, regional, and international levels. Coupled with the fact that technology is more affordable and easier to use than ever, there has never been such opportunity to promote a global culture of human rights. In response to these opportunities, we launched the Hub project in fall 2007. The Hub is an online destination where anyone, anywhere can upload footage of human rights violations from their cell phones, video cameras, and other mobile devices, and respond to calls to action about the abuses they witness. Working with a global team of allies, the site will embrace the populist shift toward usergenerated content to advance human rights. Although we have become a more recognized force in the human rights world in recent years, we hope the Hub will enable WITNESS to become even more widely known as a key ally working to support global advocacy campaigns, and as a reliable resource for news media and a public eager to learn more about human rights issues generally ignored by mainstream media. The Hub can be seen as the third prong of WITNESS, joining the Core Partners and Seeding Video Advocacy as a critical dimension of our work, and expanding our impact even more broadly by making the tools of video advocacy available to anyone interested in using them. This new stage of WITNESS’s growth moves us closer to the promise of Peter Gabriel’s powerful original vision—the possibility of a technology-enabled populist platform where everyone’s stories of human rights abuse and solutions are heard. Peter wanted to put video cameras into the hands of as many human rights activists as possible in the hope that they would capture evidence of abuses and put their footage into the public sphere, provoking a global response. Another ongoing technical challenge at WITNESS is how to minimize the security risks faced by our Core Partners and other advocates we support. We recently devoted an entire chapter of our book Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism to the subject, which also raises ethical issues that need to be addressed when working in potentially dangerous conditions. Although an advocate using video may not be able to eliminate risks, it is possible to anticipate and minimize them. In addition, because of the sensitive nature of the content likely to be uploaded and shared on the Hub site, WITNESS has a responsibility to provide as much security and anonymity as possible. We must set an example for how media can be used in a human rights context, and we

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have developed a list of requirements to ensure the integrity and vision of the Hub is not compromised.

DEVELOPING THE BEST STAFF On the institutional front, our management team is currently focused on developing an ever-more inclusive environment in which open communication is encouraged and hierarchy minimized. At the same time, there is an ongoing need to clarify the process by which the myriad decisions made each day are documented in departmental accountability and decision-making matrices. To promote a culture of inclusiveness, we have committed to sending each staff member on a leadership retreat via the aforementioned Rockwood Leadership Program (www.rockwoodfund.org), an intensive seminar focused on developing innate leadership potential. Each staff member also has a budget for annual classes that further professional development. WITNESS is committed to promoting a culture of pluralism and equal opportunity, and we have a very diverse and global staff in comparison to many of our nonprofit peers; for instance, we have eight countries and twenty-one languages represented on staff. Nevertheless, we face ongoing challenges in hiring staff who are reflective of the communities we serve, particularly at the most senior positions. We are making progress—for instance, of the last twelve new hires, eight are women and six are people of color—but always must strive to do a better job of networking in more diverse circles to help WITNESS become the truly vibrant culture we want it to be. Finally, in a high performance culture such as ours, there is the ongoing risk of burnout. This is a very real concern, particularly among those staff who confront images and stories of unspeakable brutality daily. To address this issue, WITNESS has invested in a series of vicarious trauma sessions with a licensed trauma therapist affiliated with NYU–Bellevue Hospital. We also try to provide flexibility for work at home and sabbaticals to accommodate personal circumstances and reward dedication of service. Although WITNESS has had to remain nimble and adaptable to embrace all these new changes, we have had our share of growing pains. One example can be seen with our second all-staff retreat in 2006. Since it took place shortly after several new hires were made, we constructed the retreat as an intensive, inwardlooking time to improve how we work together. This involved some candid discussion around interpersonal communications. Although intended as a constructive exercise, these efforts backfired because we did not plan for re-entry back into the office environment. The long-term impact of that retreat has been mixed—a combination of positive steps toward much more interdepartmental communication and managerial empowerment, and some damaged trust to be rebuilt. As a result, we have re-thought how to approach subsequent retreats to foster a safe and supportive environment for reflection, processing, and closure after what can be an intensive and emotional experience.

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The New Humanitarians

Another recent mistake can be seen in the way I introduced the new Hub initiative, conceived at a board of directors meeting, to the organization at large. At first, many staff resisted the idea of a populist website for human rights, fearing that it could contradict our mission to provide hands-on training and intensive support to selected human rights groups and would pose security risks to the site’s users, and questioning whether a disproportionate number of resources would be directed toward the new initiative and away from our other programs. Once we took the time to discuss the concept as an organization and involve people more (i.e., through a full-day staff meeting, a Town Hall conference with invited outside guests, and an internal steering committee made up of members from each department), we got the buy-in we needed from across the staff, along with a great deal of enthusiasm to make this exciting project happen. The lesson I learned through this process is that when introducing a major new project into an organization, it is critical to take the time to explain, discuss, and bring everyone on board, even at the risk of slowing the project down and delaying implementation, since the project’s success is ultimately contingent upon a united and supportive staff. Another key learning from facilitating sensitive discussions was that the most honest feedback will always surface in small-group conversations, with designated “rapporteurs” to report back the sense of the group without attributing remarks to anyone personally.

LESSONS LEARNED Looking back on the last decade of work at WITNESS, I have learned a lot of lessons—both meta and micro. At the micro level, I learned that it helps to do it all in the early days of a start-up, but you should begin delegating and building leadership and institutional memory as soon as you can. I learned that it is a mistake to wait too long before getting a fully-fledged finance department in place, and that having done it all yourself before—when the organization was smaller and engaged in less work—can warp your perspective on the human resources required as the organization grows. I learned that hiring a deputy director is often delayed too long; in our case, it certainly was. It meant that for a time, I was doing internally oriented management that I should not have been doing, instead of focusing my energies in places external to us where my investment could have the greatest return for the organization. I learned that building and engaging a board of directors and an advisory committee is a tremendous amount of work—and that you get out of it what you put in. I also learned how important it is to develop strong board leadership and participation in fundraising early on in an organization’s growth. At a meta level, I learned that collaboration and teamwork are challenging but critical to success. I learned how important it is to acknowledge people publicly for their contributions to your work. I learned that it always takes longer than you think it will. I learned that good management is one of the most challenging aspects of leadership, and that it requires deep personal work and self-knowledge

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to do it right. I learned that stress is choice: we can choose to experience stress in stress-inducing circumstances, or not to. I learned that we are wiser and more powerful when we are relaxed and focused. And I learned that a commitment to personal ecology—a balanced, healthy, happy life—is one of the most enduring gifts that leadership can bring to an organization. APPENDIX WITNESS (www.witness.org) 1. Watch Rights Alert videos, urgent calls to action for human rights campaigns in which our Core Partners and Partner Network are engaged. 2. Sign up to receive WITNESS e-newsletters. 3. Donate to WITNESS. 4. Find out about volunteer opportunities: interns, translators, professional filmmakers, copy editors, and field volunteers. 5. Find out about upcoming WITNESS events, download a press kit, or read articles about WITNESS. 6. Search the Media Archive, over 3,000 hours of video from human rights defenders around the world. 7. Visit the WITNESS store (www.witness.org/store) to purchase videos. Training (www.witness.org/training) 1. Watch Video for Change: A How-To Guide on Using Video in Advocacy and Activism; download the book in English, French, Russian, or Spanish for free. 2. Watch Video for Change and review a sample Video Action Plan to guide video advocacy efforts. 3. Read an overview of video advocacy and review case studies that provide examples of successful uses of video advocacy by WITNESS partners. 4. Watch and read Tips and Techniques, the WITNESS video and handbook that guide users through the essentials of creating videos. 5. Seeding Video Advocacy: learn about short-term training opportunities for organizations and individuals outside the WITNESS partnership structure. The Hub (www.witness.org/hub) See It—where you can view and interact with human rights media uploaded by the Hub community. Share It—where you can create and join groups or discussions that coincide with your interests or expertise. Take Action—where you can engage and activate other users around your campaigns and events. Volunteer with the Hub—do research, blog, edit media, review content, translate, and transcribe.

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ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: WITNESS Founder and/or Executive Director: Gillian Caldwell Mission/Description: WITNESS uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations, empowering people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, public engagement, and policy change. Website: www.witness.org Address: 80 Hanson Place Fifth Floor Brooklyn, NY 11217 USA Phone: 718-783-2000 Fax: 718-783-1593 E-mail: [email protected]

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From Violence to Agreement: The Work of the Community Relations Council in Northern Ireland Mari Fitzduff

The knock came again at the door, loud and peremptory in the silence of the Northern Ireland countryside. I opened it, the children scampering under my feet eager to see some new faces. Outside was a group of young soldiers—British army soldiers, some of the many thousands who had been coming here since 1969 in the soon to be lost hope that they could prove themselves to be a positive buffer in the war between the unionist/Protestant and nationalist/Catholic communities in Northern Ireland.1 They had since then become part of that war themselves. Now, in 1983, almost all their efforts were directed at defeating the Irish Republican Army (IRA), who had for the previous decade bombed pubs, restaurants, dance halls, and anyone deemed to be remotely connected to the British Government and particularly the Northern Ireland police. For the army to come into the area in which I had lived with my husband and children for six years was itself a dangerous trek for them. Mid-Ulster, where we lived, had the second-highest political murder rate in Northern Ireland, second only to Belfast itself. It was known as “The Killing Fields” since it was an interface area where many Catholic and Protestant areas bordered each other, and thus gave many opportunities for paramilitaries on both sides, and the security forces, to play out their deadly killing game. The war had been going on for almost a decade and a half and showed no sign of victory or loss for either side. We lived in a mainly Catholic area, near what had been my husband’s family settlement for almost 300 years. His Protestant forebears had come over from Scotland, probably in search of religious freedom themselves, and eager to take up the opportunities available in the northern part of the island of Ireland. They had farmed and prospered, building up their distinctive houses and businesses through employing many of the indigenous Catholics in their neighborhood on the shores of Lough Neagh.

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The New Humanitarians

I was from the south of Ireland, and my mother’s family had been one of the oldest of the Catholic families in the area where we now lived. She was descended from an early Irish earl, whose clan was O’Neill, and who had been driven out by the precursors of my husband’s family during the sixteenth century. The remains of the clan’s forts could still be seen nearby. Our locality had seen the worst of much of the violence that had started again in the late 1960s.2 Many Catholic and Protestant neighbors, soldiers, and policemen had been killed within a few miles of where we lived, some in front of their families. Our family business, because of its complicated history, had been blown up by both Protestant and Catholic paramilitaries and now functioned with only a square-foot window of light, so as to better protect it from bombs.3 It was in an area that was being continually patrolled and searched by the army and the police. Our two sons, both born in the late 1970s, were brought up with the constant sound of surveillance helicopters, often landing beside our house, and the frequent sounds of bombs and gunfire. Their great aunt was the postmistress of the post office at the end of our lane that was so often robbed by the IRA in pursuit of funding for their military campaign that it was eventually closed. It was to this neighborhood we had come home to in late 1976 to start a family. Despite the political tensions and the violence, ordinary criminality was almost absent in the area. It was a place of beauty, and the quiet lanes gave many opportunities for children to grow up in a wholesome way. Nevertheless, it was not uncommon to see gangs of paramilitary masked men moving about the area as they placed their own roadblocks along the roads between the villages and the towns. At times it was not easy to tell which group was in charge on any particular day, and it often necessitated quick thinking to secure a safe passage after being stopped. Luckily, the family history meant that our family had feet in both religious camps, which could be helpful. But wariness was always the order of the day—as indeed it was as I opened the door to find the British soldiers outside. They stood there, a group of them, with their guns at the ready. All of them were young faced, and heavily laden with bulletproof vests and helmets. None of them had the plummy, typical accents that their generals often sported. No, these were working class lads, with regional accents, many from areas of high unemployment throughout Britain—seeking their livelihood, and often their education, through the army. Politely they asked was it just my family inside, and would I mind if they took a look inside my house?4 And then I remembered that just a short while before, I had seen a few men on some kind of maneuvers outside my kitchen window—undoubtedly the IRA. I stood there—struck by the youth of the faces in front of me, and knowing that many of those outside in the field beyond my kitchen window almost inevitably still bore the marks of puberty themselves. It struck me deeply that within the next few minutes, more young bodies could join the hundreds before them in the graves. And I thought in my despair that there has to be another way of doing this—of sorting out the tangles of injustice and hate that had so marked my country, cost so many lives, broken so many relationships—but how?

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DISCOVERING A NEW SCIENCE It was my Damascus moment, defining both a conviction and a search that has remained with me to this day: although conflicts are inevitable, and in many cases it may be even necessary to redo structures of exclusion or oppression, there surely must be many ways in which these issues can be tackled and agreed upon without the use of violence. And so I began my search into what I soon learned was then called the field of conflict resolution.5 To my relief, I discovered that, of course, I was far from the first to feel passionately about there being better ways to address our conflicts, and learned that there was an actual body of theory and knowledge being developed around such possibilities. It was not easy to find it in those pre-Internet days, particularly living as I did deep in the countryside. Although I had started doing some graduate work, few of the university libraries in Northern Ireland had begun to gather the resources that were becoming available in the United States and the UK, particularly at the emerging peace program at Bradford University. I did two things to hasten my learning: I decided to focus my doctorate on studying the fairly unusual phenomenon of people who had once espoused sectarian activities, including bombing and murder, but who had moved away from them and who now espoused dialogue as the way forward. And I also offered to teach courses in the universities that would focus on conflict resolution. The initial courses I offered were one on mediation, and subsequently one looking at policy issues concerned with diversity management. Mediation was such a new term in Northern Ireland that for my first class, half of the people who turned up thought they were coming to a course on meditation. In addition I undertook a television series with Radio Telefis Eireann, the broadcasting station of the Republic of Ireland, called Waging Peace, which looked not at the usual bloody campaigns through which the Irish had sought their freedom but at the many nonviolent campaigns that had been used by those who wanted to challenge the rule of the British in Ireland.

NEW BODIES? Because of such work, I was contacted in 1984 by the Chief Executive of SACHR, the Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights, a quasigovernmental body set up by the British Government in 1975 to address issues of human rights in Northern Ireland. SACHR members were concerned that many of the security, equality, and economic activities currently being undertaken by the government were insufficient to bring the conflict to an end. They were also concerned that although there were assorted groups working throughout Northern Ireland on community relations issues in an independent and often ad hoc fashion, there was no body dedicated to ensuring the crucially needed cooperation and understanding between the two major communities in any strategic or comprehensive way. SACHR were keen to investigate the possibility of setting up a new body that would concern itself with the promotion of better community relations within

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The New Humanitarians

Northern Ireland,6 given the continuing absence of any local political power, and what suggestions would emerge for its development, remit, and status. Because of my work with the universities, they approached me and a colleague, Hugh Frazer, who was at that time the director of the main community development funding body—the Northern Ireland Voluntary Trust—which had been set up in 1979 particularly to fund local community work.7 We were asked to investigate two issues: (a) the adequacy and effectiveness of present structures for promoting improvement in community relations in Northern Ireland, and (b) whether a central body should be created to coordinate and fund community relations in Northern Ireland. Undertaking the report for SACHR provided us with an excellent opportunity to overview what actually was happening in the field, how effective it appeared to be, and what was deemed to be lacking in focus or capacity. We were empowered to consult very widely at local and regional levels, and across the community divides. We discovered that the number of organizations concerning themselves primarily with community relations work in Northern Ireland in 1984 was fortyfive. Most were tiny, worked independently of each other, and were funded by independent trusts; few were strategic in their approach. The number of full-time staff they employed altogether was approximately 117, and the number of part-time, voluntary staff was 86. In contrast the number of people working in the security forces was about 30,000, including police (approximately 12,000) and the British army, which fluctuated between 12,000 and 18,000 at any one time.8 The amount of resources available overall for community relations work was less than $2 million, which was approximately 0.5 percent of the figure needed for the security bill. After a widespread consultation process, our report recommended that the British government should seriously consider resourcing programs and activities designed to improve relations between the two main communities (Frazer and Fitzduff 1986). It recommended that a new community relations agency should be established to support and encourage the efforts of all those individuals and groups concerned to improve communication, understanding, and tolerance between the communities, and to initiate new work in this area. It should be an independent organization managed by a small board of trustees drawn from across the communities, with a quarter of its membership appointed by government and three quarters nominated by key agencies actively involved in building better community relations. Although independent of government, it should be funded by the government, as the resources needed to fund it were likely beyond the scope of most foundations, but also because it was believed that a closer relationship with government could ensure that its voice could be heard within government as the body deemed necessary. In addition, and to increase the new agency’s leverage on the government, the report also suggested the promotion of a specialist community relations unit within the central core office of the government. This unit should be tasked with advising the secretary of state and other ministers on all aspects of promoting

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better community relations, eliminating discrimination, and ensuring that the policies of all government departments—housing, health, industry, economic development, education—were geared to improving community relations.9 This unit should also be charged with ensuring that promoting community relations was given a much higher priority, and that adequate funding was made available to community relations initiatives on the ground.

FORMATION OF THE CENTRAL COMMUNITY RELATIONS UNIT (CCRU) The report was to prove seminal in the expansion and development of community relations activities in Northern Ireland. The suggestion to set up a unit within government to address issues of equality and community relations was acted upon in 1987, and discussion was conducted relatively speedily for a government initiative—an indication perhaps of the continuing violence, and despair about how to end the conflict. What helped was the fact that there was also another ongoing initiative within the Civil Service that was also looking at the issue of community relations, with the significant support of the head of the Civil Service, Ken Bloomfield, for the development of the new unit.10 He quickly appointed civil servants to set up the new body, which was called the Central Community Relations Unit (CCRU)11 and was charged with “formulating, reviewing, and challenging Government’s policies in order to address issues of equality and improve community relations.”12 It was tasked with exploring the ideas that had been brought forth in the Frazer and Fitzduff report, along with other issues of interest to the task. The two most senior civil servants appointed proved themselves to be people of intelligence and courage—the kind of “champions” needed within an institution if new initiatives are to get started, pitted as they often are against institutional inertia and cynicism.13 The new unit, the CCRU, was located within the Central Secretariat, and was thus established with direct access to the head of the Civil Service and subsequently to any British ministers who were in positions of responsibility for Northern Ireland. This direct connection was to prove vital in growing the new and independent agency, and in assessing what its strategic approach should be in developing community relations work. Using the Frazer and Fitzduff report as a starting point, the agency consulted widely with many statutory and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and began to develop its own agenda. One of its first tasks was the setting up of what was to become known as the Cultural Traditions Group (CTG) in 1988, which was to prove to be of vital assistance in the later development of the new and independent body. This group consisted of approximately twenty people, from both Protestant and Catholic backgrounds. It was headed up by the former controller of the BBC, Dr. James Hawthorne, and its members were drawn from universities, museums, Irishlanguage groups, and other cultural bodies. While not without their political and theological differences, these were people who were committed to attempting an

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The New Humanitarians

open appreciation of each other’s culture, and to a willingness to see that culture reflected in the structures and legislation of the state (Ryder 1994). During the formative phase, they began a series of conferences that was to prove to be seminal in framing the variety of cultures in Northern Ireland as a source of richness, and not as a problem. The first of these conferences was called Varieties of Irishness, the second Varieties of Britishness, and the third Varieties of Europeans, all providing a fresh way of looking at community differences.14 When, in 1990, the new independent body was formed, the CTG group became a subgroup of the Community Relations Council. In addition, CCRU assisted with securing the legal infrastructure for the further development of integrated education, which was an anomaly in a region where almost 100 percent of education was effectively segregated. Their work meant that the Department of Education for Northern Ireland (DENI) made provision for integrated education under the Education Reform Order (1989), and it became possible for existing segregated schools to opt for integrated status through a parental ballot. Recognizing, however, that most schools would continue to retain their segregated status, the Order also provided for two programs to become mandatory in all schools: Education for Mutual Understanding (EMU) and Cultural Heritage, both of which were designed to help children to learn to respect themselves and others, and to get to know about and understand their own culture and that of the other main community. Cross-community contact between schools was also encouraged as part of these programs. In addition, in 1990, a common history curriculum was also instituted in all schools, and in 1993, a common religious curriculum was introduced. In an attempt to involve local councilors in community relations work, in 1989 CCRU offered financial assistance to district councils in Northern Ireland that were willing to establish community relations programs.15 Funding was conditional on cross-party support. Most of the councils took up the offer, and proceeded to appoint community relations officers, whose task was to assist the development of programs within the council area that were designed to address issues of violence and hostility. CCRU also took the bold step of seeking to recognize and respect the special significance of the Irish language in Northern Ireland, to support the encouragement of it, and to fund a body related to its development, as well as assisting the funding of an Irish-language newspaper. In view of the fact that the Irish language had previously been forbidden for public use in Northern Ireland, this was an extraordinarily brave initiative. In addition, the unit also addressed the issue of community inequalities through a program called Targeting Social Need (TSN), which was designed to tackle significant differences in the socioeconomic profiles of the Catholic and Protestant communities, and improve social and economic conditions by targeting resources on Northern Ireland’s most disadvantaged areas.16 The development of all these initiatives was to provide a crucial background context to the emergence of the new

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independent body, the Community Relations Council (CRC), which was the second body that had been suggested by the report.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE COMMUNITY RELATIONS COUNCIL (CRC) In the meantime, I continued to develop my interest in the field. In 1987, along with a few colleagues, I helped set up the Northern Ireland Mediation Centre, which subsequently was to become of critical use in helping train mediators and in mediating some of the most difficult of the conflict issues, such as hostilities during marches and funeral violence.17 In addition, I had produced a book called Community Conflict Skills (Fitzduff 1988), which was a resource book for those who were trying to facilitate dialogue across the very difficult community divides, and constructively address Northern Ireland’s political, constitutional, and social conflicts. Also, fearful that a hesitant government would want any new body to address only softer issues of relationships without ensuring an adequate focus on the tougher issues of equality, human rights, and agreement on constitutional issues, I developed a Typology of Community Relations Work document, explaining how community relations work had to take place alongside other efforts, such as equality, security, economic, political, and human rights work (Fitzduff 1989a). Eventually, in the autumn of 1989, the setting up of the Community Relations Council (CRC) was announced. The members of the council were drawn from the statutory, private, voluntary, community, and academic sectors, including some from the Cultural Traditions Group. One-third of the members were appointed by the minister.18 They were drawn widely from the community, and in themselves, they represented the very deep divisions in Northern Ireland. From the beginning, the intentions of the CRC were to include not just those who represented the middle ground in the conflict, but also those at the harder edges, including some who had been associated with violence. The post of director was advertised. Having by now become even more committed to taking the work forward, I applied for an interview and was appointed the founding director. During my interview process, I articulated some conditions for undertaking the work if offered the post. The first was that, as I had outlined in my typology paper, it would be clearly understood by all that this work could only be seen as complementary to those efforts I had addressed in my typology paper—otherwise, I believed, and suggested, that the new body would have no credibility. Criticisms had already begun to flow its way: the republicans were saying that the body was a trick by the British government to substitute issues of good relations for issues of equality, justice, and an agreed political solution. The unionists for their part, ever vigilant regarding the ties with Britain that they felt the British government was trying to unloose, saw the new body as a trick to force them into a united Ireland. The second condition was that, despite the fact that the government was prepared to extensively fund this new body to help develop good relations initiatives with all sections of society, the body itself would truly be an

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The New Humanitarians

independent body, answerable only to its own board members.19 These terms having been agreed to, I was offered and accepted the post. The Task of the CRC The task facing the CRC was daunting. The number killed in the Northern Ireland conflict was 3,600 people—but given that the population of Northern Ireland was only 1.6 million, this was the equivalent of more than 600,000 dead in the United States. Ten times as many people were injured. The CRC set up its office just off Great Victoria Street, which boasted the most bombed hotel in Europe. Our office frequently shook with the sound of bombs exploding in the nearby center of the city. At times we had to be evacuated because of bombings or threatened bombs. Less than a mile away from our offices, within a one-square-mile area of North Belfast, there were over 600 murders during the period of the Troubles.20 At almost every street corner, the colors on the curbstones differentiated the territory of the Taigs (slang word for Catholic) or the Prods (Protestants). Their separation had been assisted by the erection of massive “peace” walls designed to offer some element of security to both beleaguered communities.21 The sectarian differences throughout society were all encompassing: only 7 percent of people lived in what could be termed “mixed” (i.e., Protestant/Catholic) areas. Even fewer went to mixed schools, and youth organizations such as the Girl Guides and Boy Scouts were also sectarian in nature. By age twelve, children had learned thirty different ways of telling the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant, including the subtle combination of accent, name, and background clues that ensures such “telling.” Although there were groups in existence that had been addressing community distrust issues, few of them were effectively connected with those with the power to most effectively change the situation: the politicians and the paramilitaries. In addition, a majority within the NGO sector were arranged along sectarian lines. The massive community development work that was inaugurated by the first commission in the early 1970s had certainly energized community-based work—but such work had consolidated itself along the lines of the conflict, creating many territories where few of another religion would venture (Fitzduff 1995). Many institutions, such as the BBC and museums, had located themselves firmly in alignment with the Protestant/unionist community, so much so that at the time I was writing the SACHR report, there was only one recently appointed Catholic at the senior level within the BBC. A quick visit to any of the state museums would ensure that the visitor thought there were only Protestants living in Northern Ireland—the existence of Catholics, despite their being 33 percent (1921) and later rising to 43 percent (2002) of the population was usually completely ignored. Only 7 percent of the police were Catholic, and complaints against police from Catholic communities were endemic. Sports in Northern Ireland also generally reflected the denominational split. Catholics generally played Gaelic football, camogie, and hurling, games indigenous

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to Ireland. Protestants generally played soccer, rugby, hockey, and cricket at school, games more usually associated with Britain. Even though soccer (football) was played by both communities, support for teams was mainly given on a denominational basis, and the game on occasion gave rise to violent expressions of sectarianism by both players and spectators alike. Even where communities enjoy the same sport, for example boxing, bowling or athletics, these tended to be organized around churches or youth clubs that are mostly denominational and thus prevent mixing. Cultural celebrations, and in particular those marches and festivities that celebrate particular victories or commemorate particular losses for either community, were often divisive and sometimes violent occasions. Activities such as music and dancing were usually aligned to particular identities, for example Irish or Scottish/British. And community marching has often been a particularly divisive issue between the communities. Given such divisions, not only was the work we were suggesting difficult, but it was also likely to be dangerous.22 In divided societies, those that are most hated are often those who attempt to be inclusive: for example, in Northern Ireland, mixed couples and mixed families within estates were usually the first to be attacked, bombed, or burned out in times of tension. Undertaking community relations work was to court unpopularity and resistance—most political parties refused to actively support it except for the nonaligned Alliance Party, a relatively middle-class organization, which at its most successful represented less than 10 percent of the population. From its beginning, the task was daunting—it was obvious that the newlycreated CRC would not lack for work. First Days of the CRC In our first days of the CRC, we made it clear that the Council felt it had a responsibility to work with all sections of society. It believed that prejudice and sectarianism were unfortunately widespread, that they existed irrespective of class and creed, and that every person and group had both a responsibility and opportunity to participate in combating them. It therefore sought to work with statutory, voluntary, and community bodies, and to work within areas such as sport, housing, cultural pursuits, security, business, trade unions, community development, media, and the churches (CRC 1991 annual report). The CRC started life with four program staff, three administrative staff, and a director.23 It split its work into three areas, the first of which was working with groups whose prime focus was undertaking community relations work. The second area was dealing with groups whose prime concern was not community relations, but which nevertheless had a capacity to contribute to the work by mainstreaming community relations work within their programs. The third area was maintaining and developing the work of the Cultural Traditions Group on all aspects of culture and identity.24

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The New Humanitarians

As the council had also acquired a funding responsibility, it was enabled to leverage cooperation in the above areas through the provision of funding for groups, and this funding was to help substantially in developing the work.25

COMMUNITY RELATIONS GROUPS When Hugh Frazer and I had undertaken our original report on the state of community relations in Northern Ireland in 1985, there were only 45 badly funded groups undertaking cross–community relations work in Northern Ireland. Under the auspices and funding of the CRC, this number increased significantly. By 2007, there were more than 130 organizations that arranged opportunities to enable people to meet across the community and institutional divide, and to address issues of differences, including issues of politics, policing, equality, and identity.26 In such workshops can be found local politicians, trade union officials, ex-prisoners, prison officers, community and church and youth leaders, police and soldiers, former paramilitaries, teachers, and others. To detail here all of the efforts in the many areas where such work has developed over the past few years would be impossible,27 but I have chosen several case studies that exemplify the range of work that is being undertaken by these groups. Single-Identity Work Although developing cross-community group work was obviously important, the CRC recognized from the start that that there was also a need for the development of single-identity work, as a preparation for contact-group work. Singleidentity work is in-depth group work on issues of difference within groups that are either unionist/Protestant or nationalist/Catholic, and it is aimed at increasing the confidence of a group in terms of its identity and capacity (Church et al. 2001). Group workers discovered that communities, particularly those most ghettoized through history and locality, frequently lack confidence, and can be too defensive and aggressive to engage in successful contact work. Single-identity work therefore looks at ways to enable communities to look nondefensively at the validity and worth of their own history and culture. It also includes work that enables groups to begin to identify issues about which they feel they can safely meet and cooperate with people from different communities. Without such precontact work, it was discovered that cross-community dialogue work could be burdened with so much defensiveness that it could be hostile and counterproductive. In addition, single-identity work not only increased the confidence of a group, but it also often succeeded in developing the necessary leaders who could reach out beyond their ghettoized identities to connect with the other side. This work was recognized to be so important that it eventually received significant funding from the CRC and other funders, on the condition that such programs were seen eventually to lead to cross-community dialogue, and not to an increase in hardening identities (Hughes and Donnelly 1998).

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The Interface Project28 The Interface Project is an integrated community development/community relations project that was set up along the interface areas of Belfast, many divided by so-called peace walls, erected to keep them apart. These areas were where violence was at its highest in the city. Following two years of single-identity work, which addressed issues of common social problems, local skilled mediators eventually succeeded in bringing together community development groups to look at ways in which together they could address the need to break down the emotional and physical walls that separated them. This project, and others along the interface, which were eventually to include many ex-prisoners as they returned to their communities, was to provide a fertile space for dialogue between paramilitaries and communities in the years preceding the Agreement (O’Halloran and McIntyre 1999). This group was also to prove essential in managing the tensions generated by the various marches of the different communities, and provided stewards and mediators for such events, which often engendered significant violence on the streets. The Peace and Reconciliation Group29 The Peace and Reconciliation group, based in Derry/Londonderry30 was set up in the 1980s to deal with the hostile relationships existing in the city, and in its early days, it particularly dealt with the problems of rumors and counter-rumors that contributed significantly to the spiral of violence. By using the services of contacts within each community (often ex-prisoners or ex-paramilitaries), it maintained a watchful eye on escalating stories of possible attack and counterattack, and often prevented these from stimulating full-scale violence within the city by clarifying such rumors. Subsequently, the group has been significantly involved in working on developing training for community sensitivity with the police and army, whose actions in trying to maintain law and order were often counterproductive, particularly within nationalist areas where the police and army were treated with particular distrust, but also in some loyalist areas. The group also spent much of its time facilitating contact between those who were most violently involved with each other, and on facilitating dialogue between the communities, particularly at times of particular tension such as parading and the breakdown of cease-fires. Workers Education Association31 The Workers Education Association (WEA) is an adult community learning organization dedicated to making education available to those for whom it is least accessible. In 1991 the WEA began to develop programs addressing issues of community relations. It set up an antisectarian project, called Interface, which worked with organizations in the voluntary and community sectors and with trade unions in a consultative manner to help them develop antisectarian polices and practices

28

The New Humanitarians

specific to their particular circumstances.32 Subsequently, the Interface project expanded and worked closely with the district council community relations officers helping to develop the capacity of local individuals and groups to engage more confidently and effectively in community relations activities. The project annually attracted up to a thousand participants across all parts of Northern Ireland. The WEA later expanded its work to develop programs focusing on collaboration between groups, including training in negotiation and group development. It also developed Managing Better Relations, a program designed to build the capacity of victim/survivor self-help groups to effectively manage internal and external relations work with victims/survivors groups. The WEA also produced many of the most seminal training manuals for community relations work, including titles such as Preparing for Change; Us and Them; Paths Through the Past; Conflict Management; Principled Negotiation Skills; Community Group Management; Facilitative Leadership; Building Successful Partnerships; Developing Facilitation Skills; and Our Social History. All contributed to the competencies necessary for individuals and communities to begin to address their divided histories and aspirations more constructively. Counteract Counteract, which began in the early 1990s, was a group that functioned under the auspices of the trade unions, and whose task was to end sectarianism in the workplace. At the beginning of the Troubles in 1969, workplaces were not only mostly divided, but, where there were some workplaces with both Protestant and Catholic workers, those in the minority often suffered from harassment, and in some cases murder. At particular times of the year, and particularly during those events commemorating historical gains or losses for each community, tensions would be extremely high. Counteract began a series of programs with both employers and workers aimed at eliminating such hostility: workplace awareness programs, antisectarian programs, policies for dealing with flags and emblems, and eventually the training of antisectarian harassment officers who were responsible for ensuring the end of such harassment. Counteract was one of the first major groups to develop in-house training with shop stewards and managers. Their work was developed in often difficult and dangerous circumstances, but they succeeded in almost eliminating much of the intimidating sectarian behavior that has unfortunately marked so many workplaces in Northern Ireland for decades (Counteract 1993), and which used to make life so miserable, and often dangerous, for many workers from both communities. North Belfast Community Development Centre33 North Belfast has suffered more from political and sectarian violence than any other area of Northern Ireland. It is an area crisscrossed by Catholic and Protestant areas, with a high murder rate between the communities. Communal riots are a

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particular feature of the area, and particularly during the summer, when the “marching” season is at its highest.34 Beginning in the mid-1990s, the North Belfast Community Development Centre concentrated on cross-community dialogue between community leaders from different traditions to enlist their help where possible in limiting such violence. A particular feature of such work was the use of mobile phone networks, long before these became universally available. Community leaders were issued mobile phones to keep them in touch even when it was difficult to go into each other’s areas. These were particularly useful to alert others of trouble brewing on each side, and in developing integrated strategies to avoid the worst of such confrontations. Such programs significantly limited the communal violence that was such a dangerous Saturday night feature of the area, particularly in the summer (Jarman and O’Halloran 2000). Churches Church membership and attendance in Ireland, both in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland, are the highest in Western Europe. The churches are still very important centers of social and leisure activity, particularly in rural areas where church attendance numbers are the highest. For much of the conflict, however, with a few honorable exceptions such as the Quakers and some individuals from some of the other churches, churches have either denied that addressing the conflict was their business, or have given a religious endorsement to political and cultural allegiances. In some cases, churches and their congregations have deliberately blocked reconciliation work; in the mid-1980s, a Presbyterian clergyman was forced out of office by his congregation because he crossed the road one Christmas Eve to shake hands with the local Catholic priest in a very minor gesture of reconciliation. A decade later, he was still receiving threatening letters about his action. With the arrival of the CRC, and the new concentration on community relations work in the early 1990s, there was a large increase in the number of church-based organizations that began to concentrate on community relations. The Evangelical Conference on Northern Ireland (ECONI) undertakes substantial internal work with its congregations aimed at increasing tolerance, and was one of the first Protestant organizations to involve Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA. publicly in dialogue.35 All the main churches adopted Youth Link, an organization whose purpose is to foster youth work across the community divide.36 The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) began to develop programs dealing with identity and sectarianism, and set up programs to foster community relations.37 And during the mid-1990s, the role of a few clergymen, both Protestant and Catholic, was crucial in developing dialogue between Sinn Fein and the Dublin government, and in helping the Sinn Fein leadership understand Protestant/unionist thinking, and their desire to remain connected with Britain. Some of the local churches began to play an increasingly important part in facilitating tolerance through activities such as shared social action, shared Bible

30

The New Humanitarians

study groups, interdenominational worship, joint services and demonstrations following murders, setting up interdenominational clergy groups and inviting clergy of other denominations to preach in their churches. Training for student and incumbent clergy to prepare them to deal with such issues, and in how to develop community relations is now being undertaken by all the major churches under the auspices of a variety of church-based reconciliation groups such as Corrymeela, a reconciliation group set up in the 1960s to foster dialogue between the churches.38

MAINSTREAMING COMMUNITY RELATIONS The CRC recognized that in a society that is divided along religious, cultural, or political lines, it is important that work that increases interaction and dialogue, and that develops focused options for cross-communal cooperation, is incorporated as much as possible into every aspect of society. In Northern Ireland, it was felt by those interested in community relations work that such divisions are so detrimental to the development of trust that every opportunity possible should be taken to incorporate and integrate such work into as many institutions as possible. Security Forces The successful use of force in any conflict will depend upon a variety of factors, including the degree of consensus among the people about the legitimacy of such force, the representative nature of the force, the scale of the civil unrest, and the tactics used by state forces to control and stop the conflict. Both the nature of the history of the forces in Northern Ireland and the tactics they used unfortunately ensured that in many cases the security forces themselves were perceived by substantial sections of the community, most generally in nationalist areas, to be part of the problem. The main source of irritation and resentment about the security forces was often the quality of the contact between them and the public when security forces were conducting vehicle checkpoints, foot patrols, or house searches. The number of such interactions taking place was estimated to be about 40,000 per day. The most widespread complaint about them was that of rudeness by the security forces, followed by concern about their use of abusive and sectarian language, very frequent street searches, prolonged car searches, aggressive house and body searches, and interference with nationalist emblems and symbols. Beatings and scuffles were sometimes reported, particularly between young men and the security forces. Sometimes death threats were made, either against the person being searched or against a relative, or threats were made to pass on information about Catholic targets to loyalist paramilitaries—a practice proven to have happened in some cases. Attempts to harass or blackmail people into giving information were also a source for frequent complaint (CAJ 1992). In addition, the security forces ran informants and undertook many covert operations, which substantially increased the suspicion of local communities about their objectives.

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Given the above scenario, the CRC and other conflict resolution bodies such as Mediation Network and the Peace and Reconciliation group in Derry/Londonderry, encouraged the security forces to look at possible interventions that could ensure that the contact itself did not continue to be a problem in fueling resentment and diminishing cooperation with the security forces.39 Both the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC, the police) and the army took steps to increase the quality of their recruits, and put in place selection programs to try to identify bias on the part of would-be trainees. Both sections of the security forces intensified their training to include a much greater emphasis on social skills and interaction work. The army began to prepare its staff for coming to Northern Ireland through an intensive regime that includes some understanding of the history of the region, cultural awareness work, video training on contact work of a positive quality, and in some cases, talks with community workers from both of the main traditions about ways to improve the interactions between the army and the community. The army also introduced very strict rules governing the expected quality of soldiers’ interactions on the streets, with strict disciplinary measures if these are transgressed. In 1993 the RUC, in cooperation with Mediation Network and other conflict resolution bodies, began to develop its own programs to deal with issues of sectarianism among the force, and to promote and encourage a greater respect and understanding among its staff for the differing cultural and political traditions in Northern Ireland. Such training is now an integral part of the initial training of all recruits entering the force, and has also been introduced as part of the in-service training of established police personnel. Many of the police now have also been trained in mediation techniques and are gradually introducing more informal dispute resolution techniques into their repertoire. Their use of such techniques substantially decreased the number of complaints about the security forces. Both police and army increased the rapidity with which they could identify any hostile patterns that were emerging in a particular area, or by a particular regiment. Such identification meant that they could more speedily intervene to curtail any negative patterns identified.40 Sporting Progress The idea of addressing divisions through sport is a very ancient idea, best exemplified by the Olympic Games. In Northern Ireland, however, research has shown that sport is more frequently used to reinforce divisions than to unite communities (Sugden and Bairnen 1993). With the assistance of the CRC, the Sports Council began to address this issue, and sporting activities began to be used with increasing frequency to provide opportunities for increased cultural understanding and cross-community cooperation. In 1995 the Sports Council appointed a full-time community relations officer to ensure that such a community relations need would inform where possible the further development of sport. Work has been undertaken with and by the various agencies responsible for sport. One example is the Irish Football Association,

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responsible for the promotion of soccer. Although soccer is one of the few games played by both communities, many teams were of single identity, and games between teams of different identities frequently led to displays of sectarianism and violence, particularly by club members and spectators. Such games often necessitated a large police presence. Some of these teams are now making substantial efforts to field a mixed team of players, and are using various methods to limit the use of the matches as opportunities for contention. Such work is gradually proving successful in limiting the sectarian hostilities that have traditionally attended football. Sporting skills are also now increasingly being taught on a cross-community basis; rugby and Gaelic football core skills, for example, are now taught together where possible. Some schools are now providing sports from both traditions as part of their curriculum, particularly in integrated schools. And “taster” courses in each sport are now more frequently provided across the community; for example, the Irish Rugby Football Union is now targeting more participation by Catholics in the game by means of Saturday morning sessions with children in Catholic areas. Other new and creative ways are being found by some associations to promote contact and respect between differing sporting traditions; several have set up experimental “mixed rules” games where the participants play games that are a mixture of their traditional games, for example hockey and hurling. Efforts are also being made to introduce more “neutral” games such as basketball, which are free of historical connotations and which have gained in popularity. Institutional Antisectarian Work In 1976 a Fair Employment Commission (FEC) was established to receive complaints of discrimination in employment, to investigate the extent to which there was inequality, and to ensure that organizations began to address equality issues in an effective manner. Subsequent equality legislation, along with the work of the successors of the FEC ensured that by the 1990s, discrimination against Catholics was beginning to be substantially reduced. Such reduction, however, often did little to improve relationships within organizations, and in some cases was seen to exacerbate such relations. The CRC, therefore, began to encourage all organizations, including government departments, public bodies, educational institutions, and community, voluntary, and social bodies to undertake the following antisectarian activities to help them become more inclusive: • • • •

Audit staffing (and management committees where they existed) Review employment practices to try to ensure greater community balance Audit customer ratios to ensure that all communities were served where possible Undertake antisectarian work addressing negative attitudes and behavior within an organization that, deliberately or otherwise, could prevent a balance in staffing and servicing

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• • • •

33

Train staff members to increase their ability and confidence to work in and with any community Review locations to ensure accessibility for all sections of the community Undertake anti-intimidation work with trade union officials, management, and staff to prevent and deal with intimidation Encourage an ethos within the organization to ensure that it respects the cultures of all communities in its decisions about public holidays, the display of symbols and flags, and its choice of patrons.41

Such work is not easy, involving as it does people in management who are often themselves fearful of such contact, but substantial strides were taken in developing such work in many areas, including businesses (CRC 1997), social services (Barry and Higgins 1999), and service delivery (Dunn and Morgan 1999). This approach has been further assisted by the statutory requirement placed upon most major institutions in 2000, following the Belfast Agreement, not just to address issues of equality, but also to address issues of “good community relations.”42 This requirement has significantly increased the necessity for organizations to develop their expertise in this area, and many drew substantially upon the previous learnings of other institutions in the field that had already partnered with the CRC in developing such work. Business Another newcomer that CRC helped entice into the building of peace was the business community, which began to develop its approach to the ending of violence in the early 1990s.43 Although previously content to complain about the effects of the violence on business from the sidelines, the business community now began to coalesce with trade unions to see if a more strategic approach could be put into place that would put pressure on both republican and loyalist paramilitaries to end their campaigns of violence, and to pressure the politicians to get down to the business of building an agreement. Groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, the Institute of Directors, the Confederation of British Industry, and all the major trade unions joined together and began to make statements urging the need to increase cross-border cooperation, end the war, and start serious political negotiation. In addition, they involved themselves in dialogue with all the political parties, including Sinn Fein, even before the cease-fires were announced in 1994. Their influence was very salutary, particularly on the unionist political parties, which began to feel the need to respond to the pressure to enter into serious political dialogue. CULTURAL TRADITIONS WORK Affirming Identity The first efforts of the Cultural Traditions Group were aimed at affirming the validity of differing identities. There was agreement among the group that those aspects of culture that were mainly Catholic had been discriminated against both

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The New Humanitarians

in their coverage by the media and in their support by the state. Since affirmation could be seen as threatening to many unionists, who feared it as a manifestation of political assertion, it was also deemed necessary to assist the development of cultural confidence (and not triumphalism or majoritarianism) among those who were unionist. Single-identity work on the part of both communities was encouraged in the first instance, and many single-identity projects were resourced and funded. Sometimes these were historical projects; World War I and World War II projects were particularly popular among unionists who felt that their role and loyalty in these wars had been significantly overlooked. The Orange Order, an institution feared and reviled by most Catholics, received funding to make a video of its work and history. In the case of nationalists, extra or new funding was given to projects that endorsed and developed Irish language and culture. The CTG also resourced and funded a proliferation of published cultural materials that addressed existing gaps in such materials and encouraged new thinking around the various traditions. The group also assisted broadcast media productions that would similarly exemplify cultural variety, and they helped to ensure local programming that exemplified an ethos of diversity. It also helped develop the growth in local history societies in many areas, particularly through helping to resource groups such as the Ulster Federation for Local Studies. The local history societies provided for two necessary factors: In the first instance, for many people, they provided a place of cultural affirmation, a chance to recall their roots and to feel proud of their areas. Second, such groups were also encouraged by the quality of the work itself to address their pasts in all of their complexity, and not just to focus on the simplicities that could confirm rather than decrease divisions. Increasingly, these groups also in many cases provided and continue to provide excellent vehicles for encouraging cross-community contact. Many succeeded in crossing the political and social boundaries, and began to share history and cultural sessions on a regular basis. Cultural Traditions “Fairs” In 1991 the CTG organized the first-ever Cultural Traditions Fair in Belfast. Through it, they brought together about forty groups with very different cultural and historical perspectives for a few days to provide an open exhibition for each other and for the public. It was a unique and challenging undertaking for it brought together groups that had been in the main suspicious, hostile, and often violent regarding one another for most of the life of the state. The fair was subsequently repeated at many locations throughout Northern Ireland. In addition to the cultural fairs, the CTG also organized a symbols exhibition that has been displayed at most local district councils. This was a very colorful exhibition of the hundreds of artifacts from all traditions that are displayed in homes and halls and streets, and on lapels, throughout the island of Ireland, usually to proclaim a particular loyalty, and often relating to particular institutions. In many cases, these symbols can give offence or cause hostility (Bryson and McCartney 1994). Such

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cultural displays, however, can accustom people to being in the proximity of symbols with which they usually feel uncomfortable or hostile, and tentatively point to a richness of political diversity that is available to be creatively harnessed rather than used destructively. Ireland is extremely rich in musical tradition. Its instrumental compositions are based on flute, tin whistle, violin (fiddle), bodhran (an Irish drum) and, in some cases, accordion music. Unaccompanied singing, local folk compositions, and the music of such groups as the Chieftains, which has gained an international reputation, add to the variety. In addition there is a vast repertoire of dance music for traditional Irish dancing. Unfortunately, although the musical tradition has always had some participants from the Protestant community, it has usually been seen as Catholic. Hence, it has sometimes attracted both the verbal and physical hostility of loyalists, and pubs have been attacked because of their custom of playing such music. By providing opportunities for music groups to consolidate and develop the existing interest on the part of some Protestants in such music, threats were for the most part averted. In addition, by encouraging the Scottish musical tradition, a tradition that is part of the heritage of many unionists and that historically has had very strong links (both in music and in dance) with the Irish tradition, it has been possible to widen the appreciation that now exists of both Irish and Scottish music and dance in both communities. Work has also been undertaken by a group called the Different Drums to combine the main drums—the Irish bodhran and the traditional unionist Lambeg—in some exciting instrumental compositions, thus displaying their capacity for interaction and harmony.44 Such work began in 1989 and has provided for a much less-threatening musical connection between the communities. In addition, it has spurred an interest in new combinations that can combine the best of both traditions. Irish Language Toward the late 1980s, and particularly under the influence of the Cultural Traditions Group, it was recognized by many that the negative government response to the Irish language had been both shortsighted and unnecessary, particularly in view of the fact that in other locales, the regional languages of Welsh and Scots Gaelic had each received significant support for their retention and development. The refusal of the unionist government to provide any support for the Irish language had provided a significant bone of contention for nationalists, who added that refusal to their list of discriminations. The BBC was persuaded to introduce occasional programs on the Irish language to its radio audiences. Although there was considerable resistance from many unionists, the BBC persisted with the experiment, and was eventually persuaded to introduce a regular Irish-language program in 1981, followed by some broadcasting for schools in 1985. In 1991 the BBC broadcast its first television production in Irish. In 1990 the CTG, along with the British government, helped

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The New Humanitarians

to set up and fund the Ultacht Trust, a nonsectarian group to develop and fund the study and practice of the Irish language, and which included on its management committee members from the unionist tradition. In addition, the government began to fund those schools that taught through the medium of the Irish language on the same basis as other schools. In 1992 the secretary of state for Northern Ireland announced that where there was a local demand, street names in Irish could be erected alongside the English names. A more recent public variant in the identity debate in Northern Ireland has been the emergence of the Ulster Scots language45 as a factor for consideration as an identity marker for those Protestants who had traveled from the lowlands of Scotland to Northern Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This language was protected, often through rural isolation, as a living, spoken language throughout many parts of Northern Ireland. With the advent of more regional and international media, it seemed to be dying a natural death until its revival by the development of an Ulster Scots Society in 1992. The language became important, primarily as a cultural and political identifier for some Protestants, as had the Irish language in the 1980s for many Catholics. The need for its support has been recognized as part of the Agreement, and it is one of the recognized languages of the political Assembly. Northern Ireland has always had a vibrant dramatic tradition—not just on the stages of its major city, Belfast, but also throughout its villages and towns, where local drama has had a significant place in the life of the community. In some cases, this involvement was to prove to be of significance both in affirming a culture and in questioning its simplifications. A report released in 1994 showed how the work of local dramatists working in tandem with local dramatic groups had a very significant effect in facilitating discussion about problematic issues both within and between communities (Grant 1994). The drama helped pose fundamental questions about issues such as identity, social concern, and the political possibilities that beset the conflict. In particular, when the drama picks up and deals with the very complex emotions surrounding local community dilemmas over paramilitary activity, dissatisfaction with policing, social and cultural marginalization, and other issues, it has an extremely engaging capacity that can be more powerful than many seminars and workshops. Such was the success of the above programs that, following the Belfast Agreement in 1998, a new Department for Culture Arts and Leisure (Ministry DCAL) was set up and began to take particular responsibility for issues of culture and diversity. It set up a program called Diversity 2146 as a joint venture between the Community Relations Council and DCAL, whose aim was to ensure that cultural diversity continues to be regarded as a positive, not a negative force, in Northern Ireland. Its aims are to facilitate support mechanisms relevant to cultural diversity, and to examine existing legislation, policies, and projects to ensure that they all assist the development of a culturally pluralist society. This mainstreaming of cultural pluralism within a governmental department of Northern Ireland as an aspiration to be supported and resourced is an indication of how far the success of

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such work has traveled. What was once illegal has now become an essential part of government policy designed to ensure a sustainable peace.

TRAINING CHANGE AGENTS Given the need for the multiplication of the work, both in kind, quality, and quantity, one of the first issues CRC addressed was the issue of training for the work. It defined training as the acquisition of knowledge and skills, in a structured context, which has immediate application to the conflict resolution work in hand. The CRC believed that this preparation of people and groups to deal more confidently and effectively in the prevention, management, and resolution of conflict would usually require two overlapping elements: the acquisition of knowledge and the development of specific skills. The knowledge requirement for such intervention is usually for new ways of analyzing and understanding the dynamics of conflict that can circumvent older and more destructive ways of resolving it: the need to devise win/win solutions to the conflict as opposed to win/lose scenarios, or the knowledge and understanding of the particular histories of the differing communities, and their differing hopes and fears. Necessary skills include the ability to better understand and manage the dynamics of group work, the ability to manage difficult emotions emerging within a group, to empathize and support people in addressing their hostilities and fears in safety and moving beyond these to cooperation, to ensure that the group or institution faced up to and addressed the necessary changes within their community or institution, and to help them deliver on such. The need for support in developing or facilitating training in Northern Ireland has proven to be substantial. Workshops are often fraught with denial, anger, and/or tension. Participants are drawn from widely differing perspectives, and few participants have been untouched by the violence. Workshops can include relatives of people who have been killed by the security forces or by the paramilitaries. Dealing with such issues can be extremely demanding, and the need for support and for casework sharing is vital. Such development, in its initial stages, often met with at the very least resistance on the part of many organizations and groups; in many cases, it was met with open hostility on the part of those who were either fearful of its potential to further increase divisions, or those who saw it as counterproductive to their own political preferences. Careful entry strategies, which involve securing the consent and support of those responsible for policy making and resource allocation, were required if such work was to be allowed to proceed effectively. Another major problem facing preparation work was that of the appropriate focus for the work. A conflict brings up so many difficult issues that the problem of being overwhelmed by obvious conflict resolution needs is substantial, and not necessarily conducive to accurate prioritizing. In one particular week, trying to arrange for a containment or cessation of violence may be the most pressing priority. On the other hand, the more long-term work of trying to reconstruct the structures that

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The New Humanitarians

continue the violence, such as structures of inequitable patterns of housing or employment, or divided educational systems, needs to be thoroughly conducted so as to ensure an eventual diminution of the circumstances that spawn the occurrence of violence. Gradually, within Northern Ireland (which has had the luxury of occasional respites from the kind of communal violence that has beset other conflicts), a variety of training approaches have been developed to take account of parallel needs, locational needs, and short-term, medium-term, and long term needs. Four major approaches to training began to be developed, and are still generally available from the CRC and through other agencies. The first is a modular approach, which offers training for particular needs that have been identified, or pilot testing of training for emerging needs. The second approach is to offer training through more intensive, action-learning programs for those involved full time in community relations work. The third approach has been to develop customized programs in conjunction with other organizations (public, statutory, voluntary, community, or business) based on more precise identification of their needs for conflict resolution. The fourth and most recent approach has been to organize such training on a locality/area base, so as to ensure that the conflict resolution needs of a particular place—village, town, rural ward or city estate, or hostile sectarian interface—are addressed in a more effective manner. Training modules are often run on a one- to three-day basis, addressing particular areas of difficulty or need. Most were originally organized through the CRC, but are now mainly delivered through or in conjunction with other agencies. They are offered so as to provide a repertoire of skills for use in various conflict situations, and the participants usually come from a variety of backgrounds: community workers, trade union representatives, local council political representatives, youth workers, and others. They often include •

•

•

• • • •

Contact facilitation skills, creative ideas about how to organize qualitative contact, and how to arrange for longer-term, sustainable opportunities for continuing such contact and thus ensuring its effectiveness Prejudice reduction work, which addresses prejudice and stereotyping as well as accurate information sharing between communities about each other’s hopes, fears, and beliefs Political dialogue and cooperation skills, including practice in listening and clarification skills, and exercises in creating constructive discussions of differing political choices and preferences by the participants Cultural traditions work that facilitates the sharing of cultural expression in a noncontentious way through shared fairs, festivals, and workshops Single-identity work to enable communities to look nondefensively at the validity and worth of their own history and culture Cross-community justice and rights work to ensure that groups address rights issues on a principled rather than a loyalty basis Antisectarian work, which assists people in conducting community and organizational audits to assess their sectarian nature, and to subsequently

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•

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develop programs to increase their inclusive capacity, for example, through mixed-management committees and shared work on social issues Anti-intimidation work, which addresses issues of intimidation within the community and the drawing up of organizational and community strategies to deal with the problem

Mediation skills training was also recognized to be vital for mediation within and between communities, and between politicians, paramilitaries, and governments. Action-learning training programs were initially developed to address the needs of people involved in full-time community relations work. What had once been a voluntary, often part-time activity began to develop into a full-time, quasi-professional occupation. It was in response to such developments that the CRC initiated its Action Learning Program for those involved in full-time community relations work. The program was run by the CRC, sometimes in conjunction with other community relations groups, and took place over a period of six months. The course consisted of three residential workshops and six working days. As part of the course, participants initiated, developed, and evaluated a conflict resolution project in their own area of work. The course was particularly geared to local conflict resolution strategy identification and practice. The program also provided the individual with increased skills in intensive group work, as well as the modular skills identified above. Customized programs that addressed particular organizational needs became more popular, and these were increasingly developed by the CRC in conjunction with other agencies. Such programs are probably now the most common form of training in Northern Ireland. The programs are tailored to suit the needs of particular groups to deal with sectarianism and issues arising from community divisions. They are drawn up in consultation with the organization, and if possible or appropriate, such programs attempt to involve the organization’s training or personnel officer. Organizations included the Sports Council, Health and Social Services boards, the Education and Library boards, the Training and Employment Agency, the security forces, local councils, all the main churches, and many others who were encouraged to train their own personnel to undertake the community relations training work that was needed to address particular issues relevant to their work. Local area programs began to emerge in some areas as the number of people willing to be involved in reconciliation work increased. These were tailored to address particular area needs. In Derry/Londonderry city, for example, many groups from differing areas of the city, and from varying areas of interest such as human rights and church work, began to collectively address the major exodus of Protestants from the west bank of the city to the east bank. In the Portadown area, many groups joined together to address the continuing violence in the town, both between and within communities. Such locally based programs have now become the norm on the part of all district councils, which were later tasked with developing such programs in the wake of the Belfast Agreement of 1998.

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Much of the training work initiated by the CRC is now being undertaken by organizations such as TIDES (Training for Transformation, Interdependence, Diversity, Equity, and Sustainability), Mediation Northern Ireland, and the numerous organizations and consultants for the work listed on the CRC website. In addition, much of this training is now accredited through the Open College Network (OCN).47

PROLIFERATION During the 1990s community relations work began to successfully engage a much wider spectrum of people, including those who had previously been cynical about the “peace and doves” stereotype attached to the work (Bloomfield 1997). It therefore became more possible to build a coalition of people and organizations addressing both the “softer” issues, such as understanding, dialogue, and cooperation, as well as the “harder” issues of inequality, rights, policing, and political and constitutional differences. In addition, the program begun in the 1970s that more substantially resourced community development began to pay significant political dividends. Such work, in the absence of local democracy, had provided for community participation in governmental consultation processes about social, economic, and political issues. By the 1990s, however, it had also helped to generate a new breed of “community” politicians, who developed loyalist, republican, and feminist thinking in a way that significantly enriched the political mix of parties that were eventually able to sign the Belfast Agreement. Parties such as the PUP, the UDP, the NIWC, and Sinn Fein all have considerable experience at community and social politics, including cross-community local work, through their involvement in such programs as the Interface Project, or the North Belfast Community Development Centre.48 Such experiences provided them with fruitful contacts gained from their collective experience in addressing local social issues together, and greatly assisted their collectively addressing the social and economic tasks that faced them as representatives in the new Assembly. In addition, following the ceasefires of 1994, external assistance was also offered for peace building by the European Union, which decided to help underpin the peace by allocating substantial funds to help build the economy and enshrine peace. Such funds have been useful, as their criteria for distribution often included the need for communities to work together through local partnerships, such as business, political trade union, and community representatives working together on funding decisions. Such work built on much of the community relations work that had been developed or funded by the CRC in the early 1990s, and significantly multiplied that work. As the dominos began to fall, and a political agreement dawned, I left the CRC in 1997 for other fields. I believed the backbone of the work had been completed, and the institutional implications of the work were beginning to be threaded and mainstreamed into every organization in Northern Ireland. Before I left in 1997,

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I sought to undertake one further innovation.49 Some time previously, professors Tom Hadden and Kevin Boyle had written a book addressing the central question of separation and sharing in a divided society (Hadden and Boyle 1994). It was a hope of mine to look at the possibility of policy legislation, which would be complementary to equality legislation, but which would ensure that every public agency, and where possible business, voluntary, and community organizations would also be encouraged to take their obligation to promote good community relations seriously. The CRC therefore commissioned Tom Hadden to write a paper, “Possible Structures for the Development and Implementation of Policy Appraisal on Separation and Sharing (PASS).”50 This proved to be the forerunner of the Good Relations requirement that was written into the text of the Belfast Agreement in 1998. This law ensures that the work of the Community Relations Council would, by law, now be shared by every publicly funded body in Northern Ireland—and that the need to be vigilant and plan for the management of diversity would become part of the responsibility and everyday planning of all of our major organizations, thus helping to assist in sustaining peace.

LESSONS LEARNED Find institutional champions to support and protect your work. The CRC could never have been set up without the active support of the head of the Civil Service at that time, assisted by several courageous civil servants who braved the complicated and dangerous terrain of Northern Ireland to help establish it. Such momentum was hugely assisted by a variety of significant people from the community, including the legal, academic, trade union, and business sectors, who supported it steadfastly throughout its development and on into the somewhat easier terrain that followed the Belfast Agreement in 1998. In addition, the efforts of helping to shape the work of organizations such as the police and army became possible only when champions from within these organizations emerged to help promote and develop the work within those institutions. Use insider/outsider roles constructively. The development of the work of the CRC often involved creating linkages with people on the inside of major organizations who were willing to share possible opportunities with each other, and accustom each other to the cultural and organizational necessities for success. Such work often involved partnerships in raising issues at appropriate meetings, helping each other phrase letters to leaders and organizations to ensure positive responses, identifying possible challenges and blockages, and framing opportunities for progress in as nonthreatening a fashion as possible. Do what you can, when you can—or you may regret it later. In Northern Ireland this meant consistently identifying those areas where progress, with some energy and courage, appeared to be possible to achieve, even on the most difficult of bloody days. Such a multifaceted approach also has meant

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that at difficult times, when one area of work became too difficult or too dangerous to progress, there were others where some success could be achieved, and thus the momentum of progress could be retained. We discovered it was never too early to start what needed to be done on mediumor long-term issues such as providing training, creating safe public housing, finding extra employment possibilities, or developing shared schools—and that delaying such efforts may mean that opportunities for political agreements slip away at a later stage. Do not deny the importance of identity. The decision of the Cultural Traditions Group to assist in affirming and valuing cultural and theological differences, rather than fudging or hiding them, was important. It is ironic that often only when such have been validated do people feel free to become more flexible—but such flexibility needs to be at their own pace and time, not that of any outside organizations.51 Help provide conceptual reframing, and a language with which to progress. The recognition that a win/lose outcome to any conflict is likely to be a loss for all, and the need to create win/win solutions in order to create sustainable solutions, provided a useful conceptual framework for much of the work. Such a framework has been particularly useful not just in helping to resolve local issues of marching and street fighting, but also in enlightening much of the new political thinking that eventually emerged around solutions for power sharing. The reframing of cultural differences as richness— not as problems—helped immeasurably in informing both policy and practice. The idea that people living in Northern Ireland can have both an Irish and a British passport—rather than having to choose—was a logical extension of the work of the CRC.52 In addition, familiarizing politicians with conflict resolution process strategies enabled them to do difficult things under the auspices of “conflict resolution”—a framework used frequently by the leaders of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) as the conflict began to come to an end.53 Nurture the ground. John Paul Lederach (1998) places great importance on the development of a “peace constituency” in order to ensure ultimate success in resolving a conflict. If one fails to create a groundswell that can accept the necessary compromises that often accompany a settlement, and enough support for an accommodating solution has not been garnered, it may be too late to start acquiring such when the agreement is in sight—and the agreement will fail. The sheer number of projects that were developed in Northern Ireland provided for the necessary linkages between government, paramilitaries and politicians—and for a multitude of discussions within and between communities in order for an agreement to be reached (Williams and Fitzduff 2007). Learn from elsewhere. When a war is in progress, it can be difficult to do anything other than survive. Every news bulletin that brings word of another death (as many did in Northern Ireland over the past thirty years) ensures that there has

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been all too little time for those involved in conflict resolution to stop, reflect, and learn from what has been achieved in such resolution elsewhere. And yet, when we lifted our eyes from our bloody streets and took the time to meet with those involved in the practice of conflict resolution elsewhere, it both revived and revised many of our approaches to our own problems. Aided by organizations such as the Project on Justice in Times of Transition,54 the British Council’s Governance Program,55 and UNU/INCORE,56 we were able to look at a multitude of possibilities elsewhere where violence had been managed more constructively, where war lords had at last become constructive leaders in creating a future of peace together, and to learn from them. Mainstream the work. It is never enough for one or a few agencies to be tasked with ensuring good relations within a region or a country. Where divisions of history, ethnicity, language or power exist, they provide a perfect petri dish for the development of conflict and for possible violence to erupt. Therefore, the task of ensuring that existing divisions are managed and resolved peacefully must be shared by all institutions and people that have the capacity to continually create, recreate, and sustain a fair, just, and inclusive society for all citizens, and one in which equality is proactively pursued, diversity is valued, and mutual interdependence is recognized and catered for. Without such commitment, any agreements reached may be easily breached, and violence may return. Patience. Unfortunately, recreating and refocusing a society that has been caught for decades—indeed centuries—in its hatred for each others’ perspectives and hopes is a long, frustrating, and sometimes dangerous task. When I first took the post of director of the CRC in 1990, I placed on my wall a list of organizations we wanted to enlist in our work, and we staged a plan for each of them, from first conversation, to their taking responsibility for actively training for their community relations work. Some came on board relatively quickly, within a span of one or two years. Some, such as the churches, took much longer, but by 1998, most had come on board. Some took an even longer time. Following the civil strife of 1969, the Housing Executive of Northern Ireland had been set up to deal with claims of discrimination, and had largely succeeded in undertaking this task successfully. However, most of the estates it administered were either Catholic or Protestant, and such ghettoization was extremely problematic for those families that wanted to live in mixed estates so as to broaden the perspectives of their children, and in particular for the increasing number of people in mixed marriages who had nowhere safe to live. In 1992 we began conversations with the Housing Executive on a possible mixed public housing estate, which would be jointly managed by the two communities. It was over fourteen years later, in 2006, that the Housing Executive announced it was ready to begin its work on such an idea. Learning to be patient, and persistent, in the face of people’s fears was not easy—but luckily those who continued the work of the council after I left continued the conversations, year after year, until more and more alliances were created.57

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Believe that all can change. Inevitably, there are people for whom change is extremely difficult. Such resistance can be based on a reluctance to lose power, while for many, it is based on a fear of losing identity. Some individuals and groups, whose core meaning has become bound up with their engagement in the conflict, may also resist its resolution, knowing (perhaps only at a subconscious level) that such resolution may leave them bereft in some way (Fitzduff 1989b). However, the experience of Northern Ireland would seem to suggest that there are few organizations or people that are not at some level capable of developing positive changes in their attitudes and behavior toward the out group, even when a conflict is still in progress. To see Martin McGuinness, a onetime IRA commander, and Dr. Ian Paisley, an apparently irredentist unionist, sharing power with each other and relaxing and joking as they do so in 2007, is indeed an encouragement to maintaining the faith in the possibility of change on the part of the most apparently fundamentalist of believers. Retaining such faith even through the darkest of times is perhaps the most important contribution that community relations workers can make to the development of sustainable peace.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: The Community Relations Council Founder and/or Executive Director: Mari Fitzduff Mission/Description: The aim of this council is to assist the people of Northern Ireland to recognize and counter the effects of their communal division. It was set up to promote relationships among Catholics and Protestants in Ireland. Its aim is to promote a peaceful and just society based on reconciliation and mutual trust. Website: www.nicrc.org.uk/about-the-council/background-info Address: Mailstop 086 Waltham, MA 02454 USA Phone: 781-736-5017 E-mail: mfi[email protected]

NOTES 1. Unionists generally want to retain the constitutional link with Britain, while nationalists want to break that link and unite the island of Ireland under the government of the Republic of Ireland. The island had been under British rule since the eleventh century, but following a long independence struggle, it was divided in 1921. The southern portion of the island achieved independence, while the northern part retained its British link to suit the fears and the needs of the Protestant communities. The term republicans

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3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

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generally refers to those Catholics who were most passionately committed to a united Ireland, many of whom were prepared to countenance violence to achieve their aim. Loyalist was a term usually used to denote Protestants who were most passionately “loyal” to the British monarchy—some of whom were involved in paramilitary groups. Discrimination against Catholics became rife in Northern Ireland in the decades following the division of the island in 1921 (Rose 1971). The civil rights movement started in 1967 as a movement for Catholic equality, but not enough was done quickly enough to address issues of inequality. Within two years, a peaceful process was turned into a violence campaign that saw the reemergence of paramilitary forces on both sides. A few generations previously, the family had become Catholic through marriage, but they retained the trappings of the settlers. For others, politeness was often absent, and the behavior of the security forces, both army and police, was sometimes counterproductive to the maintenance of peace (CAJ 1992). In Northern Ireland, much of this work was called community relations work. In other situations, it is called coexistence work, conflict transformation work, or peace-building work. This work is about achieving sustainable agreements to address societal or international divisions and conflicts without the use of military force. There had been a body, the Community Relations Commission, charged with such responsibilities set up in the early 1970s, but it had been abolished after an abortive attempt to set up a new parliamentary Assembly in Northern Ireland through the Sunningdale agreement of 1974. This agreement set up a power-sharing government between the politicians that lasted only a few months. After this attempt at a political power-sharing arrangement, the regional Assembly was dissolved, and power returned to the British government. Responsibility for community relations within Northern Ireland was settled upon the Department of Education. The department was charged with formulating and sponsoring policies for the improvement of community relations in Northern Ireland, and continued to do this through minor funding of district councils as well as community and voluntary groups. Now called the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland (www.community foundationni.org). The total population of Northern Ireland is 1.6 million. When the region was created in 1922, Protestants were almost 66 percent of the population, Catholics 33 percent. Current figures from 2001 census (http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/ni/popul.htm) are 43.76% Catholic, 53.13% Protestant, 0.39% other, and 2.72% none. In the absence of regional politicians, a secretary of state and ministers were appointed by the United Kingdom government to run Northern Ireland. This arrangement, which was known as Direct Rule, continued until the setting up of a new regional Assembly after the Belfast Agreement of 1998. Now Sir Ken Bloomfield. Now called the Community Relations Unit (see http://www.ccruni.gov.uk/). Two new branches, Linguistic Diversity and New TSN (Social Inclusion), were subsequently established in the autumn of 1998. The more senior civil servant appointed was Ronnie Spence, who was assisted by a colleague, Tony McCusker. The fact that they would have been perceived as coming from different religious communities helped the credibility of their work. These were facilitated by the existence of the Institute of Irish studies, based at Queen’s University in Belfast, and led with vision by Professor Ronnie Buchanan. The institute was set up in 1965 and became a leading center for research-led teaching in Irish

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15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

The New Humanitarians Studies. One of the most notable features of the institute was that it spanned the community divide. Such were the open hostilities between the local representatives that it was not unknown for the police to have to be brought in to manage the eruption of physical violence within the council chambers. Although Catholic were proportionally more disadvantaged that Protestants, there were many communities where Protestants were also poor—and not to have included them in programs addressing poverty would itself have been discriminatory, This now works under the name of Mediation Northern Ireland and provides most of the mediators for issues of tension and division in Northern Ireland (see www.mediationnorthernireland.org). The erstwhile chair of the CTG, the ex-controller of the BBC, Dr. James Hawthorne, was to become chairman of the CRC, and a distinguished Catholic ex–civil servant, Dr. Maurice Hayes, was in turn to become chair of the CTG. Although there were a few minor attempts by the Civil Service and others within government to influence some decisions in the first year of the council’s existence, they were quickly reminded of the council’s independence by the strength and public credibility of the council members. To this day, the council remains a mainly government-funded, independent body, despite several attempts to set it up as a regular NDPB—a nondepartmental public body—the usual status for executive bodies of the government. The Troubles was a universally used euphemism for the conflicts in Northern Ireland. By the time of the Belfast Agreement, there were forty-two such walls. Staff were challenged and threatened from both sides—as director I received bullets in the post, the usual sign of death threats. By 2007 this had grown to forty staff. Dr. Maurna Crozier, who had so ably provided support for the development of the CTG group in its early days, was appointed the first CTG development officer within the newly established CRC. In its first year, the council gave out 176 grants, a total of $1.38 million. In 2005–2006 the CRC distributed over 800 grants, and disbursed $13 million (CRC Annual Reports 1991 and 2006). After the ceasefires of 1994, the European Union allocated £350 million toward work aimed at the development and maintenance of the peace, and this significantly increased the number of groups undertaking the work. For a fuller review of such work, see the website of the Community Relations Council (http://www.community-relations.org.uk/community-relations/). http://www.belfastinterfaceproject.org/. http://www.peaceprg.co.uk/. Protestants call it Londonderry; Catholics call it Derry. http://www.wea-ni.com/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1. With the creation of Counteract—see next section—trade unions were no longer seen as a primary target group. http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/cdc/. There are over 3,000 marches in Northern Ireland every year, most of them Protestant. Many of these march down streets that once were Protestant and now are Catholic, thus creating tension within these neighborhoods (Jarman 1999). http://www.econi.org/. http://www.youthlink.org.uk/index.cfm?id=17.

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37. http://www.ymca-ireland.org/Equity%20diversity%20&%20Interdependence.htm. 38. http://www.corrymeela.org/. 39. Republicans usually saw working with the security forces in any capacity as “‘collusion,” and people doing the work found themselves threatened for undertaking it. 40. As part of the Belfast Agreement of 1998, the Patten report (http://www.belfast. org.uk/report.htm) brought about a total overview of police culture, recruiting practices, and other topics. The police force in existence today is rapidly addressing issues of community balance within its ranks, with Catholics being recruited on a 50–50 basis with Protestants. 41. See Logue (1993) for recommendations about such work. 42. Belfast Agreement (http://www.nio.gov.uk/the-agreement). 43. http://www.international-alert.org/pdfs/lblp_Northern_Ireland.pdf. 44. Different Drums (http://differentdrums.info/). The Lambeg drum is most often played by the marching bands of the Orange Order, a traditionally male religious Protestant organization. See http://www.grandorangelodge.co.uk/. 45. This language/dialect is spoken in the lowlands of Scotland, where many of the Protestant settlers came from in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. 46. www.diversity21.co.uk. 47. See http://www.mediationnorthernireland.org/, http://www.tidestraining.org/courses. html, and http://www.community-relations.org.uk/services/training-and-support/. 48. The (PUP) Progressive Unionist Party, the UDP (Ulster Democratic Party) and the NIWC (Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition) all have their basis in local community work. Sinn Fein also draws much of its support from such work. 49. I subsequently took over UNU/INCORE, a combined United Nations and University of Ulster international research program on issues of conflict, and in 2004 I founded an MA program for midcareer professionals interested in coexistence issues at Brandeis University in the United States. 50. Tom Hadden, unpublished paper written for the CRC, February 1997. 51. We continually funded translation facilities for cross-community meetings, even though everyone in Northern Ireland speaks English. If we did not provide such facilities, this became the point of contention that stopped people from moving on. However, when they were provided, what happened most often was that after a perfunctory, short time speaking Irish or Ulster Scots, most participants happily reverted to using English in order to dialogue more effectively and speedily. 52. The Belfast Agreement means that anyone born in Northern Ireland is free to choose either or both British and Irish identities and passports. 53. The IRA was the foremost nationalist/Catholic paramilitary group in Northern Ireland. 54. http://www.pjtt.org/. 55. http://www.britishcouncil.org/governance.htm. 56. http://www.incore.ulst.ac.uk/. 57. These include people such as Dr. Duncan Morrow, who is currently director of the CRC, and whose vision and inspiration has been a huge asset in continuing to develop the credibility and capacity of the CRC.

REFERENCES Barry, E., and P. Higgins. (1999). Getting Off the Fence: Challenging Sectarianism in Personal Social Services. London: Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work.

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Bloomfield, David. (1997). Peacemaking Strategies in Northern Ireland: Building Complementarity in Conflict Management. London: Macmillan. Boyle, Kevin, and Tom Hadden. (1994). Northern Ireland: The Choice. London: Penguin. Bryson, Lucy, and Clem McCartney. (1994). Clashing Symbols: A Report on the Use of Flags, Anthems and Other Symbols in Northern Ireland. Belfast: CRC. CAJ. (1992). Adding Insult to Injury. Belfast: CAJ. Church, Cheyanne, Anna Visser, and Laurie Johnson. (2002). Single Identity Work: An Approach to Conflict Resolution in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland: UNU/INCORE (http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/chc05/). Counteract. (1993). Annual Report. Belfast: Counteract. CRC. (1991 and 2006). Annual Reports. Belfast: CRC. CRC. (1995). “Of Mutual Benefit”: The Capacity of Economic Development to Contribute to Community Relations. Belfast: CRC. CRC. (1997). Doing Business in a Divided Society. Belfast: CRC. Fitzduff, Mari. (1988). Community Conflict Skills. Belfast: CRC. Fitzduff, Mari. (1989a). A Typology of Community Relations Work and Contextual Necessities. Belfast: Policy Planning and Research Unit. Reprinted 1993 as Approaches to Community Relations Work. Belfast: CRC (http://www.community-relations.org.uk/filestore/ documents/Approaches_to_Community_Relations_Work.pdf). Fitzduff, Mari. (1989b). “From Ritual to Consciousness: A Study of Change in Progress in Northern Ireland.” Unpublished PhD thesis, Londonderry: University of Ulster. Fitzduff, M. (1995). “Managing Conflict: Voluntary Organizations, Government, and the Search for Peace,” in Voluntary Action and Social Policy in Northern Ireland, ed. Acheson and A. Williamson. Avebury Press. Fitzduff, M. (2002). Beyond Violence: Conflict Resolution Processes in Northern Ireland. Tokyo: United Nations University Press/Brookings. Frazer, Hugh, and Mari Fitzduff. (1986). Improving Community Relations. Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights (http://www.community-relations.org.uk/ filestore/documents/Improving_Community_Relations.pdf). Grant, David. (1994). Playing the Wild Card: Community Drama. Belfast: Queen’s University Institute of Irish Studies. Hughes, Joanne, and Caitlin Donnelly. (1998). Single Identity Community Relations in Northern Ireland: Final Report. Ulster Papers in Public Policy and Management, no. 77. Belfast: University of Ulster. International Alert. (2000). The Business of Peace: The Private Sector as a Partner in Conflict Prevention and Resolution. London: International Alert (http://www.international-alert. org/publications.htm#business). Jarman, N. (1999). Material Conflicts: Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland. Oxford: Berg. Jarman, N., and Chris O’Halloran. (2000). Peacelines and Battlefields? Responding to Conflict in Interface Areas. Research and Policy Reports No. I. Belfast: North Belfast Community Development Centre. Logue, Ken. (1993). Anti-Sectarian Work. Belfast: CRC. Lederach, John Paul. (1998). Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies. United States Institute for Peace. O’Halloran, Chris, and Gillian McIntyre. (1999). Inner East Outer West: Addressing Conflict in Two Interface Areas. Belfast: Belfast Interface Project.

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Patten, Chris. (1998). The Report of the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland (http://www.belfast.org.uk/report.htm). Rose, Richard. (1971). Governing without Consensus: An Irish Perspective. London: Faber. Ryder, Chris. (1994). Cultural Traditions 1989-94. Belfast: CRC. Sugden, J., and A. Bairnen. (1993). Sport, Sectarianism and Society in Northern Ireland. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Williams, Sue, and Niall Fitzduff. (2007). Retrospective on Northern Ireland Emerging from Conflict. Cambridge: Collaborative for Development Action.

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Amnesty International: A Global Movement That Began with One Malachi Garff, Orlando Rodriguez, and James Wood

Amnesty International (AI) is a worldwide movement committed to ending abuses of human rights. Its vision is of a world in which every person enjoys all the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights along with other international standards. In pursuit of this vision, AI’s mission is to undertake research and action focused on preventing and ending grave human rights abuses. It operates under the firm conviction that individuals can make a difference. The idea for Amnesty International was born back in the 1960s when one man became outraged over a news account of two Portuguese students who were imprisoned for making a toast to liberty. Peter Benenson, a lawyer and political activist, was sitting on a London underground train, reading the Daily Telegraph, when he spotted the article that reported on these two students’ unwarranted arrest and incarceration. The account provoked deep frustration within Benenson, not surprisingly, since his ideas of equality and justice had been instilled in him at a young age. As a student, he had been engaged in a number of endeavors in humanitarian aid, including but not limited to providing services for victims of the Spanish Civil War and Jewish children fleeing Nazi occupation. These endeavors were symbolic of Benenson’s character as an activist. But it was that moment, he claims, when he was sitting in the London Tube, reading that article about the imprisoned Portuguese students, which inspired Benenson to start a campaign that would quickly become an international movement for the promotion of human rights worldwide. “Appeal for Amnesty, 1961” was a call to action for governments around the world to provide information and services for those whom Benenson termed “prisoners of conscience,” defined as those physically restrained from or punished for expressing their opinions. 51

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Benenson assembled a group of lawyers, scholars, and professionals, all likeminded on beliefs regarding humanity. Together, they wrote an article called “The Forgotten Prisoners,” published in the Observer, where they outlined their mission with four succinct objectives: 1. 2. 3. 4.

To work impartially for the release of those imprisoned for their opinions To seek for them a fair and public trial To enlarge the Right of Asylum and help political refugees to find work To urge effective international machinery to guarantee freedom of opinion1

The response to the article was extremely positive, and the general public was so inspired that within weeks, the campaign had acquired representation in countries all over the world. It provided the leverage to start a worldwide, grassroots movement. In the same year, the first international meeting was held to discuss the direction of the movement and the ultimate goals for Amnesty to work toward; in attendance were representatives of Belgium, the UK, France, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, and the United States. An office was opened in London, run by volunteer staff members. Soon after, the “Threes Network” was established, whereby each AI group adopted three political prisoners to represent, all of whom were from diverse geographical and political locations to emphasize the group’s impartiality. In less than two years’ time, by 1963, Amnesty International comprised 350 groups, had adopted 770 prisoners of conscience, and had successfully secured the release of 140 of these prisoners. The International Secretariat was established in London, and the International Executive Committee (IEC) was set up with Benenson as its secretary. Within three years of having written “Appeal for Amnesty,” Benenson was named president of Amnesty International, the number of its adopted prisoners had nearly doubled, and the UN had given AI consultative status. By many standards, the growth of this organization on an international scale was phenomenal; it might have been a product of the times. The world might not have been ready for Amnesty International in any other decade. Benenson himself emphasized that the timing of AI’s launch was an important component to its growth: “There was only one time when Amnesty could have been born, and that was in the exhilarating, brief springtime in the early sixties”2 when social change was the status quo. The organization certainly came in a time when newly realized struggles for political and religious freedom were beginning to spread around the world and ignite passion among international citizens for a new “civil society,” governed by tolerance and equality. Larry Cox, executive director of the U.S. section of Amnesty International relays that the climate of the 1960s most certainly impacted his commitment to human rights work. He states, It was a time in history when people saw problems in the world and felt inspired to do something about it; more importantly, that they felt they could do something about it.

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These were not people in government or people of power: these were concerned citizens who felt responsibility not just for themselves or their neighbors or even people within their own country; it was a concern for the well-being of humanity.3

That sentiment—that ordinary people can be vehicles of change and capable of defense for others—is what Amnesty strives to accomplish today. And indeed, many leaders of Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) are not only warriors of human rights battles of the present; they are also veterans of social movements of the 1960s. Products of their generation and driven by profound determination to deliver liberties enshrined under the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these leaders have been a critical part of this organization’s growth. Joshua Rubenstein, director of the Northeast Regional Office of AIUSA since 1975, was a student at Columbia in the late 1960s, where the takeover of university buildings and student demonstrations against the Vietnam War, university policy, and government affiliations were stifled by egregious police brutality. Coupled with his academic pursuits in the history of the Soviet human rights movement and the Holocaust on German-occupied Soviet territory, he could not have funneled his passions, experiences, and expertise into a more appropriate movement and career. Curt Goering, senior deputy executive director of AIUSA, was raised by socially conscious parents: his father ran a relief and reconstruction agency in Europe after World War II, and his mother spent her time with prisoners of war and orphans, volunteering innumerable services to soup kitchens. Goering was involved in the anti–Vietnam War movement and had registered as a conscientious objector, inspiring his decision to leave the country legally and spend the greater part of his twenties in Europe and the Middle East. While he was engaged in academic pursuits in Israel and Palestine, Goering was given a taste of the human conflicts that surround the region and witnessed firsthand the confiscation of land and destruction of trees, crops, and sometimes homes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He also studied alongside students who were frequently arrested by Israeli military authorities. These life experiences most likely shaped his mindset and personal mission; he needed to be engaged in a movement to address and reconcile these problems.

THE UNITED STATES SECTION OF AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL (AIUSA) Today, the Amnesty International movement has become an organization that works to fulfill human rights needs not only for prisoners of conscience; it also aims to reconcile a more holistic range of human rights violations. AIUSA is one of about sixty national sections of the global organization. It represents just a fraction, including approximately 360,000 AI members out of the global 2.2 million worldwide. As a section, most of its campaigns and advocacy work are part of a larger international strategic framework and are coordinated by the International Secretariat (IS). In

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consultation with sections, the IS develops an international strategy that identifies strategic opportunities for a particular section to address based on, among other factors, location and government relationships between two foreign bodies. Once these campaigns have been selected, AIUSA develops its own strategy to achieve campaign objectives, including increasing public awareness and mobilizing AI members. It is hoped that this will lead to a successful resolution of the human rights issue. To assist with this, AIUSA operates regional offices in six major metropolitan areas of the country. Each of these regional offices acts as a support center and communication vehicle to and from AIUSA volunteer leaders and members regarding national goals, and the plans and activities undertaken to accomplish them. The staff of these regional offices organize, mobilize, and support volunteers to do impactful work related to AIUSA’s human rights efforts. This is a fundamental characteristic of the modern-day AIUSA. It is the same, in principle, with what Benenson had envisioned for the Amnesty International movement almost fifty years ago. Benenson developed his work with people who were considered to be scholars and intellectuals; by some standards, this was an elitist group with large gaps between them and the people whose rights they were trying to protect. It was always in Benenson’s vision for Amnesty to be a movement in which everyone could be an active participant and beneficiary. In the early years, it lacked the mechanisms and the means to accomplish this, but not the will. With over forty years of development under its belt and with the changes in times, Amnesty has become more strategic in its efforts to reach out to the world. Communications have increased at the capacity of which modern times have allowed: Advertisements for Amnesty campaigns can be seen in virtually every medium that exists. Nearly every Amnesty section has a website. Performers across the globe promote Amnesty campaigns, and human rights have become part of more and more curricula in U.S. schools since AI’s inception. Human Rights Education AIUSA published its first educational packet on teaching human rights in classrooms in the 1980s. It has since developed its own Human Rights Education program as one of its mechanisms for increasing awareness of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the broader range of human rights violations endemic in the world, and the actions individuals and Amnesty members are performing in an effort to end these violations. Karen Robinson, the director of AIUSA’s Human Rights Education program has indicated that recently, and particularly since 9/11, school programs across the country are taking an active interest in incorporating AIUSA’s Human Rights Education program into their curricula. I believe that as people start to understand human rights as something that is both universal and personal, international and local, a value and a legal system, they see the

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infinite implications for teaching and learning. I am happy to say that I have seen many individuals involved with and exposed to HRE grow into not only activists but people who seek to bring human rights values to life each day in their actions and behavior towards others. I know teachers that have gone on to develop their own courses, university faculty that have gotten their schools to start human rights programs, students that have gone on to run organizations, to teach, to do a range of things.

Of course, human rights education exclusively in the classrooms would not be a holistic approach of reaching out to members and activists in the making. Performance arts and celebrity engagement have proven to a successful method of showing people, especially young people, that human rights are part of very real and personal values. Since 1976, Amnesty has relied on benefit events for fund raising and as a tool to raise human rights awareness, to highlight human rights violations across the globe, and to encourage individual action to fight these same abuses. One of the first Amnesty events to change the face of benefits was the Secret Policeman’s Ball, a comedy gig organized by John Cleese, the star of the Monty Python movies. Using Cleese’s connections with Monty Python, the Secret Policeman’s Ball brought together on stage many of the biggest names in comedy, and the show was a quick success. Musical performances by artists such as Pete Townsend and John Williams provided a further draw for the show, and the Secret Policeman’s Ball was soon held every few years. The Secret Policeman’s Ball has raised money and awareness for the fight for human rights, and the show’s success has encouraged the proliferation of benefit events that capitalized on the draw of celebrities, musicians, comedians, and actors alike. Following the Secret Policeman’s Ball, Amnesty sought to improve its national profile in the United States. The Conspiracy of Hope Tour of 1986 proved to be effective. With six stops around the country and leading artists such as Peter Gabriel, Sting, The Police, and U2, the concert was a hit. Most memorable was its stop at Giants Stadium in New York, where the day-long show was sold out, was broadcast live on MTV and Fox internationally, and featured even more artists such as Carlos Santana, Miles Davis, and Peter Paul & Mary. The Conspiracy of Hope Tour not only raised $3 million for the organization and focused the nation’s attention on human rights, but Amnesty membership also increased by 45,000 within one month of the end of the tour, leaving no doubt about the effectiveness of the tour’s impact in the fight for human rights. Using the model of the Conspiracy of Hope Tour, the Human Rights Now! 1988 Tour introduced human rights to a global audience, with stops in nineteen countries and featuring Bruce Springsteen, Tracy Chapman, Sting, Peter Gabriel, and Youssou N’Dour. Today, within AIUSA’s broader campaign to address the array of human rights violations in Darfur, Yoko Ono has donated the rights to John Lennon’s music to create the music compilation, Instant Karma. The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur seeks to mobilize millions of people around the urgent catastrophe in Darfur, Sudan. It combines the power of John Lennon’s music

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recorded by some of the world’s best-known artists, together with cutting-edge forms of instant activism enabled by the Internet and the latest in mobile technologies. More than fifty musical artists, including U2, Green Day, Ben Harper, and Aerosmith, have joined this international effort that combines John Lennon’s music, technology, and human rights activism. As one of the tools to combat the most desperate human rights crisis in the world, Instant Karma has produced the funds for Amnesty to be more active in the process of reinstating peace within Darfur. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed by both deliberate and indiscriminate attacks, and over 2.5 million civilians have been displaced. Although violence persists, the UN Security Council has mandated what may be an effective peacekeeping operation to guarantee security for the people of Darfur. UN peacekeepers have been granted access to the territory. AIUSA Actions The growth of this membership pool, influenced by education, community outreach, and the media, results in the power of numbers—an asset without which the bureaucracy of Amnesty International would be useless. The membership pool is instrumental, even indispensable, in executing campaigns: engaging volunteers to participate in demonstrations, letter-writing campaigns, and other efforts to pressure responsible parties to do what they have committed to do in respect of human rights. Within the United States, the victories of membership efforts are evident in changes of legislation that effectively honor human rights, one step at a time. Here is a closer glimpse at some of the other campaigns engaged in by AIUSA. Stopping Torture Stopping torture is one of a handful of campaigns that has been on AIUSA’s agenda for over forty years. It has been a priority campaign throughout the years because AIUSA, grounded in the international legal prohibitions against torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, considers it to be one of the gravest violations of human rights, essentially immoral, illegal, and counterproductive. Torture undermines the moral and legal principles on which society is based. Moral authority and the ability to pressure allies are lost when world leaders resort to torture and to cruel, inhuman, and degrading practices. As a means of interrogation, torture often results in false statements; instills resentment and anger in the victims and their families, friends, and community; and generates embittered opponents. This hostility can—and does—translate into devastating consequences for those considered enemies. Since its foundation, the United States has cherished the notion that individuals have a right to be free from oppression and torture, and that certain human rights are unalienable. The Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution prohibits “cruel

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and unusual punishment”; extends “the right of the people to be secure in their person,” and prevents self-incrimination partly to ensure that authorities avoid the coerced extraction of confessions. Among the international conventions the United States has ratified that prohibit torture are the Geneva Conventions, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Convention against Torture. The United States ratified the International Convention against Torture at the urging of President George H. W. Bush, who made it clear that “the United States must continue its vigorous efforts to bring the practice of torture and other gross abuses of human rights to an end wherever they occur.”4 The United States reaffirmed these ideals in its report to the UN Committee against Torture. In the midst of these developments in the international community’s views on torture and human rights, the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent “War on Terror” motivated the United States government to take a defensive posture, to enforce new laws, and to introduce new acts in the name of ensuring the safety of its citizens. Among these was the Military Commissions Act, passed in 2006, which authorized the United States to hold prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial, to assume guilt before innocence, to alter the definition of torture, and to use information obtained through brutal treatment as evidence. On January 11, 2002, the United States transferred the first detainees to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The U.S. administration chose Guantánamo as the location for this detention facility in an attempt to hold detainees beyond the reach of U.S. and international law. Guantánamo has become the most visible symbol of U.S. human rights abuses in the name of the War on Terror. Five years later, despite widespread international condemnation, hundreds of people of more than thirty nationalities remain there. Goering recounts that these recent executive and congressional decisions have been a source of frustration for AIUSA. Not only have these actions breached agreements made in based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but they have also jeopardized the human rights position Americans take on an international level. The image of the U.S. has been so discredited, it is so damaged now that it is hard for AIUSA to figure out effective ways, if there are any left, to utilize the power and the influence of the U.S., still the strongest country in the world, to have a positive impact on human rights around the world. Because the United States government is so discredited, that the first thing that is thrown back in the government’s face when it raises human rights issues anywhere in the world is, “look at your own back yard.” And unfortunately as long as that back yard is as dirty as it is, U.S. human rights policy cannot be very effective.5

Thus, in more recent history, AIUSA has revisited its Denounce Torture campaign with force in order to thwart human rights violations in its own backyard, in its own country: to shut down the Guantánamo prison cell and to overturn the Military Commissions Act.

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AIUSA takes this action to restore the rights of these victims of torture and other abuses, and to restore the United States’ voice in human rights issues across the globe in places such as Burma (Myanmar) and Pakistan. The administration of President George W. Bush itself has voiced several warranted criticisms to those governing powers, but we must reconcile our own violations before we expect the global community to respect our criticisms of others’ human rights positions. These abuses: stripping the rights of detainees to challenge their detention in court, the stripping of habeas corpus was something that, when I first came to Amnesty in the early 80s, was an issue that we were fighting, a right we were fighting to have restored in places like Chile or Argentina where there was a ruling junta and where habeas had been suspended.6

In response to these human rights violations, specifically with regards to the Guantánamo prison cells, the campaign to Counter Terror with Justice is asking parliamentarians around the world to sign up for Amnesty International’s framework to end illegal detention in the War on Terror. AIUSA has been collecting signatures from U.S. constituents. The signatures will be delivered to the U.S. Congress. Demonstrations have taken place, and others will proceed until this prison cell has shut down completely. Death Penalty AIUSA has always maintained that the death penalty is the ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights. By working toward the abolition of the death penalty worldwide, AIUSA’s Program to Abolish the Death Penalty looks to end the cycle of violence created by a system riddled with economic and racial bias and tainted by human error. Abolishing the death penalty has consistently been part of the core of AIUSA’s campaigns. Rubenstein, Goering, and Cox have all relayed that a significant portion of their work as human rights leaders involved condemning legislative decisions to support the death penalty and protesting the sentences of a number of individuals, some of whom have been exonerated in part thanks to pressures of the activist community. In earlier years, Goering relays, abolishing the death penalty was a difficult campaign to publicize. After all, the beginning of the campaign in the 1970s coincided with a nationwide rise in crime. It was thought, even among AIUSA members, that abolishing the death penalty was perhaps not a true human rights issue but rather a legal enforcement and criminal matter. But AIUSA maintains that in fact, the death penalty was and still is a human rights issue. As part of its early abolitionist strategy, AIUSA highlighted possible wrongful death sentences for juveniles and the mentally disabled. Even in recent history, some states had imposed the death sentence for offenders as young as fourteen. Many found these particular elements of the death penalty to be troublesome, including those who did not originally believe that the death penalty was a human

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rights issue. Gradually, the faults of the justice system began to surface, and many began to understand the bigger picture of the death penalty. After a wider pool of people became receptive to considering the death penalty as a human rights issue, more people were willing to listen to other details surrounding AI’s reports: the trends of enforcing the death penalty seemed to discriminate by race and class, and there had been obvious discrepancies in the verdicts handed down for defendants of different regions and class. This remains a serious problem within the United States that has yet to be fully resolved, but there have been steps in the right direction. Rubenstein recalls one of the more vindicating moments to resist reinstatement of the death penalty in the face of adverse legislation. William Weld, governor of Massachusetts in the late 1980s and early 1990s, considered introducing the death sentence for juveniles as young as sixteen and reintroducing firing squads as an alternative to death by lethal injection. Rubenstein was frequently quoted in the Boston Globe in the midst of these debates, condemning the implication that these ideas would be acceptable at the turn of the century and were good practices for respecting human rights. Suddenly, Weld’s calls to reintroduce the death penalty went silent. Rubenstein was informed that these propositions were dismissed when a 1987 AI report on the death penalty in the United States was placed on Governor Weld’s desk. The report provoked a strong response among Weld’s staff, and he was warned not to extend the death penalty to juvenile offenders. Thus, the attempt ended. In more recent history, DNA investigations have exonerated numerous people for crimes they, in fact, did not commit, including instances in which people were on death row and, tragically, people whose death sentences had been carried out already. This, of course, has been a very meaningful development in Amnesty’s efforts to abolish the death penalty. In very recent history, in December 2007, New Jersey became the first state in forty years to abolish the death penalty through legislative process. Stop Violence Against Women Amnesty International launched its global Stop Violence Against Women Campaign (SVAW) three years ago to help break the silence around this problem and to create a world where women and girls are afforded their basic human rights. Across the globe, Amnesty International members have united to work toward making women’s human rights a reality; the campaign is intended to be a contribution to the efforts of the women’s rights movements around the world. With this campaign, Amnesty International will show that the right of women to be free from violence is integral to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As long as violence against women continues, the promise of human rights can never be fulfilled. Within the broader Stop Violence Against Women campaign, AIUSA launched its campaign to stop violence against Native American and Alaskan Native

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women. A team of researchers delved into these Native communities and investigated; they spoke with village elders, tribal leaders, police officers, and women’s health organizations to discover what the fundamental problems were within these communities that had the reputation of abusing women. As Goering recounts, it was not instant trust between AIUSA and the representatives of these native communities. They might have been skeptical of AI’s intentions and AI’s ability to understand the complexities that surround the climate of Native women’s grievances. Eventually, it came to be seen that Amnesty could be an effective partner to amplify the voices of these communities on the margins of American society. Amnesty released its Maze of Injustice report that revealed personal anecdotes and surprising statistics. Women from these communities are 2.5 times as likely to experience rape as American women anywhere else across the country. White male offenders were the culprits in 86 percent of rape crimes, and none of them was held accountable by Native American or United States law. These women’s stories and the report inspired change. Joint legislative strategies were put into place to prosecute male offenders who had previously walked away from their crimes. In one case, funds were raised to develop a new safe shelter for women, right across the street from the police station. Shelters such as this are now equipped with adequate health care equipment and rape kits. Although there is still a long way to go before women of all communities are protected from abuse, it is encouraging to know that these communities’ voices were heard, and steps were taken to improve the well-being of women within these communities. Urgent Action, Special Focus Cases, and Individuals at Risk The scope of Amnesty International’s objectives has expanded over the years. It now has the capacity and strives to address the bigger picture of social problems within the context of its campaigns. Still, it has not forgotten its roots. Releasing prisoners of conscience remains a major objective. Just as in the days when Benenson wrote about two Portuguese students who had made a toast to freedom and were sentenced to prison, Amnesty consistently produces literature, articles, and blogs to report on the unjust imprisonment, killings, and disappearances of individuals around the world. The movement selects a handful of special focus cases, individuals whose rights have been violated and whose dismal fates reflect some of the bigger problems of the political climate and abuses of power of government bodies. The membership pool of Amnesty works together to pressure governments to release these prisoners of conscience in a number of ways, but the most widespread method is by sending letters to these responsible parties. And the difference writing letters can make is astounding. It is one of AIUSA’s oldest mechanisms to cause the release of prisoners of conscience. The development of communications has allowed Amnesty members’ voices to be heard far and wide and in the most expedited fashion.

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AIUSA’s speediest human rights response program is called the First Appeal Pledge Program (FAPP). FAPP permits the Urgent Action (UA) staff to write and send individualized messages on human rights concerns by fax, telex, telegram, or e-mail in the names of members who have pledged to pay for these prompt communications. Messages are sent to targeted government officials within hours of reception of the Urgent Action or WARN action at the UA office. In addition to ensuring a prompt kick-off response on daily Urgent Action cases, FAPP allows the UA staff to participate in the Worldwide Accelerated Response Network (WARN), which is made up of 110 contacts in seventeen countries that commit to taking immediate action 24/7 on case information from AI researchers on weekends, evenings, and holidays. WARNs are issued when there is no time to prepare and distribute a full UA case sheet, but immediate faxes, telegrams, e-mails or telexes are urgently required. There have been successes resulting from these particular methods. One example of a success was the case of photojournalist Jennifer Latheef of the Maldives. She was sentenced to ten years in prison for photographing a peaceful protest. While she was in prison, guards threatened her with torture and drowning. Her captors kicked her with steel-toed boots, resulting in a spinal injury. Amnesty International activists from around the world sent letters to the Maldivian authorities calling for Jennifer’s release. In August 2006, authorities freed her before she served the first year of her sentence. She attributes her release to the outpour of support from Amnesty members across the globe. She has been quoted as saying, “Thanks to Amnesty, ten years became ten months.”7 In any year, Amnesty members produce on average 100,000 letters to send to government authorities, pleading with them to release prisoners of conscience. Thousands of prisoners of conscience are documented every year, and hundreds are released, largely as the result of external pressures and Amnesty efforts. These campaigns are just a flavor of what Amnesty has been dedicated to in the past and in most recent years. There are constantly updates in our work, and the AI website (www.aiusa.org) provides the latest information. Currently, Amnesty is undergoing the implementation of a strategic plan with aims to reach out to a wider membership pool, to inform communities at large of the United Declaration of Human Rights, and to engage a new generation of human rights activists and agents of common good. AIUSA Executive Director Larry Cox will continue to promote human rights as the basis for peace and security in the post-9/11era. He believes this mission is particularly important in the United States, a country he cites as having abdicated its role as human rights leader. What we need is for people to take part in the democratic process that allows their representatives of their government and other governments live up to their words. The value of an organization like Amnesty International is that it has the power to make people come together and have the collective power to force

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governments to do what all governments are reluctant to do: to restrain themselves and to admit that they have certain obligations that they have to follow whether they like it or not.8

We would like to say that we predict a world in which there will not be a need for organizations such as Amnesty International, but we cannot. Cox indicates that the content of Amnesty’s work will change over time. However, there will always be a need for a mechanism and a movement that keeps the human tendency to do harm to its own kind in check. That is what makes AIUSA a mechanism to preserve democracy and it is in line with the role of Amnesty International that Benenson envisioned half a century ago. In 1961 I wrote “pressure of opinion a hundred years ago brought about the emancipation of the slaves.” Pressure of opinion is now needed to help Amnesty International achieve its ultimate objective: to close for business. Only then, when the last prisoner of conscience has been freed, when the last torture chamber has been closed, when the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a reality for the world’s people, will our work be done.9

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Amnesty International Founder and/or Executive Director: Larry Cox (AIUSA) Mission/Description: Amnesty International’s vision is of a world in which every person enjoys all the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards. In pursuit of this vision, AI’s mission is to undertake research and action focused on preventing and ending grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity, freedom of conscience and expression, and freedom from discrimination, within the context of its work to promote all human rights. Website: http://www.amnestyusa.org/contact/ Address: 5 Penn Plaza New York, NY 10001 USA Phone: 212-633-4286 FAX: 212-370-0183 E-mail address: [email protected]

NOTES 1. Peter Benenson, “The Forgotten Prisoners,” Observer (May 28, 1961). 2. Amnesty International interview with Peter Benenson, December 2007. 3. Amnesty International interview with Larry Cox, December 2007.

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4. “Statement on Signing the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991,” George H. W. Bush, March 12, 1992. 5. Amnesty International interview with Curt Goering, December 2007. 6. Ibid. 7. Amnesty International interview with Jennifer Latheef. 8. Interview with Larry Cox. 9. Statement by Peter Benenson for Amnesty International.

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The PeaceWorks Foundation: Building Consensus and Mobilizing the Grassroots in Israel and Palestine Daniel Lubetzky

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been defined by violence, mistrust, and absolutism. Throughout its history, extremists have time and again hijacked the agenda for a resolution to further their own ends, turning what has been a territorial conflict into a religious and ideological battleground. These minorities, existing on both sides and dominating the media spotlight, seek to manipulate the political situation and are determined to keep moderate agendas for reform and conflict resolution an unattainable reality. The result of this pattern is, at this point, well known: decades of stalemated accords and failed peace conferences, which seem only to add fuel to the fire of cyclical violence and calls for vengeance from both sides. The result is yet another year of bloodshed, another year of occupation, another year of possibility giving way to despair and desperation. The result is that people now believe that the conflict is intractable—that as hope for change expires, day by day the time to find a viable, mutually acceptable resolution is lost. The PeaceWorks Foundation, and its flagship initiative, the OneVoice Movement, were founded to confront and alter this status quo—first, by proving that the conflict is not intractable, and second, by helping to create a new environment on the ground in which an agreement can be reached and implemented. But in order to seek a new future, we needed new tools: a new framework to analyze the situation, and a new methodology to change it. METHODOLOGY AND STRUCTURE Founding the OneVoice Movement: Creating a New Framework and Methodology The OneVoice Movement was founded in 2002, on the tail end of another round of failed negotiations. In the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, these were some of the worst of times: in frustration and hopelessness, the world watched as 65

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the Oslo peace process collapsed, degenerating into unprecedented violence on both sides. It was so difficult precisely because we had glimpsed, or thought we had glimpsed, the promise of a resolution: never before had we felt so close to ending the conflict, to see it all come unraveled. Daily, the media—with new images of bloodshed and violence, with new stories of the eighty ways the process that delivered the Oslo accords was coming unhinged—confirmed our most cynical fears: that this is irresolvable. That violence is and will be the order of the day, every day. That Israelis and Palestinians will never agree on anything. In the midst of these dark times, it occurred to me that there had to be another way. As a Jew, the son of a Holocaust survivor, and someone who had studied, written about, traveled extensively through, and launched a successful business venture in the region, I had come to know scores of people—Israelis, Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, Christians—living the conflict day in and day out. And despite the media coverage portraying nothing but an onslaught of violence and vengeance on each side, none of the people I knew, loved, and worked with wanted to annihilate the other side. None of them wanted every inch of the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, no matter the cost. None of them was particularly interested in a holy war declared against the other side. And none of them rejoiced in the collapse of yet another peace accord. What people on the ground really wanted, as far as I knew and as far as I saw, was a better life for themselves and their children. People wanted an end to the conflict, and all the benefits that could come from that end: stability, security, stronger economies, freedom from the constraints and inhumanities of occupation and existential threat. People wanted the most basic of human rights: to live their lives in peace. Where were these people, these stories in the media? Where were their voices? Why was no one asking them what they thought, what they wanted? It seemed clear to me that if ordinary Israelis and Palestinians had a larger say in the process, we might be looking at a radically different situation—we might be looking at a negotiated resolution that provides for some, though not all, of the demands of each side. At the core, this is what the PeaceWorks Foundation and its OneVoice Movement were designed to accomplish. OneVoice is based on the simple premise that the average Israeli and the average Palestinian would elect to support a negotiated peace that involves some compromise rather than continue to live in a state of perpetual war and conflict. However, historically, the problem has been that moderates, who are in fact in the majority on each side, are vastly underrepresented in the decision-making process, as they tend to be more passive and less fervent than their extremist counterparts. The mainstream media, in turn, exacerbates this problem by giving spotlight to violence, religious fanaticism, and absolutist dogma, often relegating the call for nonviolence, reasoned pragmatism, and compromise to the unwritten and unheard. The result is that Israelis and Palestinians see only the most negative version of “the other,” as filtered through media portrayals and deeply embedded stereotypes: Palestinians see Israelis as soldiers and brutal occupiers; Israelis see

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Palestinians as suicide bombers and terrorists. Thus, although the majority of Israelis and Palestinians want an end to the conflict, they do not believe they have a partner on the other side, nor do they feel empowered to take action. The disconnect between moderates within and across Israeli and Palestinian societies reinforces the dominance of extremists, predisposing them toward mobilization and activism, and enabling them to prey on the apathy of moderates. Confronting this dynamic is the critical first step in creating large-scale change for the better in the region. The conflict, always framed as a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and between Jews and Muslims, needs to be reconsidered and reframed as one between the vast majority of moderates on both sides against a small but disproportionately loud, active, and effective group of violent extremists on both sides. Israelis and Palestinians have lived for decades with a conflict that has been hijacked and manipulated by external and internal forces of extremism alike, to the point that average citizens have lost faith in the process, in the ability of their leaders to deliver change, in the vision of a future peace, and most concretely and deeply, in the existence of a moderate counterpart across the border. We must work to rebuild that faith—by revealing the partner that already exists and by strengthening moderates on both sides from the grassroots up—in order for any progress at the top level to be possible and lasting. How It Works: “Enlightened Self-Interest” and Parallel Initiatives The OneVoice methodology is designed to prime the grassroots for mobilization toward demanding a resolution of the conflict. The primary focus is on appealing to the “enlightened self-interest” of individuals rather than their compassion for the “other side.” The majority of Israelis and Palestinians do not understand, nor are they necessarily willing to accept, the historical narrative and claims of the other side. But Israelis do not need to embrace Palestinian concerns—or vice versa—in order to start negotiating; they are each motivated by unique national aspirations. Israelis need not love Palestinians to make peace; Palestinians need not love Israelis. What is required is a basic acceptance of the fact that ensuring the independence and security of “the other” will guarantee one’s own—and the willingness to compromise for its sake. In fact, more consensus exists between Israelis and Palestinians than most assume; indeed, all of us, and not just those in the midst of the conflict, see only the most extreme versions of Israelis and Palestinians. Yet, even in the most difficult of years—in 2006 during the second Israel-Lebanon war, for example— polling on both sides reveals strong majority support for a two-state solution. Consensus exists. But it has been obscured by years of war, occupation, terror, and violence. A critical step in the conflict resolution process is revealing the hidden consensus that already exists, and working to build consensus where there is distrust and disagreement. Unlike other initiatives and organizations working in the field of IsraeliPalestinian conflict resolution, however, OneVoice is not a “joint” movement.

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There is a need and a place for groups that seek to promote cross-border and crosscultural dialogue, understanding, and cooperation. Yet often, those groups have a limited appeal: they tend to draw in the left of each society, those already associated with the “peace camp.” There is also a need to appeal to a wider segment of the public, to create a space for the center and center right (as well as the left) to become active agents in the process, to contribute positively to claiming their lives, their futures, and their nations back from the grips of the extremists’ agendas. OneVoice seeks to fill this role by organizing itself not as a joint IsraeliPalestinian movement, but as two separate, equally nationalistic, parallel movements—OneVoice Israel (Kol Ahad Israel) and OneVoice Palestine (Soutuna Filastin)—both united under the banner of the OneVoice Movement. Each office is staffed by locals with strong nationalist credentials. This unique structure enables each branch to remain accountable, politically relevant, and legitimate within its society, while both work for the same end goal: a two-state solution in accordance with the will of the majority of citizens on both sides. The Palestinian effort employs language focused very clearly on the end of occupation, the promotion of democracy, and civic unity. On the Israeli side, the language used focuses on the importance of security, safety, and civic unity. OneVoice has sought to create a movement that is structured as a microcosm of the very environment and political culture that it seeks to foster in Middle East: consensus-driven, self-empowered, parallel civic movements focused on progress and moderation. The OneVoice methodology and structure allows its members to speak in strong nationalistic terms without marginalizing their counterpart on the other side. Funding OneVoice The nature of the Middle East brings with it a great number of obstacles with regard to funding. Immediate outputs and returns are more tangible at the micro level given the volatility of the political situation. The OneVoice Movement is focused and driven toward conflict resolution, not toward conflict management. Therefore, its activities and programs take a bold and often risky approach to Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution. This, in turn, impacts the issues of income and funding. Raising funds is extremely difficult because most people have lost hope for progress. Many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that attempt to do Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution work have closed or have shrunk dramatically. OneVoice is one of the few entities that have shown enough innovation, progress, and momentum in order to continue to recruit more donors and funding in recent years. To date, the PeaceWorks Foundation has successfully built a funding structure by strengthening relationships with well-established foundations (such as the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and many others) that have supported its work over several years. Moreover, the OneVoice board and core supporters have not only been financial contributors

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themselves, but they also have helped to build a network in communities around the globe that are fully invested in the movement. The PeaceWorks Foundation has employed a business model to reinforce its fundraising efforts. Gift matching has proven to be highly successful mechanism, which is used both to increase financial support but also bridge gaps and build partnerships between Jewish/Muslim/ Israeli/Arab communities. Over the past few years, there has been a significant increase in the income received from individuals. This is the result of the aforementioned network being built by OneVoice’s international supporters and by increasing the movement’s fundraising capacity with more hires. OneVoice has also increased recruitment of inkind partners, from the IBM International Foundation to Yahoo! and Continental Airlines. PeaceWorks LLC, whose support allowed for the initial creation of the PeaceWorks Foundation, continues to be a strong partner, donating 5 percent of its profits to the foundation. It is important to note that funding is still a major limitation for the movement. OneVoice works in a space where many people do not believe there is hope. With current resources, OneVoice has been forced to switch off between scaling its numbers via canvassing and recruitment campaigns and increasing the depth of its civic engagement programming. In the coming years, with the 2007 Annapolis Conference breakthrough, it is imperative that OneVoice invests in both areas simultaneously.

ONGOING PROGRAMS AND INITIATIVES Building Consensus: Citizen Negotiations In 2003, with initial funding from the IBM International Foundation and a handful of courageous, committed donors, and with the input and guidance of a cadre of experts in the field—running the gamut from the left to the right, religious to secular, Israeli to Palestinian, American to European—OneVoice devised a unique polling system designed to give a platform to moderate voices while teaching citizens the necessity of negotiation and compromise. The poll posed as questions the ten issues that stand at the heart of the conflict and at the center of every drafted accord, and invited individuals to vote on the very issues with which the top-level negotiation teams at the time were grappling—from borders and settlements to Jerusalem to refugees. A special weighted voting system was devised to force people on each side to set priorities and make compromises: each person was given a total of 100 “negative” points, which could be allocated among the ten questions. For example, if someone wished to convey that he or she would not, under any circumstances, accept a resolution that allowed for free access to holy sites for all peoples, this could be shown by allotting all 100 points to the negative answer. However, that would leave the responder no room to reject any of the other nine positions. In other words, no one was allowed room in the poll to be an absolute rejectionist. People were made to prioritize the issues they felt most

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strongly about over those where they could leave room for negotiation and compromise. Beginning in 2004, OneVoice brought this Citizens’ Negotiations Platform to the streets of Israel and Palestine. Over 130,000 Israelis and Palestinians, throughout cities, villages, and refugee camps, voted on these issues and gave their feedback on how each should be resolved. The results were startling, and they showed an incredibly high level of consensus on a range of issues, including the more contentious and difficult ones. And despite the common perception that the conflict was intractable, 76 percent of both Israelis and Palestinians—the exact same percentage on each side—affirmed a two-state solution as the way forward. Yet numbers alone, even powerful ones, do not inspire systemic change and do not motivate people into action. In order for OneVoice’s numbers to mean anything, we needed to build a human infrastructure of engaged, committed, and mobilized citizens who could become leaders in their own communities, and who could further the process. History has shown that a strong civil society is an essential prerequisite to conflict resolution. Forging a Grassroots Network: Youth Leadership and Town Hall Meetings Israeli and Palestinian youth in particular have fallen victim to the manipulation by ideologies of extremism. There is a critical void of positive and viable outlets for youth to be engaged and activated. Unless their frustrations are channeled in the direction of moderation, these young leaders will continue to find themselves exploited as pawns by extremist thinking and action. OneVoice’s Leadership Development Program, initiated in 2005, uses a series of seminars and workshops to train young Israelis and Palestinians in the art of public speaking, conflict resolution, mobilizing support, and becoming leaders within their own communities. Workshops typically take place with two or three days of intensive introductory training, and culminate with trained Youth Leaders equipped to go out and recruit others who will empower their communities to use nonviolent means to address the conflict. The most active and articulate members are able to represent the voice of Israeli and Palestinian moderates abroad as ambassadors in OneVoice’s International Education Program. Recruiting and training young leaders is a crucial and ongoing part of OneVoice’s program work in both Israel and Palestine. OneVoice plays an important role in demonstrating to young people that there is an alternative platform to violent protest, a platform of nonviolent, negotiated settlement. Moreover, through regular workshops, OneVoice is able to create cohesiveness between moderate grassroots Palestinians and Israelis and emphasize that moderates should work together. Thus far, these workshops have recruited and engaged more than 3,000 youth activists, 1,300 of whom have graduated to become highly trained Israeli and Palestinian Youth Leaders. Over the next few years, OneVoice

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is planning to expand and deepen this program, to increase the level of responsibility and involvement of Youth Leaders who reach the highest levels of training. OneVoice’s Youth Leaders are a powerful driving engine in making sure voters participate in Citizens’ Negotiations Platform. We use various approaches such as democratization and anti-incitement campaigns, rallies, town hall meetings, and university campus events to encourage participants to vote. In addition to these outreach programs, person-to-person recruitment drives, Internet campaigns, and mobile voting kiosks will help ensure that Palestinians and Israelis aged fifteen and over in all communities—including refugee camps and kibbutzim— have the chance to voice their views on resolutions to the conflict. One of the most significant ways of reaching out to the Israeli and Palestinian people is through face-to-face town hall meeting campaigns. At a grassroots level, there is constant debate among people from a complete spectrum of political beliefs about how they should be applying themselves in the current political climate. For too long such platforms have been dominated by those espousing hard-line or extremist views. Previous OneVoice town hall meeting campaigns have served as a powerful recruitment tool for activists, with an average of over 85 percent of those attending meetings signing up to OneVoice principles. A Closer Look at OneVoice Israel OneVoice Israel is headquartered in Tel Aviv. Developing a cadre of committed core supporters has long been a goal of local programming in OneVoice Israel. With the success and development of the OneVoice Youth Leadership Program as the greatest asset to the movement’s work, it was able to use the strong base of support it had cultivated in the early years of the movement to scale up the quality of the young leaders it was recruiting during the 2006–7 year. Young leaders are the heart and the engine of OneVoice Israel, and they serve as the primary change agents throughout the movement. These committed young people inspire the direction of the movement, and help enact and execute the programs and policies within it. Youth Leaders are at the helm of OneVoice’s outreach efforts and recruitment. Starting in 2006–7 and extending into 2008, OneVoice Israel is significantly expanding and deepening its recruitment practices. In the past, OneVoice employed a leadership development strategy centered on a comprehensive series of workshops, with one used to build on another. Because of the high turnover inherent in any such movement, it was necessary to develop a model that conformed to such realities. OneVoice Israel decided to employ the “highway model”—constructed in a way that new leaders can join at any time. This enabled the movement to accommodate new activists in the program. On the sixth of each month (almost every month, except in cases of holidays), OneVoice holds preliminary youth leadership activities. Building upon its past success, OneVoice held six leadership seminars during the 2006–7 year. Each of these events drew between twenty-five and thirty participants. The movement also made special arrangements to accommodate young

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religious leaders who could not participate in meetings on the weekends. In 2008, OneVoice Israel has been holding these seminars and events monthly. Each seminar is thoroughly evaluated both by OneVoice staff and by the participants, using an open comment period as well as confidential questionnaires. Both methods enable OneVoice to tailor its approach to ensure maximum quality and effectiveness in its operation. Seminar topics in the past have included • • • •

How to Influence Myself and Others by Dr. Amir Kfir How Does the Media Work? by Michal Eldar, Ben Or Communications Conflict Resolution: Part 1 (Theory) by Dr. Muli Peleg Conflict Resolution: Part 2 (Simulations) by Dr. Muli Peleg

To encourage its Youth Leaders to become more invested and involved in OneVoice, the movement has instituted a tiered reward system. A main component of this system is sending the movement’s best and most established Youth Leaders on international tours as part of the International Education Program. Recruitment on different campuses is done in partnership with the local student unions. These collaborations are conducted both formally and informally. OneVoice Israel has been particularly effective in its efforts to recruit leaders of these student groups to join OneVoice. Some of the chairmen/women go on to participate in OneVoice Youth Leadership Seminars and in turn are motivated to help us engage the rest of their campuses. OneVoice has now organized chapters on all of Israel’s Universities: Tel Aviv University, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Hebrew University–Jerusalem, Haifa University, Bar Ilan University, and the Technion. In addition, OneVoice Israel has reached out to and is the process of formalizing chapters in nearly twenty different colleges, including the Hertzliya Interdisciplinary Center, Netanya College, Rehovot College, and the Peres Academic Center. OneVoice recently scored a significant victory at Hebrew University–Jerusalem when it was permitted to register officially with the student union. Such registration affords OneVoice the ability to draw from student funds and hold recognized events on campus, and broadens its ability to do recruitment on campus and advertise through posters and other media. Despite significant successes, however, the process is not an easy one. Although OneVoice Israel has been able to draw significant crowds to its training events, these new recruits need to be provided avenues through which they can be inspired to remain engaged in shaping the movement for the future. To this end, OneVoice Israel recently developed a spectrum of leadership subcommittees: Strategy. This committee empowers Youth Leaders to take a more active role in developing the movement’s strategy. Before a new campaign is undertaken, the strategy subcommittee is an important conduit through which individual leaders can provide feedback and perspective to enhance the effort. The

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movement understands that providing a platform for collaboration between the professional staff and the leaders on strategy is important because the Youth Leaders are the ones on whom the success of a project depends. Having them involved in the planning ensures maximum ability to succeed. PR Communications and Design. OneVoice Israel is at a distinct advantage in terms of its public relations effort: a large number of activists are involved in student media and work for several public relations companies throughout the country. The PR Committee provides an avenue through which activists can contribute to the movement’s public relations strategy. The committee also confers with the OneVoice communications team during meetings and through other avenues, and is involved in the design and dissemination of branding materials such as flyers for events and stickers. Recruitment and Field Activity. For a movement determined to overturn the status quo, efforts to recruit more members are paramount. It is cliché to note that “there is strength in numbers,” but in Israel and Palestine, where an active and visible majority of citizens have never publicly backed the peace process, a display of strong numbers could really be the tipping point to conflict resolution. The recruitment committee is mostly made up of activists on university campuses. Those on the committee are generally responsible for all events on campus and are the primary vehicles through which the OneVoice message is propagated in this venue. The committee is likely to focus in the future on events promoting the signing of the OneVoice Mandate (see Table 4.2) and on collaboration with the movement’s professional staff to uncover new growth areas. Local Events. OneVoice Israel will continue to emphasize local events as part of its methodology. Such events correspond to OneVoice’s yearly campaigns— the two most recent of which are discussed at length later in this chapter— but all ultimately seek to build on OneVoice’s core tenets of civic responsibility for ending the conflict. The Local Events Committee facilitates the creation of small events in different venues across the country and connects with leaders who need guidance in organizing and undertaking such events. Internet. OneVoice Israel is aware of the increasing power of the Internet and alternative media, and the importance of harnessing the potential of tools such as blogs and participatory forums. The Internet, as a user-driven and largely user-defined environment, is an ideal realm for OneVoice to spread its message: it is an arena in which local, moderate voices can reach out to a much wider audience, without the usual mitigating mouthpiece of the mainstream media. The Internet Committee collaborates to identify opportunities to employ this strategy and makes them available for activists, and collaborates with the communications team to effectively employ this strategy.

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A Closer Look at OneVoice Palestine OneVoice Palestine is headquartered in Ramallah and Gaza City. Recent Palestinian history is replete with paradigm-shifting societal transformations and geopolitically momentous events. These include Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections, the international blockade of the Hamas-led government, the Second Lebanon War, the Israeli government’s reactions and attitudes toward internal Palestinian political developments, the emergence of the Arab Peace Initiative, and most recently the Annapolis Conference and its aftermath. OneVoice at large, and OneVoice Palestine specifically, has been forced to cope with each of these events in order to maintain relevance in a society with rapidly shifting political whims and newly emerging challenges. As much as they represent a challenge, however, evolving political realities also provide OneVoice with new opportunities to affect positive change in the region. OneVoice Palestine is uniquely suited to respond to these challenges by providing an infrastructure through which the moderate majority of Palestinians can respond to a tumultuous political climate, and creating a platform for mobilizing the Palestinian grassroots for change: an end to the occupation, and the creation of a viable, independent state. Town hall meetings represent one of OneVoice Palestine’s chief advocacy tools. From May through December 2006, for example, the movement conducted eleven town hall meetings, coinciding with a number of severe crises within the Palestinian body politic. These crises included violent episodes emanating from Fatah-Hamas tensions, the financial blockade of Palestine, the inability to pay public service employees, and the general regional instability following Israel’s war with Hezbollah. The ongoing tense political atmosphere has exacerbated the general feeling of hopelessness among Palestinians. During these times of great political and social turmoil, OneVoice Palestine has focused on uplifting people and on giving them a new political alternative, arguing that hopelessness, depression, and a turn to violence will lead to a worse situation. Through its town hall meetings, the movement seeks to encourage every citizen to believe that he or she has a specific role to place to ending the occupation. We focus first on small, personal efforts at bringing about nonviolent change as paramount to the larger effort, enabling each citizen to play a part, from cities to villages to refugee camps. OneVoice Palestine routinely reaches out to communities in locations as diverse as Hebron, Nablus, Tulqarem, the city of Jenin, Jenin refugee camp, Salfeet, Tubas, Qalqelia, Al-Mazra’a Al-Gharbeyah village, Jericho, and Al-Jalazoun refugee camp. The town hall meetings are ongoing activities the movement conducts to catalogue newly emerging political sentiments and ideas in an effort to maintain sustainable relationships with individuals who might be eager to participate in altering the status quo. In an effort to track its penetration into Palestinian society, OneVoice Palestine maintains meticulous records of attendance at the individual meetings and the topics discussed therein. Table 4.1 summarizes the qualitative and quantitative results of these meetings in 2006–7, and reveals one

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Table 4.1 Attendance and Recruitment at Town Hall Meetings throughout Palestine, 2006–7

Location Hebron Nablus Tulqarem Jenin (city) Jenin (refugee camp) Salfeet Tubas Qalqelia Jericho Al-Mazra’a Al-Jalazoun Refugee Camp Totals

Number of Attendees 70 97 86 77 110 64 50 90 130 88 143 1005

Percentage Affirming OV Principles 71% 72% 76% 64% 54% 67% 58% 73% 65% 69% 68% 67%

# Added on Mailing List 30 43 33 20 15 11 10 37 42 7 14 262

Source: PeaceWorks Foundation.

of OneVoice Palestine’s ongoing struggles: gaining e-mail contacts for the individuals who attend its events. It is an infrastructure issue that OneVoice continues to try to overcome by maintaining frequent and regular outreach to the communities it activates. Concurrent with its focus on town hall meetings, OneVoice Palestine emphasizes the need to recruit, train, and deploy Youth Leaders within the movement. Using the strong foundations it had developed over time, OneVoice Palestine uses professional techniques to develop, strengthen, and evaluate the leadership program and the young leaders emerging from it. These methods include •

• • •

Undertaking daily recruitment of new members through workshops, meetings with students, youth center activities, and contacting individuals and participants who take part in OneVoice Palestine events. Holding regular meetings that brief youth sectors about OneVoice and about the leadership program. Using application forms that every young person must complete to join as a member. Creating core groups and committees of the most active and loyal activists in the southern, northern, and middle districts of the West Bank and holding regular meetings with these committees. These meetings focus on developing monthly action plans to delegate tasks and responsibilities for activists during a given month. The committees also ensure ongoing promotion of OneVoice across Palestine and the creation of strong relationships necessary to harness the requisite people power for civil activities.

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Keeping meticulous records that help measure the quantitative and qualitative results of this program. This includes records of new members, very active members and members who require training in particular subjects. Encouraging each activist to fill out evaluation forms in terms of what training he or she attended, how many new members were recruited, and how many signatories were recruited for the OneVoice Mandate (see Table 4.2). These forms also serve to measure Youth Leaders’ ability to represent OneVoice locally and abroad. Holding graduation ceremonies and providing certificates for dedicated activists. Collaborating with dignitaries who specialize in areas such as Israeli and foreign media, presentation skills, negotiations strategies, public awareness campaigns, team-building exercises, and conflict resolution.

In an attempt to increase its outreach beyond the West Bank, in the late fall of 2006, OneVoice inaugurated its new Gaza office after months of preparation, planning, and grassroots work. OneVoice Palestine had done outreach in the Gaza Strip in the past during the 2005 presidential elections; however, the increased restrictions on people’s movement between the West Bank and Gaza often prevented the movement’s Ramallah-based staff and activists from traveling to Gaza. This made it necessary for the movement to redouble its efforts and deepen its activism in order to advance its mission of ending the conflict through a two-state solution. Amid a challenging situation on the ground, the opening of the Gaza office enabled OneVoice Palestine to further its outreach and broaden its Youth Leadership Development program to highlight the necessity of nonviolent but assertive engagement toward ending the occupation—a critical but often unheard message in the Gaza strip. OneVoice staff in Gaza work under the most challenging of circumstances, especially since the June 2007 takeover of Gaza by Hamas, and the office has often needed to operate quietly to avoid danger. The staff there have shown extraordinary courage and commitment, and have succeeded in forming an advisory board, holding numerous meetings with young Gazans in order to build the necessary human infrastructure, and initiating a signature drive on the OneVoice mandate. In the coming year, if the political situation allows for it, OneVoice hopes to hold larger events in Gaza, largely targeting refugees.

Taking It Global: the International Education Program The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is having a polarizing effect on campuses and communities around the world. The conflict is all too often either the cause of, or an excuse for, bad relations between different ethnic or religious groups on campuses and in communities.

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The goal of the OneVoice International Education Program (IEP), launched during the 2005–6 school year, is to address the growing polarization over Middle East politics on university campuses throughout the word. OneVoice’s strong credentials in both Israel and Palestine are what set it apart from other organizations. By bringing these credentials to campuses and communities outside the Middle East, by introducing OneVoice Youth Leaders to divided campuses, OneVoice is able to create a respectful audience from groups of all backgrounds and political persuasions. This allows us to bring together students who would never normally sit in the same room, let alone applaud the same ideals, to realize that they have more in common than they could have imagined. We offer them a common cause and focus for their endeavors that will help them turn negative energy into positive action. Using the same methods we use in Israel and Palestine, OneVoice shows these groups that their views and goals coincide more than they realize, and that a united message can help build sustainable peace. Over the past year, OneVoice has brought Israeli and Palestinian Youth Leaders to address groups in New York, London, New England, California, Michigan, Ohio, eastern Canada, Washington D.C., and North Carolina. We have engaged thousands of students face-to-face and touched tens of thousands more through media and follow-up events while also targeting community groups from the Irvine Mosque and the Israel Center of San Francisco, where we were the highestrated event at their annual Shabbaton. The majority of students who attend events come from communities that are highly polarized. At the University of Connecticut, hard-line students had harassed past speakers off the podium. Even before we arrived on campus, there had been protests against our event. Although some students took up adversarial and abusive stances toward the speakers, we were able to change the power dynamic by standing up against them, isolating them, and giving a voice to moderate opinions. In doing so, we created an atmosphere of complete support and unity from the majority of the Arab, Muslim, and Jewish students in the room, who expressed a willingness to work together and with us in the future. After another similar experience, Alon Shaley, executive director of San Francisco Hillel, said, “[OneVoice’s] presence on the SFSU campus is helping to lay a foundation for dialogue and understanding. The fact that the campus was covered with posters showing that there are Israelis and Palestinians who want to genuinely sit down and engage in dialogue was simply priceless.” OneVoice’s IEP also serves as a springboard for mixed Jewish-Arab/Muslim groups to gain legitimacy and membership. At Western Michigan and Boston universities, OneVoice was able to draw hundreds of attendees to events hosted by fledgling Palestinian-Israeli peace organizations. The Boston group is now part of a regional peace alliance, which invited OneVoice back as the keynote speaker at an event for hundreds of students, many introduced to each other through our events. At Stony Brook, the IEP event was a landmark collaboration between the Jewish and Muslim student groups—they have since been working together, successfully raising money for malaria nets in Africa.

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In 2005 OneVoice was invited to Stanford University by administrators frustrated by consistent animosity between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian students. Leaders of the major groups on campus reluctantly sat around a table to hear from our activists. The dialogue continued after we left, and this year, two of these groups came together publicly for the first time to host us again. Students who attended that town hall meeting are now organizing a local dialogue group. OneVoice has also been called into schools from North Carolina in response to race-related attack on Palestinian students, and to McGill University, where we addressed students at an interfaith event the same night that a speaker with a reputation for inciting Jewish-Arab tensions was speaking at another venue. Articles written about events in regional papers such as the Ottawa Citizen, Washington Jewish Week, Guardian, and the Stanford Review complement coverage of international OneVoice events and legitimize OneVoice as a vehicle for moderates in the Diaspora. OneVoice has captured the attention of international dignitaries and world leaders from Tony Blair to Martin Luther King III to Ambassador Dennis Ross, and such business leaders as Peter Weinberg and Craig Newmark, all of whom have met with OneVoice youth representatives on their respective trips to the Middle East. Through IEP we have developed partnerships with the Center for Citizen Peace-building at the University of California-Irvine, Humanity Unites, and Americans for Informed Democracy. OneVoice supporters who cannot travel to our offices in Israel and Palestine are often inspired by attending events closer to home, meeting our volunteers, and witnessing firsthand how effective these leaders are in engaging with and activating their peers. IEP simultaneously functions as an award system for OneVoice’s most highly trained Youth Leaders. The experience of speaking at prestigious venues from the House of Lords in London to the UN and the Canadian Parliament gives credit and priceless experience to those who complete the training programs in the Middle East, serving as motivation to continue in the program and, ideally, to recruit other young people to join. The experience of entering the most hostile campuses also gives these leaders public speaking experience and helps develop their views on the conflict. After coming from Israel’s north and south, and from Jenin to Bir Zeit, our Youth Leaders are challenged in an unfamiliar atmosphere but return to the region invigorated by the support they generate and the experience they gain. In 2007–8, OneVoice IEP prioritized chapter building and continual regional networking with students to create an infrastructure for mobilizing campuses on an ongoing basis. By implementing some of the same training techniques and mechanisms we use in the Middle East, we are hoping to create a lasting OneVoice presence on college campuses, one that is organic, student driven, viral, and dynamic. As a policy, we work to ensure that all IEP funds come from separate grants from groups that only cover programs outside the Middle East, so funds spent are not detracting from any area where they are most needed.

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YEARLY CAMPAIGNS Taking Personal Responsibility: The “What Are You Willing to Do?” Campaign All the civic engagement that OneVoice does is focused on priming the people and transferring ownership back to them so they may begin to take action and to demand accountability from their elected representatives. Rallies, festivals, and marches during specific moments of political tension—Palestinian and Israeli elections, the Gaza withdrawal, and so on—as well as on an ongoing basis, are the means to amplify the voice of moderation. Yearly campaigns are designed to work synergistically with the grassroots networks built by the Youth Leadership program, town hall meetings, and Citizens’ Negotiations Platform by mobilizing those already trained and involved, and by engaging and energizing a wider segment of each population. In the fall of 2006, OneVoice launched its What Are You Willing to Do? (WAYWTD) Campaign. One of its boldest campaigns, WAYWTD focused on the personal responsibility of individuals in ending the conflict. It is easy to place all the blame for a lack of progress on elected representatives, but there has also been a critical failure on our part, as citizens, to build a grassroots base of support—to truly vest the people with the power and the responsibility to drive the agenda for a two-state solution. The campaign launched in September 2006, in the streets of the West Bank, Israel, and Gaza. OneVoice began to plant the seed of personal responsibility and civic action through a viral sticker campaign. Thousands of stickers in Hebrew and Arabic were strategically placed in cities and villages, refugee camps and moshavim, asking the question, what are you willing to do to end the conflict? This evocative campaign was the launching pad for large-scale events and a variety of other activities, all focused on amplifying the voice of moderation and reinvigorating the negotiation process toward a two-state solution. The WAYWTD campaign centered on the OneVoice Mandate, a joint declaration of collective Israeli and Palestinian goals toward a two-state solution. All activities and outreach were designed to enlist and sign up people to the mandate, which has become a critical tool for OneVoice in the months and years since. By

Table 4.2 The OneVoice Mandate • Recognize the right of both peoples to independence, sovereignty, freedom, justice, dignity, respect, national security, personal safety, and economic viability. • Implement concrete confidence-building measures that will improve the lives of the Palestinian and Israeli people, including ensuring freedom of movement for ordinary civilians and fostering education against incitement on both sides. • Immediately commence uninterrupted negotiations till reaching an agreement within one year for a Two-State Solution fulfilling the consistent will of the overwhelming majority of both populations.

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the end of 2007, signatories to the mandate had enabled OneVoice to scale up its membership from around 180,000 Israelis and Palestinians to well over 600,000. In January 2007, OneVoice was given an extraordinary opportunity by one of its strongest and most steadfast partners, the World Economic Forum (WEF), headed by Professor Klaus Schwab, a member of the OneVoice board. More than 1,000 Israelis and Palestinians from throughout Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza conducted gatherings that were broadcast directly to their leaders gathered at the plenary session at the 2007 WEF in Davos, Switzerland. In what Professor Schwab termed as the first time ever that ordinary citizens had been able to address their heads of state directly at the forum, young OneVoice leaders were actually given center stage during a plenary session packed with over 2,000 dignitaries and global business leaders. At the podium, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas as well as Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni and vice premier Shimon Peres responded to their citizens and their counterparts with candor. This rare and unique event demonstrated the power of the people to bring leaders to the table, and has served as the launching pad for emboldened citizens to test that power. Professor Schwab introduced the session by explaining, “I have the privilege to share this key session, if not the most important, at this year’s meeting.” He added, “We thought we should give voice to the ordinary people, and you should listen.” In preparation, at Tel Aviv University, OneVoice Israel had gathered over 200 Youth Leaders and supporters and filmed the Israeli statement to the leaders in Davos. The primary message, delivered by Israeli program director Adi Balderman, was to tell the political leaders that “the people are with you; there are no more excuses. What are you, the movement’s leaders, willing to do to end the conflict?” It was a very powerful call from nationalistic Israelis, demanding that elected representatives take immediate action toward negotiating a two-state solution. OneVoice Palestine filmed and recorded its statement during a gathering of more than 400 Palestinians in Al-Qasabah Theater in Ramallah on January 10. Nisreen Shahin, director general of OneVoice Palestine, delivered a strong message, expressing the determination of Palestinians to end occupation and push their leaders to negotiate and achieve the two-state solution. This event was supposed to take place on January 5 but had to be canceled because of the Israeli incursion into Ramallah one day before. And despite all the deep pain felt by the activists who had spend days and nights preparing for this event, Palestinian staff and members were able to reorganize their efforts and reactivate supporters attend the event on January 10. That night held still more challenges for our Palestinian staff and supporters, however. As they filmed their statement inside Al-Qasabah, with hundreds of people rising to their feet in support of ending the conflict and occupation through a negotiated two-state agreement, hard-line groups protested outside the theater. In the end, both for the safety of the staff as well as to protect the tapes of their statement, which needed to be mailed express to Switzerland for the WEF, staff left quietly, tapes in hand, through a back entrance.

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On January 7, 2007, OneVoice Israel and OneVoice Palestine came together in Jerusalem to film a joint statement calling for moderation and a two-state solution. This was a very rare event: not only did they film a special message from the people of Israel and Palestine, but OneVoice Youth Leaders from Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza were able to meet, some for the first time. It is always a momentous occasion. The statement from Jerusalem, delivered by Youth Leaders Eran Schafferman and Saed Mashaal, emphasized the shared destiny and shared future of the Israeli and Palestinian people. They noted the critical need for both sides to take action to make Jerusalem a free city for all religions. The leaders gathered on the stage responded directly to these statements, and pledged to work toward a resolution with renewed energy and urgency. In response to the statements from OneVoice activists, Minister Livni responded, “After watching together these wonderful youth, after listening to President Abbas, I have a feeling of sadness for lost opportunities, but also a great feeling of hope.” She added, “But it is our responsibility as leaders to give them the hope. We must make a promise and fulfill . . . the vision of two states living side by side in peace.” She acknowledged deep skepticism among many that this vision can come about, but stated, “We cannot fail” and emphasized the necessity of a realignment of “moderates committed to a solution vs. extremists opposed to this vision as a matter of ideology. Because we share the same vision, moderates must fight for the same goals . . . disempower extremists and empower the moderates.”1 In turn, President Abbas remarked, “As I heard these messages, hope rose in my heart that peace is possible, and overdue.” President Abbas explained he always had believed in the primacy of people-to-people relations and expressed hope that “these gatherings are what will lead to peace.” He stated emphatically: “I am fully convinced that in spite of all the difficulties, peace is possible.” President Abbas concluded, “the time has come to garner all the forces of goodwill . . . Nothing is more important than peace, so that this strategic part of the world will become an oasis of peace and stability.” What is most remarkable about this event and these statements is that prior to that day at WEF, the Israeli and Palestinian leadership had stopped meeting entirely. No negotiations were taking place, nor were any on the horizon. The World Economic Forum—and through it, the OneVoice Youth Leaders from Israel and Palestine—helped broker a meeting that would enable negotiations to recommence. That was truly what OneVoice aspires to accomplish: connecting the voice of the public directly to the top-level leadership by simultaneously mobilizing the grassroots and engaging the leadership through a network of partners. Momentum from the WEF event enabled OneVoice to plan and hold a successful campaign of regular events all over Israel and Palestine. Through monthly mobilizations and activities, OneVoice reached out to a variety of social sectors in a parallel fashion in Israel and Palestine—from the women’s movement, to Palestinian farmers and Israeli kibbutzniks, to foremost religious authorities, and even to the leaders of Palestinian refugee camps—all united and active under the

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banner of the OneVoice Mandate to demand decisive action from their elected leaders. Mobilizing the Grassroots: One Million Voices to End the Conflict Campaign The entire What Are You Willing to Do? campaign aimed to feed directly into simultaneous Peoples’ Summits on October 18, 2007, in Tel Aviv, Jericho, Washington D.C., London, Ottawa, and other sites around the world. This event would build from the monthly WAYWTD events and truly showcase the voice of the moderate majority to the media, the political leadership, and the world; it would also serve as a kickoff for OneVoice’s next campaign: One Million Voices to End the Conflict. By September 2007, OneVoice had collected over 500,000 Israeli and Palestinian signatories to its mandate, calling for immediate, ongoing negotiations toward a two-state solution; the Peoples’ Summits and the ensuing campaign aimed at getting the next half million. We had never tried to orchestrate anything of this magnitude before, and it was an incredible challenge—not just to convince potential sponsors, donors, participants, and partners that we could pull it off, but to convince everyone, especially the people on the ground, that it could actually help change the situation. OneVoice encounters an enormous, constant lack of hope in the potential for positive change; we hoped that a high-profile event would alter that dynamic. Right down to the wire, we were bringing new people on board: new corporate sponsors, new performers, new speakers. With only a few weeks remaining before the summits, things appeared to be matching the audacious expectations built around it. As OneVoice’s profile rose in conjunction with the One Million Voices to End the Conflict campaign, the movement’s opponents launched their own campaign to delegitimize OneVoice as a valid civil society movement and to force OneVoice to cancel the events. Under the aegis of “Another Voice,” international rejectionists who opposed a two state solution began organizing online to discredit the movement. The crux of this effort sought to damage the reputation of OneVoice by painting it as a Zionist organization dominated by American Jews and by painting its Palestinian staff as willing collaborators intent on forfeiting Palestinian rights at the negotiating table according to a firm political platform. This Internet campaign disregarded OneVoice Palestine’s deep support across a wide ideological spectrum, exemplified by the diverse membership of its board of trustees and supporting dignitaries; it also ignored the explicit language used in the organization’s literature stating that OneVoice does not advocate specific policy positions. The rejectionists also targeted and shamed the event’s performers and speakers, attempting to force the withdrawal of their participation in the summits. Ultimately, because of explicit threats made against staff and performers of the planned Jericho Summit, OneVoice Palestine was forced to postpone the event. OneVoice Israel canceled the Tel Aviv event in solidarity with their Palestinian counterparts soon afterward.

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It was truly devastating—for our staff, for our supporters worldwide, and for those on the ground in the region who saw this event for what it was: an opportunity to amplify their voices, a chance to place their concerns and their calls for resolution front and center on the world stage, a real possibility for peace. Postponing the summits—and even more than that, being called collaborators and manipulators, having our good intentions reduced to machinations designed to rob the Palestinian people—brought many of us right up against the sharpest edge of what we do and the world in which we operate. We realized how fragile it all really is, this balance we have created between national interests and the common good, between honoring different historical narratives and pursuing a shared future. I know that I am not alone among OneVoice staff when I say that it made me doubt the power and potential of what we are attempting to accomplish. I wondered if, perhaps, we had been wrong all these years. But time passes, and you gain clarity. It would have been easy, in the aftermath of the cancellations and in the wake of all these emotions, to blame the summits’ undoing wholly on rejectionist groups and those who oppose us. But we would be left only with the meager consolation of our bitterness and sense of righteousness, and we would not have the opportunity to emerge from the ordeal stronger, and more prepared to do the work that we know we must do. Thus we gathered our most committed Youth Leaders and volunteers, our core staff and board members, and undertook a comprehensive review of OneVoice’s successes and failures as an organization. Although external elements played a primary role in our setbacks, internal errors were also critical. They enabled, fed, and magnified the damage, and our weaknesses as a movement were exposed. In the weeks following the October 18th postponements, OneVoice staff worked to zone in on the internal failures. In a report furnished for the movement’s board of directors, we suggested a number of steps to help rehabilitate the organization in the wake of the summits’ cancellations. These plans included a changed governance structure, a clarification of OneVoice’s specific advocacy mission, an effort to erase the effect of the smears on OneVoice Palestine, an external audit, and more expansive measures to assess the movement’s penetration into Israeli and Palestinian society. Most importantly, we included plans to deepen and strengthen our core programs—Youth Leadership Development and our town hall meetings—to fortify and expand our grassroots network, so that the next time we are faced with a large and loud challenge, we will be equipped to face it and win.

MOVING FORWARD In the end, sustainable, meaningful change will not come from boardrooms or statehouses; it will come from ordinary citizens. The PeaceWorks Foundation is committed to empower grassroots agents of change, highlighting consensus, strengthening social and economic fabric, and empowering the people to wrest their lives from the grips of interminable conflict.

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Presently, PeaceWorks—through its main initiative, OneVoice—is focused on building consensus and mobilizing the grassroots in Israel and Palestine. But moving forward, the foundation will seek to expand, to bring the methodology that it developed for OneVoice to other conflict-ridden regions of the world. The idea that conflicts occur not because of two irreconcilable sides battling over land or resources or religion, but because a majority of moderate citizens have had control of their destinies wrest away from them by a small fringe of violent absolutists is not specific to Israel and Palestine—or to the Middle East at large. In fact, this is the dynamic that rules our era and our world. As long as it is in existence, the PeaceWorks Foundation will seek to upend this formula: we will strive to see that the moderate majorities worldwide take a stand and reclaim their lives. We have entered an age in which local conflicts have become internationalized, local economies globalized, and personal futures irrevocably intertwined with those of people halfway around the world. The result is that ordinary people have more power and more responsibility than ever to effect real, large-scale change. By giving them the tools to forge strong civil societies, to bridge the gap between toplevel leadership and grassroots interests, and to tap into a global community of invested citizens, we create the promise of a better world that we can, and will, realize.

BIOGRAPHIES Daniel Lubetzky, Founder and President, PeaceWorks Foundation (USA) Daniel Lubetzky is the Founder of PeaceWorks Holdings LLC, a business corporation pursuing both peace and profit, and of the PeaceWorks Foundation and the OneVoice Movement. The son of a Holocaust survivor, Mr. Lubetzky was born in 1968 and raised in Mexico City, where he began his education in Hebrew, English, Spanish, and Yiddish. Mr. Lubetzky earned his JD from Stanford Law School in 1993. After receiving a fellowship from the Haas Koshland Foundation to write about legislative means to foster joint ventures between Arabs and Israelis, he founded PeaceWorks Holdings. PeaceWorks Holdings’ distribution network now spans eight food industries, reaching over 10,000 food outlets, and has developed ventures across four continents. In the fall of 2000, Mr. Lubetzky began to research creative ways to amplify the voice of moderates in the Middle East, culminating with the creation of the PeaceWorks Foundation’s OneVoice Movement in 2002. In 1997 Mr. Lubetzky, then twenty-eight years old, was selected by the World Economic Forum as one of 100 Global Leaders for Tomorrow (GLT); he formed the Business of Cooperation GLT Task Force to examine ways in which business can be used as a catalyst for peace and mutual understanding in war-torn and divided societies. In 2003 Mr. Lubetzky received the Outstanding Alumnus Award from his alma mater, Trinity University. In 2004 the World Association of NGOs bestowed him

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with its Peace, Reconciliation, and Security Award. In 2005 Mr. Lubetzky was honored with the Catholic Theological Union’s PeaceMakers Award. Nisreen Shahin, Director General, OneVoice Palestine Nisreen Shahin is seasoned executive whose professional experiences include outreach, public relations, fundraising, budgeting, and translation. Having worked for the Ministry of Interior in the International Relations Department as the director of public relations, and drawing from her experience with Tawasul, Mrs. Shahin has a keen ability to mobilize and activate her fellow citizens to work toward positive alternatives and reform. She also worked with Italtrend, a European Commission Technical Assistance Project to the Palestinian Electoral Process. Her understanding of the democratic and civic challenges facing the Palestinian people places her in an important position of leadership. She is fluent in Arabic and English. She is the mother of a boy and a girl. Mowaffaq Alami, Gaza Director, OneVoice Gaza Mowaffaq Alami earned his BA from Bethlehem University in 2001. He has worked as executive director of the Standing Cooperation Committee (SCC) in Palestine, and within the Ministry of NGO Affairs as the executive director of the Minister Office. Additionally he has been involved in OneVoice’s Youth Leadership Training programs, and worked as coordinator for the Gaza Students in the West Bank Committee. Dr. Ezzeldin Masri, Youth Leadership Program Director, OneVoice Gaza Dr. Masri is dedicated and trained in education, peace building, and negotiations. He received his MA in political science from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. He worked for three years in Chicago for the board of education as an Arabic teacher. Dr. Masri returned to Gaza where he worked with the International School and became assistant principal; he then worked as an English language trainer at the Prince Hamad Center. From there, he was recruited in 2004 to the Palestinian Foreign Ministry, Peace and Negotiations Department, where he trained as a negotiator and political analyst. Dr. Masri is the father of a little boy and girl. Oriella Ben-Zvi, Co-chair, OneVoice Israel Oriella Ben-Zvi is a founding partner of Ben Or Consulting, a full-service strategic communications and consulting firm, focusing on serving the needs of Israel’s nonprofit and political communities, as well as the needs of international organizations working in the region, including UNSCO, the World Bank, the European Union, the Ford Foundation, and UNICEF. Ben-Zvi has extensive experience in a variety of communications specialties including public relations,

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marketing, advertising, and fundraising. Before moving to Israel and founding Ben-Or Consulting, Ben-Zvi worked in Washington, D.C., for the White House Office of Presidential Advance, coordinating presidential and first lady events in the United States and around the world, including major international summits in Europe, Africa, and Asia. She also served on the advance staff of the several political campaigns. Ben-Zvi holds a BA in diplomatic history and English from the University of Pennsylvania and is a candidate for an MA in political communications from Tel Aviv University. Gil Shamy, Executive Director, OneVoice Israel Gil Shamy is the executive director of the Israeli Branch of OneVoice located in Tel Aviv. He and his team have created a strong Youth Leadership program and have brought together a groundbreaking coalition of Young Political Leaders against Incitement. Currently, he is overseeing a Get-Out-the-Vote campaign for the upcoming Knesset elections. Mr. Shamy studied international relations and political communications in Israel. He has been politically active all his life, working in the Ehud Barak election campaign. He was born in Givataim. Adi Balderman, Program Director, OneVoice Israel Adi Balderman was born in Haifa and comes from a family who has been living in Haifa for thirteen generations. She spent part of her childhood in Mexico City, where she attended the International School. She has a BA in political science and general studies from the University of Haifa, and an MA in European political economy from the London School of Economics. She joined OneVoice because she believes it has the power to mobilize the silent majority who wants to live peacefully with each other. Darya Shaikh, Executive Director, PeaceWorks Foundation/OneVoice USA Darya Shaikh joined OneVoice in January 2004, working as the public education coordinator and program developer. Having received her BA in political science and Middle Eastern studies at the McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Darya came to OneVoice with a deep understanding for grassroots activism toward civic empowerment. She has been involved in reconciliation efforts in the Middle East through Hashomer Hatzair and Givat Haviva since she was nine years old. Over the course of three years, she worked as the facilitator and moderator for a delegation of Jewish-Israeli, Arab-Israeli, and Bedouin youth. Her work at OneVoice has allowed her to combine her vision of reconciliation and peace with her innate appreciation for coexistence. She was born in Brooklyn, NY; her mother is Israeli, from Hadera, and her father is Pakistani, from Karachi.

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ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: OneVoice Founder and Executive Director: Daniel Lubetzky Mission/Description: OneVoice Movement is organized to empower ordinary Israeli and Palestinian citizens to wrest the agenda for conflict resolution away from violent extremists. Website: www.onevoicemovement.org Address: The PeaceWorks Foundation & OneVoice Movement PO Box 1577-OCS New York NY 10113 USA Phone: Tel. 1.212.897.3985 x104 Fax: 1.212.897.3986 E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

NOTE 1. Webcast of the session can accessed through http://gaia.world-television.com/wef/ worldeconomicforum_annualmeeting2007/default.aspx?sn=19223.

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Nonviolent Peaceforce: A Realistic Choice for the Future Mel Duncan, Mark Zissman, and Patrick Savaiano

A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history. —Mahatma Gandhi

HOW ONE PERSON IS IMPORTANT One night in a small Sri Lanka village, a man was walking on the street alone. Suddenly, and without provocation, a second man approached on a bicycle and threw a hand grenade at him. The grenade exploded, critically injuring the man. As inconspicuously as he had appeared, the cyclist quickly rode away as if nothing had happened. Not unlike on any other night in a terror-stricken community, none of the villagers came to the helpless and wounded man’s aid. Violence creates fear, and can fear lock civil society into a desperate silence. As a rule, most fearful, silent people do not come out of their homes at night. However, a Nonviolent Peaceforce field team member heard the explosion and saw the man, lying injured and bleeding in the street. Without hesitation, she quickly ran to his aid, followed by another brave team member. As a result of their swift and courageous action, they were able to get the man to a hospital in time for his life to be saved. The following night, the residents of the village marched through the streets to celebrate the man’s survival and the courage of the Nonviolent Peaceforce personnel. The villagers committed themselves to stand united and not succumb to individual fears: a first step for the rebuilding of local civil society.

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INTRODUCTION In the twentieth century, the international community was unable to respond in a timely or effective manner to crises that led to devastating armed conflicts, brutal violence, and genocide, with Kosovo and Rwanda as two examples. In many instances, the world simply chose not to respond. At other times, a reaction occurred only after a considerable delay, typically with a militarized intervention. Regrettably, both of these responses led to untold human misery and destruction that could have been avoided with nonviolent civilian peacekeeping. It has been estimated that as few as 1,000 people trained in nonviolence could have prevented the violence and genocide that devastated Yugoslavia in 1998. Historically, this conflict resolution technique has been used successfully around the world. Nonviolence has not only changed governments and policies, but it has also been effective in popular movements that confront power, injustice, terror, and human rights violations. The formation of Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP) and its standing peace teams represents a new and powerful alternative to stop violence and human rights abuses before they reach the catastrophic levels observed in places such as Yugoslavia, Kosovo, and Rwanda. Conceived by a group of participants at the 1999 Hague Appeal for Peace and constituted in the 2002 Convening Event in Surajkund, India, NP is a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating an international peaceforce of civilians trained in nonviolent peacekeeping strategies. Composed of over seventyfive member organizations, NP responds to requests for help anywhere in the world, using proven methods of nonviolence to protect human rights, deter violence, and help create space for local peacemakers to carry out their work. Nonviolent Peaceforce represents the hope of many people for an alternative to massive military intervention. It is a key component in the development of a strategic, cohesive, nonviolent response to brutality and threats of violence.

SOME UNIQUE ASPECTS OF NONVIOLENT PEACEFORCE Although Nonviolent Peaceforce has learned from and builds upon the work of other groups using nonviolent techniques, we are unique in several ways: 1. NP is an international organization from the bottom up. We have regional offices worldwide and a fifteen-member International Governance Council, with representatives from every inhabited continent. 2. NP is creating a permanent, large-scale, paid, and trained team of peacekeepers. 3. NP is not affiliated with any national, religious, or political viewpoint. 4. NP does not take sides in a conflict, but we help create emotional and physical space between parties, enabling them to discuss differences and reach their own solutions. 5. NP’s field members receive training in nonviolent, third-party intervention strategies as well as training specific to the people, language, and culture of the conflict areas to which they are sent.

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Mission The mission of Nonviolent Peaceforce is to build a large-scale trained, international, civilian nonviolent peace force. Our aim is to prevent warfare and violence before they occur by enabling conflicting groups to enter into a discussion where all parties are heard and real solutions can be found.

The Origins of Nonviolent Peaceforce The inspiration for Nonviolent Peaceforce dates back to 1997–98. During this time period, I (Mel Duncan) received a fellowship to study the connections between grassroots organizing and spirituality. Very early in my work, the dualistic way in which I organized for peace, justice, and the environment was challenged. Instead of conceptualizing these pertinent issues from a perspective of right versus wrong, us versus them, or good versus evil, I was confronted with the possibility of organizing my beliefs from a position of unity. The ideological paradigm shift I began to experience led me to finish my fellowship at a Buddhist monastery in southern France with a Vietnamese monk by the name of Thich Nhat Hanh. He was extremely influential in helping me to further abandon the dichotomies in my thinking. During the time I spent with Thich Nhat Hanh, he shared with me his profound belief that the human race is no longer in a place in history that takes sides. This idea really resonated with me and became a catalyst for the conception of Nonviolent Peaceforce. Following my departure from the monastery in late 1998, I returned to the United States to work as a professor at the University of Minnesota. Shortly after my homecoming, I realized that I felt deeply inspired to create a nonviolent peace force. I had briefly outlined a reflective composition of what such an entity would look like near the end of my tenure in southern France. Initially, when I wrote the piece, I was just jotting down ideas and had very little intention of actually creating a nonviolent peace force. However, no matter how hard I tried, it was impossible to get the vision out of my head. Consequently, one night my wife, Georgia, told me to “just go for it.” The next day, I was reading the Nation, a progressive magazine, and there was an article about the upcoming Hague Appeal for Peace conference that was set for May 1999. The purpose of the conference was to eliminate war during the twentyfirst century. I realized from reading this article that I had found a seemingly appropriate venue to test out the currency of my idea. I was hopeful that attending this conference would not only allow me to examine the possibility of actually establishing a nonviolent peace force, but it would also help me discover if other people were in fact interested in the idea. Resolute in my decision to attend the conference, I raised enough money and luckily found a free place to stay. When I arrived at the conference, I was surprised to discover there were 9,000 participants, far more than the 5,000 originally advertised. However, it was so crowded that my ability to effectively communicate my

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idea was completely diminished. Even if I had stood on a chair and yelled at the top of my lungs, I still would have been unable to achieve my goal; the background noise was impenetrable. In the evening, and alone with my disappointment, I called my wife and expressed my concerns about the futility of finding support for my vision. In response, she wisely told me to be patient and listen quietly for the right opportunity. The next day, it was so crowded that I was completely wedged against the back wall of a room. It appeared that I was doomed to experience the same unfortunate result as on the previous day. However, to my surprise, I suddenly heard another person ask other participants about the possibility of developing a vision that was similar to mine. I was utterly amazed. Impassioned with a sense of purpose, I pushed through the crowd, grabbed him by the arm, and proclaimed, “If you’re serious about what you just said, then we have to start organizing.” That man’s name was David Hartsough, who is still centrally involved in organizing Nonviolent Peaceforce. Ironically, we discovered that while I was having this vision sitting in a Buddhist monastery, he was having the same one sitting in a Serbian jail: he had been arrested for administering nonviolence training to Kosovar Albanian students. Later that night, David and I were feverously pulling people together who shared our same vision. With these other creative participants, many of whom are still involved in our organization, we had a conversation about whether this was the time and place in history to increase the scale and scope, professionalism, and international nature of civilian nonviolent peacekeeping. Based upon this and further conversations, we then developed a proposal for actually creating a nonviolent peace force. As a crucial step in developing Nonviolent Peaceforce, we engaged in academic research and did a thorough feasibility study. That research is currently on our website as an extensive, 360-page document. We also engaged in field research as well. Often a group of us, using our own money or whatever other finances we could raise, would conduct this research with people living in some of the most violent places in the world. At the same time we were doing the field research, we were finding that people were saying to us, “I had that idea” or “We did that in our village” or “I wrote a paper about that in university” or “My whole life I’ve been training to do this,” and what we found was that far from being a vision that started with a group of us, nonviolent peacekeeping is an idea that has occurred and recurred in many people over the past half century. What has escaped CNN and other major media outlets has not escaped the consciousness of thousands of us. Far from being an organizing path, this is a task of us finding one another and saying that now is the time to put forward our resources, time, talent, and indeed our lives to expanding this concept of nonviolent peace keeping. For us, this vision finally became a reality in December 2002, when Nonviolent Peaceforce officially became operational.

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OUR WORK It is with great satisfaction to report that many of the goals and projects of our organization have been approved by hundreds of endorsers, including nine Nobel Peace Prize laureates. In conducting all that we do, Nonviolent Peaceforce strives to achieve three overarching goals: (a) to inform decision makers, opinion leaders, the public, and public institutions, so as to build support for nonviolent intervention; (b) to build the pool of people able to join peace teams through regional activities, training, and the maintenance of a roster of trained, available people; and (c) to deploy teams, learn from deployment projects, and build a body of expertise on how to implement large-scale, nonviolent intervention. In order to accomplish these goals, Nonviolent Peaceforce performs a variety of functions around the world. We work to create and maintain deployment projects; build the capacity for large-scale peacekeeping through training, engagement with our member organizations, and regional activities; and influence decisionmaking bodies worldwide. Currently, our deployment projects include Sri Lanka, Guatemala, and the Philippines. When we were invited to help in places such as Sri Lanka, or when societies in the future request our help, there is a strict process we follow prior to deployment. First, our International Governance Council (IGC) determines whether there is a clear mandate for intervention. If there is, we send an exploratory team that, in consultation with local groups and the IGC, tailors specific strategies and objectives for the conflict area. Strategies could include accompanying local peace or human rights advocates, providing protective presence in threatened areas, returning child soldiers, interposing ourselves, bridging local issues to international, facilitating communication among the groups in conflict, monitoring elections or ceasefires, training locals in conflict resolution, and other strategies as appropriate. Moreover, we also look for exit strategies, with the intent to turn over our work to local groups, since only those affected can ultimately create a lasting peace. Sri Lanka We launched our first joint project in Sri Lanka in 2003 at the invitation of several local and national Sri Lankan peace organizations. More than 67,000 people have been killed and 1.6 million displaced in the civil war that has ravaged the nation since 1983. Today, our staff in Sri Lanka consists of more than forty individuals, both local peacekeepers and international professionals. We currently have twenty field team members plus support staff in five locations in Sri Lanka. Nonviolent Peaceforce Sri Lanka (NPSL) engages in many different kinds of activities, such as different forms of accompaniment, networking and connecting, concerned engagement as internationals, presence at events and places at risk of violence and crisis, and rumor control. These activities are primarily at the request of or in some way in support of local Sri Lankan civilians. Although NPSL sometimes

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provides feedback, inspiration, and a sounding board, our work is guided by the local agenda, not ours. These activities, over time and repetition serve to • • • • •

Increase the actual safety of individuals Decrease violence in individual and family lives and in specific communities Increase nonviolent options to address problems and needs Support the building of new connections and networks Help raise the visibility of critical issues and the ability to discuss them

The result is reduced barriers to civilian involvement in peace with justice work. We assume that as this work continues, and the positive outcomes increase and the negative outcomes decrease, this will tend to make room for new civilian participation in both ongoing and new peace with justice activities. This in turn, should lead to some structural changes, thus further increasing safety, decreasing violence, and leading to more peaceful and just conditions in Sri Lanka. It is an iterative process that requires significant follow up and support after the initial set of activities. It is a process that is slow to develop and takes time to mature and show impact. Philippines Project (Mindanao) In Mindanao, the southernmost island region of the Philippines, more than 120,000 lives have been lost in a civil war fought over economics and land rights. The naturally resource-rich Mindanao islands contribute 40–50 percent of the Philippines economy. The region was originally settled by southeast Muslims (“Moros”) nearly 1,000 years ago, was conquered by the Spanish in the 1500s, and was most recently controlled by the United States. In spite of a 1996 ceasefire and the agreements between the government of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), people still live with violence. Subsequently, in May 2007, we began a second International Civilian Peacekeeping project in Mindanao on the basis of extensive feedback received and extended support from local communities and main stakeholders in the southernmost island region. While in Mindanao, our organization supports the work of local agencies that are working for peace and justice, some of which are involved in monitoring the cease-fire agreement between the government and the MILF. We have accomplished this task by sending internationals to work hand in hand with the local peacekeepers, which has thereby contributed to their safety. Together, Nonviolent Peaceforce and these local groups have helped maintain the ceasefire agreement and further the peace process in this rather volatile situation. Guatemala Project Guatemala is a nation plagued by fear and insecurity, even after eleven years have passed since the signing of peace accords that ended their bloody, thirtysix-year civil war. In this terror-stricken nation, violence still reigns with

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impunity. The number of violent deaths in Guatemala approximates that of the 1970s and 1980s, and much of that is the result of the incapacity or unwillingness of the national police to respond adequately to criminal acts and calls for help from human rights defenders. In this violate climate, human rights workers continue to work nonviolently toward a society where lives and laws are respected. National elections were held in Guatemala in early September and November 2007. A substantial increase in violence was anticipated during the time leading up to and after the elections. Accordingly, we provided a team of four accompaniers, including a team coordinator, who helped ensure the security of the human rights defenders against politically motivated violence. As a testimony to the work we have done on this project, a leading member of a Guatemala Woman’s Rights Group generously stated, “NP’s accompaniment has helped a lot. I used to have the idea that if they wanted to kill you, they’re going to do it, and they’ll probably kill the accompanier at the same time. So a person would have the extra burden of responsibility for the accompanier. But we’ve seen the specialized and professional nature of accompaniment, which means that the accompaniers understand the political dimension. They are active, not like a heavy bag you have to carry around, but someone you can discuss things with. This is very helpful.”

STAFF TRAINING AND COMPENSATION We have approximately ninety staff working worldwide, two thirds of them employed as field team members. Basic training for these peacekeeping positions is ten weeks long and includes hands-on education in local language(s), the area’s culture, the nature of the conflict, and ways to engage individuals peacefully. When appropriate, highly visible participants such as Nobel Peace Prize winners, religious leaders, and former government leaders may be recruited. Nonviolent Peaceforce field team members are asked for a two-year commitment of duty. However, as a particular benefit, these positions are paid. In addition to a monthly stipend, our field team members receive a per diem that allows them to live at the same levels as the communities in which they reside and work. Additionally, death and injury insurance are also provided. Site deployments are evaluated with great care and no unnecessary risk is taken. In the future, college scholarships and contributions to retirement funds will be part of our compensation package. The demand for these positions is quiet incredible. For example, we recently recruited for eighteen field team members; however, applicant interest was above and beyond this number. Subsequently, we had to cut off the recruitment when we had ten applicants for every available position. Remarkably, the applicants came from fifty-five different countries. In general, our field team members are not exclusively from the United States. For instance, many come from other nations, including Canada, Columbia, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt,

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Figure 5.1 Peace team trainees taking part in a simulation exercise, conducted in cooperation with the Romanian military, as part of a Nonviolent Peaceforce training (Cluj, Romania—August 2007). Photo by Phil Esmonde. Courtesy of Nonviolent Peaceforce.

Romania, Spain, the UK, Germany, the Philippines, and Pakistan. The people who believe in and are willing to participate in Nonviolent Peaceforce are there in large numbers. We are proud to be able to provide answers to what people can say “yes” to, when they say “no” to war. It is not enough just to resist. We have to also create.

FUNDING Adequate funding is a very important aspect of any organization, whether it is in the early developmental stages or already firmly established. Nonviolent Peaceforce is qualified as a charitable organization under section 501(c)(3) of the United States Internal Revenue code. Approximately half of the money we receive comes from individuals, and about 20 percent comes from grants provided by UNICEF and the governments of Germany, Canada, and Catalonia, among others. Moreover, an additional 19 percent comes from foundations and trusts. When we were just starting out in 1999, our fiscal resources were extremely limited. By soliciting contributions through the mail, we were able to raise $12,000. At this point, David Hartsough was the director of Peaceworkers, which provided organizational support and some start-up money as well.

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Historically, our budget has ebbed and flowed. Currently, it’s extremely tight, and we are trying to increase our fund-raising efforts. Contributors can assist us fiscally in a multitude of ways. For instance, they can purchase Peace Bonds, donate airline tickets and appreciated stock, or register to make monthly, quarterly, or even yearly donations.

EFFICACY MEASUREMENT Although it would be ideal, we really do not have a quantifiable way to analyze success. However, that is not a result of any deficiency within our organization. Field work can be challenging: it requires an immense amount of attention and creative decision making, and those factors alone do not allow for continual and precise measurement. Additionally, it is extremely difficult to measure a negative—how do you measure whether you prevented something from happening? For instance, there is really no way to know if the accompaniment we provided in a specific situation prevented a violent and dire situation from occurring. Instead, we examine other factors, such as the number of people participating in civil society. Specifically, we are interested in discovering if that number is either increasing or decreasing. Recently, however, we commissioned the external evaluation of our longest-running project (of almost four years); our member organizations came together in Nairobi for the first time in five years in September 2007 to review that evaluation and make decisions as to the next steps for our strategic plan.

LESSONS LEARNED In conducting our initial research and through our various deployment projects, we have learned some very interesting things about nonviolent conflict resolution worth discussing. Primarily, we quickly realized that nobody can make anyone else’s peace for them. That is the function of the local people. The most we can hope to do is provide the support and protection needed for those doing their work so that they can feel safe, be productive, and stay alive. We also learned that the most violent places in the world already had courageous peacemakers and human rights defenders currently employing their creative talents. More often than not, cross-culturally, those people were women. Time and time again, they told us that isolation is a catalyst for increased violence. For instance, quite recently, we were able to ensure the safety of some 1,000 inhabitants in a Philippine village. The community had become trapped between two armed factions, and the villagers were considering evacuation. However, at their request, our peacekeepers came to the village many times over a period of about a week and communicated with both parties. After a week of the special attention we provided, the villagers had enough confidence not to flee their homes.

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There are a number of factors that cause successful interactions like this to occur. In the contexts we are in, the combatants are susceptible to international pressure. Ultimately, they prefer that the incidences of violence and brutality be local phenomena that are not reported. Consequently, the dynamic changes when a group of people from around the world are present. Moreover, our presence also helps increase the stature of local people who are committed to peace building and human rights. Finally, the fact that we are unarmed and encouraging peace changes the atmosphere and encourages other people to step up and examine their own behaviors. From a managerial standpoint, we have discovered that adequate fiscal resources and the development of an organization’s infrastructure (e.g., human resources, administration, assessment, contractual procedures) are extremely important in the growth of an organization. In some ways, we thought we could develop Nonviolent Peaceforce much more quickly than we have. For the future, we need to continue to develop the infrastructure to support greater peacekeeping efforts. We have also learned that on an international level, it is extremely difficult to develop these organizational components with a limited amount of funds.

Figure 5.2 Nonviolent Peaceforce peacekeepers outside their office in Cotabato, Mindanao, in the Philippines (August 2007). Photo by Erika Shatz. Courtesy of Nonviolent Peaceforce.

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Figure 5.3 The second team of Nonviolent Peaceforce peacekeepers to work in Sri Lanka (September 2005). Copyright © Bob Fitch Photo. Courtesy of Nonviolent Peaceforce.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS A major challenge that Nonviolent Peaceforce will continue to face in the future is our nonalignment or nonpartisanship in a conflict areas. We must tread carefully to avoid being unduly influenced, to hold to our mission, and to cooperate with other groups without compromising our principles. We will continue the practices we currently employ to maintain a nonpartisan position, field team coordinators will be trained to be aware of and deal with these complex issues, and diverse funding sources and personnel will help prevent alignment with power structures. As a future goal of the organization, we will remain committed to training peacekeepers to build our capacity to respond rapidly to requests for help. Our continued aim is to help create, or keep open, a safe space for local peacemakers to do their work, and to protect civilians in areas of violent conflict. Toward this end, we are recruiting qualified and experienced people to be trained as nonviolent peacekeepers. These 500 people will become our reserve corps and will be available for and committed to at least six months of service within a three-year period following training. We are also raising money for a $100,000 reserve fund that would be used as seed money to help jump-start our rapid response when an urgent request is made. This fund would enable us to hire an advance team, and pay their travel and accommodation costs. As much as possible, we do not want the initial critical

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actions necessary for urgent rapid responses to be delayed because of a shortage of funds. As for future deployment projects, we are in the process of developing ventures in Columbia and Uganda. The internal armed conflict in Colombia, which has its roots in the political violence of the 1950s, has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced countless more throughout its fifty-year history. Local and indigenous communities are coming together to implement peaceful alternatives to violence. They are struggling to maintain a neutral stance between government and the armed groups, having organized themselves as “Peace Communities.” They face physical aggressions, psychological pressure, military violence, and juridical threats. Through our protective presence, we will link local peace workers to an international community dedicated to monitoring their human rights and protecting their safety. With respect to Uganda, since 1986, the northern region of the country has been plagued by rebellions, the longest and most devastating by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). In spite of a cease-fire in the second half of 2006, the danger of renewed war has not been overcome, and violence is still threatening the communities that have barely begun to recover. Throughout the region, as many as 2 million people are displaced, often forced into camps. Unfortunately, the LRA’s campaign has been characterized by the forced abductions of thousands of Ugandan children—possibly over 25,000 children. As described by Archbishop of Gulu John Baptist Odama, Uganda’s twenty-year-old civil conflict is a “war that now has grandchildren.” Subsequently, the slow but steady return of displaced citizens, ex-combatants, and former child soldiers to their homesteads will require careful monitoring by unarmed civilians trained in conflict resolution and protection services.

SUGGESTIONS I would suggest that every new organization focus on expediently developing the infrastructure for the organization; it will be crucial to growth. Additionally, as a methodological approach, we have found it invaluable to affirm the obstacles that we face as an organization. Barriers to success are an inevitable occurrence that every organization will encounter. In our case, we acknowledge them, creatively take the energy from them, and move through them. We do not deny the problems we have, but instead use the energy from those problems to fuel a possible solution. Suggested Website/Readings • • •

Nonviolent Peaceforce website: www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org A Force More Powerful, by Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall Nonviolent Soldier of Islam: Badshah Khan, a Man to Match His Mountains, by Eknath Easwaran

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All Men Are Brothers, by Mahatma Gandhi Peace and Every Step, by Thich Nat Hanh An Ordinary Man, by Paul Rusesabagina

NONVIOLENT PEACEFORCE INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE COUNCIL Our International Governance Council, the decision-making body of Nonviolent Peaceforce, is currently composed of members from thirteen countries. These members are chosen at our International Assembly. Yukio Aki, International Governance Council Member; Japan. Eric Bachman, International Governance Council Member, Executive Committee, Treasurer; Germany. Eric Bachman is a U.S. citizen and transnational peace activist. He worked in Germany for thirty-six years as a conscientious objector, and recently returned to the United States. Since 1971 he has organized trainings and seminars in many countries on subjects including nonviolence and nonviolent action, civil disobedience, environmental issues, anti-nuclear movements, apartheid and racism, the conflict in Yugoslavia, peace work in a war zone, and civilian-based defense. He was one of the founders of the ZaMir Transnational Net, an electronic communication network that was set up in the Balkans during the wars in Yugoslavia to enable communication among peace and human rights groups. He also helps nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) use information technologies, especially open source software, for social change and peace work. He has worked closely with the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, War Resisters International, German Federation for Social Defense, Balkan Peace Team–International, Peace Cottage Lippinghausen, and other peace groups in Europe and Germany. Recently he co-founded the project Bridges of Encouragement and a newsletter, Peace across the Atlantic. Simonetta Costanzo Pittaluga, International Governance Council Member, Executive Committee; Spain. Simonetta has over thirty-five years’ experience in nonviolent transformation in various small-scale, grassroots social issues. She is an accomplished Asthanga Yoga teacher and applies those ahimsa principles to her professional public relations and education work. She has been researching nonviolence and peace education and training since 1992 and is part of the NP member organization NOVA and the Center for Social Innovation in Barcelona. She is Italian, born in South Africa, now living in Barcelona, and the proud mother of two. Omar Diop, International Governance Council Member Co-Chair, Executive Committee; Senegal. Omar has worked as a high school teacher for thirty years and has served as a board member of a teacher trade union for twelve years. He created or participated in the founding of many civil society organizations and is currently leading three of them: Senegalese Civic

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League, Senegalese Coalition of Human Rights Defenders, and the network Citizenship, Democracy, Human Rights and Peace. Omar is also a founding member and board member of Civil Society Organisations Coalition, which works on the electoral process in Senegal. He is a former board member of NP member organization West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP). He led the development of a peace curriculum for primary and secondary schools and has served as the main trainer on nonviolence and peace education in Ivory Coast, Togo, Guinea, and Ghana. He is also an executive committee member of the West Africa Human Rights Defenders Network. He received his high school teaching certificate at École Normale Supérieure of Dakar, and an MA in geography at the University of Dakar. Omar currently lives in Dakar, Senegal, and has three grown daughters. Mel Duncan, Executive Director, Nonviolent Peaceforce; United States. Mel Duncan serves as the executive director of Nonviolent Peaceforce. Modeled on the Gandhian concept of Shanti Sena, Nonviolent Peaceforce is composed of trained civilians from around the world. In partnership with local groups, NP applies proven and effective strategies to protect human rights in areas of violent conflict and helps create space for local peacemakers to carry out their work. NP currently has civilian peacekeepers working in Sri Lanka, Guatemala, and the Mindanao region of the Philippines. Project development is going on for Colombia and Uganda. Duncan has over thirty years of organizing and advocating nonviolently for peace, justice, and the environment. In 1997 he received the prestigious Community Leaders Fellowship from the Archibald Bush Foundation, which allowed him to spend one and a half years studying the connections between peace, justice, and spirituality. He is a graduate of Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota, where he was awarded their Distinguished Citizen award in 2006. He also has a master’s degree from the University of Creation Spirituality/New College, San Francisco, California. He and his wife, Georgia, have eight children and live in St. Paul, Minnesota. Faith Edman, International Governance Council Member; USA. Donna Howard, International Governance Council Co-Chair, Executive Committee; USA. A long-time peace activist in the United States, Donna was pivotal in founding a Catholic Worker house in Duluth, Minnesota, for resistance and hospitality, and has served a prison sentence for disarming the U.S. Navy ELF trigger system for nuclear war. Her other work activities have been in human services: advocacy and counseling for low-income, addicted, or mentally ill people. Donna joined the work of Nonviolent Peaceforce immediately after its founding, served on the original board and research team, and worked in Sri Lanka to lay the groundwork for the first project. She has two grown sons. Ramu Manivannan, International Governance Council Member, Executive Committee; India. Ramu is an associate professor at the University of

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Madras, Chepauk Campus, and is the founder and chairperson of Buddha Smiles, a global initiative for peace, education, and development that works with rural and urban poor children in India. Ramu is an international teacher of the science and philosophy of Yoga and meditation and is an active interfaith practitioner. Ramu and his wife, Sheela, have two children. Mateo Menin, International Governance Council Member; Italy. Israel Naor, International Governance Council Member; Israel. Israel was born in Vienna, Austria. His immediate family escaped to Hungary to avoid the German Anschluss; however, much of his extended family did not survive the Holocaust. He continued schooling in Palestine and spent a year in National Service, then was drafted into the newly created Israeli Army. He earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering and a master’s in irrigation at the University of California–Berkeley, and worked as a civil engineer for U.S. and Israeli companies engaged in the planning/design of water resources development and irrigation systems. Israel and his wife, Dorothy, have been involved in peace activities in Israel since 2000, participating in demonstrations against the occupation, the Separation Barrier/Wall, and the often-brutal treatment of Palestinians. They are also engaged in humanitarian activities to save Palestinian lives. They reside in Nof Yam, Herzliah, and have three children. Lucy Nusseibeh, International Governance Council Member; Palestine. Theo Roncken, International Governance Council Member; Bolivia. Farrukh Sohail Goindi, International Governance Council Member; Pakistan. John Stewart, International Governance Council Member, Executive Committee; Zimbabwe. John has been a practitioner in the area of conflict transformation since 1986. He has worked on the Heal the Wounds Campaign to assist victims of the FRELIMO and RENAMO armed conflict along the border with Mozambique in eastern Zimbabwe. He has conducted training in nonviolent conflict resolution skills for the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. Since 1999 John has worked with Nonviolent Action and Strategies for Social Change (NOVASC), which provides technical and practical skills for negotiation, mediation, and nonviolent action through training, intervention, and accompaniment. He is also one of the founding members of the Coalition on Conflict Management, a collaborative effort of more than fifteen organizations. John resides in Harare, Zimbabwe. Cuauhtémoc Romero Villagómez, International Governance Council Member.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Nonviolent Peaceforce Executive Director: Mel Duncan Mission/Description: Nonviolent Peaceforce is a federation of over seventy five member organizations from around the world. In partnership with local groups, unarmed Nonviolent Peaceforce field team members apply proven

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strategies to protect human rights, deter violence, and help create space for local peacemakers to carry out their work. The mission of the Nonviolent Peaceforce is to build a trained, international civilian peace force committed to third party nonviolent intervention. Website: http://www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org/ Address: Nonviolent Peaceforce 425 Oak Grove Street Minneapolis, MN 55418 USA Phone: 1-612-871-0005 Fax: 1-612-871-0006 E-mail: [email protected]

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Peaceful Bodyguards: Nonviolent Action in War Zones for the Protection of Human Rights: Lessons from Three Decades with Peace Brigades International Barbara J. Wien

INTERRUPTING THE VIOLENCE Wherever there are armed conflicts and grave human rights abuses, there are brave citizens who speak out against injustice and violence. These peace and human rights advocates are often stigmatized, labeled as “subversives” or “guerrillas.” They are routinely targeted by armed actors and suffer multiple abuses, such as persecution, harassment, arbitrary detainment, imprisonment, death threats, torture, disappearance or assassination. Sexual abuse is also widely used as a weapon to silence female rights advocates. Social movements are criminalized, and a climate of endemic impunity exists in many countries. However, a new international dynamic is at work in some conflicts today. At the invitation of the local populations, nonviolent teams of foreigners are transcending national borders and deploying to areas of repression to try to prevent bloodshed at great personal risk. They are intervening along the chain of command, interrupting the orders to kill, standing with vulnerable communities, and alerting many others in an attempt to forestall atrocities. Perpetrators of heinous crimes are deterred when these foreign teams are present because the death squad leaders and those higher up the chain of command make a calculated political decision that the consequences and costs are not worth it. One such group of foreigners that has been deploying to conflict zones for nearly three decades is Peace Brigades International (PBI). Since 1981 PBI has been sending highly trained teams of human rights observers into areas of conflict and repression at the request of the local people to protect courageous individuals and communities who have been threatened with political violence. PBI is best known for pioneering a comprehensive method called nonviolent protective accompaniment. Accompaniment involves a high-profile presence alongside threatened activists, intensive relationship building with all relevant actors in the conflict, and activation of worldwide emergency response networks to 105

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Figure 6.1 PBI breaking the chain of command in human rights attacks. Source: Peace Brigades.

generate immediate pressure in a crisis situation. An exploratory team is sent first to see if the parties to the conflict might be influenced by the presence of foreigners, and whether PBI’s methods would work. This intensive, hands-on protection is one of the most effective tools available for the protection of human rights, and is currently being employed by PBI in Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Nepal, and Indonesia.1 In the 1980s and 1990s, Peace Brigades also accompanied Native American communities in Canada, and served in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti, Croatia, Serbia, Sri Lanka, and East Timor. Furthermore, PBI has provided trainings in the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi for over forty nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to share lessons about security precautions, risk assessment, and nonviolent strategies.

WHAT IS PROTECTIVE ACCOMPANIMENT AND HOW DOES IT WORK? How can Peace Brigades teams possible deter attacks using nonviolent strategies? The answer is both simple and complex. Would you rather walk through a dangerous neighborhood by yourself, or with a group of friends? Thugs and robbers usually do not want witnesses and are deterred by the presence of others. In the same manner that thousands of college students traveled to the southern United States in the 1960s to escort black voters to the polls so they would not be lynched by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), so, too, PBI field teams act as unarmed escorts, peaceful bodyguards, witnesses, and a protective presence.

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Protective accompaniment, pioneered by PBI in Guatemala, is an important method of defending the political spaces of threatened activists and civilian populations working nonviolently for democratic change. Equipped with the local language, cross-cultural skills, notebooks, cameras, satellite phones, extensive diplomatic contacts, security training, their foreign passports, and a large international advocacy network, the PBI teams escort threatened civil society activists, sometimes twenty-four hours a day. PBI safeguards diverse groups of local activists so they can expose human rights abuses and mobilize communities against violence and oppression. The PBI teams are backed up by grassroots emergency response networks in fifteen countries, and by high-level political support networks of elected officials in numerous capital cities. PBI’s time-tested methodology mixes a nonviolent and nonpartisan stance with the long-term physical presence of trained international observers. The teams initiate contacts with almost all the parties to a conflict in order to inform them of the PBI presence in the region. PBI teams leave a very big footprint everywhere they go by announcing themselves through letters and calls to all the authorities. In many instances, a U.S. field volunteer will visit his or her elected official in the home district or on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., before deploying with PBI to gain a letter of support to carry into a conflict, which can be presented to the U.S. embassy and any soldiers when stopped at a checkpoint. This letter offers another level of protection. Local authorities in a country are informed and aware if PBI is operating in their area. Presumably, illegal, armed actors are aware of PBI’s presence as well through informants and surveillance.

EMERGENCY RESPONSE NETWORKS Complementing the physical presence of PBI volunteers are concerned grassroots individuals, labor organizations, elected officials, the diplomatic corps, UN representatives, religious bodies, and academic leaders, who compose a worldwide support network capable of reinforcing PBI’s presence. The Emergency Response Network (ERN) mobilizes vital assistance in lifethreatening situations. It is activated whenever death threats, abductions, arrests, assaults, or expulsion from the country threatens one of PBI’s teams, volunteers, or someone they accompany. Members of the ERN send a fax, letter, or e-mail to the relevant authorities to bring pressure to bear in the countries in which the crisis is occurring. Citizens in fifteen European, North American, and Asian countries participate. They will contact members of Parliament or congressional representatives on short-term notice. At the next level, PBI will activate its Political Response Network (PRN), which operates at a higher level of politicians and officials. PBI first attempts to use the leverage enjoyed with elected officials, foreign ministries, and embassies in each country where PBI has offices before activating the grassroots networks. PBI’s ability to rapidly mobilize grassroots responses and high-level officials helps deter violence directed against team members and the local activists whom

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PBI accompanies. Once someone joins the ERN, he or she can expect to receive alerts, depending on the level of danger. Requests for faxes, letters, phone calls, or a combination of all may be made. Members of the ERN receive a description of the crisis situation, a suggested message, and information about phoning or ordering a pre-composed fax to be sent. Working side by side with local human rights defenders, PBI’s volunteers are then just the outward symbols of the pressure the international human rights community is prepared to apply in the event of abuse.

WHO IS BEING PROTECTED? For twenty-four years, PBI has been escorting forensic anthropologists exhuming bodies at clandestine gravesites in Guatemala to collect DNA evidence, or since 1994 accompanying witnesses from Colombia testifying before the U.S. Congress or the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The peace teams have been visiting the offices of labor leaders on a daily basis in Indonesia, Mexico, and Guatemala for years to deter attacks against them, or acting as international observers at marches and demonstrations in Nepal so civil society can speak, to site just a few examples. PBI serves very diverse populations of human rights defenders; the following represent just a few. •

• • • • • • •

Trade union, environmental, and globalization activists trying to stop the effects of corporate privatization on democracy, workers’ rights, indigenous communities, jobs, and the environment by protesting logging, drilling, mining, and other extractive industries destroying their ecosystems Community peace negotiators working to stop ethnic violence and intolerance Human rights investigators documenting allegations of human rights violations Lawyers and legal groups pushing human rights cases in the courts Women’s and gay rights groups providing direct protection for females and homosexuals, often the most vulnerable people during armed conflicts Family members of the disappeared offering mutual support networks and denouncing ongoing human right violations Clergy and church workers assisting those most impacted by political violence Internally displaced populations struggling for the right of return

With PBI by their side, activists have taken massacre cases before the courts, organized to empower disenfranchised women, exposed the human and environmental cost of large-scale mining industries or illegal logging, and claimed justice for displaced indigenous populations that have been forced off their land by corrupt land owners or narcotics-trafficking gangs. These examples are just a few of the struggles with which PBI is trying to help less powerful populations.

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PBI’S MISSION PBI operates within the peace team field or, more technically, what is called third-party nonviolent intervention (TPNI). TPNI involves various related strategies, such as accompaniment, interpositioning, humanitarian assistance, observation, and policy work. The movement has historic roots not only in Gandhi’s vision, but also in the rich and deep theory and practice of the U.S. civil rights movement. The emergence of Peace Brigades International in the early 1980s (along with Witness for Peace) played a critical role in developing this branch of nonviolence. PBI pioneered the strategy of international protective accompaniment, which was copied or modified by new peace team organizations in the decades that followed. Such groups now include Christian Peacemaker Teams, Nonviolent Peaceforce, the International Solidarity Movement, Friends Peace Teams, Guatemala Accompaniment Project, and Iraq Peace Teams, among many others. The movement has naturally evolved over the last twenty years, with growing numbers of groups and strategies. Advances in communication technology (cell and satellite phones, e-mail, Internet) have allowed for real-time, international reactions to crises as they develop almost anywhere in the world. Peace team selection and training have become more rigorous. And PBI is seeing a diversification of volunteers and staff, with greater numbers of people involved from the Global South. In recent years, several important books have been published on the subject of protective accompaniment, such as Unarmed Bodyguards: International Accompaniment for the Protection of Human Rights (Mahony and Eguren, 1997) and Nonviolent Intervention Across Borders: A Recurrent Vision (Moser-Puangsuwan, eds., 2000). Training for Change also published a phenomenal training resource called Opening Space for Democracy: Third-Party Nonviolent Intervention Curriculum and Trainer’s Manual (Hunter and Lakey, 2003). Taking a Stand by Elizabeth Boardman (2005) describes the growing field of nonviolent interpositioning. As of this writing, PBI deploys multiple teams on the ground in Guatemala (since 1983); Colombia (since 1994); Mexico (since 1998); Indonesia (since 1999); and Nepal (since 2005). Formerly, PBI also deployed teams to El Salvador (1987–1992), Sri Lanka (1989–1998), Canadian Native American communities (1992–1999), East Timor (1992–2000) and Haiti (1995–2000). PBI was a founding member of three coalitions: Cry for Justice (Haiti), Balkans Peace Team, and International Service for Peace-SIPAZ (Chiapas).

WHERE DID THE IDEA OF A “PEACE BRIGADE” COME FROM? PBI’S FOUNDING PBI was founded by Buddhists, Gandhian disciples, and Quakers on Grindstone Island, Canada, in 1981. The founders envisioned a world in which people address conflicts nonviolently, where human rights are universally upheld, and where social justice and intercultural respect have become a reality. They have

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practiced these principles and values by reaching decisions through the Quaker method of decision making known as consensus at all levels of the organization. The ideas of a peace brigade and the use of accompaniment as a strategy come from both the Quakers and Gandhi. In seventeenth-century England, Quakers offered their services as mediators before or during a conflict. This has its roots in the Quaker belief that there is God in every person, and therefore, no person should be debased, exploited, or destroyed. In early twentieth-century South Africa, Gandhi trained groups in nonviolent protest and personal interpositioning (getting in the way) while demanding fair treatment for that country’s Indian population. Upon his return to India, he organized a group of peace volunteers in Bombay, calling them Shanti Sena, literally meaning an international peace army or peace brigade. Gandhi believed that a group of neutral people, trained and ready to suffer abuses, injury or even death while acting to save lives, would have the moral authority to bring a sense of humanity to armed conflicts and eventually convince opposing parties to seek peaceful solutions. PBI’s work and use of accompaniment as a calculated strategy is an extension of this belief. The First World Peace Brigade After Gandhi’s death in 1962, activists in Shanti Sena helped form the World Peace Brigade (WPB), along with Jayaprakash Narayan, a close associate of Gandhi; Michael Scott from Britain, noted for his work on African liberation; and A. J. Muste, a veteran of nonviolent action from the United States. Sponsors of the WPB included Julius Nyerere, then prime minister of Tanganyika, and Kenneth Kaunda, who later became president of Zambia. From 1962–1964, the main work of the WPB was promoting nonviolence as a component of African liberation struggles. The WPB initiative collapsed mainly because of difficulties of communication (in those pre-fax, pre-e-mail days) and funding problems. “The problem of the World Peace Brigade was money, money, money . . . very few things in the world are made better by lack of money,” said Charles Walker at the 1981 founding meeting of PBI. From 1964 to 1972, the Shanti Sena were involved in helping to negotiate a ceasefire in the ten-year war between the Naga people and the Indian Government, and maintained observer teams in the region for the following six years. In the 1971 crisis that led to the founding of Bangladesh, peace brigades played a variety of roles. From 1972 to 1974, the Cyprus Resettlement Project helped resettle 5,000 Greek and 15,000–20,000 Turkish refugees who had fled their villages during fighting in 1963. PBI’s Founding Meeting, Grindstone Island, Canada, August 13–September 4, 1981 After this series of ad hoc international peace initiatives, on January 12, 1981, a letter signed by Narayan Desai (Shanti Sena Mandal), Raymond Magee

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(Peaceworkers), Piet Dijkstra (Foundation for the Extension of Non-violent Action), Radhakrishana (Gandhi Peace Foundation), and George Willoughby was sent out to a number of organizations inviting them to attend a conference to revive the idea of an international organization committed to unarmed third party intervention in conflict situations. The founding meeting was attended by Raymond Magee, Lee Stern, Henry Wiseman, Murray Thomson, Narayan Desai, Gene Keyes, Charles Walker, Dan Clark, Mark Shepard, and Jaime Diaz. Among them, they had previously participated in numerous peace actions and organizations. Although some women had been invited, none were able to attend, and the minutes note, “Those present deeply regretted the lack of women participants.” Debates at the meeting centered around the following issues: the role international peace brigades could play in current conflicts; nonpartisanship; organizational approaches (build a new organization from scratch, promote a new organization from existing ones, coordinate existing interested groups, or encourage others to act); the need to review the experiences of over fifty previous nonviolent actions; whether this was the right moment to launch a new organization; the relationship of peace brigades to the United Nations; and all the practicalities of setting up an international organization, such as networking, training, project development, fundraising, and location of the secretariat. The meeting reached agreement on a structure (a directorate of four people, and an Assembly of approximately twenty-five people, with subcommittees to develop different areas) and approved the founding statement. Comments Made During the Evaluation of the Meeting “This enterprise was so tentative and tenuous PBI wondered ‘will it happen at all’ but it did, illustrating the hold which the idea of international non-violent action had among its proponents. Our determination not to have a second failure [referring to the earlier World Peace Brigade initiative] must moderate zeal with prudent achievable objectives.”—Charles Walker. “This was primarily a collective enterprise without prominent leadership. The World Peace Brigade had towering personalities but often at odds, unlike this group.”—Narayan Desai. “The attempt to initiate PBI appeared so fragile at times this week, but these moments were overcome, and the outcome is indeed substantial.”—Hans Sinn. Daniel Clark, a former secretary of PBI has written about the early years of Peace Brigades in two articles: “Transnational Action for Peace” in Transnational Perspectives (1983) and “Friends and International Peace Brigades” in Friends World News (1983). He wrote the following: PBI were already aware that Gandhi had envisioned the possibility of international peace brigades, and that since his death, nonpartisan brigades had

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functioned within India during Hindu-Moslem rioting. PBI later discovered that the World Peace Brigade had been formed during the early Sixties, and had been active in assisting the Zambian independence movement. It had also organized the Delhi-Peking March in which two American Friends, George Willoughby and Charles Walker, took part in connection with the Indian/Chinese border conflict. In 1964, several of the principals in the World Peace Brigade, including Marjorie Sykes, a Friend in India, negotiated and monitored a ceasefire in a secessionist guerrilla war in Nagaland. Later, in 1974, Charles Walker and A. Paul Hare had been among the organizers of the Cyprus Resettlement Project, a successful demonstration of the international peace brigade idea which was unfortunately stopped short by a new Turkish invasion of Cyprus.

Minutes of Consultation on an International Peace Brigade, Grindstone Island, Canada, August. 31–September. 4, 1981 Peace Brigades: Some Models, memo to the Grindstone Consultation by Charles Walker From Gandhi’s Peace Army to Peace Brigades International, by Narayan Desai, Piet Dijkstra, and Charles Walker

THE MANDATE OF PEACE BRIGADES INTERNATIONAL Noninterference PBI has a very strong mandate of deploying only after being petitioned by the local population. This is a clear departure from many missionary and aid agencies that venture into foreign countries at their own behest. PBI also has an extremely strict policy of noninterference in the affairs of the groups they protect. They would never attempt to direct the work of the locals or advise them on how best to carry out their goals. They follow the “First Do No Harm” philosophy modeled on the Hippocratic Oath. Neutrality What does it mean to be neutral in a civil conflict or war? By taking that position, is not PBI taking a position? It is true that PBI has historically been on the side of the marginalized in a society. These are often indigenous populations that are usually the underdogs and the downtrodden. However, the PBI brigades are not patronizing or pitying the locals. Rather, they see locals as very courageous. The teams simply serve as observers in the conflicts and shadow the threatened civil society leaders. They do not advocate for one side of the conflict or another. They do not lobby for one particular piece of legislation or another. They do not conduct public denunciation campaigns because that would endanger the teams and the civilians whom PBI protects. PBI does advocate for respect for international human rights norms and standards, and peaceful resolution to conflict.

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Nonpartisanship There are many complex layers and levels to the conflicts where PBI serves. The politics are long-standing, going back many generations. Far be it for outsiders to begin to comment publicly on the complexities, or advocate for one political party over another. Nor does PBI endorse legislation or take a stand on aid to a country in conflict, except in very rare circumstances.2 PBI will consider petitions for accompaniment by anyone who feels his or her rights are being violated, but only from individuals who have denounced violence and armed struggle.

METHODS OF EVALUATION AND INDICATORS OF SUCCESS A substantial body of evidence collected over the last three decades indicates that the increased presence and visibility of international peace teams has prevented many arbitrary searches and arrests by government security forces because of PBI’s intensive dialogue and prior relationship building with them. Further, it has been documented that attacks on civilians from armed factions are down when they know PBI teams are operating nearby. Undoubtedly, the most noteworthy accomplishment is that in over a quarter of a century, PBI has successfully protected the lives of thousands of activists, while never losing a single volunteer in some of the most repressive environments in the world. The results of PBI’s unique human rights protection program can be gauged by a just a few of the following indicators: a. Military leaders and security forces are increasingly held accountable for atrocities. b. Activists challenging corrupt power structures are surviving to build significant movements for peaceful social change in their countries. Some have even been elected to public office. c. Citizens who before were too intimidated to speak out are now taking a stand and freely participating in grassroots civil society organizations. d. Entire communities are emboldened to practice peaceful resistance to armed actors. e. Revenge killings have been reduced. Last, it is important to note that the civil society workers PBI escorts and defends have a multiplier effect in their countries, enabling activists to continue organizing on behalf of a much larger constituency. They represent many others in their ethnic group, community, region, or province. For instance, in Guerrero, Mexico, PBI protects five organizations (sited elsewhere in this chapter), but this affects more than fifty human rights workers. Rigorous evaluation methods are used at multiple levels on a continuous basis.

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At the team level: Each PBI team holds weekly meetings where the work is analyzed in conjunction with in-country experts, local NGOs, international NGOs, and relevant stakeholders. Evaluations every three months at the local, regional, and national levels: The local human rights organizations and individuals protected by PBI meet with the teams on a regular basis to provide feedback and evaluation of our work. They tell their escorts what is going well in the relationship, what they would like PBI to do differently, and what changes they would like to see made. Evaluations at international level: PBI project leaders are required to submit updated reports to the PBI International Council each month to ensure they are operating within the requirements and mandate (both political and financial). Annually, the International Council reviews the financial practices and records of the projects. Tri-annual global evaluation: Finally, every three years, all PBI projects undergo an external evaluation by a team of country experts and human rights specialists, the results of which are presented to PBI’s worldwide General Assembly. The evaluation is conducted on all of PBI’s projects simultaneously in order to exchange lessons across the conflicts. An evaluation team of six persons visits and stays in each country for several weeks, aided by two members of each field team. They hold dozens of meetings with organizations, political analysts, staffs of international NGOs, the United Nations, and members of other international accompaniment organizations, among others. Telephone interviews are conducted, and questionnaires are sent to governing committee members, former PBI field volunteers, and the current project office staff. PBI’s fifteen country groups are also involved in the evaluations. The results of these evaluations, especially the recommendations, have been invaluable for developing a strategic plan for each project and increasing the impact of the projects. The most recent external evaluation was carried out in 2004 according to the “Do No Harm” approach,3 which measures the impact of international NGOs in areas of conflict. The evaluators drew up a report based on private interviews with those whom PBI teams accompany. Their conclusions in 2004 were unequivocal: There is a great need for PBI. Indigenous communities, women’s groups, lawyers, and relatives of the disappeared emphatically and unanimously told the evaluators that without PBI’s presence, they could not carry on their critical work. Activists cited numerous examples when the authorities cooperated and they felt safe because of PBI’s presence by their side.

CAREFUL SCREENING AND SELECTION OF FIELD VOLUNTEERS Three decades of very careful screening and training of field volunteers has ensured that PBI has become a trusted and trustworthy source of information, human rights documentation, and dissuasion. The requirements to serve on a PBI team are having a commitment to PBI’s principles, being at least twenty-five years old, having appropriate language skills, and being available for one year in the field.

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First, an interested person must apply and fill out a fairly lengthy application about why he or she wishes to serve. Then, the person would be invited to an orientation to see if PBI is a good fit. An orientation is usually a weekendlong program involving intensive discussion, exercises, role plays, and briefings on the human rights conditions in the countries where PBI serves and the methodology of protection. Finally, a candidate may be invited to training. These are rigorous, five- to six-day sessions in most instances. The training team observes a candidate closely to assess his or her psychological profile and suitability to serve on the team, such as cross-cultural adaptability, language skills, maturity, thoughtfulness, commitment to nonviolence, and many other traits. PBI volunteers come from all walks of life: academia, public schools, social work, building trades, engineering, businesses, government service, medical professions, law, and many other careers. They have hailed from over forty countries in the last two and half decades, including Ireland, Poland, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, all the Scandinavian countries, Spain, Germany, Italy, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Japan, Canada, and the United States. The overriding common characteristics shared by many of the field volunteers are their patience, subtlety, low-key manner, persistence, and ability to navigate frustrating and very difficult negotiations, sometimes with known perpetrators of human rights abuses. Among the challenges facing PBI field volunteers during their year-long to eighteen-month service are personal danger, cross-cultural sensitivities, long hours, gender issues, homesickness, and total lack of privacy. The team members live and work in the same house twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

FUNDING PBI has never accepted any U.S. government funding, nor has it ever charged for protective services. This strict policy is largely because of the history of U.S. involvement in the conflict countries where PBI deploys, and the conditions attached to U.S. government funding. If PBI were to ever take funds from the U.S. government, it is felt that the field teams might become suspect, and the threatened activists they protect might be put at greater risk.

WHERE PBI OPERATES: THE WORK OF THE TEAMS Colombia Colombia has been the scene of a bloody civil war that has raged for fortysix years. It has the one of largest internally displaced population in the world—3.4 million inhabitants—after Sudan. Many trade union activists, human rights lawyers, judges, Afro-Colombians, and the dispossessed from the land have been massacred. Colombia has the worst human rights record in the

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Western Hemisphere: torture, extra-judicial killings and assassinations, disappearances, and arbitrary arrests are perpetrated daily by military, paramilitary, and guerrilla forces. The violent nature of the Colombian conflict is made even more deadly by the millions of dollars the U.S. contributes yearly in military aid. Human rights defenders, activists from displaced communities, and community-based organizations often find themselves as targets of violence. In order to deter that possibility, Colombia project volunteers maintain a presence in the offices of threatened organizations such as the Inter-congregational Commission for Justice and Peace, the Nunca Mas (Never Again) Project, and the Association of Family Members of the Detained-Disappeared, among others. By employing PBI’s tested method of providing unarmed, protective accompaniment to threatened or persecuted individuals, Colombia project volunteers are helping to secure safe spaces in which Colombian activists can pursue their own nonviolent, peace-building goals. PBI also engages in diplomatic relations work in Colombia. By fostering connections with embassy staff, military and government officials, and representatives of international human rights agencies, the project can mobilize effective support in times of crisis. Established in 1994, the Colombia project now operates in Bogotá, Barrancabermeja-Magdelana Medio, Turbo-Uraba, and Medellin. Four highly trained teams of thirty-five to forty field volunteers provide protective accompaniment to civilians fleeing from political violence. The beneficiaries are hundreds of peace and human rights workers and thousands of internally displaced people. PBI also builds diplomatic and political relations with the Colombian government and foreign embassies. This is PBI’s largest project worldwide, with a $1million+ budget. It was started in 1994. Guatemala Guatemala was the first country where PBI deployed (1983). There were countless, untold numbers of assassinations, personal tragedies, state sponsored terrorism against women and indigenous peoples, and organizational setbacks in the early years before formal, systematic, well-prepared PBI accompaniments began. The Guatemalan civil war lasted until 1996 and claimed over 200,000 lives. Many residents are still trying to account for their dead loved ones. Residents are threatened, harassed, and killed for trying to exhume the bodies and do DNA testing. Anyone who tries to challenge the leaders of the former Guatemalan death squads (known as clandestine or “parallel” powers) risks grave bodily harm and assassination. These clandestine patrols operate with impunity, and few dare to prosecute them. Today, PBI operates in Zacualpa, Quiche, and Guatemala City, Guatemala. Among the beneficiaries of PBI’s presence are trade union activists who have been tortured in recent years for trying to organize for labor rights. PBI protects female environmental activists trying to stop mining companies from destroying drinking water and rain forests.

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PBI has walked side by side with DNA specialists who are attacked while gathering forensic evidence at clandestine graves in Guatemala to present to the UN. Peace Brigades has been protecting many of these groups since 1983. Our nine-totwelve-person team operates in remote rural areas and the capital city. PBI works with trade unionists, widows and “Family Members of the Disappeared,” forensic scientists, and anthropologists among many other beneficiaries. Mexico Most people think of Mexico as a tourist destination, but the remote areas where PBI operates actually have the fourth highest torture rate of any area in the world. Security forces operate with impunity. There are no other international organizations with a permanent presence on the ground in Guerrero and Oaxaca, aside from PBI. These are the poorest and most militarized areas in Mexico. Mexico has a long history of human rights violations. These include pervasive torture and repressive counterinsurgency measures being carried out by the government in response to armed indigenous uprisings in the states of Chiapas (1994), Guerrero (1996), and Oaxaca (2006). In 1999, as a result of the alarming increase in the number of disappearances of community organizers and nonviolent activists, along with the decreasing democratic organizing space available to such activists because of threats of violent reprisals, PBI received a request to establish a long-term, protective international presence from the Mexican group CNI (National Independent Committee for the Defense of Prisoners, the Persecuted, Detained, Disappeared, and Exiled), an association of family members of the disappeared. CNI regularly receives threatening phone calls, its members often are subject to intimidation and harassment, and some CNI members have been assassinated and disappeared. PBI began accompanying members of CNI in January 2001, and the project continued to expand with peace teams in Guerrero and Oaxaca, and a coordinating team in Mexico City. Mexican civil society had great expectations for improvements with the 2000 election of opposition candidate Vicente Fox as president. But since the October 2001 assassination of lawyer Dina Ochoa, the risk for human rights defenders has never been higher. Following Ochoa’s killing and further death threats, PBI has been providing increased accompaniment to organizations such as the Center for Human Rights Miguel Austin Pro Juarez (PRODH). According to the center’s director, Edgar Cortez, “PBI are convinced that the presence of PBI is important. Our decision [to request accompaniment] was based on the fact that PBI’s presence could ensure an adequate level of security for us. This supports our ability to mobilize and work with the victims that come to us.” Established in 1998, the PBI Mexico project focuses on protective accompaniment and information distribution. Accompaniment clients include not only PRODH but also the Voice of the Voiceless. In Mexico, with a total of nine volunteers, PBI protects a network of over fifty human rights workers trying to stop human rights abuses and violence perpetrated

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by landowners, army patrols, and police. PBI leads delegations of foreign diplomats from the embassies in Mexico City to Guerrero to see for themselves the condition of the people and learn about the violations. PBI also conducts security workshops at the request of the local NGOs. PBI never charges for these workshops. The Mexico City office also protects political prisoners who have been wrongfully accused. Nepal The year 2004 saw mounting tensions between Maoist guerrilla fighters and the king of Nepal. In 2005 exploratory PBI missions began conducting surveys and interviews in 75 percent of the rural provinces of Nepal and Katmandu to determine the threat level facing the civilian population and whether Peace Brigades methods would be effective. After a rigorous two-year examination and repeated visits to the country, it was determined by the International Council of Peace Brigades that the teams could effectively provide a protective presence and deter violence. The first permanent team deployed to the capital, Katmandu, in spring 2005. In 2006 a five-person team began monitoring protest rallies and providing peacekeeping to quell the violence. Daily accompaniments of human rights leaders began in summer and fall 2006. PBI works to protect Dalits, or untouchables of the lower caste, who have been raped by government soldiers. PBI had been petitioned by student organizers, advocacy groups, and human rights lawyers to go to Nepal. PBI also had been petitioned by the Advocacy Forum, Physicians for Human Rights, and the Nepal Bar Association through a formal process to request “nonviolent protective accompaniment.” PBI maintains an office in Katmandu and travels to many rural provinces. Indonesia Established in 1999, the PBI Indonesia project focuses on protective accompaniment and workshops in conflict transformation. PBI has offices in Aceh, Japura, Wamea, Papua, and Jakarta, Indonesia. PBI teams protect women’s rights groups, civil society activists, and human rights lawyers. Their clients include, among many others, the Rehabilitation Action for Torture Victims (RATA) and Flower Aceh, a women’s rights group. PBI has four subteams operating over a vast network of islands in the Indonesian Archipelago. PBI works in the capital city of Jakarta and also in tiny rural villages. In Indonesia, PBI provides accompaniment, but also teaches peace education, conflict transformation, and security workshops at the request of the local communities. PBI incorporates their local traditions and wisdom, so the curriculum is not artificially imported. Because of numerous requests, PBI sent a team to Aceh province in January 2001.

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Aceh, a poor but resource-rich province located on the northern tip of Sumatra Island, was the site of a long-running armed conflict between the government of Indonesia and an armed opposition group, the Free Aceh Movement (Gherkin Aceh Media, GAM). The team in Aceh has had a presence for seven years now and was one of the only international NGOs speaking the local language. They were there during the recent tsunami. In 2006 a peace agreement was signed between the guerrillas and the Indonesian government. PBI is continuing to monitor the cease fire. In Papua, PBI determined that there was sufficient evidence of torture and repression by Indonesian military forces against those advocating for greater political freedoms to deploy a peace team to the region beginning in 2005. PBI’s presence has grown and continues to this today. Each of the five PBI projects described above operates not only its sub–field teams on the ground, but has its own steering committees and governing bodies, political analysts, and training units. The teams protect human rights defenders from the death squads twenty-four hours a day. The five projects are financially monitored monthly, coordinated continuously, and evaluated yearly by the PBI International Council and the International Secretariat in London (ISEC). Separate project fundraisers write grants to secure money from many sources around the world. The USA Country Group consults and communicates with the five projects and the International Secretariat in London to support the projects’ work on their behalf and accurately represent them in the United States.

PBI IN THE UNITED STATES PBI-USA raises political, human, and financial resources to support the overseas teams in five countries. The staff of PBI-USA participates in coalitions; represents the organization in policy forums; and visits the offices of congressional representatives, the White House, the State Department, embassies, the Organization of American States, the United Nations, and many other agencies to raise awareness of human rights violations our foreign field teams may have witnessed. In coalition with many other U.S. nonprofit organizations, PBI-USA provides careful information and documentation to officials so they may act to prevent political repression against human rights activists, massacres, and grave human rights abuses. In addition, the U.S. staff raises money in the United States on behalf of the field teams. The PBI-USA office retains just 10 percent of any foundation grant awarded. The rest, 90 percent, goes directly to the field teams. Any money raised from individual donors (noninstitutional funders) through grassroots fundraising is used to support the Washington, D.C., office and domestic programming. Third, PBI-USA organizes programs and national speaking tours to attract new people to serve on the teams. Orientation sessions are conducted twice a year to recruit potential field volunteers. These sessions explain the criteria and risks involved in becoming a PBI field volunteer. Returning field volunteers also travel

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around the United States, giving talks and speeches to raise awareness and money, and to attract candidates. Upon request, the U.S. staff will also provide trainings and public presentations for churches, grassroots groups, universities, schools, and civic associations about our nonviolent methods. Finally, the USA Country Group hosts a website, publishes a national newsletter, transmits electronic newsletters, supervises interns, and distributes project publications in the United States, among its many other tasks. The U.S. office is one of fifteen Peace Brigades country groups around the world. PBI-USA is a separate legal entity, has it own board of directors (called a national coordinating committee), and has its own tax exempt status with the IRS.

CONCLUSION: PBI AS PART OF A GLOBAL HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT There is now broad recognition among the international community of the effectiveness of PBI’s protective accompaniment. By offering a field-based presence, PBI complements the more traditional external pressure offered by the international human rights movement, which provides insufficient protection in many circumstances. The United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, and countless other NGOs have stated that PBI serves as their eyes and ears on the ground in remote areas where they do not have a presence. These organizations frequently thank the teams for protecting activists for whom they are advocating. PBI has played a major role in highlighting the struggle of human rights defenders nationally and internationally, and has helped put the protection of human rights defenders on the agendas of governments all over the world. There are challenges facing the peace team movement, both internal and external. Generally, peace team groups have a very low profile and limited public recognition, relative to environmental groups, for example, and little financial support. In addition to looking for broader sources of funding, the groups also need to find more potential candidates to accommodate the growing need for services and to allow for greater selectivity. Other challenges include operating in the post 9/11 environment, the overwhelming nature of some conflicts, the multiplicity of violent actors in those conflicts (including non-state, religious, and economic actors), and the ever-changing strategies of these aggressors. At the same time, there are tremendous opportunities. The first is to tap into the tremendous peace energy generated in opposition to the Iraq War. Another is already underway: PBI has initiated talks with the other peace team organizations, calling for greater collaboration in areas of mutual interest, such as fundraising, media, public outreach, recruitment, training, and emotional support. If all the peace team groups coordinated activities and programs, they could be greater than the sum of their parts. “Movement building” among all peace team organizations could significantly advance the field. PBI works to open a space for peace in which conflicts can be dealt with nonviolently. PBI uses a strategy of international presence and concern that supports

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local initiatives and contributes to the development of a culture of peace and justice. The aim of PBI’s international presence is to support both political and social processes through joint strategies with local groups and individuals. In pursuing innovative and nonpartisan strategies for peacemaking, PBI volunteers and supporters around the world demonstrate that individuals working together can act boldly as peacemakers even when governments cannot or will not.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Peace Brigades International Executive Director: Katherine Hughes Mission/Description: Peace Brigades International (PBI) is a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that protects human rights and promotes nonviolent transformation of conflicts. When invited, PBI sends teams of volunteers into areas of repression and conflict. The volunteers accompany human rights defenders, their organizations, and others threatened by political violence. Perpetrators of human rights abuses usually do not want the world to witness their actions. The presence of volunteers backed by a support network helps deter violence. PBI teams create space for local activists to work for social justice and human rights. Website: http://www.peacebrigades.org/ Address: 1326 9th St, NW Washington, DC 20001 USA Phone: 202-232-0142 Fax: 202-232-0143 E-mail: [email protected]

NOTES 1. PBI’s strategies are described as among the most cutting-edge in the world by the Center for Victims of Torture in their New Tactics in Human Rights workbook and their case study, “Side by Side–Protecting and Encouraging Threatened Activists with Unarmed International Accompaniment” found on the organization’s website. 2. On February 21, 2005, eight civilians including three children were massacred in the San Jose de Apartado Peace Community in Colombia. PBI issued a rare public statement urging protection for the Peace Community and their accompaniers, calling for an investigation into the massacre and reiterating their commitment to protecting the Peace Community. PBI activated all support networks, with special emphasis placed on obtaining a political response in the United States. Working jointly with the Fellowship for Reconciliation (FOR), PBI organized numerous meetings on Capitol Hill, at the

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Department of State, and with dozens of NGOs, including a public event with Amnesty International. In coalition with many other human rights organizations, PBI sent a letter to U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice calling on U.S. officials to withhold human rights certification from Colombia until there was an investigation. Thirty-two members of Congress sent a letter to President Uribe of Colombia, urging protection for the peace community and justice for the perpetrators. As of 2008 that portion of U.S. military aid tied to the State Department human rights certification (known as the Leahy Amendment) is still being withheld from the Colombia military as a result of widespread protests and grassroots emergency responses organized by PBI, the United Church of Christ, Amnesty, FOR, and countless others. 3. The “Do No Harm” approach was developed by the Collaborative for Development Action (CDA) based on an extensive analysis of lessons learned in the humanitarian aid field in emergency situations. Conclusions are drawn regarding how humanitarian aid agencies might improve their work, be more aware of the negative impact of their projects, and plan future projects accordingly. The strategy caught the attention of many NGOs, donors, and academics. For more information, see the Collaborative for Development Action (CDA) website at www.cdainc.com.

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Witness for Peace: Transforming People—Transforming Policy Stephanie Benjamin and Teresa Barttrum, interviewing Melinda St. Louis

Through the years, Witness for Peace (WFP) has answered prophetic calls to accompany Latin Americans most affected by harmful U.S. policies and corporate practices. WFP’s work in Nicaragua was born from the outrage at U.S. government funding of the Contra War in the 1980s. Unlike the anti-Vietnam protests of the decade before, where citizens protested within U.S. borders, WFP brought U.S. citizens to the war zones of Nicaragua to witness firsthand the effects of the U.S. government’s policy. Throughout the 1980s, WFP built a grassroots movement to oppose U.S. government involvement in the war, primarily through its delegation program. Witness for Peace’s success in Nicaragua built the momentum that carried the organization into other countries in Latin America. WFP documents the impact of unfair economic and military policies in Nicaragua, Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela; exposes the human cost of these U.S. policies to U.S. citizens who travel with WFP to these countries; and mobilizes a motivated grassroots network of nonviolent, faith-based activists to hold policymakers accountable for these policies and pressure for positive change. In the past twenty-five years, WFP has developed and maintained a steady nationwide base of 15,000 members, sent more than 13,000 people to Latin American and the Caribbean on short-term transformative delegations, and sustained a highly skilled team of international volunteers in program sites abroad. In its first years, in the 1980s, WFP established its successful model of merging the powerful forces of on-the-ground documentation, assertive media strategies, a dynamic delegations program, and stateside grassroots mobilization. WITNESS FOR PEACE MISSION STATEMENT Witness for Peace is a politically independent, nationwide grassroots organization of people committed to nonviolence and led by faith and conscience. Our mission is to support peace, justice, and sustainable economies in the Americas by 123

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changing U.S. policies and corporate practices that contribute to poverty and oppression in Latin America and the Caribbean. We stand with people who seek justice.

COVENANT OF MISSION FOR PEACE • We commit ourselves to nonviolence in word and in deed as the essential operating principle of Witness for Peace. • We commit ourselves to honesty and openness in our relationships with one another. • We commit ourselves to a prayerful (reflective), spiritual approach and to unity with one another as the foundations for this project. • We commit ourselves to be responsible and accountable in our actions to the community of which we are a part and to the principles of leadership that have been established. • We commit ourselves to maintaining the political independence of Witness for Peace. • We commit ourselves to act in solidarity and community with the Latin American and Caribbean people, respecting their lives, their culture, and their decisions. We will respect the suggestions of our hosts with regard to our presence and mobility in another land. • We commit ourselves to record our witness and, upon return, to share our experience with the North American people through the media, public education, and political action.

THE BEGINNINGS In 1983 faith-based peace activists in the United States began to hear stories of how counterrevolutionaries (Contras) funded by U.S. taxpayer money staged crossborder raids on civilian and military targets in Nicaragua from camps in Honduras in an effort to topple the Nicaraguan government. On April 8, Contras attacked El Porvenir, a tobacco farm a few miles from the Honduran border, wounding civilians, burning the tobacco warehouse and fields, and damaging homes in the community. The next day, thirty North Carolinians visiting Nicaragua at the time heard about the attack and traveled six hours by bus from Managua to El Porvenir. They entered a small house on the edge of the farm and saw blood on the floor and walls. A young mother told the group that her baby, two toddlers, and her mother had all been injured in the attack and taken away in an ambulance. She did not know if they were dead or alive. As the group—eight pastors, academics, a housewife, a congressional aide, and a retired IRS employee, among others—listened to the young mother describe the attack, the bus driver honked the horn indicating it was time to leave. The Nicaraguans asked the group to stay; the group was faced with an excruciating decision: to go or stay. They got on the bus, and on the way back to Managua, vowed to find a way to stop this war financed by the U.S. government.

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This determined group went back to the United States and in three months organized a delegation of 153 U.S. citizens to travel to Nicaragua to call attention to the war and to demand an end to U.S. financial and moral support for the Contras. On July 4 the delegation traveled to the border town of Jalapa where Contra attacks had increased. People from Jalapa were grateful for the North American presence in their town, telling the delegation that they felt safer when they were there. They said, “If you leave, the bombing and shelling will start again because it is your government that is funding this war. So with you here, you are providing some protection to us.” These words touched the delegates in a profound way. Could the war be stopped with a permanent presence of U.S. citizens in the war zones? Many in the group said, “We must try.” Armed with a determination to stop the war, the group began Witness for Peace. Providing protection and gathering information to share with people back in the United States was their motive; the group realized that they had to organize in order to maintain this type of presence and to bring this story back home. WFP established an ongoing presence in Nicaragua from that point on, sending thousands of U.S. citizens to accompany the Nicaraguan people in war zones and to document the “human face” of the Reagan administration’s military policy. WFP personnel on the ground in Nicaragua and thousands of visiting delegates heard stories of how Contras murdered, raped, tortured, and kidnapped thousands of innocent Nicaraguan civilians, and destroyed crops and infrastructure. WFP led the way in bringing the brutal facts of those policies home to the U.S. public through grassroots education and media outreach. From 1984 to 1989, WFP activists across the United States organized events to resist Reagan’s war in Central America. Thousands not only protested in the streets of the United States but also made the journey to the war zones of Nicaragua to resist this brutal war with their bodies, willing to risk their lives for peace as many through the centuries have risked their lives for war. They often faced danger traveling on roads laced with land mines. In 1985 a delegation from New York went on a WFP-chartered boat, and was subsequently kidnapped by the Contras on the Rio San Juan. The delegation openly defied a warning from the Contras to not go beyond a certain point on the river. They were released after three days, bringing much-needed media and congressional attention to the cruelties of the Nicaraguan war. In 1988 the five Central American presidents designed a plan resulting in a peace agreement that eventually ended the war in Nicaragua. Over the course of the decade, WFP’s eyewitness accounts and documentation of the impact of the U.S.-sponsored, vicious war motivated tens of thousands of U.S. citizens to protest the war and demand that Congress stop providing financial aid to the Contras. Such activism by WFP may have averted an all-out U.S. invasion of Nicaragua, and certainly contributed greatly to the effort to cut off U.S. military aid to the Contras. In 1990 Nicaragua had a peaceful transfer of power. As Nicaragua embarked on a harsh program of structural adjustment programs promoted by the U.S., the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, WFP continued its permanent presence and delegations continued, albeit in reduced numbers.

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WFP RECEIVES MORE CALLS FOR INTERNATIONAL PERMANENT PRESENCE Nicaragua was not the only country bearing the brunt of U.S. policies. In the 1990s WFP was invited by people in Guatemala, Haiti, Cuba, and Colombia to establish a presence in order to document the impact of harmful U.S. policies. In 1990 WFP was invited to accompany Guatemalan refugees in southern Mexico who were organizing to return to their homeland. WFP established a presence in both Guatemala and in the refugee camps in Mexico. WFP volunteers and delegates accompanied the Guatemalan refugees on their first dangerous repatriation. WFP escorted tens of thousands of returning refugees over the next two years. During this time, WFP personnel in Guatemala heard about hundreds of thousands of indigenous Guatemalans killed during the brutal civil war in Guatemala. The U.S. administrations in the 1970s and 1980s supported Guatemalan military dictators, supplying them with military aid and supporting their scorched earth policy that resulted in what has since been classified as genocide. WFP took testimonies from Guatemalan survivors of four brutal mass killings that took place between February and September 1982 in a small community of Rio Negro. Guatemalan armed forces murdered 369 people, more than half the community’s total population. At the time of the massacres, the people of Rio Negro were on the verge of losing their homelands to a large dam project funded by the World Bank. Although construction of the dam had begun in 1976, it was not until late 1982 that the Chixoy Valley and the community of Rio Negro were to be flooded, just a few months after the massacres. WFP staff on the ground in Guatemala wrote A People Dammed, a publication that examines the Chixoy Dam as a case study in destructive World Bank lending, suggesting links between the project and the 1982 Rio Negro massacres. The document brings to light the most damning element: the lack of attention paid to the Maya Achí people of Rio Negro, who had inhabited the Chixoy Basin for many centuries and were to be resettled with funds provided by the World Bank. A People Dammed helped the community break the story to the media, prompting the World Bank to investigate and rectify its failure to adequately resettle people displaced by the Chixoy Dam. Afterward, WFP organized the first nonviolent public protest ever held at the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C. WFP also responded to a cry for help from the Haitian people in 1994. During the height of the illegal regime that ousted President Jean Bertrand Aristide and murdered thousands of Haitians, the Haitian religious community called for an international presence to stand by a people in crisis. WFP sent the first of many delegations to Haiti. Witness for Peace answered the call to the highlands of Chiapas after forty-five indigenous Tsotsils, fasting and praying for peace, were massacred in December 1997. Paramilitaries had murdered the victims—the majority women and children— with bullets and machetes. Witness for Peace took many delegations to Chiapas in the following years to accompany those at risk of military action at the hand of the U.S.-supported Mexican security forces and paramilitary groups. With time,

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the focus shifted to documenting the effect of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on small coffee and corn farmers in Chiapas. In 2001 WFP Mexico program headquarters moved to Mexico City and then in 2005 to the current location, Oaxaca. In 1999 WFP began a permanent presence and an active delegations program in Cuba to expose the human costs of the U.S. embargo. Over the next six years, more than a thousand WFP activists traveled to Cuba to witness the sinister impact of the U.S. government’s forty-year blockade against the island nation. In 2005, after tightening the U.S.-Cuba travel regulations, the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the U.S. Treasury Department denied WFP the license to take delegations to Cuba. Even though delegations cannot visit Cuba at this point, WFP grassroots groups continue to pressure Congress to lift the travel ban and the embargo against Cuba. In October 2000, WFP, at the request of Colombian civil society, began its first permanent presence in South America. WFP was asked by churches and human rights organizations in Colombia, who were familiar with WFP’s work in Central America, to go to Columbia because of their concerns about the effects of U.S. military aid to Colombia. Colombians felt that they had been forgotten by people in the United States. For decades, Colombia has endured a brutal armed conflict between the nation’s army, leftist guerilla movements, and right-wing paramilitary groups. Overwhelmingly, the victims of this conflict have been civilians. In response, the United States created Plan Colombia, sending billions of dollars in mostly military aid and training, but also substantial funding for aerial eradication of coca crops. In March 2001, on very short notice, WFP organized a 100-person delegation to Colombia. The delegation included religious, union, and organizational leadership. The delegation split up into four groups and went to four areas of the country that were directly involved in conflict. One of the groups spent several nights with 1,000 Colombians living on the outskirts of a town, displaced because of the violence and aerial fumigation. The team was close enough to the violence to hear the gunshots and to feel the fear of the people. A five-year-old boy, knowing that the United States was funding military operations in his country, approached one of the group members and asked her if people in the United States hated Colombians. WFP personnel in Colombia documented the human, social, and environmental effects of this multibillion dollar military and counter-narcotics funding package given to the Colombian armed forces. Ostensibly to fight the War on Drugs, the Plan Colombia aid package has done little more than inflame a complicated conflict that places civilians in the crossfire and destroys huge quantities of legitimate subsistence crops. More than 3.6 million people have been displaced from their homes because of the violence that kills around 30,000 Colombians every year. A total of over 300,000 Colombians have died in the violence over the past fifteen years. Hundreds of thousands will likely be displaced as a direct result of government policies, and WFP is working to put a stop to this. WFP led the

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effort to organize the National Mobilization on Colombia, which brought 10,000 people to Washington, D.C., to educate the public and challenge policymakers to end U.S. support for paramilitary death squads and destructive counter-narcotics fumigation in Colombia.

WORK IN THE UNITED STATES Although permanent presence in the international program sites is a keystone of WFP program, equally important is the work in the United States to change U.S. policies that negatively affect the people in Latin America. This difficult task includes working for long-term structural changes in addition to lobbying policy makers to pass or block certain legislation. In the 1980s, thousands of returned delegates demanded time and time again that their elected officials in the House and Senate vote “no” to Contra aid. In 1994 WFP staff organized the first of many Washington, D.C., vigils to close the U.S. Army School of the Americas, which offers combat and counterinsurgency training to soldiers of some of the most abusive militaries in the world. In 1994 many lobbied Congress to vote no on NAFTA, and in 2005 thousands of WFP and other activists pressured policy makers to vote no on the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). At times this lobbying produces positive results. In 2007, for example, there was an important policy shift in Colombia, which directed some of the U.S. military funding toward social aid funding. WFP has been part of a coalition on Colombia, which for the last seven years has been encouraging that shift, a much more positive approach for U.S. policy. Although only one small step in the right direction, it is worthy of celebration. WFP also works at the micro level, encouraging personal transformation and forging relationships between people in the Unites States and their neighbors in Latin America. WFP observes these personal transformations in each delegation. When people’s lives are changed, they are motivated to become long-term activists in the Americas. For example, WFP facilitates life-changing delegations for university students, who are involved in efforts to ensure that their campuses do not purchase universitylicensed apparel that was made under exploitative conditions. WFP takes these groups of students to visit factories in Nicaragua, which produce university apparel. Many times, these are factories where union organizers have been fired and threatened. Students visit and stay in workers’ homes, which are often one-room houses, to learn about the realities facing the workers. In the morning, the students may join a worker on a crowded bus packed with hundreds of other workers, all trying to get to the factory so they can sew the pockets on the jeans that college students wear. The students listen to the struggles of union organizers, and then brainstorm how they can be in solidarity with those struggles back on their own campuses. WFP assists with delegations such as these in order to help change the currently disjointed globalized economy, in which consumers have no human connection with producers.

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In 1997 WFP staff and membership worked closely with sweatshop workers in Nicaragua’s Free Trade Zone, resulting in the first union contract ever secured for sweatshop workers in Nicaragua. The union leadership directly credits WFP for this remarkable breakthrough. The following year, international team members and delegations were among the first on the scene in Nicaragua to aid with reconstruction and much needed medical care after Hurricane Mitch. In 2000 WFP published a groundbreaking, forty-page report called A Bankrupt Future that detailed the devastating human effects of the debt crisis in Nicaragua. On WFP delegations, transformations happen all the time. People make connections, such as the one between producers and consumers. The delegations offer opportunities to learn about those affected by various international policies, and then to come back and work for change. WFP is not a charity-giving organization. The organization works to change policies in the United States while also working to help improve problematic situations throughout Latin America. Currently, WFP is situated in Colombia, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Cuba; information about some of their work in these countries is summarized below.

CURRENT WFP PROGRAMS Delegations to Colombia Responding to calls for solidarity from Colombians, WFP has committed to continue to send delegations of U.S. citizens to that country. A typical WFP delegation to Colombia would be involved in learning firsthand about current issues facing the Colombian people, and members also take a proactive position on instigating change. The delegations meet with a wide range of experts and activists, including leaders in the business community and the peace movement, in order to hear their different analyses of U.S. policy in Colombia. They learn about the economic roots of Colombia’s conflict, and see firsthand the impact of aerial spraying. The delegation hears testimonies from displaced people and others directly affected by the conflict as well as travels to areas outside of the capital city of Bogotá to see firsthand the impact of U.S. military assistance and counternarcotics practices. Delegations talk with union organizers about the violence they face and meet with U.S. Embassy and Colombian government and military officials. They often help develop grassroots legislative and media strategies to work for change. Mexico Program Witness for Peace’s work in Mexico focuses on U.S. policy and corporate practices toward our neighbor to the South. For example, one focus is on how NAFTA has impacted Mexico’s most vulnerable people: small farmers and workers. WFP addresses issues such as indigenous rights, food security, and working conditions, and documents the relationship of NAFTA to Mexican migration. In October 2007,

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WFP released Forced from Home: U.S. Trade Policy and Immigration, a document that examines the root causes of Latin Americans’ immigration to the United States. WFP Mexico also looks at important alternative movements that are thriving in Mexico, such as fair trade coffee production, peaceful resistance to militarization in Chiapas, and sustainable farming and development models that provide alternatives to NAFTA. WFP examines critical issues in Mexico City and the states of Oaxaca, Puebla, Tlaxcala, and Chiapas. Delegations to Mexico WFP encourages participants in delegations to learn about how U.S. policies and corporate practices affect people in Mexico. Delegations give participants the opportunity to learn firsthand about these issues from those most affected by the policies. There is a diverse range of delegations offered through the Witness for Peace Mexico, a few of which are described below. Globalization 101: At What Human Cost?: Despite promises that corporate-led globalization and regional free trade agreements such as NAFTA will alleviate poverty and support dignified and sustainable development, the case of Mexico illustrates otherwise. Delegates learn how Mexican small farmers, workers, indigenous people, women, and men are impacted by free trade, and about the resistance strategies they have adopted to construct a healthier and more just future. Delegations can also focus more specifically on the struggles of indigenous peoples in Mexico and of women. The Globalization of Alternatives: Another World Is Possible: These delegations debunk the myth that “everyone is against something, but not FOR anything!” a common phrase heard among Mexican people. Participants learn how Mexicans from all parts of civil society are proactively organizing to construct communities that are true alternatives to the neoliberal development model. They meet with labor organizers, urban neighborhood activists, small farmers, and indigenous people who are seeking to build a more just and inclusive Mexico. Examining the Roots of Migration: Free Trade & Migration: These delegations focus on policies that are driving people to take increasingly dangerous border crossings in search of a way to sustain the families they have left behind. Delegates travel to southern Mexico to see firsthand the effects of U.S. policies and how they have contributed to migration. Participants learn from activists, farmers, and women about what the effects of migration have been on daily life, and how people are creating alternatives in Mexico that allow for men, women, and children to construct viable and healthy lives at home. Fair Trade Coffee: People over Profits: The struggle for economic justice inside and outside the free trade model is happening all over the world. In Mexico, many viable alternatives have taken shape, one being the promotion of fair trade. Fair trade attempts to offer small farmers a fair and living wage for their work. Participants learn about the cooperative fair trade system in

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Oaxaca and Chiapas, as well as about other organizations that are seeking a better way to do trade. Corn and the Mexican People: NAFTA and the Mexican Countryside: Because of NAFTA, many Mexican agricultural producers are no longer able to compete. This delegation focuses on the impacts of free trade agricultural policies on the Mexican countryside, providing meetings with organizations that are fighting to change NAFTA-related agricultural policies and learn from the very campesinos that are resisting these policies. Biodiversity, GMOs, and Food Sovereignty: Mexico is considered one of the few biologically “mega-diverse” countries in the world and has become a place of intense debate over the use of natural resources and the introduction of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), such as GMO corn. The impacts of GMOs on health, culture, and the environment should not be underestimated. The country’s biodiversity is an extremely valuable cultural and ecological resource, but is also highly valued as an economic resource by transnational companies. Participants learn about the threats of corporate involvement and how indigenous communities in Chiapas and Oaxaca are defending native foods and resources. Where Does the Violence Begin?: The poor in Mexico are often those most vulnerable to military and political violence. Mexico provides an example of how economic violence can begin a larger cycle of violence such as in military conflict. These delegations visit areas of Mexico that have seen conflict and explore what the roots are. They also learn about where the U.S. government and citizens fit into this cycle of violence, and what is being done in Mexico to end it. Other titles include Spirituality and Economic Justice, Faith, Conscience, and Workers’ Rights: NAFTA and Its Impacts on Mexican Labor, and The Violence That Plagues Mexico: Economic Roots. WFP is able to custom design delegations for groups wanting to work in Mexico. Witness for Peace Nicaragua Program Based in Managua, Nicaragua, WFP has maintained a permanent presence in this Central American country since 1983. Over the years, WFP has examined and challenged unjust U.S. government policies and corporate practices that hurt the poor majority in Nicaragua. WFP has consistently maintained political independence and used nonviolent direct action as a primary tool in Nicaragua. When the Contra war officially ended in 1990, Witness for Peace saw that although the military battles were over, the economic war was only beginning. Since the early 1990s, WFP’s Nicaragua program has directed its focus toward U.S. economic policy, examining the effects of U.S. government policy as well as those of institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. In addition, the work addresses corporate responsibility by advocating for respect of labor and human rights.

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Problems with Free Trade and Labor In 2006 Witness for Peace Nicaragua continued to focus attention on free trade and free trade agreements as essential issues affecting Nicaragua. Free trade opens up markets by eliminating all taxes and tariffs on products being imported and exported, creating one large economy in which everyone competes against everyone else. Free trade is part of the model that encourages countries to produce for export rather than for their own consumption. Under this model, poor countries such as Nicaragua are supposed to use their “comparative advantage” to compete against large economies like Mexico and the United States. Nicaragua’s “comparative advantage” is a cheap, abundant labor force and cash crops. Following in the footsteps of NAFTA, CAFTA (Central America Free Trade Agreement) involves five Central American nations (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua), and the Dominican Republic. CAFTA passed in the U.S. Congress by one vote on July 27, 2005. Since then, all participating countries have ratified the agreement, despite large and sometimes violent protests by their citizens. Some Central Americans are protesting free trade because for them, CAFTA means food insecurity, increased migration and exploitation, and less democracy. On April 1, 2006, CAFTA went into effect in Nicaragua. WFP plans to continue its campaign against these unfair, unjust free trade agreements by working to monitor the effects of CAFTA and to promote awareness of current bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements being negotiated, specifically the Andean Free Trade Agreement (AFTA) between the United States and Colombia and Peru. Talks with Ecuador, originally part of the AFTA negotiations, have been suspended. Expanding NAFTA further south through the regional free trade agreement CAFTA is a strategic step toward the hemispherewide FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas).

“Racing Downward” Nicaragua, like many developing countries, has spent decades looking for a way to boost its impoverished economy. Under the neoliberal prescription to find a comparative advantage, impoverished countries such as Nicaragua have been obligated to offer cheap labor to the global economy. Each developing country courts foreign companies wanting to produce a product inexpensively by offering a cheaper labor force than other countries. In the apparel industry, the cheapest countries will succeed in attracting foreign-owned garment assembly factories (maquilas), which seek to attract orders from the United States’ big apparel brand names, which, in turn, seek to attract us, the consumers. This system has spawned the notorious “race to the bottom”: a race of developing countries to be the cheapest option for the multinational corporations that produce and sell our jeans and T-shirts. Prevailing neoliberal logic says Nicaragua should strive to win this race. Nicaragua offers maquila investors the lowest wages in Central America, governmental tax

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breaks, and unenforced labor laws. Such cost savings have attracted dozens of foreign-owned maquilas, boosting the number of maquila jobs from 1,000 to over 70,000 in the last fifteen years. These cost savings have taken their toll on Nicaragua’s workers. Foreign-owned maquilas routinely violate and disregard Nicaragua’s worker-friendly labor laws, which end up trampling on worker’s rights. The Ministry of Labor does little to enforce the law, knowing that the companies may balk at increased production costs and abandon Nicaragua for a country offering more lax laws. As a result, thousands of Nicaraguan workers are regularly insulted and harassed by superiors, forced to work late into the evenings, fired for pregnancy or illness, and denied legally entitled pay and benefits. Unions that attempt to halt such exploitation are summarily dismantled by management’s blatant acts of union busting. Under CAFTA, sold to the Nicaragua public with the promise that a surge in maquila jobs would replace lost agricultural jobs, the country is becoming even more dependent on the maquila system. Given CAFTA’s failure to establish a realistic mechanism for labor law enforcement, more maquilas likely will mean more exploitation. Many also question how long these maquila jobs will last. With the recent entrance of bigger and cheaper contenders such as China, Nicaragua now faces grim competition in the global race to the bottom. To win, Nicaragua may need to allow for escalated erosion of workers’ rights. Since 1990 Nicaragua has been greatly impacted by foreign debt, structural adjustments, and the effects of international financial institution (IFI) policies. For over fifteen years, Witness for Peace has advocated for debt cancellation and the end of conditionality from IFIs. Today, WFP’s efforts focus on the unconditional canceling of Nicaragua’s debt to the Inter-American Development Bank and the removal of conditions by IFIs, including conditions preventing social spending and those leading to the privatization of Nicaragua’s public services. Delegations to Nicaragua WFP offers people the chance to get informed and involved by joining them on one of its delegations to Nicaragua. Participants will be able to learn more about CAFTA and the damaging effects of the U.S. policy of free trade. The delegations will also learn what they can do to help stop the spread of free trade to the Andean Region. WFP remains devoted to educating U.S. citizens about the complex maquila system that breeds such exploitation, and invites people to join ongoing delegations to Nicaragua. Some of the highest-ranked activities on WFP delegations include visiting a free trade zone maquila, talking privately with maquila workers and unionists, and exploring realistic alternatives to the race to the bottom. To learn more about maquilas and workers’ rights in Nicaragua, check out the WFP publication Behind the Seams: Maquilas and Development in Nicaragua located on WFP’s website.

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WITNESS FOR PEACE IN ACTION In deciding which U.S. policies to focus on, WFP takes its cues from the people at each international program site. The organization has always believed in the integrity of working this way, regardless of whether or not it may cause the organization to veer away from issues that are front-page news. International Team members who live and work at the program site carry out WFP programs at international sites for at least two years. These International Team members, all with college or graduate degrees, are professionally trained facilitators and energetic, knowledgeable educators responsible for planning and implementing the program for each delegation. In the United States, WFP staff located in Washington D.C., regional organizers, and grassroots activists spread out across the country carry out the important work of WFP. When facing important issues such as strategic planning or implementing a certain campaign, decisions are made by consensus, with people representing all different arms of the organization involved. As a grassroots network, WFP requires the energy of all its members to be actively involved and move the work forward. Consensus decision making is a challenging process because it gives everyone a lot of power, but it also requires that everyone have the organization’s best interest at heart, with a goal of trying to move forward with the best solution. WFP also follows this model in consultations with partner organizations in Latin America. The WFP delegation model is innovative and original. When WFP began its delegation model in 1983, study abroad programs and other types of immersion programs were not very common. WFP does not use the traditional “book learning” education model. Rather than reading about Latin America in a textbook, delegates gain a perspective on the current situation facing the majority of Latin Americans through direct experience with the local population at each international program site. WFP pedagogy, developed over the years, emphasizes independent thinking combined with active, dynamic group discussion and participation, accommodating different learning styles. Many different organizations consult with WFP, asking for help and for contacts on how to develop their own kind of transformational experience.

CHALLENGES When faced with countless challenges through the years, Witness for Peace has relied on consultation with local partners and strategic planning. A current challenge is how to grow to a national scale as a grassroots network with very limited human and financial resources. Almost all accomplishments are the result of the incredible work of volunteers and committed people around the country, organizing delegations and speakers tours. Another challenge is keeping people engaged once they return to the United States after a delegation to one of the international program sites. Keeping the experience present and ensuring that people stay connected to the policy issues is

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a difficult task. WFP attempts to provide tangible action ideas and tools for activists, so that they remained engaged without feeling completely overwhelmed with the enormity of the task of promoting more just policies. Examples of these tangible actions include hosting a house party to discuss the root causes of immigration, making calls to members of Congress at key legislative moments, or organizing a media event. An additional challenge has been finding a way to measure success. This is difficult considering WFP’s large goals, including structural changes in government policies that may take years to accomplish. WFP recently finished a three-year strategic plan, which includes qualitative and quantitative benchmarks. Using these benchmarks allows the organization to track progress and monitor success. FUNDING FOR WITNESS FOR PEACE WFP is funded almost exclusively through the nationwide grassroots network of members, small grants from religious communities and congregations, and the fees paid for delegations. The organization occasionally receives small grants from secular foundations for specific projects. LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE WFP has laid a strong foundation in the international program sites by forging strong partnerships and relationships. But in order to be more effective in changing U.S. policy, a much broader and more informed network in the United States is necessary. Because of limited resources, WFP has tended to focus primarily on international needs, but in order to sustain the momentum needed to change policies, the organization has committed to invest more energy and resources in building up grassroots strength in the United States. WFP wants all grassroots activists involved to feel they are connected to a nationwide effort. A first step is an increased effort to disseminate information about progress because everyone should be aware of all of the great work that is taking place on a regular basis. WFP is also working in coalition with other organizations so the efforts in targeting key members of Congress, addressing particular legislative battles, and identifying particular corporate targets are maximized. JOINING WFP AND TAKING ACTION Changing harmful U.S. policies in Latin America is a challenging goal, which will require the determined activism of thousands. WFP invites you, the reader, to join in this exciting movement for justice. Visit www.witnessforpeace.org to learn more about the following ways to get involved, as well as much more. •

Travel to Latin America with Witness for Peace. There are many opportunities to join an existing delegation or organize a customized delegation for your group.

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Join WFP’s Action Alert network. WFP sends timely updates and requests for action when it is needed most. Lobby your member of Congress for more just policies toward Latin America. WFP provides tips and tools as well as talking points on key policies. Participate in nationwide conferences, trainings, protests, and events. WFP brings together activists from all over the United States to examine the current state of the most critical issues facing Latin America and to receive important activist training in coalition building, media work, legislative advocacy, and nonviolent direct action. Get connected locally. WFP has six active regions around the country: New England, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, Upper Midwest, Northwest, and Southwest. These regions host speaking tours of bold voices from Latin America, organize delegations, train activists locally, and much more. Donate to Witness for Peace. WFP can only continue its work in Nicaragua, Mexico, and Colombia through the support of grassroots activists around the country. Follow the example set by Witness for Peace, and help support peace, justice and sustainable economies in the Americas.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Witness for Peace Executive Director: Melinda St. Louis Mission/Description: Witness for Peace (WFP) is a politically independent, nationwide grassroots organization of people committed to nonviolence and led by faith and conscience. WFP’s mission is to support peace, justice, and sustainable economies in the Americas by changing U.S. policies and corporate practices that contribute to poverty and oppression in Latin America and the Caribbean. Website: http://www.witnessforpeace.org/ Address: 3628 12th Street NE 1st Floor Washington, DC 20017 USA Phone: 202.547.6112 X18 Fax: 202.536.4708 E-mail: [email protected]

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Southern Poverty Law Center Myron Panchuk and Patrick Savaiano

Recently, in New London, Connecticut, nooses were left in an African American Coast Guard cadet’s bag. Black swastikas were spray-painted on two Jewish synagogues in New Jersey. In Glendale, Arizona, a chemical bomb was tossed from a car at a mosque. The bomb landed near two people associated with the Albanian American Islamic Center. A Latino day laborer was beaten by a white male in Marina, California, who had just offered him a job. In Palm Springs, California, a gay man was attacked by a man who bit his ear off. In Garland, Texas, swastikas and anti-Semitic slurs were painted on a pastor’s residence. All of these incidents of hate acts were reported in 2007 and represent a growing trend in the number of incidences of expressed hate, harassment, and discrimination. In 2007 alone, over 300 similar acts of hate were reported by the Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This project is dedicated to monitoring hate groups and extremist activity in the United Sates. Hate acts include, and are not limited to, assault and intimidation; vandalism and the destruction of property; the distribution of racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic leaflets; rallies and speeches; harassment; and even murder. All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. The number of hate groups has grown by 48 percent in recent years, from 602 in 2000 to 888 in 2007. The most notable are the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), neo-Confederates, neoNazis, white nationalists, Christian Identity, racist skinheads, and black separatists. From the 1800s until the 1960s, over 4,700 men and women were lynched in the United States. The noose remains, and continues to be used, as a symbol of racist intimidation of African Americans by whites. Although there have been few reported noose incidents, since the case of the “Jena 6,” there has been a rash of as many as sixty noose incidents over the course of just a few weeks in 2007. This reflects an alarming new trend and a social reality that challenges the gains of the civil rights movement, and signals what is perceived by many as a backlash against 137

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black America. It should also be noted that the level of hate crimes in this country is astoundingly high—more than 190,000 annually, according to the most recent findings of the Department of Justice in 2005.

HISTORY By the late 1960s, the legislative victories of the civil rights movement had yet to be tested. In Montgomery, Alabama, the movement’s birthplace, two Southern lawyers committed to racial equality were determined to exercise these laws to their fullest potential. By taking pro bono cases that few others would pursue, Morris Dees and Joseph J. Levin Jr. helped implement the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Some of their early lawsuits resulted in the desegregation of recreational facilities, the reapportionment of the Alabama legislature, and the integration of the Alabama state troopers. After formally incorporating the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1971, with Julian Bond as its first president, Dees and Levin began seeking nationwide support. They mailed thousands of letters explaining their clients’ needs and received donations from committed activists all over the country, enabling them to hire a staff and expand their work for justice. During the 1970s and 1980s, the center’s courtroom challenges led to the end of many discriminatory practices. Their cases won equal benefits for women in the armed forces, ended involuntary sterilization of women on welfare, and reformed prison and mental health conditions. Several of these early cases resulted in landmark decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court. When Klansmen in Decatur, Alabama, attacked a civil rights gathering on May 26, 1979, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) brought its first civil suit against a major Klan organization. That case led to the 1981 creation of Klanwatch to monitor organized hate activity across the country. When the scope of this work broadened to include other types of hate groups, it was renamed the Intelligence Project. SPLC attorneys developed strategies to hold white supremacist leaders accountable for their followers’ violence. By suing for monetary damages for victims of Klan violence, the Southern Poverty Law Center was able to bankrupt several major Klan organizations and to draw national attention to the growing threat of white supremacist activity. SPLC civil suits would eventually result in judgments against forty-six individuals and nine major white supremacist organizations for their roles in hate crimes. Multimillion-dollar judgments against the United Klans of America and the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations effectively put those organizations out of business. Other suits halted harassment of Vietnamese fishermen in Texas by the Knights of the KKK and paramilitary training by the White Patriot Party in North Carolina. In 1994 the Southern Poverty Law Center began to investigate white supremacist activity within the antigovernment militia movement. Shortly before the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that took the lives of 169 people, Morris Dees wrote a letter warning U.S. attorney general Janet Reno of the danger posed by militias. After the bombing, the Southern Poverty Law Center published critical

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information and special reports about the growth of the militia movement and called for increased law enforcement. As the 1990s ended, the numbers of antigovernment groups waned. At the same time, the Intelligence Project’s monitoring efforts expanded to include groups such as the Nation of Islam, the Council of Conservative Citizens, and the League of the South. As the white supremacist movement grew more sophisticated—its members trained in the use of weapons and organized into secret cells—the data compiled by the Intelligence Project became even more important to law enforcement. Today, its quarterly Intelligence Report is read by nearly 60,000 law enforcement officers nationwide, and Intelligence Project research has led to criminal convictions in several hate crime cases. When the Southern Poverty Law Center began taking on the Klan in court, threats of retaliation against the SPLC became real. Klansmen burned the Southern Poverty Law Center’s office in 1983. Over the years, several plots to bomb the SPLC offices and kill Morris Dees were thwarted. SPLC lawsuits were effective in weakening organized white supremacist activity, but random hate crime increased in the 1980s. Children were growing up with little knowledge of the sacrifices that had been made to bring legal apartheid to an end. In 1989 the Southern Poverty Law Center decided to memorialize those killed during the civil rights movement and to make the stories of their lives accessible to all who seek to learn more about that era. Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam War Memorial, was commissioned to design the Civil Rights Memorial. It stands on a plaza facing the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, drawing visitors from countries around the world. In 1991 the Southern Poverty Law Center launched Teaching Tolerance, providing teachers with free classroom materials on tolerance and diversity. The program’s award-winning magazine is now read by more than 400,000 educators nationwide, and Teaching Tolerance multimedia kits are in use in thousands of schools across the country.

LANDMARK CASES Challenging Segregation Like other cities across the South, Montgomery, Alabama, took the extraordinary step of closing swimming pools, parks, and recreational facilities rather than integrate them as court ordered in 1958. Later, those pools were filled with dirt. The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) filled the city’s recreational needs but continued to segregate children, going so far as to ban kids who swam at an integrated pool from city-wide meets. Then in 1969, the YMCA refused to admit two African American children to its summer camp. Southern Poverty Law Center co-founder Morris Dees filed a class action suit, Smith v. YMCA, to stop the YMCA’s policy of racial discrimination. He uncovered a secret 1958 agreement in which Montgomery officials gave

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the YMCA control of many city recreational activities. The court ruled the city had invested the YMCA with a “municipal character” and ordered the YMCA to stop discriminatory practices. Joe Levin joined forces with Dees in 1971, creating the Southern Poverty Law Center. Many early cases helped change the face of the South, including Nixon v. Brewer, which resulted, for the first time since Reconstruction, in the election of seventeen African American legislators in the state of Alabama. Employment Discrimination The Alabama state troopers long symbolized systematic oppression in the South and, as late as 1972, remained an all-white institution. In 1963 troopers stood behind George Wallace and his promise of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” and in 1965 beat civil rights activists during the march from Selma to Montgomery. Paradise v. Allen, filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1972, transformed the troopers forever and set legal precedent. Alabama was ordered to hire one qualified African American trooper for every white trooper hired, until the force was 25 percent black. State officials resisted, imposing a virtual ban on hiring to preserve the allwhite force and making it difficult for newly hired African American troopers to complete training. State officials also prevented African American officers from advancing by refusing to implement fair promotion tests. In 1987 the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In view of the troopers’ long history of discrimination, the high court upheld SPLC’s controversial affirmative action remedy. The case finally ended in 1995, more than twenty-three years after it began. The Alabama state troopers have been transformed from a symbol of oppression to an evidence of affirmative action’s success, with the highest percentage of minority officers in the nation. SPLC has litigated other landmark discrimination cases in the public and private sectors, including •

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Frontiero v. Richardson (1973), the first successful sex discrimination case against the federal government. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Department of Defense regulations granting certain benefits to the dependents of servicemen but not to the dependents of servicewomen were unconstitutional. Dothard v. Rawlinson (1977), another Supreme Court case addressing women’s rights, opened the way for women to be hired in law enforcement jobs traditionally reserved for men.

Opposing the Death Penalty Although the Southern Poverty Law Center’s primary legal focus has been the civil lawsuit, it has taken on compelling capital cases, seeking justice for

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those too often sentenced to death because of race or a lack of funds. Cases include those of •

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Joan Little, an African American inmate accused of murdering a white jail guard in North Carolina. The guard was found dead in her cell without his pants. Little said he had tried to rape her. A jury found Little not guilty. Roy Patterson, a highly decorated African American Marine sergeant, facing the death penalty after shooting two white Georgia law enforcement officers who had been abusive toward him and his family. After a twelve-year legal battle, SPLC attorneys finally won Patterson’s freedom. Johnny Ross, who became the nation’s youngest resident on Death Row at age sixteen after being convicted of the rape of a white woman in Louisiana in 1975. SPLC attorneys used blood tests that should have cleared him at his original trial to prove Ross was innocent.

In 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the convictions of eleven death row inmates in Alabama after affirming SPLC’s claim that the state’s death penalty statute was unconstitutional. Dubbed the “kill ’em or let ’em go” provision, this unique statute gave juries in capital cases but two choices: a guilty verdict that carried an automatic death penalty or an acquittal. The Court ruled in Beck v. Alabama that the failure to give the jury the option of finding the defendant guilty of something less serious than capital murder— such as manslaughter or first-degree murder—was unfair. This lack of options created the risk that the jury would vote to convict defendants of capital murder merely to avoid setting them free. “Such a risk cannot be tolerated in a case in which the defendant’s life is at stake,” the Court stated. In 1976 the Southern Poverty Law Center started a project known as Team Defense. SPLC attorneys developed trial strategies for capital cases, using existing trials as laboratories for the proper use of pretrial motions, expert witnesses, and jury selection procedures. Lessons learned were shared at seminars and in manuals that SPLC published in an effort to guide attorneys across the United States. Although SPLC no longer produces the death penalty manuals, it financially supports the efforts of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), an organization that represents death row inmates and produces capital litigation manuals and other educational materials. The Southern Poverty Law Center also continues to represent several death row inmates in their appeals. Battling Hate Groups Since 1979 the Southern Poverty Law Center has shut down some of the nation’s largest white supremacist organizations by helping victims of racist violence sue for monetary damages. Although the hate groups usually do not have much money, judgments won by SPLC have effectively put them out of business. These

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courtroom victories were funded entirely by SPLC supporters; the Southern Poverty Law Center accepts no legal fees from its clients. In 1979 over 100 members of the Invisible Empire Klan, armed with bats, ax handles, and guns, clashed with a group of peaceful civil rights marchers in Decatur, Alabama. Although the FBI investigated but could not find enough evidence of a conspiracy to charge the Klansmen, SPLC filed a civil suit against the Invisible Empire and numerous Klansmen in Brown v. Invisible Empire of the KKK. SPLC investigators uncovered evidence that convinced the FBI to reopen the case, and nine Klansmen were eventually convicted of criminal charges. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s civil suit was finally resolved in 1990. The settlement required Klansmen to pay damages, perform community service, and refrain from white supremacist activity. In a unique addition, the Klansmen were also required to attend a course on race relations and prejudice, taught by the leaders of the civil rights group they had attacked back in 1979. SPLC lawsuits in 1982 and 1984 ended Klan paramilitary activity in Texas and Alabama. Klan groups in these states were training paramilitary forces in the use of grenades, explosives, weapons, and techniques of ambush and hand-to-hand combat, all in preparation for what they believed was an impending “race war.” In 1981 Texas Klansmen tried to destroy Vietnamese-Americans’ fishing businesses by burning their boats and threatening their lives. Armed Klansmen cruised Galveston Bay and practiced guerrilla tactics at secret paramilitary camps. SPLC attorneys filed a lawsuit, Association of Vietnamese Fishermen v. Knights of the KKK, which halted the Klan’s terror campaign and shut down its paramilitary training bases. On the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birth in 1987, as an interracial group marched in all-white Forsyth County, Georgia, Klansmen throwing rocks and bottles forced the group back. SPLC attorneys sued to vindicate the marchers’ rights in McKinney v. Southern White Knights. In October 1988, a federal jury assessed nearly $1 million in damages against two Klan organizations and eleven followers responsible for the attack. To ensure the Klan felt the financial pressure of the verdict, SPLC investigators traced the assets of the major Klan defendant, the Invisible Empire, over a fiveyear period. In 1994 the Invisible Empire was forced to pay damages and disband. The group’s office equipment was given to the NAACP. In 1988 Tom and John Metzger sent their best White Aryan Resistance (WAR) recruiter to organize a Portland skinhead gang. After being trained in WAR’s methods, the gang killed an Ethiopian student. Tom Metzger praised the skinheads for doing their “civic duty.” SPLC attorneys filed a civil suit, Berhanu v. Metzger, asserting the Metzgers and WAR were as responsible for the killing as the Portland skinheads. In October 1990, a jury agreed and awarded $12.5 million in damages to the family of the victim, Mulugeta Seraw. In 1994 the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review Metzger’s appeal, allowing SPLC attorneys to begin distributing funds from the sale of WAR’s assets. The principal beneficiary is Seraw’s son, Henok, who receives monthly payments from WAR’s bank account.

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Nineteen-year-old Michael Donald was on his way to the store in 1981 when two members of the United Klans of America abducted him, beat him, cut his throat, and hung his body from a tree on a residential street in Mobile, Alabama. The two Klansmen who carried out the ritualistic killing were eventually arrested and convicted. Convinced the Klan itself should be held responsible, SPLC attorneys filed a civil suit on behalf of Donald’s mother in Beulah Mae Donald v. United Klans. In 1987 the Center won a historic $7 million verdict against the United Klans and the Klansmen who had been involved in the lynching. The verdict marked the end of the United Klans, the same group that had beaten the Freedom Riders, murdered civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo, and bombed Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. The group was forced to turn over its headquarters to Beulah Mae Donald, and two additional Klansmen were convicted of criminal charges. On May 17, 1991, a member of a white supremacist organization called the Church of the Creator murdered Harold Mansfield, an African American sailor who had served in the Gulf War. After SPLC investigators documented the group’s violent history, the center sued and obtained a $1 million default judgment against the so-called church in Mansfield v. Church of the Creator. Prior to the conclusion of the case, the church transferred ownership of its headquarters to late neo-Nazi leader William Pierce to keep it from falling into the hands of Mansfield’s heirs. Until his death in 2002, Pierce headed the National Alliance (he also authored The Turner Diaries, a fictional work that has inspired terrorists, including Timothy McVeigh). In 1995 SPLC attorneys filed Mansfield v. Pierce, suing Pierce for his role in the fraudulent scheme, and won an $85,000 judgment. In July 1998, security guards at the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho shot at Victoria Keenan and her son after their car backfired nearby. SPLC filed Keenan v. Aryan Nations, seeking justice on their behalf. After a weeklong trial, a jury ruled that leader Richard Butler and his organization were grossly negligent in selecting and supervising the guards. In September 2000, SPLC won a $6.3 million jury verdict against the Aryan Nations and Butler. The judgment forced Butler to give up the twenty-acre compound that had served for decades as the home of the nation’s most violent white supremacists. A South Carolina jury awarded the largest judgment ever against a hate group in Macedonia Baptist Church v. Christian Knights of the KKK (1998). The Christian Knights of the KKK, its state leader, and four other Klansmen were ordered to pay $37.8 million, later reduced by a judge to $21.5 million, for their conspiracy to burn an African American church. The Southern Poverty Law Center brought the case on behalf of Macedonia Baptist Church, one of several rural black churches burned by arsonists in the mid-1990s. The judgment forced the Klan to give up its headquarters. When the property was sold, the deed included a restriction that the land never be used for white supremacist activities. The Christian Knights were transformed from one of the most active Klan groups in the nation to a defunct organization.

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Protecting Worker Safety For twenty-seven years, Nat Thomas Wilkins had worked at the Westpoint Pepperell cotton mill in Opelika, Alabama, cleaning and combing cotton. Every day, Wilkins inhaled millions of microscopic cotton dust particles that clogged his lungs, making him so ill he could barely work. He was sent to a doctor and placed on medical leave. After helping Wilkins apply for Social Security benefits, the company terminated his employment. Westpoint Pepperell never informed Wilkins of what it had suspected for years—mill workers were in danger of contracting byssinosis, a preventable, work-related lung disease commonly known as “brown lung.” By the time Wilkins discovered the truth, he required a respirator. The Southern Poverty Law Center took Westpoint Pepperell to court in Wilkins v. Lanier (1979). Evidence showed the industry had concealed information about brown lung disease from its workers. Although the suit could not restore Wilkins’s health, it did clear the way for brown lung victims to receive some financial security. Since the case ended in 1983, federal regulations control the level of dust to which cotton workers may be exposed and require textile companies to provide regular medical screenings. Fighting for Tax Equity Despite sitting on rich mineral deposits, Kentucky’s Appalachian counties for years were among the poorest in the nation. A tax system virtually exempting unmined coal from taxation ensured that typical miners working long, dangerous hours paid more taxes on their vehicles than out-of-state coal owners paid on coal reserves. Without tax revenues, schools and public facilities languished. Lawsuits filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in cooperation with Kentucky fair tax advocates, such as Nowak v. Foster (1984) and others, helped change the financial landscape. The lawsuits forced the state to begin collecting a fair share of taxes from owners of valuable coal reserves. As a result, local schools began receiving over $1 million annually in additional revenue. These taxes also were credited with making possible an industrial park that provides hundreds of local jobs.

The Confederate Flag On April 25, 1963—the day U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy came to Montgomery to urge the state to integrate one of its universities—Alabama Governor George Wallace raised the Confederate battle flag over the state capitol dome. A lawsuit by Southern Poverty Law Center attorneys, Holmes v. Hunt, finally brought the flag down in 1993. Working with African American state legislators, SPLC used a forgotten sentence in the state code to argue the law permitted only

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state and national flags to fly above the capitol. A state judge agreed and issued an injunction prohibiting the governor from flying the flag. Challenging Prison Conditions The Southern Poverty Law Center fights to ensure that prisons and jails are not barbaric institutions. In Pugh v. Locke, a landmark 1976 case involving SPLC, a federal court ruled Alabama prisons were “wholly unfit for human habitation.” SPLC attorneys worked for more than a decade to force the state to bring the prisons up to constitutional standards. In 1995 Alabama took a giant step backward when it brought back chain gangs, a relic of Alabama’s racist past. SPLC attorneys sued in Austin v. James and secured an agreement that barred the state from ever reinstituting chain gangs. The Southern Poverty Law Center also challenged the state’s use of the “hitching post,” a torture device to which inmates were handcuffed as punishment for refusing to work. A federal district court ruled in Austin v. James that the hitching posts were “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the Eighth Amendment, and permanently banned their use. The client later sought monetary damages for his ordeal on the hitching post. That case, Hope v. Pelzer (2002), went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declared that the hitching post was “obviously cruel” and “antithetical to human dignity.” A settlement agreement secured by SPLC attorneys in Bradley v. Haley (2000) brought dramatic improvements in the health care received by Alabama’s mentally ill inmates. Before the far-reaching agreement, inmates such as Tommy Bradley, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, were banished to isolation cells twenty-two hours a day and offered little or no care. Now Bradley and others receive mental health services and interact with other inmates outside of their cells up to eighteen hours a day. Medical Services for the Poor In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Southern Poverty Law Center attorneys worked to force Alabama to provide adequate care to the thousands of mentally ill and mentally retarded persons committed to state institutions. SPLC attorneys then turned their attention to the abysmal services offered emotionally disturbed children in foster care. R.C. v. Fuller (1988) led to a breakthrough court agreement, established with help from mental health law experts at the Bazelon Center in Washington, D.C. In Harris v. James, the Southern Poverty Law Center challenged Alabama’s failure to provide Medicaid recipients with medically necessary transportation as mandated by federal law. Many SPLC clients were dialysis patients who had to go without food to pay for transportation to regularly scheduled treatments. Some were even forced to miss appointments altogether. In 1995 a federal judge ordered the state to implement a new transportation assistance program. Since then, more than 40,000 Medicaid recipients have been helped.

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Seeking Better Educational Opportunities The Southern Poverty Law Center maintains a strong interest in educational issues. SPLC attorneys have advocated for learning disabled children in Georgia and Mississippi to ensure that their needs are met, and on behalf of homeless children to ensure they receive the educational benefits to which they are entitled. In Penny Doe v. Richardson (1998), the Southern Poverty Law Center sued on behalf of a homeless African American teenage girl denied admission to public school because of her homelessness. After SPLC filed a class action lawsuit on her behalf, local and state school boards agreed to admit Doe and rewrite their policies to ensure that homeless children receive the same educational benefits as their non-homeless peers.

Challenging the “School-to-Prison Pipeline” From desegregation cases to a lawsuit brought on behalf of an African American teenager denied admission to public school because of her homelessness, the Southern Poverty Law Center has long advocated for better educational opportunities and outcomes for children. Continuing its commitment to protecting the rights of vulnerable children, in 2007 the center initiated a new project aimed at stemming the flow of children from schools to prisons. The project is attacking the problem on two fronts: in the schools and in the juvenile justice system. First, it seeks to ensure that public schools provide the appropriate special education services to children with emotional and behavioral disabilities. (As is well known among special education and juvenile justice advocates, children with emotional and behavioral disabilities are among the least likely to graduate from high school and the most likely to end up in prison.) Second, it seeks major reforms in the juvenile justice system—mainly by decreasing incarceration of nonviolent offenders and ensuring that troubled children receive effective, community-based rehabilitative services. The SPLC School-to-Prison Reform Project is an outgrowth of the center’s work over the years representing children with disabilities in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. By using a combination of advocacy strategies and by working with parents and community leaders, the center has secured classwide relief for thousands of children. The project collaborates with and provides technical assistance to education, disability rights, and juvenile justice advocacy groups around the country. Despite widespread misconceptions, very few children confined in prison are serious offenders. Most are nonviolent. Nationwide, about seven in ten suffer from emotional disturbance or some other educational disability. Almost all come from poor households. About two-thirds are African American or Latino. Many of these children simply do not belong in the criminal justice system—but they wind up there because of inadequate special education programs and overly punitive school discipline policies.

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Incarceration brutalizes children and tears apart their families. It drains government resources while doing little, if anything, to reduce crime. Juvenile prisons are often plagued with violence and provide no meaningful rehabilitation, treatment, or education. Recidivism studies have consistently shown that youths released from juvenile prison are likely to re-offend. Experts agree there is a direct pipeline from the juvenile justice system to the adult prison system. By targeting the juvenile justice system, SPLC aims to intervene in the lives of society’s most vulnerable members and stem the flow of children into adult prisons. The center combines litigation, legislative advocacy, community organizing, and public education to pursue juvenile justice reform in seven states in the Southeast. Since 2005, the SPLC’s Mississippi Youth Justice Project has worked with grassroots advocates and state leaders to achieve major systemic reforms in that state, creating a framework for model juvenile justice programs throughout the country. A Department of Justice report has chronicled horrific abuses in Mississippi youth facilities: children were routinely beaten, shackled, tied to poles, and hogtied. Suicidal girls were locked in dark, solitary cells without ventilation or toilets. Children were denied basic needs, including education and proper medical care. State legislation passed in 2005 and 2006 is now transforming the state’s system to one that relies less on incarceration and more on community-based treatment. A 2007 lawsuit by the Southern Poverty Law Center over abuses at the state’s Columbia Training School, a prison for girls, led Mississippi’s political leaders to close the facility. In Louisiana, the SPLC supports the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL). In 2000 the center teamed with the JJPL to negotiate a settlement agreement with the state and the U.S. Department of Justice that requires the state to reduce violence and to improve medical and mental health services at juvenile correctional facilities. The SPLC is also a member of the Alabama Youth Justice Coalition, a collaborative venture that involves child, disability, and other advocacy groups statewide. Although juvenile crime in Alabama has plummeted in the past ten years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of children in locked juvenile justice facilities. Alabama now has one of the highest juvenile incarceration rates in the United States. About eight in ten children locked up in Alabama in 2006 were imprisoned for nonviolent misbehavior. In addition, SPLC operates the Southern Juvenile Defender Center (SJDC), a seven-state project aimed at improving the quality of indigent defense for children in criminal proceedings. The SJDC conducts training seminars for defense counsel and provides assistance in the form of research, motions banks, and litigation support. Immigrant Justice Project The Southern Poverty Law Center created the Immigrant Justice Project (IJP) in 2004 to address the unique legal needs of migrant workers, a group particularly vulnerable to workplace abuse. IJP litigates cases that can result in systemic,

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industry-wide change. Prior to the establishment of IJP, there was no entity providing legal representation to most immigrant workers in the South. IJP protects the rights of migrant workers and presses for reform in the guest worker program through litigation, education and community outreach. In the spring of 2006, IJP filed a lawsuit against a subsidiary of the food giant Del Monte Fresh Produce on behalf of migrant workers who were being underpaid. IJP also has filed lawsuits on behalf of migrant forestry workers and other guest workers. IJP published a ground-breaking report, “Close to Slavery,” on the guestworker program in March 2007 and later testified several times before Congressional hearings about the abuses guest workers experience. After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in August 2005, IJP added another initiative to its agenda. In New Orleans and the surrounding area, IJP found immigrants doing backbreaking cleanup work while being ruthlessly exploited by U.S. companies. IJP filed major lawsuits against companies working in New Orleans and is advocating stronger federal enforcement of worker protection laws. The stories of these workers are documented in Broken Levees, Broken Promises: New Orleans’ Migrant Workers in Their Own Words. In February 2006, IJP launched a project aimed at ending gender discrimination and sexual harassment of immigrant women in the workplace. The project educates immigrant women about their rights, informs the public about the problem, and represents immigrant women who face sexual abuse on the job. THE INTELLIGENCE PROJECT The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project is dedicated to monitoring hate groups and extremist activity in the U.S. It also publishes the Intelligence Report, a quarterly magazine updating law enforcement, the media, and the public on the activity it investigates. The project has also established law enforcement training to help officers identify and respond to hate crimes. The Intelligence Project was created in 1981 in response to an incident two years earlier. During a peaceful march in Decatur, Alabama, Klan members attacked civil rights activists. Curtis Robinson, an African American, shot a Klansman in self-defense. When Robinson was convicted of assault with intent to murder by an all-white jury, the Southern Poverty Law Center appealed his conviction and brought its first civil suit against the Klan. During the suit, SPLC investigators discovered evidence suggesting a resurgence of Klan activity. The original intention was to take action against the Klan—and the cross burnings, beatings, shootings, and other violence that authorities largely ignored. Although the project’s original purpose was to gather information about the Klan, it evolved into much more. Today, the project monitors domestic hate groups—including neo-Nazi, racist skinheads, Christian Identity adherents, black separatists, and extremist militias—making it an acknowledged expert on the wide spectrum of U.S. hate activity. Intelligence Project leaders, recognized as comprehensive and reliable sources of information on the extreme Right, have been called upon by the government and the media. The project’s director testified before Congress in 1996 about far-right

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extremists in the military, and the editor of the Intelligence Report presented a paper on Internet hate as a United Nations–certified expert to the UN’s High Commission on Human Rights in 2000. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s intelligence information on Buford Furrow was widely used in the media after he attacked a Jewish community center in Los Angeles in 1999. Within hours the project identified Furrow as a former guard of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations, and the U.S. News and World Report said the project’s work in the Buford case “bested the nation’s mighty law enforcement agencies.”1 Although the number and affiliation of the groups it tracks has expanded, and although its methods have evolved into high-tech, online tracking as well as solid, fundamental investigative techniques, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project never tires in its mission to document the threat of extremism. Through its tracking efforts, incisive reporting, and educational programs, the Intelligence Project is and will continue to be the nation’s preeminent monitor and analyst of American extremism.

TEACHING TOLERANCE In 1991, Teaching Tolerance began supporting the efforts of K–12 teachers and other educators to promote respect for differences and an appreciation of diversity. As part of its mandate, Teaching Tolerance publishes a semiannual, self-titled magazine that profiles educators, schools, and programs promoting diversity and equity in replicable ways. In addition, the program produces and distributes free, high-quality anti-bias multimedia kits. At Teaching Tolerance’s website, www.teachingtolerance.org, visitors can find a wealth of resources, including • • • • •

Teaching Tolerance magazine, including current and back issues Ordering instructions for multimedia kits, handbooks, and the magazine Features such as Writing for Change, lessons that challenge bias in language Classroom activities and resources, classified by subject and grade level Grant opportunities for K–12 educators developing anti-bias projects in their schools and communities

Teaching Tolerance has earned accolades from a variety of organizations, including three Oscar nominations, two Academy Awards, and more than twenty honors from the Educational Press Association of America—including the Golden Lamp Award, its highest honor. Most of all, Teaching Tolerance is proud to help educators bring tolerance into the classroom.

CIVIL RIGHTS MEMORIAL The Civil Rights Memorial honors the achievements and memory of those who lost their lives during the civil rights movement, a period framed by the momentous Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 and the assassination of

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Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968. Created by Vietnam Veterans Memorial designer Maya Lin, the striking black granite memorial is located across the street from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s office building in Montgomery, Alabama, a city rich with civil rights history. The Civil Rights Memorial is just around the corner from the church where Dr. King served as pastor during the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955–1956, and the capitol steps where the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march ended in 1965. The memorial is located on an open plaza accessible to visitors twenty-four hours a day, every day of the week. There is no admission fee. The plaza is a contemplative area—a place to remember the movement, to honor those killed during the struggle, to appreciate how far the country has come in its quest for equality, and to consider how far it has to go. The Civil Rights Memorial Center is adjacent to the memorial. In addition to exhibits about civil rights movement martyrs, the Memorial Center houses a fiftysix-seat theater, a classroom for educational activities, and the Wall of Tolerance.

FUNDING The Southern Poverty Law Center was incorporated in 1971 and is tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. All contributions, grants, and bequests are tax deductible. The tax identification number is 63-0598743. SPLC’s work is supported primarily through donor contributions. The center does not receive or use government funds. During the last fiscal year, approximately 70 percent of SPLC’s total expenses were spent on program services. At the end of the fiscal year, SPLC’s endowment—a special, board-designated fund to support future work—stood at $201.7 million. The center is proud of the stewardship of its resources. Financial documents are available online. For more information, please visit the website at www.SPLCenter.org. TEN WAYS TO SUPPORT THE CENTER’S EFFORTS FOR JUSTICE AND TOLERANCE 1. Support the Center’s Work through a Tax-Deductible Gift Without committed supporters, the center could not fund its many programs for justice and tolerance. If you are interested in joining its family of supporters, SPLC welcomes donations online, or by phone or mail. Or individuals may join Friends of the Center by pledging a recurring donation once a month. 2. Join the National Campaign for Tolerance The National Campaign for Tolerance seeks to enlist 5 million people to participate in community tolerance initiatives. Individuals who join the campaign will receive a Citizen’s Action Kit containing tools for fighting hate and intolerance.

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3. Remember the Center in Your Estate or Retirement Plans Many planned giving options include retirement plans, gift annuities, gifts of stock and securities, and remembering the center in one’s will. 4. Fight Hate in Your Community and Schools If your community is experiencing the effects of hate and bias, print Tolerance.org’s 10 Ways to Fight Hate and share its suggestions with other concerned community leaders. Learn more about responding to hate at school, or how to address hate in higher education using 10 Ways to Fight Hate on Campus. 5. Share How You Are Fighting Hate If you have used the ideas in 10 Ways to Fight Hate and other center publications, or if you have developed your own strategy, let us know how it worked. 6. Promote Tolerance and Respect Read 101 Tools for Tolerance to find simple ideas for promoting equity and diversity in yourself, your home, your schools, your workplace, and your community. 7. Teach Tolerance in the Classroom Encourage teachers and school administrators to use our free Teaching Tolerance materials, read Teaching Tolerance magazine, and use our classroom resources and activities. Educators can also apply for grants to create anti-bias projects. 8. Mix It Up at lunch Read how to Mix It Up at Lunch to find out how schools in your area can participate. Teens can cross social boundaries by starting a Mix It Up Dialogue Group, applying for Mix It Up grants, or sharing their stories. 9. Monitor Hate in Your Local Community Send us news clippings about hate crimes and hate group activity in your area, or flyers, posters, and other hate materials for the Intelligence Project’s comprehensive records. Tell us about hate incidents you have observed. For news articles, be sure to include the name of the newspaper and the date the story ran. Send your materials to this address: Attn: Hate activity Intelligence Project 400 Washington Avenue Montgomery, Alabama 36104

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10. Do Your Homework Learn more about the civil rights movement and those who sacrificed their lives to achieve equality. Read the Intelligence Report’s latest issue to educate yourself about today’s hate and extremism. Get the latest updates on bias issues from www.Tolerance.org. Stay up to date on the center’s work by signing up for our e-newsletter.

BIOGRAPHIES Joseph J. Levin Jr., SPLC Co-founder and General Counsel Joseph J. Levin Jr. was born in Montgomery in 1943. His father was a lawyer with a commercial practice, and young Levin entered law school, just as his family expected him to do. He earned his JD from the University of Alabama in 1966. After serving two years as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, Levin returned to his hometown to join his father’s law practice. But the security of an established commercial practice left him unsatisfied. In the early 1960s, Levin saw one of his University of Alabama fraternity brothers persecuted for expressing unpopular views. Melvin Meyer, editor of the school newspaper, the Crimson White, was taunted by fellow students and the community because he courageously argued in favor of integration at a time when Alabama governor George Wallace “stood in the schoolhouse door” to prevent black students from enrolling at the state’s largest college. The harassment directed at Meyer peaked when the Ku Klux Klan burned a twelve-foot cross in front of Levin’s Jewish fraternity house early one morning. From the privacy of his office, Levin cheered another young Montgomery lawyer—Morris Dees—as he made headlines with the successful representation of a series of underdogs in civil rights cases. Levin told Dees’s brother that he would like to help. Joe Levin and Morris Dees collaborated on a high-profile defense case that became the Associated Press’s news story of the year. Although inexperienced in civil rights practice, Levin was “a natural-born trial lawyer, tireless and bright,” Dees says. The two decided to start the law firm that eventually became the Southern Poverty Law Center. As the center’s legal director from 1971 until 1976, Levin worked on more than fifty major civil rights cases. He argued the landmark sex discrimination case Frontiero vs. Richardson, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal law giving preferences to men in the military. He also argued and won Gilmore vs. City of Montgomery, in which the Supreme Court prohibited the use of public recreational facilities by private academies seeking to avoid school desegregation. In 1976 Levin left the center to supervise President-elect Jimmy Carter’s Justice Department transition team. He went on to serve as special assistant to the attorney general and chief counsel to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In 1979 he entered private practice in Washington, D.C.

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Levin continued his connection to the center by serving as its president and board chairman. In September 1996, Levin returned to Montgomery to assume the role of chief executive officer. Since November 2003, Levin has served as general counsel, helping guide the center today and in the future. Morris Dees, SPLC Co-founder and Chief Trial Counsel Morris Seligman Dees Jr. was born in 1936 in Shorter, Alabama, the son of farmers. He was very active in agriculture during high school and was named the Star Farmer of Alabama in 1955 by the Alabama Future Farmers of America. Dees attended undergraduate school at the University of Alabama, where he founded a nationwide direct mail sales company that specialized in book publishing. After graduation from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1960, he returned to Montgomery, Alabama’s capital, and opened a law office. He continued his mail order and book publishing business, Fuller & Dees Marketing Group, which grew to be one of the largest publishing companies in the South. In 1969 Dees sold the company to Times Mirror, the parent company of the Los Angeles Times. In 1967 Dees began taking controversial cases that were highly unpopular in the white community. He filed suit to stop construction of a white university in an Alabama city that already had a predominantly black state college. In 1969 he filed suit to integrate the all-white Montgomery YMCA. As he continued to pursue equal opportunities for minorities and the poor, Dees and his law partner, Joseph J. Levin Jr., saw the need for a nonprofit organization dedicated to seeking justice. In 1971 the two lawyers founded the Southern Poverty Law Center. Civil rights activist Julian Bond was its first president. Dees has received numerous awards in conjunction with his work at the SPLC. Trial Lawyers for Public Justice named him Trial Lawyer of the Year in 1987, and he received the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Award from the National Education Association in 1990. The American Bar Association gave him its Young Lawyers Distinguished Service Award, and the American Civil Liberties Union honored Dees with its Roger Baldwin Award. Colleges and universities have recognized his accomplishments with honorary degrees, and the University of Alabama gave Dees its Humanitarian Award in 1993. In 2001 the National Education Association selected Dees as recipient of its Friend of Education Award, its highest award, for his “exemplary contributions to education, tolerance and civil rights.” Dees is chief trial counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center. In his pioneering role at the center, Dees participates in suing hate groups and mapping new directions for the center. In addition to his work for the center, Dees frequently speaks to colleges and universities, legal associations, and other groups throughout the country. Over the years, he has been awarded at least twenty-five honorary degrees. Dees’s autobiography, A Season for Justice, was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1991. The American Bar Association re-released it in 2001 as A Lawyer’s

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Journey: The Morris Dees Story. His second book, Hate on Trial: The Case against America’s Most Dangerous Neo-Nazi, was published by Villard Books in 1993. It chronicles the trial and $12.5 million judgment against white supremacist Tom Metzger and his White Aryan Resistance group for their responsibility in the beating death of a young black student in Portland, Oregon. His third book, Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat, exposes the danger posed by today’s domestic terrorist groups. It was published by Harper Collins Publishers in 1996. Richard Cohen, President and Chief Executive Officer A graduate of Columbia University and the University of Virginia School of Law, Cohen came to the SPLC as its legal director and now serves as its president and chief executive officer. He and Dees have formed a dynamic trial team, winning a series of landmark lawsuits against some of the nation’s major hate groups. Cohen also successfully litigated a wide variety of important civil rights actions: defending the rights of prisoners to be treated humanely, working for equal educational opportunities for all children, and bringing down the Confederate battle flag from the top of the Alabama state capitol. In 1997, the national legal magazine American Lawyer selected Cohen as one of forty-five young public sector lawyers “whose vision and commitment are changing lives.” In 1999 he was a finalist for the National Trial Lawyer of the Year Award for his work with Dees on Macedonia Baptist Church v. Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a lawsuit that ended with a record $37.8 million judgment against a Klan group for its role in the burning of a South Carolina church. Cohen also has been a creative force behind some of the center’s most successful education projects. He has served as executive producer for six documentary films created for the center’s Teaching Tolerance program. Four of those films were nominated for Academy Awards, and two—Mighty Times: The Children’s March in 2005 and A Time for Justice in 1994—won Oscars. Since being named center president in 2003, Cohen has dedicated himself to continuing the organization’s tradition of working tirelessly for those who have no other champions. Under his leadership, the center established the Immigrant Justice Project in 2004, opened a Mississippi office in 2005, and expanded the organization’s work to reform the juvenile justice systems in Southern states. “Our highest calling is representing those who have no voice and who fall through the cracks in our society,” he said. Cohen says one of his most meaningful cases was a lawsuit the center brought on behalf of the wife and six children of a black man who died in police custody in Hemphill, Texas. After the lawmen were acquitted of murder charges by a hometown jury, they sued Cohen and Dees for suing them. Cohen managed to turn the tables on the lawmen, winning a substantial monetary settlement for the family and collecting evidence later used by prosecutors to convict the police officers on criminal civil rights charges.

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James McElroy: Chair, Board of Directors Like much of the United States at the time, racial tensions in James McElroy’s Illinois hometown ran high during the civil rights era. Many of his friends and family were either neutral or hostile to the civil rights movement, leaving McElroy, now chairman of the SPLC’s board of directors, to look to figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Julian Bond, and the Freedom Riders for inspiration. That inspiration led to a number of early activist efforts for McElroy. Many of his friends turned against him one day in high school when he decided to join dozens of his fellow students in a walkout to protest a racial incident at the school. He carried that activism to the University of Illinois, where he was known for engaging members of the Ku Klux Klan in debates at a campus bar. Ultimately, it was the early inspiration from the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement and their pursuit of justice and equality that led McElroy to a career in law. It also led to his eventual relationship with the center, which began almost by accident fifteen years ago in a San Diego office building. “By sheer coincidence, Morris Dees was in San Diego working on the Tom Metzger case,” recalls McElroy, referring to the center’s landmark lawsuit against Metzger and his hate group, White Aryan Resistance (WAR). “I heard he was in the same office building where I was working. I wanted to introduce myself to him, so I strolled down and said hello. I told him, ‘I know this is a Portland case, but if you need any help in San Diego, let me know.’” Dees was in San Diego to take Metzger’s deposition in the case that ultimately resulted in a $12.5 million judgment against Metzger and WAR. The center filed the suit on behalf of the family of Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian student killed in 1988 by a Portland, Oregon, skinhead gang trained in WAR’s methods. Minutes after McElroy’s chance meeting with Dees, Metzger filed a counter suit, stopping the deposition. Dees sought McElroy’s help with the San Diego arm of the case. In 1996 McElroy joined the center’s board of directors. Four years later, he assisted the center with Keenan v. Aryan Nations in Idaho, which resulted in a $6.3 million judgment against the Aryan Nations and its founder, Richard Butler. In 2003 he was elected board chairman. Julian Bond: First SPLC President and Member of the Board As an activist who has faced jail for his convictions; as a veteran of more than twenty years of service in the Georgia General Assembly; and as a writer, teacher, and lecturer, Julian Bond has been on the cutting edge of social change since he was a college student leading sit in demonstrations in Atlanta in 1960. Bond also has a long history with the Southern Poverty Law Center. When Morris Dees and Joseph J. Levin founded it in 1971, Bond became its first president. He served as president emeritus for years, and today serves on its board of directors. Bond also narrated two of the center’s videos, the Academy Award–winning A Time for Justice and The Shadow of Hate, which was nominated for an Oscar.

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Acknowledgment In preparing this chapter Patrick Savaiano interviewed Joseph J. Levin Jr., cofounder and general counsel of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Southern Poverty Law Center Founders: Morris Dees and Joseph J. Levin Jr. President: Richard Cohen Mission/Description: Throughout its history, the center has worked to make the nation’s Constitutional ideals a reality. The center’s legal department fights all forms of discrimination and works to protect society’s most vulnerable members, handling innovative cases that few lawyers are willing to take. Over three decades, it has achieved significant legal victories, including landmark Supreme Court decisions and crushing jury verdicts against hate groups. Website: http://www.splcenter.org Address: 400 Washington Ave. Montgomery, AL 36104 USA Phone: (334) 956-8200 Fax: (334) 956-8488 E-mail: [email protected]

NOTE 1. “Hitting before Hate Strikes,” U.S. News and World Report, Sept. 6, 1999.

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Human Rights Campaign Trevor Thomas and Myron Panchuk

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) is America’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender equality. By inspiring and engaging all Americans, HRC strives to end discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) citizens and realize a nation that achieves fundamental fairness and equality for all. HRC seeks to improve the lives of GLBT Americans by advocating for equal rights and benefits in the workplace; ensuring families are treated equally under the law; and increasing public support among all Americans through innovative advocacy, education, and outreach programs. HRC works to secure equal rights for GLBT individuals and families at the federal and state levels by lobbying elected officials, mobilizing grassroots supporters, educating Americans, investing strategically to elect fair-minded officials, and partnering with other GLBT organizations. The Human Rights Campaign represents a grassroots force of more than 700,000 members and supporters nationwide. As the largest national gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender civil rights organization, HRC envisions an America where GLBT people are ensured of their basic equal rights and can be open, honest, and safe at home, at work, and in the community. HISTORY The Human Rights Campaign was founded in 1980, with a goal of raising money for congressional candidates who supported fairness. In the years that followed, the organization established itself as a resilient force in the overall movement for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender civil rights as it strived to achieve fundamental fairness and equality for all. In 1980 Steve Endean, an advocate for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender equality, founded the Human Rights Campaign Fund (HRCF) to raise money for pro-fairness congressional candidates. In that era, several extremist, right-wing 157

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groups, including the Moral Majority and the National Conservative Political Action Committee, were gaining notoriety, and HRCF was created in part to counter their anti-gay tactics. Over the decades that followed, the Human Rights Campaign—which dropped the word “Fund” from its name in 1995—expanded its mission and became a leading player in the pro-equality movement nationwide. It lobbied for fair-minded legislation in Congress, worked alongside corporate America to gain needed protections for GLBT workers, and spread the message of equality to every corner of the country.

SOME NOTABLE ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF THE HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN • In its first major electoral effort in 1982, HRCF donated $140,000 to 118 congressional candidates. Eighty-one percent of those candidates went on to win. • In 1986 HRCF and its allies stopped right-wing attempts to revoke a law that aided HIV-positive Washington, D.C., residents. • In 1990, following HRCF’s lobbying, Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act, which protects people with HIV and AIDS from discrimination. • In 1992, HRCF endorsed Arkansas governor Bill Clinton in the presidential race. After Clinton’s victory, HRCF’s executive director took part in the first meeting between GLBT leaders and a sitting president. • In 1995 HRC created its Workplace Project, which fights for fair-minded workplace policies in corporate America. • In 1997 HRC ran public service announcements on GLBT equality during the landmark coming-out episode of the sitcom Ellen. • In 1998, following the murder of Matthew Shepard, HRC led the national movement supporting hate violence legislation to protect GLBT Americans. • In 1999, thanks to HRC’s lobbying, the Senate passed a major hate crimes bill. • After the attacks of September 11, 2001, HRC worked to ensure that survivors’ same-sex partners received federal relief funds. • In 2002 HRC launched its Historically Black Colleges and Universities Program to meet the unique needs of GLBT students of color. • After a Massachusetts court ruled in favor of marriage equality in 2003, HRC sent staff and funds to the statewide pro-fairness movement. • Twice—in 2004 and 2006—HRC led the successful fight against the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would have banned marriage for GLBT families. • In 2005, HRC launched its Religion and Faith Program to reclaim the faithbased debate over GLBT issues from the radical right. • In 2006, thanks to HRC’s policy work, two key provisions in the Pension Protection Act ensured financial protections for same-sex couples. • In the 2006 elections, following HRC’s voter mobilization efforts, more than 200 pro-equality candidates won their races, resulting in a fair-minded majority in the U.S. Congress.

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The Human Rights Campaign works each and every day to create a fair environment for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans. To become a part of that movement, join HRC today.

SUPPORTING FAIR-MINDED CANDIDATES Pro-equality laws come from pro-equality leaders. When fair-minded Americans come together to support political candidates who support gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender civil rights, those candidates later become elected officials who help to enact laws that enhance the rights of their GLBT constituents. The Human Rights Campaign offers campaign support for targeted proequality candidates. Through extensive get-out-the-vote efforts, partnerships with like-minded organizations, and financial contributions to candidates, HRC plays a major role in elections across the country. HRC provides assistance with message development, educational advertisements, get-out-the-vote mailings and phone calls, grassroots membership mobilization, and fund raising. HRC operates one of the largest and most successful political action committees in the country, which endorses fair-minded federal candidates and provides them with financial support. HRC members are also able to contribute directly to HRCendorsed candidates through HRC’s online contribution “bundling” program.

FOCUS ON DIVERSITY The Human Rights Campaign’s diversity mission has two important and related components. The first is to ensure that diversity is an intrinsic value of HRC’s organizational culture, not just a set of statistics or numbers. The second part of HRC’s diversity mission is to be one of the most successful organizations in the country at uniting gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people and straight supporters with people of all races and backgrounds to ensure equality for all. HRC’s Diversity Department, the first such program for a GLBT advocacy organization, is responsible for driving this diversity mission. In 2007 the organization created a chief diversity officer position that reports directly to HRC’s president. In addition to building partnerships and strategic alliances, supporting pride events for people of color and conducting diversity trainings for the organization’s volunteers and members, HRC’s Diversity Department is focused on two major initiatives: •

HRC’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Student Leadership Program, a one-of-a-kind program that educates and organizes students, faculty, and administrators at HBCUs on the issues specific to GLBT students. Launched in 2002 in the wake of a swell of violence against black GLBT students on HBCU campuses, this program empowers, inspires, and informs campus communities. It trains student activists to sustain dialogue, build viable student-led GLBT organizations, and open campus-wide debates on GLBT issues, often for the first time.

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HRC’s National Dialogue, an endeavor to give voice and power to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people of color. Alongside qualitative and quantitative research to identify the issues that would make a difference in the lives of these communities, HRC is organizing a grassroots effort led by the organization’s volunteers and members to engage face-to-face with GLBT people of color at work, at home, at places of worship, and in the many different ways in which we come together in our communities. The results of the National Dialogue will inform HRC’s legislative agenda in 2008, as well as its diversity and educational outreach programs.

EDUCATIONAL OUTREACH Through research, educational efforts, and outreach, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation encourages gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans to live their lives openly and seeks to change the hearts and minds of Americans to the side of equality. The HRC Foundation is a nonprofit, tax-exempt 50(c)(3) organization. Programs funded in part or in full through the HRC Foundation include •

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The HRC Coming Out Project, which encourages GLBT and straightsupportive Americans to come out and live openly by providing resources that empower them to talk about their lives and advocate for GLBT equality. The HRC Family Project, which empowers members of the GLBT community to take action to protect their families, improves the practices within key institutions that serve GLBT families and promotes visibility of GLBT families. The HRC Historically Black Colleges and Universities Outreach Program, which trains student activists to sustain dialogue, build viable student-led GLBT organizations, and open campus-wide debate on the issues that affect the GLBT community, often for the first time. The HRC Religion and Faith Program, which amplifies the voices of clergy who support GLBT equality while also equipping and empowering people of faith to talk about GLBT issues from a religious perspective. The HRC Research Center, which serves as a comprehensive and authoritative source of research on GLBT issues for members of the media, lawmakers, proequality advocates, and other thought leaders. The HRC Workplace Project, which promotes equality in the workplace by advocating for policies that prohibit discrimination against GLBT workers, provide employees with equal benefits and diversity training, and encourage appropriate marketing.

MEDIA OUTREACH The Human Rights Campaign has participated extensively in the public policy discussion and debate on America’s airwaves. HRC is often called upon by the media to frame issues affecting gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans,

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and to offer thoughtful commentary on the news of the day. Whether it is offering a comment on the importance of marriage equality or guiding writers and producers through the complicated questions surrounding workplace fairness for GLBT employees, HRC is always willing to serve as an expert witness on the topics that impact GLBT and straight-supportive Americans. For decades, HRC has been a go-to resource for TV news, magazines, newspapers, and radio shows on GLBT issues. HRC spokespeople have appeared on every major TV network, as well as on cable news channels, including CNN and Fox News. They have also been quoted everywhere from the New York Times and Fortune magazine to small-town papers across the country. HRC also works extensively with the GLBT media and with nontraditional press outlets, including blogs and other online media. HRC also produces its own weekly radio show and daily webcast, as well as frequent public service announcements and advertisements. Every Monday, listeners tune in to The Agenda with Joe Solmonese, an original show covering GLBT issues and starring HRC president Joe Solmonese, broadcast live on XM Satellite Radio. In addition, each weekday morning, HRC’s daily webcast, Equally Speaking, keeps viewers updated on the day’s GLBT news. Plus, HRC’s many public service announcements, which have appeared in print, online, and in radio and television broadcasts, have addressed such key topics as hate crimes, marriage equality, coming out, and workplace discrimination. IMPORTANT HRC ISSUES Aging When gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender seniors need to turn to others for housing assistance, they often face three challenges: lack of family help, a shortage of welcoming housing, and fear of discrimination and harassment. Although heterosexual seniors often rely on their spouses or children to help them, many lesbian and gay seniors find themselves without either resource, says Steven Karpiak, executive director of Pride Senior Network. In fact, when members of Senior Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE) conducted focus groups in New York City, they found that approximately two thirds of the lesbian and gay seniors interviewed lived alone—a higher rate of isolation than among the general elderly population. Other research has found similar results. The need for assisted housing for lesbian and gay seniors, therefore, may be even greater than it is for heterosexual seniors. Yet here, too, we face some unique challenges. With all the media attention that lesbian and gay retirement communities have received in recent years, you may think there are plenty of welcoming places to go. But the fact is that there are only a few. Most welcoming retirement communities are still on the drawing board—and in many cases, plans have been stalled because of an inability to attract the money needed to build them, according to Terry Kaelber, executive director of SAGE, which is trying to build an assisted

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living facility for gay and lesbian seniors in New York City. “I think one of the reasons for that is because gay and lesbian seniors, in general, are an invisible population, and because of that, it’s difficult to get hard-core marketing studies that really mean anything to mainstream developers,” says Kaelber. Moreover, even if all the planned communities were built, most of these developments would be very expensive to live in—costing more than many of today’s gay seniors could or would pay. There also are ambivalent reports about whether lesbian and gay seniors even want housing targeted specifically to them. Even though many retirement centers historically have been organized by niche groups (with some, for example, targeted to Catholics and others to Jews), many lesbian and gay seniors report little interest in segregated housing and express a preference to remain in their own community near friends and loved ones. “The reality is most older people don’t live in retirement communities, period. So there isn’t any reason to believe that would be particularly different in the gay community,” says David Aronstein, a social worker and managing partner of Stonewall Communities, a project to build gay- and lesbian-friendly senior housing in Boston. “One thing that came out in our focus groups is that people wanted it to be gay-managed [and] owned and predominantly occupied by gays, but people were very clear that it would be fine if there were straight people who lived there, too. People have wide friendship networks that aren’t always exclusively gay.” Although there are a few gay or lesbian retirement communities in Florida and the Southwest, there has not been a rush to build retirement homes at gay and lesbian vacation spots, such as Key West, Florida, or Provincetown, Massachusetts. One reason, Aronstein suggests, is the distance those spots are from the nearest medical facility. Still, Marcy Adelman, a San Francisco psychologist and founder of the planned Rainbow Adult Community Housing, notes there are increasing incidents of “spontaneous combustion,” where small groups of friends have rented apartments or purchased units next to each other in RV parks or rural developments to create their own lesbian and gay senior housing communities. Nancy Nystrom, a sociologist at Michigan State University, belongs to one such group. “I do research with older women,” she says, “and I found several collective groups of women who have bought homes in residential areas and then just knocked down the common fences. Nobody knows about them because they’re not advertising.” Her group of eight women, ranging in age from fifty-five to seventyone, plans to build a housing cluster of five to seven manufactured houses interconnected through a community common house at its center on a five-acre plot outside Seattle. After paying their share of the land purchase, about $50,000, and the purchase of their home, the women will have to pay only $517 per month in upkeep. “The theory is the more interactive and more interconnected the women are with each other and helping each other out, the longer they can put off the need for full assisted living,” says Nystrom. Nystrom hopes the project, which is not up and running yet, will serve as a model for other groups of lesbian and gay seniors.

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Yet perhaps the most common problem is one of isolation and loneliness, brought on by a fear of discrimination. “The major struggle that older lesbians and gay men have in long-term care facilities is the need to remain closeted out of fear of retaliation and out of an instinct of self-preservation,” says Doni Gewirtzman, a Lambda Legal staff attorney who specializes in age discrimination. In part, Gewirtzman says, this is because the current generation of lesbian and gay seniors came of age in a time of “officially sanctioned homophobia and abuse of gay people,” and the coping strategy that many of them learned was just to remain in the closet. The result, however, is that many lesbian and gay seniors find themselves unable to freely discuss what most people talk about when they get old—namely, the people they love. The rights of elderly gays and lesbians vary from state to state, even county to county, says Gewirtzman, noting that most nursing home operations are regulated at the state level.

Hate Crimes “Matt is no longer with us today because the men who killed him learned to hate. Somehow and somewhere they received the message that the lives of gay people are not as worthy of respect, dignity and honor as the lives of other people.” —Judy Shepard, HRC board member and mother of Matthew Shepard, slain University of Wyoming student

In May 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act (H.R. 1592) with a strong bipartisan vote of 237–180. The Senate approved the nearly identical Matthew Shepard Act (S. 1105) as an amendment to the Department of Defense authorization bill. The amendment passed by a voice vote after passing a procedural hurdle known as “cloture” by a bipartisan vote of 60–39. Unfortunately, while being reconciled in conference committee between the House and Senate, just prior to being sent to the president’s desk, inclusion of the hate crimes provision in the final version of the bill fell victim to challenges from opponents of hate crimes as well as unrelated concerns regarding Iraq-related provisions in the defense bill. The hate crimes veto threat issued by the White House and organized opposition by House Republican leadership cost significant numbers of votes on the right. Iraq-related provisions that many progressive Democrats opposed cost votes on the left. Moderate Democrats, many of whom voted for the hate crimes bill in May, did not want to test the president’s veto threat and risk a delay in increased pay for military personnel. All of these factors resulted in insufficient votes to secure passage of the bill with the hate crimes provision. At this time, the Human Rights Campaign is working with allies to find another legislative vehicle in the second half of this Congress to move the Matthew Shepard Act forward. All violent crimes are reprehensible, but the

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damage done by hate crimes cannot be measured solely in terms of physical injury or dollars and cents. Hate crimes rend the fabric of our society and fragment communities because they target a whole group and not just the individual victim. Hate crimes are committed to cause fear to a whole community. A violent hate crime is intended to “send a message” that an individual and “their kind” will not be tolerated, many times leaving the victim and others in their group feeling isolated, vulnerable, and unprotected. According to 2004 FBI statistics, hate crimes based on sexual orientation constituted the third highest category reported and made up 15.5 percent of all reported hate crimes. Only race-based and religion-based prejudice crimes were more prevalent than hate crimes based on sexual orientation. GLBT Health Issues, HIV, and AIDS The Human Rights Campaign’s health information has historically focused on issues surrounding the HIV/AIDS pandemic; however, HRC is broadening its information scope to include a wider variety of issues such as lesbian health, healthcare discrimination, and the Healthcare Equality Index (HEI), a project that provides a quality indicator for healthcare related to GLBT people. The Human Rights Campaign is dedicated to the coverage of all health-related issues facing the GLBT community. HRC is working to secure adequate funding for HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment, research, and housing, and for scientifically sound national HIV/AIDS policy. In addition to our independent work on these issues, HRC works with our allies in the Federal AIDS Policy Partnership. HRC believes that a coordinated and comprehensive approach must be aggressively pursued to stop this epidemic. This balanced approach must include significant and appropriate resources to help prevent new infections from occurring; provide quality care, treatment, and support services for those living with HIV/AIDS; boost current research efforts to find a cure; and understand the importance of the role HIV/AIDS is playing in the global arena. Immigration Around the world, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender families face widespread discrimination. Most governments do not offer legal recognition for samesex relationships. In addition, binational GLBT couples in many countries must cope with immigration laws that fail to recognize their families. In the United States, out of 1 million green cards or immigrant visas, approximately 75 percent are issued to family members of U.S. citizens and permanent residents. However, the current definition of “family” in U.S. immigration law does not include same-sex partners. Therefore, thousands of same-sex couples are separated or live in constant fear of being stopped by officials who demand to see documentation and threaten detention. In some cases, same-sex partners face

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prosecution by the Citizenship and Immigration Service—including hefty fines and deportations. U.S. citizens are sometimes left with no other choice but to emigrate with their partners to a country with more fair-minded immigration laws. The Human Rights Campaign is working with its allies in Congress to amend current immigration law to cover same-sex relationships. International Rights Many other countries grant same-sex couples greater rights, benefits, and protections than those available to GLBT families in the United States. In 2001 the Netherlands became the first country to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples. Since then, marriage equality has become the law in Belgium, Canada, Spain, and South Africa. Domestic partnership registration is also an option in a growing number of countries, and some governments recognize same-sex partnerships for immigration purposes. The Human Rights Campaign is working closely with state leaders across the nation on marriage initiatives. In 2006 the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to receive the same state-level benefits, protections and obligations as opposite-sex married couples. As a result of the ruling, the New Jersey legislature voted in late 2006 to offer civil unions to same-sex couples. Currently, same-sex couples are entitled to all the state-level rights and benefits of marriage in Massachusetts. In addition, same-sex couples in Vermont and Connecticut are able to enter into state-level civil unions. A 2006 court ruling in New York denied marriage to same-sex couples and sent the issue to the legislature. California’s supreme court ruled in June 2008 that same-sex marriage was valid. GLBT Military “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue, Don’t Harass”—the current U.S. policy on gays in the military—is the only law in the country that forces people to be dishonest about their personal lives or be fired or possibly imprisoned. This discriminatory policy hurts military readiness and national security while putting American soldiers fighting overseas at risk. As recently stated by John M. Shalikashvili, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former supporter of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT), lifting the ban is inevitable. “When that day comes, gay men and lesbians will no longer have to conceal who they are, and the military will no longer need to sacrifice those whose service it cannot afford to lose.”1 The Military Readiness Enhancement Act (MREA) remedies this discriminatory and unworkable policy and replaces DADT with a policy of nondiscrimination. MREA was introduced in the 109th House of Representatives by Rep. Martin Meehan (D–MA) with 122 bipartisan co-sponsors, and will be reintroduced in the 110th Congress.

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Countless gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans have and will continue to serve in the U.S. military with distinction. The only question is whether they will have to lie about their sexual orientation to do so. Since enactment of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, numerous gay and lesbian troops have served openly while pending discharge with no effect on unit performance, readiness, cohesion, or morale. Moreover, U.S. military personnel are already serving side by side with openly gay service members—with no identifiable negative effects—in and from countries throughout the world. Former Defense Secretary William Cohen agrees: the ban is discriminatory, and “we’re hearing from within the military what we’re hearing from within society, that we’re becoming a much more open, tolerant society for diverse opinions and orientation.”2 We must end this discriminatory policy sooner rather than later, and ensure that the U.S. military can recruit and retain the best and the brightest troops regardless of their sexual orientation. Adoption and Parenting Rights In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in state legislation that would prohibit or restrict the ability of GLBT people to adopt children or to serve as foster parents. The sponsors of these bills disregard the social science research and professional opinion on GLBT parenting. Moreover, these measures could potentially deny thousands of children awaiting foster care placement or adoption the opportunity to find a home and a loving family. Fortunately, none of the bills proposed since 2005 has passed, but the future holds more challenges. Learn about the HRC Foundation Family Project’s All Children—All Families initiative, which is committed to finding permanent families for children by promoting fairness for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender foster and adoptive parents. People of Color You can be “in the closet” about your sexual orientation or gender identity, but you cannot hide your race. The outside world sees race first. For people of color— a term used to describe African Americans, Latinos/as, Asian Pacific Islander Americans, Native Americans, Arab Americans, mixed-race people, and others— that means we often identify first with our race or ethnicity before we identify according to our sexual orientation or gender identity. We have unique experiences and need to find ways to feel safe and to express our power. What does it mean to be an African American gay male or lesbian, for instance? What does it mean to be “out” as Mexican and bisexual? Through partnerships and programs, the Human Rights Campaign strives to develop the tools and resources for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning people of color to live full and healthy lives without fear or oppression at home, in our communities, in the workplace, and in our places of worship.

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Religion and Faith The Human Rights Campaign’s Religion and Faith Program’s mission is to change the conversation about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people and faith. Because of the pioneering efforts of brave religious people speaking out for equality, a new movement for change is emerging that embraces a culture of welcome, compassion, and hospitality, values that are at the heart of all our faith traditions. HRC’s program is engaged in this movement at every level. We have created much-needed resources, such as our online weekly preaching and devotional resource Out in Scripture, our Living Openly in Your Place of Worship guide, and our biweekly e-newsletter. Through our Religion Council, we are ensuring that every month 10 million Americans hear diverse religious voices speaking about equality through newspapers, radio, television, blogs, and webcasts. Our work with twenty-three Progressive State Clergy coalitions is also spreading equality on the state and local level. And, through our Clergy Safe Space Conversations, we are having difficult, yet faithful, conversations with religious leaders struggling to reconcile their faith with GLBT concerns. In doing this work, we literally stand with religious people in all the places they gather. Our work takes us from organizing progressive clergy coalitions in fellowship halls on a given Thursday night to partaking in Shabbat services on Friday evening, to preaching from the pulpit on Sunday morning, followed by a Safe Space Conversation in a church basement on Monday. We are also taking the message of equality on the road to seminaries, college campuses, and assembly halls, talking with people about faith, fairness, and the religious tools for advocacy they can draw upon from their own faith traditions. Our message of equality is also reaching the halls of Congress, where religious leaders speak out on such critical justice issues facing the GLBT community as the Federal Marriage Amendment, hate crimes legislation, and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. Throughout all this, we are spreading the good news that transformation is truly happening one community at a time. Transgender Issues So this is the bottom line for me, the results of a lifetime of struggling with self-definition. It is OK to be me, who I am. It is OK to tell people the truth about myself. It is OK to live and work as I truly am. It is OK for the world to know who I am. In fact, it’s not just OK to do that. It is absolutely necessary. I am Debra Davis. I am a proud human being. . . . David is not here anymore—Debra will be working here from now on.” —Debra Davis, male-to-female transsexual, addressing staff and faculty at Southwest High School in Minneapolis, 1998

It is not easy to come out on the job, even if you have already come out to your family and friends. Those who come out as transgender in the workplace are often

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met with ignorance and a lack of respect. Some transgender people lose their jobs, face discrimination and bigotry, or are forced to quit in order to avoid negative reactions and hostility. It is important to take inventory of the risks involved with being out at work. Coming out on the job has the potential to affect your livelihood, since there is no federal law that protects you from being fired because of your gender identity. However, many states, cities, and counties have laws or ordinances that prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and expression. Additionally, a number of other states interpret their existing nondiscrimination laws to protect transgender people. It is important to know the law in your city or state before coming out at work. Additionally, more corporations and businesses in the private sector are beginning to cover gender identity and expression in their nondiscrimination policies. A growing number of private-sector employers include gender identity in their nondiscrimination policies, including such Fortune 500 companies as IBM and JPMorgan Chase. “Most employers wouldn’t knowingly create a hostile work environment for the employees in whom they have invested time and training,” says Diego Sanchez, director of TransHealth and Education and Development at the Justice Resource Institute. “Inclusive policies help a company retain valuable employees.” If you are transgender, you may wish to discuss your personal situation with a trusted manager, supervisor, or human resources professional before coming out to co-workers. Because of the possible consequences, there are many important questions to ask oneself before coming out at work. Corporate Equality The Human Rights Campaign Foundation recently released the sixth annual Corporate Equality Index showing an unprecedented 195 major U.S. businesses earned the top rating of 100 percent, up from 138 last year—a 41 percent increase. The Index rates employers on a scale from 0 to 100 percent on their treatment of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees, consumers, and investors. The 195 businesses that met all of the criteria employ more than 8.3 million workers. When the Index was first released in 2002, only 13 companies, employing 690,000 workers, received the top rating. “More businesses than ever before have recognized the value of a diverse and dedicated workforce,” said Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solmonese. “More importantly, these employers understand that discrimination against GLBT workers will ultimately hurt their ability to compete in the global marketplace.” “Yahoo! is proud to be part of HRC’s Corporate Equality Index and to be in the company of a pioneering group that has stepped up to create a more inclusive work environment for today’s diverse employee groups,” said Cammie Dunaway, Yahoo!’s chief marketing officer and executive sponsor of the company’s GLBT employee group. “We’re committed to making Yahoo! a great place to work and

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remain focused on offering progressive employment policies and benefits while recruiting the best talent from all backgrounds. We value our tens of millions of LGBT consumers around the world and are always looking for ways to further connect them to the information, passions, and communities that matter most to them, on our Yahoo! LGBT Pride site and across our network.” The movement in corporate America toward equality in the workplace has prompted a coalition of corporations and civil rights groups to form the Business Coalition for Workplace Fairness aimed at leveling the playing field by enacting the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). This Act would ban workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. “In the next few weeks, Congress will vote on federal legislation that U.S. employers have already overwhelmingly embraced,” said HRC president Joe Solmonese. “It’s the right thing to do for our economy and for our country.” Today, at least 282 cities and towns, and 19 states, across the country have added workplace protections that protected against discrimination based on sexual orientation in both public and private sector jobs. More than 93 local jurisdictions, and 11 states, have laws that include protections based on gender identity. The Corporate Equality Index, which this year rates 519 businesses, measures the extent to which employers protect their GLBT employees. Ratings are based on factors such as nondiscrimination policies, diversity training, and benefits for domestic partners and transgender employees. This year’s report includes these findings: (1) the banking and financial services industry has 32 companies with 100 percent ratings, more than any other industry. There are also 30 law firms with the top rating, up from 12 last year. (2) Three sectors saw their first company achieve a top rating. In mail and freight delivery, United Parcel Service (UPS) achieved 100 percent. In contrast, FedEx (FDX) received a 55 percent rating and does not provide benefits for domestic partners firm wide, including to married same-sex couples in Massachusetts. In the transportation and travel services industry, Travelport, known for its travel sites such as Orbitz.com, is the first to receive a perfect score. Harrah’s Entertainment (HET) is the first gaming industry company to achieve 100 percent. For the first time, a majority of rated firms—58 percent—provide employment protections on the basis of gender identity. Among the 57 companies that have newly achieved a perfect score of 100 percent are Allstate Insurance Co. (ALL), Electronic Arts (ERTS), Esurance, J.C. Penney (JCP), KeyCorp (KEY), Macy’s (M), Marriott International (MAR), MasterCard (MA), Waste Management (WMI) and Yahoo! (YHOO). GLBT Youth Why “Generation EQ” you ask? Well, you may have seen the current 18–25-yearolds referred to as “Generation Q.” But this age group is more than just Generation Queer (or even questioning!). This age group is more supportive of GLBT equality

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than any generation ever. From widely supported issues such as hospital visitation and workplace fairness all the way to full marriage equality, young people are overwhelmingly pro-equality. Further, it may very well be this generation that will see the promise of full equality fulfilled. The Human Rights Campaign supports providing our youth with comprehensive sexuality education, which includes abstinence as one method of reducing disease and unwanted pregnancies, but it also includes instruction and education on contraception, which can stop the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Abstinence-only education programs teach youth that abstinence from sexual activity until marriage is the expected social norm and the only manner in which to avoid sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancy. Further, abstinence-only program educators are not permitted to discuss the proper use of contraception, including condoms, as a way to reduce the risk of contracting HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases. In abstinence-only programs, only failure rates of condoms can be discussed. HRC works in coalition with other organizations working to stop the spread of HIV, such as AIDS Alliance for Children, Youth and Families; Advocates for Youth; the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League; and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. HRC works to educate policymakers on the dangers of abstinence-only programs on GLBT youth and supports efforts to increase the availability of comprehensive sexuality education, which includes abstinence but also other methods of reducing risk. In February 2002, HRC joined seventy-seven other groups in sending a letter to President George W. Bush urging him to reconsider his decision to request huge increases in funding for abstinence-only programs in his budget. HRC has also endorsed and encouraged members of Congress to support the Responsible Education about Life Act. This legislation would provide $100 million to states to support sexuality education that includes medically accurate messages about both abstinence and contraception. HRC continues to encourage and advocate for funding of broad-based prevention activities rather than abstinence-only programs. The current focus on abstinence-only prevention campaigns, while worth continued study for certain populations, is not meaningful to the GLBT community. Same-sex couples cannot get married in forty-eight out of the fifty states and therefore, abstinence only until marriage is an unreachable goal and means nothing to the very population that needs to hear prevention messages. To continue to advocate such a policy without implementing prevention programs directed to the GLBT community is highly irresponsible and will only lead to further HIV infections. A discussion of the importance of abstinence must be coupled with comprehensive sexuality education. With nearly two thirds (63 percent) of teens in the United States having had sexual intercourse by the time they are eighteen, it is vital to provide them with information to protect themselves. Such discussions must

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include information on methods of reducing risks, including use of condoms and other birth control methods. Although abstinence-only programs may delay sexual activity and reduce the number of sexual partners over a lifetime, abstinence-only education programs that cannot discuss condoms are placing our youth in danger. In fact, only the failure rates of condoms can be discussed in abstinence-only programs. Although there are obvious sensitivity concerns about at what age such discussions should begin, to ignore these topics would be irresponsible and would disregard the reality of teenage sex. There is little scientific evidence that shows that abstinence-only education programs work. Research continues to demonstrate that comprehensive sexuality education, including abstinence and contraception, is most effective. Well-respected groups—including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Society for Adolescent Medicine, the Institute of Medicine, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Nurses Association, and the American Public Health Association—all reject abstinenceonly programs and support comprehensive sexuality education. In fact, the Institute of Medicine recommends the following: “Congress, as well as other federal, state and local policymakers, eliminates the requirements that public funds be used for abstinence-only education and that states and local school districts implement and continue supporting age-appropriate comprehensive sex education” (No Time to Lose: Getting More from HIV Prevention, Institute of Medicine).

STAFF Joe Solmonese, President As president of the Human Rights Campaign, Joe Solmonese has demonstrated that he has the political, strategic, and communications skills to make the organization a powerhouse both in Washington and around the country. Under his leadership, the National Journal rated the organization the second most successful interest group in all of Washington during the 2006 election. His vision for equality is clear: to make sure that HRC is wherever there are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans, and to equip them with all the assistance and resources he can to help secure equality. Whether it is listening to gay families tell their stories over coffee in Kansas or advocating for GLBT workers on factory floors in North Carolina, Joe is working tirelessly to win the hearts and minds of the American people. Committed to making clear that nobody has a monopoly on religion, Joe launched HRC’s Religion and Faith Program in 2005. The program provides new, innovative resources for GLBT and straight-supportive people of faith so they can stand up to those who use religion as a weapon. He has also worked hard to engage a younger generation whose commitment to equality is greater than any of their predecessors. He has mobilized hundreds of students, including those at historically black colleges; overseen HRC’s highly successful Youth College campaign

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trainings; and spoken on several campuses, including Columbia University and Cornell University. Joe understands that this next generation is the one that will lead us to full equality for all Americans. Before coming to HRC, Joe was chief executive officer of EMILY’s List, overseeing one of the nation’s most successful efforts to elect progressive women in every part of the United States. Joe brings that experience to HRC and is leveraging his experience to make the organization a national model of effective advocacy. Heading up an organization with more than 700,000 members and supporters, as well as an annual budget of more than $30 million, Joe understands that the fight for equality is a people-powered movement that is only as strong as those “on the ground.” That is why he implemented an unprecedented field and political operation in the last two years. During that time, HRC has seen several impressive victories. The House of Representatives passed a hate crimes bill for the first time ever. The Senate and the House of Representatives both soundly rejected the discriminatory Federal Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And, despite the bitter and divisive climate, HRC convinced Congress to pass groundbreaking new pension benefits for same-sex partners. With Joe at the helm, HRC was instrumental in moving the House, the Senate, and state legislatures all over the country toward more fair-minded majorities. He leveraged HRC’s political action committee, the largest PAC in the nation for GLBT rights, in critical races nationwide. Out of the 225 candidates endorsed by HRC in the last election, an astounding 211 were elected. And HRC successfully flexed its electoral muscle in several high-stakes races, such as the defeat of the notoriously anti-gay senator, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. Whether adding expertise and resources to HRC’s Workplace, Family, and Coming Out projects, appearing on CNN or in the New York Times, or hosting his weekly XM radio show, The Agenda with Joe Solmonese, Joe is committed to educational work that changes public opinion and ultimately moves our country forward. A native of Attleboro, Massachusetts, Joe lives in Washington, D.C. He graduated from Boston University in 1987 with a BS in communications. Susanne J. Salkind, Managing Director As managing director, Susanne Salkind is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day administrative operations of the Human Rights Campaign, including finance, human resources, information technology, general counsel, operations, and HRC’s stores and action centers. She works closely with President Joe Solmonese to implement organization-wide programming and crossdivision decision making. Additionally, she serves as a liaison to HRC’s board of directors and foundation board as well as overseeing communications to the HRC board of governors. Prior to serving as managing director, Salkind was the deputy campaign director for HRC’s 2004 campaign to defeat the Federal Marriage Amendment. In this

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role, she developed communications and lobbying strategy for the legislative campaign, including television, newspaper, and online advertising; coalition management; and grassroots lobby organizing efforts. Before joining the Human Rights Campaign, Salkind was an associate at the law office of Arnold & Porter, where she specialized in legislative and election law. Salkind originally came to HRC in July 1994 as the deputy political director. She was responsible for designing and implementing electoral programs for the HRC political action committee, including analyzing candidates, recommending contributions, and developing advising campaigns for the $1.1 million campaign fund. Salkind also directed voter registration and campaign involvement programs for more than 250,000 members and managed HRC’s Youth College campaign training program. Salkind has also been a regional field manager for the National Abortion Rights Action League, where she served as the primary liaison between the national prochoice political organization and its state affiliates. She has worked on or volunteered for numerous federal and state political campaigns, and worked in the Maine state legislature for two years. In 2002 Salkind received her JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, graduating cum laude. In 1990 she graduated cum laude from Bates College with a bachelor’s degree in biology. In her free time, she enjoys sailing, cooking, and spending time in Delaware with her partner, Lynn, and her Labrador retrievers, Mercy, Lily, and Captain. Michael Cole, Senior Communications and Media Center Manager Michael Cole manages the Human Rights Campaign’s state-of-the-art, in-house media center, producing material for HRC town hall meetings, gala dinners, and other events, as well as the award-winning www.hrc.org. He leads the team that produces Equally Speaking, a daily gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender news webcast on the HRC website. Cole also produces The Agenda with Joe Solmonese, HRC’s weekly, live radio show exclusively on XM Satellite Radio. He serves as the program’s lead correspondent, producing packages in the field to capture the breadth and depth of the GLBT community. Prior to holding this position, he worked on the HRC press staff, advancing a message of fairness in the media. Cole focused on local media markets, bringing him to more than a dozen states promoting GLBT equality everywhere from church basements in Topeka, Kansas, to the steps of the Supreme Judicial Court in Boston. Before joining the Human Rights Campaign, he worked at the U.S. Embassy in Belgium and the U.S. House of Representatives. Christopher Johnson, Director of Public Affairs and Interactive Communications Christopher Johnson is the director of public affairs and interactive communications at the Human Rights Campaign. In this role, Johnson promotes and advances the HRC foundation’s public education and outreach programs that

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strive to create a more welcoming world for GLBT people. He also helps oversee the organization’s online political advocacy programs and manages outreach to blogs. Prior to joining HRC’s staff in January 2007, Johnson served as communications director to Rep. Melvin Watt, D-NC, the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. A native of Atlanta, Johnson also served as deputy press secretary to Rep. David Scott, D-GA. Johnson has also worked for the Georgia Democratic Party and the public relations firm Manning, Selvage and Lee Atlanta. Johnson holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a certificate in markets and management from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Brad Luna, Communications Director Brad Luna joined the Human Rights Campaign as director of media relations in the summer of 2005 and brings to the organization a diverse array of experiences in the field of communications, including messaging for a member of Congress and working for top-tier political campaigns, nonprofit organizations, and Fortune 500 companies. Prior to joining HRC, Luna worked at a Washington, D.C., public relations firm, assisting the United Nations Foundation and advising General Electric on its new product branding and marketing. In the 2004 election cycle, Luna managed Rep. Brad Carson’s, D-OK., 2004 bid for the U.S. Senate. During this time, he served as chief political strategist and oversaw the development of strategy, messaging, and finance. This top-tier campaign was featured on Meet the Press with Tim Russert, CNN, and Fox News, and in the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, and other national outlets, and was rated “the best run campaign of 2004” by political analysts.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Human Rights Campaign Founder: Steve Endean President: Joe Solmonese Managing Director: Susan J. Salkind Mission/Description: The Human Rights Campaign is America’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender equality. By inspiring and engaging all Americans, HRC strives to end discrimination against GLBT citizens and realize a nation that achieves fundamental fairness and equality for all. HRC seeks to improve the lives of GLBT Americans by advocating for equal rights and benefits in the workplace, ensuring families are treated equally under the law, and increasing public support among all Americans through innovative advocacy, education, and outreach programs. HRC works to secure

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equal rights for GLBT individuals and families at the federal and state levels by lobbying elected officials, mobilizing grassroots supporters, educating Americans, investing strategically to elect fair-minded officials, and partnering with other GLBT organizations. Address: Human Rights Campaign 1640 Rhode Island Avenue NW Washington, DC 20036-3278 Phone: HRC Front Desk: 202/628-4160; TTY: 202/216-1572; Toll-Free: 800/777-4723 Website: www.HRC.org Fax: 202/347-5323

NOTES 1. John M. Shalikashvili, New York Times, Op-Ed, January 2, 2007. 2. Interview with Wolf Blitzer, CNN, January 2, 2007.

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10

The Global Security Institute: Seeking True Security for All through International Cooperation Rhianna Tyson

Nuclear weapons are impractical, unacceptably risky and unworthy of civilization. —Senator Alan Cranston

Nuclear weapons represent a thoroughly modern paradox: this means of pursuing security undermines the end of obtaining security. —Jonathan Granoff

INTRODUCTION On August 6, 1945, the United States detonated a 15-kiloton nuclear weapon in the atmosphere over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Ninety thousand people were killed instantly, with 50,000 more dying of radiation sickness and other related effects in the subsequent months. Three days later, the United States detonated another nuclear weapon—this one a hydrogen bomb—over the city of Nagasaki, instantly killing 74,000 people and injuring 75,000 others. Both cities were utterly destroyed, leveling buildings and disintegrating roads, unleashing what former Nagasaki Mayor Iccoh Itoh called a “calamity that came upon Nagasaki like a preview of the Apocalypse.”1 The unrivalled destructive capability of nuclear weapons, combined with the similarly unparalleled persistence of its deleterious effects, place nuclear weapons in a class of their own. No other weapon continues to kill and poison future generations. No other weapon so completely destroys the environment—the air quality, the soil, the groundwater, the entire ecosystem. Nuclear weapons can render all civilization obsolete. They are, as the visionary American senator Alan Cranston understood, immoral, and they are unworthy of civilization. With this 177

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belief, he founded the Global Security Institute (GSI), a unique organization dedicated to strengthening international cooperation based on the rule of law, with a particular focus on nuclear arms control and disarmament. Combating the scourge of nuclear weapons is the paramount challenge facing the twenty-first century. There are, of course, other prescient challenges to the survival of humanity and our planet, foremost of which being the threats posed by climate change and the persistent poverty of billions. However, the cooperation that is required for the negotiated elimination of nuclear weapons will set the cooperative framework that is needed to address the other most pressing threats facing humanity today, including climate change and poverty elimination. As GSI president Jonathan Granoff said while testifying as a representative of the International Peace Bureau to the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates in 2007, addressing these global challenges “requires new levels of international cooperation. No state, nor even a powerful group of states, can succeed alone. Universal coordinated approaches using our highest values . . . are needed.”2 Such cooperation will remain impossible while under the Damocles sword that looms over our heads, in the form of thousands of deployed nuclear weapons, many of them loaded onto missiles that remain on high alert, ready to be launched within minutes. Senator Roméo Dallaire, the former head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, used a suitable metaphor for this dilemma in a keynote address to a GSI-sponsored meeting in New York City in 2007. Asking governments to cooperate on climate change while under the threat of nuclear annihilation is akin to asking children to work out their differences while pointing loaded guns at each other’s temples.3 The Global Security Institute, therefore, believes that we must collectively negotiate the elimination of nuclear weapons, through the rule of law, as a primary step toward achieving an effective global security regime.

THE DELICATE BALANCE OF THE FIFTY-YEAR NUCLEAR SCOURGE After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, other countries rushed to join the United States in the “nuclear club”: the United Kingdom tested its first weapon in 1952, followed by the Soviet Union (1952), France (1960), and China (1964). By the 1980s, there were over 60,000 nuclear weapons in existence.4 Most of the weapons deployed today represent about eight times the destructive capacity as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. During the Cold War, the Soviets tested the RDS-220, or Big Ivan, a weapon equivalent to over 3,000 Hiroshimas at over 50 megatons, and the U.S. tested the B-41, a weapon equivalent to over 1,500 Hiroshimas. The destructive forces that loom over humanity’s head exceed the capacity of the mind to grasp. The good news is that not many countries have these devices, and over 95 percent of today’s nuclear weapons are in the arsenals of just two countries—the United States and Russia.

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Without any restraints in place, and with the growing perception that nuclear weapons bring prestige to the country that develops them, it was widely believed that the number of nuclear armed countries would inevitably skyrocket.5 This fear incited the international community to limit the spread of nuclear weapons and work toward their elimination by negotiating and adopting the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty (NPT), which entered into force in 1970. Under the NPT, countries that do not possess these weapons promise never to acquire them, in exchange for nuclear energy technology and the promise that those who do possess them will work “in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.”6 Eventually, all but three countries—India, Pakistan, and Israel7—signed the NPT, thus achieving the nonproliferation goal of the treaty, and confirming the NPT as “one of the three most important legal instruments of the 21st century.”8 For fifty years, the world was held hostage by the Cold War, whereby two countries possessed the capability to destroy the planet hundreds of times over. According to a study by Nobel Laureate Sune Bergstrom, a limited nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union would have killed a billion people immediately, with possibly more than 2 billion people in the immediate aftermath, rendering life for the survivors barbaric and brutally primitive in the ensuing “nuclear winter,” the semi-permanent cold climate resulting from the sun’s inability to penetrate the radioactive cloud-laden atmosphere.9 Miraculously, the fifty years of the Cold War came and went, and humanity survived—barely. Several times, tension between the two superpowers nearly resulted in a nuclear exchange, instances in which the planet very nearly escaped extinction. The most infamous instance took place in 1962, when U.S. spy planes discovered Soviet missiles in Cuba, shortly after Fidel Castro declared Cuba a socialist state and formalized an alliance with the USSR. Thirteen days passed, with both sides threatening to spark a nuclear war, before the United States and the Soviet Union came to an agreement: the United States would publicly vow never to invade Cuba in exchange for the dismantling of the Soviet missiles there. In addition to this instance, there were thirty-two very serious accidents, false alarms, and malfunctions involving U.S. nuclear weapons before 1980, according to the U.S. government.10 One notorious example of a false alarm occurred in 1995, when a scientific rocket launched off the coast of Norway showed up on Russian radar as demonstrating a trajectory similar to that of a U.S. Trident missile. Russian operating rules allowed President Yeltsin fewer than ten minutes to decide a course of action: wait to see if it was a mistake, or launch a nuclear retaliatory strike. Thankfully, other early warning systems indicated conclusively that the rocket was not heading toward Russia, and Yeltsin did not destroy the planet. Although the world narrowly avoided an all-out nuclear war, the nuclear age still managed to claim many victims. From uranium mining to nuclear explosion testing, millions of people have been sickened or killed in the pursuit of nuclear weapons. In the South Pacific, where France conducted 175 nuclear test explosions,11 cancer and birth defect rates soared. Women in the Marshall Islands

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repeatedly gave birth to “jellyfish babies,” transparent, boneless babies doomed to die only hours or days after their painful birth. Women in the western United States found that the baby teeth of their children were replete with strontium-90, a carcinogen produced by the nearby weapons testing undertaken at the Nevada Test Site. The people of Kazakhstan near Semipalatinsk, the preferred testing grounds for the Soviet Union, were similarly harmed. Even though we have made great strides toward curbing the dangers of nuclear weapons, such as through treaties banning the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, further international safeguards on nuclear materials, and other such limited measures, nuclear weapons continue to impoverish humanity and keep us on the edge of annihilation. •

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The United States spends over $100 million per day to maintain its nuclear arsenal. This is the approximate annual budget of the International Atomic Energy Agency to safeguard nuclear materials worldwide.12 Approximately 30,000 nuclear weapons remain in the world, with over 95 percent of them in the arsenals of Russia and the United States. The other 1,500 are possessed by China, the United Kingdom, France, Pakistan, India, and Israel. More than 4,500 warheads remain on hair-trigger alert. There are 2,360,000 pounds of existing Russian weapons-grade fissile material, with much of it vulnerable to theft or diversion by terrorists or hostile organizations. Only eight to ten pounds of fissile material are necessary to build a crude nuclear bomb. As little as eight pounds of plutonium is needed to build a bomb. A missile is not needed to deliver such a device; a tugboat or truck could be used. Forty-four countries are capable of developing nuclear weapons. These countries have access to the fissile material and technology to build nuclear weapons. With the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty jeopardized, nuclear weapons could quickly spread.

Such a security paradigm is untenable. It defies credibility to presume that, by accident or design, a catastrophic use of nuclear weapons will not ensue at some point. Any use remains unacceptable, and the ongoing persistence of some states that these weapons bring them unique and legitimate security value is the greatest stimulant to the quest by others to acquire them. Inequity breeds instability. Either all have a right to these devices, or none should have them. Moreover, at present, no major powers are squared off as existential mortal enemies, and pointing these weapons at one another is clearly senseless. The weapons cannot deter a terrorist unafraid of self-destruction. Using a nuclear weapon against a non–nuclear weapon state would be patently unacceptable, and using them against a nuclear weapon state would be suicidal. Thus, logic and morality compel working to obtain their universal, verifiable elimination.

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REDEFINING SECURITY IN A POST–COLD WAR WORLD The end of the Cold War presented an unprecedented opportunity for a new security paradigm, one that was not based on a notion of “mutually assured destruction” and where governments of the world could cooperate on new security challenges, freed from the Damocles sword of nuclear annihilation. Toward this end, Senator Cranston developed a Global Security Program comprised of forty specialists drawn from around the world. These specialists met in Moscow in September 1993, in Washington, D.C., in May 1994, and in New Delhi in October 1994, where the Global Security Program was adopted. A report was published by the Rajiv Gandhi Institute, and its findings were presented by Mikhail Gorbachev to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in October 1994. The final document was distributed widely to policymakers in Washington, D.C., and 600 copies were presented to national leaders and experts in scores of countries. In an effort to transform the Global Security Program from dialogue to action, Senator Cranston launched the Nuclear Weapons Elimination Initiative in 1995 under the auspices of the State of the World Forum, providing a high-profile platform for the Nuclear Weapons Elimination Initiative to bring the message of nuclear abolition to elite decision makers and opinion shapers. Widely cited statements favoring abolition were compiled by the initiative under Senator Cranston’s direction, including a pair of statements by military leaders in 1996 and by civilian leaders in 1998. As a way to institutionalize the Nuclear Weapons Elimination Initiative and ensure its continuation, Senator Cranston, along with Jonathan Granoff and other active State of the World Forum participants, created the Global Security Institute in 1999. Mr. Granoff served as GSI’s CEO and continued his work as vice president of Lawyers Alliance for World Security as well as the NGO (non-governmental organization) Committee on Disarmament at the UN. When Senator Cranston passed away on the eve of this new millennium, the board of directors elected Granoff to serve as president and Senator Cranston’s son, Kim Cranston, as GSI’s chairman. They quickly went about gathering other leaders in the field to work in a synergistic fashion and thus developed four dynamic, integrated programs, together designed to reduce threats posed by nuclear weapons, strengthen international cooperation and law, and advance rapidly toward a nuclear weapon–free world.

THE GLOBAL SECURITY INSTITUTE: A UNIQUE APPROACH In today’s globalized world, governance is a multilevel process. A sea change in our approach to security—which is what is required if we are to reframe nuclear weapons as a source of insecurity—requires movement on all levels, at the head of state level, at the legislative level, and at the level of civil society, in all countries, everywhere. In sum, security must be understood in human terms—how people actually live. Otherwise, we risk creating a world where some states attempt to

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become secure while neglecting the actual daily life needs of the vast majority of people. Nuclear weapons have no place in a road map to human security. GSI is unique in working to affect change at multiple levels. It operates through four integrated programs, each targeting a different constituency of decision makers and influencers: governments, parliaments, and civil society leaders. Through the Middle Powers Initiative (MPI), seven international NGOs— including two Nobel laureate organizations—are able to work primarily with the foreign ministries and, at times, the executive branches of key “middle-power” governments: politically and economically significant, internationally respected countries that have renounced the nuclear arms race, a standing that gives them significant political credibility. This type of “track 11⁄2 diplomacy” is especially effective with middle-power countries—such as Canada, Japan, European nonnuclear states, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil—that then encourage and educate the nuclear weapon states to take immediate, practical steps to reduce nuclear dangers, and commence negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons. MPI convenes top-level diplomats in off-the-record meetings, offering a noncombative atmosphere for the divergent players to work out the legal, political, and technical solutions to eliminating nuclear weapons, thereby building bridges between governments and constructing a global consensus. MPI is composed of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), the International Association of Lawyers against Nuclear Arms (IALANA), the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility (INES), the International Peace Bureau (IPB), the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF), and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). In Washington, D.C., GSI’s efforts are executed through the Bipartisan Security Group (BSG), a group of experts with experience in diplomacy, law, intelligence, and military affairs. Many BSG members are former high-level governmental officials, able to use their contacts and credibility to advance the consensus agenda promoted by MPI. Through regular briefings on the Hill, BSG provides reliable information and analysis of arms control and nonproliferation issues to members of Congress and their staffs. Outside of Washington, the policies advocated by GSI are advanced through a program called the Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament (PNND), a nonpartisan forum for parliamentarians, nationally and internationally, to share resources and information; develop cooperative strategies; and engage in nuclear disarmament issues, initiatives, and arenas. Through PNND, GSI helps parliamentarians become engaged in nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament initiatives, and to turn the ideas of MPI into national legislation. Parliamentarians, because of their close relationship to constituents and their connections with parliamentary colleagues worldwide, have a crucial role to play in crafting policies that meet the security needs of the citizens of their countries, regions, and the world. As former UN Under-Secretary-General Jayantha Dhanapala recognized, “The parliaments of the world are the bridges between

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government and civil society. They provide the funds to pay for national initiatives. Through their deliberations, they help to shape policy, and through their investigative and oversight powers they build public accountability. They provide a bulwark to ensure that governments comply with their international commitments and pledges—a role that at times requires the enactment of domestic legislation. These functions are absolutely vital to the future of nuclear disarmament. They help to give disarmament not only vision, but also some backbone, muscle, and teeth.”13 Through the Disarmament and Peace Education (DPE) program, GSI encourages new leadership and promotes new thinking on nuclear weapons elimination through innovative educational activities. GSI collaborates with prominent leaders in other fields, including Nobel peace laureates, religious leaders, military experts, students, scientists, and environmentalists. Through special events, reports, and educational materials, GSI encourages others to incorporate nuclear abolition advocacy into their own important activities. GSI has successfully built a community of common purpose across a diverse spectrum of leadership by positioning global security as a collective human imperative. Each of these programs reinforces its respective approaches. For example, the international perspective gained through working with significant middle-power countries is a unique approach, highly valuable in advocacy and education in Washington, which often lacks perspective beyond national interest. It is the firm belief of GSI that only a global approach to protecting the climate, addressing poverty, and eliminating nuclear weapons will be successful. The coordinated efforts of the exceptionally dynamic leaders of each program are noteworthy. MPI has a steering committee with such outstanding figures as Kim Campbell, former prime minister of Canada and the first female head of government in North America; and Ambassador Miguel Marin-Bosch, former deputy foreign minister of Mexico. MPI’s driving force is the visionary world leader Senator Douglas Roche, O.C., former Canadian disarmament ambassador, who is the author of nineteen books on peace and disarmament. PNND Global Coordinator Alyn Ware nearly single-handedly traveled the world to create the PNND network. Lastly, the Bipartisan Security Group’s chairman and director are two of America’s most distinguished former ambassadors, Thomas Graham and Robert Grey. The members of the BSG ensure exceptionally high-level access to decision makers in Washington, a formidable reinforcement to PNND’s direct link to parliaments the world over. This networked, multidimensional approach allows the advancing of strategic policies in great depth, while concomitantly ensuring broad outreach. Each program makes efforts to circulate the advocacy materials produced by the others, thus enriching the international dialogue with varying perspectives and approaches to achieving the same results. Although GSI’s programs stretch across the globe, the organization itself remains relatively small. Each of the four offices—in New York, Washington, D.C., Wellington, New Zealand, and Philadelphia, PA—has a small staff. A great deal of

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its successful work is dependent upon volunteer efforts of its leaders and experts and their abilities to inspire others to join GSI’s efforts.

GSI TODAY: RECENT ACTIVITIES AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES In 2005 the Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons ended without progress. No agreement could be reached on how to strengthen either side of the core bargain—the responsibility to eliminate nuclear arsenals and the obligation to effectively prevent their spread. The bitter disagreements that deadlocked the month-long conference threatened not only the international nonproliferation effort, but multilateralism itself.14 Incited by this failure, in 2005 the Middle Powers Initiative undertook its most focused project yet—the Article VI Forum, a creative initiative to bring together likeminded states and NGOs in a noncombative atmosphere, to brainstorm together on the technical, political, and legal requirements necessary for achieving a nuclear weapons–free world. Over thirty states have participated in this process since its launch at the United Nations in New York in 2006. The governments of Canada, Austria, and Ireland hosted and co-sponsored the third, fourth, and fifth meetings of the forum, a testament to the value that these middle-power countries see in this initiative. Other states, including Germany, Sweden, and Japan, are anticipated to host future gatherings. The Article VI Forum helped identify a consensus agenda for strengthening both disarmament and nonproliferation to which all states should be able to agree. Moreover, the policies identified by the Article VI Forum process pass key tests: they do not diminish the security of any state; they reinforce the NPT and enhance the rule of law; they make the world safer now; and they move the world toward the elimination of nuclear weapons.15 The Article VI Forum will culminate in a conference in 2010, just prior to the next review of the NPT. It will be held at the prestigious Carter Center in Atlanta, GA, the third such time that GSI will have partnered with President Carter’s esteemed institute. The policies that are crafted through the Article VI Forum process are advanced throughout the world. With its headquarters just blocks from the United Nations, MPI regularly convenes decision makers in seminars, workshops, and special events to push these policies up the bureaucratic ladders of their respective foreign ministries. Beyond the UN, MPI sends high-level delegations directly to the capitals of key countries, delivering presentations to the parliaments and foreign ministries, and often holding audiences with foreign ministers or prime ministers directly. In 2006 the Rt. Hon. Kim Campbell, former prime minister of Canada and GSI advisory board member, successfully led MPI’s fifth high-level delegation to the government of Canada since 1998. Other delegations included General Lee Butler, former head of U.S. Strategic Command, Robert McNamara, former U.S. secretary of defense, and actor and GSI supporter Michael Douglas. The fifth delegation included MPI chairman, the Hon. Douglas

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Roche, O.C., BSG chairman Ambassador Thomas Graham, and GSI president Jonathan Granoff. The delegation was received by the prime minister, the deputy foreign minister, and the national defense minister. The delegation presented an MPI briefing paper prepared especially for the government of Canada. In addition, the delegation formally testified before the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. Even more recently, in January 2008, MPI chairman Hon. Douglas Roche, O.C., and the MPI program director were received by the foreign ministries of Dublin, Berlin, Oslo, and Madrid, presenting MPI briefs and effectively advancing the consensus agenda. In January of 2008, Granoff joined GSI advisor President Mikhail Gorbachev in a private meeting with UK prime minister Gordon Brown, where they presented MPI’s most recent briefing materials, Towards 2010: Priorities for NPT Consensus16 and Visible Intent: NATO’s Responsibility to Nuclear Disarmament,17 along with significant declarations produced at the Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates.18 As we move closer to the next Review Conference of the NPT, more hopeful signs of progress abound. In January 2007—and again in January 2008—a group of establishment conservatives published an op/ed in the Wall Street Journal, calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. The path toward abolition spelled out by these former U.S. officials, including former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, former defense secretary William Perry, and former senator Sam Nunn, were nearly identical to the steps advocated by GSI and its programs. This op/ed—produced through a process convened by the Hoover Institute and to which several BSG members, including Ambassador Graham actively contributed—and the momentum that it helped build, forever put to rest the myth that abolition was impractical, radical, or at worst, anti-American. Such momentum reinvigorates and impels GSI, despite its small pool of funding sources, to expand its programs and seize the opportunities. In October 2007, the PNND Global Council elected five dynamic female parliamentarians as their new co-presidents. Each of these parliamentarians is a leader in her own country, and a formidable spokesperson and campaigner for nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation. Alexa McDonough (Canada), Marian Hobbs (Aotearoa-New Zealand), Lee Mikyung (South Korea), Uta Zapf (Germany), and Senator Abacca Anjain Madisson (Marshall Islands) will lead this emerging force of 500 legislators from over seventy countries in global parliamentary initiatives to prevent nuclear proliferation and advance nuclear disarmament. To highlight the power of the new female leadership of the network, GSI organized a panel event at the United Nations when diplomats gathered for the sixtysecond session of the General Assembly. Joining two of the new co-presidents on the panel was civil society leader Cora Weiss and cultural icon Christie Brinkley, a remarkable demonstration of the confluence of the parliamentary, diplomatic, and civil society leadership of the abolition movement. Moderated by GSI senior officer Rhianna Tyson, the event brought together women who are working on all levels to prevent conflict involving nuclear weapons. Such an all-women panel, as the chairwoman pointed out, was a rare occurrence at the UN, particularly for an event

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geared toward delegates attending the General Assembly’s First Committee on Disarmament and International Security. This rarity, however, “does not reflect the reality of the movement to abolish nuclear weapons,” said Ms. Tyson, “a movement in which women have always played a leadership role.”19 It was particularly timely, then, that this nuclear abolition panel was held on the eve of the seventh anniversary of the adoption of Security Council Resolution 1325, which calls for greater women’s participation at all levels of conflict resolution and prevention decision making. The Bipartisan Security Group, too, continues to grow in efficacy and strength. Over the past several years, it has published a laudable number of respected policy briefs, which form the basis of its advocacy with members of Congress and their staffs, who are educated through regular briefings on the Hill. In many ways, the quiet, ongoing meetings of BSG, and in particular those of its director, Ambassador Grey, with senior staff on Capitol Hill, remain the backbone of GSI’s efforts. Beyond these informal presentations, BSG offers official, on-the-record input to governmental proceedings as well. Both BSG chairman Ambassador Thomas Graham and GSI president Jonathan Granoff testified before the House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations as part of a panel focusing on the topic, “Weapons of Mass Destruction: Current Nuclear Proliferation Challenges.” Subcommittee Chairman Christopher Shays, R-CT, called the testimonies “some of the most substantive, interesting, demanding, and valuable in my decades in Congress.”20 Substantial inroads have been made through the DPE program, too. In 2006 the Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates issued the Rome Declaration, the first statement by these morally authoritative voices calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. GSI president Jonathan Granoff, a senior adviser to the Summit Secretariat and representative of the Nobel laureate organization to the International Peace Bureau, was instrumental in this process. MPI chairman Hon. Douglas Roche, O.C., and GSI advisory board member Jayantha Dhanapala, also contributed to this historic summit.21 At the 2007 Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, Mr. Granoff chaired two sessions, including the closing press conference, a panel featuring Nobel laureates Mikhail Gorbachev, HH Dalai Lama, Betty Williams, Muhammed Yunus, and Mairead Corrigan Maguire. Taking a comprehensive vision toward security, GSI has begun working closely with the Secure World Foundation to advance a cooperative security regime in space and to prevent an arms race there. If space is weaponized, the moral imperative to eliminate nuclear weapons will become all the more difficult to obtain. From this values-based perspective, GSI works assiduously to integrate practical analysis into its advocacy. In this regard, GSI has co-hosted presentations on the subject at key UN events with the governments of Sweden, Russia, and China, and with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. In an interview with Banning the Bomb, Granoff said, “It is time that we started looking at nuclear weapons with the same disgust as we look at the plague as a weapon. No one would say that the plague is a legitimate weapon in the hands of

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some people but illegitimate in the hands of other people; the plague itself is illegitimate as a weapon. Thus we need to carefully climb down this ladder of nuclearism that we have . . . by taking steps that will make us safer, that will reduce the value of nuclear weapons and the threat that we live under.”22

CONCLUSION Fewer than 200 years ago, enslavement of human beings was an accepted practice in much of the world. Dozens of economies were dependent on the trade of human beings as slaves. Despite the enormity of the task, the moral imperative of abolishing slavery finally triumphed over the vested, powerful, institutionalized interests that sought to preserve it, and after nearly a century of struggle, humanity finally rid itself of the evil of slavery. Who today could excuse the enslavement of people as anything less than an abomination? Does anyone doubt that it is a violation of humanity with which humanity cannot co-exist? The parallels between the movements to abolish slavery and nuclear weapons are striking. MPI chairman, the Hon. Douglas Roche, O.C., in a presentation to the European Parliament in 2007, elaborated on these similarities: • •

•

Nuclear weapons are the slavery of the twenty-first century. With their threat of Armageddon, they enslave all of humanity. They are the “ultimate evil.” As this century progresses, the political structure must learn that nuclear weapons and humanity cannot coexist, just as slavery and human rights cannot co-exist. Nuclear weapons are a denial of the range of human rights opened up by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We cannot only deal with nuclear weapons by making the conditions of their acceptance more palatable any more than Wilberforce could accept merely a lessening of pressure of the chains around slaves’ necks; the total abolition of slavery was required. So too, it will not be enough to have full ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty or successful negotiations to ban the production of fissile material; nuclear weapons in their entirety must be done away with. The only hope for peace in the twenty-first century is the total abolition of nuclear weapons. This can be achieved when the social, economic and political structures turn against these weapons of mass murder. . . . Like the slavery abolitionists, nuclear weapons abolitionists have history on our side. Despite the seemingly impregnable hold of the powerful, new counter-forces are developing and need but the concerted action of enlightened parliamentarians aided by an energized civil society to prevail.23

The Global Security Institute is just one element making up this “energized civil society” that, despite the enormity of the task, is confident of prevailing. We know that if we do not eliminate nuclear weapons, the weapons will surely eliminate us. Their abolition is the moral, legal, and political imperative of our time.

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In 2002 Jonathan Granoff delivered a presentation at the closing ceremony of the Gandhi and King Season for Nonviolence at the United Nations in New York. Speaking from the heart that beats in every person who has dedicated his or her life and work to the imperative of nuclear abolition, he said: I believe that the mystery that has placed the power of destruction in the binding forces of the atom has placed the healing power of love in our hearts and further gifted us with both the courage and wisdom to use that power effectively. . . . I commit to work to cause my country to disavow its unlawful, immoral posture of failing to negotiate the elimination of nuclear weapons. I commit to work through national and international legal mechanisms to curtail, control and abolish these devices. Will not some of you join this call from the conscience of humanity?24

To find out more about the Global Security Institute and how you can support its efforts, contact us through www.gsinstitute.org.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Global Security Institute Founder: Senator Alan Cranston Executive Director: Jonathan Granoff Mission/Description: Global Security Institute is dedicated to strengthening international cooperation and security based on the rule of law with a particular focus on nuclear arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament. GSI was founded by Senator Alan Cranston, whose insight that nuclear weapons are impractical, unacceptably risky, and unworthy of civilization continues to inspire GSI’s efforts to contribute to a safer world. GSI has developed an exceptional team that includes former heads of state and government, distinguished diplomats, effective politicians, committed celebrities, religious leaders, Nobel peace laureates, disarmament and legal experts, and concerned citizens. Website: http://www.gsinstitute.org Address: One Belmont Ave. Suite 400 Bala Cynwyd, PA 19004 USA Phone: 610-668-5488 E-mail: [email protected]

NOTES 1. As quoted in “The Power Over the Ultimate Evil: In the Footsteps of Gandhi and King,” by Jonathan Granoff, presented at the closing ceremony of the 2002 Gandhi and King Season for Nonviolence, United Nations, New York, April 9, 2002. Available at http://www.gsinstitute.org/docs/Gandhi_King.pdf.

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2. See “Axis of Responsibility: Addressing the Critical Global Issues of the 21st Century,” presentation by Jonathan Granoff, President of the Global Security Institute, to the 8th Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, December 12, 2007. Available at http://www. gsinstitute.org/gsi/pubs/12_2007_Axis.pdf. 3. See “Preventing Nuclear Genocide,” keynote luncheon address by Senator Roméo Dallaire, Special Representative of Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament, at the PNND Global Council meeting, New York, October 12, 2007. Available at http://www.gsinstitute.org/pnnd/index.html. 4. See Table of Global Nuclear Weapons Stockpile: 1945-2002, Natural Resources Defense Council, at http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/nudb/datab19.asp. 5. Many countries did indeed develop nuclear weapons programs. Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, and Taiwan at one point started domestic nuclear programs, but eventually renounced them and joined the NPT. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the newly independent countries of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine inherited the nuclear weapons left on their territories, but each of them returned the weapons to Russia and joined the NPT as non–nuclear weapon states. The South African apartheid government was secretly developing nuclear weapons, which the post-apartheid government dismantled in a transparent and internationally verified manner, joining the NPT in 1991. Iraq, too, had an active nuclear weapons program in the 1980s. Following their defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the UN-mandated inspections dismantled the last of the program. And in December 2003, Libyan leader Muammar Qadafi voluntarily, and unexpectedly, renounced his country’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs. 6. Article VI of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Full text of the treaty is available at http://disarmament.un.org/wmd/npt/npttext.html. 7. India first detonated a nuclear explosion on May 18, 1974, which the government described as a “peaceful nuclear explosion.” On April 8, 1998, India detonated a nuclear weapon device, two days after a missile test in Pakistan. For its part, Pakistan tested its first nuclear weapon on May 28, 1998. Israel maintains a policy of “ambiguity,” neither confirming nor denying the existence of nuclear weapons in the country. According to the Federation of American Scientists, the CIA reported in 1968 that Israel had successfully produced nuclear weapons, and by the 1970s, Israel had approximately thirteen 20-kiloton atomic weapons. Currently, it is believed that Israel possesses 100–200 nuclear weapons. See http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/ israel/nuke/index.html. 8. Banning the Bomb interview with Jonathan Granoff, president of the Global Security Institute, April 2007. See http://www.vermont.be/banningthebomb/2007vienna/ videofiles/JonathanGranoff_WS.mov. 9. Sune Bergstrom’s study is cited in Carl Sagan, The Nuclear Winter, Council for a Livable World Education Fund (Boston, MA: 1983), and summarized in “Preventing an Accidental Nuclear Winter” by Dean Babst, June 28, 2001: http://www.wagingpeace.org/ articles/2001/06/28_babst_nuclear-winter.htm. 10. See “US Nuclear Weapons Accidents: Danger in our Midst,” Defense Monitor, 10(5), Center for Defense Information, Washington, D.C.: 1981. Reprinted with permission at http://www.milnet.com/cdiart.htm. 11. Of these, 41 were exploded in the atmosphere and 134 underground. When combined with the tests undertaken in the Sahara desert, France’s total number of nuclear tests amounts to 192. See http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/france/nuke.htm.

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12. Stephen I. Schwartz, Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of US Nuclear Weapons Since 1940. (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998). 13. Cited in the brochure of the network of Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (see http://www.pnnd.org). 14. See Douglas Roche, O.C., “Deadly Deadlock: Political Analysis of the 2005 NPT Review Conference,” at http://www.gsinstitute.org/2005NPTpoliticalanalysis.pdf. 15. See “Towards 2010: Priorities for NPT Consensus,” MPI paper for the 2007 NPT Preparatory Committee, (Vienna: April 2007). Available at http://www.gsinstitute. org/mpi/docs/Towards_2010.pdf. 16. Towards 2010 is available at http://www.gsinstitute.org/mpi/docs/Towards2010.pdf. 17. Visible Intent is available at http://www.gsinstitute.org/mpi/pubs/NATO_brief_2008.html. 18. The Rome Declaration (2006) can be found at http://www.gsinstitute.org/docs/Rome_ Declaration_2006.pdf. The Charter for a World without Violence (2007) can be found at http://www.nobelforpeace-summits.org/ENG/PDF/2007/CHARTER_ULTIMATE.pdf. “Three Questions to Fulfill Our Duty to the Next Generation” (2007) can be found at http://www.nobelforpeace-summits.org/ENG/PDF/2007/THREE_QUESTIONES.pdf. 19. The full transcript of these remarks is available at http://www.gsinstitute.org/gsi/ archives/303tyson.html. 20. The testimonies of GSI president Jonathan Granoff, BSG chairman Ambassador (Ret.) Thomas Graham Jr., GSI advisory board member Dr. Frank von Hippel, Dr. Hans Blix, and other arms control experts from the House subcommittee can be found at http://www.gsinstitute.org/bsg/index.html. 21. Read the presentations delivered by Jonathan Granoff, Senator Roche, and Jayantha Dhanapala to the Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates at http://www.gsinstitute.org/docs/ Rome06_speeches.pdf. 22. Video footage of the interview is available at http://www.npt-webcast.info/ video.php?ID=88. 23. Douglas Roche, “Lessons from William Wilberforce: Priorities for Nuclear Weapons Abolition,” Address to European Parliament International Conference on Nuclear Disarmament (Brussels: April 19, 2007). Available at http://www.gsinstitute.org/mpi/ docs/04_19_07_Roche_EP.pdf. 24. The full text of these remarks is available at http://www.gsinstitute.org/docs/ Gandhi_King.pdf.

11

Search for Common Ground John Marks and Susan Collin Marks

OUT OF MAD It was 1982. The superpowers, the United States and the USSR, were caught up in an arms race, framed by the nuclear doctrine of mutually assured destruction, or MAD. John Marks was looking for a paradigm shift. He saw the Cold War, metaphorically, as two boys standing knee deep in a room full of gasoline. One held twelve matches; the other held nine—and they were arguing over who had the most. John acknowledged that the mix of matches was important and that certain combinations were more dangerous than others. Still, he noted, attention was focused on rearranging the mix—on arms control. John, above all, was concerned that one match could ignite everything. For the world to be truly safe, in his view, the gasoline would have to be drained from the room. This meant transforming the very framework or context in which the United States and the USSR were confronting each other. John believed that both countries would only become secure when the other one was secure. He became an advocate of common security, which reflected a very different— indeed, transformational—way of dealing with international security questions. He was convinced that there had to be better ways of resolving differences—that confrontational, win-lose techniques were not only dangerous, but in the end, ineffective and unworkable. So in 1982 he founded a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., called Search for Common Ground (Search), to find concrete ways of shifting how the world deals with conflict— away from adversarial, you-or-me approaches to nonadversarial, you-and-me solutions. It was an audacious vision, and, at the beginning, Search had only two employees—John and one other. Then, as now, funds were needed to give concrete form to the vision. He realized that fundraising provided the very lifeblood 191

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of the organization and saw it as an integral activity that needed to be enjoyed and honored. Still, in those first years, money came in sporadically in four different ways: • •

• •

Initially, there was a $20,000 grant from a foundation that had supported John’s previous work as a political activist. John called it “severance pay.” The anti-nuclear movement was in full swing, and Search received several foundation grants to help bring the business and minority communities into the effort to build a more secure world. John stood up in living rooms for what he termed “Tupperware fundraising.” He shared his vision and called for others to make a “substantial” contribution. Still, the sum of the above was not sufficient to operate Search, even on a shoestring. John had not understood that, as the founder, he would provide, in essence, the organizational float. Then, his mother died and, fortuitously, left him a modest, five-figure inheritance. His father declared he should invest the money and buy stocks and bonds. Instead, John chose to invest in his vision, and these funds allowed him to miss paychecks. (John did, indeed—to use his father’s words—“piss away” his inheritance, and he thinks it was the best investment he ever made.)

The organization struggled along, enjoying modest success, but operating very much on the fringes. It was definitely out of tune with President Ronald Reagan’s concept of the Soviet Union as the “evil empire.” But in 1989, as the Cold War faded, Search hit the mainstream. It formed a partnership with the Moscow publication, Literaturnaya Gazeta, to establish the Soviet-American Task Force on Terrorism. The results included an unofficial agreement between a former CIA director and the ex-head of counterterrorism for the KGB that outlined how U.S. and Soviet intelligence organizations might work together to combat terrorism. The key recommendation (later published in the task force’s book, Common Ground on Terrorism, was that the United States and the USSR should “treat terrorism as a problem shared by both superpowers and cooperate wherever possible to eliminate the threat.”1 The KGB immediately accepted. The CIA initially rebuffed the effort because the Agency rejected the premise of equivalence with the KGB. But soon, as the Gulf War became imminent, the U.S. government needed intelligence on Iraq, and the CIA had little choice but to establish a cooperative relationship with the KGB. Not only was the counterterrorism project a success, but it also brought credibility. In fact, the RAND Corporation, a key Pentagon think tank, became the co-sponsor. The project attracted front-page attention and was the subject of an ABC-TV Nightline program. Ted Koppel may have rolled his eyes when he mentioned the name Search for Common Ground, but John was interviewed, and the Nightline host made clear Search’s pivotal role in organizing the project.

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INTO THE MIDDLE EAST As Soviets and Americans were finding common ground, the Cold War was ending, and John realized that the organization needed to expand—or die. Then, as has occurred often in Search’s history, an unplanned opportunity presented itself. Two people who had been involved in the terrorism project proposed that Search organize a similar project on Lebanon. John agreed. He now had the contacts and a model. So, in 1989, he set up the U.S.-Soviet Task Force on Lebanon, recruited a high-level team of American participants, and flew off to Moscow for the first meeting. Two major ideas emerged. First, Lebanon could not be treated in a vacuum without dealing with the larger Middle East, and second, rather than pursue a bilateral, U.S.-Soviet strategy, a multilateral, regional approach seemed more suitable. As has also sometimes been true at Search, the original concept was flawed, but susceptible to adjustments that made it work. Soon, John incorporated the lessons learned and wrote a proposal for a multitrack effort to replicate in the Middle East what the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (now OSCE) had done. The proposal languished—until the first Gulf War. With armed violence raging, liberal American foundations such as Ford, MacArthur, and W. Alton Jones wanted a peace plan, and Search’s proposal seemed to be just that: namely, a regional structure that would bring together Arabs, Israelis, Iranians, and Turks. Within months, each of these foundations made Search’s first, second, and third six-figure grants. Although seeking common ground in the Middle East was exactly what Search had been doing with the United States and the USSR, the world had changed. Promoting Middle East peace was clearly a mainstream activity. John knew Search was operating in a new world when he received an unsolicited phone call from former assistant secretary of state Alfred “Roy” Atherton, asking if he could join the effort. Soon John and his colleagues were meeting Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat, Hosni Mubarak, and Prince Hassan of Jordan. Search needed—and usually received—official permission to sponsor unofficial meetings. And the meetings were often quite successful. In 1993–94, before official peace talks had started, Search sponsored back-channel sessions between former Jordanian and Israeli generals. The generals worked out a series of unofficial agreements that became the basis of the eventual Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty.

BEFORE SEARCH John clearly had come a long way from when, at age twenty-two, he came to Washington in 1966. Then, he hoped for a meaningful Foreign Service career that would end with his becoming an ambassador. He saw himself working out of an office in the magnificent U.S. Embassy building on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. He would negotiate treaties and drive a sports car around Europe. However, as with so many of his generation, Vietnam got in the way. In John’s case, his draft

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board refused him a deferment to take a diplomatic assignment in London. John, intent on staying out of the military, employed a novel strategy. He became one of the few members of his generation to go to Vietnam to avoid the draft. He became a civilian official working in the pacification program in a province east of Saigon. The Vietnam experience knocked John off the linear path. In 1970 he resigned from the State Department in protest over the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. He saw himself changing sides when he went to work as executive assistant for foreign policy to U.S. Senator Clifford Case (R–NJ). His main task was to secure passage of the Case-Church Amendment, which in 1973 cut off funding for U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War. He left the senator’s staff in 1973 and coauthored The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, a best-selling exposé about U.S. intelligence abuses. Next, he wrote The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” an award-winning book about the CIA’s use—and misuse—of LSD and other behavioral techniques. John became a minor culture hero, but he was troubled by the adversarial quality of his work—which was mostly defined by what he was against. Instead of throwing monkey wrenches into the old system, he wanted to build a new one. While John was going through these changes, the woman who would become Susan Collin Marks, his wife and closest colleague, was coming of age in South Africa. Her home was in Port Elizabeth, a city nestled on a sweeping bay in the country’s southeast. Her mother was one of the first members of Black Sash, a women’s human rights organization set up in 1955 to protest the “death of the constitution” under apartheid laws. She taught Susan that apartheid was wrong. When Susan was five, she accompanied her mother into black townships, where she saw the impact of racism and discrimination. The experience of her mother’s courageous activism—of being a white South African—shaped Susan’s life. After 1990, when South Africa began its transition from apartheid to democracy, Susan channeled her passion for justice and dignity into peacemaking, peacebuilding, and conflict transformation under the auspices of South Africa’s National Peace Accord. On a daily basis, she mediated conflicts, intervened in bloody street clashes, took a bullet in the leg while trying to calm a confrontation, facilitated multiple dialogues and policy forums, and helped formulate new policies of community policing. The guiding principle in Susan’s work is the profound compassion that derives from the African principle of Ubuntu, the interconnectedness of all human beings. She believes that when people are provided with the space to be their best, generally they will step into it. Susan would later write a book about the South African peace process—and the Ubuntu spirit that defined it—titled Watching the Wind: Conflict Resolution during South Africa’s Transition to Democracy (U.S. Institute of Peace: 2000). Coming Together In 1993 John traveled to South Africa to produce a TV series, called South Africa’s Search for Common Ground. One evening he had a drink with co-producer Hannes Siebert, who asked John if he was married. “I’m divorced,” said John, “but

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I’m looking.” Looking for what? asked Hannes “A tall, beautiful mediator,” replied John. Hannes said, “I know her.” The next day, Hannes introduced Susan and John. Within twenty-six hours, they bonded and recognized that they shared a vision. Indeed, the first time John told Susan that he no longer wanted to tear down the old system, but rather to build the new, Susan jokingly accused him of having peeked into her notebooks and stolen her ideas. By 1994 Susan had moved to Washington, married John, and joined Search. They became a powerful team, and Search started to grow at the rate of about 20 percent each year. They complemented each other and had a knack for improving the other’s ideas. Susan was better with people and process. John specialized in recognizing possibilities and developing new projects. Under their joint leadership, Search attracted brilliant, committed, gifted people, and blossomed into an international nongovernmental organization (NGO) with 350 full-time staff, operating out of offices in seventeen countries. John and Susan became each other’s principal advisor. They adopted a non-plagiarism rule and described their work with the first-person-plural “we” (which form will be used for the rest of this chapter). Keeping Hope Alive Today, reading the newspapers can be an overwhelming, disempowering experience. The world is clearly in peril. The Chinese ideogram for crisis combines both danger and opportunity. At Search, we react to crisis by looking for the opportunity that lies between the old, which is breaking down, and the new, which is being born. We see the space between the old and the new as the place for breakthroughs—and transformation. As Buckminster Fuller said, You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

One of our core principles is that conflict is a normal part of human interaction, and that violence is only one of the possible responses—and not an inevitable one. Indeed, most people, most of the time, choose the nonviolent path. They find ways to resolve their differences peacefully—within families, at work, and in communities. Even internationally, among states, most disputes are settled amicably. Every day, the world whirrs with cooperation—from telephone and postal services, to shared scientific data, to high-wire diplomacy. Indeed, despite awful exceptions, the world is almost always much more at peace than at war. Unfortunately, however, tens of millions of people are caught up in armed struggles, and millions are still dying every year. Violent conflict has a profoundly negative impact on the whole planet, even when it occurs in remote places. Where violence exists, human rights are abused, economic development is stifled, the environment suffers, hopes and dreams are shattered, and misery abounds. Every day it becomes more urgent to stop the cycle of violence.

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It is clear that the world needs to develop constructive, positive ways to deal with conflict. Current problems—whether economic, ethnic, or environmental— are simply too complex and interconnected to be settled on a violent, adversarial basis. The earth is running out of space, resources, and recuperative capacity to deal with wasteful conflict. It is in everyone’s self-interest to resolve and transform conflict. The world is interdependent. Borders, walls, legislation, and checkpoints cannot keep out weapons of mass destruction, disease, resentment, and despair. There is a practical and ethical imperative to creating a peaceful, nonviolent world that offers dignified, decent lives for all. Although the world is overly polarized and violent behavior is much too prevalent, we remain optimistic. We continue to search for—and often find—new ways to empower large numbers of people to make a shift in attitudes and behaviors. But inevitably, we have our share of setbacks. In Liberia, looters sacked our radio studio. The Iraq war diverted much of our African funding. In the United States, both the Left and the Right attacked our Network for Life and Choice as we sought to drain the poison from the abortion issue. Still, we do not give up. In Liberia, we rebuilt our Talking Drum Studio and resumed making radio programs to encourage peacebuilding. We diversified our funding in Africa, finding new sources. Sadly, however, we had to shut down the Network for Life and Choice when escalating polarization caused our funding to dry up. This is the story we want to tell—how an abstract idea—the search for common ground—became a concrete reality, with multiple forms of expression. How it was built, expanded, and sustained; how it lives vibrantly in the hearts and minds of a multi-cultural staff scattered across the planet; and how it continues to reach into societies caught in deadly conflict, bringing inspiration and hope that the violence can and will end, because there is a better way.

INSTITUTION BUILDING Jean Monnet, chief architect of what became the European Union, has said, “Nothing changes without individuals. Nothing lasts without institutions.”2 In our view, the principal reason Search has flourished is because we have brought social entrepreneurial skills to the field of conflict resolution, and because we have built an organization with sufficient resources and personnel to tackle multilayered conflicts that extend across entire countries and regions. Historically, the conflict resolution field has been mostly composed of committed individuals. Sometimes, they work together in networks or ad hoc partnerships, but for reasons of both temperament and economics, they largely avoid organizations. This is the consultant or sole practitioner model. We have developed an alternative. Instead of paying our staff consulting fees by the day, we employ them by the year. In the process, we have made long-term conflict prevention much more affordable. We believe that the most effective way to deal with complex conflicts is for professional peacebuilders to be engaged on the ground on a full-time, long-term basis.

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Organizationally, we have senior managers and country directors—master builders who can inspire and lead, supervise complex projects, and hold together many disparate pieces. We try to maintain a creative operating environment. We believe that our organization—indeed, our lives—must be consistent with our vision and the new world we seek to build. We try to avoid a highly centralized system. We want the organization to be a haven for sub-entrepreneurs, who operate autonomously, but within a common ground framework. At the same time, we require strong financial management from headquarters. This model is full of challenges and contradictions. It requires both innovation and effective administrative and financial systems. Unfortunately, such systems rarely are exciting to social entrepreneurs, who would much rather develop a new project than find ways to improve accounting procedures. Indeed, we recognize that there is a core tension between nimbleness and stability. And we have learned through experience—sometimes the hard way—that an organization like Search requires both. There are never enough hands to do everything. The passionate, talented people who are drawn to our work are usually stretched to their limits. Exciting work is accompanied by financial problems that drain energy from everyone. Even in the Internet age, communications are difficult in many countries where we work. Violence can flare up and wipe out years of work. Funding often falls through for reasons that have no connection with our work or the conflict at hand, and everything to do with the donor’s bureaucratic needs. In fact, one beautiful summer day, when Search still had a staff of only forty, the two of us sat together on a rock in the middle of Virginia’s Rappahannock River and reviewed whether we really wanted to build an organization. Would the administrative and financial burdens drag us down? We talked about our vision of a world in which all people live peacefully. For this to happen, we knew that humanity would have to learn how to transform conflict into change and growth. We realized that there would be a need for effective institutions, able to carry out large, complex activities. We reaffirmed our commitment to building an organization that would be respected, respectful, resourceful, sustainable, and at its core, transformational. We opted for continued growth, despite the obstacles. There also was—and is—the question of funding. Where would we find the money? The field of conflict resolution is relatively new. Until 2006, only one American foundation, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, provided substantial funding to the field as a field, and then Hewlett decided to close its program. Still, through perseverance and ingenuity, we have been able to find funding from governments—particularly European ones—and other foundations that support conflict resolution as part of their backing for such activities as democratization, human rights, good governance, and independent media. We have also been able to secure an increasing amount of funds from individual and corporate contributions.

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BASIC OPERATING PRINCIPLES Each morning, 350 searchers, representing thirty nationalities, come to work at our offices in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and the United States. They leave their ethnic and religious identities behind, and they work together to find peaceful ways to deal with differences. They are Israeli and Palestinian, Hutu and Tutsi, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, and Christian. It is heroic for them to stand for peace—often in the midst of fear and hatred. One of our basic operating principles is to employ people from all sides of the conflict. This is crucial to our work of reconciling warring parties, since we believe that in order for reconciliation to take place out there, it also must occur on the inside. In other words, we as an organization must walk the talk. We know that peace is a process, not an event. Although we certainly appreciate those glorious moments when agreements are signed, we recognize that real peace usually occurs after a long, arduous process of reducing fear, dealing with concerns, and chipping away at stereotypes. Instead of confronting the other side as the enemy, people in conflict gradually start to find solutions that maximize the gain of all the parties involved. We avoid parachuting. We believe that peacebuilding requires a long-term commitment, and we avoid dropping into a conflict for a short visit. We use our presence on the ground to develop knowledge and build a network of relationships on all sides. We try to be inclusive and to involve as many partners and allies as practical—including national governments, opposition groups, civil society, security forces, diplomats, international organizations (such as the UN, the World Bank, and the European Union), and—increasingly—the business sector. We work on a societal level, and we usually adopt a multipronged, multiproject strategy. We become immersed in the local culture. We believe it is very important to have a profound sense of where we are. Conflicts are complex, and it takes deep engagement to understand them. In any given country, we try to combine what we have learned elsewhere with the unique qualities present there. We work to support and expand indigenous wisdom and creativity. We partner with local peacebuilders to strengthen their ability to transform their own conflicts. We recognize that each country is different, with a unique history and culture. A standardized, off-the-shelf approach simply does not work, and we have no single operating model. Still, we find similarities: everywhere there is a storytelling tradition, and everywhere people in conflict see themselves as victims. In our view, about 50 percent of our toolbox works when we enter a new place, and 50 percent does not—and we never know which 50 percent it will be. For us, the keys are creativity and nimbleness. Our methodology is rooted in a simple idea, which we heard first from South African ANC (African National Congress) leader, Andrew Masondo: understand the differences and act on the commonalities. And, within that framework, we have developed a diverse toolbox, which includes such traditional techniques as mediation, training, facilitation, and back-channel negotiations. Because violent

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conflict depends on stereotyping, demonizing, and dehumanizing, we also use the tools of popular culture to help reverse this process. Thus, we produce soap operas that communicate win-win messages of mutual respect, tolerance, nonviolence, and problem solving. We make music videos that have turned into theme songs for entire peace processes. We produce reality TV—with good values. In addition, our toolbox includes street theater, sport, art, community organizing, and film festivals. In sum, we are weavers who knit together multiple strands to help mend countries that are torn and broken. We aim to de-radicalize and encourage moderate voices. We work both top down and bottom up. We promote societal healing across whole countries.

FIELD OFFICES Until 1994, our funding came exclusively from individuals and foundations in the United States. Motivated as the two of us were by both practical and romantic impulses—a combination that remains the norm for us—we bought Eurail passes and sought funding in the capitals of Europe. For a week, we spent our nights in sleeping cars and, by day, met with foreign aid officials in Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, The Hague, and Brussels. It paid off. Soon, we were raising more money in Europe than in the United States. We registered as a Belgian NGO, and we adopted a strategy of having as many funding sources as possible. We wanted to avoid being dependent on any single funder. With new means to pay the bills, we started to open field offices. Our first was in Macedonia, where our director was Robert Frowick, a retired U.S. ambassador, who gave us instant status. When John first visited him in Skopje, he arranged for lunch with the country’s president, who endorsed our program on national television. Our next office was in Burundi. Its opening followed the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. In November of that year, Lionel Rosenblatt, then head of Refugees International, challenged us: if we could not take action to help prevent Burundi, which has the same ethnic mix as Rwanda, from becoming a killing field, how could we, in good conscience, call ourselves a conflict prevention organization? Lionel was absolutely right. A month later, we were on a plane to Bujumbura. We talked to everyone we could—Hutus and Tutsis, politicians, civil society leaders, the diplomatic community, religious and business figures, women, youth, teachers, and donors. Because of the escalating violence, development agencies and other NGOs were pulling out. We recognized an immediate need to defuse tension and prevent violence. We felt the key bastion against disaster was Ahmedou Ould-Abdullah, an extraordinary man who was the UN secretary general’s special representative. He was working tirelessly to negotiate, mediate, and cajole—to somehow stop the slide toward the abyss. Ahmedou became our patron (and our future board member). He went to bat for us with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which had a budget for economic development but was not spending it because of

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Figure 11.1 Burundian musicians make music for peace at a drumming festival. Courtesy of the Search for Common Ground Archive.

the violence. Ahmedou requested that a good part of it be given to us. Within months, we had our first program with a budget of more than $1 million a year. Timing is critical to our work. It reflects a mix of instinct, common sense, and good problem solving. We try to stay ahead of the curve, but not too far out in front. At a head level, this means judging where we can bring added value, and figuring out how to gain entry. At a heart level, it is a compassionate response to the events in our world, and a deep listening to that inner voice that draws us forward, even though we may not know exactly what that will mean or what it will look like. Burundi: Studio Ijambo In Bujumbura, we set up a radio production facility, called Studio Ijambo, which means wise words in Kirundi, to produce balanced, noninflammatory programming. In Rwanda, hate radio had incited the killers. We hoped to use radio to do the opposite: to defuse violence and build bridges. We recruited a team of journalists—both Tutsis and Hutus. They were often considered traitors to their ethnic group because they were working for the common good. Studio Ijambo was—and is—a studio, not a station. Although we wanted to disseminate our programming widely, we feared that if we became a radio station,

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we would be the target of government wrath, and we would be considered competitive with other stations, rather than being seen as a resource. We hoped that our shows would be broadcast by all the radio stations in the country, which is what happened, and we subsequently adopted a similar model in starting studios, not stations, in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Guinea, Congo, and Côte d’Ivoire. The idea was to provide local stations and networks with free, high-quality programming that contained messages of peace and reconciliation. From the beginning, our largest customer in Burundi was the country’s national radio. In our peak years, we were producing as much as fifteen hours a week of original programming. Our programs were informative and balanced. Mixed Hutu/Tutsi reporting teams were able to go where neither could go alone. They provided protection for each other, and demonstrated both the reality and perception of balanced reporting. In the mid-1990s, when the government and rebel groups cut off contact, we initiated a series of parallel interviews, which allowed the various factions to hear each other’s perspectives over the airwaves. We invited rebel leaders for telephone interviews, and convened roundtable discussions of government, political party, and civil society leaders. Our journalists made a point of traveling to remote corners of the country so that all Burundians felt included in on-air conversations. The studio set new standards in Burundi for unbiased journalism, and the local radio stations began to change their style, too. The head of Burundi National Radio has credited Studio Ijambo with greatly improving reporting standards throughout the country. In an ABC Nightline program, host Ted Koppel called the studio “the voice of hope.” At this writing, thirteen years after it started, the studio is still going strong. Our most popular programming was a twice-weekly, radio soap opera series called Our Neighbors, Ourselves. Started in 1996, this was our first-ever soap (it led to similar programming in nine other countries). The series, written by a Burundian playwright, told the story of a Hutu family and a Tutsi family that, during 616 episodes, succeeded in peacefully resolving their disputes. Burundi is a small media market, where polling showed the series was heard by 87 percent of the population. Indeed, the impact reached the point where our fictional characters became part of national folklore, and we were, in effect, defining Burundian archetypes. Roger Conrad, an official with USAID, described the impact of the soap opera and the other programs thus: “You have introduced the vocabulary of peace and reconciliation to the national conversation at all levels, where previously only words of hate and mistrust were heard.” Burundi: Women’s Peace Center Another highly effective part of our multipronged strategy in Burundi was our Women’s Peace Center. Also established in 1996, the center sought to mobilize women as peacemakers. It worked with thousands of women’s associations in

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organizing, training, and facilitating interethnic dialogue, providing information about women’s rights, and helping resettle internally displaced people. In sum, it was a venue for societal healing. Please consider this story: Léonie Barakomeza and Yvonne Ryakiye were born in the locality but did not know each other. In 1993 fighting broke out, and their community was destroyed. Léonie and her fellow Tutsis fled to one side of the river; Yvonne and the Hutus went to the other. In 1996 the two met through Search for Common Ground’s Women’s Peace Center and began working together. Unlike most of their neighbors, they were willing to cross the river that separated them. Accused of treason to their group, they persisted. Other women followed their example, and links grew. These women created a women’s association and urged people to return home. Despite meager means, they pooled resources and built forty brick houses for both Tutsi and Hutu families. Their efforts were recognized, when, along with eight other Burundian women, they were nominated for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.

Burundi: Youth Young militia members, paid a few dollars a day by military and political leaders, carried out most of the actual violence in Burundi. In 1999 we started an initiative to provide alternatives for these youths. It was originally known as the Working with Killers project, and it began when an Italian TV crew asked to use Studio Ijambo to interview two cousins, a Hutu rebel and a Tutsi gang member. They had been enemies for years. Contrary to expectations, the two agreed to stop fighting and team up with a local youth group, Jamaa (Unity). With our support, they began to build an ethnically mixed youth movement called Gardons Contact (Let’s Stay in Touch). It was not easy. One of the first events we sponsored was a workshop for thirty ethnically mixed youth who gathered on a Saturday afternoon. Participants talked, played cards, and made music. As the evening wore on, no one wanted go to sleep. The adults finally declared that it was time for bed. There was silence. We learned a lesson about holding workshops for violent enemies: no one feels safe sleeping. Finally, assurances from the adults, plus fatigue, won out, and they went to bed. In the morning, having survived the night, the Hutu and Tutsi youth looked at each other with fresh eyes. They began to talk more deeply, and they discovered the common ground: both felt exploited by political leaders. This group became the core of our youth activities. We provided funding, a platform, food, and process suggestions. They organized ethnically mixed soccer tournaments, and they began to tell their stories through comic books, which they wrote and illustrated. They related the horrors they had seen—for example, watching victims die horrible deaths. The comic books were so compelling that the Burundian Ministry of Education added them to the curriculum material for the country’s schools.

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Burundi: Domestic Shuttle Diplomacy From the beginning, we realized that conflict resolution in Burundi would benefit greatly from continuing mediation and facilitation. In 1995 we brought in Jan van Eck, a former South African ANC member of parliament, to promote dialogue and help solve problems among leaders of conflicting parties outside of the official peace talks. He worked directly for us for two years, and independently for another ten. During this whole period, Jan spent about half his time in Burundi. He became a widely trusted intermediary, who was in contact with virtually every party to the conflict, including rebel groups with whom almost no one else was talking, and he facilitated many agreements—small and large. Burundi: Culture Violent conflict is not an intellectual exercise, and in Burundi, as elsewhere, we want to reach people on the emotional level. Therefore, we make wide use of popular culture. And in Burundi, this meant drumming and dancing. We organized national competitions and held giant festivals in Bujumbura. Studio Ijambo employed a full-time disk jockey, and we produced music for peace radio programs. We even enlisted Jamaican reggae star Ziggy Marley, who has a huge following in Burundi, to record public service announcements (PSAs). Continued Expansion By 1997 we had also established field offices in Ukraine and Angola, and we were ready for a new opening. It came when Jan Pronk, then the Dutch minister of development cooperation, requested that we launch a Liberian radio studio similar to Studio Ijambo in Burundi. And he sweetened the suggestion by offering start-up funding. This offer posed a dilemma for us. We had taken, as an article of faith, that the availability of funding would not be allowed to drive our programming. Given the Dutch offer, we had long discussions, and we came to see that our organizational integrity does not depend on where we work or on whose idea it is to get started. We realized that to produce programming with messages of peace—in Liberia or anywhere else—is totally consistent with our vision. So, we accepted the Dutch grant and established Talking Drum Studio in Liberia. This, in turn, led to more expansion, which occurred because several of our Liberian staff members turned out to be refugees from the war in neighboring Sierra Leone, and they urged us to establish a second radio studio in Freetown. That seemed like a good idea, and we were able to secure funding from donors who were impressed with the work we were doing in Liberia. In addition, we recognized that West African conflicts do not respect national borders, and we saw the importance of acting regionally. Next, from Sierra Leone, we expanded into Côte d’Ivoire and then into Guinea. This chain of

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events, in fact, illustrates our methodology for building the organization: we reacted to an opportunity, learned from experience, and discovered—or stumbled upon—a new insight. As will be discussed below, this is how we function as social entrepreneurs. Middle East In the Middle East, unlike in West Africa, we started in 1991 with a regional approach. But after the violent second Palestinian intifada broke out in 2000, we saw we needed to make some major changes. As the bloodshed spread, neither Arabs nor Israelis were particularly interested in meeting and embarking on joint action programs. We went into a period of intense reflection, and we realized that we needed more bilateral programs, aimed at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This seemed particularly true after 9/11 when we got a sense—deep in our guts—that the Palestinian-Israeli struggle was at the heart of what was tearing up the earth. The two of us made a life-changing decision: We decided to move to Jerusalem for two years to do whatever we could to heal the conflict. We became co-directors of Search’s Middle East program. We found a house just seventy yards from the Green Line that split the city, and we opened our office on the other side. In personal terms, we were able to create the balance that is so important when working in a divided society. And, we were balancing a lot. In addition to running the Jerusalem office, we were still president and executive vice president of the whole organization. At first, we shuttled between Jerusalem and Washington, D.C., where we spent a week every six weeks, but we could not sustain the pace—nor did we want to be away so often from Jerusalem. In Washington, we had a strong leader, Shamil Idriss, who had started with us as an intern, become head of our Burundi project, and at twenty-seven moved up to be our chief operating officer. Our overloaded work schedules, but not Susan’s health, were helped by a seven-hour-time difference, which allowed us to work a full day in Jerusalem, and then spend much of the evening on the phone and in email connection with Washington. We rebuilt the Jerusalem program to meet the changed reality. Producing media seemed to represent one of the few activities where we felt we could make a difference. So we did the following: •

CGNews. We built up the Common Ground News Service, which every week offers a selection of solution-oriented, bridge-building articles to newspapers and websites around the world and to more than 20,000 individual subscribers. We negotiated rights to reproduce articles from leading publications, and we commissioned original articles from a network of prominent contributors. In 2005 we added a second weekly edition that publishes articles to improve understanding between the Islamic world and the West. Our news service now appears in Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, English, French, Hebrew, and

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Urdu. Altogether, more than 6,500 of our articles have been reprinted in such places as Al Hayat (London), Ha’aretz (Tel Aviv), Christian Science Monitor (Boston), Al Quds (Jerusalem), Washington Post/Newsweek Online, Jakarta Post, Frontier Post (Peshawar), Kuwait Times, Jordan Times, Arab News (Jeddah), and Al-Jazeera.com (Doha). (For a free subscription, please click on www.cgnews.org.) Nonviolence. Like many people, we felt that if only the Palestinians would practice Gandhian nonviolence, their conflict with Israel would be much more likely to be resolved. So, we commissioned polls among both Israelis and Palestinians—and released them to considerable publicity—showing that clear majorities of both peoples favored a nonviolent approach but believed that the other side would react with deadly force. We also arranged for the independent Palestinian TV network, called Ma’an and consisting of nine local TV stations, to broadcast a subtitled version of the PBS documentary series, A Force More Powerful. Our aim was to demonstrate the success of nonviolence in places such as India, South Africa, and the American civil rights movement. Also with Ma’an, we co-produced talk shows in which Palestinians discussed the documentaries. The Ma’an Network was then operating on such a shoestring that the price for an hour-long talk show was less than $1,000. The Ma’an Network. Ma’an soon became a major partner. This group of local Palestinian TV stations was run by an extraordinary entrepreneur, Raed Othman, who kept pushing us to expand the relationship. We wound up co-producing many additional discussion shows, two soap opera series of thirty episodes, and a regular TV news magazine. Also, we collaborated in developing local news shows, originating at member stations. And we introduced Raed to international funders, including the Dutch government, which funded him in setting up the Ma’an News Service, which has grown into Palestine’s most-visited website. Television Documentary. John conceived, wrote, and produced a four-part TV documentary series portraying what an eventual Palestinian-Israeli peace settlement could look like. The core idea was to examine, in an evenhanded way, the aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians and to show that negotiated settlements are possible. Called Shape of the Future, it aired in 2005 and was the first-ever program broadcast simultaneously on Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab satellite TV. Former President Jimmy Carter described it thus: This series examines the fears and aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians in an even-handed way. It shows how a negotiated agreement could address those fears and aspirations, and do so without threatening the national existence of either side. Israel and Egypt were able to accomplish this task at Camp David more than 25 years ago and this series supports the belief that Israelis and Palestinians can do the same.3

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Figure 11.2 John and Susan on location in the Negev desert during the filming of Shape of the Future, which aired simultaneously on Israeli and Palestinian TV. Courtesy of the Search for Common Ground Archive.

COMMON GROUND PRODUCTIONS Shape of the Future was one of many TV and radio series produced by Common Ground Productions (CGP), the media production division of Search for Common Ground. CGP was John’s vision. From the beginning, he realized that if we were going to be successful in changing how the world deals with conflict, we would need to reach tens of millions of people through media. He was inspired in two different ways: First, in 1979, ABC-TV had turned his book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” into a documentary. John noticed that about 8 million viewers had watched it—which was about 7,970,000 more than had read it. Second, he was struck by a remark attributed to the late New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling, who said, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” In 1986 John rather grandly declared that, in addition to being head of Search for Common Ground, he was also president of CGP. To prove it, he had cards made. Since printers do not normally ask for verification that an organization actually exists, CGP was born. Within two years, we produced a ten-part Search for Common Ground series, hosted by NPR’s Scott Simon, which aired on over 100 U.S. public television stations. Additional TV series followed in Russia, Sri Lanka, Angola, and South Africa (which led to John meeting Susan).

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Nevertheless, in many of the places we worked, particularly in Africa, television was seen by only a very small part of the population. Radio is the principal means of communication, so we made a retro move into radio—in Burundi, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, and Guinea (as well as in Indonesia, Ukraine, Palestine, and Nepal). In all, we have produced thousands of hours of TV drama, radio soap opera, documentaries, call-in shows, and music videos. Here are some more of our greatest hits: •

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Macedonia: Nashe Maalo (Our Neighborhood). This is a forty-one-part dramatic TV series for children, produced in association with Sesame Workshop. It aired from 1999 to 2003, and reruns continue. It was viewed by 91 percent of Macedonian youth, and it spun off a number one music video, a puppet theater, a website, and a teacher’s guide for the classroom. The plot features a talking apartment house in which live Macedonian, Albanian, Turkish, and Roma families, and it promotes themes of interethnic tolerance. Cyprus: Gimme6. This eight-part series tells the stories of a Greek Cypriot boy who spends a summer at soccer camp in London, and of a Turkish Cypriot girl who plays the violin in a youth orchestra. It has been broadcast to both the Greek and Turkish sides of Cyprus. Africa: Search for Common Ground. This documentary series was co-produced with Ubuntu TV & Film for the South African Broadcasting Corporation and other African stations. It shows African conflicts actually being resolved. Viewers see village elders mediating a land dispute and a domestic violence workshop that successfully deals with spousal abuse. A review in the Johannesburg Sunday Times by Zakes Mda called it “the most inspiring piece of television I have seen in a long time.” Sierra Leone: Insai Di Saloon (Inside the Salon). Produced in 2007, this tenepisode TV series uses a sitcom format to encourage voter turnout and to address issues facing women and disaffected young men. Nigeria: The Station. This is a fifty-two-part TV drama about a fictional, multiethnic, multireligious team of reporters and producers that works for a Lagos TV news station. Broadcast started in 2006 on Nigeria’s two principal national networks and continues until 2009. It was preceded by a fifteen-part reality series, The Academy, about the selection and training of the Station’s cast. United States–Egypt: The Bridge. Aired in 2007 on the Hallmark Network, this is the pilot for a future series featuring exchanges between people in the United States and the Islamic world. The first program follows two Americans and two Egyptians—cowboys and talk show hosts—as they experience the challenges of day-to-day life in the other culture. Although reality TV usually emphasizes differences and weaknesses, The Bridge focuses on what the participants have in common.

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Figure 11.3 SFCG’s Nigerian TV soap opera is championed by former President Bill Clinton. Courtesy of the Search for Common Ground Archive.

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP We have broken new ground in terms of combining media production with conflict resolution, just as we have done seminal work in developing societal conflict transformation. We have built Search with a can-do approach and a knack for finding innovative solutions. From the beginning, we have launched new projects—starting, literally, from zero. In recent years, a term has come into vogue that is now used to describe people like us: we are called social entrepreneurs. Just as a Molière character declared that he had not realized he had been speaking prose his whole life, in our early years, we did not have this term to describe ourselves. But in 2006, we were both named Skoll Fellows in Social Entrepreneurship, so we now have a plaque on the wall certifying our profession. We have developed our own principles of social entrepreneurship, and they shape our work. Here they are: 1. Start from vision. Our vision is to transform the way the world deals with conflict—away from adversarial, win-lose approaches to non-adversarial, win-win solutions. Everything we do must be consistent—or at least not inconsistent—with our vision. 2. Be an applied visionary. In order to change the world, it is necessary to break down complicated projects into finite pieces—and to make things happen. We strive to be incrementally transformational.

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3. Be prepared to deal with high levels of complexity. When you intervene in complex systems, such as international conflicts, you can be sure that there will be unexpected results. 4. “On s’engage; et puis on voit.” As Napoleon said, you become engaged, and then you see new possibilities. In our work, this translates into recognizing you cannot plan in advance the various steps to be followed or the results to be achieved. 5. Practice aikido. In the Japanese martial art of aikido, when you are attacked, you do not try to reverse your assailant’s energy flow by 180 degrees, as you would in boxing. You accept the attacker’s energy, blend with it, and divert it by 10 or 20 degrees in order to make you both safe. In our work, this means accepting a conflict as it is—while transforming it one step at a time. 6. Make “yes-able” propositions. As Roger Fisher and Bill Ury wrote in their landmark book Getting to Yes, everything works much better when people say “yes” to your proposals, which need to be both in their interest and in yours. 7. Enroll credible supporters. Social entrepreneurs, who usually operate on the cutting edge, are often seen as marginal—or even crazy. Having prominent supporters can be very helpful. 8. Apply fingerspitzengefühl. This is a German word meaning to have an intuitive sense of knowing—at the tip of your finger. Either you have it or you do not. 9. Demonstrate chutzpah. Chutzpah is a Yiddish word for nerve or effrontery. Or, as author Leo Rosten wrote, it is the quality “in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.”4 In our view, a social entrepreneur needs this characteristic— without being overly pushy or culturally inappropriate. 10. Develop good metaphors and models. Most people will not shift their attitudes and behaviors if they do not have a good idea of where they are headed. Metaphors and models—compelling stories—are crucial to the reframing process. 11. Have a high tolerance for ambiguity. If you are uncomfortable with not knowing where you are going and cannot deal well with the unexpected, you probably will not be a successful social entrepreneur. 12. Find trimtab points. On ships and airplanes, the trimtab, a tiny rudder at the leverage point, can turn the craft with a minimum of effort. Similarly, social entrepreneurs should find the places where their initiatives will have a large impact from a comparatively small input. 13. Be persistent. We cite the example of a child’s toy truck that advances until it hits a piece of furniture, backs off, and then finds another path forward.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER: THE UNITED STATES AND IRAN In 1996 we made a long-term commitment to improving Iranian-American relations, and we have stayed engaged ever since. (Start from vision.) We began by organizing a series of confidential meetings in Europe between high-level,

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former U.S. and Iranian officials. (Be an applied visionary.) Susan facilitated, and she quickly succeeded in enabling the group to work together on the shared problem of how to have a better relationship—instead of facing each other as adversaries. After five such meetings, participants agreed on a blueprint for bringing the two countries back together. Unfortunately, neither group was successful in getting this new policy adopted when they went home. (Be prepared to deal with a high level of complexity.) Then, an Iranian participant made an exciting proposal. (“On s’engage et puis on voit.”) He suggested that one way to break the deadlock might be for Americans to return openly to Tehran where they had not publicly appeared in almost twenty years. He stated that any Americans who appeared in Iran would be the criticized, but those who would be the least criticized would be wrestlers. Why wrestlers? Because in Iranian folklore, wrestlers are the great mythic heroes, and wrestling is still the most popular sport with the masses. It was a plausible, culturally appropriate way of not directly confronting the conflict but finding a way around. (Practice aikido.) When we returned to Washington, we arranged an introduction to USA Wrestling, America’s national wrestling federation. It turned out that American wrestlers had recently been invited to Iran for a tournament, but for reasons that had to do with security and political difficulties, we were told that they probably would not be going. We helped convince USA Wrestling that it would be safe and desirable for them to participate. We proposed that we would look after the politics, while they would take care of the wrestling. (Make yes-able propositions.) We got an unofficial green light from the Clinton administration, and we set up a meeting between Iran’s ambassador to the UN and USA Wrestling. (Enroll credible supporters.) In addition, we arranged with the Swiss government, which represents U.S. interests in Iran, to welcome the wrestlers. We even were able to give the private cell phone number of the Swiss ambassador in Tehran to USA Wrestling and said they could call him in case of trouble. (Demonstrate chutzpah.) We were clearly in the right place at the right time. (Apply fingerspitzengefühl.) While we were making preparations, Iranian president Khatemi gave an interview to CNN, calling for a “dialogue of civilizations.” In February 1998, John and the U.S. national wrestling team flew to Tehran. It was an electrifying experience. The American wrestlers marched into the arena, proudly—but without chauvinism—carrying the American flag. The media beamed the scene around the world and contrasted it with the last time the American flag had appeared in Tehran, during the hostage crisis, when it had been burned on a daily basis. We had created a vivid new global image. (Develop good metaphors and models.) When we returned home, President Clinton invited the wrestlers and John to the Oval Office. The U.S. government wanted to send a positive signal to Iran, so our visit was filmed and then transmitted to Iran by satellite. (Find the trimtab points.) We had a vision that “wrestling diplomacy” would end in a breakthrough in relations, but for various reasons involving national egos and not paying

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enough attention to the needs of the other, the new day never dawned. It had been a heady ride, but we were not about to give up. However, we faced an operational dilemma. What had once been a highly confidential project to improve U.S.-Iranian relations had been spotlighted in the world’s media. So, we made a virtue out of necessity, and adopted a two-track strategy. (Have a high tolerance of ambiguity.) We decided both to sponsor public exchanges and to hold back-channel meetings. In fact, we came to see that the exchanges would provide cover for the meetings, and soon we were involved in Iranian-American film summits, film showings in both countries, visits of astronauts, and exchanges among environmentalists, academics, and doctors. As a professor at Tehran University put it, “What [Search for Common Ground] has been doing has had a profound effect on the psyche of both the [Iranian] public and the elite. . . . No other activities have had such an effect.” In sum, we provide an active channel for dialogue and communication between the United States and Iran, and we use our connections to seek peaceful solutions and implement projects on the ground. And we are operating by what we call the Woody Allen principle: namely, “80 percent of success is showing up.” With Iran, we have been showing up since 1996. On one level, our efforts might be seen to have failed, since Iranian-U.S. relations have sunk very low. Still, we are not deterred because we are committed for the long haul, and we believe we have accomplished a great deal. In fact, we know it is extremely important that we maintain contact, particularly at times when governments are barely talking. With most official channels closed, we remain well positioned to play a facilitating role toward better relations. To get an idea of the impact we can have, here is what a former Iranian ambassador to the UN said in 2005 about our role in looking for constructive solutions in the nuclear domain: I believe you saved our negotiations. Your ideas kept the negotiations going. . . . If there is any outcome of the negotiations that is to the satisfaction of both sides, it will be a derivative of the discussions of this group—with conditions that will make it possible for both sides to accept.

If nothing else, we are relentless—with Iran and everywhere we work. (Be persistent.)

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Search for Common Ground Founders and Executive Directors: John Marks and Susan Collin Marks Mission/Description: To transform the way the world deals with conflict: away from adversarial approaches, toward cooperative solutions. Although the world is overly polarized and violence is much too prevalent, those associated with Search remain essentially optimistic. Their view is that, on the whole,

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history is moving in positive directions. Although some of the conflicts currently being dealt with may seem intractable, there are successful examples of cooperative conflict resolution that can be looked to for inspiration—such as in South Africa, where an unjust system was transformed through negotiations and an inclusive peace process. Website: http://www.sfcg.org Address: 1601 Connecticut Avenue, NW Suite 200 Washington, DC 20009 USA Phone: (202) 265-4300 Fax: (202) 232-6718 E-mail: [email protected] or [email protected]

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4.

New York: W.W. Norton, 1991, p. 15. Quoted in John Gardner, On Leadership (New York: Free Press, 1989). E-mail from Matthew Hodes of the Carter Center, April 8, 2005. The Joys of Yiddish, p. 94 (1971).

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The Project on Justice in Times of Transition Tim Phillips

HISTORICAL CONTEXT The end of the cold war and the collapse of communism throughout Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union at the end of the twentieth century represented a fundamental change in global politics that was revolutionary in its importance, ushering in a wave of newly independent states eager to hold free and fair elections, establish the rule of law, modernize their economies, and join forces with the West. Western governments and nonprofit organizations rushed in to assist these new states on a range of critical issues, including the design of new constitutions and democratic institutions, the creation of market economies, and the establishment of independent media and other institutions of civil society. All of these efforts were much needed, forward-looking in nature, and designed to facilitate the transition to democracy and to help prepare these states for membership in the larger international community. Yet in the euphoric early days of the transition from communism to democracy, something fundamental was missing: a serious public debate about the recent past. The totalitarian regimes of the communist Eastern Bloc viewed the state as the ultimate source of power and legitimacy, and they sought to control almost every aspect of their citizens’ daily life. This highly toxic environment lasted for decades and permeated the institutions, everyday life, and mindsets of citizens, who fought a daily battle for survival and basic dignity under communism. After decades of repression, how could the new democracies of Europe transition into fully democratic states unless a new concept of citizenship and new habits of mind were formed among their citizens? Suspicion of everyone and every action was rampant under communism, and this attitude would not disappear overnight, particularly because communism collapsed quickly in Central and Eastern Europe

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rather than declining over a longer period of time, which could have allowed these issues to be addressed in a less politicized and more tolerant manner. Dictatorships, particularly those of the all-intrusive, totalitarian form, often force their subjects into situations that people in free countries would never understand. Adam Michnik, one of Poland’s most eminent intellectuals, who was a leading dissident under communism, has pointed out that ordinary people were coerced into some degree of collaboration with the communist regime in order to lead normal lives and simply care for their families. Yet every interaction with the state was an insult to an individual’s dignity and honor. If you wanted to acquire a passport to visit a sick relative in the United States, for example, the passport authorities would tell you that they would give you the proper document as long as you would agree to spy on the people you met with and anyone else the state deemed important. At that point, according to Michnik, the average citizen is forced to make a fundamental decision: do I say yes and thus compromise my integrity and become a collaborator; say no and sign away my job, my apartment, and my children’s education; or lie to the authorities and agree to spy but only provide false or useless information? If you choose to live by your principles and refuse to collaborate, you put everything at risk and become known as an enemy of the state. In Michnik’s view, ordinary people should have the right not to be heroes. Democracies seek to provide the maximum freedom to their citizens, and the legitimacy of the democratic state depends on the free will of the people. How could trust in the state, an essential building block for democratic nations, be developed in former communist countries where the bonds of trust with the state were nonexistent or at best limited? How could trust be developed when intelligence services were spying on everyone and forcing neighbors, co-workers, and even family members to spy on each other? It was in response to this complex and painful legacy that the Project on Justice in Times of Transition was born. Founded in 1992, the Project initially was designed to assist the new leaders of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in confronting their nations’ poisonous history of communist repression, to help them identify and address the difficult and complex issues of human rights violations, to explore ways to deal with former collaborators and state security files—and to do so in a way that respected the rule of law and contributed to the building of tolerant and sustainable democratic societies. In the first few years of its work, the Project primarily focused on the urgent needs of the post-communist countries in Europe, but it soon broadened its efforts to include countries moving from violent conflict to peace. Since its inception, the Project has organized more than fifty major initiatives around the world using its pioneering methodology of shared experience, which is based on two fundamental principles: that people can learn from the experiences of others, and that people can change. By bringing leaders from one country to share their experiences in addressing the aftermath of conflict or repression with their counterparts in another country grappling with similar challenges, the Project has helped

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build trust between once-bitter enemies in what were seemingly intractable conflicts, and our methodology has been replicated in hundreds of settings around the world. The Project on Justice in Times of Transition has earned a global reputation for its groundbreaking work in transitional justice—a field it is credited with launching—and in conflict resolution, and for its significant contributions to peace, reconciliation, and the rule of law in South Africa, Northern Ireland, Central America, the Balkans, and the former communist states of Europe.

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE PROJECT The idea that led to the creation of the Project on Justice in Times of Transition originated in May 1991 when I attended a two-week seminar at the Salzburg Seminar, an American educational institution in Salzburg, Austria, that brings together emerging leaders from countries around the world to discuss important policy and cultural issues. I had been awarded a fellowship to take part in a program on the environment and sustainable development that included participants from more than twenty countries. Among them were many former dissidents from the emerging democracies of Central and Eastern Europe who now held leadership positions in their countries, including posts as government ministers, parliamentarians, and heads of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). I was invited to participate in the program because of recent work I had done in the United States on climate change and sustainable development. In 1989, as I started to become aware of the growing threat of climate change and its impact on the planet, I conceived, organized, and raised funds for a program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University to educate the media (specifically general assignment reporters who knew little about scientific or environmental issues) about the increasing danger global warming posed. This program, “Understanding Global Warming: A Seminar for Journalists,” which featured some of the most prominent scientists, policymakers, and scholars addressing the issues, was the first program of its kind tailored to the general media in the United States, and it introduced dozens of reporters to the issues of climate change. The seminar also showed me that you can make a difference on an emerging global issue if you bring together first-rate and relevant people, let them talk to and learn from each other, and challenge them to move beyond consensus thinking. Moreover, the success of this seminar, as well as my earlier work in Central America (described below), demonstrates that a totally unknown person with a well-thought-out idea, substance, tenacity, and goodwill can make a meaningful impact in the world. During my stay in Salzburg, I spent considerable time talking to the other participants, particularly the representatives from the former communist bloc, some of whom were about my age (I was thirty-one). Although I was extremely interested in the environmental and development issues being discussed in our seminar, the questions that most intrigued me lay outside the formal seminar agenda.

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I wondered how those newly independent countries would confront the complicated legacies of the often brutal communist dictatorships. What would they do with officials of the former communist regimes? Some of them were guilty of human rights abuses, but most were merely dutiful party members—yet it was their support that had helped keep the communists in power for decades. I also wondered how the citizens of those new democracies would confront the legacy of human rights violations, collaboration, and the poisonous problem of state security files. In short, how would the countries of Central and Eastern Europe come to terms with their communist past? I found these issues deeply fascinating and important. During coffee breaks, over steins of beer at the nightly sessions in the Bierstube, and on long morning and evening walks through the cobbled streets of Salzburg and around the beautiful lake on whose shore stands Schloss Leopoldskron, the home of the Salzburg Seminar, I had a chance to discuss these issues with the Central and Eastern European participants. Everyone I spoke with stressed that dealing with the communist past was essential for them as individuals, and that the transition to democracy would not succeed if their countries did not find ways to address these difficult issues. Several of them pointed out that in the year and a half that had passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the initial euphoria that had greeted the collapse of communism was starting to wane, and the hard work of building new, democratic societies was growing more difficult each day. They feared that the communist past would emerge in an ugly, vindictive way, and that it was essential to confront its legacies quickly before they could be manipulated for political gain or retribution. As I thought about these challenges facing the post-communist states, I realized that there was an opportunity for me and others to contribute, in some small way, to help the leaders of these fragile new democracies address these critical issues. My recent experience in Central America had introduced me to some of the same issues in another context, and provided me with valuable insight into the experiences and mindsets of individuals living under dictatorship and civil conflict. Between 1987 and 1989, I independently organized two fact-finding trips to Central America for prominent figures from the U.S. media, senior congressional staff, and individuals of public renown whose opinion counted within American political and policy circles. At the time, the United States was embroiled in contentious foreign policy debates over Central America and the Reagan administration’s actions in the region, and I thought it would be useful to enable some influential Americans to see for themselves what everyday life was like in conflicttorn El Salvador, Sandinista-controlled Nicaragua, and democratic Costa Rica. The idea behind the trips was simple: to introduce U.S. opinion leaders to the realities of Central America unfiltered through the press, the divisive debates in Washington, or secondhand information, and to allow them to draw their own conclusions about the conflicts in the region. All I asked of them was to write a column, opinion editorial, or a memorandum about their impressions of the trip upon their return home.

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These delegations included such luminaries as John Kenneth Galbraith; authors Doris Kearns Goodwin, Richard Goodwin, and James Carroll; journalists Howard Simons, Hendrik Hertzberg, and Christopher Hitchens; and senior editors from the Los Angeles Times, the New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, and other influential publications. I introduced them to government leaders in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, as well as representatives of the guerilla movements, including the Contras (as the anti-Sandinista guerilla movement was called), plus labor leaders, human rights activists, and democratic opposition groups. We spent considerable time talking with the key political actors in the region, from Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega and hard-line Minister of the Interior Tomas Borge on the left, to Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani on the right, and two of the most courageous leaders whose politics fell more to the center in the highly polarized environment of Central America of the 1980s, Violeta Chamorro and Costa Rican President Oscar Arias. In 1987 Violeta Chamorro was two years away from defeating Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua’s first truly democratic election since the Sandinista revolution, and Oscar Arias was courageously defying the Reagan administration by pursuing a regional peace process rather than one dictated by Washington. Although very different in style and personality, both these leaders believed deeply in the value of negotiation, democratic processes, and the step-by-step process of building trust and working with all sides to develop a “home-grown” process of peace. For these efforts, Oscar Arias was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987, and Violeta Chamorro was elected president of Nicaragua in 1989 and led a peaceful transition to democracy. We also spent time in both urban barrios and the countryside. The participants were struck by the extreme poverty, polarization, and numbing levels of violence in both El Salvador and Nicaragua, where tens of thousands had been killed and several million displaced in both countries. This reality contrasted sharply to peaceful, democratic Costa Rica: although it shared the same history, language, and culture, and occupied a very small geographic region, Costa Rica was markedly different from its neighbors. Although the delegation members debated at length the causes of these differences, what they saw with their own eyes had a powerful impact on them all. Many wrote influential articles upon their return to United States and continued to write about Central America in the years ahead. For my own part, witnessing firsthand in Central America the difficulty of moving from dictatorship to democracy prepared me intellectually and practically to think about the challenges facing the emerging democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, and to question how their citizens and new leaders who had lived under communism would rebuild their societies.

FIRST STEPS Toward the end of the two-week program in Salzburg, I approached the deputy director of the Salzburg Seminar, Tim Ryback, with my thoughts on these issues, with the idea that the seminar might organize a special program to help

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new leaders from the former communist states figure out how best to confront the legacy of their past. My experience in Central America and my conversations with the Central and Eastern European participants in Salzburg convinced me that this idea was sound. Tim, who wrote about German history and politics for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books and had authored an important book in the late 1980s about dissidents living under communism in Eastern Europe, was immediately interested, enthusiastic, and supportive of my idea. He helped me develop a memorandum outlining a proposed three-day conference that would bring together leaders of the former communist states with their counterparts from other countries that had successfully navigated the difficult transition from dictatorship to democracy. Tim’s colleagues at the seminar also responded positively to my idea; they suggested that I take the lead on the proposal and contact two key individuals in the United States who were playing a leadership role in helping consolidate the democratic transitions in the Central and Eastern Europe: Wendy Luers and George Soros. I had never heard of either of these people (this was before George Soros became famous outside the business world for his financial skills and his philanthropy), but soon I was working closely with both their organizations, and Wendy and I would co-found the Project on Justice in Times of Transition. In 1991 Wendy Luers headed the Charter 77 Foundation–New York, a nonprofit organization dedicated to strengthening democracy and civil society in Czechoslovakia (the foundation is now known as the Foundation for a Civil Society). Wendy had established the foundation at the request of Václav Havel, the former dissident and playwright who was the first president of independent Czechoslovakia, just a few months after the Velvet Revolution toppled the communist regime in November 1989. The organization was named after the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia that Havel and other dissidents had initiated in 1977 to challenge the communist system. Wendy had gotten to know Havel and many other Czech and Slovak dissidents who had played a key role in Czechoslovakia’s democratic revolution when she lived in Prague in the mid-1980s while her husband, William Luers, served as U.S. ambassador. Wendy played an important role in that period by reaching out to the dissidents and publicizing their cause to influential audiences in the United States and Western Europe. As ambassador, her husband was constrained from such contacts, but Wendy had no formal restrictions, and she skillfully developed relationships with the dissidents, supporting them in several key ways, including introducing them to American writers and artists such as Arthur Miller, John Updike, and William and Rose Styron, who championed their cause in the United States, and connecting them with human rights and pro-democracy advocates in the West. In my first meeting with Wendy in September 1991, she immediately recognized the value in the idea of bringing together the new leaders of the postcommunist states with former leaders of democratic transitions in South America and Western Europe, and she proposed that we work together to make the conference happen. In the 1970s, Wendy had worked on human rights issues in Latin

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America for Amnesty International and was intimately acquainted with the legacy of human rights abuses, deeply intrusive domestic intelligence services, political imprisonment, and disappearances that were the horrible consequences of the military dictatorships in the region. She understood that life in Nazi Germany; in Spain under the authoritarian Franco regime; and under the military dictatorships in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, while differing in the particulars, shared many of the same characteristics of life under communism. Wendy and I both strongly believed that the new leaders of Eastern Europe, who had suffered under communism, could learn from the experience of others who had grappled successfully with the complicated and emotionally wrenching transition from dictatorship to democracy, gaining insights they could adapt to their own democratic transitions. Wendy’s rich experience in Latin America, coupled with her firsthand knowledge of life under Czechoslovakia’s communist dictatorship, made her an ideal partner for this initiative, and I was delighted that she wanted to work with me. Moreover, by some marvelous coincidence, that very evening she and her husband, Bill, who was then president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, would be hosting Václav Havel on his first visit to the United States as president of the newly independent and democratic Czechoslovakia. Wendy asked me if she could show my memorandum to President Havel, and of course I said yes. I could hardly believe my good luck. The next morning she called me to say that President Havel enthusiastically endorsed the idea of the meeting. Havel said it would address a vital set of issues, and he agreed to participate in the meeting in some way. On the same day I met Wendy Luers, I also met the Hungarian-born financier George Soros. George Soros has become a legend for his support of pro-democracy movements in Eastern Europe and around the world, spending billions of his own money to support dissidents, human rights activists, and others seeking to create democratic, open societies. In 1991 Soros was ramping up his support for the democratic transition in the former communist states of Eastern Europe as well as in the Soviet Union, which was then teetering on the brink of collapse. (In addition to setting up a network of his own foundations throughout the former Soviet bloc, Soros provided crucial seed funding to the Charter 77 Foundation–New York.) Soros immediately liked my conference proposal and agreed to fund the travel expenses for all the participants from Central and Eastern Europe and from the Soviet Union. His network of foundations throughout the region played an important supporting role in identifying key individuals to participate in the initial conference, and also provided significant support for the work of the Project on Justice in Times of Transition in its first few years. With President Havel’s backing and George Soros’s promise of financial support, I began to work closely with Wendy Luers and her two program officers, Mary Albon and Eric Nonacs, to build a team to organize the conference and seek additional funding for the event. Wendy invited two eminent American legal minds to join us, Lloyd Cutler and Herman Schwartz. Lloyd Cutler, who had served as White

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House counsel to President Jimmy Carter (and later to President Bill Clinton) and was a founding partner of one of the most distinguished law firms in the United States, Wilmer Cutler Pickering, presided over the Washington legal and political establishment, and his involvement with the conference added another layer of legitimacy and gravitas to our effort. Herman Schwartz was a distinguished professor of constitutional law at Washington College of Law at American University and a long-time advocate for human rights, civil rights, and civil liberties in the United States and around the world. Both Herman and Lloyd were deeply involved in a program launched by Wendy’s foundation to help draft the new constitution of postcommunist Czechoslovakia, and Herman later served as an advisor on constitutional and human rights reform to governments throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Together, we quickly put together an informal advisory committee that included a number of distinguished individuals with expertise on the issues, including Jeri Laber, Alice Henkin, Diane Orentlicher, Lawrence Weschler, Alan Ryan, Tina Rosenberg, Jose Zalaquett, Jürgen Habermas, Ralf Dahrendorf, and Timothy Garton Ash, among others, who advised us on the conference agenda. (Most also participated in the initial conference in Salzburg.) By December 1991, we were off and running. A scant three months later, we convened the Salzburg Conference on Justice in Times of Transition.

THE SALZBURG CONFERENCE ON JUSTICE IN TIMES OF TRANSITION We did not quite know what to expect from the Salzburg conference, which took place in March 1992. After all, it was an experiment. Our untested approach, which was grounded in nothing more than a firm belief in the power of shared human experience that transcends national boundaries, was greeted with skepticism by some of the funders we asked for support1 and initially was only reluctantly accepted by many of the individuals we invited to participate. Although Wendy and I and the rest of our core team shared the conviction that the new leaders of the post-communist states could learn from the experiences of their counterparts in Latin America and elsewhere whose countries had already weathered difficult democratic transitions, would the Eastern Europeans in fact hear what those individuals had to say? We envisioned the Salzburg conference as an opportunity to help the new leaders of post-communist Europe figure out how to address the painful legacy of their past, which threatened to undermine the democratization process, by introducing them to the transition experiences of other countries in all their legal, political, and moral dimensions—and as told by political leaders and other individuals who had been directly involved in those transitions. We anticipated that individuals who had suffered under repressive regimes would understand each other, and while there were very real differences between various countries and their respective national histories, we believed that dictatorships share many of the same characteristics, and that humans fundamentally react to them in the same ways.

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To that end, we invited to the Salzburg conference key leaders from the postcommunist states of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (the USSR had formally disbanded in December 1991), who were now actively engaged in addressing the tragic human legacies of communism in their roles as government officials, journalists for newly independent media, and leaders of the emerging nongovernmental sector. They formed a veritable “who’s who” of leaders of the anti-communist dissident movements throughout the region, including such prominent figures as Adam Michnik, Wiktor Osiatynski, and Kostek Gebert from Poland; Jan Urban, Martin Butora, and Karel Schwarzenberg from Czechoslovakia; Sergei Kovalev and Arseny Roginsky from Russia; Miklos Vasarhelyi and Josef Szajer from Hungary; as well as others from the Baltic states, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, former Yugoslavia, and recently reunified Germany. From outside the region we invited leaders of post-dictatorship democratic transitions from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, El Salvador, and Spain. Among these eminent individuals in attendance were Raul Alfonsín, the Argentine president who led the democratic transition after the fall of the military dictatorship; Rafael Michelini, a leading member of the Uruguayan Senate, whose father had been assassinated by the Argentine military on orders of the Uruguayan military when he was a leading candidate for president of his country; and Jami Malamud Goti, President Alfonsín’s human rights advisor who prosecuted the Argentine military following the collapse of the dictatorship. Other participants included prominent human rights advocates, intellectuals, constitutional scholars, criminal law experts, government officials, and foundation representatives from Western Europe and the United States. Also in attendance were an observer from South Africa, which was then in the process of negotiating a transition from apartheid and minority rule to democracy for all its citizens, and an observer from El Salvador who was engaged in the final peace negotiations that led to the signing of the 1992 Chapultepec Accords that ended twenty years of brutal conflict. The overarching goals of the Salzburg conference were to identify and address the key legal, political, and moral issues confronting the post-communist states, including assessing and developing standards for dealing with officials of the former regimes and former collaborators, considering what to do with the millions of state security files of the communist regimes now in government hands, and exploring the deeper, more difficult personal issues of how victims of dictatorship manage the transition to democracy in a psychologically healthy and tolerant manner that respects the rule of law and instills habits of a democratic culture. In each of the conference’s sessions, Latin Americans, Western Europeans, and Americans described how other countries had dealt with the particular issue under discussion, attempted to identify the key components of the issue, and reviewed the democratic legal principles guiding action on the issue. Respondents from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union posed questions and suggested possible options for their own countries, which spurred general discussion and debate. The first day at Salzburg did not seem to bode particularly well for our shared experience approach. The participants from Latin America and Western Europe

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described the horrors of life under dictatorship and the suffering their countries had endured on so many levels. The participants from the former communist countries countered with their own stories of life under a repressive regime, and the brutality and constant indignities they had lived through. Everyone believed that their country’s experience was unique, that no one else had suffered as they had suffered, and that their pain was the greatest; as a result, the participants were talking past each other. The message being sent on that first day, from all sides, was that the experiences of the various countries represented were so fundamentally different from each other that they could not learn from each other. The disparities were variously ascribed to different legal systems, different economic traditions, and different cultures and social systems. For example, some maintained that the capitalist traditions of Latin America were so different from communism that it would be impossible to find commonalities. Yet by the second day of the conference, something had changed. Maybe credit should go to the rounds of drinks and informal conversation in the Bierstube the night before, but on the second day, the participants were more comfortable with each other, and they started to listen to each other rather than lecture. Looking around the conference room, they saw the pained expressions on each others’ faces as they shared their stories, and they realized that they had more in common than they had first imagined. They began to find common ground on the issues, and while there were still some heated disagreements, these were now conducted as debates rather than arguments. And then, together, the participants started proposing solutions to the challenges facing the post-communist countries, solutions that were inspired by what other countries had done in the past. Some specific recommendations emerged, such as the creation of national truth and reconciliation commissions modeled on those of Argentina and Chile, as well as guidelines based on democratic principles to govern the disqualification and prosecution of ex-communist officials and collaborators with the former regime, and guidance on handling state security files of the communist intelligence services. At a more philosophical level, the group agreed that in any transition to democracy, the rule of law should take precedence over political justice, but the victims of the previous regime must not be brushed aside or forgotten. The poisonous legacies of the past must not be swept under the rug, but must be openly confronted and defused by the new government and by society at large. Afterwards, many of the participants told me how personally transformative the Salzburg Conference on Justice in Times of Transition had been for them. The Eastern Europeans found new perspectives and new ways of thinking, and they left feeling hopeful that they could find solutions to their countries’ most complicated challenges, now that they knew other countries had succeeded in doing so in the past. They took inspiration from those examples, and were keen to share what they had learned with their colleagues at home. And in the years to come, many participants in the Salzburg conference (and in subsequent Project initiatives) were eager to share their countries’ experiences with other countries, such as South Africa, Nicaragua, and Northern Ireland, as they faced their own complex transitions.

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The desire of many of our participants to share their profound experience of transformation with leaders in other countries struggling with change has turned out to be one of the most valuable outcomes of our work over the years, one that has enabled the Project to build an extraordinary network of current and former leaders who have participated in peace processes, managed negotiations, struggled with ceasefires and breakdowns in talks, sought to build trust and accountability, and promoted reconciliation. Many of these individuals have told me that they feel a moral obligation to share their experience. Some of our early speakers, such as Roelf Meyer, one of the key players in the negotiations ending apartheid in South Africa, and Joaquín Villalobos, the former senior commander of the FMLN guerilla movement in El Salvador, have told me that they wished they had had access to leaders who had gone through a similar process when they were struggling with transition in their own countries. Achieving fundamental change, whether at the deeply personal or national political level, is a profoundly difficult and painful process that can take years to happen, if at all. One of the dynamics seen in societies long divided by conflict or political repression is that any hint of change, compromise, or accommodation with your “enemy” is seen as a betrayal of your own community, of your family, ancestors, and neighbors. Decades of violence and polarization harden attitudes, creating a political and psychological environment that makes it difficult for leaders as well as ordinary people to consider changing their views or “talking peace” with their sworn enemies. I recall one of our participants describing elements of our work as analogous to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Often the leaders of peace negotiations or a national transition process whom we bring together in our audiences do not recognize that they have a problem, while the experienced speakers we bring in from outside instinctively understand, empathize, and want to support these leaders as they struggle to navigate the difficult but necessary processes of personal and national transformation. The Salzburg conference has been cited in numerous books and scholarly articles for its leading role in identifying and addressing issues of transitional justice in post-communist Europe, and for introducing the concept of transitional justice to the global agenda. The Salzburg conference also introduced the methodology of shared experience, which the Project on Justice in Times of Transition has used successfully in every meeting, conference, and workshop it has organized since its founding in 1992. This methodology, discussed in further detail below, is the foundation of the Project’s success as a catalyst for proactively addressing transitional justice issues in countries undertaking the difficult transformation from repression to democracy and from conflict to peace.

LAUNCHING THE PROJECT ON JUSTICE IN TIMES OF TRANSITION One of the most important recommendations to emerge from the Salzburg conference was that we should continue to work on these issues and develop follow-up programs on specific themes discussed in the meeting. When we met with President Havel at Prague Castle after the Salzburg conference, he also urged

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us to focus attention on these critical issues. As a result, Wendy Luers and I wasted no time in institutionalizing the work of the Salzburg conference by establishing the Project on Justice in Times of Transition as a separate but affiliated program based within the Charter 77 Foundation–New York that would seek independent funding for its work and programming. Wendy, Lloyd Cutler, Herman Schwartz, and I quickly formed a steering committee to guide the work of the Project, appointed Mary Albon as director and Eric Nonacs as program officer, and started planning conferences and workshops that responded to several urgent requests from Salzburg participants from the former communist bloc, Central America, and South Africa. We also started to build an international advisory board that eventually included such distinguished individuals as Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel, Arpad Göncz, Mikhail Gorbachev, Oscar Arias, and Jose Zalaquett, among others. We later expanded the advisory board to include representatives from countries we worked in or with over the subsequent years.

METHODOLOGY AND FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES One of the Project on Justice in Times of Transition’s most significant contributions is the development of the “shared experience” methodology that was first used in Salzburg. The methodology stemmed from the simple insight that I had, which was shared by Wendy Luers and the other organizers, that on a biological, emotional, and psychological level, humans have many of the same response mechanisms to the formative experiences of their lives. The one human instinct we all share is survival, and the repression and violence of dictatorships and civil conflict pose great challenges to the basic survival instinct of an individual—and of a nation. Although it is true that every country has its own unique national experience and history, how people respond to the terrifying, humiliating, and dehumanizing experience of life under dictatorship or during civil war is fundamentally the same around the world. What we understood intuitively, and humbly, was that people in these situations struggle as individuals on a deeply personal and psychological level with the burdens of violence, fear, and repression. But we also understood that it was possible to move beyond these terrible experiences, and learning about the experiences of others who had done so could help speed the process of both internal and societal change. This belief that individuals can learn from the experience of others guided the design of the Salzburg conference, and all of the Project’s subsequent efforts have been grounded in this methodology of shared experience. Our approach is simple and practical. First, we recognize that in most countries where we work, particularly those transitioning from dictatorship or longstanding conflict, individuals develop a very insular view of their own reality: they believe no one else has suffered the way they have suffered; that no one else can understand the horrible experiences they have endured; and that differences in culture, history, language, and geography are too great to allow for any cross-cultural learning. They tend to be reluctant to listen to or respect the views of outsiders. Individuals who have

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suffered have remarkable defenses against further hurt and pain. They develop a “deafness” to others as a self-defense mechanism that can be difficult to penetrate. This inward-looking perspective often stems in part from the vertically divided social structure of many countries where there is little or no interaction across class, ethnic, religious, or political allegiances. It also arises in countries where bonds of trust have been destroyed by years (or even decades) of violence and repression, leaving people unprepared to respect or value the views or experience of others. This tendency is not confined within national borders and extends to “others” from the outside. Understanding and respecting this reality allows us to structure our programs in a way that carefully yet powerfully shows people who are not psychologically prepared to listen to outsiders that “others” have something valuable to offer. We do this by identifying and selecting widely respected, compassionate, and articulate leaders from other countries to serve as panelists and speakers in our programs. But even before we line up speakers, we work with local partners and confer with all sides in our target country so that we can identify the important issues that need to be addressed and make sure all local perspectives are represented; select the countries with the most relevant experience to feature; and structure our agendas so that there is plenty of time for listening and sharing in both formal and informal settings. We team up with local partner organizations that are highly respected, can bring all sides to the table, and have a nuanced understanding of the local issues and challenges. The Project ensures that the forum is a neutral environment where all sides are welcome and their views will be listened to. Often, simple curiosity about what the former president of another country or a famous negotiator from South Africa or the Middle East has to say brings our target audience “into the room.” We prepare our international speakers to focus their remarks in a way that enables them to quickly connect to the local audience and breaks down the perceived differences between them. The international leaders we bring to our meetings understand the reluctance that local leaders have toward outsiders, whom they perceive as coming in to tell them what to do. Having once been in that situation themselves when they were struggling with similar national challenges, our speakers understand this dynamic, and they seek to connect with their audience in a personal way that allows participants to see the similarities between their experiences, and to begin to entertain new perspectives on their own problems. Our speakers often share deeply personal experiences with our audiences, such as how they felt the first time they sat down across the negotiating table from their sworn enemies, or the moment that prompted them to realize that violence was not helping their cause but only hurting people. Often the “volume” or “intensity” of the speakers’ own past suffering cuts through the inability of audience members to listen; hearing the powerful story of another’s suffering is a sad, but necessary element to a breakthrough in perception and possibility. In essence, what our participants discover is that “if he or she can move beyond such pain and anger, then I can as well.”

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One powerful example of this kind of personal transformation is that of the late David Ervine, who was once a member of a Protestant loyalist paramilitary organization in Northern Ireland and who spent nearly a decade in prison for terrorist activities. Yet when David emerged from prison, he became one of the leading loyalist political voices calling for peace and negotiations to end more than thirty years of civil war. In 2006, shortly before his untimely death from a heart attack, David shared his life story with senior leaders of the ELN guerilla movement in Colombia in a Project initiative designed to reengage the ELN in peace talks and initiate a ceasefire agreement with the Colombian government. David told the Colombians that he had joined the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) when he was seventeen years old on the day he learned that another Protestant boy, of the same age and same last name, had been killed by a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Stunned and traumatized by the event, which took on added resonance for him because of the victim’s similar name and age, David joined the UVF because he was convinced that the only defense against such random violence was a good offense, and he believed he could no longer stand by but must defend his community, his identity, and his way of life, all of which he saw as under threat. He told the Colombian guerillas that in the beginning, he believed he was killing “others” to live, but gradually, as the violence and dehumanizing impact of the conflict took over, he realized he was living to kill. David pointed out that all liberation and paramilitary groups develop their own mythology and justification for the acts of violence and terrorism they commit, but that mythology imprisons them in a mindset that can be extraordinarily difficult to transcend. His audience was transfixed by his story. These powerful insights he shared connected David to the ELN commanders in a meaningful way at a deeply personal level, and they immediately recognized a similar dynamic in their own situation. As a result, they were willing to listen to his advice about what to consider as the ELN negotiated a ceasefire with the Colombian government and what sort of transformations to prepare for—both personally and as a guerilla movement transforming itself into a legitimate political party. We have witnessed this same phenomenon, a shared personal story resonating in a very powerful way, among leaders in Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, and other countries seeking to end longstanding conflicts. Other examples include the moment at a 1995 Project conference in Belfast when the South Africans Roelf Meyer, the ruling National Party’s chief negotiator with the African National Congress (ANC), and Dullah Omar, a member of the ANC’s negotiating team who became minister of justice under President Nelson Mandela, recounted to an audience of hundreds of Northern Ireland political, community, and paramilitary leaders how they and their fellow negotiators ended the decades-long apartheid regime and achieved a peaceful transfer of power from the small white minority to a government led by South Africa’s black majority. Omar and Meyer described how the negotiators slowly developed trust in each other, how each side dealt with breakdowns in the peace process, and how they addressed the legacy of violence; they also described the critical leadership role of both F. W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela in promoting national reconciliation.

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Both Omar and Meyer emphasized that a peace process takes time, and that there will be complications and breakdowns, but the two sides have to remain committed and stick with the negotiations, finding ways to move forward when talks bog down. Afterward, several of the Northern Ireland leaders in attendance, including Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness of Sinn Fein, Jeffrey Donaldson of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), and John Hume, leader of the Social Democratic Labor Party (SDLP), told me that listening to the story of the South African transition as recounted by two senior negotiators from opposing sides who had managed to work together to bring an end to apartheid peacefully made them realize that peace could come to Northern Ireland, too, gave them the confidence that they could take similar steps, and strengthened their resolve to initiate peace talks. Another important moment occurred in London in 1995 during a Project conference for leaders of the three ethnic communities in Bosnia (Muslim, Serb, and Croat) following the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords. The meeting was designed to foster reconciliation among the three communities by highlighting the examples of reconciliation in El Salvador, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, and Central and Eastern Europe. The opening session of the conference fell flat: the Bosnians were not tuned into the presentations by the outside speakers and were instead venting about their own conflict and suffering, emphasizing that no one could appreciate or understand the trauma they just passed through. As already mentioned, this is a common initial reaction at many Project events, but we were concerned that we might not be able to get the Bosnians to really listen to what the international speakers had to say. But then the moderator for the panel on reconciliation in El Salvador, James LeMoyne, who had served as New York Times bureau chief for El Salvador during the worst of the conflict, took a dramatic new tack in introducing the Salvadoran panelists. First he introduced Ricardo Castaneda, the former Salvadoran ambassador to the United Nations and a key figure in the peace negotiations, by describing how on one occasion when he had gone to the ambassador’s home in San Salvador to attend a dinner for foreign diplomats, he had come across the bodies of several campesino labor leaders who had been tortured, eviscerated, and dumped in front of the ambassador’s house to intimidate him away from the peace talks. The killers of the campesinos were not from the guerilla movement but rather from the right-wing death squads, who were hostile to the peace process. After hearing this introduction, the Bosnians stopped talking with each other and started to listen to James. He then introduced Joaquín Villalobos, former senior commander of the FMLN guerilla movement in El Salvador and one of the most brilliant, brutal, and visionary guerilla leaders in Latin American history, who ultimately abandoned violence in favor of participating in a negotiated political process and led the FMLN toward peace. James told the disturbing story of how Joaquín’s girlfriend, who was also a guerilla fighter, had been captured by the Salvadoran army, tortured, and dismembered into more than seventy pieces, which were left in a bag for Joaquín to find. As horrendous as these introductions were, they cut through the “differences” between El Salvador and Bosnia, commanding the attention of the Bosnians, who

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thereafter listened intently to the story of how the two sides reached peace in El Salvador, working together to build trust and foster national reconciliation in the aftermath of a brutally violent civil war. It is not uncommon to see one-time bitter enemies sitting side by side on Project panels, including historic figures such as the former communist leader of Poland General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who imposed martial law, and the former dissident and Solidarity activist Adam Michnik, or Joaquín Villalobos and former Salvadoran president Alfredo Cristiani. The impact of such juxtapositions is powerful, especially since these former enemies are there to jointly tell the story of their country’s path to peace and democracy. The possibility of learning from the experience of others is critical to the Project’s approach, but there is a second principle that underpins our methodology of shared experience: that people can change. One of the most valuable contributions of our work is the recognition that even in deeply divided societies, people can change and move from a world view that is zero sum to one in which compromise is not a sign of weakness or humiliation, but in fact is a sign of courage and strength that leads to shared benefit and success. For people in our audiences, such examples are so profound and so startling that they often lead to paradigm shifts in their own thinking, not only showing them that change is possible, but emboldening them to take the first steps toward compromise. Once it was unimaginable that certain conflicts could be ended, so to hear from the people who have achieved the unimaginable is one of the most powerful tools we have for showing leaders of countries emerging from conflict that they, too, can bring positive change to their homelands. Our international speakers demonstrate by their own example that although change requires leadership—and courage—everyone has the capacity to exercise such leadership, and indeed, it is the duty of leaders in societies riven by conflict or repression to strive for change that can bring about peace, stability, and national reconciliation. The first step is accepting the necessity of change: recognizing that a willingness to compromise is not a sign of weakness and humiliation but a sign of strength, and that it can result in a win-win solution. As a result of the success of our approach and the powerful experience of the leaders we work with, many have been invited to advise on peace processes elsewhere. For example, Roelf Meyer has remained engaged in Northern Ireland and became involved in the Basque region in Spain, Sri Lanka, and Kosovo. David Ervine was involved in Bosnia and Colombia. Joaquín Villalobos was involved in Sri Lanka, Bosnia, and the Middle East. Monica McWilliams, leader of the Women’s Coalition in Northern Ireland, and Naomi Chazan, former deputy speaker of the Israeli Knesset, have met with leaders in Palestine, Bosnia, and Guatemala.

THE PROJECT’S MOST SIGNIFICANT PROGRAMS Since its founding in 1992, the Project on Justice in Times of Transition has organized more than fifty programs around the world to assist countries in transition. Some of these programs have entered the history books for the impact they

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had in helping nations address their recent past, such as in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, or in South Africa after apartheid. Other programs sought to help nations move from violent civil conflict to peace by giving leaders the confidence and the tools to start a peace process—by introducing them to the experiences of other countries that had succeeded in ending seemingly intractable conflicts and building more tolerant societies. The following examples, in addition to the historic Salzburg conference on Justice in Times of Transition, represent some of the Project’s most influential and historic programs. Reconciliation in Times of Transition (El Salvador 1993) The Project convened the first public forum in El Salvador following the signing of the 1992 peace accords to bring together all the key players in the conflict along with leaders of civil society to focus on consolidating peace and eradicating social division, confrontation, and political violence. The conference was widely covered in the Salvadoran media and is credited with helping demonstrate that reconciliation was possible after more than a decade of war. Dealing with the Past (South Africa 1994) The Project helped organize the first major conference in South Africa that focused the country’s new leadership on strategies for dealing with the legacy of the past, building democracy, and fostering national reconciliation after apartheid. This conference introduced the concept of the truth commission pioneered by Argentina and Chile into the South African debate, which ultimately led to the creation of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Reflections on Transition (Nicaragua 1994) The Project convened the first major public forum in Nicaragua following the collapse of the Sandinista government in 1989 to focus on national reconciliation, civil-military relations, property restitution, and economic reform. The final panel of the conference provided the first opportunity in Nicaraguan history for leaders of the major political parties and government institutions to come together without recrimination to discuss their visions of the nation’s future. Reconciliation and Community: The Future of Peace in Northern Ireland (Northern Ireland 1995) The Project organized the first event in Northern Ireland’s history to bring together the senior leaders of all the political parties, paramilitary groups, civil society, and the Irish and British governments to discuss the possibility of peace. Senior negotiators from South Africa, El Salvador, Colombia, Poland, and the Middle East shared their experiences in ending long-standing conflicts and

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dictatorships. Northern Ireland’s political leaders from all sides view this conference as one of the first moments in which they could envision peace. Executive Leadership Training Programs for Northern Ireland Political and Community Leaders (United States 1996–2003) The Project organized five week-long executive training workshops that brought together senior political and community leaders from Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and Great Britain to develop leadership skills and gain a broader perspective on their own role and the role of other parties in shaping the transition in Northern Ireland. Participants considered obstacles to the peace process, and explored ways to facilitate trust between the communities and to create institutions of joint governance that would institutionalize a new process of coexistence and governance. Conference on Missing Persons for Family Members in the Former Yugoslavia (Hungary 1997) This event brought together for the first time individuals from the Muslim, Croat, and Serb communities in Bosnia who had lost family members in the conflict to discuss strategies for finding their loved ones with representatives from Guatemala, South Africa, Kurdistan, and Chile. Local Actors in Peacebuilding, Reconstruction, and the Establishment of the Rule of Law (five meetings in locations around the world, 2002–2003) For this series of meetings, the Project brought together local leaders from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Balkans with senior United Nations officials to discuss and develop recommendations to improve rule of law programs in UN peacekeeping operations. These meetings provided senior UN policymakers in New York with the first comprehensive opportunity to meet with practitioners and leaders from the countries in which the UN carries out peace operations to review the impact of their rule of law initiatives. Our initiative resulted in a series of recommendations that helped prioritize legal reform as a critical part of future peace operations, and these recommendations have been adopted in subsequent UN peacekeeping operations. Session for the Ulster Democratic Unionist Party (United States 2004) The Project held a closed-door working session for senior members of the Democratic Unionist Party designed to help them consider ways to engage in dialogue with Sinn Fein and restart all-party talks to renew momentum toward a final

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agreement among all Northern Ireland’s political parties and the restoration of local rule. Ready to Govern: Developing a Strategy for Kosovo’s First 100 Days (United States 2007) Senior Kosovar political leaders and members of civil society from both the Albanian and Serb communities came together with senior officials from the United States, the European Union, and countries that previously had negotiated a transition to nationhood and independence to develop a strategic plan for the realization of independence and the creation of a new, unified nation as spelled out in the Ahtisaari Plan. Negotiating from Conflict to Peace (Colombia 2007) The Project convened two workshops with senior Colombian government officials and ELN guerilla leaders to consider other countries’ experiences with the transformation of paramilitary organizations into peaceful political leadership, and with cease-fire and disarmament verification and management. These meetings, which took place at a pivotal moment in the Colombian peace process, helped lend confidence to the ELN leadership that a successful transition to legitimate democratic practices was possible, and resulted in the Colombian Senate and civil society becoming more proactively involved in the negotiations between the ELN and the government.

HOW THE PROJECT DESIGNS PROGRAMS The Project approaches each program opportunity with a set of simple and clear questions that help guide our work. We ask questions such as the following: •

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Can we be helpful to the country and region involved? Will our efforts add value to the transition or negotiation process, and can we make a positive contribution to peace or reconciliation by our efforts? Can our work fill a useful niche that no other institution or organization has already filled? Who has invited us in to play a role, and are they respected, legitimate, and sincere in their efforts? Will our efforts be supported by the national government, international organizations, or respected parties who will work with us and guide our efforts locally? Can we secure adequate funding? Will our funders be perceived as nonpartisan by all sides? What type of follow-up programming can we envision? Can we ensure that our initial event will not be a one-off program but something that leads to

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follow-up activities, such as workshops and consultations, which will continue to engage key players in the transition and keep the process moving forward? How do we measure success in our efforts? What criteria can we use to gauge impact and progress?

Local partners are essential to the ultimate success of our work because they know the local political terrain, they have a nuanced understanding of the issues, they have relationships with key local actors, and they can carry on activities on the ground after or in between Project meetings, workshops, and conferences. We carefully vet any organization we work with to make sure that it is respected by all parties to a conflict, and that it does not have an agenda that favors one side or the other. We also ask if our shared experience methodology will be useful to the transition process and whether we will have access to key decision makers at various levels within critical target audiences. If we satisfy ourselves that we can provide real value and not duplicate the efforts of other organizations (unless complimentary programming is requested and helpful), then we undertake more in-depth research on the country and the issues to be addressed. Once we have completed the initial evaluation and believe we can play a useful role, we then develop an agenda with a brief set of issues to address, and identify the appropriate and most relevant examples from other countries to share. We then invite individuals to participate whom we consider to have the most relevant personal experience, insights, and ability to connect with the target audience. We also strive to keep our programs flexible so they can respond to evolving dynamics within a meeting or a larger shift in the political environment in the country where we are engaged. An example of how we design our programs can be seen in Kosovo, where we are collaborating with several local and international partners to support the Kosovar leadership as it prepares for independence and the building of a new sovereign state. There are a number of daunting and complex issues to consider when building a state from scratch, from the design and establishment of new institutions of government, the drafting of a national constitution, and the design of state symbols, to the selection and training of government officials at all levels of government, from the municipal to the national level. The Kosovar leadership also needs to prepare for an international donor conference; organize its foreign ministry; establish relations with key international institutions such as the United Nations, the European Union, and the World Bank; and open embassies and diplomatic offices around the world. For all of these needs, both practical and substantive, there are leaders from countries that have gone through similar processes who can offer valuable insight, guidance, and support. For example, Ashraf Ghani, who was minister of the economy and a senior political advisor under President Karzai in the post-Taliban government of Afghanistan, led the process to design a new, representative government in Afghanistan (the Loya Jirga) that included all elements of Afghan society and is credited with uniting the

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country under the new government. Minister Ghani also organized and led the Afghan government delegation to the international donor conference in Bonn, Germany, which resulted in billions of dollars of much-needed international financial, technical, and infrastructure support for the new Afghan government. In both cases, Minister Ghani had direct, relevant, and insightful experience as well as concrete recommendations to share with the Kosovar leaders, which they respected and incorporated into their own nation-building work.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS In conjunction with the Project on Justice in Times of Transition’s fifteenth anniversary in 2007, the Project leadership launched a strategic review of our programs and focus areas, taking stock of our achievements and contributions to the fields of conflict resolution and transitional justice, and considering areas of focus in the coming years. Under the direction of Ina Breuer, the Project’s outstanding executive director, we will continue to work in Kosovo and Colombia, but we also intend to broaden our efforts beyond engagements in specific countries to address issues confronting the field of conflict resolution as a whole. Specifically, we are developing programs to consider the challenges to conflict transformation, to look at the lessons learned from durable peace, and to ask why some peace processes are fragile and why some conflicts remain intractable. We also plan to look further at the challenges to personal and societal transformation and the role of forgiveness in confronting past abuses and promoting reconciliation. We are designing a program with input from other leading conflict resolution experts to measure the impact of traditional conflict resolution practices and to evaluate whether the conflict resolution community needs to revise, improve, or rethink their toolbox of approaches. We are also developing an initiative in partnership with the University of Amsterdam to look at the rise of extremist violence in Western Europe, particularly from second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants, and to understand how issues of cultural identity, marginalization, and political events outside Western Europe influence local immigrant populations. The goal of this initiative is to draw lessons from other societies that have addressed immigration and cultural, religious, and ethnic identities successfully in a tolerant and inclusive way. Building on our prior work in Central America, we are developing a program for young leaders representing all perspectives from throughout the region to discuss issues of civic engagement and civic responsibility. Half the population of Central America is younger than thirty years of age, and increasing crime, faltering educational systems, a lack of economic opportunities, and a growing class divide are making them more apathetic toward the political process, disengaged from their communities, and skeptical about their own ability to make a positive impact. The Project will convene young Central American leaders with their peers from other parts of the world, and with senior leaders from the region who will serve as mentors, to learn

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about successful examples of civic engagement and consider ways to enable greater political and social participation throughout Central America. In 2006 the Project formed a strategic partnership with the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University to jointly develop programming in areas of mutual interest. Dozens of Tufts undergraduate and graduate students have worked closely with Project staff and with participants in many of our initiatives, and they have made significant contributions to our work. In addition, the Project recently formed a strategic partnership with the Center for International Conflict Resolution at Columbia University to jointly develop programs and conduct research on conflict resolution and reconciliation initiatives, such as our recent programs for the government and ELN guerilla movement in Colombia. From 1999 through 2004, the Project was based at Harvard University as an interfaculty initiative affiliated with Harvard Law School, the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Our relationship with Harvard provided significant opportunities for the Project to expand its research capabilities, engage world-class scholars and researchers in our work, and produce several case studies related to leadership and negotiations based on the experience of leaders with whom we worked closely in Northern Ireland and South Africa. The Project will continue to respond proactively to opportunities to make a positive impact in countries struggling with change and to use the methodology of shared experience in all our work. Based on our experience over the past fifteen years, we know that individuals can learn from the experience of others, and that fundamental change, while difficult, is both possible and essential to bringing about peace and reconciliation. The Project has also begun to research and analyze the impact of our shared experience approach, as well as other conflict resolution methodologies, with the aim of developing clear and practical guidelines for employing our methodology so that others can use it effectively in their efforts to promote peace and reconciliation, as well as in other areas.

ADVICE AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE NGO LEADERS If there are lessons I have learned about starting up and running an effective NGO from my fifteen years of experience in helping build the Project on Justice in Times of Transition, I would suggest the following: •

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An individual or a group of individuals with a great idea, a can-do attitude, and a practical approach can have a meaningful impact on important local, national, and international issues. It is very important to reach out and collaborate with others in your field, to learn from their experience, and to seek ways to improve your work and your understanding of the issues. Try to find partners who can complement your skills and strengths, who can work with you in a productive and collaborative manner, and who can mobilize a set of relationships and networks that can contribute to your project’s success. Collectively, there is more wisdom among

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a group of people or organizations working toward the same goal than exists in one person or organization. It helps to understand that while others may be hesitant to support or be cynical about your ideas, often it is simply because they are stuck in an old point of view and find it hard to “think out of the box.” For example, I often encountered leaders who told me that there is nothing they could learn from the experience of others, yet I knew instinctively, and eventually through experience, that they could. By being creative and confident but also humble, my colleagues and I usually managed to persuade them to participate in one of our programs, which let them see for themselves that individuals can indeed learn from others, and that achieving peace is possible. It is essential to approach your work from a collaborative point of view rather than a competitive one. Far too often, nonprofit groups (as well as other organizations) view others in their field as competitors rather than potential partners, so they do not reach out to each other or try to work together when it makes sense, and they end up duplicating efforts, and wasting time and resources. Most people choose to work in the nonprofit sector because they want to make a contribution to improving the world, not to make a profit or eliminate the competition, and it is important not to lose sight of this larger goal. Taking a collaborative and mutually supportive approach is essential and ethically important. Never take the position that you have all the answers or insist that people should listen to you and your organization. As an American citizen, I have found that in any international context, it was very important to be humble and to acknowledge that I did not come from a country that had experienced a brutal civil war within living memory, or one that had been ruled by a repressive dictatorship that fostered division and distrust. The Project’s role, as a U.S.-based organization, is to serve as a neutral facilitator of dialogue and shared experience, and not to take a proscriptive approach. But this lesson holds true in any forum—no one wants to be lectured to about what they should or should not do. If there is one final lesson I have learned from my work with the Project on Justice in Times of Transition, it is that transformative change, while difficult to achieve, is possible. There are no better examples than South Africa, where negotiations brought a peaceful end to apartheid, and Northern Ireland, where a seemingly intractable civil war was ended through the joint efforts of all parties to the conflict. In both cases, once-bitter enemies are now partners in the political process, working toward the common good. Yet this lesson, that transformative change is possible, is not confined to societies in transition. There are countless challenges of all sorts at the local, national, and global level that need urgent attention, but efforts to address them are often hindered by a self-defeating sense that change is impossible. Your challenge is to imagine the unimaginable, to find creative solutions to problems that seem immune to resolution—and prove that they are not.

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PROJECT ON JUSTICE IN TIMES OF TRANSITION INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY BOARD José Maria Argueta, Guatemala Oscar Arias, Costa Rica Paul Arthur, Northern Ireland Hanan Ashrawi, Palestinian National Authority George Biddle, United States Kurt Biedenkopf, Germany Thomas S. Blanton, United States Alex Boraine, South Africa Martin Butora, Slovak Republic Naomi Chazan, Israel Roger Errera, France Jose Maria Figueres, Costa Rica Richard Goldstone, South Africa Leonel Gomez, El Salvador Mikhail Gorbachev, Russia Václav Havel, Czech Republic Maurice Hayes, Northern Ireland Stephen Heintz, United States Branka Kaselj, Croatia James LeMoyne, United States Nelson Mandela, South Africa Roelf Meyer, South Africa Adam Michnik, Poland Shimon Peres, Israel Tanja Petovar, Sweden Dimitrina Petrová, Bulgaria John Podesta, United States Jon Snow, Great Britain Dick Spring, Republic of Ireland Rose Styron, United States Lawrence Weschler, United States José Zalaquett, Chile

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Project on Justice in Times of Transition Founders and executive directors: Wendy Luers and Timothy Phillips Mission/Description: The Project on Justice in Times of Transition brings together individuals from a broad spectrum of countries to share experiences in ending conflict, building civil society, and fostering peaceful coexistence. It

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currently operates in affiliation with the Foundation for a Civil Society in New York and the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University. Since its creation in 1992 by co-chairs Wendy Luers and Timothy Phillips, the Project has conducted over 50 programs for a variety of leaders throughout the world and has utilized its methodology to assist them in addressing such difficult issues as the demobilization of combatants, the status of security files, police reform, developing effective negotiating skills, political demonstrations, and preserving or constructing the tenets of democracy in a heterogeneous society. Through its innovative programming, the Project has exposed a broad crosssection of communities in transition to comparable situations elsewhere, and has contributed to the broadening of international public discourse on transitional processes. In recent years the Project has conducted programs that have helped practitioners and political leaders strategize solutions in a variety of countries and regions, including Afghanistan, Colombia, East Timor, Guatemala, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, Palestine and Peru. Address: 96 Packard Avenue Medford, MA 02155 USA Telephone: (917) 340 5443 Fax: (617) 627-3940 E-mail: [email protected]

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Exodus World Service Heidi Moll Schoedel

Finding friends in America is like finding medicine in a refugee camp. Almost impossible. —Refugee from Burma

I can find a couch on a street corner. But how can I replace the friends and family members we’ve left behind? —Refugee from Bosnia

Nearly 13 million refugees and asylum seekers worldwide suffered the heartwrenching loss of friends, family members, and the familiar places of home in 1988, the same year we launched Exodus World Service. My two co-founders and I had little to offer in response to such immense anguish. We boasted no connections to world leaders. Our empty bank accounts provided no funds to purchase food, shelter, or medical care. In fact, we could barely claim an office. We worked from an unfinished basement holding three desks, one donated computer, and a phone line. Pooled retirement savings funded our first few months of operations. Despite our meager resources, we shared a bold dream. We believed that we could bring hope and healing to refugees around the world by mobilizing local churches to offer hospitality to strangers. Twenty years later, the statistics remain overwhelming. In fact, the number of refugees and asylum seekers has grown to more than 14 million worldwide. Given this situation, I understand the temptation to conclude that ordinary people can make no real difference; to believe that helping refugees necessitates massive resources, power, and influence; and to look solely to governments and world leaders for solutions. But instead of despair, I feel hope. I have grown to deeply appreciate the wisdom of our early vision. Granted, Exodus’s impact is miniscule when 239

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measured against the enormity of the refugee crisis. But the impact is palpable and life changing when measured by the lives of individual refugees and volunteers. I have learned from refugees that their deepest wounds are not physical, but emotional. Refugees battle more than hunger, cold, and disease. They must also conquer fear, loneliness, and despair. Exodus brings healing through a deceptively simple strategy: we inspire and equip volunteers to invite refugees in—into their homes, into their lives, into their communities. Warm and loving hospitality provides more than practical and material help. It provides connection, belonging, and hope for the future. And it is not just refugees who benefit. Volunteers also find their lives changed by these connections: their worlds enlarge, and they grow in new and unexpected ways. Such was the experience of Mohammed, a refugee from Somalia, and Pat, an Exodus volunteer. As a Somali Bantu, Mohammed’s life had always been difficult. The Somali Bantu were once slaves and occupied the lowest rung of Somali society. But when civil war broke out, life became intolerable. The Bantu became targets for murder, rape, and theft. To save their lives, Mohammed and his family fled to a refugee camp in a neighboring country. Life there was not much better. The refugee camp was crowded and dangerous. Survival was all that mattered. And while they waited year after year for someplace safe to start over, Mohammed’s sight slipped way, and he became blind. Finally, they received the long-awaited news that the United States had granted them refugee status. Pat and fellow members from his church were there to welcome Mohammed’s family on the day they arrived in Chicago. The church’s refugee ministry began quite simply with two people who said yes to Exodus World Service’s invitation to welcome refugee families. At that time, they had no idea where the journey would lead. Church volunteers provided Mohammed’s family with a Welcome to America! Pack containing all the items needed for the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. The volunteers put sheets on beds, hung towels in the bathroom, filled kitchen cupboards with pots and pans, and turned an empty apartment into a home. Their genuine hospitality brought comfort to a family weary from jet lag and frightened by the confusion of a new language and culture. Pat returned regularly to visit Mohammed and his family. He helped them practice English, introduced them to their new community, and answered questions about life in the United States. One day while out for a drive, Mohammed confided in Pat his biggest fear. Mohammed explained to Pat that he trusted him. He said that even though he was Muslim and Pat was Christian, he could see that Pat was a man of prayer. And therefore he was coming to Pat for help. He was terrified he would be unable to survive as a blind man in the United States. What could be done? Pat had no idea how to respond. He was simply a volunteer who had said yes. He was not a doctor. He knew nothing about the social service system or benefits for blind people. What could he do? Taking a deep breath, Pat responded that he did not know how he could help, but he would pray. When Pat returned home, he called a friend from church who knew a friend, and this led to a consultation with an eye doctor. That eye exam revealed the possibility of a surgical repair in one eye. Pat talked to more people, and each one offered what they could. Before long, the doctor had donated his fees, a hospital

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had donated services, an anesthesiologist had stepped forward, and the operation was arranged. Pat was there when the bandages were removed. He witnessed the miracle when Mohammed looked into the eyes of his wife and children for the first time in years. He shared Mohammed’s first look at his new homeland. He watched Mohammed skip down the sidewalk because he could travel without holding someone’s hand. The lives of Pat and Mohammed will never be the same because a small, ordinary church offered hospitality to refugees.

A VISION FOR A NEW ORGANIZATION The vision for Exodus can be traced back to a small church in Evanston, Illinois. Two of the Exodus co-founders, Dennis Ripley and George Wadsworth, attended the church and served on a committee that welcomed some of the first Vietnamese “boat people” to arrive in the United States. The church developed such a strong commitment to welcoming refugees that they brought Dennis on staff to mobilize neighboring congregations. Eventually, hundreds of refugees were helped through their efforts. In the late 1970s, the U.S. Department of State began contracting with private voluntary organizations to assist in the resettlement of refugees. Initially, the government expected this to be a short-term, emergency program to resettle the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing Vietnam. But the basic resettlement structure implemented at that time continues to this day. Dennis accepted an offer to coordinate the Chicago-area efforts of one of the fledgling refugee resettlement organizations. He brought George on staff to assist him, and eventually I also joined the staff of this organization. Together, we accumulated a combined total of more than twenty-five years of resettlement agency experience at the local, state, and national level. Through the refugee resettlement system, federal and state governments contract with nonprofit organizations to provide specific resettlement services to newly arriving refugees. The goal of the system is to help refugees become economically self-sufficient in the shortest time possible. The role of the resettlement agencies is to provide refugees with linguistically and culturally appropriate services. Services funded by the government are those deemed helpful to developing self-sufficiency, such as English language classes and employment services. Funding formulas are based on the number of refugees served, but refugee arrival rates are uneven and unpredictable, and agencies often receive little notice before families arrive. All of these factors contribute to a system that is fragile and crisis oriented. In the late 1980s, the level of volunteer involvement started dropping, and resettlement agency staff began to complain about “compassion fatigue.” According to prevailing wisdom, the private sector was burned-out after assisting a steady flow of Vietnamese and Indochinese refugees. Fewer churches were stepping up to sponsor newly arriving refugee families. So instead of relying on volunteers to “sponsor” refugee families, many resettlement agencies began shifting to staff-based models for service delivery.

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Professional resettlement agency staff offered invaluable support to help refugees adjust to a new life. They provided expertise in everything from English language instruction for nonliterate students to job placement strategies. But professional staff could not address refugees’ deep need for relationship and connection. Their caseloads were too large and their responsibilities too numerous to allow them to build personal friendships with the refugees they served. It was in this context of a crisis-driven system with decreasing volunteer involvement and overworked staff that the vision for Exodus’s ministry began to take shape. Those early years in church-based refugee ministry had planted an enduring appreciation for the life-changing impact of one-on-one relationships forged between refugees and local community members. It was becoming apparent that the existing refugee resettlement system was ill-equipped to nurture this type of grassroots, volunteer involvement. Perhaps, we mused, a new model was needed to fully engage the local church—a model not tied to the crisis-driven fluctuations of the refugee resettlement program, a model committed to nurturing and equipping volunteers for long-term involvement.

THE EARLY YEARS Our first step in launching a new organization was to seek the counsel of a diverse group of advisors. We outlined our dreams and visions in a concise prospectus and shared that information in personal meetings with key mentors. We requested honest and thoughtful critique. Did we make a compelling case for the formation of a new organization? Were there any important factors or information that we failed to take into account? Our next step was to gather a group of mentors together for a full-day evaluation session. The ultimate question addressed in that session was whether to proceed with the creation of a new organization. At the end of many hours of vigorous conversation, a vote was taken. Our mentors unanimously supported the new venture, and most of those present agreed to serve as members of the organization’s first board of directors. We then announced our plans to the agency where we were currently employed. It was a difficult departure. Our intention to form a new organization left some colleagues feeling betrayed. Why, they wondered, could we not implement our vision within the framework of the existing organization? What were our motives? Would a new organization compete with and undercut the work of the existing organization? Over time, we have built a solid partnership with the agency we left. We have been able to demonstrate our desire to complement, rather than compete, with their continued ministry. But this healing took time. We pooled the retirement funds we received upon leaving that agency to provide seed money for this new venture. We used those funds to purchase basic office equipment and supplies, and to cover initial salary expenses. An attorney donated his time to draft our bylaws and file for our nonprofit status as a 501(c)(3) organization. A graphic artist donated his skills to design our logo

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and letterhead. After opening a post office box and establishing a phone line (312-REFUGEE), we were in business. Our first major challenge was securing ongoing operational funds. Working with our governing board members, we compiled lists of friends and family members, and mailed all of them an invitation to join us in this new venture. We met one-on-one with potential supporters, outlining our vision and passion. We also contacted key foundations willing to fund start-up efforts and prepared detailed proposals requesting their support to help launch this new initiative. Eventually, a combination of individual gifts, church donations, and a start-up grant from the Pew Charitable Trust funded our first year of operations. This private-sector funding mix of individuals, churches, and foundations continues to sustain the organization today. Once initial funding was secured, we turned our attention to fleshing out our service model. Volunteers used phone books, church directories, and other tools to help us compile a database of 3,000 churches in the greater Chicagoland area. We began contacting those churches and conducting initial market research. What did they know about the refugees living in their community? Were they currently involved in refugee ministry? Why or why not? What questions did they have? What fears did they share? We sought advice from experts in the areas of marketing and church ministry. At the time of our launch, baby boomers were changing the face of church leadership. Our consultants advised us that new ministry models were needed, because baby boomers shared very different expectations and priorities from the generation of leaders that preceded them. We needed to develop service projects that were concrete and specific. We needed to offer projects that were time limited. And most importantly, we needed to clearly articulate the impact a volunteer would make through his or her involvement. We also consulted with front-line staff from the Chicago-area refugee resettlement agencies. We acknowledged their frustration with the current level of volunteer response from local churches. But we also challenged them to expand their models for volunteer involvement. At that time, sponsorship was the only option offered to most churches and volunteers. Sponsorship involved a significant investment of time and resources. It required a three-month initial commitment, thousands of dollars, and hundreds of hours of volunteer time. What if sponsorship is simply too expensive for a local church, we asked? Our research strongly indicated the need for other, less-intense ways through which churches and community volunteers could get involved and still make a meaningful impact. Using the feedback and advice we received from all of these diverse sources, we developed the Welcome to America! Pack. The welcome pack meets a core need for the refugees and the refugee resettlement organizations. It provides all the household supplies needed to set up the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen of a refugee family’s first apartment and includes a first month’s supply of food staples. Collecting and delivering a welcome pack is much easier than sponsoring a refugee. It requires only six weeks from start to finish and costs only $500 if everything in the welcome pack

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is purchased new. The cost is even lower if the welcome pack includes used items in excellent condition. We designed the Welcome to America! Pack to appeal to a wide range of church groups. And we incorporated program design elements that would appeal to a baby boomer audience: the project is time limited with a defined beginning and end point, it offers a direct connection to a specific refugee family, and the impact of the project is easily measured and defined. However, our goals for the project extended beyond simply collecting and delivering the Welcome to America! Pack. We envisioned the welcome pack as a first step into deeper and longer-term involvement in refugee ministry. An important component of our project design was the requirement that volunteers personally deliver the welcome pack to an arriving refugee family. This personal delivery adds administrative complexity. It requires juggling last-minute refugee arrival information with volunteer schedules and resettlement agency timeframes. From a resettlement agency perspective, it would be simpler to have the volunteers deliver the welcome pack to their office before a family arrives. But delivering the welcome pack directly to the refugee family creates a personal connection for the volunteers. It elevates the project from merely transferring stuff into an opportunity to welcome strangers. It provides a starting point for ongoing friendship and connection. Exodus World Service volunteers delivered a Welcome to America! Pack to a refugee family from Sudan. The volunteers brought along their six-year-old son, who connected immediately with the nine year old in the refugee family. The two boys laughed together, played soccer in the apartment, and wrote down their names for one other. When it was time to leave, they carefully shook hands. On the drive home later that evening, the volunteers were very moved when their son reported that his new refugee friend had generously given him one of the only things he had brought with him to his new home—the bag of peanuts from the airplane. “It really puts things in perspective,” they told us later, “when a little boy who has nothing is willing to give something away.”

Our market research revealed that welcoming refugees from different cultures and language groups pushed churches and volunteers outside their normal comfort zones. Volunteers were not comfortable interacting with refugees and did not feel equipped to help meet their needs. They were also afraid that refugee ministry was “too big.” The only model most volunteers were familiar with was the traditional sponsorship model. And many volunteers referenced negative past experiences with refugee sponsorships in which the experience felt overwhelming, seemed unsuccessful, or otherwise ended badly. It was therefore very important for us to offer strong training and support. We wanted volunteers to feel safe saying yes. We developed the Welcome to America! Pack resource manual to equip volunteers. It includes step-by-step instructions for organizing and completing the project. It contains a variety of tools to make the project user-friendly, such as a

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sample bulletin announcement, a reproducible sign-up sheet, and a list of common questions and answers. It clearly spells out what volunteers are expected to do, how Exodus will help, when the project starts and stops, how much it will cost, and what the impact will be. Armed with a project and support materials, we began marketing the Welcome to America! Pack to our database of 3,000 churches. Initially, we sent letters inviting churches to collect a welcome pack. Over time, those letters developed into specially designed advertising mailers promoting the project to specific target audiences. We experimented with target groups within churches, and found women’s ministries and youth programs to be most responsive. The mailers use attention-getting and sometimes humorous themes, and address the needs and concerns of our target audience. For example, a mailing to women’s ministries mentions the common problem of too much stuff and encourages women to “clean out their closets and make a difference for refugees.” A mailer to youth groups picks up on the popularity of the Survivor reality show and challenges youth groups to help a refugee family survive in the United States. The mailers offer a cost-effective strategy to narrow our target market down from 3,000 churches to a much smaller group of churches interested in learning more about refugee ministry. We invest more time and resources in this select group by making personal follow-up calls and offering free training and support materials. From this smaller group, we identify those volunteers ready to commit to collecting a welcome pack. At the same time we built relationships with interested local churches, we also strengthened our relationships with local resettlement agencies. The Welcome to America! Pack model represented a new strategy for engaging volunteers. Resettlement agency staff had some investment in the new model because we consulted them during the development phase. But we needed to work out a wide variety of details related to how we would be notified of arriving refugee families, how we would ensure that we did not duplicate resettlement agency efforts, how we would guarantee the volunteers received accurate and timely information, and so on. We approached these resettlement agency relationships with the same commitment to strong customer service and support that we applied to our volunteers. By understanding and meeting the organizational needs of the resettlement agencies and serving them well, we built strong working partnerships and began to receive more and more referrals of new refugee families. During these early years, we also implemented a variety of other initiatives to try to increase local church involvement in refugee ministry. We co-hosted a conference with Wheaton College and the Slavic Gospel Association focused on Soviet Christian refugees, a new group of refugees that began arriving in the United States shortly after we launched our organization. We hosted a speaking tour with Boris Perchatkin, one of the first Soviet Christian refugees to arrive in the United States. We partnered with David and Karen Mains and the Chapel of the Air ministries to feature refugee ministry as part of their 50 Day Spiritual Adventure. We convinced the Chicago area refugee resettlement organizations to

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work together to promote refugee ministry to local churches by hosting a joint Refugee Sunday campaign. We organized resettlement agency staff and local church volunteers in a Chicago 500 Campaign, designed to invite every church in Chicago to welcome one of the approximately 500 refugees arriving in the Chicagoland area annually at that time. All of these initiatives deepened our understanding of how to effectively engage volunteers. They shaped our language and further defined our brand. They expanded awareness of and credibility for our organization. They deepened our relationships with the resettlement agencies and other partner organizations. But although everything we tried left its mark on our current organization, the Welcome to America! Pack has had the most enduring impact and remains one of our flagship programs. Volunteers who experienced their first encounter with a refugee family during our initial year of operation still maintain friendships with the refugees they welcomed. Churches have built permanent Welcome to America! Pack collection closets and now collect as many as six to twelve Welcome to America! Packs every year. And relationships formed through Welcome to America! Pack deliveries continue to bless the lives of those involved. I regularly hear stories of wedding celebrations, cross-country travel, holiday feasts, and other events that keep these volunteer/refugee friendships warm and strong. James and Ellen fled Liberia because of violence and persecution. They were married in a simple ceremony in the refugee camp during long years spent waiting for a safe place to call home. Although not the celebration Ellen dreamed of, this was the only wedding that could be arranged. When they finally arrived in the United States, James and Ellen struggled to start a new life in a strange land. Fortunately, they were not alone. Exodus World Service volunteers made a commitment to welcome and serve them. The volunteers helped with many practical needs, and over time became close friends. One day, gazing at the wedding picture of one of the volunteers, Ellen casually mentioned her unfulfilled desire for a “real” wedding. That off-hand comment inspired a flurry of activity. What an opportunity to bless this special couple who had survived so much! Working together, the volunteers ordered a wedding cake, purchased wedding attire at a resale shop, contacted a pastor, and invited their high school children to perform live music. Just a few weeks later, James and Ellen said “I do” surrounded by their new friends in a beautiful backyard ceremony. Ellen wore the pearl necklace and white shoes first worn by her American friend at her wedding many years ago. Now Ellen has her own wedding picture hanging on the wall, which reminds her of special friends who helped make a dream come true.

THE MIDDLE YEARS From the start, we placed a high value on the importance of keeping solid records to document the impact of our efforts. In the early years, we cobbled together a combination of free and low-cost software to record information. More recently, we have begun using a single, web-based program that integrates our

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financial information, volunteer management records, and contact management functions into one system. Early data analysis revealed that although the Welcome to America! Pack project effectively mobilized churches and individual volunteers into first-time volunteer involvement with refugees, only some of the volunteers maintained ongoing contact with the refugee families they welcomed. To help us better understand this program dynamic, we invited a graduate student to analyze the Welcome to America! Pack program as part of his thesis research. His investigation revealed that although almost all of the participating volunteers wanted more personal connection with refugee families they welcomed, many had no idea how to proceed. These volunteers were held back by their fears about overcoming language and cultural barriers, their sense of inadequacy in responding to the significant needs of refugees, and their uncertainty about how to proceed. It was clear that for this group of volunteers, additional structure and support was needed. In response to these findings, we began designing a “friendship” program that could foster ongoing relationships between volunteers and refugees. Once again, we started with market research. World Relief, a national resettlement agency, provided seed funding. We surveyed the World Relief resettlement agency staff, Exodus volunteers, and newly arrived refugees, and sought opinions on such issues as how frequently volunteers and refugees should connect, where meetings should take place, how much structure meetings should have, and other similar topics. We hosted focus group sessions. And we gathered information about effective friendship-building programs that served other populations, such as international students. Not surprisingly, there were differences between what refugees desired from a friendship program and what volunteers were comfortable with. Refugees requested volunteers who would visit for one to two years. Volunteers, on the other hand, preferred much shorter time frames. In designing what would become our New Neighbor Program, we opted to use a three-month time frame. Our rationale was that we would be more successful recruiting volunteers if the time frames were short. A strong connection could develop in three months. And we knew from experience that once a friendship blossomed, it would continue. If such a connection did not develop naturally within a three-month time frame, it would probably be a good idea to end the formal connection. Another key decision made after gathering feedback was to hold meetings in the refugee’s home, instead of in the volunteer’s home or a neutral location such as a library. Traveling to a volunteer’s home would be too difficult for new refugees with limited access to transportation. And a public location was too sterile and intimidating. Meeting in the refugee’s home allowed the refugee’s children and other family members to be present during visits. And it provided a comfortable and flexible location. Volunteers and refugees could watch TV, cook together, review mail or school papers, and do a variety of other things. Our next step after making these core program decisions was to develop program training and support materials. As with the Welcome to America! Pack program, we placed a high value on volunteer service and support. Our strong

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belief, confirmed through years of operation, is that the quality of support we provide to our volunteers has a direct correlation with the long-term impact of our volunteers. We want our volunteers to go beyond one-time serving opportunities. We want them to make welcoming refugees part of their ongoing life as individuals or church communities. Developing this depth of commitment requires that we nurture strong, supportive, and personal relationships with our volunteers and equip them to serve. The New Neighbor Handbook we produced includes information about the refugee resettlement system, cross-cultural communication skills, ideas for meeting activities, and other helpful tools. We developed promotional tools, including a brochure. We also worked out systems and associated tools to enable coordination and partnership with the refugee resettlement agencies in identifying and matching interested refugees. In addition, we developed a training workshop that was and is being used to prepare thousands of volunteers to build effective cross-cultural relationships and to manage inevitable cross-cultural conflict. The workshop is experiential in design, so that participants learn by doing and not simply by hearing. The training builds an awareness of the participants’ own culture and an understanding of how other cultures differ. It prepares participants for the inevitable conflicts that arise during cross-cultural interactions, and equips them with proactive problem-solving skills. Once these tools were in place, we began offering the New Neighbor Program to volunteers. Participants have ranged in age from retirees in their eighties to newborn babies accompanying their parents on weekly visits. Over time, program variations have developed, including a New Neighbor-Citizenship Program, which links refugees who have applied for U.S. citizenship with volunteers who meet with them once a week to help them prepare for the required civics and history exam, and a New Neighbor-College Program, which links college students with new refugee families. More than 90 percent of the refugees involved in the New Neighbor Program improve their English language skills, increase their knowledge of local resources, and strengthen their sense of community. But the impact goes so much deeper. The relationships formed through this program stand the test of time. New Neighbor volunteers visit their refugee friends every week for a minimum of three months. But almost 70 percent of the volunteers visit for much longer, often for years. Ralph, a retiree, responded to a notice in his church bulletin advertising the New Neighbor Program. He was matched with James, a refugee from southern Sudan. Although it has now been several years since they were first introduced, they remain close friends. “Ralph helps me and teaches me how to speak English in this country so I can get a better life,” explains James. “We talk about Sudan and life going on around DuPage County. He never misses a day. When he says he is coming, he is coming. I am really thankful for the things he’s done. I see him like an uncle to me.” Their relationship has profoundly impacted Ralph, as well. “James is a wonderful man, and he and I have really become friends. I’ve come to know more about the

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Sudan and to realize what James had to go through. I certainly can say today that I have gained more, I have received more than I ever expected when I first met James.” These two men share a deep connection and mutual respect. But they never would have met without the New Neighbor Program. “When we came, we didn’t know anybody,” explains James. “You don’t see anybody standing in the street, somebody like Ralph who can help you. It takes a program like the New Neighbor Program.”

Additional Exodus volunteer opportunities include the School Kit Collection, in which volunteers collect and deliver backpacks filled with school supplies for new refugee children; the Exodus Advocacy Network, which mobilizes volunteers to speak up on behalf of refugees to those in power; and the Expanding Your Table Thanksgiving program, which arranges for refugee families to spend Thanksgiving in American homes. We followed a similar process to develop each new program. We first analyzed service gaps, then researched possible responses, used the research results to design program components, and finally developed training and support resources. We also have gradually expanded our training and educational resources. With the help of volunteers, we developed, tested, revised, and eventually published a six-week Bible study on refugees. We adapted refugee simulation activities for use with our volunteers. We used the donated services of a church audiovisual program to produce DVDs. A retired volunteer helped us create and manage our web page, where we post a variety of resource and education tools, as well as links to other organizations. We recruited and trained volunteers who formed a Speaker’s Bureau and now work with our staff to lead presentations and workshops for other groups. At least one new program we developed did not stand the test of time. The Refugee Furniture Network(RefNet) used volunteer drivers to collect donated furniture and deliver it to refugee families. The program successfully saved beds, mattresses, kitchen tables, chairs, and other essential furniture items from the landfill and put them in the hands of refugees in need. But analysis of our program results showed that RefNet did not result in our primary goal of building relationship connections. The furniture donors and refugee recipients rarely met, and the volunteer drivers were too busy on their routes to make personal connections with the refugee families. We therefore discontinued this program. The termination of RefNet flowed from several key decisions made by the governing board. Governing board members meet quarterly for half-day meetings. But at the start of every fiscal year, they schedule a two-day strategic planning retreat. In the early years, the strategic planning retreat focused on practical issues related to starting an organization: developing a fundraising plan, creating a brand identity, implementing policies regarding human resource issues, and the like. But as the organization solidified and began developing a track record, the board used the retreat to address several critical questions that arose regarding core mission and values.

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One of the first critical mission questions tackled by the governing board was to define our core customer. Exodus serves three primary customers: new refugee families arriving in our community, volunteers recruited from local churches, and resettlement agencies. The needs, concerns, and interests of each of these customers are not always compatible. This can be illustrated by the Welcome to America! Pack program. The names of newly arriving refugee families are referred to us by the resettlement agencies. Under the terms of their federal contract, the resettlement agencies must ensure that all new refugee families receive certain basic household supplies. Their primary concern is that these supplies be available when a new family arrives. Arranging volunteer deliveries causes additional work and last-minute juggling for the resettlement agency staff. From their perspective, the Welcome to America! Pack program would be most efficient if the supplies were delivered to their office prior to the arrival of a refugee family. Even more helpful would be having supplies available in storage so they could be accessed whenever a new family arrived. From the volunteer perspective, however, the most rewarding aspect of the project is the opportunity to personally meet and welcome the refugee family. Volunteers often do not fully appreciate the challenges a new family will confront until they meet them face to face. Volunteer commitment is deepened and motivation to serve increased when volunteers witness firsthand the significant impact of their contribution. Personally delivering a Welcome to America! Pack can provide powerful and life-changing moments. Volunteers see a barren apartment and realize that the items they collected are the only things that fill the shelves. Volunteers struggle to communicate across language and cultural barriers, and begin to grasp how much a new family will need to learn to survive. Volunteers observe the tremendous relief and gratitude expressed by a family when they are finally safe in the United States, and they gain a new perspective on their own blessings. From the refugee perspective, it would be ideal if the Welcome to America! Pack volunteers returned to visit on a regular basis. The volunteers are some of the first people refugees meet when they arrive. The warm welcome and support the volunteers offer eases the fear and loneliness of the refugees’ first day in the United States. Initial bonds of trust are built with the volunteers, and the refugees expect to see the volunteers on an ongoing basis. They are disappointed if volunteers do not come back. The board had to determine which of these competing interests should take precedence as we designed and implemented programs. Their conclusion was that our primary customer is the volunteers, with refugees a close second. To live out our mission to mobilize volunteers, we must design programs that are attuned to their needs and interests. Of course, we want the programs we design to be of real assistance to refugees. We do not want programs that simply make volunteers feel good, while providing neutral or even negative benefit to refugees. We therefore pay close attention to the needs and interests of new refugee families. But when there are options, such as whether or not we require Welcome to America! Pack

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volunteers to return for additional visits or how long an initial commitment period is asked of New Neighbor volunteers, we will be guided by the volunteer interests. Our rationale is that if we do not meet the needs of volunteers, they will not get involved. But if volunteers have a positive experience, they have the potential to go on to longer-term involvement, which will ultimately provide even greater benefit to refugees. The resettlement agencies fell to a distant third in this analysis. Our partnership with the resettlement agencies provides a very effective way to identify and connect with refugees who need help. That partnership offers an effective method of preventing duplication of service. But the board was clear that the ultimate goal of our partnership is to serve volunteers and refugees, not resettlement agency staff. To the degree possible, we design programs that meet the needs of the agencies as well, but when there is a conflict between what is best for the agency and what is best for the volunteers and refugees, we ask the agencies to flex. In the Welcome to America! Pack program, for example, we have insisted the agencies take on the responsibility for helping us arrange volunteer deliveries, which they have willingly done. We have a complex relationship with the resettlement agencies. Initially, resettlement agencies viewed Exodus as a potential threat. Our mission is unique, and it does not fit the mold of any other refugee service organization. The resettlement agencies were unclear about our role and saw us as competitors for scarce resources. Working relationships were first formed at the direct staff level. We collaborated with the caseworkers directly responsible for providing services to refugee families. As the value of what we offered became apparent, support developed at management levels. Today, we are primarily viewed as strategic partners. But with high turnover among resettlement agency staff, we continually need to rebuild working relationships. We also still confront the challenges to partnership that exist in a field with high need and competition for less than adequate resources. Our approach to interagency cooperation is to focus on providing strong customer service to the agencies and helping them achieve their goals. We take a pragmatic approach and look for areas where our programs can add value. Another key mission and vision issue addressed by the board was to define our core product. As we began exploring new opportunities, we saw two paths for expanding on our initial success in mobilizing volunteers. One path would be working to increase the depth of our programs by providing opportunities for volunteers to engage in longer-term and more intense volunteer involvement. The other path would be working to expand the breadth of our programs by engaging larger number of volunteers in refugee ministry with our existing programs. To address this question, we once again looked at the lessons we had learned to date and the experience of others. After analysis and discussion, the board reached the conclusion that Exodus’s key niche in the refugee ministry market is engaging new volunteers. For the majority of volunteers, the most difficult steps are the first ones. New volunteers need to learn about refugees and their needs, develop compassion for refugees and a desire to help, step outside of their comfort zones, and

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find practical ways to serve. Exodus’s programs effectively address these issues and get first-time volunteers involved. We are one of the only organizations specifically focused on mobilizing new refugee ministry volunteers. Once volunteers become engaged, the experience often takes on a momentum of its own. The experience of welcoming and serving refugees is so life changing and the relationships formed so meaningful that the motivation to stay involved becomes internally driven. When volunteers reach this stage in their journey, they begin finding their own ways to help. They no longer need time-limited, shortterm, specific, well-supported projects. They no longer need the safety net and hand-holding that Exodus staff members provide. They become much more independent and self-directed. At this stage, there are many organizations that offer programs and opportunities where these volunteers can serve. The board’s decision to focus our ministry on engaging new volunteers was not an either/or decision. Choosing that path did not mean we would not also serve long-term volunteers. However, our support for long-term volunteers has taken a different form. Instead of designing structured, clearly defined service projects, we offer long-term volunteers encouragement and support. Exodus invites these volunteers to become part of a community of people who have made a long-term commitment to welcoming and serving refugees. That community includes staff members, board members, volunteers, and refugees. We provide these volunteers information about refugee issues and opportunities; link them with other people with similar interests; involve them in leadership roles where they can speak out, train new volunteers, or help in other areas; and thank them, affirm them, and remind them that what they do is valuable. The governing board made another important decision regarding our core product. The board clearly stated that Exodus is a mobilizing organization, and not a direct service organization. Our staff members do not provide core services directly to refugees; rather, they mobilize and equip volunteers, and it is the volunteers that serve refugees. This issue arose in response to opportunities for expansion of Exodus’s programs suggested by volunteers and funding organizations. For example, volunteers became aware of the acute need for affordable housing, and suggested Exodus buy an apartment building to house new refugee families. Other suggestions included teaching refugees to drive, finding jobs for refugees, and starting an income generation program. Staff time and resources are limited. No matter how efficient the organization, there is a limit to how many people a staff member can serve directly. This is particularly true in the area of relationship building. It is impossible for staff members to build strong friendships with every new refugee. The governing board realized that Exodus significantly leveraged our resources and impact by focusing on volunteer mobilization. By using staff to mobilize and equip others, we greatly increase their impact. By investing in the deployment of long-term volunteers, we vastly increase the level of resources and support available to serve refugee families. As the board further clarified and defined Exodus’s mission and vision, board members began to look for new metrics for evaluating progress toward achieving

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our objectives. We kept detailed records from the start, and had data for such quantifiable areas as the number of refugees served, the number of volunteers mobilized, and the like. But the board realized we needed additional data to evaluate whether our programs effectively engaged new volunteers, launched volunteers into long-term involvement, and resulted in the formation of long-term, mutually beneficial relationships between volunteers and refugees. The process of developing new metrics began by identifying star volunteers, who clearly exemplified Exodus’s mission in action. We created a list of the specific characteristics demonstrated by these volunteers. From that list of specific traits, characteristics common to multiple volunteers were generalized, and those characteristics most reflective of our mission were then prioritized. Ultimately, this list was narrowed to a set of key traits that we referred to as the Seven Traits of a Refugee Champion. We define a Refugee Champion as an individual who shares God’s compassionate love for refugees and puts that compassion into action. A Refugee Champion demonstrates the following characteristics: 1. Service: completes service projects and may go beyond basic requirements 2. Knowledge: learns more about refugees 3. Relationship: develops friendships with refugees 4. Recruitment: involves others in serving refugees 5. Initiative: self-initiates action to serve refugees 6. Faith Motivation: is internally motivated by a commitment to welcome and serve refugees 7. Lifestyle: makes service to refugees an ongoing part of his or her lifestyle We next analyzed each characteristic on the list to identify what Exodus can do to help develop that characteristic and how we can evaluate our effectiveness in doing so. Our statistics on program involvement were helpful for assessing how effectively we addressed the first characteristic, engaging volunteers in the completion of service projects. But we needed more creative methods for the other characteristics. We began using a variety of other evaluation tools, including postproject evaluation forms and surveys. Identifying and implementing effective metrics for program evaluation is an area we continue to refine. A volunteer with a professional background in corporate training and evaluation programs is currently working with us. Our challenges include balancing the desire for meaningful and detailed data against the limited staff time and resources available to collect and analyze those data, and identify meaningful indicators. We have no problem documenting the concrete measurables—the value of items donated, the number of hours of one-on-one language instruction, the number of people involved—but the most meaningful impact of Exodus’s work is harder to quantify. Exodus provides community and connection. We provide hope and a network of support. We provide a way for refugees to be valued for the gifts and talents they bring and the perspectives they share.

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Sometimes the only way we can convey this deep impact is by sharing anecdotal stories of refugees and volunteers we have served, such as the following: Abu served as a police officer in Iraq. But when he spoke out against unjust policies, he was tortured and threatened with death. He escaped to Syria, hoping to find safety. Instead, he was beaten and left in jail with his arms handcuffed in front of him for more than a year. After his release, he fled again to Lebanon. While in Lebanon, Abu received word that he could resettle as a refugee in the United States. For the first time in years, he had hope. But his friends warned him to be careful. They were afraid he would face additional beatings and persecution in the United States because he was a Muslim. Shortly after Abu arrived in the Chicagoland area, Exodus World Service volunteers came to his apartment, bringing a home-cooked meal, food, and household items. Abu was very frightened. “What do they want from us?” he whispered anxiously to his wife. “We have no money in our pockets to give them.” It soon became apparent they wanted nothing in return. Abu was amazed. “They did not care whether I was Muslim or Christian. They did not care that I did not look like them and could not speak their language. Our guests were here to share with us. These things were gifts.” Beatrice knows sadness. Born and raised in Rwanda, she survived the horrific genocide that ravaged her homeland. Beatrice and her two young children managed to escape alive, but her husband did not. Devastated by his murder, Beatrice and her children found the following years to be filled with continued trauma and suffering. Many times the challenges overwhelmed Beatrice, but somehow she found enough strength to keep going alone. Beatrice and her children finally found a safe place to rebuild in the Chicagoland area. High school students from a church service group warmly welcomed them and filled their new apartment with box after box of household supplies and food staples. Beatrice watched them work with tears streaming down her face. Later, after sharing laughter and pizza, she stood to make a speech. Through a translator she told the story of her suffering. She ended by saying, “Today, for the first time I have forgotten my sadness.” George recently wrote a thanksgiving e-mail to the Exodus staff. “I sit here this morning having just finished my quiet time thinking of the strange circumstances that connected me to Exodus. Without a doubt, the few minutes I spent in an empty apartment seven or eight years ago with nine Bosnians was one of the most significant moments in my life. I can never forget that time or for that matter almost any encounter I’ve had with refugees. You have no idea how the opportunity that your leadership has provided has shaped my thoughts, values, and most importantly my faith. I’m more grateful than you’ll ever know.”

THE PRESENT Today Exodus remains small, with two full-time and five part-time employees and an annual budget of approximately $300,000. But increasingly, our impact reaches beyond the Chicagoland area and into other communities across the United States and around the world. This trend began with invitations to speak at national conferences. Several of the national resettlement agencies invited us to lead workshops at their annual

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conferences to share what we were learning about mobilizing local volunteers. As people from other areas of the country learned about our work, we began receiving invitations to speak at events hosted by other groups, such as national church denominations. This led to calls from individual churches or organizations asking for advice and resources to help them in their local community. We freely offered whatever help we could. This included phone and e-mail consultation, sharing of our program manuals and educational tools, and even traveling to local communities to train staff and volunteers. For example, a church group in the Missouri area secured local grant funding that enabled me to visit them several times to provide intensive training and support to local leaders. A resettlement agency in Michigan sent staff to our office to watch us in action and then invited me to their office to lead a staff training. These requests caused the board to address new areas of mission clarification. First, was our mission specific to the Chicagoland area? Board members quickly agreed that our mission had no geographic limitations. Our goal is to mobilize volunteers to serve refugees wherever they are located in the world. The second issue that arose was more complex: how much control did we want to maintain over the use of our program models and materials? Addressing this issue required the board to evaluate a variety of different aspects of our ministry. These included our desire for excellence in all areas of our work, our brand identification, our limited financial resources, our fundraising capacity, and our organizational structure. The board’s position on this issue developed gradually over the course of several years. Once again, we looked at both our own experience and the lessons learned by other local nonprofit organizations with national impact. We identified a variety of possible responses, including opening local affiliate offices, franchising our programs, or networking with other individuals and organizations. Opening local affiliate offices offered the greatest degree of control. In this model, we would recruit and hire local staff, train local staff to use our service models, and directly supervise their implementation. But a local affiliate model also placed the greatest demands on our organizational structure and fundraising capabilities. The board therefore ruled this option out. Franchising would maintain control by licensing the use of such programs as the Welcome to America! Pack and the New Neighbor Program. In the licensing agreement, we could specify usage guidelines and quality-control parameters. But franchising assumed that a one-size-fits-all approach was best. And we were learning through our work with other groups that although our general principles were very transferable, specific local dynamics varied considerably. These local variables included which resettlement agencies (if any) operated in the local community, how many new refugees were resettled in the local community, what resources were available to the church or group interested in helping, and so on. Ultimately, the board decided to use a networking approach. They determined that mobilizing more volunteers for refugee ministry was Exodus’s top priority. They were more concerned about effectively leveraging what we learned in the

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Chicagoland area than in maintaining control or assuming credit for what we helped accomplish in other communities. Our impact outside the Chicagoland area has taken a variety of forms. A few examples: •

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Groups from across the United States and around the world have ordered copies of our six-week Bible study, Entertaining Angels. One national mission organization now lists the study as required reading for some short-term volunteers, a network of churches in Sri Lanka has distributed copies to local churches, and a ministry in Austria is working on a German translation so that the study can be used with local churches. Exodus continues to receive invitations to lead training workshops. Recently, we have provided training for mission personnel of two different national denominations. A variation of our New Neighbor program is being implemented in England. The group implementing the program used information about our track record in the Chicagoland area to secure a special grant to test new resettlement models. A church in South Africa is exploring the development of a Welcome to Cape Town program to mobilize other local churches.

Another way in which Exodus has engaged on a global level is through the Refugee Highway Partnership (RHP). The RHP grew out of an international conference hosted by the World Evangelical Alliance and several other organizations that brought together almost 200 people from around the world representing different church-based refugee ministry programs. Attendees expressed a strong desire for a structure that would allow continued post-conference connection and collaboration. Exodus was one of a small number of organizations invited by the conference organizers to help implement an ongoing structure. What evolved is a global partnership of refugee ministry organizations and churches that Exodus currently chairs. The RHP has a loose organizational structure, with no budget or staff. What unites the participating organizations are shared core values about the importance of mobilizing local churches to welcome and serve refugees. The mission of the RHP is to increase the involvement of churches around the world in welcoming and serving refugees. Working together, the RHP has launched a web page, produced training and educational materials, hosted roundtable discussions and conferences, and launched a Global Day of Prayer for Refugees. Yet another way in which we are reaching outside the Chicagoland area is by taking teams of local volunteers to serve refugees in other locations. Less than 0.5 percent of the world’s refugees resettle in the United States. In fact, last year the United States welcomed only 53,725 refugees. The vast majority of the world’s refugees languish in other countries around the world. International ministry teams provide a way for our volunteers to address some of the needs outside our own country.

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Our first team spent two weeks serving refugees at a processing center in Austria. We recently took another group of volunteers to Uganda at the request of local Ugandan churches struggling to respond to the immense needs of refugees and displaced persons. Our initial experience indicates these international trips expand volunteers’ understanding of the refugee experience and inspire deep commitment to continued involvement. But we are still experimenting with how to incorporate such trips into our ongoing programs. I anticipate that the next few years will bring further refinement of Exodus’s national and international contributions. At present, we are reactive and not proactive in this area. We respond when groups request assistance. But we have no structured way to make groups aware of the resources we have available. Our national and international efforts are also limited by my personal time and energy. The lessons we have learned in almost twenty years of ministry are stored in my head, but our desire is to capture that information in a more durable and reproducible form. We are currently exploring how we can use our web page and distance learning technology to share what we have learned with others. We are also discussing the development of a resource manual for groups in other locations, similar to the user-friendly handbooks developed for the Welcome to America! Pack and New Neighbor Program. Another new area of ministry development is community organizing. Through funding from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, we recently launched the Refugee Bridge Group. This young community organization currently includes more than 100 refugee members representing a wide variety of different nationalities. They are gaining a growing voice in policy decisions affecting refugees in DuPage County, Illinois. Local school districts, the county health department, and local social service organizations are beginning to turn to these refugee leaders for input and advice. We look forward to seeing the long-term impact the Refugee Bridge Group will have in the local community, and discovering how our community organizing efforts can grow and develop in the future.

FUNDRAISING Exodus uses every available resource to implement our programs. We involve volunteers not just to provide services to refugees, but to help with everything from editing our newsletter to managing our web page. We look for in-kind contributions and have gladly received donated computer equipment, printing services, office supplies, and other resources. But despite our creative use of resources and our efforts to keep expenses to bare-bones levels, we still need funding to pay staff, rent office space, print materials, and provide telephone service, among other needs. This fundraising challenge has been constant throughout our history. Every year we receive enough money to continue our programs, but rarely is anything left to spare. Contributions are used as soon as we receive them to serve refugees, and we must continually raise more. For me, one of the most challenging aspects of

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managing a small nonprofit organization has been learning to live peacefully with this constant financial stress. Defining ourselves as a mobilizing organization has forced us to carefully and strategically find ways to effectively communicate the impact of what we do. It has also caused us to rely on individuals, churches, and private foundations as our primary sources of funding. Almost all the federal and state funding available for refugee services is targeted toward agencies providing direct services to refugees. A direct service model is also more familiar to foundations and corporate funders. Currently, more than 97 percent of our funding comes from private-sector sources. Although it is challenging to raise these funds, private-sector funding ultimately provides us with greater stability and flexibility. We are not dependent on a few, large government grants, and therefore do not suffer the significant fluctuation in funding that resettlement agencies experience when arrival rates are inconsistent. We host two major fundraising events each year, a Celebration of Hope dinner held each year in the spring, and a Run/Walk for Refugees held each year in the fall. In addition, we communicate with our donors through a monthly e-mail newsletter and through periodic appeal letters. Our fundraising model is relational, and we try to provide the same level of service and support to our donors that we provide to our program volunteers. (In fact many of our donors are also program volunteers.) Our desire is not just to raise money, but to raise long-term friends for our ministry.

CORE VALUES What started almost twenty years ago as a small group of three co-founders has become a grassroots community of thousands. Steadily, one by one, we have been joined by people who share our desire to welcome and serve refugees. Together, a community of ordinary people is making an extraordinary difference. Exodus’s most valuable contribution has been its role as a catalyst. By bringing volunteers and refugees together, Exodus activates life-changing connections. Exodus releases the potential for positive impact and mutual benefit that volunteers and refugees offer to one another. The Exodus family is very diverse. We range in age from little Anna, who began volunteering with her parents when she was just four months old, to Terry, who recently celebrated her ninetieth birthday. Retirees, youth groups, college students, families, singles, small groups, and school classes have all been involved in our ministry. The Exodus family includes members of tiny Christ United Methodist Church, a twenty-five-person church that has welcomed multiple refugee families, and members of Willow Creek Community Church, one of the largest churches in the United States, with 20,000 worshippers on any given Sunday morning. We come from a wide range of denominational backgrounds, including mainline and evangelical, Catholic and Protestant; we live in urban, suburban, and rural neighborhoods; and we represent many different ethnic communities.

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We also bring different gifts. Some of us help refugees learn English or study for the citizenship exam, some of us collect household items and food staples to turn apartments into homes, some of us donate money, and some of us speak up to those in power. What unites us is our shared commitment to the transformative power of community and hospitality. We take to heart the commands to “welcome the stranger” and “love our neighbors as ourselves,” and we put those into action. We know firsthand the life changes that can happen when people open their homes and their lives to refugees. Exodus provides a practical, hands-on approach to what can seem like insoluble problems. We take issues that seem too big to grasp and provide a doable way to respond. Exodus’s ministry is both simple and profound. It is simple because it involves sharing with people in the everyday moments of their daily lives. Refugees and volunteers cook meals and try new foods, they read the mail and sort out the important notices from the junk mail, and they talk about practical issues such as how to get an emissions test, where to buy the best groceries, and how to pay taxes. But Exodus’s ministry is also profound because the relationships that form in those everyday moments transcend the distinctions of refugee and volunteer. The authenticity of friendships that reach across cultures and life experiences, the commitment to stand together through the ups and downs of life, the willingness to learn and grow from one another—these are powerful. These relationships transform lives.

INFLUENCERS I have been most influenced by leaders outside the traditional refugee ministry and social service fields. Leaders and research in the following disciplines have shaped the development of our programs, particularly our understanding of how to effectively mobilize volunteers: •

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Communication and marketing. We use research and data from the for-profit sector about how to inspire, motivate, and move people to action. This also includes analysis of the unique characteristics of generational cohorts such as the baby boomers and the “millennials.” Change management. This includes the book Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers’s classic work that summarizes years of research about how new ideas spread; the work of John Kotter on leading and managing change; and Odyssey of the Mind, a program that develops creative problem-solving skills. Adult education. This field includes information and resources about teaching through experiential learning and the importance of connecting new information to existing frameworks. More recent developments in this field applicable to Exodus include distance learning models and educational strategies using web-based technologies.

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Another incredible influence and source of continued inspiration have been the refugees we have welcomed. Refugees demonstrate courage, creativity, resiliency, and adaptability. They have offered fresh perspective and new insight, and helped us bring clarity and focus to our mission and vision.

PRINCIPLES TO SHARE The Exodus journey is unique. Each nonprofit must define its own mission and vision and chart its own path forward. But here are some principles we have learned that may be helpful for other organizations. •

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Laser in on your mission. Invest the time to distill your mission down to its core essence. Wrestle with words until you can find ways to communicate your mission in simple, powerful language. Then discipline yourself to regularly measure your programs and activities against your mission. A strong, clearly defined mission is one of your most powerful tools. It provides the metrics you need to gauge your effectiveness. It offers marketing language to help others understand the importance of your work. And it protects you from the distractions and temptations to wander off target that will come from funding opportunities, staff and volunteer personalities, and donor preferences. Stretch your thinking. Critically assess those things that are crucial to your mission, be they methods or values or partners. Then refuse to hold tightly to everything else. Be willing to test boundaries, imagine new possibilities, and try doing things in new ways. This does not mean that you should not learn from the lessons of those who have gone before you or not trust in the value of your own experience. But it does require that you be willing to listen actively when new staff members, volunteers, or those you serve dare to ask the “what if” or “why” questions. Walk the tightrope. One of the greatest challenges in running a nonprofit is living in the space between your vision of what could be done and the reality of what can be done. Of course, there is always a risk of complacency. It is possible to become so inured to a problem or issue that you simply accept it as inevitable and stop trying. But a much greater risk for visionaries is the opposite extreme. The very passion that drives you to create a new organization can also cause disillusionment and burn out. Your vision should always be larger than what currently exists. A bold vision keeps an organization alert and forward focused. But the very definition of a bold vision means that you are not there yet. The present reality is not good enough. There is more to be done. If this dissatisfaction with what is overshadows the dream of what could be, it will drain away your energy, momentum, and enjoyment. Remember, you are on a journey. What is most important is not where you are today, but the progress you are making toward your vision for the future. Look for leverage. Visionaries launch new organizations because existing organizations are not doing the job. You have probably identified gaps, or even

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gaping holes, in existing services. But resist the temptation to assume that you are the only one willing or able to respond to an unmet need. Try to identify not only what is not happening, but also what is being done well. Explore creative ways to leverage your vision and contribution by partnering with groups that can strengthen, deepen, or expand what you do. Be sure to keep your eyes open for nontraditional partners in unrelated fields that may be able to offer skills or expertise applicable to your mission. Keep telling your story. For your organization to succeed, you will need not only to cast a vision, but also to get others to follow. It is not enough that you are personally devoted to your cause. You need to instill the same passion, commitment, and willingness to act in others. Of course, the process of mobilizing others begins with a clearly articulated mission and vision. But once that is in place, storytelling can be one of your most effective tools. Talk about the lives that are changed because of what you do. Translate your cause into individual people and faces. Make your vision personal. Facts and statistics and research are all important, but ultimately people get involved when they feel connected to other people.

CONCLUSION Gilbert Tuhabonye is a refugee and a survivor of the Burundi genocide. His book, This Voice in My Heart, describes the horrific experience of being burned alive in a building filled with his high school classmates. He was the only one to survive. Through his deep faith, he has been able to find new hope and forgiveness. He is now living in Texas and training marathon runners. Gilbert ends his book by sharing a saying he learned as a young boy in Burundi: “It is easy to light a fire and difficult to extinguish it.” “I understand that much better now than I did then,” he states in his conclusion. “Though some would rather have seen me destroyed by flames, no one can extinguish the fire inside of me. The light God has placed there still burns brightly. Each day I try to honor this great gift of life with some gesture of gratitude.”1 If you are excited by a vision—if you dream of making a positive difference in the world—then start creating sparks. Gather people around you who can add their flame to yours. Light a fire that cannot be extinguished. We need more people who see a need and respond. We need more people to say yes. So take a leap of faith and get involved.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Exodus World Service Founder and Executive Director: Heidi Moll Schoedel, National Director Mission/Description: Exodus World Service transforms the lives of refugees and of volunteers. Exodus educates local churches about refugee ministry, connects volunteers in relationship with refugee families through practical

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service projects, and equips leaders to speak up on behalf of refugees. The end result is that wounded hearts are healed, loneliness is replaced with companionship, and fear is transformed into hope. Exodus’s service recruits local volunteers, equips them with information and training, and then links them directly with refugee families newly arrived in the Chicago metropolitan area. Exodus also provides training and tools for front-line staff of other refugee service agencies. In addition, Exodus has developed several innovative programs for use by volunteers in their work with refugees. Website: www.e-w-s.org Address: 109 Fairfield Way, #101 Bloomingdale, IL 60108 USA Phone: 630-307-1400 x107 Fax: 630-307-1430 E-mail: [email protected]

NOTE 1. Gilbert Tuhabonye with Gary Brozek, This Voice in My Heart: A Genocide Survivor’s Story of Escape, Faith and Forgiveness (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). p. 260.

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A Successful Institution in a Struggling System: The Story of the International Institute for Sustainable Development and Sustainable Development in Canada Lillian Hayward It is easy to assume quickly that “sustainable development” deals mainly, or even exclusively, with environmental matters. But the very concept was designed to encompass much more than the pursuit of clean air and clean water. Sustainable development and its champions strive for—and celebrate—the critical union among environmental health, economic progress, and well-being for all people. Although the specifics of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)’s research and objectives have changed over the years, the human dimension has always been at the core of IISD’s reason for being. The Canadian-based International Institute for Sustainable Development, begun in 1990 in the wake of the Brundtland Commission, continues to pursue ideas and projects that will improve the lives of all people. For example, IISD studies and promotes policy tools designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and ways in which economies and communities can benefit in a carbon-constrained future. But IISD is also on the leading edge of understanding adaptation to climate change. Recognizing that impacts of climate change are already upon us, IISD keeps a sharp policy focus on how small-island states, Arctic communities, drought-ravaged populations, and other vulnerable people can understand and take action to adapt their livelihoods to the impacts of climate change. IISD’s work in trade is predicated on the belief that international trade can be a force for achieving sustainable development, that properly crafted and effectively implemented international trade policies can play a key role in achieving environmental benefits while advancing developed and developing country economies. The work also includes a focus on international investment treaties as tools for achieving sustainable development and improving the economic prospects of people in developing countries. A key element of this work lies in

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helping officials from the developing world negotiate treaties that are consistent with the basic tenets of sustainable development. The institute is also engaged in the vigorous study of natural resource management issues in its home province of Manitoba and elsewhere, with a particular focus on prairie agriculture and water availability and quality. Through its work with indicators, measurement, and assessment, IISD is actively involved in identifying quality of life indicators at a community level and using these to inform actions in the community. As this chapter describes, IISD was an early adopter of electronic communications tools and, to this day, continues to keep international negotiations transparent through its far-reaching coverage of major meetings and conferences. And the institute is now looking at the exciting, evolving policy field of Internet governance and how the future of a secure, accessible Internet is an essential part of the infrastructure for the advancement of sustainable development. To achieve its broad aims and to remain nimble and adaptable, IISD taps into top research talent around the world, partners with like-minded organizations, and seeks relationships with community leaders and decision makers in business, government, and civil society. In its people-centered view, IISD believes that we are all partners in the pursuit of a better world and a meaningful, prosperous, sustainable future.

INTRODUCTION The year 2007 marks the twentieth anniversary of one of the most pivotal reports in the history of environmental policy. This report, titled Our Common Future, was developed as a global agenda for change and was released in 1987 into a world hungry for guidance and action on environmental issues. One of the strengths of Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland Report, named after Gro Harlem Brundtland, chair of the UN commission that produced the report, was that it presented the world with a fundamentally different way of looking at the environment. It defined sustainable development (SD) as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”1 Unlike previous environmental paradigms, Our Common Future provided an integration of economic development and the environment, two notions that had been seen as mutually exclusive because of groups such as the Club of Rome, which in its Limits to Growth study appealed for conservationism in the face of rapidly diminishing resources. This linkage between the environment and the economy was very popular, particularly in political circles, and gained endorsement in principle from the G-7 leaders at the Toronto Summit in 1988. This definition of SD became more popular during the preparations for, and culmination of, the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992.2 Our Common Future provided a number of recommendations which, along with the highly popular definition of SD, led to visible institutional changes in

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Canada. For instance, it is possible to identify direct linkages between the Brundtland Commission’s recommendations and the establishment of one particularly successful Canadian organization, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). In the twenty years since the release of the Brundtland Report, this institution has had the opportunity to grow, mature, and come into its own. Today, IISD is internationally recognized for its work. This chapter will examine the IISD in six sections. The first will look at the genesis of the institution through an identification of the drivers that led to its creation, including a combination of public interest, political landscape, and institutional structure that are at the foundations of the institute. Second, the major eras of IISD will be detailed, beginning with how the institute has developed and changed over time from its early days as a relatively unknown player on the international field to being a world-renowned institution. Third, the internal and external barriers and challenges that have faced the organization will be addressed. Section four will then provide an account of the opportunities and breakthroughs that have helped shape the growth of the institute, including key meetings, major turning points, and the creation of strategic opportunities. The fifth section examines organizational issues and how fundamental institutional aspects like finances, personnel, and location have shaped the orientation and growth of IISD. The final section will provide an examination of the road ahead for IISD and sustainable development in Canada. It will assess the success of IISD and comment on its meaning for Canada’s engagement with sustainable development in an institutional sense. This chapter concludes that, although IISD is a very successful institution, it is a single institution and is not representative of how SD has fared in Canada in a general sense. This juxtaposition of a successful organization within a struggling system provides a demonstration of the capacity of Canadian organizations when they are able to harness expertise and innovative thinking. IISD’s experience is important because it has remained a strong and relevant organization in spite of potentially catastrophic organizational crises, risky endeavors, and tumultuous times for the government of Canada. This is a testament to IISD’s strong and dedicated leadership, which has been tested on many occasions only to emerge even stronger and more determined. Thus, while little has been done to significantly change the way we do things in the twenty years since the Brundtland Commission first offered its recommendations, IISD is an illustration of the real potential of Canadian sustainable development institutions.

GENESIS: IDENTIFICATION OF DRIVERS In the late 1980s, public interest in the environment was running very high. This was a time of great environmental awareness both in Canada and around the world. Awareness was raised by highly publicized environmental catastrophes in the mid-1980s such as the chemical leak in Bhopal, India; the severe drought in Ethiopia; the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, Soviet Union; and the discovery of a

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hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, all of which occurred between 1984 and 1986. “These were accompanied by later, somewhat more national and continental issues, such as the PCB fire at St. Basile-le-Grand; the huge tire fire in Hagarsville, Ontario; and, last but not least, the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.”3 With all these events occurring within a short period of time, environmental awareness in Canada reached a fever pitch. It was in the midst of this atmosphere that the Brundtland Commission sent twenty-two men and women from its task force to Canada for a series of eleven high-profile meetings in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia. During these meetings, the commission listened to a wide variety of ideas and opinions from a range of individuals, including environment ministers, aboriginal leaders, industry leaders, environmental stakeholders, and students.4 Even before Our Common Future was brought forth, the message of the commission was already quite clear. It described the observable environmental trends as “appalling,” and equated the slow and insidious process of environmental degradation to the spread of cancer.5 So in 1986, the combination of public interest, heightened by the commission’s extensive Canadian tour and the impending release of the commission’s recommendations, caused governments in Canada to take action. The Canadian Council of Resource and Environment Ministers, which was the committee made up of federal and provincial ministers of environment, established the National Task Force on Environment and Economy (NTFEE) “to initiate dialogue on environment-economy integration among Canada’s environment ministers, senior executive officers from Canadian industry, and representatives from environmental organizations and the academic community.”6 The NTFEE supported the main conclusions of the Brundtland Commission in principle and set out to address them in the Canadian context. The final report of the task force made a series of recommendations that reflected the relevance of the Brundtland Commission to Canada. It was from the report’s significant international component that the idea for the creation of an international institute for sustainable development first emerged. The creation of the institute was solidified when, in 1988, Brian Mulroney addressed the United Nations General Assembly debate on the Brundtland Report. The Prime Minister’s Office was looking for a concrete announceable to include in his speech to his international counterparts. Given the immense public appetite for environmental action and the opportunity to address an international forum, it was a perfect time for Mulroney to announce the establishment of an institution with a focus on international environmental issues. The result was the announcement on September 29, 1988, by the prime minister to the United Nations General Assembly of the establishment of “a centre which will promote internationally the concept of environmentally sustainable development. This centre will be located in Winnipeg and will work closely with the United Nations Environment Programme and other like-minded international institutions and organizations.”7

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Two years later, in March 1990, the Globe 90 Conference was held in Vancouver. At that time, it was one of the largest environmental conferences ever held, with over 2,000 delegates attending and more than 600 exhibitors from 50 countries.8 Gro Harlem Brundtland delivered a keynote address during the week-long conference, stressing that “the [global environmental] crisis is a more real threat to the world than nuclear war, but unless the gap between rich and poor nations is bridged, it will continue to grow.”9 Globe 90 provided the perfect backdrop for the signing of the funding agreement for IISD by Gary Filmon, premier of the Province of Manitoba, where the institute would be headquartered, and federal environment minister Lucien Bouchard. The agreement provided the new institution with $25 million over five years, funded by the government of Manitoba, and the government of Canada through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and Environment Canada.10 Politics The political landscape at the time of the IISD’s creation was one in which environmental issues had gained significant momentum. However, environmental issues were not an immediate or natural fit for the Progressive Conservative government. The environment did not figure prominently into the government’s neoconservative agenda, which focused primarily on economic issues such as reducing the role of the state in the economy and promoting free trade.11 The Brundtland Commission’s definition of sustainable development provided the kind of connection between the environment and the economy that made environmental issues more popular with the Conservatives. But even with the linkages made between the environment and the economy through sustainable development, the federal government was generally anxious about the recommendations that would come out of the Brundtland report. Public expectations were high, and in order to preempt the advice that would come out, or Our Common Future, the NTFEE was assembled in 1986, following the Brundtland Commission’s visit, in order to assess the relevance of the commission’s work for Canada.12 The environment figured prominently in the 1988 election campaign, during which Mulroney promised to deliver a strategy for the environment. Once the government was re-elected, the 1989 Speech from the Throne emphasized its commitment to the environment through the recognition of environmental issues, strong support for the recommendations of the Brundtland Commission, and the announcement of a new environmental agenda.13 Major changes at the Department of Environment reflected this new agenda. The environment portfolio experienced a rapid increase in importance thanks to the creation of the cabinet Committee on the Environment. The minister of environment was also added to the roster of key cabinet committees, including the powerful cabinet Committee on Priorities and Planning. The result was positive from the

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perspective of environmental issues. Not only was the department more powerful, but this was also the first time since its creation that the department enjoyed the unequivocal support of the prime minister. However, this additional power came at a price because of concerns around the cabinet table about departmental autonomy14 in the face of an increasingly influential Department of Environment. There was also anxiety surrounding the financial burden created by this department taking on large and ambitious projects during a time of fiscal restraint. This included Canada’s Green Plan for a Healthy Environment, a CDN$3 billion15 environmental master plan that required government-wide participation. It was in the midst of this political turmoil that IISD was created. However, because of the fact that it was designed as an independent institution, a characteristic that will be discussed in the next section, it was insulated from the internal strife that characterized the government of Canada during this period. Institutional Structure IISD is a private, not-for-profit organization that was created under the Canada Corporations Act, Part II: Corporations Without Share Capital. The institution’s incorporation letters were signed by Jim MacNeill, the former secretary general of the World Commission on Environment and Development and the primary author of Our Common Future; by the late J. C. Gibson, a member of the faculty of agriculture at the University of Manitoba; and by Lloyd McGinnis, a professional engineer who was awarded the prestigious Gold Medal Award as Canada’s Outstanding Engineer in 1986.16 The structure of the organization was a popular model,17 somewhat similar to other institutions such as the International Development Research Centre, the International Centre for Ocean Development, and the Economic Council of Canada.18 These government-owned “crown corporations” were characterized by funding arrangements in which the government would provide the funding they needed to define their core businesses and establish relationships with stakeholders.19 It is likely that the decision to make IISD a private, nonprofit organization was taken because both federal and provincial governments were involved in its creation, making a crown corporation impossible.20 The institution was developed as a kind of hybrid, receiving funding both from the government of Canada through CIDA and Environment Canada as well as the government of Manitoba. The establishment of the institution as an independent organization has been lauded as an “inspired decision”21 for a number of reasons. First, it has enabled IISD to take risks that would have been prohibitive for government and to produce reports that would have been difficult to create in a bureaucratic environment. Second, the government has allowed the institution to appoint its own board members without intervention, allowing IISD to establish a highly skilled and engaged board of directors, one that has been described as one of the best boards of any like institution.22 Finally, it has given IISD the freedom to determine its

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funding structure, giving it a great amount of flexibility to decide the ways in which its funds will be used. Even though it is an independent institution, IISD maintains close relationships with its funders. It has entrenched this relationship in the organization’s bylaws, which grant observer status to the president of CIDA, the deputy minister of Environment Canada, the chief civil servant of Manitoba, and that province’s deputy minister of the environment, allowing them to participate in board meetings. IISD has found that the benefit of having major donors participate in this way is that they are able to gain an understanding of what the institution is doing and identify ways in which they are able to collaborate.23 Although Canadian-based, IISD’s relevance as an international organization is exemplified by the composition of its board of directors. Roughly half the members of the board come from outside of Canada, which has led to a variety of individuals from around the world contributing to the work of the institution. This means that international perspectives are always a consideration for the board of directors, an undeniably important characteristic for an organization striving for a voice in international fora. MAJOR ERAS During the first two years of its existence, IISD was relatively inactive from an external perspective, but internally the groundwork was being laid. The early days of IISD were spent debating the key internal elements of the organization such as the mission, the structure, and the programs. The founding chair, Lloyd McGinnis, recalls: In those early days we spent as much time telling people what we were not going to do as we did outlining our plans. Responding to a question on television in the spring of 1990 in Vancouver, I stated that no, we were not going to spend our funding on bricks and mortar, and no we would not be employing lab coats. As the interview pressure mounted, I somehow blurted out that the Canadian challenge was to convert a concept into practice—and we were on our way.24

In 1991 “IISD’s mandate as refined by the Board of Directors, had become clearly focused on two main areas of activity: policy research and communications.”25 By this time, research themes had also been identified and included the integration of environment and economics in decision making, institutions for sustainable development, and reforming public policies. Possibly the most important topic undertaken by IISD was that of trade and sustainable development within the area of public policy research. David Runnalls, who had been offered the job of president of IISD, instead joined the institute as a consultant to establish a program on trade and sustainable development. This area of research faced a considerable amount of skepticism when it was first introduced,26 but it turned out to be a very timely decision: environmental issues began to be a topic for discussion in major trade agreements such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and

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Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The result was that IISD was at the forefront of research on trade and environment linkages, and had developed expertise that allowed it to address the issues faced by both the GATT and NAFTA. Since this decision to focus on trade and sustainable development, this area has consistently been one of IISD’s largest programs. Communications have always been important for IISD, as highlighted by its first mandate, and have always played an important role in its activities. One key way the institution has changed since its inception is through its use of the Internet. As early as 1991, the organization was examining how it could become more connected through information networks. The annual report from that year details communications objectives involving the “exploration of international computer networking relationships.”27 In 1994 IISD launched the organization’s website, IISDnet, a fully electronic database “allowing fast and focused computer access to the Institute’s information clearinghouse.”28 This early adoption of Internet technology likely made IISD the first nongovernmental organization (NGO) to have this kind of Internet presence, giving it a wide-open field in which to establish itself. The continued growth of the Internet and electronic communications has helped IISD solidify its place as a world leader in sustainable development and as an important source of information on environmental issues. The early uptake of this new technology turned out to be one of the most important decisions made by that early board, and has led to IISD’s prominence on the Internet and as a leader in electronic accessibility. By making information accessible to everyone and establishing an early presence on the Internet, IISD was able to position itself as a leader in information dissemination at a time when most organizations were still relying on traditional methods for getting their data out to their audiences. The website is not the only way that IISD has found a way to expand and improve its commitment to communications. Launched in 1992 at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED)—also known as the Earth Summit—in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) continues to be one of IISD’s most successful products. It was released daily at the conference under the name Earth Summit Bulletin, and consisted of a concise and comprehensive summary of the negotiations that was distributed to conference delegates. The distribution of this report on the state of the negotiations at the Earth Summit reached 10,000 copies,29 both printed and via electronic bulletin boards, and highlighted the need for this kind of service. After the Earth Summit, IISD offered the ENB an institutional home, and since then, the service has continued to grow. It is now created and distributed at major conferences all over the world. A third era in IISD’s history is possibly the most substantial in terms of defining how the organization was run. In 1995 the government of Canada, headed by Prime Minister Jean Chretien, conducted a review of its funding to programs. IISD faced a “monumental slash” of its core funding30 as Environment Canada’s funding to the organization was reduced by 91 percent between 1996 and 1998,

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$3,500,000.00

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Figure 14.1 IISD core funding, 1990–2006. Courtesy of Lillian Hayward, based on IISD annual report data.

representing an overall decrease in total core funding of approximately 45 percent during that two-year period (see Figure 14.1). This funding cut led to a fundamental shift in the way that the institution did business. Jim MacNeill, who was the chair of IISD during this era, had been advocating for the need to diversify funding. This funding cut gave the organization the incentive it needed to change from a spending culture to a revenue culture.31 And with that, a major effort [began] to expand the sources and levels of the Institute’s funding. This funding transition mark[ed] a significant change in institutional culture for IISD, with a very successful staff effort to find support for programs. Today, IISD’s annual budget is double the level of 1995 expenditures, even though the level of core funding has dropped.32

This change in funding sources has shaped the institution in many ways because by shifting to a revenue culture, the program directors became fundraisers. This has made them responsible for listening to their audiences, shopping their proposals around, and raising the funds required to support their projects. This fundamental shift in the orientation of the organization enabled IISD to become a significantly more entrepreneurial organization. The result is that today, the institute does not spend much time responding to requests for proposals from

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governments and other agencies. Instead, it develops its own research ideas and works to engage funders and partners to support the work.33 This system helps to ensure that the ideas produced by the institute are new and fresh. It also has the added benefit that any products that it produces will be taken up by an audience that has already committed to it. With the addition of William Glanville as vice president and COO to its staff in 1998, IISD could begin to examine institutional development and begin to establish a more coherent approach to program planning.34 The result was a new strategic plan that was presented to the board of directors in 1999.35 This new plan had to reflect the new realities of the organization, which included substantial growth of its revenues from about $5 million in 1993 to almost $10 million in 2000,36 as well as the growth of the institute itself, which had expanded from its single office headquartered in Winnipeg to include offices in Calgary, New York, and Ottawa.37 The plan helped define IISD’s vision— “Better living for all—sustainably”38— and its mission—“To champion innovation, enabling societies to live sustainably”39—both of which are still used to define the institute. An internal strategic review by the board of directors and staff led to a reorganization of IISD away from a rigid program structure and toward a more dynamic configuration in order to “capture the energy of the entire staff to encourage creativity, innovative thinking and interdisciplinary research.”40 This was done by redefining programs as “strategic objectives” and allowing employees to move between these objectives according to where their expertise was needed.41 The next major era for the organization will likely come when its current president, David Runnalls, retires from IISD in 2010. He is the longest-serving president in IISD’s seventeen-year history, having been at the helm of the organization since 1998. A change in this kind of long-standing leadership could mean a significant change for IISD, however, the ways in which this change might manifest itself could be quite varied depending on who comes into this position.

BARRIERS AND CHALLENGES IISD’s early life was marked by a “series of birthing and budgetary crises and a couple of near-death experiences.”42 These were significant obstacles that the organization had to overcome, and in many cases, these have helped shape the organization into what it is today. The barriers and challenges that IISD faced during its development have been broken down into four separate “crises”: its challenging birth, the termination of similar organizations, and two separate and severe funding cuts. In addition, some barriers and challenges have presented themselves as more sustained issues, including the tension between its national and international commitments, the rise and fall in the popularity of environmental issues, and the challenge of remaining relevant. Each of these experiences has had a hand in shaping IISD into its current form. The first crisis encountered by IISD was whether or not it would happen at all. Prime Minister Mulroney announced the creation of an international institution

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for sustainable development in a speech to the UN General Assembly in 1988; however, not much happened following that announcement. There was intergovernmental wrangling between the government of Canada and the government of Manitoba, and to further complicate the situation, there was significant tension between the leaders of these governments.43 The opportunity to have IISD as an announceable for the Mulroney government at the Globe 90 Conference in Vancouver likely played a large role in getting the proper elements in place to solidify the funding agreement and establish the organization. The second crisis for IISD came only a few years into its life when the Mulroney government terminated several of the institutions that had been created around the same institutional model as IISD “as part of a wider policy of expenditure reduction.”44 For instance, the Economic Council of Canada and the International Centre for Ocean Development both found themselves on the chopping block,45 signaling that the government was no longer interested in supporting organizations that were established according to this model. There were concerns that IISD could see its end in another round of similar cuts; however, the loyalty and support of the Province of Manitoba and the fact that it was created by Mulroney himself, likely helped secure its survival. The third crisis came as a result of “the June 1993 (Prime Minister) Kim Campbell reorganization, in which [the Department of Environment (DOE)] suffered significant losses to its mandate, personnel, and budget.”46 This decline in the capacity of the department impacted IISD as the DOE clawed back some of its funding. Although this was by no means a fatal blow for IISD, there was a real concern within the organization that it would set a precedent, resulting in Manitoba pulling back its funding, too.47 Fortunately, this situation never materialized. The fourth crisis presented itself as the Liberal Government Program Review exercise in which IISD suffered a severe cut to its core funding. There were a number of things that saved the organization from what could have been a total collapse. In addition to the continued support of Manitoba, the institute was fortunate to find itself located in the same city as the riding of Lloyd Axworthy, a prominent minister in the Liberal government, who recognized the importance of the organization to his constituents in Winnipeg. In spite of the cuts, the institute emerged from this crisis as a more entrepreneurial organization, enhancing its ability to respond to its audience’s needs and putting it in a better position to respond to the international community’s interests. Each of these crises presented a challenge for the newly formed institution and could have meant the end of IISD before it even reached its fifth anniversary. However, instead of destroying IISD, they actually made a contribution to shaping the organization into what it has become today. “Each of these crises inspired the Board, management and staff to new heights of leadership and determination, and from each the Institute emerged stronger and more vigorous than ever.”48 This is a testament to the strength of the institution and a demonstration of the ability it has to overcome even the most potentially fatal blows.

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Few crises of the magnitude of those that occurred in the first five years of the institute’s existence have presented themselves in recent years, but the organization continues to face ongoing challenges of another nature. From the very beginning, the institution has had to perform a balancing act between the interests of all of its stakeholders. These stakeholders are multiple and varied, from those in its home province of Manitoba, to those at the national level, to those all over the world. Angela Cropper, IISD board member and international vice chair, explains: Finding the right balance between attending to the needs of the home country and addressing the needs of the rest of the world, in keeping with the institute’s vision and mission, is a recurring dilemma around the Board table. I have often been found in the posture of holding the institute’s feet to this fire. But perhaps this is the role of its International Vice-Chair! And recent recognition that IISD is the most highly ranked and researched sustainable development policy outfit, globally speaking, is a good indicator that it might be successful in managing this dilemma.49

In spite of its success, overcoming this challenge is a constant balancing act that the institute must face on a continuing basis. In addition to the internal challenges the organization has faced, there have also been a number of external barriers, including the rise and fall of interest in environmental issues within the Canadian population. The Brundtland Commission’s definition of sustainable development was widely accepted and captured the interest of governments, industry, and individuals; however, as the concept of SD permeated through the population, it came to mean everything to everyone, which caused people to question whether it meant anything at all. Also, while environmental issues were “top of mind” in opinion polls in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they quickly dropped off of the Canadian population’s radar during the recession of 1992–9350 and in the wake of highly publicized political events such as the failures of both the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, which dealt with Canada’s constitution and very character. This combination of a concept that is difficult to define and a diversion of public interest away from environmental issues created a barrier for the work that IISD was undertaking and presented a major communications challenge. In addition to overcoming barriers to communication, IISD has had to find ways to become relevant to the audiences that it most wanted to reach. Developing brand recognition, gaining trust, and firmly establishing itself as a reliable source of SD information took a significant amount of work. Remaining relevant continues to be a challenge for IISD, but it is supported by the solid foundation that has emerged as a consequence of the obstacles and crises that marked its early years. OPPORTUNITIES AND BREAKTHROUGHS Barriers and challenges have shaped the structure of IISD, but it is the opportunities that have made the most significant contribution to IISD becoming a world-renowned institution. These opportunities and breakthroughs include the Rio Earth Summit, the adoption of innovative communications tools, and, the

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pursuit of new programming areas. By seeking out opportunities that have the most potential to have an impact, IISD has positioned itself for success. This is not to say that these have been without risk, but it is within some of the risks that the institute has been able to reap substantial rewards. One of the major and arguably most obvious breakthroughs in IISD’s history was its involvement in the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Rio was a significant event, attracting heads of state and NGOs from around the world. Not only was it a globally significant event, it was in many ways IISD’s debut on the international stage. The institute could not help but become involved when one of its own board members, Maurice Strong, an individual who also played a significant role in the Brundtland Commission, was named the conference’s secretary general. In addition to the role that Strong played in the summit, IISD “made commitments of both human and financial resources to certain projects contributing to the UNCED preparatory process,”51 and used the event as an opportunity to widely release its first major report: Business Strategy for Sustainable Development: Leadership and Accountability for the ‘90s. Following the summit, Lloyd McGinnis, chair of IISD’s board of directors, noted: Our presence was felt in several ways: the contributions of Nicholas Sonntag, our Communications and Partnerships Director, who worked directly with Maurice Strong; the daily publication of the Earth Summit Bulletin; the participation of several Board members and our President with the Canadian UNCED delegation; co-sponsorship for several events at the Global Forum and a display booth there; and financial support for developing country nationals to attend specific events.52

The publication of the Earth Summit Bulletin was a major breakthrough for this kind of large-scale meeting. Its daily release at the summit allowed people to become genuinely involved in the meetings and enabled everyone, including governments with small delegations, to keep up to date on outcomes of key negotiations, something that had previously been the domain of wealthy countries with large delegations. This meant that communications improved between parties as a result of the publication’s use as a common knowledge base. IISD supported the Bulletin at the Earth Summit and saw the extensive benefits that came from it. The Institute offered the Earth Summit Bulletin, renamed the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, an institutional home, and it has been part of the organization ever since, providing a vital service for UN conferences and summits. “More than fourteen years later, IISD Reporting Services has produced thousands of reports from hundreds of negotiations covering dozens of major multilateral environmental agreements.”53 After taking up the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, the challenge then became finding a fast, efficient, and effective way to distribute the documents as well as other IISD publications. The launch of the World Wide Web held major potential for this kind of widespread distribution, and IISD became one of the first 1,000 users of web-based technology.54 This technology has helped IISD’s information to reach a wide range of users ever since.

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IISD program areas also demonstrate where the institution has embraced opportunities. Every five years, the organization does an external and an internal scan in which it determines what issues are presenting themselves as environmental challenges and what it is possible for the institute to do about these within its capacity. Intentionally, IISD has tried to stay away from opportunities in crowded fields, preferring instead to look for opportunities in areas where it would be possible to create new perspectives.55 This has led to its important work in fields such as trade and sustainable development, which has resulted in expertise that has become well respected by international trade organizations and institutions such as NAFTA. IISD has experienced a number of breakthroughs since its creation, many the result of opportunities it has created for itself. These have been attributed to a strong board of directors and senior staff, who have been able to identify which opportunities to take and which risks are worthwhile. This has enabled IISD to take advantage of major meetings, new communications products, and program opportunities that foster relationships and establish credibility.

ORGANIZATIONAL ISSUES Finances When the original funding agreement was signed at the Globe 90 Conference in Vancouver by Lucien Bouchard and Gary Filmon, it was a five-year, $25 million deal in which Environment Canada would contribute $3 million, the Canadian International Development Agency would contribute $1 million, and the government of Manitoba would contribute $1 million annually for five years. This was guaranteed core funding, which was meant to help IISD get started building the organization as well as establishing and maintaining relationships. The problem with this kind of funding model however, is that because all of the organization’s most important and immediate costs are covered, there is no incentive to think innovatively or seek out audiences for the work that was being done. Cuts by Environment Canada and the subsequent program review exercise resulted in serious and significant funding reductions for the organization. Rather than allowing these changes to weaken the institute, IISD adopted a new structure in order to expand the sources and level of its funding.56 So, in spite of the fact that Environment Canada cut its core funding levels to IISD from a high of $3 million to a low of $200,000 a year, the institute’s overall funding has actually almost tripled, from about $5 million in 1993 to approximately $14 million today. The majority of this increase has come in the form of designated grant funding, the funding that IISD seeks out itself to fund its programs. Designated grants funding started outpacing core funding in 1998 and has maintained levels well above core funding ever since (see Figure 14.2). Recently, IISD has made another shift in its funding model. While still receiving operating grants and designated grants, it has started introducing what it calls “framework agreements,” in which donors commit to providing funding for both core operations and programs over multiple years. The benefit of this new kind of

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$10,000,000.00 Designated Grants $9,000,000.00

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Figure 14.2 IISD designated grants and operating grants, 1994–2007. Courtesy of Lillian Hayward, based on IISD annual report data.

funding is that it is another way of diversifying funding arrangements and guarantees funding for a specific period of time. By having organizations enter into these kinds of agreements, it also helps IISD form closer strategic alliances and partnerships with its donors.57 It is funding that also demonstrates the positive reputation that IISD has in the international community. Since 2002, IISD has consistently had more designated grants coming from governments outside of Canada than inside (see Figure 14.3). This reflects the value that is placed on its work by governments around the world. In terms of specific country contributions, Canada remains a top donor, with the government of Canada contributing approximately $1.54 million in designated grants in the 2006–07 fiscal year. However, the government of Switzerland is not far behind, contributing a total of approximately $1.33 million in designated funding in that same period. Personnel The first board of directors was appointed by the government of Canada, but after that, the government has had no part to play in appointments to IISD’s

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278 $8,000,000.00 Canada $7,000,000.00

Governments of Other Nations United Nations Agencies International Organizations

$6,000,000.00

Philanthropic Foundations Private Sector and Other

Amount

$5,000,000.00

$4,000,000.00

$3,000,000.00

$2,000,000.00

$1,000,000.00

19 94 /9 5 19 95 /9 6 19 96 /9 7 19 97 /9 8 19 98 /9 9 19 99 /0 0 20 00 /0 1 20 01 /0 2 20 02 /0 3 20 03 /0 4 20 04 /0 5 20 05 /0 6 20 06 /0 7

$0.00

Year

Figure 14.3 IISD designated grants, 1994–2007. Courtesy of Lillian Hayward, based on IISD annual report data.

board or staff. To have this institution run independently of government has been described as an “inspired decision,”58 and has resulted in the freedom of IISD to appoint its own board members, leading to a board of directors that some have ventured to claim is the best board of any like institute, largely for this reason.59 Institute staffing has evolved into a very flexible and adaptable system. When it was first established, IISD was housed solely in Winnipeg. However, the institute has since established offices in New York, Ottawa, and Geneva. In addition to these four physical offices, which house permanent staff, IISD has also established what are known as “associate” positions. This model was initially introduced in order to attract highly qualified individuals in a crowded international marketplace, recognizing that it may be impossible to have these individuals as full-time staff. IISD has developed an open-ended but formalized contracting procedure to accommodate these individuals.60 This is an innovative staffing tool that provides the flexibility of time and location to its associates while maintaining certain bureaucratic elements that are necessary for this kind of employment arrangement. The result is that IISD has been able to expand its workforce beyond its regular employee base and attract the expertise of subject experts from all over the world. Having access to this kind of capacity is extremely important for an institution that is continuously striving to keep itself relevant. It enables IISD to reach

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beyond its organizational boundaries and form additional networks through these individuals, who are located all around the world. This structure helps create a nimble and adaptable institution that is able to thrive in a competitive international environment. Location An interesting feature of IISD is the fact that it is based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, as opposed to the nation’s capital in Ottawa or another larger city. To understand one of the key reasons that Winnipeg was selected as the home of this organization, it is necessary to look back to some of the events that occurred surrounding the Canadian aerospace industry in the mid-1980s.61 At that time, the government of Canada was offering a $1.4 billion contract for maintenance of CF-18 fighter jets; Bristol Aerospace Limited of Winnipeg was the top choice following bidding and review of proposals by the Department of National Defence. However, the company was passed over in favor of Montreal-based Canadair, stirring up considerable anger and frustration in Western Canada. In response to the announcement, Winnipeg member of parliament Lloyd Axworthy, then a member of the opposition, stated: “It’s a clear message to Western Canadians that we should be hewers of wood and drawers of water. . . . We’re not capable of undertaking major activities in technology development. It’s an unfair and tragic message—one that has to be fought against.”62 Shortly after, when the government of Canada’s intent to create an international institute for sustainable development came to light, the Province of Manitoba was quick to express its interest. An initial proposal that the institute be located in Winnipeg63 was followed by intensive lobbying of Environment Canada and the Prime Minister’s Office by the government of Manitoba.64 The lobbying exercise was successful and led to the subsequent funding agreement that created IISD. Some have criticized IISD for its location, claiming that its growth is inhibited because it is so far away from the major urban and economic centers of Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, as well as from Canada’s center of government in Ottawa.65 However, like many of the challenges that IISD has faced in the past, the institution has turned this into an opportunity and touts what it refers to as “the Winnipeg Advantage” because “it was felt that being in Winnipeg afforded IISD greater access to local decision makers and allowed its messages to be heard locally and provincially, not drowned out by the background noise of national headlines in larger centres.”66 Being in Winnipeg also has conferred a number of additional benefits, including creating incentives for enhanced communication and securing the support of the city of Winnipeg and the Province of Manitoba, things that would not have come as easily in large urban centers. Winnipeg is not a major urban center, and it is not likely the first place people consider when selecting potential locations for a world-class institution; however, it has had a large part to play in building and shaping this organization. “Being located in Winnipeg offered an advantage . . . because it forced IISD to develop in a way that allowed it to connect to and exert influence on the outside world.”67

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This ability, and necessity, to make connections and build networks contributes to the strength of the organization.

THE ROAD AHEAD IISD has been a very successful institution. As of March 31, 2007, it had more than seventy donor organizations, including federal departments and provincial governments in Canada, governments of other nations, United Nations agencies, international organizations, philanthropic foundations, and private-sector institutions. Although much support has come to the organization in the form of grants, it has also come in the form of accolades. In 2004 IISD was declared the Most Effective SD Research Organization in a GlobeScan survey. The survey asked “experts who have either had a direct role in SD research organizations, had dealings with them, or studied them . . . to name a maximum of four specific SD research organizations that they consider to be particularly effective.”68 IISD was ranked by experts to be more effective than other well known SD institutions such as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the World Resources Institute, and the United Nations. Although comparing these institutions against one another is difficult because of their vastly different mandates and activities, it speaks volumes about the effectiveness of IISD, a small organization in the midst of these large establishments. In many ways, IISD has exceeded expectations by becoming a world leader in SD information and ideas. However, this does not mean that it can become complacent. If the organization is to remain successful, it must continue to build on its strengths69 while maintaining the flexibility and entrepreneurial spirit that it has been so successful at applying to its work. In spite of the successes of IISD as a sustainable development institution in Canada, the organization is an exception rather than a rule. Sustainable development as an idea is alive and well in Canada; however, as an agenda for action and change, SD has not made much progress. In a report released in 2005 titled It’s Time to Walk the Talk, the Standing Committee on Energy, Environment, and Natural Resources noted that governments and corporations in Canada talk a lot about sustainable development but hesitate to take any real, meaningful action on this concept.70 This means that while the notion of sustainable development has permeated throughout Canadian government and industry, it is still just lip service, failing to constitute real, concrete action for the majority of these institutions. This has not gone without notice, and Canada has faced criticism from inside and outside of the country. For instance, the Conference Board of Canada has described Canada as a “middle-of-the-road” performer, lagging behind top OECD countries in a number of environmental indicators such as greenhouse gas emissions and hazardous waste production.71 The Pembina Institute has criticized Canada’s attempts to integrate SD principles into legislation, calling them “limited and almost entirely symbolic.”72 Both the World Economic Forum and the OECD have also been critical pointing out that in

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Canada, very little progress has been made in advancing the principles of sustainable development.73 Canada used to be a world leader on the international environmental stage, but its reputation has been steadily slipping within and outside the country because of its failure to actually integrate SD into policy and day-to-day operations, and because its overall engagement with SD has been underwhelming. The country has created a world-class institution that is producing relevant information on SD; nevertheless, aside from IISD’s work, there has been a serious lack of science/policy engagement.74 In spite of having strong institutions within the country such as IISD, it seems that there has been very little movement on environmental issues and very little uptake of sustainable development. This comes in the face of the dire warnings issued by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment75 in 2005, the shocking predictions of the Stern Report76 in 2006, and the seemingly daily reports of natural disasters and evidence of accelerating climate change. There is a serious lack of urgency in what Canada has done to date, with actions more akin to fiddling at the edges of the issues rather than striving for real and significant solutions. We can be very proud of the work IISD has done in spite of this environment, and we can hold it up as evidence that an institution that suffered so many “near death experiences” has the potential to become larger and more successful than anyone could have anticipated. But one institution is not enough. SD needs to become part of the policy paradigm in all institutions, and it is only then that we will begin to see the implementation of a real agenda for change.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) Founding Board of Directors: Lloyd McGinnis (chair), Peter M. Kilburn (president and CEO), Dian Cohen, Dr. J.C. Gilson, Prof. José Goldemberg, Dr. Arthur J. Hanson, Dr. C. S. Holling, Dr. Pierre Marc Johnson, Hon. Gloria Knight, Dr. Jim MacNeill, Dr. Shimwaayi Muntemba, H. E. Mohamed Sahnoun, Dr. Emil Salim, Dr. David W. Strangway, Lynn Zwicky Chair, Board of Directors: Daniel Gagnier President and CEO: David Runnalls Mission/Description: Founded in 1990, the International Institute for Sustainable Development contributes to sustainable development by advancing policy recommendations on international trade and investment, economic policy, climate change, measurement and assessment, and natural resources management. Through the Internet, we report on international negotiations and share knowledge gained through collaborative projects with global partners, resulting in more rigorous research, capacity building in developing countries, and better dialogue between North and South. IISD’s vision is better living for all—sustainably; its mission is to champion innovation, enabling societies to live sustainably. IISD is registered as a charitable

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organization in Canada and has 501(c)(3) status in the United States. IISD receives core operating support from the Government of Canada, provided through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and Environment Canada; and from the Province of Manitoba. The institute receives project funding from numerous governments inside and outside Canada, United Nations agencies, foundations, and the private sector. Website: http://www.iisd.org Address: International Institute for Sustainable Development Head Office 161 Portage Avenue East, 6th Floor Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada R3B 0Y4 Phone: +1 204 958-7700 Fax: +1 204 958-7710 E-mail: [email protected]

NOTES 1. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future,(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 8. 2. Bruce Doern and Thomas Conway, The Greening of Canada: Federal Institutions and Decisions, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), p. 5. 3. Bruce Doern and Thomas Conway, The Greening of Canada: Federal Institutions and Decisions, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), p. 14. 4. Michael Keating, “Global Task Force Comes to Canada,” Globe and Mail, May 20, 1986, A19. 5. Michael Keating, “Global Task Force Comes to Canada,” Globe and Mail, May 20, 1986, A19. 6. National Task Force on Environment and Economy, Report of the National Task Force on Environment and Economy, (1987), p. 1. 7. Canada. External Affairs Canada. Address by the Right Honourable Brian Mulroney, Prime Minister of Canada, before the UN General Assembly. (Ottawa: External Affairs Canada, Sept. 29, 1988), p. 8. 8. Craig McInnes, “Environment Conference Weighs Solutions,” Globe and Mail, Mar. 20 1990, A5. 9. Craig McInnes, “Environment Conference Weighs Solutions,” Globe and Mail, Mar 20, 1990, A5. 10. International Institute for Sustainable Development, “IISD Timeline,” Aug. 7, 2007, http://www.iisd.org/about/timeline.asp. 11. Glen Toner, “The Green Plan: From Great Expectations to Eco-backtracking to . . . Revitalization?” In How Ottawa Spends 1994–95: Ideas and Innovation, ed. Susan Phillips (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994), p. 233.

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12. Robert J. P. Gale, “Canada’s Green Plan,” A Study of the Development of a National Environmental Plan (1997), p. 101; Mar. 1, 2007: http://www.ies.unsw.edu.au/about/staff/ robertsFiles/greenplan.pdf. 13. Canada. Parliament. Speech from the Throne, 34th Parl, 2nd sess, vol. 131 (Ottawa: Parliament, 1989) p. 81; Oct. 21, 2007: http://www2.parl.gc.ca/Parlinfo/Documents/ ThroneSpeech/34-02-e.pdf. 14. Robert J. P. Gale, “Canada’s Green Plan,” A Study of the Development of a National Environmental Plan (1997), pp. 112–113; Mar. 1, 2007: http://www.ies.unsw.edu.au/about/ staff/robertsFiles/greenplan.pdf. 15. All dollar figures in this chapter are in Canadian currency. 16. International Institute for Sustainable Development, “Founding Chair: Lloyd McGinnis,” Aug. 3, 2007: http://www.iisd.org/about/staffbio.aspx?id=387. 17. Robert Slater, personal interview, Sept. 21, 2007. 18. Arthur Hanson, personal interview, Nov. 9, 2007. 19. Robert Slater, personal interview, Sept. 21, 2007. 20. David Runnalls, personal interview, July 24, 2007. 21. Jim MacNeill, personal interview, Oct. 26, 2007. 22. Jim MacNeill, personal interview, Oct. 26, 2007. 23. David Runnalls, personal interview, July 24, 2007. 24. IISD, Sustaining Excellence for 15 Years. 2004–2005 Annual Report, (Winnipeg: IISD, 2005), p. 11. 25. IISD, Annual Report 1991–1992, (Winnipeg: IISD, 1992), p. 8. 26. International Institute for Sustainable Development, “IISD Timeline,” Aug. 7, 2007: http://www.iisd.org/about/timeline.asp. 27. IISD, Annual Report 1991–1992 (Winnipeg: IISD, 1992), p. 12. 28. IISD, Annual Report 1994–1995 (Winnipeg: IISD, 1995), p. 11. 29. International Institute for Sustainable Development, “IISD Timeline,” Aug. 7, 2007: http://www.iisd.org/about/timeline.asp. 30. Jim MacNeill, personal interview, Oct. 26, 2007. 31. Jim MacNeill, personal interview, Oct. 26, 2007. 32. International Institute for Sustainable Development, “IISD Timeline,” Aug. 7, 2007: http://www.iisd.org/about/timeline.asp. 33. David Runnalls, personal communication, Feb. 12, 2007. 34. William Glanville, personal interview, Nov. 15, 2007. 35. IISD, Annual Report 1998–1999 (Winnipeg: IISD, 1999), p. 2. 36. IISD, Annual Report 1999–2000 (Winnipeg: IISD, 2000), p. 3. 37. IISD, Annual Report 1998–1999 (Winnipeg: IISD, 1999), p. 2. 38. IISD, Annual Report 1998–1999 (Winnipeg: IISD, 1999), p. 5. 39. IISD, Annual Report 1998–1999 (Winnipeg: IISD, 1999), p. 5. 40. IISD, Annual Report 1999–2000 (Winnipeg: IISD, 2000), p. 4. 41. William Glanville, personal interview, Nov. 15, 2007. 42. Jim MacNeill, “Chair’s Message” Annual Report 1998–1999 (Winnipeg: IISD, 1999), p. 3. 43. Arthur Hanson, personal interview, Nov. 9, 2007. 44. Canadian International Development Agency, “CIDA’s Strategy for Ocean Management and Development: The Lessons of ICOD,” Nov. 11, 2007: http://www. acdi-cida.gc.ca/CIDAWEB/acdicida.nsf/En/NAT-329142438-QRX. 45. Arthur Hanson, personal interview, Nov. 9, 2007.

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46. Glen Toner, “Environment Canada’s Continuing Roller Coaster Ride.” In How Ottawa Spends 1996–97: Life Under the Knife, ed. Gene Swimmer. (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1996), p. 99. 47. Arthur Hanson, personal interview, Nov. 9, 2007. 48. Jim MacNeil, “Chair’s Message,” Annual Report, 1998–1999 (Winnipeg: IISD), p. 3 49. Angela Cropper, “Anniversary Reflections,” Annual Report 2004–2005 (Winnipeg: IISD, 2005), p. 10. 50. Glen Toner, “Environment Canada’s Continuing Roller Coaster Ride.” In How Ottawa Spends 1996–97: Life Under the Knife, ed. Gene Swimmer (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1996), p. 101. 51. IISD, Annual Report 1991–1992 (Winnipeg: IISD, 1992), p. 13. 52. Lloyd McGinnis, “Chairman’s Report,” Annual Report 1992–1993 (Winnipeg: IISD, 1993), p. 2. 53. International Institute for Sustainable Development, “Products,” IISD Linkages, Oct 15, 2007: http://www.iisd.ca/about/about.htm#history. 54. Arthur Hanson, personal interview, Nov. 9, 2007. 55. Arthur Hanson, personal interview, Nov. 9, 2007. 56. IISD, Annual Report 1994–1995 (Winnipeg: IISD, 1995), p. 2. 57. William Glanville, personal interview, Nov. 15, 2007. 58. Jim MacNeill, personal interview, Oct. 26, 2007. 59. Jim MacNeill, personal interview, Oct. 26, 2007. 60. David Runnalls, personal interview, July 24, 2007. 61. Robert Slater, personal interview, Sept. 21, 2007. 62. Christopher Waddell, “Canadair gets $1.4-billion job Jet repair contract stirs bitterness,” Globe and Mail, Nov. 1, 1986, A1. 63. Gary Filmon, “Anniversary Reflections,” Annual Report 2004–2005 (Winnipeg: IISD, 2005), pp. 11–12. 64. Gary Filmon, “Anniversary Reflections,” Annual Report 2004–2005 (Winnipeg: IISD, 2005), p. 11. 65. Arthur Hanson, personal interview, Nov. 9, 2007. 66. William Glanville, The Winnipeg Advantage: An Example of Organizational Adaptation and Innovation (Feb. 2005), p.1. 67. William Glanville, The Winnipeg Advantage: An Example of Organizational Adaptation and Innovation (Feb. 2005), p. 5. 68. GlobeScan, The GlobeScan Survey of Sustainability Experts (Toronto: GlobeScan, Jan, 2005), p. 14; Nov. 5, 2007: http://surveys.globescan.com/sdroleaders/sose04-2_resorg.pdf. 69. Jim MacNeill, personal interview, Oct. 26, 2007. 70. Canada. Parliament. Senate. Standing Senate Committee on Energy, Environment and Natural Resources, Sustainable Development: It’s Time to Walk the Talk, 2nd interim report (Ottawa: June 2005), p. 1. 71. Conference Board of Canada, Performance and Potential 2004–2005: How Can Canada Prosper in Tomorrow’s World? (Ottawa: Conference Board of Canada, 2004), p. 40. 72. Pembina Institute as cited in Glen Toner and Carey Frey, “Governance for Sustainable Development: Next Stage Institutional and Policy Innovations,” in How Ottawa Spends 2004–2005, ed. Bruce Doern (Montreal: McGill-Queen University Press, 2005), p. 201. 73. Canada. Parliament. Senate. Standing Senate Committee on Energy, Environment and Natural Resources, Sustainable Development: It’s Time to Walk the Talk, 2nd interim report (Ottawa: June 2005), p. 3.

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74. Alan Nymark, “Looking Back: How have we done in Canada?” in Facing Forward–Looking Back: Charting sustainable development in Canada 1987–2007–2027, Oct. 18, 2007. 75. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005, Mar. 7, 2008: http://www.millenniumassessment.org. 76. United Kingdom. HM Treasury. Stern Review on The Economics of Climate Change (London: Oct. 2006): http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_ review_economics_climate_change/sternreview_index.cfm.

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Afterword Keith Ferrazzi

If you take the ingredients of social entrepreneurship, venture philanthropy, and social networking, liberally mix with individuals who hold a passion for making a true difference in various aspects of people’s lives throughout the world, and then take a sample of some of the best, the result you have is The New Humanitarians. Chris Stout has served as a uniting thread to connect these organizations in this three-volume set. While these organizations are all different in their approaches and goals, they share a common aspect of their work: innovation. Indeed, they are the new humanitarians. They are born from the power of the individual taking action in a novel way, and then using the power of their relationships to effect impactful change. After all, giving back is a huge part of a life well led. In the spirit of Three Cups of Tea, Chris’s adventuresome life has taken him to a variety of exotic and often not-so-safe locales, and the work he has done in these venues has resulted not only in his Center for Global Initiatives, but also The New Humanitarians. He has done well with many of the aspects I wrote about in Never Eat Alone but applied them in the milieu of humanitarian work. He and I share a kinship, as Chris was a reviewer for the ABE Awards that I founded, a fellow Baldrige Award reviewer, and a fellow “TEDizen” during the Richard Saul Wurman era; was elected as a Global Leader of Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum; and served as faculty with me in Davos. So it is no surprise that Chris has the brainpower as well as the horsepower to have accomplished this wonderful compilation of wunderkinder. Chris is able to contribute to Davos talks and UN presentations, but he is much more at home working in the field and with his students. He is known for bringing people together in cross-disciplinary projects worldwide—in healthcare, medical education, human rights, poverty, conflict, policy, sustainable development, diplomacy, and terrorism. As the American Psychological Association said

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about him and his work: “He is a rare individual who takes risks, stimulates new ideas, and enlarges possibilities in areas of great need but few resources. He is able to masterfully navigate between the domains of policy development while also rolling up his sleeves to provide in-the-trenches care. His drive and vigor are disguised by his quick humor and ever-present kindness. He is provocative in his ideas and evocative in spirit. His creative solutions and inclusiveness cross conceptual boundaries as well as physical borders.” The New Humanitarians serves a testament to this praise. Simply put, these organizations are amazing. The people behind the organizations are amazing. Their stories are amazing. And as a result, this book is amazing.

Series Afterword

THE NEW HUMANITARIANS I am honored to include Professor Chris Stout’s three-volume set—The New Humanitarians—in my book series. These volumes are like rare diamonds shining with visionary perspectives for the fields of human rights, health, and education advocacy; charitable and philanthropic organizations; and legal rights and remedies. The New Humanitarians volumes are of great value to informed citizens, volunteers, and professionals because of their originality, down-to-earth approach, reader-friendly format, and comprehensive scope. Many of the specially written book chapters include the latest factual information on ways in which the new leaders, advocates, and foundations have been instrumental in meeting the critical medical and human service needs of millions of people in underdeveloped and war-torn countries. Professor Chris Stout has developed a pathfinding set here. A gifted and prolific psychologist who planned and edited these comprehensive volumes, Stout has developed an original concept couched in these three remarkable books. I predict that the New Humanitarians will rapidly become a classic, and will be extremely useful reading for all informed citizens and professionals in the important years ahead. Albert R. Roberts, DSW, PhD Series Editor, Social and Psychological Issues: Challenges and Solutions Professor of Social Work and Criminal Justice School of Arts and Sciences Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey

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About the Editor and Contributors

Chris E. Stout is a licensed clinical psychologist and founding director of the Center for Global Initiatives. He also is a clinical full professor in the College of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry; a fellow in the School of Public Health Leadership Institute; and a core faculty member at the International Center on Responses to Catastrophes at the University of Illinois–Chicago. He also holds an academic appointment in the Northwestern University Feinberg Medical School and was visiting professor in the Department of Health Systems Management at Rush University. He served as a nongovernmental organization special representative to the United Nations for the American Psychological Association, was appointed to the World Economic Forum’s Global Leaders of Tomorrow, and was an invited faculty at their annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. He was invited by the Club de Madrid and Safe-Democracy to serve on the Madrid-11 Countering Terrorism Task Force. Dr. Stout is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, past-president of the Illinois Psychological Association, and is a distinguished practitioner in the National Academies of Practice. He has published thirty books, and his works have been translated into eight languages. He was noted as being “one of the most frequently cited psychologists in the scientific literature” in a study by Hartwick College. He is the 2004 winner of the American Psychological Association’s International Humanitarian Award and the 2006 recipient of the Illinois Psychological Association’s Humanitarian Award. Teresa Barttrum attended Ball State University for her undergraduate studies. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and photojournalism. She worked at the Herald Bulletin in Anderson, Indiana, and at the Star Press as a staff photographer for five years before moving back to the field of psychology. She then worked at 291

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the Youth Opportunity Center, a juvenile residential treatment facility, as a frontline supervisor in the Treatment of Adolescents in Secure Care (TASC) Unit of this organization. While employed at this organization, she helped develop and facilitate a therapeutic horseback riding program, served as a therapeutic crisis intervention instructor, and completed multiple in-service trainings. She currently attends the Adler School of Professional Psychology while pursuing her doctoral degree in clinical psychology. She completed her community service practicum at the Center for Global Initiatives while working on the book project The New Humanitarians: Innovations, Inspirations, and Blueprints for Visionaries. Stephanie Benjamin grew up on Long Island, New York, always dreaming of being a doctor and an artist. She earned her bachelor’s degree in art history and studio art from Tulane University in New Orleans and continued her education in Northwestern University’s post-baccalaureate pre-medical school program. Currently, she is at the Adler School of Professional Psychology working on a master’s degree in counseling psychology and art therapy. Through her internship at The Center for Global Initiatives she worked to help ameliorate inequalities in global healthcare by writing for The New Humanitarians as well as doing grant research and writing for other worldwide projects. After completing her clinical internship at Rush University Medical Center, she will be attending medical school in order to become a physician and continue working to improve healthcare around the world. Gillian Caldwell is a film maker and attorney with experience in the areas of international human rights, civil rights, intellectual property, contracts, and family law. She is the executive director of Witness (www.witness.org), which uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations, empowering people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, public engagement, and policy change. She has led Witness’s rapid expansion since 1998 and was formerly co-director of the Global Survival Network (GSN), where she coordinated a two-year, undercover investigation into the trafficking of women. She is a recipient of numerous awards for her work at GSN and Witness, including the Echoing Green Fellowship, the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, the Rockefeller Foundation Next Generation Leadership Award, the Schwab Foundation Award for Social Entrepreneurship, the KnightRidder Tech Laureate Award from the Tech Museum, and a Special Partner recognition by Ashoka: Innovators for the Public. Gillian received a BA from Harvard University and a JD from Georgetown University. She speaks Spanish. Mel Duncan serves as the executive director of Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP). Modeled on the Gandhian concept of Shanti Sena, Nonviolent Peaceforce is composed of trained civilians from around the world. In partnership with local groups, NP applies proven and effective strategies to protect human rights in areas of violent conflict and helps create space for local peacemakers to carry out their

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work. NP has civilian peacekeepers working in Sri Lanka, Guatemala, and the Mindanao region of the Philippines. Project development is going on for Colombia and Uganda. Duncan has over thirty years of organizing and advocating nonviolently for peace, justice, and the environment. In 1997 he received the prestigious Community Leaders Fellowship from the Archibald Bush Foundation, which allowed him to spend one and one-half years studying the connections between peace, justice, and spirituality. He is a graduate of Macalester College, St. Paul, MI, where he was awarded their Distinguished Citizen award this year. He also has a master’s degree from the University of Creation Spirituality/New College, San Francisco. He and his wife, Georgia, have eight children and live in St. Paul, Minnesota. Keith Ferrazzi is one of the rare individuals to discover the essential formula for making his way to the top through a powerful, balanced combination of marketing acumen and networking savvy. Both Forbes and Inc. magazines have designated him one of the world’s most “connected” individuals. Now, as founder and CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, he provides market leaders with advanced strategic consulting and training services to increase company sales and enhance personal careers. Ferrazzi earned a BA degree from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Mari Fitzduff is a Northern Ireland–born activist, educator, writer, and academic. She is currently professor and director of the MA Conflict and Coexistence Program at Brandeis University. She helped set up the first courses in conflict resolution at both universities in Northern Ireland. The field was so new that people “turning up for mediation thought they were turning up for meditation.” She authored a training book in 1988, which had particular application in the conflict in Northern Ireland, called Community Conflict Skills. It has since been translated into Indonesian, Serbo-Croatian, and other languages spoken in countries rife with ethnic strife. It gives over fifty ways of looking at issues of justice, political choices, and bridge building. She was active in the Community Relations Council, which was funded by both British and European funds, but was independent “so we could make choices about what we wanted to fund and decisions, etc. I went through the usual processes and became the first chief executive of that.” Malachi Garff is from Bethel, Connecticut, and worked with Amnesty International as an intern in fall 2007. She is a student at Tulane University in New Orleans, and will major in international development and anthropology with a minor in French. At school, she is involved with various philanthropic groups working on a number of causes, including Darfur, breast cancer, and Tibetan refugees. She has studied and lived in Paris, and spent one summer living in an orphanage in Kikatiti, Tanzania, where she taught elementary school English. After college, she hopes to pursue a career working for the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) and agricultural development in rural areas.

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About the Editor and Contributors

Lillian Hayward is a recent graduate from Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, where she completed her MA in public administration (MAPA) with a concentration in innovation, science, and environment. She has done extensive study in the areas of sustainable development and environmental issues, particularly as they relate to public policy development and implementation. Her success in this policy field is highlighted by her receiving the 2007 Delphi Group Graduate Scholarship in Environment and Sustainable Development Public Policy and Entrepreneurship. In addition to her academics, she was also the project manager for the creation of the Carleton School of Public Policy and Administration’s graduate journal ISEMA: Perspectives on Innovation, Science and Environment. This peer-reviewed journal highlights the best work the MAPA program has to offer in the field of innovation, science, and environmental policy research. The journal is now in its third edition. Prior to attending Carleton, she studied at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where she earned her BA with honors in philosophy and a minor in cell and molecular biology. Daniel Lubetzky is chairman of PeaceWorks Holdings LLC, a business corporation pursuing both peace and profit through joint ventures among neighbors striving to coexist in conflict regions (with ventures in the Mideast and Southeast Asia, and a sales network reaching 10,000 customers in the United States). He is also founder of the PeaceWorks Foundation’s OneVoice Movement, empowering ordinary Israeli and Palestinian citizens to wrest the agenda for conflict resolution away from violent extremists. Born and raised in Mexico City, Lubetzky received his BA in economics and international relations, magna cum laude, from Trinity University, and his JD from Stanford Law School. Fluent in Spanish, English, Hebrew, and French, Lubetzky has lectured at several universities, as well as at the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, and the United Nations. He was selected twice by the World Economic Forum as one of 100 Global Leaders for Tomorrow (GLT) in 1997 and again in 2007. He is the recipient of several awards, including the World Association of NGOs Peace Security and Reconciliation Award. John Marks is president and founder of Search for Common Ground, a nonprofit conflict resolution organization with offices in seventeen countries. He is a bestselling, award-winning author. He also founded and heads Common Ground Productions. He wrote and produced The Shape of the Future, a four-part TV documentary series that was simulcast on Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab satellite TV, and he was the executive producer of the Nashe Maalo TV series (Macedonia); Africa: Search for Common Ground (South Africa); The Station dramatic series (Nigeria and Egypt); and numerous other TV programs and series. Along with his wife, Susan Collin Marks, he is a Skoll Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship. He was formerly a U.S. Foreign Service officer and executive assistant to the late U.S. Senator Clifford Case. A graduate of Cornell University, he was a fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School.

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Susan Collin Marks is vice president of Search for Common Ground. She is South African and served as a peacemaker during South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy; see her book, Watching the Wind: Conflict Resolution during South Africa’s Transition to Democracy (2000). Honors include a 1994–95 Jennings Randolph Peace Fellowship at the United States Institute for Peace, the Institute for Noetic Science’s Creative Altruism award in 2005, and a Skoll Fellowship for Social Entrepreneurship in 2006. She speaks, teaches, coaches, mentors, writes, facilitates, and supports peacemakers, peace processes, and conflict resolution programs internationally. Mehmet Oz received a 1982, undergraduate degree from Harvard and a 1986 joint MD and MBA from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Wharton Business School. He is vice-chair of surgery and professor of cardiac surgery, Columbia University; founder and director, Complementary Medicine Program, New York Presbyterian Medical Center; currently, director, Cardiovascular Institute, New York Presbyterian Hospital. Research interests include heart replacement surgery, minimally invasive cardiac surgery, and health care policy. He is a member of the American Board of Thoracic Surgery; American Board of Surgery; American Association of Thoracic Surgeons; Society of Thoracic Surgeons; American College of Surgeons; International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation; American College of Cardiology; and the American Society for Artificial Internal Organs. He is the author of more than 350 publications. Myron Panchuk completed his BS degree in psychology and philosophy at Loyola University–Chicago in 1976. In 1982 he was ordained to the priesthood for the Chicago Diocese of Ukrainian Catholics and has actively served this community for over twenty years. His professional work includes designing and facilitating retreats and conferences for clergy and laity, professional development, conflict resolution, and social advocacy. He is a co-founder and member of Starving For Color, a humanitarian organization that provides baby formula for orphans in Ukraine. Myron is currently a counseling graduate student at the Adler School of Professional Psychology and is engaged in a community service practicum with Dr. Chris Stout at the Center for Global Initiatives. He intends to continue his studies and pursue a doctorate in depth psychology. Tim Phillips is the founding co-chair of the Project on Justice in Times of Transition and a co-founder and member of the External Advisory Committee of the Club of Madrid. Mr. Phillips has served as a consultant to nongovernmental and governmental organizations in the United States and abroad on democratization, conflict resolution, and transitional justice initiatives. Mr. Phillips is also a member of the Board of Directors and Advisors of the Foundation for a Civil Society, the University of the Middle East, the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University, and the Coexistence Initiative at Brandeis University. He has served as an advisor to the Government of Sri Lanka in the design and implementation of its

296

About the Editor and Contributors

peace process and has worked closely with leaders in several countries on conflict resolution and reconciliation initiatives. In 1997, Mr. Phillips and the Project on Justice in Times of Transition were profiled in the PBS documentary series The Visionaries, which aired on television in the United States and Canada. Orlando Rodriguez, a native New Yorker, is a student at Columbia University majoring in political science and human rights. He is a member of the Amnesty International chapter at Columbia University and has been developing a strong foundation as a human rights activist. On his debate team, he has argued for peacekeeping operations to be mandated within the Guantánamo Bay prison cells. He hopes to pursue a career in public interest law after graduating. Patrick Savaiano is currently enrolled in the doctoral (PsyD) program at the Adler School of Professional Psychology (ASPP) in Chicago, IL. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2004 with a BA in history and Spanish, and has since worked in marketing, real estate, and music. In the summer of 2003, Patrick had the rewarding experience of traveling to Costa Rica by himself to work with Habitat for Humanity. Although he still plays guitar in two bands, in 2006 he decided to shift his “day job” away from business and into the profession of psychology. In fall 2007, as part of ASPP’s Community Service Practicum, he worked under Dr. Chris E. Stout at the Center for Global Initiatives (CGI). He became an integral member of a team of students and professionals that ultimately put together a book project titled The New Humanitarians: Innovations, Inspirations, and Blueprints for Visionaries. Savaiano hopes to use the experience he has gained at ASPP and CGI to fuel his desire to help the less fortunate and underserved populations throughout the world. Heidi Moll Schoedel is national director of Exodus World Service, a nonprofit organization she co-founded in 1988. Exodus World Service builds connections between volunteers and refugees in the greater Chicagoland area, and develops training and resource materials for leaders around the world. Her first involvement with refugees was managing a local refugee resettlement program, which provided community orientation, job training, English language classes, and other services to newly arriving refugees. In response to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, she mobilized a national network for World Relief that successfully legalized 14,000 undocumented individuals. She also chaired the national working group of nonprofit legalization programs. She currently serves as chairperson of the Refugee Highway Partnership, a global network of refugee ministry organizations she helped launch. She lives in the Chicagoland area with her husband and four children. Trevor Thomas joined the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) in October 2007 as deputy communications director. Prior to HRC, he worked for Michigan governor Jennifer M. Granholm, serving in her executive office. There he directed rapid

About the Editor and Contributors

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response and surrogate communications for the governor’s cabinet and top advisors, including for the first gentleman. Thomas joined the governor’s team in early 2006, serving on her successful re-election campaign. He was responsible for opposition research, confirming the accuracy of campaign advertisements and messaging, and executing rapid response. The Washington Post named the campaign as one of the “10 Best” in the 2006 election cycle. A journalist by trade, Thomas worked as an assignment editor and news producer at West Michigan’s NBC affiliate, WOOD-TV. In this role, he helped cover state and national stories, including the 2004 presidential election, the 2002 state gubernatorial election, and the attacks on September 11, 2001. He also previously served as a producer/reporter at WGVU, the NPR/PBS affiliate. In July 2004, Thomas served as a guest essayist for the Grand Rapids Press, speaking out against an anti–gay marriage amendment on the Michigan ballot. Following publication, he served on a number of GLBT panels at Grand Valley State University, Western Michigan University, Aquinas College, and at the 2004 National Academic Advising Association’s national conference in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thomas’s work also includes a three-year tenure on the board of directors for the Network of Western Michigan, a nonprofit that aids the local gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community. He holds a BS in broadcast journalism from Grand Valley State University. While in college, he served two years as chair of education for Grand Valley’s gay-straight alliance, a position he created. He is also credited with starting a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender speakers’ program aimed at educating students on sexual orientation and gender identity. Thomas currently serves as an alumni advisor for the newly created GLBT campus center. Rhianna Tyson is a program officer for the Global Security Institute. Before coming to GSI, Rhianna was the project manager of the Reaching Critical Will project of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, United Nations Office, where she coordinated civil society efforts at disarmament fora of the United Nations. Her writings have been published in Disarmament Forum, the quarterly publication of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR); the IAEA Bulletin, the flagship publication of the International Atomic Energy Agency; and others. Previously, she was an intern with the Arms Control Association in Washington, D.C., and with the Society for International Development in Rome. She holds an MS with distinction in global politics from the London School of Economics, and a BA in gender and international relations from Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts. From the time she was twenty-one, Barbara J. Wien has worked in U.S. inner cities and war zones around the world to end human rights abuses, violence, and war. She published her first book on war and peace at the age of twenty-four, which sold over

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About the Editor and Contributors

10,000 copies and went into a seventh edition. When she was twenty-seven, she led an international delegation of 300 labor union presidents to El Salvador to stop the killing of priests, school teachers, and trade union activists by U.S.-backed death squads. More recently, she worked with religious leaders in northern Uganda and southern Sudan at the invitation of the United Nations to gain the release of over 5,000 child soldiers kidnapped by the Lord’s Resistance Army. In April 2002, the U.S. Embassy in Delhi, along with Hindu and Muslim women’ s organizations, invited her to India to work with them to stop communal rioting and violence in Gujarat and the northeast region (Bangladesh border). She has also worked for justice and peace in Gaza and the West Bank with Israelis and Palestinian human rights leaders. Wien is co-director of Peace Brigades International (PBI)-USA, a nonprofit organization made up of hundreds of unarmed volunteers from over forty countries. For twenty-five years, PBI has been sending teams of human rights observers into areas of conflict at the request of local groups to stop massacres and torture. PBI escorts and protects human rights activists being targeted for assassination by security forces, death squads, paramilitaries, and other repressive agents. The brigades accompany some of the most “at risk” and marginalized members of society, sometimes twenty-four hours a day. PBI is well known for escorting forensic specialists during the exhumation of bodies at clandestine grave sites, collecting testimony on human rights violations, visiting the offices of threatened labor leaders, acting as international observers at marches or demonstrations, and accompanying lawyers and witnesses to present evidence in court or to the United Nations. PBI operates in the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Nepal, and Indonesia (and formerly in Haiti, Sri Lanka, and the Balkans). Wien has worked to establish over 200 university degree programs in the study of peace and social justice. She has taught courses on alternatives to war and violence at Catholic University, Georgetown, and Columbia. She serves on the boards of several foundations and international peace education groups. In 2002–3, she worked with the playwright Eve Ensler, author of the Vagina Monologues, to end violence against women through Eve’s V-Day Foundation. Wien organized celebrity delegations to Afghanistan, India, Palestine, and other conflict areas to shine the spotlight on the needs of the women. By awarding over $7 million in royalties from Eve Ensler’s plays, Wien was able to work with grassroots women’s coalitions in more than fifteen countries to end honor killings, bride burnings, female genital mutilation, rape, incest, and war. For five years, she worked at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), an organization created and funded by the U.S. Congress. There, she trained U.S. police officers serving as UN peacekeepers in East Timor, the Balkans, and Haiti; humanitarian workers delivering food and medical supplies to war-torn areas; diplomats negotiating peace agreements; and refugee officials working to avert crises in the

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camps. She enhanced USIP training methods to be more highly interactive, authentic, and skills-based. Her programs received high ratings from participants. Wien is the author of numerous articles and several books. She holds a BA in international relations from American University’s School for International Service, and completed graduate work at City University of New York in comparative world history and economics. She also earned a teaching certificate from Columbia University Teachers College in peace education. James Wood is an assistant to the executive office at Amnesty International-USA. He received his BA from Fordham University, and shortly after, he moved to the Thai-Burmese border, where he worked and lived for two years. He spent his time there working with a nongovernment organization that works to prevent human trafficking as an English teacher, grants administrator, running coach, and project coordinator. His work has consistently been geared toward human rights and international development, but he is most passionate about the conflicts in Burma and the plight of stateless persons. Mark Zissman earned his BA in psychology from Northern Illinois University in 2007. He is currently pursuing both his MA in counseling psychology and his PsyD in clinical psychology at the Adler School of Professional Psychology. As a graduate assistant at the Center for Global Initiatives, he is assisting with the development of Project Niños, an endeavor focused on helping noncriminal yet imprisoned children in Bolivia. With aspirations to become a child and adolescent clinical psychologist, he plans to continue his efforts to help create meaningful change in the lives of the world’s youth.

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Index

Note: A page number followed by an f or t indicates that the reference is to a figure or table respectively. AJEDI-Ka/PES, 7 Aki, Yukio, 101 Alabama Youth Justice Coalition and SPLC, 147 Alami, Mowaffaq, 85 Albon, Mary, 219 All Children—All Families, 166 Al-Qasabah Theater, Ramallah, 80 Amnesty International (AI), xxviii abuses of human rights, fighting against, 51 AIUSA leaders and, 53 birth of, 51 Campaign to Save Darfur, 55–56 communications of, 54 events, 55 expansion of, 52 membership pool of, 60 mission of, 51 objectives of, 52, 60 organizational snapshot of, 62 product of the times, 52–53 Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur, 55–56 Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) abolishing death penalty, 58 actions of (see AIUSA actions)

16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, 143 1994 genocide in Rwanda, 199 Abbas, Mahmoud (President), 80–81 ABC Nightline program, 201 Abstinence-only program for GBLT youth concept of, 170 debate on, 170–171 HRC’s opposition to, 170 Institute of Medicine’s comment on, 171 Abu Ghraib prison, 5 Academy, The, Nigeria, 207 Action-learning training programs, 39 Adelman, Marcy, 162 African National Congress (ANC), 226 Agenda with Joe Solmonese, The, 161, 172, 173 AI. See Amnesty International (AI) AIUSA. See Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) AIUSA actions Program to Abolish the Death Penalty, 58–59 Stopping torture, 56–58 SVAW campaign, 59–60 301

302 Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) (continued) Campaign to Save Darfur, 55–56 Cox, Larry, contributions of, 61–62 Denounce Torture campaign, 57 events, 55 FAPP of, 61 Goering, Curt, contributions of, 53 Human Rights Education program, 54–56 human rights needs, fulfilling, 53 prisoners of conscience, release of, 60 regional offices, role of, 54 Rubenstein, Joshua, contributions of, 53 strategy development of, 54 ANC. See African National Congress (ANC) “Appeal for Amnesty, 1961,” 51 April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, 138 Arafat, Yasser, 193 Arias, Oscar, 217 Aronstein, David, 162 Article VI Forum, MPI disarmament and nonproliferation, strengthening, 184 mission of, 184 policies, advancement of, 184–185 Aryan Nations compound in Idaho, 143 Association of Vietnamese Fishermen v. Knights of the KKK, 142 August 6, 1945, U.S. nuclear attack, 177 Austin v. James, 145 B-52s, 8 Bachman, Eric, 101 Balderman, Adi, 80, 86 Banning the Bomb, 186 Bay, Galveston, 142 BBC alignment with Protestant/unionist community, 24 introducing occasional programs in Irish language, 35 Beck v. Alabama, lawsuit, 141 Behind the Seams: Maquilas and Development in Nicaragua (WFP), 133 Belfast Agreement (1998), 39

Index Benenson, Peter and his idea for Amnesty International, 51, 54 “The Forgotten Prisoners,” 52 Ben-Zvi, Oriella, 85–86 Bergstrom, Laureate Sune, 179 Berhanu v. Metzger, 142, 154, 155 Bernal, Gael Garcia, 8 Big Ivan/RDS-220, 178 Bipartisan Security Group (BSG), 182, 183, 186 Black separatists, 148 Bloomfield, Ken, 21 Bond, Julian, 138, 155 Borge, Tomas, 217 Bouchard, Lucien, 276 Bought & Sold: An Investigative Documentary about the International Trade in Women (WITNESS), 2 Bound by Promises (WITNESS), 7 Boyle, Kevin, 41 Bradley v. Haley (2000), 145 “Brown lung.” See Byssinosis Bridge, The, United States and Egypt, 207 Brinkley, Christie, 185 Broken Levees, Broken Promises: New Orleans’ Migrant Workers in Their Own Words, 148 Brown v. Board of Education, 149 Brown v. Invisible Empire of the KKK, 142 Brown, Gordon, 185 Browne, Jackson, 8 Brundtland Commission, 266 Brundtland Report. See Our Common Future (Brundtland Report) Brundtland, Gro Harlem, 264 BSG. See Bipartisan Security Group (BSG) Building Successful Partnerships (WEA), 28 Bujumbura, Burundi, 199, 200, 203 Burundi, Search field office Domestic Shuttle Diplomacy, 203 drumming festival at, 200f first program at, 199–200 Gardons Contact movement, 202 Ould-Abdullah, Ahmedou, contributions of, 199 Studio Ijambo at, 200–201 Women’s Peace Center at, 201–202

Index Bush, George W. (President), 170 Business Coalition for Workplace Fairness, 169 Business Strategy for Sustainable Development: Leadership and Accountability for the ’90s (IISD), 275 Butler, Lee, 184 Butler, Richard, 143 Byssinosis, 144 CAFTA. See Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) Campbell, Kim, 183, 184, 273 Canada’s Green Plan for a Healthy Environment, 268 Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), 267 Carroll, James, 217 Castaneda, Ricardo, 227 Castro, Fidel, 179 CCRU. See Central Community Relations Unit (CCRU) Cecilia, story of, 1 Celebration of Hope dinner, 258 Center for Human Rights Miguel Austin Pro Juarez (PRODH), 117 Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), 128, 132, 133 Central Community Relations Unit (CCRU) CTG, setting up of, 21–22 funding district councils in Northern Ireland, 22 Irish language’s significance, recognizing, 22 legal infrastructure for integrated education, securing, 22 mission of, 21 setting up of, 21 TSN program, 22–23 Central Secretariat, 21 Cervantes, Neyra Azucena, story of, 7 CGP. See Common Ground Productions (CGP), Search Chain gangs in Alabama, 145 Chamorro, Violeta, 217 Chapel of the Air ministries, 245 Charter 77 Foundation, New York, 218, 219, 224

303 Chazan, Naomi, 228 Chretien, Jean, 270 Christian Identity adherents, 148 Christian Knights of the KKK, 143 churches, community relations group, 29–30 Church of the Creator, 143 CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, The, (Mark, coauthor), 194 CIA-KGB cooperation, 192 CIDA. See Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) Citizens’ Negotiations Platform, 70, 71, 79 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 138 Civil Rights Memorial, 139, 149–150 Clark, Daniel, 111 Cleese, John, 55 Clinton, Bill (President), 208f, 210 “Close to Slavery” (IJP), 148 CNI. See National Independent Committee for the Defense of Prisoners, the Persecuted, Detained, Disappeared, and Exiled (CNI) Cohen, Richard, 154 Cohen, William, 166 Cold War communism, collapse of, 213–214 Marks’ opinion on, 191 mutually assured destruction, doctrine of, 181, 191 nuclear scare during, 178, 179 redefining security post, 181 Cole, Michael, 173 Colombia, WFP delegations to, 129 Common Ground on Terrorism, 192 Common Ground Productions (CGP), Search birth of, 206 greatest hits of, 207 inspiration behind, 206 Search for Common Ground series, 206 Communist regime in East bloc collapse of, 213–214 Michnik’s views on, 214 views on state’s role under, 213 Community Conflict Skills (Fitzduff 1988), 23 Community Group Management (WEA), 28

304 Community Relations Council (CRC), xxviii action-learning training programs, 39 antisectarian activities of, 32–33 community relations groups and (see Community relations groups) community relations, mainstreaming (see CRC and maintenance of community relations) CTG, subgroup of, 22 (see also Cultural Traditions Group (CTG)) customized programs, 39 emergence of, 23–24 first days of, 25–26 funding and proliferation, 40–41 lessons learned by, 41–44 local area programs, 39 major approaches to training, 38 mediation skills training, 39 organizational snapshot, 44 problems faced by, 37 task of, 24–25 training change agents of, 37–40 training modules, 38–39 Community relations groups addressing issues of differences, 26 Churches, 29–30 Counteract, 28 Interface Project, 27 North Belfast Community Development Centre, 28–29 Peace and Reconciliation group, 27 single-identity work of, 26 Workers Education Association, 27–28 Conference for Security and Cooperation (OSCE), Europe, 193 Conflict campaign, 82 Conflict Management (WEA), 28 Conrad, Roger, 201 Conspiracy of Hope Tour of 1986, 55 Conspiracy of Hope Tour, the Human Rights Now! 1989 Tour, 55 Core Partner campaigns, 5 Corporate equality issues, HRC Business Coalition for Workplace Fairness, formation of, 169 Corporate Equality Index’s report, 168, 169

Index Dunaway, Cammie, comment of, 168–169 workplace protections, increasing, 169 Council of Conservative Citizens, 139 Council on Foreign Relations in New York, 181 Counteract, 28 Counter Terror with Justice, 58 Cox, Larry, 52, 61 Cranston, Alan GSI, developing (see also Global Security Program (GSI)) Nuclear Weapons Elimination Initiative, launching, 181 nuclear weapons, opinion on, 177 Cranston, Kim, 181 CRC. See Community Relations Council (CRC) CRC and maintenance of community relations business, 33 institutional antisectarian work, 32–33 security forces, 30–31 sports, 31–32 CRC training action-learning training programs, 39 customized programs, 39 four major approaches, development of, 38 local area programs, 39 major challenges, 37–38 mediation skills training, 39 training modules, 38–39 Creative Commons license, 10 Crimson White, 152 Cristiani, Alfredo, 217, 228 Cropper, Angela, 274 CTG, cultural traditions work affirming identity, 33–34 cultural traditional fairs, organizing, 34–35 Irish language, recognizing, 35–37 CTG. See Cultural Traditions Group (CTG) Cultural Heritage program, DENI, 22 Cultural Traditions Group (CTG) CRC and, 22, 23 cultural traditions work of, 33–37

Index

305

DADT. See “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) Dallaire, Roméo, 178 DARCI. See Decision, Accountable, Responsible, Consultant, Informed (DARCI) Dayton Peace Accords, 227 Death penalty, AIUSA’s views, 58–59 Decision, Accountable, Responsible, Consultant, Informed (DARCI), 11 Dees, Morris Seligman, Jr., , 138, 153–154

Donald, Michael, 143 Dothard v. Rawlinson (1977), lawsuit, 140 DPE. See Disarmament and Peace Education (DPE) program DRC. See Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) Dual Injustice (WITNESS), 7 Dunaway, Cammie, 169 Duncan, Mel, 102 and conception of Nonviolent Peaceforce, 91 and Hartsough, 92 suggestions by, 100 Duty to Protect, A (WITNESS), 7 Dvilo, Thomas Lubanga, 7

Del Monte Fresh Produce, 148 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), 7 DENI. See Department of Education for Northern Ireland (DENI) Denounce Torture campaign, 57 Department for Culture Arts and Leisure (Ministry DCAL), 36 Department of Education for Northern Ireland (DENI), 22 Department of Environment, 267–268, 273 Desai, Narayan (Shanti Sena Mandal), 110, 111 Developing Facilitation Skills (WEA), 28 Dhanapala, Jayantha, 182–183 Diaz, Jaime, 111 Diffusion of Innovations (Rogers), 259 Dijkstra, Piet (Foundation for the Extension of Non-violent Action), 111 Diop, Omar, 101–102 Disarmament and Peace Education (DPE) program, 183, 186 Diversity Department, HRC HBCU Student Leadership Program, 159 National Dialogue, 160 “Do No Harm, approach, PBI,” 114 “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT), 165–166 “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue, Don’t Harass,” policy, 165 Donald, Beulah Mae, 143

Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB), 270, 275 Earth Summit. See United Nations Conference on Environment and Development Earth Summit Bulletin (IISD), 270, 275 Eck, Jan van, 203 ECONI. See Evangelical Conference on Northern Ireland (ECONI) Edman, Faith, 102 Education for Mutual Understanding (EMU), DENI, 22 Education Reform Order (1989), DENI, 22 EJI. See Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) ELN guerilla movement, Colombia, 226 Emergency Response Network (ERN), 107–108 Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), 169 EMU. See Education for Mutual Understanding (EMU), DENI ENB. See Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) ENDA. See Employment NonDiscrimination Act (ENDA) Endean, Steve, 157–158 End the Conflict campaign and OneVoice Movement, 82 Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), 141 Equally Speaking, 161, 173 ERN. See Emergency Response Network (ERN) Ervine, David, 226

setting up, 21–22 Customized programs, CRC, 39 Cutler, Lloyd, 219–220

306 Evangelical Conference on Northern Ireland (ECONI), 29 Exodus Advocacy Network, 249 Exodus World Service, xxxi–xxxii arising issues of, 255 bringing hope for refugees, 239–240 core values of, 258–259 customers of, 250 early years of, 242–246 (see also Exodus World Service, early years) engaging on global level, 256 family, 258 fundraising for, 257–258 healing strategy of, 240 impact of, 253, 256 influencers, 259–260 inspirational source of, 260 invitation to volunteers, 252 local affiliate offices of, 255 market research by, 244 middle years of, 246–254 (see also Exodus World Service, middle years) ministry of, 242, 259 network, 249 New Neighbor Program, 255 (see also New Neighbor Program) niche in refugee ministry, 251(see also Refugee ministry, Exodus) organizational snapshot, 261–262 partnerships, 245–246, 251 at present, 254–257 (see also Exodus World Service, present) phone and e-mail consultation, 255 principles of, 260–261 Refugee Champion characteristics and, 253 School Kit Collection and, 249 staff members of, 252 vision for, 241–242 volunteers, 240–241, 243 volunteers to Uganda, 257 Welcome to America! Pack and, 243–245 (see also Welcome to America! Pack program) Exodus World Service, early years challenges faced by, 243 goals of, 244 initial funding, 243

Index other initiatives taken by, 245–246 steps taken in launching, 242–243 Welcome to America! Pack, developing, 243–245, 246 Exodus World Service, middle years analyzing Welcome to America! Pack program, 247 core customers, defining, 250–251 development of promotional tools, 248 “friendship” program between volunteers and refugees, 247 governing board’s important decisions, 252–253 lessons learned by, 251–252 New Neighbor Program, launch of, 248–249 program training, developing, 247–248 RefNet and, 249 Refugee Champion and, 253 resettlement agencies and, 251 stories of refugees, 254 training and educational resources, expansion of, 249 using web-based program, 246–247 volunteer opportunities, 249 Exodus World Service, present community organizing, 257 franchising, 255 on global level, 256 impact, 254–255, 256 mission, 255 and RHP, 256 serving refugees, 257 Facilitative Leadership (WEA), 28 Fair Employment Commission (FEC), 32 FAPP. See First Appeal Pledge Program (FAPP) FEC. See Fair Employment Commission (FEC) Feminicide, Mexico, 7 Filmon, Gary, 276 First Appeal Pledge Program (FAPP), 61 Fitzduff, Mari conflict resolution field, discovering, 19 leaving CRC, 40 SACHR, report for, 19–21 story of, 17–18

Index Focus for Change benefit, 8 Force More Powerful, A, 205 Forced from Home: U.S. Trade Policy and Immigration (WFP), 130 “Forgotten Prisoners, The,”(Observer), 52 Foundation for a Civil Society. See Charter 77 Foundation, New York Frazer and Fitzduff report, 21 Frazer, Hugh, 20, 26 Free Aceh Movement (Gherkin Aceh Media, GAM), 119 Freedom Riders, 143, 155 Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), 132 Frontiero v. Richardson (1973), lawsuit, 140, 152–153 Frowick, Robert, 199 FTAA. See Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) Furrow, Buford, 149 Gabriel, Peter, 3–4, 8 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 217 Galster, Steve, 1 Gandhi and King Season for Nonviolence at the United Nations, 188 Gardons Contact (Let’s Stay in Touch), 202 Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat (Dees), 154 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 269–270 Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), 133 Gewirtzman, Doni, 163 Gilmore vs. City of Montgomery, 152 Gimme6, Cyprus, 207 Glanville, William, 272 Glass, Philip, 8 GLBT youth abstinence-only education programs for, 170–171 comprehensive sexuality education for, 170 HRC and, 170–171 supportive of GLBT equality, 169–170 Global Security Institute (GSI), xxx–xxxi approach of, 181–184 (see also GSI approach)

307 dynamic program leaders of, 183–184 “energized civil society” making, 187 nuclear arms control and disarmament, 177–178 Nuclear Weapons Elimination Initiative and, 181 organizational snapshot, 188 recent activities of, 184–187 (see also GSI, recent actions of) Global Security Program, 181 Globe 90 Conference, 267 GMOs. See Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) Goering, Curt, 53 Goindi, Farrukh Sohail, 103 Golub, Leon, 1 Goodwin, Doris Kearns, 217 Goodwin, Richard, 217 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 181, 185 Graham, Thomas, 183, 185, 186 Granoff, Jonathan, 178, 185, 186–187, 188 Grey, Robert, 183 GSI approach, 181 BSG and, 182, 183, 186 DPE program and, 183, 186 MPI and, 182, 183, 184 (see also Middle Powers Initiative (MPI)) PNND and, 182–183, 184 GSI, recent actions of Article VI Forum of MPI, 184–185 BSG’s policy briefs/ on-the-record input, 186 DPE’s Rome Declaration, 186 female leadership in nuclear abolition panel, 185–186 op/ed in the Wall Street Journal, publication of, 185 PNND Global Council, importance of, 185 Secure World Foundation and, 186 GSI. See Global Security Institute (GSI) Guatemala Project, NP, 94–95 Guatemala Woman’s Rights Group, 95 Hadden, Tom, 41 Harris v. James, 145 Harris, Emmylou, 8 Hartsough, David, 92

308 Hassan (Prince of Johnson), 193 Hate acts, United States of America lynchings in 2007, 137–138 recent of, 137 SPLC’s reports on, 137, 138–139 white supremacist activities, 138–139, 142 Hate on Trial: The Case against America’s Most Dangerous Neo-Nazi (Dees), 154 Havel, Václav (President), 218, 219 Hawthorne, James, 21 HBCU. See Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Student Leadership Program Healthcare Equality Index (HEI), 164 Henok, 142 Hertzberg, Hendrik, 217 Hiroshima, 177, 178 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Student Leadership Program, 159 Hitchens, Christopher, 217 “hitching post,” in USA, 145 Hobbs, Marian (Aotearoa-New Zealand), 185 Holmes v. Hunt, 144–145 Hope v. Pelzer (2002), 145 House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations, 186 Howard, Donna, 102 HRC. See Human Rights Campaign (HRC) HRC Coming Out Project, The, 160 HRCF. See Human Rights Campaign Fund (HRCF) HRC Family Project, The, 160 HRC Foundation, 160, 166, 168 HRC Historically Black Colleges and Universities Outreach Program, The, 160 HRC issues adoption and parenting rights, 166 aging, 161–163 (see also Senior Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE)) corporate equality, 168–169 (see also Corporate equality issues, HRC)

Index GLBT health issues, HIV, AIDS, 164 GLBT military, 165–166 GLBT youth, 169–171 hate crimes, 163–164 immigration, 164–165 international rights, 165 people of color, 166 religion and faith, 167 transgender issues, 167–168 HRC Religion and Faith Program, The, 160 HRC Research Center, The, 160 HRC staff Cole, Michael, 173 Johnson, Christopher, 173–174 Luna, Brad, 174 Salkind, Susanne J., 172–173 Solmonese, Joe, 171–172 HRC Workplace Project, The, 160 Hub project, WITNESS, 12, 15 Human Rights Campaign (HRC) diversity mission, 159–160 educational outreach, 160 equality for GLBT citizens, seeking, 157 fair-minded candidates, supporting, 159 history of, 157–158 important issues of (see HRC issues) media outreach of, 160–161 notable accomplishments of, 158–159 organizational snapshot, 174–175 staff of, 171–174 (see also HRC staff) Human Rights Campaign Fund (HRCF), 157 Human Rights Education program, AIUSA benefit events, role of, 55 development of, 46 incorporation in school programs, 54–55 Human Rights Promotion, conditions for, 6 Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, 5 IALANA. See International Association of Lawyers against Nuclear Arms (IALANA)

Index IBM International Foundation, 69 ICC. See International Criminal Court (ICC) Idriss, Shamil, 204 IEC. See International Executive Committee (IEC) IEP. See OneVoice International Education Program (IEP) IFI. See International financial institution (IFI) IGC. See International Governance Council (IGC) IISD. See International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) IISD, barriers and challenges balancing act between stakeholders, problem of, 274 challenging birth, 272–273 DOE’s withdrawal of a part of funding, 273 external barriers, 274 Liberal Government Program Review, impact of, 273 termination of similar projects, 273 IISD, creation of awareness, raising of, 265–266 Brundtland Commission, message of, 266 Globe 90 and, 267 institutional structure, 268–269 international institute for sustainable development, emergence of, 266 politics of, 267–268 IISD, major eras communications, focus on, 269, 270 decline of core funding, 270–272, 271f Earth Negotiations Bulletin and, 270, 275 Internet and electronic communications, growth of, 270 policy research, focus on, 269–270 program planning, coherent approach to, 272 vision, defining, 272 IISD, opportunities and breakthroughs for, 274 Rio Earth Summit, 1992, 275

309 Earth Summit Bulletin, publication of, 275 World Wide Web, using, 275 external and an internal scan, 276 IISD, organizational issues of finances, 276–277, 277f location, 279–280 personnel, 277–279 IJP. See Immigrant Justice Project (IJP) IMF. See International Monetary Fund (IMF) Immigrant Justice Project (IJP) creation of, 147–148 gender discrimination of immigrant women and, 148 paper on Internet hates, 149 rights of migrant workers, protecting, 148 INES. See International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility (INES) Insai Di Saloon (Inside the Salon), Sierra Leone, 207 Instant Karma, 56 Intelligence Project of SPLC creation of, 138, 148 domestic hate groups, monitoring, 148 extreme Right, information on, 148 Furrow, Buford, information on, 149 mission of, 137, 148, 149 white supremacist movement, reports on, 138–139 Intelligence Report, 139, 148 Interface Project, 27 International Association of Lawyers against Nuclear Arms (IALANA), 182 International Council of Peace Brigades, 118 International Criminal Court (ICC), 7 International Education Program (IEP), 76–78 International Executive Committee (IEC), 52 International Financial Institution (IFI), 133 International Governance Council (IGC), 93

Index

310 International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), xxxii Brundtland Report’s recommendations and, 264–265 challenges faced by, 272–274 (see also IISD, barriers and challenges) communications and, 270 core funding of, 271–271f creation of, 265–269 (see also IISD, creation of) designated grants and operating grants, 277f, 278f establishment of, 264–265 funding model, 276–277, 277f future, 280–281 international trade, opinion on, 263–264 involvement in 1992 Rio Earth Summit, 275 launch of World Wide Web, 275 location of, 279 major eras of. (see IISD, major eras) natural resource management issues, study of, 264 offices, 279–280 opportunities and breakthroughs for, 274–276 (see also IISD, opportunities and breakthroughs for) organizational snapshot, 281–282 people-centered view of, 264 personnel of, 277–279 political landscape of, 267–268 program areas, 276 research and objectives of, 263 structure of, 268–269 vision of, 272 International Liaisons, 2 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 125 International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility (INES), 182 International Peace Bureau (IPB), 182 International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), 182 International Secretariat (IS), 52, 53 Invisible Empire Klan, 142

IPB. See International Peace Bureau (IPB) IPPNW. See International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) IRA. See Irish Republican Army (IRA) Iranian-American relations and Search Iranian ambassador to the UN, comment on, 211 meetings between U.S and Iran, arranging, 209–210 Search’s two-track strategy, 211 U.S. national wrestling team’s visit to Tehran, 210 USA Wrestling and Iran’s ambassador to UN, 210 Irishness, varieties of, 22 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 17 IS. See International Secretariat (IS) Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 65 Itoh, Iccoh, 177 It’s Time to Walk the Talk, 280 January, story of, 7 Jaruzelski,Wojciech, 228 “jellyfish babies,” birth of, Marshall Islands, 179–180 “Jena 6,” noose incident in USA, 137 Jerusalem, Search’s Middle East program Common Ground News Service, 204–205 Ma’an Network, 205 nonviolence program, 205 office, opening of, 204 TV documentary series, 205, 206f JJPL. See Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL) Johnson, Christopher, 173–174 Jolie, Angelina, 8 Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL), 147 Kabbah, Tejan (President), 8 Kaelber, Terry, 161–162 Keenan v. Aryan Nations, 143, 155 Keenan, Victoria, 143 Kennedy, Robert, 144

Index Keyes, Gene, 111 Key Results Areas (KRAs), 10–11 KGB, 192 Kidjo, Angelique, 8 “Killing Fields, The,” (of Northern Ireland) 17 King, Martin Luther, 142, 149–150 KKK. See Ku Klux Klan (KKK) Klansmen, SPLC’s fight against (see SPLC’s fights against hate groups) Klanwatch, 138, 139 Klerk, F. W. de, 226 Knights of the KKK, 138 Kol Ahad Israel. See OneVoice Israel (Kol Ahad Israel) Koppel, Ted, 192, 201 Kotter, John, 259 KRAs. See Key Results Areas (KRAs) Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 106, 137 Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, 8 Lawyer’s: Journey: The Morris Dees Story, A (Dees), 153–154 League of the South, 139 Lederach, John Paul, 42 LeMoyne, James, 227–228 Lennon, John, 55–56 Let’s Stay in Touch (Gardons Contact), 202 Levin, Joseph J., Jr., 138, 152 Liberia, Search field office, 203 Liebling, A. J., 206 Lin, Maya, 139, 150 Literaturnaya Gazeta, 192 Little, Joan, 141 Liuzzo, Viola, 143 Living Openly in Your Place of Worship guide, HRC, 167 Livni, Tzipi, 80, 81 Local area programs, CRC, 39 Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act (H.R. 1592), 163 Lubetzky, Daniel, xxviii, 84–85 Luers, Wendy Charter 77 Foundation, heading, 218 Project on Justice in Times of Transition, co-founding, 218–219 Luna, Brad, 174

311 Macedonia Baptist Church v. Christian Knights of the KKK, 143, 154 Macedonia Baptist Church, 143 Macedonia, Search field office, 199 Madisson, Abacca Anjain, (Marshall Islands), 185 Magee, Raymond (Peaceworkers), 111 Mains, David, 245 Mains, Karen, 245 Mandela, Nelson (President), 226 Manivannan, Ramu, 102–103 Mansfield v. Church of the Creator, 143 Mansfield v. Pierce, 143 Mansfield, Harold, 143 Maquila system, 132–133 Marin-Bosch, Miguel, 183 Marks, John, 206f CGP and, 206–207, 208f Cold War, opinion on, 191 Collins, Susan, meeting, 194–195 common activity, advocating, 191 life before Search, 193–194 Search, founding, 191 (see Search for Common Ground (Search)) Marks, Susan Collins, 206f childhood of, 194 Search, joining, 195 Ubuntu, guiding principle of, 194 Marley, Ziggy , 203 Mashaal, Saed, 81 Masri, Ezzeldin, 85 Matthew Shepard Act (S. 1105), 163–164 Maze of Injustice report, 60 McDonough, Alexa (Canada), 185 McElroy, James, 155 McGinnis, Lloyd, 269 McGuinness, Martin, 44 McKinney v. Southern White Knights, 142 McNamara, Robert, 184 McVeigh, Timothy, 143 McWilliams, Monica, 228 Mediation skills training, CRC, 39 Menin, Mateo, 103 Metzger, John, 142 Metzger, Tom, 142 Meyer, Melvin, 152 Meyer, Roelf, 223, 226–227, 228

312 Meza, David, 7 Michnik, Adam, 214, 228 Middle Powers Initiative (MPI) Article VI Forum of, 184 composition of, 182 “track 11⁄2 diplomacy” and, 182 Mighty Times: The Children’s March, film (2005), 154 Mikyung, Lee (South Korea), 185 MILF. See Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) Military Commissions Act, 57 Military Readiness Enhancement Act (MREA), 165 Miller, Arthur, 218 Ministry DCAL. See Department for Culture Arts and Leisure (Ministry DCAL) Mississippi Youth Justice Project, SPLC, 147 Mohammed experience of, 240–241 Pat and, 240 Welcome to America! Pack and, 240 Monnet, Jean, 196 Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955–1956, 150 Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), 94 “Moros,” 94 MPI. See Middle Powers Initiative MREA. See Military Readiness Enhancement Act (MREA) Mubarak, Hosni, 193 Mulroney, Brian, 266, 267, 273 “Mutually assured destruction,” (MAD), doctrine of, 181, 191 NAFTA. See North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Nagasaki, 177, 178 Naor, Israel, 103 NAPF. See Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF) Narayan, Jayaprakash, 109 Nashe Maalo (Our Neighborhood), 207 National Alliance, 143 National Dialogue, 160 National Independent Committee for the Defense of Prisoners, the

Index Persecuted, Detained, Disappeared, and Exiled (CNI), 117 Nationalists in Northern Ireland single-identity work for, 26 war between unionists and, 17 National Task Force on Environment and Economy (NTFEE), 266 Nation of Islam, 139 Neo-Nazi, 148 New Neighbor Handbook (Exodus World Service) New Neighbor Program in England, implementation of, 256 launch of, 248 licensing of, 255 Nicaragua’s Free Trade Zone, 129 Nightline, ABC-TV, 192 Nixon v. Brewer, 140 Nonacs, Eric, 219 Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP), xxix, 89 accomplishing goals, 93 analyzing success, 97 developing ventures in Columbia and Uganda, 100 efficacy management, 97 formation of, 90 funding for, 96–97 future plans, 99–100 goals, 93 Guatemala Project of, 94–95 International Governance Council, 101–103 lessons learned by, 97–98 mission of, 91 nonviolent techniques of, 90 organizational snapshot of, 103–104 origins of, 91–92 peacekeepers of, 98f–99f project in Philippines, 94 project in Sri Lanka, 93–94 (see also Nonviolent Peaceforce Sri Lanka (NPSL) staff training and compensation, 95–96, 96f trainees, 96f work of, 93–35 Nonviolent Peaceforce Field Team, xxix Nonviolent Peaceforce International Governance Council, 101–103

Index Nonviolent Peaceforce Sri Lanka (NPSL) activities of, 93 result of, 94 service, 94 team of peacekeepers, 99f North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 127, 128, 270 North Belfast Community Development Centre, 28–29 Northern Ireland Voluntary Trust, 20 NP. See Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP) NPSL. See Nonviolent Peaceforce Sri Lanka (NPSL) NPT. See Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) NTFEE. See National Task Force on Environment and Economy (NTFEE) Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF), 182 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 179 Nuclear weapons abolition of slavery and, 187 challenge of combating, 178 climate change and, 178 combating scare of, 178, 181 destructiveness of, 177 GSI’s focus on disarmament of, 177–178 (see also Global Security Institute (GSI)) Nuclear weapon scourge combating, 178, 181 delicate balance of fifty-year, 178–180 Nuclear Weapons Elimination Initiative institutionalizing, 181 launch of, 181 Nusseibeh, Lucy, 103 Nyerere, Julius, 110 Nystrom, Nancy, 162 Odyssey of the Mind (Kotter), 259 Omar, Dullah, 226–227 One Million Voices to End the Conflict campaign, 82–83 OneVoice, Gaza contributors , 85 opening of, 76 staff in, 76

313 WAYWTD campaign in, 79–80 OneVoice International Education Program (IEP) funds for, 78 goal of, 77 partnerships with center for citizen peace-building, 78 OneVoice Israel (Kol Ahad Israel), 68 chapters of, 72 contributors, 85–86 goal of, 71 leadership development strategy of, 71 leadership seminars conducted by, 72 leadership subcommittees of, 72–73 local events, emphasizing on, 73 OneVoice Palestine and, 81 at Tel Aviv University, 80 tiered reward system, instituting, 72 young leaders of, 71 OneVoice Israel, PR Committee, 73 OneVoice, Local Events Committee, 73 OneVoice Mandate, 79t and WAYWTD campaign, 79–80 signatories for, 76 signing of 73 OneVoice Movement, xxviii–xxix aim of, 65 basic premise of, 66–67 communications team, 73 “enlightened self-interest” focusing on, 67 foundation of, 65–66 funding for, 68–69 future of, 83–84 IEP of, 77–78 (see OneVoice International Education Program (IEP)) leadership development strategy of, 71 leadership seminars, 71–72 mandate of, 79–80 methodology of, 67–68 mobilizing the grassroots, 82–83 nationalistic parallel movements of, 68 One Million Voices to End the Conflict campaign, 82–83 OneVoice Israel and OneVoice Palestine, joint statement of, 81 organizational snapshot of, 87 parallel initiatives of, 67–68

Index

314 OneVoice Movement (continued) programs of (see OneVoice, programs and initiatives) WAYWTD campaign, 79–80 WEF event of 2007, 80–82 OneVoice Palestine (Soutuna Filastin) attendance and recruitment at town hall meetings, 74–75, 75t foundation of, 68 leadership programs, evaluation of, 75–76 message of, 80 OneVoice Israel and, 81 OneVoice’s Gaza office, significance of, 76 Shahin, Nisreen, contribution of, 85 societal transformations and, 74 support system of, 82 training Youth Leaders, 75 OneVoice, programs and initiatives Citizens’ Negotiations Platform, 70 Leadership Development Program, 70–71 negotiation and compromise, teaching, 69–70 OneVoice Israel, 71–73 (see also OneVoice Israel (Kol Ahad Israel) OneVoice Palestine, 74–76 (see also OneVoice Palestine (Soutuna Filastin)) OneVoice’s Leadership Development Program, 70–71 OneVoice’s Youth Leaders, 71 OneVoice’s Youth Leadership Training programs, 85 Ortega, Daniel (President), 217 Ould-Abdullah, Ahmedou, 199–200 Our Common Future (Brundtland Report) a global agenda for change, 264 IISD and, 265 (see also International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)) recommendations made by, 264–265 strengths of, 264 sustainable development, defining, 264 Our Neighbors, Ourselves, 201 Our Social History (WEA), 28

Out in Scripture (HRC), 167 Paradise v. Allen, lawsuit, 140 Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament (PNND), 182–183, 184, 185 PASS. See “Possible Structures for the Development and Implementation of Policy Appraisal on Separation and sharing (PASS)” (Hadden) Pat, 240 Paths Through the Past (WEA), 28 Patterson, Roy, 141 PBI. See Peace Brigades International (PBI) PBI Colombia, 115–116 PBI founding meeting, Grindstone Island, Canada, 110 attendees of, 110–111 comments made during, 111–112 issues discussed in, 111 PBI Guatemala, 116–117 PBI Indonesia, 118–119 PBI mandate neutrality, 112 nonpartisanship, 113 PBI Mexico, 117–118 PBI Nepal, 118 PBI network in Colombia, 115–116 in Indonesia, 118–119 in Mexico, 117–118 in Nepal, 118 in United States, 119–120 PBI, foundation of founding meeting of, 110–111 founding principles of, 109–110 WPB and, 110 PBI-USA, 119–120 Peace and Reconciliation group, 27–28 Peace Brigades International (PBI), xxix aim of, 121 breaking chain of command in human rights attacks, 106f deployment in Guatemala, 116–117 ERN of, 107–108

Index evaluating methods, 113–114 first World Peace Brigade, 110 forensic anthropologists, escorting, 108 foundation of, 109–112 founding meeting of, 110–112 funding for, 115 indicators of success of, 113 mandate of, 112–113 mission of, 109 mobilizing grassroots, 107 neutrality, 112 nonviolent protective accompaniment, 105–107, 106f operating network and projects of, 115–120 organizational snapshot of, 121 as part of global human rights movement and, 120–121 selection of field volunteers, 114–115 services, 108 “Peace Communities,” 100 PeaceWorks Foundation (USA), xxviii, 65 contributors to, 84–87 focus of, 67–68 funding structure, building, 68–69 fundraising efforts of, 69 grassroots network, forging, 70–71 methodology and structure of, 65–70 mobilizing grassroots, 82–83 OneVoice Movement of, 65 (see also OneVoice Movement) Penny Doe v. Richardson (1998), 146 People Dammed, A (WFP), 126 Peres, Shimon, 80 Pew Charitable Trust, 243 Philippines Project (Mindanao), NP, 94, 98f Phillips, Tim developing memorandum, 217–218 Luers, Wendy, cooperation of, 218–219 Project on Justice in Times of Transition, idea behind, 215–217 Pierce, William, 143 Pittaluga, Simonetta Costanzo, 101 PNND. See Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament (PNND) Political Response Network (PRN), 107

315 Portland skinheads, 142 “Possible Structures for the Development and Implementation of Policy Appraisal on Separation and sharing (PASS)” (Hadden), 41 Preparing for Change (WEA), 28 Principled Negotiation (WEA), 28 “Prisoners of conscience,” 51 PRN. See Political Response Network (PRN) PRODH. See Center for Human Rights Miguel Austin Pro Juarez (PRODH) Program to Abolish the Death Penalty, AIUSA, 58–59 Project on Justice in Times of Transition, important programs of, 228 conference on missing persons for family members, Hungary 1997 El Salvador 1993, 229 executive training programs for Northern Ireland political and community leaders, United States 1996–2003, 230 negotiating from conflict to peace, Colombia 2007, 231 Nicaragua 1994, 229 Northern Ireland 1995, 229–230 peacebuilding, reconstruction, and establishment of Rule of Law program, 230 session for Ulster Democratic Unionist Party, 230–231 South Africa 1994, 229 strategy for Kosovo’s first hundred days, 231 Project on Justice in Times of Transition, xxxi advice and recommendations for future NGO leaders, 234–235 designing programs, 231–233 Ervine, David, contributions of, 226, 228 first steps of, 217–220 focus of, 214–215 fundamental principle of (see Project on Justice in Times of Transition, methodology of)

316 Project on Justice in Times of Transition (continued) future directions, 233–234 global reputation of, 215 historical context of, 213–215 inspiration behind, 215–217 international advisory board of, 236 launching of, 223–224 LeMoyne, James, contributions of, 227 Meyer and Omar, contributions of, 226–227 organizational snapshot, 236–237 Salzburg conference and (see Salzburg conference on Justice in Times of Transition) “shared experience” methodology of, 223 (see also Project on Justice in Times of Transition, methodology of) significant programs of, 228–229 (see also Project on Justice in Times of Transition, important programs of) Project on Justice in Times of Transition, methodology of approach, 224–225 forum’s neutral environment, ensuring, 225 international speakers, role of, 225 “shared experience” methodology, development of, 224 shared personal stories, impact of, 226–228 target audience “into the room”, bringing, 225 Pronk, Jan, 203 Protective accompaniment, PBI books on, 109 Colombia project and, 116 definition of, 105–106 effectiveness of, 120 Indonesia project and, 118 Mexico and, 117 working strategy of, 106–107 PSAs. See Public service announcements (PSAs) public service announcements (PSAs), 203 Pugh v. Locke (1976), 145 Rabin, Yitzhak, 193

Index Radhakrishana (Gandhi Peace Foundation), 111 Radio Telefis Eireann, 19 Rainbow Adult Community Housing, 162 Rajiv Gandhi Institute, 181 RAND Corporation, Pentagon, 192 R.C. v. Fuller (1988), 145 Reagan, Ronald, (President), 192 Reebok Human Rights Foundation, 4, 8 RefNet. See Refugee Furniture Network (RefNet) Refugee Bridge Group, 257 Refugee Champion, seven traits of, 253 Refugee Furniture Network (RefNet), 249 Refugee Highway Partnership (RHP), 256 Refugee ministry, Exodus early years in church-based, 242 Exodus World Service niche in, 251 increasing local church involvement in, 245 programs, 256 promotion for, 246 volunteers in, 251–252 Religion and Faith Program, HRC mission of, 167 Progressive State Clergy coalitions and, 167 resources, creating, 167 Religion Council, HRC, 167 Reno, Janet, 138 Republican National Convention (New York), violence at, 5 Responsible Education about Life Act and HRC, 170 RHP. See Refugee Highway Partnership (RHP) Rio Earth Summit, 1992, 275 Ripley, Dennis, 241 Robinson, Curtis, 148 Robinson, Karen, 54–55 Roche, Douglas, 183, 184–185, 187 Rockwood Leadership Program, 11 Rodgers, Nile and CHIC, 8 Rogers, Everett, 259 Roncken, Theo, 103 Rosenblatt, Lionel, 199 Ross, Johnny, 141 Rubenstein, Joshua, 53 Runnalls, David, 269, 272

Index Run/Walk for Refugees, 258 Ryback, Tim, 217, 218 SACHR. See Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights (SACHR) SAGE. See Senior Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE) Salkind, Susanne J., 172–173 Salzburg conference on Justice in Times of Transition, 1992 first day of, 221–222 goals of, 221 impact of, 222 methodology of shared experience, 223 (see also, Project on Justice in Times of Transition, methodology of) outcomes of, 223 participants of, 221 post-communist Europe, helping, 221 recognition of, 223 second day’s developments at, 222 skepticism around, 220 Salzburg Seminar, Salzburg, Austria, 215 Sanchez, Diego, 168 Schafferman, Eran, 81 School Kit Collection, 249 School-to-Prison Reform Project, 146 Schwab, Klaus, 80 Schwartz, Herman, 219, 220 Scott, Michael, 110 SD. See sustainable development (SD) Search. See Search for Common Ground (Search) Search field offices Burundi, expansion to, 199–203, 200f (see also Burundi, Search field office) Liberia and Sierra Leone, 203–204 Macedonia, expansion to, 199 Middle East, expansion to, 204–205 Ukraine and Angola, expansion to, 203 Search for Common Ground (Search), xxxi CGP of, 206–207, 208f conflict and violence, approach to, 195–196 conflict resolution field, institutionalizing, 196–197 core principle of, 195

317 counterterrorism project, success, 192 field offices of (see Search field offices) foundation of, 191 funding of, 191–192, 199 Iranian-American relations, commitment to improving, 209–211 Literaturnaya Gazeta, partnership with, 192 Middle East program of, 204–206, 206f Middle East, venture into, 193 operating principles of, 198–199 organizational snapshot of, 211–212 reaction to world’s crisis, 195 during Reagan’s time, 192 social entrepreneurship principles of, 208–209 U.S.-Soviet Task Force on Lebanon, 193 Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” The, 194, 206 Search, operating principles of immersing in local culture, 198 methodology, principle of, 198–199 parachuting, avoiding, 198 people from all sides of conflict, employing, 198 Season for Justice, A (Dees), 153 Secret Policeman’s Ball, 55 Seeding Video Advocacy definition of, 5 program, 11 Senior Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE) challenges faced by, 161 higher rate of isolation among, 161, 163 separate retirement centers, debate on, 162 “spontaneous combustion,” increase of, 162 welcoming retirement communities, lack of, 161–162 Seraw, Mulugeta, 142 “Severance pay” of Search, 192 Shadow of Hate, The, 155 Shahin, Nisreen, 80, 85 Shaikh, Darya, 86 Shamy, Gil, 86 Shanti Sena, 110

318 Shape of the Future, 205–206, 206f Shays, Christopher, 186 Shepard, Mark, 111 Sierra Leone, Search field office, 203 Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1 Simon, Paul, 8 Simon, Scott, 206 Simons, Howard, 217 SJDC. See Southern Juvenile Defender Center (SJDC) Smith v. YMCA, lawsuit, 139–140 Solmonese, Joe, 161, 171–172 Soros, George pro-democracy movements, supporting, 219–220 Project on Justice in Times of Transition and, 219–220 South Africa’s Search for Common Ground, 194, 207 Southern Juvenile Defender Center (SJDC), 147 Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), xxx Alabama Youth Justice Coalition, collaboration with, 147 Confederate battle flag, bringing down, 144–145 death penalty, opposing, 140–141 education for homeless children, 146 EJI, supporting, 141 employment discriminations, challenging, 140 founders and staff, 152–155 (see also SPLC founders and staff) funding, 150 hate acts and, 137–138 history of, 138–139 (see also Southern Poverty Law Center, history of) IJP, creation of, 147–148 Intelligence Project of, 137, 139 (see also Intelligence Project of SPLC) JJPL, supporting, 147 Klansmen, battling, 141–143 (see also SPLC’s fights against hate groups) medical services for poor, 145 Mississippi Youth Justice Project, 147 organizational snapshot, 156 prison conditions, challenging, 145

Index racial discriminations, challenging, 139–140 School-to-Prison Pipeline, challenging, 146–147 School-to-Prison Reform Project of, 145 SJDC, operating, 147 tax equality, fighting for, 144 Team Defense project of, 141 ways of supporting, 150–152 worker safety, protecting, 144 Southern Poverty Law Center, history of Civil Rights Act of 1964, 138 Civil Rights Memorial, building, 139, 149–150 Klanwatch, creation of, 138 Teaching Tolerance, launch of, 139, 149 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 138 white supremacist activities, actions against, 138–139 Soutuna Filastin. See OneVoice Palestine (Soutuna Filastin) SPLC. See Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) SPLC founders and staff Bond, Julian, 155 Cohen, Richard, 154 Dees, Morris, 153–154 Levin, Joseph J., Jr, 152–153 McElroy, James, 155 SPLC’s fight against prison conditions chain gangs, fight against, 145 “hitching post,” opposition to, 145 uninhabitable Alabama prisons, 145 SPLC’s fights against hate groups Aryan Nations and Butler, fighting, 143 Christian Knights of the KKK, fighting, 143 Church of the Creator, fighting, 143 Invisible Empire Klan, fighting, 142 Klan paramilitary activity, ending, 142 Pierce, William, case of, 143 Southern White Knights, fighting, 142 United Klans of America, fighting, 143 WAR, fighting, 142 SPLC’s landmark cases

Index Association of Vietnamese Fishermen v. Knights of the KKK, 142 Austin v. James, 145 Berhanu v. Metzger, 142, 154, 155 Beulah Mae Donald v. UnitedKlans, 143 Bradley v. Haley (2000), 145 Brown v. Invisible Empire of the KKK, 142 Dothard v. Rawlinson (1977), 140 Frontiero v. Richardson (1973), 140 Harris v. James, 145 Holmes v. Hunt, 144–145 Hope v. Pelzer (2002), 145 Keenan v. Aryan Nations, 143, 155 Little, Joan, case of, 141 Macedonia Baptist Church v. Christian Knights of the KKK, 143, 154 Mansfield v. Church of the Creator, 143 Mansfield v. Pierce, 143 McKinney v. Southern White Knights, 142 Nixon v. Brewer, 140 Nowak v. Foster, 144 Paradise v. Allen (1972), 140 Patterson, Roy, case of, 141 Penny Doe v. Richardson (1998), 146 Pugh v. Locke, 145 R.C. v. Fuller (1988), 145 Ross, Johnny, case of, 141 Smith v. YMCA, 139–140 Wilkins v. Lanier (1979), 144 SPLC, ten ways of supporting, 150–152 Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights (SACHR) establishment of, 19 Frazer and Fitzduff ’s report for, 20 Station, The, Nigeria, 207 Stern Report, 281 Stern, Lee, 111 Stewart, John, 103 Stonewall Communities, 162 Stopping Torture, 56–58 Stop Violence Against Women (SVAW) campaign, 59–60 Studio Ijambo, 200–201 Studio Ijambo, Burundi, 200–201, 202, 203 Styron, Rose, 218

319 Styron, William, 218 Sustainable development (SD), 264 SVAW campaign. See Stop Violence Against Women (SVAW) campaign Talking Drum Studio, Liberia, 203 Targeting Social Need (TSN), CCRU, 22 Teaching Tolerance, SPLC anti-bias multimedia kits, distributing, 149 appreciation of diversity, promoting, 149 honor and awards for, 149 launch of, 139 Team Defense project, SPLC, 141 Tel Aviv OneVoice Israel at, 71 Peoples’ Summits in, 82 Thich Nhat Hanh, 91 Third-party nonviolent intervention (TPNI), 109 This Voice in My Heart (Tuhabonye), 261 Thomson, Murray, 111 TIDES. See Training for Transformation, Interdependence, Diversity, Equity, and Sustainability (TIDES) Time for Justice, A, film, (1994), 154, 155 Towards 2010: Priorities for NPT Consensus, 185 TPNI. See Third-party nonviolent intervention (TPNI) Trafficking Victims Protection Act, 2 Training for Transformation, Interdependence, Diversity, Equity, and Sustainability (TIDES), 40 TSN. See Targeting Social Need (TSN), CCRU Tuhabonye, Gilbert, 261 “Tupperware fundraising” for Search, 192 Turner Diaries, The, (Pierce), 143 Typology of Community Relations Work (Fitzduff), 23 Tyson, Rhianna, 185–186 UA. See Urgent Action (UA) Ulster Scots Society, 36 Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), 226

320 UNCED. See United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) “Understanding Global Warming: A Seminar for Journalists,” program, 215 Unionist in Northern Ireland single-identity work for, 26 war between nationalist and, 17 United Klans of America, 143 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), 270 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 51 Updike, John, 218 Urgent Action (UA), 61 Urgent Action, Special Focus Cases, and Individuals at Risk, 60–62 USA Country Group, 120 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 199–200 USAID. See U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Us and Them, 28 U.S.-Soviet Task Force on Lebanon, 193 U.S. Trident missile, 179 UVF. See Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) Valdemir, story of, 7 Varieties of Irishness, 22 Vega, Suzanne, 8 VH1 Honors, 7 Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism, 12 Vietnamese-Americans’ fishing businesses, 142 Villagómez, Cuauhtémoc Romero, 103 Villalobos, Joaquín, 227–228 Visible Intent: NATO’s Responsibility to Nuclear Disarmament, 185 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 138 Wadsworth, George, 241 Waging Peace (Radio Telefis Eireann), 19 Walker, Charles, 110, 111 Wallace, George, 144, 152 WANEP. See West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP)

Index WAR. See White Aryan Resistance (WAR) Ware, Alyn, 183 WARN. See Worldwide Accelerated Response Network (WARN) Watching the Wind: Conflict Resolution during South Africa’s Transition to Democracy (Marks), 194 WAYWTD. See What Are You Willing to Do? (WAYWTD) campaign WEA. See Workers Education Association (WEA) “Weapons of Mass Destruction: Current Nuclear Proliferation Challenges,” 186 WEF. See World Economic Forum (WEF) event Weiss, Cora, 185 Welcome to America! Pack program analysis of, 247 and churches, 246–247 development of, 243 for involvement in refugee ministry, 244 marketing of, 245 model of, 245 use of, 244 volunteer service and support, 247–248 West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP), 102 Westpoint Pepperell cotton mill, 144 WFP. See Witness for Peace (WFP) WFP, current programs of delegations to Colombia, 129 Mexico Program, 129–131 Nicaragua Program, 131–133 WFP in Nicaragua Contra War in the 1980s and, 123, 124–125 life-changing delegations, facilitating, 128 Nicaragua’s Free Trade Zone, working with, 129 Witness for Peace Nicaragua Program, 131–133 What Are You Willing to Do? (WAYWTD) campaign, 79–80, 82 White Aryan Resistance (WAR), 142 White Patriot Party in North Carolina, 138

Index Wilkins, Nat Thomas, 144 Willoughby, George, 111 WILPF. See Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) Wiseman, Henry, 111 WITNESS, xxvii, 15 birth of, 4 Bound by Promises video, 7 challenges faced by, 12 core partners campaigns, 5 creative approach of, 8 DARCI models, 11 developing staff of, 13–14 donation of musical performances and, 8 Dual Injustice video, 7 Duty to Protect, A, screening and distributing of, 7 experience of, 5 five KRAs of, 10 funding for, 9 global communication and, 11–13 history of, 3–4 HUB project, launching, 12–13 human rights framework, 6 inspiration behind, 6–7 lessons learned by, 14–15 mission of, 6 organizational snapshot, 16 portfolio of, 9 present situation of, 4 progress of, evaluating, 9–11 promotion of videos, 7–8 role of, 4–5 strategy plan of, 5–6 supporting the work of, 8–9 third prong of, 12 training, 15 undercover video, importance of, 1–3 Witness for Peace (WFP), xxix actions taken by, 123, 134 beginning of, 124–125 challenges faced by, 134–135 in Columbia, 127–128 in Cuba, 127 foundation of, xxix funding for, 135 future plans, 135 in Guatemala, 126

321 in Haiti, 126 in highlands of Chiapas, 126–127 joining, 135–136 maintaining nation wide base, 123 mission statement, 123–124 in Nicaragua, operating principle of, 124 organizational snapshot, 136 programs of (see WFP, current programs of) staff in U.S., 134 work in United States, 128–129 Witness for Peace Mexico Program delegations to, 130–131 focus of, 129 Witness for Peace Nicaragua Program debt cancellation, advocating, 132–133 delegations to, 133 problems with free trade and labor, 132 WITNESS progress, evaluation of DARCI model, implementation of, 11 detailed monitoring and evaluation plan, 11 expansion of staff and budget, 9–10 group of management practices, development of, 11 “open-source” approach to initiatives, 11 Performance Evaluation Dashboard and, 10 “positive return on social investment,” demonstration of, 10 Seeding Video Advocacy program and, 11 Witness to Truth (WITNESS), 1, 8 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), 182 Workers Education Association (WEA), 27–28 Working with Killers project, Burundi, 202 World Economic Forum (WEF) event, 80–82 World Peace Brigade (WPB), 110 World Relief, 247 Worldwide Accelerated Response Network (WARN), 61 World Wide Web, 275

Index

322 WPB. See World Peace Brigade (WPB) www.rockwoodleadership.org, 11 Yeltsin (President), 179 YMCA. See Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA)

Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 29 discriminations by, 139 SPLC’s lawsuit against, 139–140 Zapf, Uta (Germany)