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

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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

209

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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• • • • • • • • • • • •

•

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

6

The New Humanitarians

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

10

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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The New Humanitarians

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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The New Humanitarians

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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The New Humanitarians

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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The New Humanitarians

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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The New Humanitarians

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 New Humanitarians

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).

From an Idea to Action: The Evolution of Médecins Sans Frontières

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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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The New Humanitarians

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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The New Humanitarians

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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The New Humanitarians

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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The New Humanitarians

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 New Humanitarians

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).

3

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: •

•

•

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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•

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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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The New Humanitarians

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% <0.5% <1.0%

80% 74% 38%

82% 83% 60%

96% 98% 60%

87% 98% 60%

100% 100% 68%

64% 43% 41%

100% 100% 65%

0.5%

81%

91%

92%

99%

83%

70%

87%

40%

30%

30%

5%

5%

<5%

47%

<1%

4

2

1

0.1

<0.1

1.7

0.24

1.9

18

15

11

6.0

4.0

0.5

4.1

1.2

Courtesy of Shobha and Raj Arole.

Table 6.2 Overview of CRHP Activities (1970–2006) TB patients treated Leprosy patients treated and rehabilitated Artiﬁcial limbs and calipers provided Tube wells for safe drinking water Plant nurseries–villages Land leveled (hectares) Irrigation wells dug Check dams Houses built for poor people Women involved in credit program Training skill formation (tailoring, weaving, ﬁshing, agriculture, dryer) Training in community-based health (since 1983) (grassroots workers, policy makers, project managers, health and development professionals and students, etc.) • Persons from India • Persons from other countries Courtesy of Shobha and Raj Arole.

9,621 5,089 17,222 198 203 10,433 523 223 283 6,064 1,859

17,661 1,911

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ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Jamkhed (aka Comprehensive Rural Health Project—CRHP) Founders: Shobha Arole, Raj Arole Mission/Description: The Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP) was started to provide health care to rural communities. It developed a comprehensive, community-based primary health care (CBPHC) approach. CRHP is located at Jamkhed, which is located far from any 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. With values of compassion, justice, respect, and trust, the CRHP at Jamkhed works to empower people, families, and communities, regardless of caste, race or religion, through integrated efforts in health and development. Website: http://www.jamkhed.org/ Address: Comprehensive Rural Health Project Jamkhed, Dist. Ahmednagar Maharashtra–413 201 India Phone: +91.2421.221322 Fax: +91.2421.222892 E-mail: [email protected]

REFERENCES Arole, M. (1995). Voices of South Asian Women. Kathmandu: UNICEF, South Asia Ofﬁce. Arole, M., and Arole, R. (1994, 2003). Jamkhed: A Comprehensive Rural Health Project. Jamkhed, India: CRHP. Newell, K. (Ed.) (1975). Health by the People. Geneva: World Health Organization. Population and Economic Development Linkages, 2007 Data Sheet. (2007). Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Books Arole, M. (1995). Voices of South Asian Women. Kathmandu: UNICEF, South Asia Ofﬁce. Arole, M., and Arole, R. (1994, 2003). Jamkhed: A Comprehensive Rural Health Project. Jamkhed, India: CRHP. Husale, D. (2003). Mukta (life stories of Village Health Workers in Marathi; English translation in process). Jamkhed, India: CRHP.

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Chapters Arole, M. (2002). “The Comprehensive Rural Health Project in Jamkhed, India.” In Rohde, J. and Wyon, J. (Ed.). Community-Based Health Care (pp. 47–60). Boston: Management Sciences for Health. Arole, M., and Arole, R. (1975). “A Comprehensive Rural Health Project in Jamkhed (India).” In Newell, K. (Ed.). Health by the People (pp. 70–90). Geneva: World Health Organization. Arole, M., and Arole, R. (2002). “Jamkhed, India: The Evolution of a World Training Center.” In Taylor-Ide, D. and Taylor, C., Just and Lasting Change (pp. 150–160). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Arole, R. (1993). “The Comprehensive Rural Health Project, Jamkhed.” In Antia, N. and Bhatia, K. (Ed.). People’s Health in People’s Hands: A Model for Panchayati Raj (pp. 125–140). Bombay: Foundation for Research in Community Health. Arole, R., Fuller, B., and Deutschmann, P. (2005). “Community Development as a Strategy for Promoting Mental Health: Lessons from Rural India.” In Herrman, H., Saxena, S., and Moodie, R. (Ed.). Promoting Mental Health (pp. 243–251). Geneva: World Health Organization.

Articles Arole, S., Arole, R., Premkumar, R., Murray, M., and Saunderson, P. (2002). “Social stigma: A comparative qualitative study of integrated and vertical care approach to leprosy.” Leprosy Review (73): 186–196. Arole, S., Premkumar, R., Arole, R., Mehandale, S., Risbud, A., and Paranjape, R. (2005). “Prevalence of HIV infection in pregnant women in remote rural areas of Maharashtra State, India.” Tropical Doctor (35): 111–112. Kermode, M., Herrman, H., Arole, R., White, J., Premkumar, R., and Patel, V. (2007). “Empowerment of women and mental health promotion: a qualitative study in rural Maharashtra, India.” BMC Public Health (7): 225. McCord, C., Arole, R., Arole, S., and Premkumar, R. (2001). “Efﬁcient and effective emergency obstetric care in a rural community where most deliveries are at home.” International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics (75): 297–307.

Research Chitnis, Ketan. (2005). “Communication for empowerment and participatory development: A social change model in Jamkhed, India.” PhD dissertation, University of Ohio. Nossal Institute, University of Melbourne, Australia, in partnership with CRHP (2007–2008). “To assess mental health literacy among CRHP project villages and develop a mental health training program for village health workers.” Yan, Jennifer Pui Jan. (2005). “Empowerment of adolescent girls: The Jamkhed experience.” Master’s thesis, Department of International Health, Melbourne University, Australia.

Prizes and Awards 1979 1985

Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership (Asian “Nobel” prize) Honorary Doctorate for Public Service, Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania, USA

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NCIH Award for Service in International Health, Washington, DC, USA Padma Bhushan National Award for Social Service (Raj) Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs Award, Geneva, Switzerland Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Dalit Mitra Award for work among backward classes (Raj) Mother Teresa Memorial National Award for Social Justice (Raj) Zee TV Astitwa for Outstanding Woman in Health Care (Shobha)

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

Dedicated to Maximilian and Antonia Marie When the International Center for Equal Healthcare Access (ICEHA) was founded on November 21, 2001, the world’s attention was focused on a need for funding and the availability of affordable, low-cost drug treatments as solutions to the AIDS pandemic that was ravaging the developing world. Understandably, the ﬁeld of “Global Health” was not yet well developed at that time, and few in the West had any experience implementing “access to anti-AIDS medication” programs, with millions of dollars in backing, only to realize that entire healthcare systems in the developing world were almost nonexistent. The most pertinent question for me became one of how we can build these critical systems in a sustainable, effective, empowering way without taking years to accomplish the end result? What initially started as a very small pilot program in Vietnam and Cambodia has since spread its wings rapidly across countries and continents. Working in countries as diverse as Nepal, Vietnam, Cambodia, South Africa, Lesotho, Burundi, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Suriname, Kiribati, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, ICEHA is deploying over 6,500 aggregate person-years of high-quality, professional medical expertise from doctors and nurses in the Western world to their colleagues in the developing world, saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Out of great vision, passion, and ultimate persistence, ICEHA grew into the “global leader in clinical skills rapid transfer to emerging nations,” an international nonproﬁt organization with ofﬁces at present in London, New York, and Stellenbosch.

IMMEDIATE AND SUSTAINABLE IMPACT The sustainability and deﬁned scope of ICEHA’s endeavors can best be highlighted using the example of a clinic in Vietnam that has become “mentored out.”1 Binh Thanh clinic is located in Ho Chi Minh City, one of the areas with the 121

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highest HIV prevalence rate in Vietnam. Only in March 2005 was funding made available to provide anti-AIDS medications to AIDS patients through the Vietnamese public sector. In collaboration with the Provincial Health Authorities and Family Health International, Binh Thanh OPC became the ﬁrst outpatient AIDS clinic. Given the high level of stigma associated with being HIV positive in Vietnam, the clinic opened in March 2005 without publicity. At the time of opening, the Vietnamese healthcare providers at Binh Thanh clinic had received a two-week didactic training course in AIDS care and were told to start providing patients with AIDS care and treatment. Of course, it is quite a different matter to be told how to do a spinal tap for crypto-meningitis than to have the conﬁdence and practical skills to carry out the procedure. Hence, to get the clinic personnel up to speed and institute the necessary operational systems, ICEHA was asked to send its volunteer clinical mentors to Binh Thanh OPC during the initial period of introduction of AIDS care and treatment in the clinic. In this country where HIV-infected patients typically go into hiding, Binh Thanh OPC had 200 patients in HIV care within six weeks of opening, 600 patients in AIDS care with more than 1,000 patient visits another six weeks later; and three months after that, 1,200 patients were in AIDS care, with the clinic personnel having started to provide leadership to clinics in the surrounding areas. At that point, ICEHA pulled back as quality control procedures showed that our local colleagues were providing the best AIDS care possible within the existing resource limitations. Therefore, the clinic was, in our parlance, “mentored out.” Thirty-two local healthcare providers had been given practical clinical expertise by seven clinical mentors over a period of six months. Following ICEHA’s pullback, the clinic continued to ﬂourish. By March 2006, the patient population had grown to 1,500, and the local government relocated the clinic to a larger space. Binh Thanh OPC clinic remains a model of excellence in the region and is being copied throughout the country with the assistance of ICEHA’s clinical mentors. In addition, an unintentional result of our clinical mentoring activities turned out to be the effect on local healthcare workers of being exposed to passionate colleagues and of being given the skills to provide the best care possible. By the time the clinic became mentored out—and this is true in all clinics where we are asked to deploy ICEHA clinical mentors—the clinic staff walked around as if they owned the clinic: they were proud and passionate to work there, having seen their standing in their communities rise as word about the quality of their services had spread. This was quite a different picture from the staff ’s attitude when we initially arrived, an attitude that had been rooted in the high level of stigma associated with caring for AIDS patients.

WHAT WAS THE TRIGGER? Ten years ago, a Western infectious disease physician landed in Rwanda, conﬁdent, hopeful, and with a supply of antiretroviral medications (ARVs) for 100 AIDS patients in his suitcase. His assignment was to set up an AIDS research

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program in this country stricken by AIDS. The infectious diseases clinic looked good by local standards, desolate by ours. Clinic personnel were delighted to see him and appreciative of the medication supply, while patients in dire need of AIDS care were lined up outside the clinic walls, looking gaunt, the sparkle of life gone from their eyes. Rather quickly, however, did he realize that unless he, as a Western healthcare provider, was going to put these patients on the ARV medications he had carried with him, they would not be receiving the treatments they so urgently needed. The Rwandan physicians looked at the bottles of pills with a mix of horror, puzzlement, and excited anticipation. They had participated in a two-week, didactic training course on AIDS care, but that had been only theory. And what is the value of theory in real life anyhow? When an AIDS patient entered their small ofﬁce, they would continue to be highly reluctant to give him any physical examination, or touch him for that matter, still afraid that they might perhaps “catch AIDS” that way. As for these various interesting-looking pills, their questions came quickly: “What are they?” “How would one use those?” Along similar lines, the operational systems needed for AIDS care were close to nonexistent in the clinic. Nurses were not keeping patient records, nor were patient ﬂow systems set up, a situation that resulted in waiting lines of more than 500 patients on Monday with none on Tuesday. Lab tests were, of course, not available, and neither were proper dispensing procedures at the pharmacy in residence. A phone call to the employer of the Western physician followed. “No, he couldn’t come home in a week. He couldn’t just leave the medications in the clinic; there was no infrastructure for AIDS care, no operational systems, no practical medical expertise. The AIDS research program would not be started on time. Indeed, he would need several months to set up the care delivery system that would ultimately get the medications from his suitcase into the patients in a clinically justiﬁed way. If not, a worse epidemic—a resistant one—could be created.”2 The employer of that physician was the International Therapy Evaluation Center (IATEC) at the University of Amsterdam. And the chief operating ofﬁcer of IATEC was Dr. Marie Charles. As a Belgian physician with a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University, I had been offered the position of COO in the late 1990s after having lived in Indonesia and Malaysia for several years. At that time, IATEC was a multimillion-dollar, university-based research center that conducted clinical research in HIV and AIDS across the developing world. But despite the fact that we were well funded and able to bring antiretroviral medications into the African clinic settings which universally lacked both AIDS care and treatment, the lack of adequate healthcare infrastructures was an impediment to the rapid implementation of our clinical research programs, and hence by inference, to any level of AIDS care delivery. A year into my job, the UNAIDS-brokered Accelerated Access Initiative (AAI) was announced. Under AAI, ﬁve large pharmaceutical multinationals had agreed to provide antiretroviral medications “at cost” to selected developing countries in

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an attempt to help stem the AIDS pandemic. It was quite clear to all of us that, while most certainly reduced drug costs were an absolutely necessary step, unless one were to set up the critical delivery systems necessary for AIDS care, no amount of increased international donor funding or a reduction in drug costs would beneﬁt the patients on the ground. Indeed, months after AAI was announced in a high-proﬁle fashion and as the initiative failed to show much immediate increase in numbers of patients receiving treatment, one could sense the public opinion starting to turn against the possibility that antiretroviral medications could be given to patients in resource-poor settings because of the “resource poverty” aspect of these developing countries. We knew well that the lack of resources did not prohibit the delivery of antiretroviral medications to those who needed them. Our HIV clinical research was indeed carried out successfully, and HIV clinical research is quite a bit more complicated than AIDS care. The turn the public opinion was starting to take was scary, and it needed to be corrected urgently. Hence, over the summer of 2000, after many controversial discussions in my own home after work, I managed to convince two colleagues to co-found a separate nonproﬁt organization with me called PharmAccess International. We had no budget, no employees, no logo, and no website, but we had a great vision of what needed to be done in terms of proving that a lack of patients on treatment in the developing world despite lower drug costs, was an issue of undeveloped or absent healthcare systems, and not one of medications that were too complicated for resource-poor settings. In our search for clinics with existing operational systems, we approached Heineken Breweries. Although Heineken’s corporate medical insurance scheme did not cover AIDS care and treatment at that time, each of its nine subsidiaries throughout Africa had well-established clinic facilities, trained medical staff, laboratories, and pharmacies. In the end, it took one of the two other co-founders, Richard Hoetelmans, and me nine months of meetings at senior corporate levels; analyses ranging from the clinical protocols to be used to economics, public relations, and negotiations with pharmaceutical companies; and countless evenings and weekends of background work before I received a call on July 21, 2001, that Heineken’s corporate board had decided to include AIDS care and treatment in the medical insurance scheme for its employees. It was a multimillion-dollar implementation contract. Within six weeks, we had the ﬁrst employees of Heineken on ARV treatment in Rwanda and Burundi, the pilot countries. Heineken Breweries had become the ﬁrst multinational corporation to provide AIDS care and treatment to its workforce. Many have since followed in Heineken’s footsteps. However, just weeks before this landmark phone call in July 2001, I had been relocated back to Manhattan and was faced with the question of how to run an organization I had co-founded from an ocean away. It had been one thing to handle conference calls with Heineken’s management in Amsterdam at 3 a.m. in New York; it was another to manage employees and programs for years to come from a distance. Declining the suggestion by my co-founder colleagues that I run

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the business development side from Manhattan, I decided to resign from the board and as managing director of PharmAccess International. The remaining directors compensated me ﬁnancially for the time I had spent in successfully building the organization, a gesture that would later prove vital in ICEHA’s startup phase. In addition, I inherited the U.S. corporate entity, which had not yet been put into operations. Richard Hoetelmans resigned for personal reasons a few weeks after I left, leaving only one of three original co-founders ultimately in charge. My vision in setting up the Dutch nonproﬁt had always been one where we would initially target the private sector to put AIDS patients on antiretroviral treatment quickly, but from there, we would build the bridge into the public sector where the largest number of AIDS patients were and still are. Building the bridge into the public sector would have entailed leveraging various resources from the private sector, including ﬁnancial, operational, clinical facilities, and so on, in order to build up the public healthcare sector to such an extent that AIDS care and treatment could be provided easily there, too. Realizing that the Dutch nonproﬁt organization had a very different vision upon my leaving, I decided to found yet another nonproﬁt organization, the International Center for Equal Healthcare Access (ICEHA) to focus solely on building healthcare capacity in public healthcare systems across the developing world, leveraging the enormous untapped human capital resource called “clinical expertise” so abundantly available in the West. ICEHA’s initial focus would be infectious diseases and AIDS, without precluding an expansion into other ﬁelds of medicine at a later date. Robin Lewis, PhD, associate dean at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University in New York, had been following my career path from afar and joined the board of directors of ICEHA from the onset. Brieﬂy thereafter, we were joined by Brian Boyle, MD, JD, assistant professor of infectious diseases at Cornell Weill Medical College in Manhattan and internationally recognized for his HIV expertise. From the beginning, both of them intrinsically understood the need for ICEHA’s existence and were willing to do whatever it would take to help the organization achieve its mission and vision. ICEHA began operations on November 21, 2001. Similar to my previous entrepreneurial experience, here too did we have a great vision for ﬁlling a need that no one else addressed, a long name, a few directors, no employees, and no funding at all. Within days, Robin Lewis asked me to give a two-hour seminar on ICEHA and its underlying philosophy to a group of Southeast Asian fellows who were in residence at Columbia University. I had only a business card at that time. Little did I realize then how vitally important this early seminar would turn out to be for ICEHA’s future. Indeed, a few weeks thereafter, I received a Christmas card from Hanoi, signed by a certain Professor Trinh Ngoc Trinh, a name that did not sound familiar. Since I travel frequently and meet countless people around the world whose names unfortunately tend to blend together after a while, I politely sent a Christmas card back only to receive, by return mail, a beautifully written, one page

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proposal containing a highly detailed account of how ICEHA’s proposed activities could greatly help improve the healthcare system in Vietnam, especially in light of the important role healthcare professionals play in the prevention of HIV transmission. The proposal was signed by the same Professor Trinh, director of the Highland Education Development Organization (HEDO). While I could not locate his name or his organization on Google, and despite the fact that we did not have any funding for ICEHA at that time, I decided to use some of the limited savings from my previous venture for an exploratory trip to Vietnam, a country I had never visited before. When I arrived in Hanoi on a foggy Saturday afternoon in March 2002, all I knew was that someone by the name of Trinh Ngoc Trinh would fetch me at my hotel the next morning at 6 a.m. and that we would drive together to Langson Province for meetings with the Provincial Health Authorities and the People’s Party Committee. In addition to being the director of HEDO, Professor Trinh turned out to be professor emeritus in education and a national hero for his outstanding contributions during the Vietnamese-French war. HEDO has been in existence for more than ﬁfteen years and is a Vietnamese nongovernmental organization (NGO) that implements programs to improve the livelihoods, health, and education levels of the ethnic minorities in the highlands of Vietnam. Langson Province is a stunningly beautiful highland province of approximately 750,000 people on the border with China. Located on major trucking and tourist routes, its HIV prevalence rate was higher than that of surrounding provinces. At some point during the six-hour

Figure 7.1 ICEHA Vietnam-Lao Cai Province. Courtesy of ICEHA.

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early morning drive, Professor Trinh informed me that Professor Do Nguyen Phuong, Vietnam’s minister of health at the time, had sent me his welcome wishes and apologized for not being able to meet in person given that he was in Laos on that day. I accepted the welcome with a smile, understanding that a lot of politics were happening behind screens I had yet to discover existed. After an exquisite lunch in a hawker-stall restaurant, I was brought to an ofﬁcial meeting hall in a French colonial style building that housed the ofﬁces of the Provincial Health Authorities. The setting was surreal: French colonial architecture with bright bougainvilleas climbing the walls, heavy wooden French doors half ajar offering a peek of the sky where monsoon-like thunder clouds were rapidly stacking up, and the meeting room inside looking as though a top Chinese interior decorator had his dream fulﬁlled with all of its gold- and red-colored trimmings. Six hours and forty Vietnamese teacups later, HEDO, myself, and three representatives of the Provincial Health Department and the People’s Party Committee agreed that a three-way collaboration would be the best method for building local healthcare capacity and clinical skills appropriate for the looming ﬁght against HIV. At no point in time had I been asked for material resources or ﬁnancial support. The only requests I had received were for clinical skills and expertise. The days following were spent in a myriad of visits and meetings at the provincial hospital, various district hospitals, and village clinics, allowing me to get a sense of the healthcare structure in the province. Once back in Hanoi, HEDO arranged visits with people they thought would be inﬂuential in turning the proposed collaboration into a success. Figuring that Vietnam was their country, that they had invited me, and that the success of the program would be as much their responsibility as my own, I merely followed their lead, a tactic we use to this day at ICEHA. On the ﬁnal evening before ﬂying back to New York, Professor Trinh asked me whether I would mind stopping by the house of the minister of health on our way to dinner. Despite the fact that this was an unannounced visit in a country where foreign visitors and high-level government ofﬁcials do not exactly mingle informally, Professor Trinh and I ended up joining Professor Do Nguyen Phuong and his family at the dinner table. A soft-spoken, brilliant man and an extraordinary leader, the ten minutes during which Professor Phuong questioned me about the proposed collaboration and ICEHA’s activities culminated in an official government approval, a fact that would only become clear to me during the years that followed as government ofﬁcials changed appointments, and program approvals of other NGOs were revoked, while ICEHA has yet to have a straw put in front of its feet to this day. All we continue to be asked for is a faster expansion and scale-up within the country. Although it was as obvious to me then, as it is now, that the extraordinary wealth of human capital in clinical skills and capabilities so abundant in the West is what many countries in the developing world really want to help them build their own human resource capacity, ICEHA was not able to attract donor funding easily. We were in an ironic dilemma of being a startup organization without a

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track record or brand name recognition, addressing an issue—the lack of critical healthcare systems and healthcare capacity—that donors at that time did not consider to be an issue, and proposing to ﬁx the issue by using a method most had never heard of (namely, the rapid transfer of clinical skills through mentoring), and yet, we did have a product that the developing world not only needed but clearly wanted. It seemed to me that there was—and to this day remains—a signiﬁcant disconnect between what “the West” perceives to be the issues in need of being addressed through international development versus what developing countries know they need, and the ways in which these countries think that it can be delivered most effectively inside their borders. However, while the average Western donor did not understand or value “capacity building” at the onset, our message right away resonated as well with colleagues in the medical profession as it did in the developing world. As word of what I was proposing to do with ICEHA spread, the number of qualiﬁed colleagues who contacted me with offers to help rose exponentially. The vast majority of them had more than ten years highly specialized clinical expertise, had reached the pinnacle of their medical careers, and had extensive family lives—all of which meant that, even though they could not easily give up their lives in the West to work overseas for a few years, they were passionate about wanting to make a personal contribution in the ﬁght against the AIDS pandemic, and they were also able to make some time available, pro bono. The one thing they needed was an opportunity overseas, deﬁned in time, space, and content, where they could make an impact the very second they arrived, put systems in place that would stay in place after their assignment was completed, see the situation change as their assignment progressed, and upon their return, know that everything they had done was there to stay. Initially, only physicians contacted me, but soon thereafter nurses joined, later on followed by pharmacists and lab technicians. In the early stages, almost all offers to become involved came from within the United States. However, over the years, we have reached a point where we are now sourcing expert healthcare workers from over fourteen countries. As such, we opened up a European ofﬁce in London in April 2006 to more adequately and efﬁciently channel the European applicants through our vetting and matching system prior to sending them on assignments. Unfortunately, the funding hurdle meant that I would need to keep on tapping into the small amount of personal savings that I had received from my Dutch nonproﬁt. It also meant that I would need to ask our colleagues not only to work as volunteers but also to cover their own expenses while overseas until we had proven the need for ICEHA’s existence and the basic program model, both a necessity to attract funding. Given that the Vietnamese had invited us into their country with open arms and given that they understood exactly what we were all about, we decided to do the proof-of-concept with them. Although the concept phase would take almost twenty months to be completed, this was the ﬁrst real step for ICEHA in becoming the “global leader in clinical skills rapid transfer to emerging nations.” As an after-the-fact note, I ended up receiving the National

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Medal of Honor from the Vietnamese president, Mr. Nguyen Minh Triet, at the opening of the National Assembly in Hanoi in June 2007. The National Medal of Honor was given for global leadership in sustainable healthcare development in emerging nations and speciﬁcally for ICEHA’s impact on the Vietnamese healthcare system.

SYSTEM BUILDING THROUGH RAPID SKILL TRANSFER—THE PROGRAM MODEL ICEHA’s program model is one of system building through rapid skill transfer and empowerment. The model is underpinned by a co-investment scheme whereby the majority of the funds needed are being provided by the recipient developing countries themselves. Twenty months is a long time for a proof-of-concept trial. The timing was mainly a result of having to build the organization on a shoestring, against the prevailing public opinion of how international development aid should be delivered, and of being in part self-funded, in part funded with the help of $50,000 from a few corporate donors in 2002 and 2003. The proof-of-concept was not focused on the co-investment structure for which ICEHA would later become so well known; rather, it focused on proving that healthcare capacity and healthcare systems can be built rapidly, in a very cost-effective way, using volunteer experts for a minimum of six weeks. At the very moment of the proofof-concept period coming to a successful close, we had $1 left in our corporate bank account on December 31, 2003. Although we did not have any employee responsibilities or liabilities at that point, I had still cut it quite close, and two directors of the board resigned very shortly thereafter, leaving Brian, Robin, the treasurer, and myself to continue, all of us as committed as ever. Fortuitously, ICEHA received its ﬁrst large corporate foundation grant in January 2004. At last, the organization was in a position to structure its program model, provide the required quality control, and start off on its path of growth that would ultimately lead it to expand into twelve countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America by December 2007. ICEHA operates in a small niche and specialized format. What it provides to the developing world is very speciﬁcally “practical clinical expertise adjusted for resource limited settings.” Even then, we only agree to make ICEHA’s resources available when a range of criteria have been met by the countries requesting ICEHA’s assistance. A typical example of how this works is highlighted by a recent experience: A few weeks ago, a delegation of the Ministry of Health of Congo Brazzaville came to meet me in London. They arrived in the morning, leaving London again that same evening. The delegation included the Director General of the Ministry of Health, the Senior Advisor on HIV/AIDS to the Minister of Health, the Head of the National HIV/AIDS scale-up program in the country, and the Technical Advisor in HIV/AIDS to the Ministry of Health. This high-level delegation of four had arrived with the signature power of the Minister of Health. We

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had not worked with Congo Brazzaville before and had not had lengthy program discussions with anyone in that country. However, in the months leading up to our meeting in London, that government had designed its national scaleup plan for tackling the AIDS epidemic in their country. Through hearsay or word-of-mouth from colleagues in neighboring countries, ICEHA had been brought to their attention, and due diligence on us had been completed before a meeting was requested in person. Over the course of three hours, the highlevel delegation explained the contents and design of their national plan, the structure of the healthcare system, and the potential role ICEHA clinical mentors could have in helping their country achieve its goal of providing access to AIDS care and treatment for all who need it. The local healthcare workers had already received classroom HIV/AIDS training courses, but this didactic knowledge did not give them the conﬁdence to provide the actual care, nor did it teach them how to set up the necessary operational systems in the clinics such as the keeping of patient records, the organization of clinic ﬂow, universal precaution procedures, referral systems for complex cases, and so on. At the end of the three hours, I was asked whether we might consider giving their request for multidisciplinary teams of ICEHA clinical mentors top priority. Timing for implementation was determined at the meeting to be as soon as possible. The example of Congo Brazzaville is almost a perfect textbook example for how ICEHA’s clinical mentoring model tends to spread across the developing world. The level of misconception about AIDS care on the part of healthcare workers in the developing world cannot be underestimated. It reaches deep with possible detrimental ramiﬁcations. To date, we continue to run into situations where healthcare workers who have just started putting patients on antiretroviral medications turn to us, excited about the progress these patients seem to be making, yet at the same time wondering how long they should keep the patients on the medication before they can send patients home given that they do look so much better. At that moment, we know that the entire basis for AIDS care and treatment was somehow not understood by the treating healthcare worker even though he or she did have classroom training. Indeed, the antiretroviral medications do turn AIDS into the equivalent of a chronic disease—provided the patients take the prescribed regimen diligently for the rest of their lives, and provided resistance to the therapy does not occur. However, if patients take the medications on and off, or for short periods of time, or split the dosages with their family members, or any number of scenarios along these lines, the AIDS virus becomes resistant to the existing therapy and a much worse epidemic than the current one will be in the making. In another country, and this example, too, continues to be found across the developing world, we were in the infectious disease ward when a late-stage AIDS patient was wheeled in by his family, only to be brushed off to an empty bed with the wave of a hand by the clinic staff member. Eventually, the attending physician agreed to do a physical examination. He took out his stethoscope, and put the ends of the instrument in his ears while dropping its head onto the skin of the

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patient from almost ﬁve inches above, making sure that at no point in time his ﬁnger tips actually touched this patient. It turned out that he indeed had been told of the ways in which HIV transmits (skin contact not being one of the possibilities), but that having been told is one thing while believing it fully and acting on that belief is yet another. Only gradually, after seeing the ICEHA clinical mentors give proper physical examinations to admitted AIDS patients during their clinical mentoring assignments, did this physician in question come to trust the fact that he, too, could safely touch the AIDS patients. Upon exiting the infectious disease ward, we were startled to see a disposable syringe lying outside on the windowsill next to a bottle with alcohol in a hospital where the nursing staff had been properly instructed that needles are a one-time deal and are not to be used from one patient to the next. Theory is obviously not translating into practice. The reuse of unsterilized needles from one patient to the next has been highlighted increasingly by the World Health Organization (WHO) over the past few years. In a neighboring hospital, needles were obviously discarded regularly because we found them lying in heaps on the ground next to the hospital building. In addition to the children playing in the heaps, street vendors, too, would regularly gather to ﬁnd the needles, repackage them, and sell them in their street stalls or on the markets. None of these issues, and countless others that this chapter does not allow enough space for, are too difﬁcult to be rectiﬁed or too cumbersome. The most effective way to remedy the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical expertise is to provide local healthcare workers who have received didactic training with some form of a safety net while they are applying the acquired medical theory in clinic practice. We only stumbled on the clinical mentoring model through reﬂection and outof-the-box thinking, having had prior experiences with ineffective, large-scale classroom training courses for which Western faculty were ﬂown into a developing country to “teach” local colleagues how to provide AIDS care even though they themselves had little knowledge of the resource-poor settings from which the audience came. The courses were extraordinarily expensive, and knowledge retention rates hovered around 10 percent three months after the course; the percentage of actual application of the acquired knowledge in the developingcountry clinics was even less. The competing practice of training foreign physicians by ﬂying them from the developing world to the West for six months so that they could receive training in Western hospitals did not fare much better, both in terms of high cost and in terms of lack of efﬁcacy in teaching these physicians how to provide AIDS care to their patients back home. ICEHA’s signature clinical mentoring model is rooted in the medical training we received ourselves and in the realization of what made us learn how to provide patient care. Most certainly, didactic lectures in an auditorium gave us the theoretical understanding of medicine but not the competence or conﬁdence to actually care for patients. The lectures were necessary but not sufﬁcient: their theory had to be turned into practical expertise during the subsequent years of

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residency, years during which we saw patients with a more senior physician looking over our shoulders, providing a safety net in case we needed guidance. For every clinic ICEHA has sent its clinical mentors to, we have found that it takes anywhere from three to ﬁve months of continuous clinical mentoring for a clinic to become “mentored out.” “Mentored out” is a state in which our local colleagues are providing the best care they can within the existing resource limitations of their clinics. Once a clinic has become mentored out, ICEHA clinical mentors pull out, leaving in place a structure that works, is sustainable, and is there to stay, bearing fruit for many years to come. The aspect of “continuous” clinical mentoring for three to ﬁve months is rather important. One does not change attitudes or build operational systems in a lasting fashion in only a few weeks, even though many overseas assignments offered through other organizations allow for two-week stints in foreign locations. Personally, I believe that two-week assignments resemble a practice of medical tourism or provide an opportunity to put a bandage on a situation and on a single patient, but do not provide a lasting remedy or a system for thousands of patients. Given that ICEHA clinical mentors can commit to participating for six weeks on a pro bono basis, but not for three to ﬁve months, we achieve the continuous coverage needed by sending consecutive ICEHA clinical mentors to the same clinic, thereby guaranteeing that the impact of the clinical mentors is lasting, sustainable, and optimal. The kind of clinical mentors ICEHA sends to each respective clinic is entirely dependent on the job at hand. For instance in Lesotho, a country with the world’s third highest HIV prevalence rate at 23 percent and only a handful of physicians present, the Ministry of Health decreed that nurses in the village clinics would be the ones administering ﬁrst-line AIDS care and treatment. The Lesotho nurses had been given a ten-day didactic training course in Maseru, following which they were sent back to their clinics and tasked with providing AIDS care. To help them bridge the gap between the lectures and actual work, ICEHA clinical mentors were requested through the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative (CHAI) to provide coaching to the local nursing staff in the very clinics where they were working. Because the local staff members to be mentored were nurses, ICEHA sent nurse clinical mentors. Other countries, such as Congo Brazzaville, request ICEHA clinical mentors in teams of ﬁve, including a physician, nurse, counselor, pharmacist, and lab technician, given that their national scale-up plan calls for AIDS care to be delivered with a multidisciplinary team approach. The practical clinical expertise ICEHA provides to the developing world is based on what is needed locally; it is provided in such a way that it does not artiﬁcially re-create Western healthcare delivery since that would be utterly unsustainable. Therefore, all clinical mentoring is provided within the national HIV care and treatment guidelines of a speciﬁc country, taking into consideration the limitations of resources in the various settings. Indeed it would be a futile exercise to have ICEHA clinical mentors coach local colleagues on the interpretation of MRI scans when no such machine exists in that country; at the same time, teaching local clinic staff how to use the basic X-ray machine that had been so

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generously donated by an international charity twenty-four months ago and is sitting idle in a corner because no one knows how to operate it, can make the difference between life and death for some patients. Once a decision has been made by ICEHA to agree to a request for clinical mentors from a new country, a local partner is chosen to handle all local logistics and help assure quality control. At no point will one see ICEHA’s logo embossed on the door of a company car, or above the entrance of a well-designed ofﬁce in the developing world. Our discrete policy to instead and deliberately work through a local partner has led in many cases to the program being perceived as “a local initiative with local ownership,” rather than as another international development project. Beyond the philosophical meaning, this policy also has practical implications for the implementation of the program. Not only would it be very cumbersome for ICEHA staff to arrange for a local translator in the Mekong Delta from our ofﬁces in New York or London, ICEHA’s method of clinical mentoring is also quite different from what people in the developing world have come to expect of international aid groups. Indeed the common assumption of what foreign healthcare workers will be doing has led us to the discovery that it is not sufﬁcient to prepare ICEHA clinical mentors in great detail before sending them on a mentoring assignment; it is equally important that the healthcare workers in the receiving clinics are prepared and understand that the ICEHA clinical mentors are not there to take over the jobs and responsibilities of

Figure 7.2 ICEHA Nepal—Seti Clinic in Dhangadhi. Courtesy of ICEHA.

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local clinic staff. The ICEHA clinical mentors will only exponentially increase the clinical competency of local colleagues who can optimize the care they themselves provide as a result. This speciﬁed role of ICEHA clinical mentors is diametrically opposed to the direct care delivery most international NGOs in the healthcare ﬁeld focus on, a practice that perpetuates developing-world dependence on Western aid and charity in the ﬁeld of healthcare. It takes solid preparation of the staff in the receiving clinics in order to make them understand the difference. The list of ICEHA in-country partners continues to grow, but so far they include World Health Organization (WHO), Highland Education Development Organization (HEDO), National Center for HIV, Dermatology and STD (NCHADS), Family Health International (FHI), Care International, COVAB, HealthNet TPO, Right to Care, Foundation for Professional Development, Project Support Association, CHAI, and Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS Nepal (NAP+N). An Unorthodox Funding Model: Co-Investment As mentioned above, ICEHA was set up without seed funding and the initial years of 2002 and 2003, during which we completed the proof-of-concept were very hard indeed. If it had not been for my ability to work full-time without a salary, it would have been an impossible exercise. So, while we were fundraising in the ﬁrst eighteen months with limited success, it became quite clear almost from the onset that it would be one thing for us to raise funding in the West to cover the costs of recruiting the clinical mentors, of screening them for their qualiﬁcations and personality, of preparing them adequately, of ensuring that they were matched to the appropriate clinic, and of managing them throughout their ﬁeld assignment. It would be another thing entirely to fundraise additionally for all costs associated with the actual placement of the clinical mentors in the developing world for minimum periods of six weeks. Although the ICEHA clinical mentors contribute their time and skills on a pro bono basis, all reasonable trip expenses are covered. Given that the developing countries themselves approach us with the line “what ICEHA provides [practical clinical expertise] is exactly what we need and want,” I decided that it would be more efﬁcient to come up with some kind of cost-sharing arrangement both sides could live with and which would fall in line with ICEHA’s philosophy of empowerment. To date, the co-investment deal that has worked for all sides is one where ICEHA does not charge the developing countries for any of the costs ICEHA incurs in screening and preparing the clinical mentors. ICEHA ﬁnds its own private, individual, and corporate donors to cover that side of the equation. At the same time, the developing countries are required to cover all in-country implementation costs that occur as a result of the clinical mentoring activities. These costs include basic room and board, local transport, economy class plane ticket, and other necessary expenses. One could say that each developing country

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pays for the cost of skill transfer within its own borders. The fact that both sides contribute ﬁnancially is offset tremendously by the value of the in-kind contribution of the clinical mentors, who participate on a pro bono basis. Indeed, if funding from any source would have had to cover Western salaries for clinical mentors while on assignment, one would need to put a serious question mark to the value and the cost-effectiveness of any such program. As a net effect of the coinvestment approach, for every $2,000 of Western funding, an additional $6,000 to $8,000 in funding is released by a source within a developing country itself, both of which are offset by a value ranging between $12,000 and $28,000 per clinical mentor per assignment. Loyal and Visionary Donors, Committed to Curing the Dependence of the Developing World on Charity, Rather Than Simply Feeding That Dependence Sometimes people ask me why it took so long for ICEHA to build a stable donor base. Having reﬂected on the question, the answer is one not limited to ICEHA but is applicable to anyone running one step ahead of what is considered to be cutting edge. It naturally takes a little while for any entrepreneur to ﬁnd a way to effectively communicate an unorthodox message to others who are used to thinking in a conventional way; at the same time, it also takes a while to ﬁnd those donors who are sophisticated and farsighted enough to understand the value of actually building complete systems that will result in millions of smiling children a few years down the road as opposed to one smiling face today, which might not even be alive to be smiling tomorrow. Over the years, ICEHA funders in the West have included generous private individuals, many of whom know our clinical mentors personally or professionally. These and others believe in the system-building model as strongly as we do and see the immediate value of their investment to the extent that some of them, having committed to raising a speciﬁc amount from friends and colleagues, have taken out personal bank loans when a commitment could not be ﬁlled by their pool of friends alone. The vast majority of the funding, however, comes through a small group of extremely insightful and loyal visionary corporate donors. Over the years, these have included the J&J Foundation, Tibotec Corporation, Rufford Foundation, William A. Haseltine Foundation for Medical Sciences and the Arts, Gilead Foundation, Elton John AIDS Foundation, Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, St. Stephen’s AIDS Trust, American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR), Merck Foundation, and International Finance Corporation. In-country implementation costs have been covered by a variety of in-country funding mechanisms, including through the WHO, the Global Fund for Malaria, TB and AIDS, DFID, USAID, and PEPFAR, as well as various local branches of multinational corporations. In the end, the origin of the in-country funding is not as important as is the fact that the funding needed locally is already available within the country in question.

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Our Western funders, both individuals and corporate, are an extraordinary and dedicated group, with many of them having contributed month after month, year after year, excited to see the organization grow and realizing its tremendous impact. The pivotal factor in dealing with any donor has been personal contact and engagement: one person within a foundation who decides to champion our cause by helping us through the application process, or who decides to contact colleagues in fellow foundations, alerting them to ICEHA’s value proposition, which frequently results in those foundations inviting us to submit grant proposals. The same is true at the individual level, where we have seen the most extraordinary gestures of generosity. These individuals tend to have met us personally; tend to know one of our clinical mentors and send in the donation in his or her honor; or tend to be a past, present, or future clinical mentor who is so taken by the model that he or she becomes a perpetual donor. Past clinical mentors have held concerts for us, donating all proceeds, or have referred wealthy patients to us when asked what their favorite charity is. Most recently, we were even adopted as “favorite charity of the year” by the Stop AIDS student group at Newcastle University in the UK. Without all these funders, we could not be doing what we do so well: saving lives and building the systems that free developing countries from their dependence on Western charity and aid in the ﬁeld of healthcare. Quality Control, Monitoring, and Evaluation I personally think that much of the international donor funding is being spent all too frivolously on monitoring and evaluation (M&E) methods “McKinsey Style,” whereby the M&E component itself becomes a ﬂourishing industry even more so than the impact of the program it is supposed to be measuring. Nevertheless, a certain level of M&E is most deﬁnitely necessary to show that one’s activities are indeed having the impact they are intended to. As such, the quality control ICEHA uses is quite strict yet optimized to show exactly what needs to be shown, namely the impact of clinical mentoring on setting up sustainable healthcare systems and—as a result—the impact on saving lives of patients, not one time, but for decades to come. The quality control of ICEHA’s programs encompasses both quantitative as well as qualitative measures. At the beginning and upon completion of their assignments, ICEHA clinical mentors complete a pre- and postassessment questionnaire regarding the clinic systems and care provided. These are not judgment questionnaires but rather objective measurements of what is happening in the clinic over time. All data collected are entered into an SPSS database, and trends are analyzed on a per-clinic and a per-country basis. In addition, each clinical mentor has to submit, on a weekly basis, a brief report of activities, either via e-mail or in transcribed teleconferences with ICEHA staff. These weekly reports in freestyle format cover anything relevant to the experience. They serve multiple purposes, but one of their main beneﬁts is that they indicate at which stage the ICEHA clinical mentor has built a relationship of trust with

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local counterparts to the extent that these counterparts will accept the practical skills the mentor is attempting to impart. Clinical mentoring does not work if the foreign clinical mentor is perceived as a “Western professor who will tell the local healthcare workers how to deliver care.” Clinical mentoring does work when it is perceived as an exchange of expertise between two sides that are equals in terms of social standing within their own societies. It works when there is an underlying basis of trust and mutual respect. How can we tell that this is happening? Pretty much across all countries and clinics where ICEHA clinical mentors have ventured, it has taken ten days to two weeks before we receive a report stating something along these lines: “You will never believe what happened today, but Dr. XYZ pulled me aside and asked whether I might be willing, in my spare time, to also provide clinical coaching to his colleagues in the other clinic where he works, but which is not on the list to receive clinical mentors . . .” When we receive an e-mail like this, it shows us that the underlying basis of trust and mutual respect has been built, and we know that the effectiveness of the clinical mentoring can increase exponentially from that point onward. In the meantime, although we receive feedback from the ICEHA clinical mentors on a weekly basis, our in-country partner is in contact with the clinic personnel to ensure that any issues arising from their end are addressed, and to double-check that the activities of each clinical mentor are appropriate for the clinic setting and the existing resource limitations. The ﬁnal piece of quality control is a ﬁnal trip report, which is an extensive document that discusses all activities the clinical mentor undertook during his/her ﬁeld assignment, every issue that was encountered plus measures taken to remedy the issue, the status of the clinic upon leaving, and a recommendation as to whether further clinical mentoring is needed or whether the clinic might be mentored out. The report is submitted to ICEHA and shared with ICEHA’s in-country partner; it follows a predetermined, ﬁxed outline and is written in such a way that it can be sent on to the minister of health of the respective country when appropriate and in the interest of the country’s healthcare system. If the clinic is set to receive additional clinical mentors, this report is also shared with them to ensure that they know the baseline from which they are supposed to start. As for the quality control on the clinical mentor side—namely how mentors perceive their experience with ICEHA—the best indicator is the rate of return of our clinical mentors: almost 30 percent of them participate again within twelve to eighteen months of their ﬁrst assignment, with many having participated four or ﬁve times as of this writing. We also have several ICEHA clinical mentors who have found their assignments so rewarding that they have temporarily left their careers in the West either to take on permanent teaching positions in the country of their ﬁeld assignment or to become perpetual ICEHA clinical mentors, going from one ﬁeld assignment to the next. Regardless of how many are repeat volunteer clinical mentors, 99 percent of our clinical mentors call us within two weeks of their return back home with the words “thank you so very much—this was the most extraordinary experience of my personal and professional life.”

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WHO ARE THE ICEHA CLINICAL MENTORS? All of us are quite fortunate to have been born in the West and to have been given extraordinary educations with brilliant careers as a result. However, there comes a point in life when these brilliant careers reach the pinnacle of their success, and when we start looking outside of them for additional opportunities where we, as individuals, can have a greater impact, often much beyond what we can have in our own clinic settings. At the same time, we do not want to forgo our brilliant careers, and we usually also have family lives that would prohibit us from moving overseas for any lengthy period of time. Ideally, we would like to be given an opportunity deﬁned in time, place, and content where we can make a signiﬁcant impact, see the systems change with our own eyes, and know that these now optimized systems will remain in place once we return to our own home life. And that is where ICEHA comes in. While ICEHA uses a minimum requirement of three years of clinical expertise beyond residency, a large proportion of healthcare professionals applying have more than ten years of specialized clinical expertise. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds: physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, nurses, social workers, pharmacists, and lab technicians; they also come from a wide variety of clinics and hospitals, including academic, community based, public, and private practice. Most recently the pool of volunteer ICEHA clinical mentors available for the six-week minimum commitment has surpassed the 700 mark. In total they represent more than 7,500 aggregate person-years of clinical expertise on offer to the developing world. Recruitment, Screening, and Preparation of ICEHA Clinical Mentors In the early years of ICEHA, prospective candidates contacted me as word about ICEHA spread through the grapevine. However, once we had the proper ﬁnancial resources and were experiencing the exponential increase in demand for our clinical mentors from overseas, we put a solid recruitment structure in place where word-of-mouth referrals are still a signiﬁcant player, but where recruitment goes much beyond that. ICEHA clinical mentors are recruited at every venue they might possibly be found congregating, from their clinics to national and international conferences, from small seminar discussions about the potential for individual impact to continuing medical education (CME) courses. The recruitment itself has two components, one impersonal (through magazine advertisements or Internet search engines) and one personal. If I were to have to pick one method over the other, I would say that the personal recruitment method is the conditio sine qua non. Many of our colleagues with tremendous expertise to share, who would be great clinical mentors, are sitting on the fence, attracted to the idea but unsure whether they should make the leap of faith. An ad in a newspaper or on the Web will pique their interest but will not be sufﬁcient to make them submit an application to become a clinical mentor. The in-person interaction with ICEHA staff at various venues, as well as

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personal referrals from colleagues, helps them decide to turn their dream into reality. Personally, I think that it is a comfort-zone issue, one in which they learn from the personal contact that they will be taken care of and managed well throughout the process, and not just put on a plane to a desolate faraway place without further contact. Once prospective candidates submit applications to become ICEHA clinical mentors, we subject them to a rigorous screening and selection process, much beyond their clinical capabilities or paper résumé with references. Prior experience in the developing world is a plus but not a must, given that our model is quite different than that of other organizations, and we have found that often our most ﬂexible and best clinical mentors have been those without prior preconceived notions about what it will be like, notions they developed during their experiences with other organizations. The success of the ﬁeld assignment will depend as much on an applicant’s clinical expertise as it does on personality. Being a clinical mentor is not for everyone. Over the years, we have turned away some well-known professors from various academic institutions because they, while being respected professors in their own right, did not have the personality or ability to interact with their local colleagues in a way that clinical mentors need to be able to do: as colleagues on the same professional level with neither side being more of an expert. Individual personalities are also important from a cultural perspective. There are cultural differences across all continents on this planet, and methods of social interaction that work in Europe do not necessarily go over well in the United States, or vice-versa as we all well know. Similarly so, not all personalities are suitable for Asian cultures, and neither are all of them appropriate for African settings. Given that it would be very contrived and inadequate to attempt to assess personality and character of applicants through a paper résumé or an Internetbased questionnaire, we require instead that all ICEHA clinical mentors attend a mandatory, two-day preparation course held regularly in New York, London, Sydney, or Stellenbosch for qualiﬁed applicants from those regions. These preparation courses are the main selection tool, allowing us to observe the interaction between candidates in group discussions as well as to assess an applicant’s personality on an individual level. The courses also prepare the attendees for what is awaiting them as ICEHA clinical mentors, how they will need to leave Western-speciﬁc clinical knowledge at home while learning to think inside country-speciﬁc guidelines and resource limitations, how they might use creativity and out-of-the-box thinking to ensure that their practical clinical expertise can be transferred onto their local colleagues without putting these same local colleagues in a position where they feel as though they are being treated as students. The courses are well received, with several attendees having commented over the years how they have gone overseas with other organizations in the past, including with the U.S. government, but how no one has ever set them down to make them reﬂect and understand what it will take to be successful in these settings.

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Mentors are initially slightly surprised and sometimes even uncomfortable at being told to forget their Western habits and resource-rich wisdom the very moment their plane takes off for their assignment. However, one of the reasons why ICEHA clinical mentors end up valuing their overseas experience so highly is because it brings them back in touch with the basic reasons why they went into medical or nursing school in the ﬁrst place, reasons grounded in a passion to care for patients at a human level, to use clinical skills and human interaction to make a diagnosis, and to cure the sick rather than being directed by printed lab values on a computer sheet. Once the clinical mentor candidates have passed the screening tests and preparation course, ICEHA staff contractually engages and matches them to available positions in the developing world not only according to their availability, skill levels, and the needs of the receiving clinics, but also according to their personalities. The contract is needed to formalize the assignment given that they are not embarking on a relaxing vacation but on a job with responsibilities, albeit without pay. So far the screening and preparation process has worked very well, and the percentage of failed placements—as deﬁned either by a clinical mentor returning home early or by a clinic asking a clinical mentor to leave—has been limited to only 1 percent. In contrast, the percentage of return volunteer clinical mentors hovers around the 30 percent mark.

A NONHIERARCHICAL ORGANIZATION OF PASSIONATE ENTREPRENEURS ICEHA prides itself on being a nonhierarchical, non-bureaucratic organization. I am an entrepreneur and a strong believer in the fact that when one empowers carefully selected people, they will live up to the task at hand and passionately run with the responsibility given to them. This is true not only for ICEHA’s clinical mentors and for our colleagues in the developing world, but also for ICEHA’s extraordinarily gifted and dedicated staff. To date, every staff member, with only one exception, has ﬁrst contributed to the organization as an operational volunteer. This means that they are given signiﬁcant responsibility within the organization’s operations but work under a volunteer contract, without compensation, ﬁnancial or otherwise. This practice allows both sides to experience in real life whether there is a mutually beneﬁcial match. ICEHA has beneﬁted tremendously from dedicated operational volunteers from the very beginning, with Kathy Reniers, Emy McCord Schwimmer, Cassandra Doll, and Ruchi Rastogi among the very ﬁrst ones to help me reﬁne the model and pull the proof-of-concept off the ground. ICEHA’s ﬁrst paid employee came about in an unconventional fashion. During the academic year 2002–03, Columbia University SIPA gave me a team of seven graduate students whom I asked to conduct due diligence background research for ICEHA’s possible entry into Cambodia. Columbia’s commitment

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was solid, and SIPA covered the costs for ﬁeld visits of the entire team to Cambodia so that their research would be anchored in reality. Upon graduation, all students stayed in touch, showing up en masse at ICEHA’s fundraisers, referring colleagues, and providing other connections. There was one who remained in closer touch: an exceptional young woman named Katie Graves-Abe. A daughter of diplomats, Katie had moved around the globe throughout her upbringing. She had lived in the West as well as in places as remote as Democratic Republic of the Congo and had taken to ICEHA’s model like a ﬁsh to water. Upon graduation, Katie had accepted a job with another foundation but continued to help ICEHA as a volunteer during her spare time. Nine months later, she called me, asking if I might let her know when I would have an employee position within ICEHA. Timing was fortuitous: a few weeks prior, we had received our ﬁrst grant allowing us to cover recruitment processes, and while funding was fully allocated to all activities to be done, I thought we could pull $25,000 into a salary package for our ﬁrst employee. Ultimately, how can one build an organization, for proﬁt or nonproﬁt alike, if one is not willing to invest in people with talent? Realizing, however, that Katie was earning signiﬁcantly more in her other job, I mentioned that I did not think our package was a fair proposition, but it was all I had. Within twenty-four hours she accepted, taking the jump. From the very beginning, she had signiﬁcant responsibilities as the person behind ICEHA’s selection process, and her responsibilities have only increased exponentially over the years. The way Katie became involved is mirrored by all ICEHA staff, both employees and volunteers. ICEHA remains an organization based on values such as passion, integrity, loyalty, honesty, and empowerment; it is an organization where every staff person has to be an entrepreneur in his or her own right, passionately ﬁghting for ICEHA’s vision.

FACTORS FOR SUCCESS The factors underpinning ICEHA’s success are multiple, but if I needed to summarize them in one line, it would come down to this: empower people and ask them to take responsibility. Empowerment in ICEHA happens at various levels: empowerment of our local colleagues in the developing world, whereby we give them the practical clinical expertise, which allows them to take responsibility for their patients; empowerment of governments in the developing world, whereby we do not decide for them what they need and when, but rather they decide that for themselves (and, as a result, help pay for it); empowerment of the ICEHA clinical mentors, who are given the local framework within which they need to provide the clinical mentoring and yet have to rely on their own creativity and initiative to make it work; and empowerment of ICEHA’s staff, whereby every staff person, employee and operational volunteer alike, is given the target goal of what they have to achieve, but is empowered and supported to do what it takes to get there.

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The speciﬁc characteristics that constitute ICEHA’s success are more expansive than a one liner, however. They include 1. System building and system change 2. Sustainability 3. A simple model highly deﬁned in content and parameters 4. Micromanagement of ICEHA clinical mentors; the “personal touch” in selection, preparation, matching, and management 5. Financial co-investment 6. Immediate impact 7. Local responsibility 8. Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of ICEHA interventions 9. Leverage of resources 10. Scale and replication within countries and across continents

THE FUTURE: SCALE AND GROWTH ICEHA’s future is one of scale and vast expansion. ICEHA’s sustainable model and immediate impact are proven and solid. However, what is even more important, it is not us sitting in New York or London deciding that what ICEHA has on offer is what the developing world will want; rather, it is the developing world approaching us, not with requests for material assistance but instead with requests for our ICEHA clinical mentors and the practical clinical expertise they can impart on their local colleagues. Over the next ﬁve years, ICEHA will grow its pool of volunteer clinical mentors from more than 700 to 2,000, while its deployment programs will aim to add four to six new countries each year without necessarily leaving any of the existing countries prematurely. In addition, ICEHA will be expanding its clinical mentoring model beyond HIV/AIDS to include other ﬁelds of medicine, such as primary care, internal medicine, emergency medicine, and OB/GYN. The expansion into other ﬁelds of medicine is mainly due to requests by countries that have seen the clinical mentoring model work beautifully and sustainably for HIV/AIDS. As a result of this expansion, ICEHA’s impact on healthcare systems in the developing world will scale exponentially, impacting millions of lives across the globe, not one time but forever to come. In order to meet the challenge of such scale and exponential growth, ICEHA will need to add a long-term quality to its funding base, which, to date, still runs on a year-to-year basis, as is true for many nonproﬁts. At the same time, a yearto-year funding basis would never be acceptable in the for-proﬁt industry because no organizational long-term strategy can be implemented in this way. Obtaining funding that can cover multiyear costs will allow the organization to successfully build and execute its vision of scale like an unstoppable space rocket.

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SUMMARY ICEHA’s model is not about one-way, endless charity; rather, the model is one of ultimate system change, empowerment, high leverage, scale, replication, sustainability, immediate impact, and innovation. Although ICEHA is using this model to build healthcare capacity in the developing world, the same model could be used in other ﬁelds, including education in schools, management capacity in government offices, and economic development. All it would take is someone who is very passionate about the cause using the obvious solution we have developed, and putting him or herself 150 percent behind it, 150 percent of the time. Ultimately, this is ICEHA’s story. ICEHA did start as a dream and a strong conviction that the way in which international development was tackling the AIDS pandemic was incomplete and misguided. But in the end, if not for the passion, commitment, and dedication of all of ICEHA’s clinical mentors who forgo a Western income for six weeks at a time in order to impart their knowledge to their colleagues in the developing world as a human capital transfer, if not for ICEHA’s dedicated staff, all of whom started as operational volunteers working after-hours while being employed elsewhere, and all of whom end up working passionately more than seventy-hour work-weeks as employees, if not for our loyal and visionary donors, and if not for the solid support of ICEHA’s board members and countless friends and colleagues who often ventured out on a personal limb to help me get ICEHA off the ground but prefer to remain quietly behind the scenes, I really would still be dreaming my dream to this day. That would have been a great pity. The results have been extraordinary so far; the scale-up is an even greater promise.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: International Center for Equal Healthcare Access (ICEHA) Founder and Executive Director: Marie Charles Mission/Description: ICEHA is a nonproﬁt organization of physicians and nurses who volunteer their medical expertise to developing countries in order to equip the local healthcare professionals with the skills needed to take care of their own patients within existing resource limitations. Website: www.iceha.org Address: 101 West 23rd Street Suite 179 New York, NY 10011 Phone: 847-232-9885 E-mail: [email protected]

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NOTES 1. Excerpt from personal correspondence, FAQs ICEHA (www.iceha.org). 2. Marie Charles, “Perspectives from the International Center for Equal Healthcare Access: Improving HIV care in Western countries: Lessons learned in the developing world.” Medscape (October 25, 2005). Available at http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/514563.

8

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

If you just happened to be a pilot and had $700, where would you go? What would you do? Most of us would probably ﬂy to the Caribbean for a bit of rest and relaxation, or perhaps to Manhattan to go to dinner and a Broadway play. In 1990 Allan Gathercoal took his faith in God and the goodness of others, combined that with the $700 dollars, and took off on a “wing and a prayer,” to ﬂy this organization’s ﬁrst medical/dental mission to the garbage dumps outside Mexico City. He remembered the saying “Find a need and ﬁll it, ﬁnd a hurt and heal it” and used that as the runway for creating a unique, but desperately needed, organization know today as Flying Doctors of America. Not aligned with any religious or denominational group, this nonproﬁt organization has ﬂown over 160 humanitarian missions and provided medical services for over 130,000 persons in need in Mexico, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, India, China, Mongolia, Vietnam, Thailand, and parts of the African continent. Flying Doctors of America has grown into a collaborative effort of medical and non-medical professionals who volunteer their talents and time to reach out and assist the world’s poorest of the poor. By traveling to remote destinations and serving the most desperate populations, Flying Doctors of America lives by the spirit of one of the greatest humanitarians of all time, Mother Teresa of Calcutta. As she gave hope to the hopeless, this group does so also by visiting those who live in the darkness of poverty and by healing the sick and disabled.

BACKGROUND Allan Gathercoal is a Christian humanitarian, who sought to put “feet on his faith.” His graduate studies in psychology and theology and his personal belief system have been incorporated into a dynamic and ongoing synthesis of theory and 145

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Figure 8.1 Flying Doctors of America medical team in Salta, Argentina. Courtesy of Allan Gathercoal.

praxis that actualizes the core teachings of the Christian gospels. Allan’s vision for the Flying Doctors of America is rooted in his own soul-searching that critiques the church as being solely concerned with its own ﬁnances, operations, and dogmatic correctness. Institutional self-absorption can only be remedied through an authentic Christian praxis of compassion and care. As he began to look at the church with a critical eye, he discovered that too little is given for the care of the downtrodden, widows, orphans, and of the oppressed and poor. In 1989 he began to conceive of a movement that would liberate both the doctor and the patient by inviting physicians and dentists of the United States in medical missions to travel as a medical team to developing countries and work among those living in abject poverty. In such a manner, the core spiritual values of Christ’s teaching and ministry ﬁnd expression in improving the lives of the disenfranchised. Through research done at Virginia Tech, Allan discovered that the majority of physicians and dentists (99 percent) never leave the conﬁnes of their ofﬁces in America to help the world’s poor. He contacted scores of physicians and dentists and asked them what stopped them from giving back to those in need; their consistent concerns were time, management of mission, and cost. How would they get to where they are going, and who would help them get there and how much would it cost them in time and money? This motivated Allan to formulate the concept of

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Flying Doctors of America, with the purpose of creating short-term, affordable/tax deductible, and professionally managed medical missions. Doctors would only have to volunteer one or two weeks of their time, cover personal outof-pocket costs—and Flying Doctors of America would do the rest. With Flying Doctors, everybody wins. The medical and non-medical volunteers miss only a few days of work and go on the adventure of a lifetime. Support volunteers serve as translators, team leaders, photographers, and healthcare assistants. The individual or corporate sponsors get tax beneﬁts plus the knowledge that they are making a real difference in the world. And most of all, those in need receive ﬁrst-rate medical care. As the result of much soul-searching, brainstorming, and research, Flying Doctors of America was launched in 1990, with the express purpose of bringing hope and healing to the world’s poor. Allan’s mission was to fulﬁll the intent of Christ’s teachings: to love the least of my brothers and sisters in this world. For Allan Gathercoal, love is not just a noun, but a verb. This understanding of love demands action and an ongoing engagement in the world that has fueled Flying Doctors of America since its inception. An effective innovator and entrepreneur, Allan Gathercoal has worked as a church growth minister, started up new churches, and designed educational programs in California. He has earned masters degrees in psychology and theology and a doctorate from Columbia Theological Seminary. President and founder of Medical Mercy Missions, Inc., Allan promotes interfaith dialogue, and in 1996 he received the Vision of Race Unity Award. While these credentials are impressive, the most outstanding attribute Allan possesses is his passion to help those in desperate need.

MISSIONS In circling the globe for the last seventeen years, the work of Flying Doctors of America has reached as far as Africa, India, and China. Currently, about 80 percent of the work focus is in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. However, efforts are being made to expand beyond these regions, and new ﬁelds of assistance are being explored. Missions are ranked on a three-level system. Each level becomes more physically arduous for the volunteers. Most anyone, for example, most anyone can go on a Level 1 mission. For such missions, volunteers are housed in a hostel or hotel. They also have access to showers, ﬂush toilets, and good food. From their places of residence, volunteers are transported to and from the clinics and hospitals where they are assigned to serve. Level 2 missions are more demanding. These missions take volunteers further out into rural communities. Typically, there is no electricity, and churches or schools serve as makeshift clinics. At times, volunteers sleep on cots in the mayor’s house or in the church itself, and do not have such amenities as hot shower and ﬂush toilets.

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Level 3 missions are the most arduous and physically demanding. Volunteers travel to their assignments in the most remote areas of the world by hiking, on horseback, or by dug out canoe. They sleep in tents, dig their own toilets, and wash by taking sponge baths or simply jumping into a local river or lake. Volunteers for Level 3 missions must meet criteria established for physically ﬁtness, emotional health, and the skills needed to serve indigenous peoples. The geographic areas served by Level 3 missions are the Amazon, the high Andes Mountains, and the plains of Mongolia. Occasionally, there is a fourth level that occurs during times of conﬂict and serves the needs of war-torn areas and refugee camps. These missions are not advertised or promoted on the Flying Doctors of America’s website. Those selected for these special Level 4 missions have been with Flying Doctors of America for some time and have served on multiple missions. They must be capable of enduring overwhelming stress and be in great physical shape. Most volunteers for these critical missions have military backgrounds and are very athletic. These missions are rare and may occur only every few years. The goal of each mission is to fulﬁll three critical areas of concern: (1) provide immediate medical and dental intervention and care, (2) establish reciprocity and cooperation with local providers, and (3) analyze the greater needs of the community. As intervention becomes established and the local population is being attended to, local healthcare providers are engaged in building a relationship of mutual cooperation and respect with their American colleagues. As members of Flying Doctors of America begin to educate their host community on everything from dental to personal hygiene, they are also being reciprocally educated by the indigenous medical community. This mutuality encourages the sharing of information and the acquisition of a working knowledge of pressing health needs; quite often, it facilitates dialogue with the public health ofﬁcials in that country. Allan is concerned that some individuals erroneously think they have the authority to resolve the medical healthcare needs of foreign countries. The missions of Flying Doctors of America are opportunities to serve as liaisons between the targeted community and the resources available in that country. In such a manner Allan’s concept of the Flying Doctors’ job is to accomplish its immediate mission and to empower the local population. It is the job of the volunteers to remain sensitive to the traditions and customs of local groups and their way of life. The work of Flying Doctors of America volunteers is to empower local communities in engaging their governments to create change. For example, citizens may not even know that their government has a program that could make more water available. Local activists make contact with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that specialize in creating new sources of water such as building new wells. By addressing and accommodating the pressing infrastructure needs of the local community, volunteers will attempt to establish the contacts needed to ﬁnd the means and the resources to resolve these concerns.

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Flying Doctors of America has a database in excess of 16,000 volunteers. Over 10,000 of these volunteers are doctors and dentists, and about 4,000 are pharmacists, nurses, and general volunteers. An average surgical team consists of six to eight volunteers, while a primary dental or medical team consists of approximately sixteen volunteers.

FLYING DOCTORS OF AMERICA: CONCEPT TO REALITY In fulﬁlling the call to provide medical assistance to the world’s needy, Flying Doctors of America has been transformed from an organization based on Christian practice to an interfaith humanitarian organization—one that embraces religious, racial, and multicultural diversity. The objective has always been to bring hope and healing to the world’s poor as Mother Teresa did. By traveling to some of the most remote regions of the globe, volunteers have experienced the challenge of adventure in high-risk areas. This has been characterized by some as a way of embracing their own “inner Indiana Jones.” It has been Allan’s experience that if you challenge physicians with adventure as well as care and medical relief work, most will respond enthusiastically and be eager for the challenge. They will go and take care of the poor, and also enjoy the adventure of having done so. An additional beneﬁt is to come home and tell your buddies about it over a cup of coffee. Fortunately, there continues to be a positive response on behalf of the medical and dental communities. After all, there would be no medical missions without them. Allan Gathercoal is himself a model of personal growth and transformation. In many ways, his spiritual life has been an alchemical process from transforming “lead into gold.” As a Minister and committed Christian, he has walked a path of personal individuation that has taken him from accepting the status quo through the soul-searching of doubt and questioning. An expansive intellectual foundation in theology and psychology, melded with his commitment to developing dynamic leadership skills, has taken him to a new horizon of possibilities and social engagement. When he encountered the barriers of organizational lethargy, he surpassed them with the prophetic vision of the organization he founded. Christ’s message to build the kingdom of God in this world did not fall upon deaf ears. It led Allan to understand and appreciate the synergy of God and man’s cocreative activity in building a new and better world. In meeting and working not only with Mother Teresa but also with Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and peoples of all faiths and spiritualities, he has come to understand his path of personal growth and individuation to be a witness to the boundless love of the inﬁnitely divine in the lives of all men and women. Allan Gathercoal engages his thousands of volunteers in a similar process of personal growth and transformation by inviting them to ﬁnd “release” from the conﬁnes of ofﬁces, the slavery of schedules, and the rat race of routines. A cognitive shift begins to take place, and the volunteer begins to identify the leadenness in his or her life and to embrace new potential. For many, this means taking stock

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and doing some needed soul-searching, which leads to actualizing greater potential and interest in the welfare of others. There is no doubt that this alchemical process has changed not only Allan’s perspective on life, but has touched the lives of his volunteers as well.

FUNDING There is an old adage that says, “No money, no mission.” Unfortunately, even the charitable work of nonproﬁt groups needs to be funded. Allan funded the ﬁrst mission himself. To get this ﬂedgling organization off the ground and keep it “ﬂying,” ﬁnancial resources needed to be found. Allan ﬁrst received funding by simply asking. He admits that there is no other way than going out as a supplicant. You hit the pavement, start visiting your colleagues, and pitch them your idea. Depending upon whether or not the person sees the beneﬁts of a donation, the response will be either positive or negative. All organizations are faced with the hard reality that ﬁnancial appeals are difﬁcult and time consuming. Acquiring funding from foundations can be cumbersome. Allan expressed his frustration with endless paperwork and the need to jump through endless hoops. This kind of legwork requires so much time and energy that the big NGOs such as the American Cancer Society actually employ dedicated staff that do nothing but write grant proposals. Successful management of the fundraising task demands commitment and a strong belief in the vision of the organization. But it can be done.

OVERCOMING OBSTACLES Flying Doctors of America has experienced numerous growing pains as it continues to enhance its organizational viability. Through the years, ﬂexibility in program development and an effective analysis of costs and needs has tweaked and ﬁne-tuned this group’s ability to serve the needs of the world’s poor. Critical focus has been given to three important aspects of its operations: (1) maintaining a ﬂeet of planes, (2) providing for warehouse and storage space, and (3) developing an ongoing working relationship with other humanitarian organizations. Initially, Flying Doctors of America had its own planes. However, by the mid 90’s it was decided that it would be more cost effective to sell off most of the ﬂeet and take advantage of commercial ﬂights. This radical reduction in the costs of ﬂeet ownership and maintenance opened up Allan’s eye to taking a look at the question of warehouses and storage. An organization that is regularly engaged in medical missions needs easy and quick access to equipment, supplies, and pharmaceuticals. In this situation, Allan beneﬁted from his cost-cutting decision to sell his ﬂeet of planes. The warehouses and storage facilities that Flying Doctors owned were also sold. Excessive cost and the timing of medical missions were cited as the reasons for making this

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decision. Not only was the actual ownership of warehouse space costly, but there was also the added concern that the donated pharmaceutical products would exceed their expiration dates. Perhaps developing a model of partnering with other groups would be the wisest approach in successfully alleviating these growing concerns. One example is the partnership developed with Medical Assistance Programs. The sole purpose of this group is to collect donations of medications and equipment. Since Medical Assistance Programs already does the footwork of networking with pharmaceutical and equipment providers, there is no need for Flying Doctors to duplicate these efforts. There is also no need to be concerned with storage or the potential hassle of disposing of expired medications. In facing these and other barriers and obstacles, Allan Gathercoal’s perseverance and innate ability to adapt renewed his vision for Flying Doctors, and he sought out other humanitarian agencies with areas of specialized interest with which to partner. Cooperation and reciprocity are key concepts for successfully attaining goals in the twenty-ﬁrst century. This is true not only for the business world, but also for advocates and agents of change in a world of health inequality.

MISSION EXAMPLES: BOLIVIA AND PERU In August 2007, Flying Doctors of America took a group of doctors on a mission to a women’s prison in La Paz, Bolivia. The team consisted primarily of twelve medical and dental volunteers, but also included nurse practitioners, chiropractors, and support personnel. Colonel Victor Conde Salcedo, general director of penitentiary services (Direct General del Servicio Penitenciario) provided team members with photo IDs that allowed them access to the prisons of Bolivia as ofﬁcially recognized medical and dental providers. Flying Doctors of America is the ﬁrst non-Bolivian NGO to visit women’s prisons in this country. Since most of the imprisoned women are poor and homeless, their children stay and live with them. At each of the prisons, Flying Doctors of America volunteers were able to set up makeshift clinics with a focus on general medical needs, pediatrics, and gynecology. Team members were housed in a local hotel and transported on a daily basis by van. Roseanne Carroll and her husband, Dr. Scott Carroll, were volunteers for the Bolivian Women’s Prison Mission. This was their third mission with Flying Doctors of America. They prefer missions in more exotic locales so that they can traverse jungles and endure more physically demanding conditions. The Carrolls mentioned that Allan ﬁnds the best drivers who plan out the best transportation routes for traveling through remote regions. This gives the volunteers a needed sense of security and the knowledge that they are taken care of very well. Despite living for a few days with little to no technology and at times coming home with gastrointestinal problems, the Carrolls both expressed deep gratitude for the profound experience they had as volunteers. Words do not sufﬁce in describing the well of feelings and thoughts experienced during the mission work.

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A common theme mentioned by the Carrolls, and echoed in interviews with other volunteers, was the oneness of all humans in a world of great diversity. They ﬁnd that in reaching across cultures and the barriers of language, customs, and religious traditions, their participation in the missions of Flying Doctors of America has beneﬁted them perhaps even more than the recipients of their care. They also feel very fortunate to be able to share these experiences with each other. Otherwise, the fear of not being able to grasp the full impact of this experience would be difﬁcult to process. The missions have really put life into a new perspective for them, especially when they discovered that most Bolivians live on a one dollar a day. Roseanne and Scott recounted their last day in the women’s prison. Roseanne was able to participate in distributing reading glasses to the inmates. The inmates quickly formed a line and tried to secure the best spots they could while still attending to their duties. Roseanne noticed a woman who was crying hysterically. She soon found out that the woman had to ﬁnish her chores before she would be able to stand in line to receive a pair of glasses, and she feared they would all be gone before she was able to get in line. This upset her horribly, for she dearly wanted a pair of glasses to improve her eyesight. Roseanne assured this woman that a pair would be saved for her. The relief she saw in this woman’s face melted her soul. Roseanne said she could never ask for a greater reward than knowing the impact this two-minute encounter had on this woman’s life. On the last day at the prison, the team saw over 500 patients, which included women and children. Dr. Carroll also recalled an event on a mission to Peru that touched him deeply. He remembers waiting for their canoes to arrive on the banks of a small village. For some reason, there was a delay, and the team found themselves with time on their hands. Within ten minutes, the team had set up a makeshift clinic and was able to see the entire village before their canoes arrived. He recalls how good he felt in being able to assist another group of people. The gratitude they expressed to Dr. Carroll and his team was overwhelming.

CURRENT DIRECTION Flying Doctors of America is always exploring new concepts and ideas in medical practice, such as the use of herbal medicines and homeopathic cures. Flying Doctors of America board members have been impressed with the positive results of current research in these areas and would like to dedicate resources in promoting this new approach. For example, researchers have discovered a berry in the Amazon that shows promising results in curing certain types of cancers. Homeopathic and natural medicines are a new area of investigation that embraces a holistic approach to the treatment of illness. After a number of years of operation, Flying Doctors of America has added physical therapy teams to their missions by inviting orthopedic doctors, chiropractors, physical therapists, and massage therapists to participate. Recognizing that many of the individuals they treat suffer from skeletal and muscular deterioration

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because of strenuous physical labor, the decision to address this issue by incorporating physical therapy teams has been a godsend to many. At least four times a year, the board of directors of Flying Doctors of America meets for brainstorming sessions in which a critical look is taken at their entire operating philosophy. One unique aspect of Flying Doctors of America is that each director is required to lead a mission every two years. This time spent out in the ﬁeld is refreshing and helps board members come up with new ideas and concepts. Flying Doctors of America also encourages its members to think outside of the box, and see what is going on with other NGOs and in other places in the world. By not restricting their own vision, they just keep pushing the envelope. In keeping with Peter Drucker’s idea that an organization needs to totally reinvent itself every seven years to be successful, Flying Doctors of America continually works at enhancing its original mission and purpose. Flying Doctors of America continues to revise itself in the hopes of providing the world with better medical care. This is their prime objective.

FUTURE DIRECTION Flying Doctors is also looking at integrating its work with that of environmental groups concerned with developing medicines and treatments originating in such places as the Amazon. An eco-friendly philosophy that values the role of indigenous peoples and their contributions to the healing arts is a means not only of valuing the medical practices of native cultures, but also a way of protecting the Amazon region itself. Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, has been a source of great inspiration for Flying Doctors of America. By expanding their direction with an ecological focus, an emphasis on protection of the environment and natural resources will assist in bringing an improved quality of life for those served by Flying Doctors of America.

IF I ONLY KNEW THEN . . . Although Allan completed inquiries into what would entice physicians to volunteer, he wished he had investigated other NGOs that were working in the same or similar areas of service. After Flying Doctors of America had been in practice, Allan discovered two or three major organizations engaged in similar nonproﬁt endeavors. He realized that much initial trial and error could have been avoided had he expanded his researched from the very start. Allan recommends that when creating new organizations, it is crucial to seriously evaluate your plans. Take a look not only at what other NGOs are doing, but also consider how their concepts can make a difference and how their organizations are being successful. Another key element that Allan wished he had spent more time considering is funding. A motto on Allan’s desk reads “there is no mission without margin.”

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Regarding money, people give to groups they know, believe in, and that beneﬁt them. This knowledge would have made fundraising a lot easier.

ALLAN’S MENTORS Allan has had a score of mentors. He attributes his passion for caring and giving to Mother Teresa because he witnessed her putting these values into practice. Dr. William Pannell, Senior Professor of Preaching at Fuller Theological Seminary, challenged Allan theoretically. Dr. Walter Brugeman from Columbia Theological Seminary also challenged him to be a practitioner of rhetorical criticism and “live the text of the prophets.” These are just two of the many whom Allan cites as having inﬂuenced him. Some of the best have been on his board of directors. These have been individuals who have constantly enhanced Allan’s values and challenged him as to how the organization was going to realize those values. Allan believes that individuals do not begin think outside their paradigms unless they have people who challenge them. He thinks that people basically live by the law of inertia, and they stay at rest until they are pushed by an outside force that makes them more active and engaged. Allan’s ﬁnal piece of advice to others is to “Just Do It!” You are going to learn as you do it. The best teacher is experience. Do your initial research, but after that, “Go for It!” You do not want to be one of the millions who say over and over, “I was going to.” Just go out there and do it. Allan admits that there will be critics and there will be failures, but you are also going to have your victories. You are going to have that deep satisfaction of knowing that you made a difference!

FLYING DOCTORS OF AMERICA BOARD OF DIRECTORS Michael Altman. Michael has been a volunteer since 1990 and has served on the board of directors of Flying Doctors of America since 1991. He has been on several medical missions and currently serves as a team leader. As a CPA for twenty-six years, Michael currently runs a ﬁnancial advisory practice with Ameriprise Financial. He served as vice-chairman of the Cobb County Republican Party in 2005–07 and treasurer in 2004–05. He was appointed by the governor to serve as chairman of the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust. Ed Atwell, MD. Dr. Atwell, a graduate of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, completed his internship and residency in orthopedic surgery at the Medical College of Georgia, followed by a sports medicine fellowship. Now in private practice in Cartersville, GA, he is also an active pilot and has served several terms as the president of the Cartersville Pilots Association. Dr. Atwell has served on the Flying Doctors of America board of directors since 2003 and has been chairman since 2005. He says, “The practice of

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medicine has been extremely rewarding and fulﬁlling to me. Leading and participating in medical missions allows me to give back some of these blessings.” Allan M. Gathercoal, DD, MTh, MA. Allan is the president/founder of Flying Doctors of America, which he founded in 1990. He travels the globe, but his second home is in Latin America. He has been the team leader on more than 140 medical/dental missions. Allan is an ordained minister and holds a doctorate from Columbia Theological Seminary. He is a private pilot and an aﬁcionado of adventure sports. He was born in England. Allen Hord, MD. Dr. Hord is a physician at the Piedmont Hospital (Atlanta, GA) where he specializes in pain management. He maintains an adjunct appointment as clinical associate professor of anesthesiology at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, GA. Dr. Hord is certiﬁed by the American Board of Anesthesiology and was awarded a Certiﬁcate of Added Qualiﬁcations in Pain Management. Dr. Hord is also certiﬁed by the American Board of Pain Medicine. In 2004 he was once again voted to the list of Best Doctors in America. Kayreen Jeter, RN, BSN. Kayreen is a registered nurse with primary experience in adult health and has been an intensive care nurse for nineteen years. During this time, she has also worked for a cardiothoracic surgical group for six years and managed an ICU for two years. Her primary area of expertise is ICU bedside nursing for cardiothoracic surgery patients.

FLYING DOCTORS OF AMERICA BOARD OF ADVISORS Héctor Guillermo Vilar Rey, JD. Dr. Guillermo is the director general for the Gobierno de la Provincia de Salta. He is an accomplished lawyer (professor of law) and is ﬂuent in Spanish and English. He represents his country and the Provincia de Salta throughout the world. He has recently traveled to the United States, Canada, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay, Spain, England, Turkey, Israel, and Egypt. He was born in Salta, Argentina. Dan Bailey. Dan owns a website design and marketing business (danbailey.com) and has been working with Flying Doctors of America updating the organization’s website and marketing efforts via e-mail since 2005. A native of Atlanta, GA, and former police ofﬁcer, Dan has been in the computer technology industry since 1990. Sherman Wade. A graduate of Saint Norbert College in Green Bay and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Graduate School, Sherman served four years as a captain in the U.S. Army and the last 35 years in the trade show business. Since retiring in 2002, he has been a marketing consultant to trade show organizers and the managing partner of a real estate investment company. Very active in the community, Sherman has served on the board of directors of Atlanta Children’s Shelter, the Atlanta Chapter of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and presently on the board of the Atlanta

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Track Club. He has been on Flying Doctors missions to Mongolia, Peru, and Bolivia and joined the board of directors in 2002.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Flying Doctors of America Founder: Allan Gathercoal Mission/Description: For more than eighteen years, Flying Doctors of America has been bringing together physicians, dentists, nurses, chiropractors, other health professionals, and non-medical support volunteers to care for people who otherwise would never receive professional medical care. The organization runs short-term medical/dental missions to the rural regions of the developing world. They operate under the “Mother Teresa Principle,” focusing on the poorest of the poor who live in conditions that are difﬁcult for most Americans to imagine. Website: www.Fdoamerica.org Address: 15 Medical Drive Cartersville, GA 30121 Phone: (770) 386-5221 E-mail: [email protected]

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

The Marjorie Kovler Center for the Treatment of Survivors of Torture, a program of Heartland Alliance for Human Needs & Human Rights, commemorated twenty years of providing comprehensive services to torture survivors in October 2007. Since 1987, the Marjorie Kovler Center has worked with more than 1,500 survivors of torture from seventy-four different countries in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Torture is the deliberate inﬂiction of severe physical or psychological pain carried out by anyone acting in an ofﬁcial capacity for the purposes of extracting a confession, punishment, intimidation, or discrimination. Torture exerts control over people and communities to create a cycle of fear, intimidation, and alienation. Survivors of torture often suffer from complex posttraumatic stress that manifests as anxiety, distrust, depression, ﬂashbacks, intrusive memories of the traumatic event, concentration and memory problems, and a range of physical symptoms. Disempowerment of individuals and communities is the goal of torture. The goal of treatment, therefore, is to empower survivors to use their strengths and reclaim personal integrity and a sense of control in their lives. The Marjorie Kovler Center helps survivors restore trust in others and reestablish a sense of community. This chapter will provide a brief history of the torture rehabilitation ﬁeld and the development of the Marjorie Kovler Center, with its unique model of providing quality care to torture survivors using and managing pro bono professional services. The philosophy and model of care created by the center’s staff and Executive Clinical Committee will be discussed through an examination of the political and cultural dynamics of torture, and its impact on individuals and communities. An overview of the center’s current demographics will also be provided.

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THE CHICAGO IMMIGRANT AND REFUGEE EXPERIENCE Chicago has a long history as a port of entry for immigrants seeking to improve their lives. In 1888 the Travelers Aid Society was founded to assist young people entering the city. Two years later, activist Jane Addams founded the Hull House and was quickly providing social services to more than 1,000 individuals a week. Addams worked for legislation to protect immigrants from exploitation, limit the working hours of women, mandate schooling for children, recognize labor unions, and provide for industrial safety. In 1908 Grace Abbott, a beneﬁciary of Hull House’s services, became the ﬁrst director the Immigrants’ Protective League, which combined direct service and advocacy for broader social reforms for immigrants. Travelers Aid and the Immigrants’ Protective League merged to form Travelers Aid of Metropolitan Chicago in 1967. With funding assistance from the United Way, the two organizations served travelers, immigrants, prisoners, and others living in destitution. In 1980 these two organizations legally incorporated to form Travelers and Immigrants Aid (TIA), now named Heartland Alliance for Human Needs & Human Rights. With a social justice perspective and a vision to expand services, the newly hired president, Rev. Dr. Sid Mohn, reinvigorated TIA’s mission to serve the poor and most vulnerable. The inﬂux of refugees from Southeast Asia to the United States as the result of the Vietnam War began in 1975 and impacted refugee resettlement services and policies. In 1978 the Illinois Department of Mental Health in collaboration with the Illinois state refugee coordinator, Dr. Edwin Silverman, conducted a Community Forum on Asian mental health concerns that brought together community leaders and mental health professionals. The meeting led to the development of Asian Human Services to serve the mental health needs of the pan-Asian community in Chicago. The Refugee Act of 1980 created the Federal Refugee Resettlement Program to diversify and provide for the effective resettlement of refugees. This was followed by a Refugee Mental Health Initiative by the Ofﬁce of Refugee Resettlement, which provided funding to the Department of Mental Health in various states to develop culturally speciﬁc services for different refugee populations. In Chicago, these events resulted in Travelers and Immigrants Aid developing a refugee mental health program in 1982, which used bilingual refugee staff to assist identiﬁed refugees with mental health problems. The bilingual staff provided social services in the community and interpreted for psychiatrists conducting evaluations and monitoring medications. It was not long before the bilingual staff recognized that some refugees were torture survivors.

A RESPONSE TO TORTURE The United Nations General Assembly adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948. Article 5 states, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or

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punishment.” In 1961 Amnesty International was founded and began advocating for prisoners of conscience who were being detained and were enduring cruel and inhumane treatment. In 1972 Amnesty International launched a worldwide campaign for the abolition of torture. The growing human rights movement provided a foundation for the development of the torture rehabilitation movement worldwide. In 1979 members of a Danish medical group obtained permission to admit and examine torture victims at Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark. Three years later, in 1982, Dr. Inge Genefke founded the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims (RCT) in Copenhagen as an independent institution with its own premises. The Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture was founded by several Toronto doctors, lawyers, and social service professionals, many of whom were associated with Amnesty International. They had begun to recognize torture victims, many of whom were seeking refugee status in Canada, in their practices as early as 1977. This group of professionals recognized the need for specialized services for the social, health, and legal problems faced by this particular group. In the United States, a similar process was also taking place. In 1978 Dr. David Kinzie, a psychiatrist at the Oregon Health Sciences University, began a small program to treat traumatized refugees coming to Oregon after the Vietnam War. Dr. José Quiroga, a physician who ﬂed Chile after the coup that overthrew President Allende, and Ana Deutsch, a marriage and family therapist who had escaped with her family from the “Dirty Wars” in Argentina, began seeing torture victims in 1980 at the Venice Family Clinic in Southern California. This collaboration eventually led to the development of the Program for Torture Victims in Los Angeles. On the East Coast, Dr. Richard Mollica, a psychiatrist, co-founded the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma with Jim Lavelle, a social worker. In the Midwest, Minnesota governor Rudy Perpich worked with the local human rights community to found the Center for Victims of Torture in May 1985 in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Attorneys, physicians, psychologists, and other service providers were becoming aware of the growing numbers of torture survivors living in the metropolitan Chicago area. Thousands of Southeast Asians were resettled in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and Cambodian genocide. The migration of undocumented Central Americans ﬂeeing civil conﬂicts in their homelands, especially from El Salvador and Guatemala, resulted in the migration of thousands of undocumented refugees. Torture-affected individuals and families began presenting in legal clinics, medical settings, and social service agencies. Service providers were not alone in their growing awareness of the special needs of survivors of torture. The Sanctuary Movement was formed to develop a network of faith-based shelters for Central Americans ﬂeeing the civil wars in their homelands. The Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ in Chicago was the second church in the country to declare sanctuary, housing Salvadoran and Guatemalan families in 1982. Eventually, area churches and synagogues formed

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the Chicago Metropolitan Sanctuary Alliance. During 1983 and 1984, the Chicago Religious Task Force on Central America relocated Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees by establishing an “underground railroad” from Arizona to Chicago. Also in 1984, Amnesty International launched its second Campaign against Torture. The Wellington Avenue Church was a meeting place for concerned Chicagoans. It was in this sanctuary community that TIA’s president, Dr. Mohn, met Chicago attorney Craig Mousin. The meeting resulted in a collaboration that eventually led to the development of the Midwest Immigrant Rights Center (MIRC) in 1985 as a program of Travelers and Immigrants Aid. MIRC (now grown into the National Immigrant Justice Center, or NIJC) became a network of pro bono attorneys trained to represent asylum seekers who would otherwise not have access to legal representation. Physicians and psychologists in Chicago also became engaged in the issue. Dr. Robert Kirschner, a forensic pathologist at the Cook County Medical Examiners Ofﬁce, began working on the examination of remains found in Argentina in 1985. This and other experiences gave him expertise in forensic documentation of human rights abuses. Concurrently, Dr. Irene Martínez, a physician at the then Cook County Hospital (now John Stroger, Jr. Hospital) and a survivor of torture from Argentina’s “Dirty Wars,” began identifying torture survivors in the emergency room at the hospital. As a Spanish-speaker, she was frequently referred patients from Central America. “I thought they were torture survivors because they reminded me of me,” she stated. Martínez was a former Amnesty International prisoner of conscience and activist, coming to the United States in 1981 after her release from detention in Argentina. She ﬁrst made her way to Los Angeles, California, where she met Dr. Quiroga and Ana Deutsch, then providing treatment for torture survivors at the Venice Family Clinic. It was from this encounter that Martínez learned that the feelings she had been experiencing since her release had a name: posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She shared that this information helped her realize she was not losing her mind. It made her think that other torture survivors might also beneﬁt from having a better understanding of the psychological consequences of torture. In July 1983, Dr. Martínez began her residency in internal medicine at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. She gave a presentation titled “Psychology and Human Rights Abuses” at the Illinois Psychologists Association’s (IPA) annual meeting in November 1986, which led to conversations in December of that year between psychologists from the IPA and health providers from Cook County Hospital interested in providing services to torture survivors. It was a natural development for Chicago’s Travelers and Immigrants Aid (now Heartland Alliance), which already had developed a refugee mental health program, to house a torture treatment center. Dr. Edwin Silverman, chief of the Bureau of Immigrant and Refugee Services, Illinois Department of Human Services, and long-time advocate for refugee concerns, met with Dr. Sid Mohn, president of Travelers and Immigrants Aid to discuss the need for a center in Chicago to serve torture survivors. Drs. Kirschner and Martínez began providing

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valuable documentation for MIRC attorneys representing Central American asylum seekers. Initial discussions about providing health services, including mental health and social assistance, began with Sister Sheila Lyne, president and chief executive ofﬁcer of Mercy Hospital & Medical Center. In February 1987 a formal meeting occurred that included representatives of key organizations: Sister Sheila Lyne of Mercy Hospital; Steven Miles, MD, from the University of Chicago’s Center for Clinical Medical Ethics; Dr. Sid Mohn, president of Travelers and Immigrants Aid; Thomas Hollon, PhD, and Susana Schlesinger, PhD, from the Illinois Psychological Association; and Robert Kirschner, MD and Irene Martínez, MD, from the Cook County health system. The idea of a Chicago center specializing in the treatment of survivors of torture had the support of people and organizations that could make it a reality. They agreed to carry out the following initiatives by the end of 1987: 1. The director of the Refugee Mental Health Program at TIA was psychologist Dr. Antonio Martínez. With funding from the Bureau of Refugee and Immigrant Services of the Illinois Department of Human Services, his position was restructured to provide him with time to help establish a model of care for a torture treatment center in Chicago to be housed under the auspices of Travelers and Immigrants Aid; he would later become the center’s ﬁrst director. 2. Dr. Steven Miles agreed to have the Center for Clinical Ethics host a conference at the University of Chicago on the treatment of survivors of torture. This conference would bring together the leaders in the ﬁeld, including Barbara Chester from the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, MN; Dr. David Kinzie from the Intercultural Psychiatry Program, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, Oregon; Dr. Irene Martínez, physician at Cook County Hospital in Chicago and a survivor of Argentina’s “Dirty War”; Dr. Richard Mollica of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma at Massachusetts General Hospital; Dr. Elena Nightingale, one of the editors of the recently published The Breaking of Bodies and Minds: Torture, Psychiatric Abuse and the Health Professions (W.H. Freeman, 1985); and Dr. Glenn Randall, coauthor of Serving Survivors of Torture (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1991). 3. Dr. Irene Martínez spoke at a Social Issues Section–sponsored presentation at the 1987 Illinois Psychological Association’s annual meeting to identify other interested psychologists. Her presentation was titled “Treatment and Needs of Victims of Torture and Their Families.” 4. Mercy Hospital committed to providing medical services to ten identiﬁed torture survivors, including physical and dental care as well as psychiatric services. The collaborative and multidisciplinary spirit of this group was essential to the creation of a torture treatment center in Chicago. It reﬂected a synergism that would be contagious as the planned events took place throughout 1987.

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During this time, Chicago philanthropist Peter Kovler had read about the Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims in Copenhagen. Through the Blum-Kovler Foundation, Peter Kovler initiated funding in the amount of $75,000 that helped launch the ﬁnancial reality for the Chicago-based torture treatment program in November 1988. The foundation’s only request was to name the Center after Kovler’s mother, Marjorie—thus began the Marjorie Kovler Center for the Treatment of Survivors of Torture. The multidisciplinary working group met several times throughout the year and followed through successfully with their commitments: Dr. Antonio Martínez was named director of the Marjorie Kovler Center. He attended the conference at the University of Chicago where he announced the intent to recruit volunteers interested in providing services to torture survivors, who would be screened and referred by the newly formed Marjorie Kovler Center. A piece of paper was passed around for potential volunteers to list their contact information. A list of ﬁfty names was compiled, and the interested individuals were invited to the ﬁrst meeting of clinical volunteers on February 20, 1988.

PROVIDING SERVICES FOR TORTURE SURVIVORS The Marjorie Kovler Center for the Treatment of Survivors of Torture was located in the diverse Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, where many new immigrants and refugees initially settle. Nestled on the third ﬂoor of a building that housed multiple refugee assistance programs, the Marjorie Kovler Center had two ofﬁce spaces and three staff members. Dr. Antonio Martínez divided his time between the Refugee Mental Health Program and the Marjorie Kovler Center, providing administrative coordination. The additional staff included a full-time clinical supervisor and a half-time case manager. A staff triad of administration, clinical work, and case management/volunteer coordination provided the structure, which allowed pro bono professionals and other volunteers to contribute services. The ﬁrst year’s budget was approximately $80,000 for staff salaries, rent, and other direct costs. Within the ﬁrst four months, thirty-two individuals were accepted as clients at the Marjorie Kovler Center. The caseload included torture survivors from Vietnam, Cambodia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Iran, and Iraq. By the end of the calendar year, the client numbers reached seventy-four, and Ethiopia and Honduras had been added to the country of origin list. A core group of twelve pro bono therapists emerged from the outreach efforts and became the Executive Clinical Committee. The twelve clinicians provided guidance and consultation to the staff of the Marjorie Kovler Center in developing a clinical model of care using pro bono professionals. The committee started to meet once a month for one hour to discuss program challenges such as screening and coordinating volunteers. A three-hour multidisciplinary meeting followed and provided volunteers an opportunity to discuss cases in a supportive, conﬁdential setting. This monthly, four-hour time

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slot became integral to developing a cohesive volunteer model of care for torture survivors. Torture treatment was a relatively new ﬁeld, and most of the volunteers had no practical experience in treating torture survivors. A multidisciplinary and comprehensive approach evolved.

CASE STUDY Understanding the political and cultural context of torture survivors’ experiences became an essential part of providing appropriate treatment. Most of the pro bono clinicians had experience working with trauma, but not torture; experience working in therapeutic dyads, not triads that integrated an interpreter; and experience with different economic classes, but not necessarily different worldviews. Learning to be sensitive to the consequences of ofﬁcially sanctioned torture, developing a communication rhythm with an interpreter, and being open to the consideration of different ways of understanding the world presented challenges to Western-trained clinicians providing psychotherapy to indigenous and other individuals from the non-Western world. An example that illustrates these challenges involved a clinical psychologist working with an unaccompanied minor from Central America. Maria (not her real name) had made her way to Chicago via the Sanctuary Movement. While living with a family who had agreed to provide for her needs as an adolescent, she was referred to the Marjorie Kovler Center for behaviors that included lying and hoarding food. Her trauma history included being orphaned as an infant when her parents were disappeared. She was raised by an older woman, who was taking care of many children orphaned by the civil conﬂict in their country. Maria also survived her village being bombed, and her own abduction and rape by soldiers. After giving birth to a child as the result of the rape, Maria worked in the city and sent the money she earned to the woman who had raised her and was now raising her child. After several harassing encounters with the military, Maria ﬂed to the United States, fearing the harassment would escalate into more abuse. Her crossing as an undocumented minor assisted by the Sanctuary Movement provided her with some assurance of refuge once she arrived safely in Chicago. Maria was ﬁfteen years old when a family who agreed to provide her with basic needs and education received her. This was a difﬁcult transition, however, and was fraught with many miscommunications and misunderstandings. Identifying and understanding these issues was a primary task of individual psychotherapy. Maria was of indigenous descent, had a second grade education, and had been raised in a rural village where, she described, everyone contributed to the well-being of the community. Her description of the woman who raised her and other orphans was that she was her abuela, or grandmother, and that the other children were her brothers and sisters. Maria also described having

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several different pseudonyms and indicated that using different names was part of survival when meeting strangers. She described learning as a child that it was not safe to trust people she did not know. The political context of civil war and the cultural and linguistic worldview of campesino life, in addition to Maria’s multiple traumatic experiences, were all essential components for the therapist to understand. The use of a Spanish-speaking interpreter to assist the therapy process was a challenge for Maria, since Spanish was her second language; for the therapist, who needed to rely on the interpreter to be the conduit of communication; and for the interpreter, who had to ensure accurate representation of what was being said. All the participants were unfamiliar with these conditions of psychotherapy. There was a huge learning curve to be mastered. Creating a safe environment became the ﬁrst task of therapy. Maria’s grandmother had been a signiﬁcant ﬁgure in Maria’s life, and she missed her very much. At her own initiation, Maria performed a ceremony where she used her indigenous belief system to call upon her grandmother to be “present” during the sessions. The blending of psychotherapy with an indigenous practice provided a cross-cultural blending of healing strategies. Fortiﬁed by the felt sense of her grandmother, Maria was able to talk about her multiple traumas in a psychotherapeutic context. Additionally, Maria found family therapy sessions an important component of her treatment, stating, “They are my family now and need to know what is happening in my life.” Maria regularly brought forth her deep connections to her community and her abuela, and placed her own experiences in the context of a collective experience. Center staff and volunteers recognized what the collective experience brought to Maria’s reservoir of strength and resilience. The case manager, volunteers, and other service providers worked in a collective spirit, closely coordinating with the therapist to address needs that affected Maria’s daily life. Maria needed medical attention for contractures secondary to scarring from napalm burns, English as a Second Language classes, intensive support during multiple housing transitions, employment assistance, and referral for legal assistance. Recruiting pro bono providers as needs arose, accompanying Maria to appointments in the community, and responding to crises was also a collaborative effort sustained for a decade. By sharing who she was with us, Maria unwittingly led our center into a deeper sense of collective responsibility, action, and joy. Maria remains engaged with the center’s services, activities, and the same helping professionals after seventeen years, reﬂecting her resilience, independence, and connectedness.

A CLINICAL MODEL FOR TORTURE TREATMENT The Marjorie Kovler Center’s clinical model developed with special attention to three areas: (1) understanding the dynamics of torture and its psychological effects, (2) grounding treatment in a political context, and (3) adapting treatment to varying cultural concepts about torture and mental health. Initially, our knowledge of torture and its effects was limited to the kinds of trauma we were accustomed to seeing in our professional practices. Only by listening carefully to

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survivors—to their stories and their feedback—and reﬂecting with colleagues over time did we begin to understand how we could best offer assistance as a program. Treatment constantly interacts with the dynamics of torture and its political and cultural contexts. As illustrated in Maria’s story, we continue to rely on the client/survivor as expert on issues related to her own experience and as the ultimate arbiter of a treatment’s success. Dynamics of Torture The most immediate aspects of our clients’ initial presentation are the palpable feelings of vulnerability and mistrust. Whether a person’s gaze is cast downward and words are spare, or eyes look fearfully to you, silently pleading for respite from pain, nonverbal expressions communicate volumes about past experiences and present needs. We wanted to communicate safety and trust to survivors. To do this effectively, we knew we had to ﬁrst understand the survivors’ core experiences of torture. Humiliation, threat of death, unpredictability, and complete powerlessness pervade torture. The intentional application of extreme physical pain accompanied by interrogation was also destructive to language that might describe it (Scarry, 1985). The depth of trauma was degrees of intensity beyond what most clinicians had previously encountered and treated, so we read and discussed what was available on the subject as we began meeting with new clients and listening carefully. Social Conditions Literature from Latin America, both clinical and autobiographical, illustrated the speciﬁc context of torture for many of our ﬁrst clients. It underscored the strategic, systematic way torture was used to exert power and silence dissent. Jacobo Timmerman wrote not only of the shocking brutality to which he and others were subject in Argentina, but his narrative also provided insight into methods and psychological aspects of perpetrators in a torturing hierarchy (Timmerman, 1981). Regimes combined isolation with extreme brutality for maximum, long-term impact. It seemed clear that a central objective of perpetrators was to convince the victims that no one would believe their stories, even if they survived to tell them, leaving survivors with an enormous and unjust burden of guilt and shame. Dictatorial regimes had effective propaganda machines to generate myths about the threat dissidents constituted. Regimes tried to marginalize individuals, diminish the inﬂuence their voices could have on others, and stigmatize their families. Many regimes were able to convince sectors of civil society to collude with the idea that a political or social group could be regarded as almost subhuman, a “torturable class” of people (Conroy, 2000, p. 27). Learning about these realities helped us understand clients who avoided telling their stories or disclosing signiﬁcant details about their experience of torture and persecution. We were also challenged to believe the unbelievable.

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The conditions present for systematic terror often included collaborating institutional elements, such as clergy allied with dictatorships and other professionals, such as physicians and psychologists, lending credibility to inhuman methods of enforcing state control (Lifton, 2004; Scarry, 1985). Understanding this nuanced aspect of some torture experiences helped us to be sensitive to clients hesitant to seek needed treatment, and to modify how we were accustomed to conduct medical and psychological evaluations. We became more conscious that we might be perceived as authority ﬁgures and adjusted our style and workspace to convey warmth and safety. Accommodating the need for a slower pace—a ﬁrst session dedicated solely to helping the client feel more at ease, explanations for reasons why questions were asked or actions taken, and reassurances that survivors were not obligated to comply with any request we might make—we proceeded with increasing awareness. The knowledge and reality that “helping” professionals collaborated with torturers also brought staff and volunteers closer to understanding that the capacity to torture could be present in all of us, however distressing the idea. Political Asylum These powerful psychological themes of guilt, shame, and silence had legal ramiﬁcations once a survivor had arrived safely in this country (Bogner, 2007). Many survivors avoided talking about their experiences to prevent the onset of painful, intrusive memories and to attempt to forget, however elusive the wish. In the early years, many did not apply for political asylum out of fear of retraumatization or fear of retaliation against their families at home. In 1996 Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which profoundly restricted protection for asylum seekers by requiring expedited ﬁling of asylum applications (McAndrews, 2002). Torture survivors were suddenly compelled to enter a retraumatizing, unpredictable legal process before they had an opportunity to stabilize their lives. There is an inherent and frightening power differential in the asylum process, increasingly adverse and accusatory. Here, the burden of proof is on the asylum seeker, who needs to produce documents to support the claim. In their home countries, however, the focus is on evading immediate danger to survival. Those who manage to ﬂee are able to do so because a support network mobilizes on their behalf, often paying bribes to help them escape captivity, obtaining false documents if necessary, choosing the destination, and making travel arrangements. Most never imagine having to prove they were tortured, as if living through it and carrying the emotional and physical pain were not proof enough. The psychological pressure to prepare for the asylum process often overwhelms survivors, and the discretionary nature of decisions can be devastating. Therapeutic support is critical as a client constructs a written narrative testimony of his or her persecution. Center staff and volunteers have responded to these legal imperatives with treatments that emphasize symptom management, coordination

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of constant efforts to provide medical and psychological forensic documentation of torture, and the ﬁnding of resources to assist clients in chronic economic instability. Asylum applicants are not eligible for any government assistance and often have prolonged waits for work authorization. Documenting the effects of torture is a labor-intensive process for a volunteer organization, but when survivors are granted asylum, there are tremendous concrete and symbolic gains. Asylum represents a crucial step toward security and family reuniﬁcation, as well as a milestone in the treatment stage of safety (Herman, 1992). Twenty years later, the legal process continues to present challenges to the treatment team—intensiﬁed by heightened suspicion of asylum seekers since September 11, 2001, and increased discretionary powers for immigration judges (REAL ID Act, 2005). Strength in Community The legal pressures, profound trauma, and often disabling physical and psychological symptoms facing survivors led the Marjorie Kovler Center to a collaborative, multidisciplinary treatment approach. As much for our own beneﬁt as for the clients’, a collective approach would provide peer support for intense trauma work and help us form a community of support and healing. The systemic use of torture to destroy real or perceived threats to power can result in a strong disincentive on the part of survivors and their communities to organize, take action, or voice dissent. Informed by the survivor’s experience of isolation and helplessness, we hoped to recreate a sense of community. By ﬁrst helping a survivor to connect with his or her innate strength and resilience, and then helping the survivor connect with our community, we were offering ours as a bridge to others. The political context of torture, systematic in its disempowerment, permeated our understanding of empowerment as a core objective of treatment and our belief that effective treatment should extend beyond the individual (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Offering assistance to increase English language proﬁciency (ESL classes and volunteer tutors), to obtain training and employment (occupational therapist), to address causes of physical pain (nurses, doctors, dentists, physical therapists, acupuncturists, massage therapists), to engage in expressive therapies (art, dance, movement), or to attend a cooking group or free cultural event are center services that complement individual psychotherapies. Reduced symptoms of insomnia, depression, and anxiety, along with participation in activities beyond the therapeutic dyad, signal an increasing sense of agency and a change from the core dynamics of torture. Sharing Power The dynamics of power exist simultaneously at personal, interactional, organizational, and structural levels (Wolf, 1999). Our objective to encourage empowerment inﬂuenced our organizational layers (after increased funding in 2000 from the Torture Victims Relief Act) and methods of service delivery—from administrative

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to clinical, intake evaluation to case management model, and interactions with clients around health and material needs. A balance of power and awareness of choices is critical to the effectiveness of services and the quality of our relationship with survivors. Empowerment may initially manifest in a choice to accept or decline a particular recommendation in the Initial Treatment Plan. Over time, however, many clients have recovered their voices of dissent and have spoken to the media, lobbied ofﬁcials in Washington, D.C., established activist organizations, and ﬁled civil lawsuits against torturers who reside in this country. The center has been uniquely engaged at these broad levels of empowerment: supporting Torture Abolition and Survivors’ Support Coalition International (TASSC), founded and run by survivors; inviting collaboration with a client advisory board; working with torture survivors who pursue justice through civil cases supported by the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) by providing psychological evaluations and support; and promoting clarity and consistency in our mission so that the Marjorie Kovler Center is easily identiﬁed with our model and strong public stance against the use of torture. Importance of Relationship Torture is a relational trauma and a political act, using a range of techniques intentionally applied by another human being for maximum humiliation and harm. One of its central aims is to undermine a person’s ability to form healthy relationships. The psychological imprint of the survivor’s forced relationship with a cruel and unpredictable authority confounds subsequent relationships. For survivors, the prospect of entering a relationship is anxiety provoking and potentially retraumatizing. Relationships are often avoided in early stages of recovery. For example, survivors may hesitate to come to the center after being referred by someone or may spend their days alone in their rooms, avoiding interaction with roommates or potential encounters outside the home. To the extent that any situation or relationship begins to reconstitute elements of the torture experience (i.e., a sensory piece of the present that resembles the traumatic past), a survivor will feel increasingly vulnerable and respond accordingly (e.g., shut down emotionally, show signs of central nervous system hyperarousal, have a ﬂashback, avoid repeating the experience). Survivors who have disclosed painful details of their torture to a therapist or attorney may avoid coming to the next appointment. To engage survivors in treatment, the center’s staff and volunteers knew they would have to earn trust in clear and intentional steps. Although retraumatization is unavoidable, minimizing it is a philosophical and operational tenet for our center. All team members are mindful of incorporating choices in their interactions with survivors: to slow the pace, to not disclose a detail until ready, to sit facing the provider or not, and to accept medication or not. Clear information and descriptions of the process help shape realistic expectations. Providing choices becomes a therapeutic intervention whose effect is to convey sensitivity to their

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vulnerability, gradually instill trust and safety in the relationship, and restore conﬁdence in the survivor’s own inherent ability to heal. Survivors suffered profound betrayal in the context of a human relationship and often have needs for transparency beyond conventional clinical boundaries. They often challenge clinicians to respond to questions about our political views or stance on U.S. support for or involvement with their country’s military. Having been exposed to the worst of humanity, survivors often wondered why we were doing this work, suspicious of our motives. To respond in the classical ways in which we are trained would risk retraumatizing or alienating our clients. Instead, it has been essential to demonstrate solidarity with survivors and the movements for social change with which they have typically been associated. In the center’s early days, the clinical committee, struggling to respond in ways sensitive to the dynamics of torture, would openly discuss these issues. A model of therapeutic accompaniment developed to provide reassurance for the existential dilemma of trusting people again and to recognize the pervasiveness of retraumatizing experiences in survivors’ daily lives. Therapeutic Accompaniment The practice of accompaniment challenges traditional ideas of clinical boundaries (Fabri, 2001). Often, professional boundaries are deﬁned by meeting in an ofﬁce for a set amount of time. In working cross-culturally, we have found that to engage survivors who come from countries and cultures with limited if any knowledge of the Western mental health model, it is necessary to make adjustments and modiﬁcations to conventional frameworks. This may include, but is not limited to, a physician conducting a forensic medical examination in a non-medical setting, a psychotherapist accompanying a survivor who was raped as part of her torture to a medical examination, or a case manager driving and staying with a client through her dental appointment. It may also involve therapy in a client’s home. The guiding principle determining how and when to adjust conventional boundaries is found in answering these questions: Is this therapeutic for the survivor? Will it enhance engagement in treatment? Does it promote greater safety and trust? We have learned boundaries are internalized, and professional roles can be maintained in any physical environment. A Therapeutic Partnership The Therapeutic Partnership is a model of psychotherapy using interpreters to meet the needs of cross-cultural mental health. Using the empowerment model that permeated the philosophy of care of the Marjorie Kovler Center, the expertise of each participant—survivor, interpreter, and clinician—was acknowledged as an essential component of the therapy process. A collaborative methodology was promoted: the therapist was viewed as providing expertise on

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the psychological consequences of severe trauma, such as torture, and strategies for recovery; the survivor was an expert in what trauma had occurred and its expression within his or her own cultural, linguistic, and political context; and the interpreter was the conduit for communication, an expert in the languages spoken by the therapist and survivor. There were also times when the interpreter provided more than language interpretation. When the interpreter was from the survivor’s homeland, he or she was also a cultural broker, often translating the meaning of behaviors and expressions in ways that promoted deeper understanding of the communication. Additionally, the interpreter at times was an advocate for either the survivor or the therapist, assisting the other in grasping the full meaning of what was needed or being expressed. The therapeutic triad became a therapeutic partnership and reﬂected respect and trust, necessary ingredients for psychotherapy. Spiritual Support Another vital component developed by Eva Sullivan-Knopf, an early case manager at the Marjorie Kovler Center, was the Irene Pastoral Counseling Program, Irene designating “peace” in the Greek tradition. With a background in ministry, Eva recognized the importance of spirituality in a survivor’s life and worldview. The Irene component essentially was organized around offering pastoral counseling to Marjorie Kovler clients. The volunteers and consultants to the program represented many faiths, including Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Eva continued to consult with volunteers even after she left for a church ministry. Many of the volunteers continued this service, but the Irene component itself eventually diminished over the years without on-staff leadership. The legacy, however, continues with ongoing links to communities of faith, particularly the Chicago Theological Union and local mosques, churches, and temples that provide spiritual support to clients and consultation to staff and volunteers.

POLITICAL CONTEXT OF TORTURE The ﬁrst clients at the center were predominantly Latin American and Southeast Asian; therefore, it was imperative that we as a program understood the sociopolitical history and current policies of United States’ involvement in those hemispheres. Basic questions such as how the economic and political interests of the United States interacted with the power structures of each country could have implications for treatment. One had to be able to distinguish between ofﬁcial reports of the “communist reign of terror” in Central America and reports from a union organizer from Guatemala or catechist from El Salvador who was systematically targeted for torture, disappearance, and assassination (President Ronald Reagan televised speech, 1984). Staff and volunteers had to demonstrate they were

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not antagonistic to the opinions or activities that led to the client’s persecution. Our program also had to reassure clients we did not have government ties and would protect conﬁdentiality. A sociological framework that explained the relationship between war, oppression, and mental health was especially useful to elucidate the psychological and spiritual effects of the wars in Central America on communities (Martin-Baró, 1994).The concept of our own liberation being tied to others’ liberation was not only consistent with the guiding philosophy of liberation movements prevalent in Latin America at the time, but it was also useful to shift the inherent power differential in a treatment relationship to a more equitable balance. One therapist remembers her Guatemalan clients sharing in greater depth after they saw her marching in a protest against U.S. policies in Guatemala. Many volunteers were drawn to the center’s work, appalled by knowledge that torture was prevalent and either overtly or covertly supported by our government. Learning that survivors were in Chicago in substantial numbers, they hoped they might contribute in some small way to a survivor’s recovery and begin to wedge into systems perpetuating the practice of torture. This continues to be a central motive for our volunteers twenty years later. As staff and volunteers listened for the ﬁrst time and then repeatedly to stories of gross human rights violations, we looked to each other and to those we trusted for points of reference. We experienced shifts in our worldviews and episodic vicarious trauma, as in nightmares and symptoms of anxiety or depression that had not been present prior to the work. We also came to question the impact of our work as long as torture persisted with impunity all over the world. Acknowledging the presence of social phenomena such as denial and dissociation in our own society (including friends and family) compelled us to break the cycle of social denial by action and by speaking out in solidarity with our clients (Herman, 1992). The U.S. government’s participation in torture is now widely known. The photos and national debate dealt a psychological blow to many clients who do not have the luxury of debating the issue in abstract terms. We have continued standing with our clients to oppose the use of torture of any kind against any human being.

EFFECTS ON FAMILIES The Marjorie Kovler Center adopted the United Nations deﬁnition of torture: “Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inﬂicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inﬂicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public ofﬁcial or other person acting in

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an ofﬁcial capacity” (UN Convention). The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, from Argentina, taught us about the suffering of family members of the disappeared. Just as torture is an oppressive tool applied systemically, the center’s clinical committee recognized the corresponding need to systemically treat the effects of torture in the family. Some children felt they must keep secrets about their mother’s, father’s, or sibling’s torture or disappearance to shield the family from stigma in the community or further persecution from authorities. In many countries, there are substantial threats to families and risk of persecution once a member ﬂees the country. Many family members have witnessed extreme violence in their communities and are traumatized, even though they themselves were not tortured. The center’s staff and volunteers understand our clients’ symptoms and behaviors in relation to their experience of torture—as normal reactions to abnormal circumstances rather than pathology. This approach brings solidarity into the clinical framework and incorporates a political consciousness into our conceptualization of PTSD and its treatment. PTSD is a common, albeit imperfect, diagnosis to describe symptoms survivors frequently experience once they survive torture. Although assisting clients to decrease the frequency or intensity of these symptoms is essential to the recovery process, the center also values the long view on treatment. When a survivor recovers his or her voice, this is a political act of demonstrating to the torturing regime that they failed to silence or incapacitate the survivor. For example, although clients who bring lawsuits against torturers enter a public, prolonged, and emotionally taxing process, they have reported signiﬁcant therapeutic gains from confronting the perpetrators in a federal courtroom where juries have ruled in the survivor’s favor. The survivor as plaintiff often pursues this line of justice to honor the memory of so many who did not survive, reclaiming the path of social justice begun long before their persecution. Many clients, even after their lives are more stable and secure, continue to exercise power in meaningful ways. Accompanying clients in their goal to reclaim justice is a rich and complex process. Many of us who know and work with survivors have ourselves been transformed by their experiences of profound social engagement.

CULTURAL CONTEXT OF TREATMENT Many of our early clients from Latin America and Southeast Asia came from cultures that valued the collective over the individual. They expressed themselves in the collective “we” and had always lived with extended family before ﬂeeing their country. We considered the importance of the survivor’s role in family and community, and brought clinical intervention into those dimensions. Long-term group work with both Cambodian women and Guatemalan exiles also involved seeking assistance from the community to help reframe cultural concepts and incorporating expressive therapies to facilitate the therapeutic process and engage the wider community.

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CASE STUDY: CAMBODIAN WOMEN’S GROUP The Cambodian women who had been tortured and raped by soldiers of the Khmer Rouge understood their experience in the context of karma, a Buddhist concept of cause and effect that asserts one’s past actions are the cause of present circumstances. The women felt deeply responsible for their own suffering and believed it was directly related to terrible acts committed in past lives. Furthermore, they did not want to talk about it. Pat Robin, a volunteer psychologist, sought consultation from the center’s then director, Antonio Martínez. Together, they invited cultural experts to help them overcome these obstacles to treatment. One was an academic who met with the clinical committee and offered to reframe the women’s interpretation of karma. Rather than having had past lives as terrible people, they were likely to have been diligent caregivers in their communities, which explained why they needed to allow others to care for them in this lifetime. A Buddhist monk in the community was consulted about how to work with the women when they did not wish to talk about their trauma in Western fashion. He shared a parable about the need to follow the river as it bends, suggesting that clinicians needed to adapt to the group’s inclinations even if it meant forging a new path. The group eventually worked with a local dancer/choreographer Jan Erkert to create “Turn Her White with Stones,” a dance piece where the women were able to incorporate their stories and traditional rituals into the choreography and ﬁnally into a dance, which was performed by an Erkert Company dancer at Columbia College. The women’s group also collaborated with a drama therapist to produce a theatrical piece on their survival and resilience under the Khmer Rouge. The women created a dark, narrow maze through which individuals, escorted by the women, entered the theater. They led the audience members to their seats in this way to convey a sense of the fear and confusion the women had felt in refugee camps. With attention to movement and narrative, the women collectively faced and re-shaped traumatic memory with a greater sense of control, and they also were able to illustrate their stories to a wide community audience. This acknowledgement of their experience was very meaningful to them.

CASE STUDY: GUATEMALAN GROUP Mario González, a Guatemalan psychotherapist and long-standing staff member, who understood the political culture of resistance and mistrust, organized a Guatemalan group of men and women in the late 1980s and later worked together with Antonio Martínez as co-facilitator of the group. Beginning in a church basement, the group later rotated meeting in each member’s home, a step that drew members together as well as helped them feel safe. Trust and security were ﬂeeting for Guatemalans in that period

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when the approval rate for political asylum was less than 1 percent (INS Yearbook, 1984) and the U.S. government was funding the brutal dictatorship. The early goals were to break the isolation members were experiencing and to rebuild the sense of community they had lost in exile. The group received support from the larger community, including Casa Guatemala and Su Casa, a Catholic Worker house. Group meetings were always followed by informal social gatherings in spirited Guatemalan fashion. The group transitioned from previous discussions of traumatic material to lighter conversation in a relaxed setting, nourished by the presence of children, spouses, friends, music, dance, and traditional food. In 1990 group members expressed concern about their children dealing with the effects of trauma, loss, and dislocation. New volunteers were recruited to meet with the children while the parents met in a separate room. This new group incorporated therapeutic activities to support the children’s identity as Guatemalan as well as help them cope with the challenging transitions to life in a large North American city. As children of survivors, the young group members carried their own suffering. The group members developed a distinct role in the community, where they contributed to the cultural and political activities through traditional Maya dance, theater, and art; they named themselves Konojel Junam (All Together). They also worked with Jan Erkert and performed a piece of their own design, “Jornadas de Esperanza” (Journeys of Hope) to a full house at the Harold Washington Library. After several years of meeting together and moving through distinct stages, the adult group focused on an oral history project to bring validation to their experiences and raise awareness about the human rights situation in Guatemala. The group had collected testimonies of members in the form of life narratives rather than focusing solely on traumatic events. They received funding for one year from the Illinois Humanities Council to present a series of public presentations they named “Twelve Parallel Lives.” Each narrative represented a sector of Guatemalan civil society targeted by the repression. The series of presentations, which took place in public spaces such as the Chicago Cultural Center, universities, and bookstores, included an introduction, reading of one narrative by someone other than the author, discussion facilitated by a center volunteer with questions from the audience, and closing with a marimba and traditional dance by Konojel Junam. A community arts group created a series of paintings and prints inspired by the narratives and donated the image used on the ﬂyer. The Guatemalan community actively participated and donated traditional food. Community support and validation was meaningful to the group, and Chicagoans beneﬁted from the opportunity to learn directly and personally about the human rights situation in Guatemala.

INNOVATIONS This section introduces ways in which the center’s program has and continues to evolve to meet the needs of our clients. Whether challenged by changes in funding, demographics, or shifts in immigration policy, the center remains committed to develop and test creative responses.

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A Community Organization The Marjorie Kovler Center developed an individualized approach to treatment that is nonhierarchical, noninstitutional, and nongovernmental, and its organizational structure mirrored this approach. The internal structure and spirit of the center’s organization of staff and volunteers remains basically horizontal. Everyone, from interns to senior directors, is encouraged to contribute ideas and opinions, make coffee, wash dishes, and mop up when necessary. Clear and direct communication is valued over chain-of-command style. Our clients tend to be hypersensitive to the power dynamics of human behavior—an open, warm community serving tea or coffee to all visitors encourages a return visit and the chance to form bonds of trust and friendship. There is no mistaking how much we have learned and still have to learn from survivors—about forming community, engaging in social action, courageously speaking out against injustice, enduring the losses, and sharing the victories together.

Recent Funding and Growth of the Torture Treatment Program From 1987 to 2000, the center relied on numerous grants beginning with the initial grant from the Blum-Kovler Foundation that launched the Marjorie Kovler Center. This foundation has continued to support the center’s work with an annual donation. Additional sources of funding have included local (e.g., Michael Reese Trust Fund) and national foundations (e.g., Rosenberg Fund for Children) as well as individual donors. Functioning on a small budget that provided two full-time and one half-time staff, the center has depended on volunteers in providing services. Maintaining consistent funding was an ongoing struggle and required administrative coordination of grant writing and reporting. In the mid1990s, the Marjorie Kovler Center applied for and received funding from the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture. This additional resource has helped fund a staff position that conducts intake assessments. Minnesota Senators Dave Durenberger and the late Paul Wellstone, a Republican and a Democrat, ﬁrst introduced the Torture Victims Relief Act (TVRA) in 1994. Enacted in 1998, the TVRA had strong bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate. In 2000, the ﬁrst year of appropriated funds that implemented the TVRA, the Ofﬁce of Refugee Resettlement in the Administration for Children and Families awarded four-year grants to seventeen organizations. The Marjorie Kovler Center was one of the grantees in 2000 and has continued to receive funding through the Torture Victims Relief Act. This meant that almost overnight the center staff increased from three to nine. A stronger infrastructure to support the volunteer network was a direct outgrowth of this funding, and the capacity to provide services to torture survivors doubled within twelve months. Current Case Management and Community-Building Efforts Case management and volunteer coordination were essential components of the initial design of the center. The growth in 2000 allowed for case management

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to build a team (two full-time staff and two full-time volunteers). They have built a unique model of service provision, linking client needs with skilled volunteers. Rather than a traditional case management model, whereby each is responsible for coordinating services for a set caseload of clients, the model follows a transdisciplinary approach. As such, roles and responsibilities for each service (e.g., coordination of health appointments, forensic exams, ESL tutoring, special events) are rotated, resulting in greater knowledge of services and resources by the team and greater accessibility for clients. Nurturing Familiar Occupations: Farms and Bees Historically, the Marjorie Kovler Center has been committed to community building, and case management supports this through organized trips and activities. The case management team solicits free tickets and coordinates client groups to attend local cultural events, many relating to the clients’ culture and others expanding exposure to local resources. Community building expanded beyond the Chicago city limits when a volunteer, Tom Spaulding, invited the center’s clients and staff to visit a rural farm, Angelic Organics. Here, clients had the opportunity to participate in farm tasks and specialized workshops. The farm held special meaning for clients who reconnected with positive experiences and memories from their home countries. As a Guatemalan woman shared, “You can see many farms, but none invite you in. Here you feel at home.” After trips to the farm, clients expressed the wish to return. This inspired the development of a local urban farming project where clients could use their agricultural skills and experience connection with the earth in their own neighborhood. With staff support and resources from the Angelic Organics Learning Center, the center began collaborations with the Chicago Waldorf School, and clients have been planting and tending their organic garden located only two blocks away. This urban farm project also promoted the development of a rooftop apiary at the center, with honeybees as the “livestock.” Clients have the opportunity to harvest honey and tend to the bees—an occupation familiar to many— under the guidance of volunteer, Mirsad Spahovic, who was a beekeeper for twenty years in his native Bosnia. Nourishing Universal Rituals: International Cooking Group Vegetable produce from the garden and honey from the roof are used every other week by the international cooking group. At each group meeting, a client oversees preparation of a meal from his or her home country, and group members follow the client’s lead, pitching in with chopping, sautéing, and seasoning, culminating with sitting down to share and enjoy a delicious meal. Participation in familiar occupations and engagement in universal rituals have served to support rebuilding of community, evidenced by high turnout and sustained membership in these groups.

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Digniﬁed Work Vocational assessment of a survivor’s skills is another aspect of joint case management and occupational therapy services offered at the center. An Occupational History assessment is conducted when a client is referred to occupational therapy (OT). This assessment considers the interests, skills, and strengths of the client in the home country as well as adaptation to the new environment. OT services are primarily concerned with how the sequelae of torture, displacement, and acculturation affect a survivor’s ability to perform meaningful occupational roles in the domains of self-care, leisure, and work within challenging environments that systemically restrict occupational opportunities. The new environments confronted by refugees and asylum seekers often foster “occupational deprivation,” which prevents access to potential opportunities and inhibits the essential need for belonging (F. Kronenberg, N. Pollard, 2005; G. Whiteford, 2005). The most predominant environmental obstacles identiﬁed by clients in the OT assessment include (1) barriers to employment, such as long waits for work authorization, lack of readily available jobs, difﬁculty transferring existing skills, and limited access to further education; (2) isolation, including lack of social opportunities that feel safe and culturally comfortable as well as homesickness; and (3) diminished status secondary to the loss of occupational roles, for example, in the role as family provider, parent, or community leader. The occupational therapist works closely with case managers who assist with speciﬁc vocational tasks, including creating a résumé, ﬁlling out job applications, practicing for interviews, and obtaining educational equivalencies. The paucity of culturally familiar social opportunities and opportunities for enhancing skills is addressed through group activity interventions such as community outings, the international cooking group, urban farming groups, and links to appropriate community resources. These services, designed to meet needs that clients identify, demonstrate that engagement in positive experiences offers a means for clients to use their skills and capacity to create safe connections and communities. These have taught us that engagement in meaningful experiences can be transformative.

CURRENT DEMOGRAPHICS The Marjorie Kovler Center has sought to transform programming and services in response to survivors’ needs and systemic environmental changes. The demographics of countries represented have shifted dramatically over the past twenty years. The number of survivors receiving services at the Marjorie Kovler Center has also steadily increased with each year. Tables 9.1 through 9.4 indicate the current demographics of survivors receiving services at the center, referral sources, and volunteer valuations.

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Table 9.1 Participant Demographic Information for Fiscal Year 2007 Age

No.

%

Persons served: 330 Female 164 (50%) Male 166 (50%)

0–10 11–20 21–30

5 23 89

1% 7% 27%

Africa Latin America Asia

World region (nationality): 209 50 35

63% 15% 11%

Survivor status: Torture survivors 284 (86%) Family members 46 (14%)

31–40 41–50 51–60 61–70

117 61 30 7

35% 18% 9% 2%

Europe Middle East North America

15 14 5

5% 4% 2%

Source: 2007 Annual Report, Marjorie Kovler Center of Heartland Alliance.

CONCLUSION As demographics shift in response to worldwide conﬂicts, the lessons learned about providing a healing environment for survivors of torture continue. A remarkable journey has been undertaken in Chicago through the work of the Marjorie Kovler Center. This chapter shared snapshots of the journey and provided insights into the necessary social conscience and community effort that go into creating a response to a social illness such as torture. The journey is bittersweet. We are happy and saddened by our twenty-year efforts to assist survivors of torture in rebuilding their lives. It is our sincere wish to close our doors one day because our services are no longer needed—that torture is no longer practiced in the world we share. Table 9.2 Nationalities Served in Fiscal Year 2007 (total 53) Afghanistan Albania Angola Benin Bosnia-Herzegovina Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Chad Chile Colombia Congo Congo (DRC) Cote d’Ivoire Ecuador El Salvador

1 6 4 1 5 1 2 2 1 33 5 1 9 13 24 2 6 5

Eritrea Ethiopia Guatemala Guinea Haiti Honduras India Indonesia Iran Iraq Kenya Kosovo Liberia Malawi Mauritania Mexico Mongolia Nepal

19 15 27 5 4 1 1 1 2 3 4 3 7 2 3 1 1 1

Nigeria Pakistan Rwanda Senegal Sierra Leone Somalia Sri Lanka Sudan Thailand Tibet Togo Tunisia Turkey Uganda United States Vietnam Zimbabwe Total

Source: 2007 Annual Report, Marjorie Kovler Center of Heartland Alliance.

2 2 3 1 1 5 1 8 1 1 43 4 4 11 5 15 2 53

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Table 9.3 Referral Sources in Fiscal Year 2007 Source of Referrals

Oct. 2006–Sept. 2007

Mutual Aid Associations Ethnic/Religious Communities Hospitals/Clinics Lawyers/NIJC Other TOTAL

8 38 3 43 8 100

Source: Year-end Data Report, Marjorie Kovler Center of Heartland Alliance.

BIOGRAPHIES Rev. Dr. Sid Mohn is president of Heartland Alliance for Human Needs & Human Rights, a service-based human rights organization focused on investments and solutions to help the most poor and vulnerable in our society succeed. He joined the organization in 1980, and also serves as president of its three partners: Heartland Housing, Heartland Health Outreach, and Heartland Human Care Services. Prior to his tenure at Heartland Alliance, he held positions with the Chicago Urban League, the Kane/DeKalb Counties Employment and Training Consortium, International Documentation, and La Casa Center. Dr. Mohn is a graduate of Temple University, received his Master of Divinity from the School of Theology at Claremont, California, and his doctorate from McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. He is a United Church of Christ clergyperson and a member of the Order of Ecumenical Franciscans. Dr. Mohn is past chair of the board of directors of the National Immigration Forum and is a member of the board of directors of International Social Services U.S. Committee for Refugees, Chicago Commission on Human Relations, and Global Chicago. Rev. Craig Mousin has been the university ombudsperson at DePaul University since 2001. He received his BS cum laude from Johns Hopkins University, his JD with honors from the University of Illinois, and his MDiv from Chicago

Table 9.4 Volunteer Hours and Valuation in Fiscal Year 2006 Volunteers

Hours

Rate

Value

Amate and Mennonite Volunteers Counseling by trainees Clinical professionals Interpreters Case Management volunteers Total

4,800 1,904 1,588 219 810 9,231

$12 $50 $100 $40 $10

$57,600 $95,200 $158,800 $8,760 $8,100 $328,460

Source: 2007 Annual Report, Marjorie Kovler Center of Heartland Alliance.

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Theological Seminary. He joined the College of Law faculty in 1990, and served as the executive director of the Center for Church/State Studies until 2003, and codirector from 2004–07. He is an associate editor of the center’s publication, Religious Organizations in the United States: A Study of Identity, Liberty and the Law (Carolina Academic Press, 2006). He co-founded and continues to co-direct the center’s Interfaith Family Mediation Program. He has taught in DePaul’s School for New Learning, the Religious Studies Department, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and in DePaul’s Peace Minor program. He has also taught immigration law and policy as an adjunct law professor at the University of Illinois College of Law. Rev. Mousin began practicing labor law at Seyfarth, Shaw, Fairweather & Geraldson in 1978. In 1984 he founded and directed the Midwest Immigrant Rights Center, a provider of legal assistance to refugees, which has since become the National Immigrant Justice Center. He also directed legal services for Travelers & Immigrants Aid between 1986 and 1990. He helped found DePaul College of Law’s Asylum and Immigration Legal Clinic. Rev. Mousin was ordained by the United Church of Christ in 1989. He has served as an associate pastor at Wellington Avenue U.C.C. and was a founding pastor of the DePaul Ecumenical Gathering (1996–2001). Rev. Mousin is the secretary of the board of trustees of the Chicago Theological Seminary. In addition, he is member of the leadership council of the National Immigrant Justice Center and the Immigration Project of Downstate Illinois. Both provide legal services to immigrants and refugees. He previously served on the Illinois Equal Justice Project of the Chicago and Illinois State Bar associations. Edwin Silverman, PhD, received his bachelor’s degree from Purdue University and his doctorate from Northwestern University. He has been employed by the State of Illinois since 1973. From 1976 until 1997, he administered the Illinois Refugee Resettlement Program, which became part of the Illinois Department of Public Aid in 1980. In 1997 the program became part of the Illinois Department of Human Services, and he continues to administer it as the chief of the Bureau of Refugee & Immigrant Services. He has actively participated in the development of program and policy at the federal level, and contributed to the drafting of the Refugee Act. He is president emeritus and active on the executive board for SCORR, the national afﬁliation of State Coordinators of Refugee Resettlement. He has received awards from the federal government, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and various community groups for his contributions to the area of refugee resettlement. He also received the assistant secretary’s Public Service Award from DHHS and was one of ﬁve national recipients in 1995 of the American Society for Public Administration’s National Public Service Award. Thomas Hollon, PhD, received his doctorate in clinical psychology in 1955 from Catholic University and earned the Diplomate in Clinical Psychology from the American Board of Professional Psychology in 1961. Dr. Hollon served on the staff of Rockford Memorial Hospital, on the boards of the Rock River Valley Mental Health Association and the Shelter Care Ministries (serving the homeless mentally ill), and on the faculties of DePaul University and the University of

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Illinois College of Medicine. He served as president of the Illinois Psychological Association, chair of its Social Issues Section, and its representative to the council of the American Psychological Association. On a pro bono basis, Dr. Hollon served as chair of the Citizens Advisory Council of Illinois Mental Health Region 1-A and of the Winnebago County Health Planning Committee; president of the local chapter of United Cerebral Palsy; and member of the Illinois Human Rights Authority, the Suicide Prevention Council, the Health Professional Network of Amnesty International, and the Psychologists for Social Responsibility. Finally, Dr. Hollon was central to organizing the national Conference on Victims of Torture at the University of Chicago in 1987, co-sponsored by the IPA, Cook County Hospital, and Amnesty International. He then led the way the following year to the establishment of the Marjorie Kovler Center for the Treatment of Survivors of Torture under the aegis of Travelers & Immigrants Aid and IPA, and he served for the center’s ﬁrst eight years as a volunteer therapist and the chair of its Executive Clinical Committee. Susana Jiménez Schlesinger, PhD, is a clinical psychologist who earned her doctorate in counseling psychology from Loyola University in 1983. She taught at Loyola University, the Institute for Christian Ministries at the University of San Diego, Central YMCA College, and the National College of Education in Evanston, IL. She served as a consulting psychologist with the Head Start Program, Enhanced Family Childcare Homes Program of El Valor, and the Boys & Girls Clubs of Chicago, and continues her longstanding private practice. She served as chair of the Social Responsibility Section for the Illinois Psychological Association from 1994–97 and is presently chair of their Peer Assistance Committee and liaison for Ethnic/Minority Issues. She also represents the IPA on the Coalition of Illinois Counselor Organizations Steering Committee for the Prevention of Violence in Schools. She volunteered as a Spanish-speaking psychologist at the John Garﬁeld School’s Family Enrichment Program. Finally, she was a founding member of the Marjorie Kovler Center, served on its Executive Clinical Committee, and was a pro bono bilingual psychotherapist. Irene Martínez, MD, is an internist at John Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County in the Division of General Medicine and is a member of the Preventive Medicine Section. A native of Córdoba, Argentina, she graduated from medical school in 1980. Dr. Martínez was a desaparecida/political prisoner during Argentina’s “Dirty War.” She was an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience and moved to the United States after she was released from prison. In the mid1980s, Dr. Martínez became an advocate for torture survivors, recognizing their special needs from her own experiences. She was one of the founding members of the Marjorie Kovler Center of Heartland Alliance in Chicago, where she continues to contribute her expertise. She strongly encourages the practice of artistic expression to be part of the healing process and disease prevention. Dr. Martínez enjoys painting, writing, dancing, and caring for her daughter Sr. Sheila Lyne, RSM, is president and chief executive ofﬁcer of Mercy Hospital & Medical Center, Chicago’s ﬁrst hospital. Sister Sheila holds a master degree in

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psychiatric nursing from St. Xavier University and an MBA from the University of Chicago. Sr. Sheila’s association with Mercy dates back to 1958 when she was a student nurse. In 1970 Sister Sheila was appointed director of Mercy’s Diagnostic and Treatment Center. She was promoted from this position to assistant vice president and director of human resources. As vice president, Sister Sheila honed her skills and solidiﬁed her role as a leader within the organization. She was named acting president in October 1976 and president in February 1977. In 1991, she was appointed commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health. She was the ﬁrst woman to hold the position as well as the ﬁrst non-physician. Since her return to Mercy in December 2000, Sr. Sheila has focused on the development and expansion of Mercy programs and services that respond to the growing communities surrounding the hospital. Sister Sheila is a member of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, Regional Community of Chicago, and currently serves on the board of St. Xavier University. Steven Miles, MD, is professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis and is on the faculty of the university’s Center for Bioethics. He is board certiﬁed in internal medicine and geriatrics, and teaches and practices at the University of Minnesota. Previously, he was assistant professor of medicine and associate director of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago, 1986–89. He has taught in many countries and has served as medical director for the American Refugee Committee for twenty-ﬁve years, which has included service as chief medical ofﬁcer for 45,000 refugees on the Thai-Cambodian border and projects in Sudan, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzogovina, Indonesia, and on the Thai-Burmese border. He has published three books, more than twenty chapters, and 120 peer-reviewed articles on medical ethics, human rights, tropical medicine, end of life care, and geriatric health care. Antonio Martínez, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and co-founder of the Marjorie Kovler Center, serving as its director for the ﬁrst seven years. Dr. Martínez earned a PhD in clinical psychology and critical theory, at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, a masters degree in community social psychology at the University of Puerto Rico–Rio Piedras, and a BA in general studies concentrating in psychology and anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico–Rio Piedras. Presently, he works with the Ambulatory Health Services of Cook County at the Dr. Jorge Prieto Family Health Center in Chicago. Dr. Martínez is also regular trainer for the International Ofﬁce of Immigration and Naturalization Services Asylum Division at the Federal Law Enforcement Center in Glencoe, GA. He has addressed the chief justices of the Immigration and Naturalization Service at their national annual conference regarding issues of torture and credibility. Dr. Martínez has lectured about trauma and the severe consequences of abuse and torture in the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Puerto Rico, Chile, Argentina, London, and Nepal, and Colombia. He also provided expert testimony for the People’s Law Ofﬁce representing four survivors of police torture in Chicago under Commander Burge. He received several awards recognizing his work in the area of trauma induced by torture, including the Norma Jean Collins Award, the

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Chicago Community Trust Fellowship, and the UNESCO Chair for Peace. He had the honor of being a consultant to actress Glenn Close in her Toni Award performance as Paulina, a torture survivor, in the Broadway play Death and the Maiden. He is an advocate of a systemic and developmental model for the accompaniment of survivors of torture. His philosophy of treatment was published by the Universidad Pontiﬁcia Javeriana and the Center Terres des Homes, Italia, Centro de Acompañamiento y Atención Psicosocial Terres des Hommes Colombia, Bogota 2004, “Modelo de solidaridad de atención a los sobrevivientes de tortura.” Fertile Soil This life-giving soil, On which the sower plows One furrow after another Terrace upon terrace Carefully spreading seeds With the sole purpose Of creating a garden teeming with hope, Watered with her children’s tears, Making her womb a more fertile place. In this soil, The seasons of the year are lived daily. In autumn, Fallen branches gently gathered Are carried as fertilizer to the garden, And in the gentle silence of the night, Our hearts’ anguish is softened. When winter arrives, And suffering’s cold overtakes us, The warm embrace and the sower’s own suffering lift us. With spring we see The rebirth of life, A restlessness revealed, And a great desire to smell the scent Of newness, of beauty and of what has been lost. And beneath the summer’s burning sun Arises the steep slope of loneliness. Each somber and bitter step Accompanied by exile and torture But soothed by mother earth’s lifeblood. On this soil, When the tempest, the thunders, the forests’ lament Overpower the depth of your being Snatching your breath and your reason for living, Someone is ever present to remind you

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184 Of the dance of the winds over the rivers, Of the joyous and colorful song of the birds, And of the shining rainbow Revealing her brightness after the storm. This fertile soil Is indeed nurtured with love, Her sowers keeping ignited The eternal ﬂame of unconditional commitment, Defying the silence of a dark day, Knowing that with the coming of the dawn They will see the sun rise and, With the delicate touch of the dew, Will bring forth the sweet fragrance of solidarity, respect and mutual understanding. Beautiful soil, thank you. For upon entering your space The dawn springs up in us, Though perhaps for only a moment, And from your womb sprout Peace, goodness, warmth, compassion. For the fruit of your harvest is love. Thank you, sowers, For your difﬁcult and steadfast work. Graced by your dedication and affection, From this soil we taste the sweetest of all nectars. Matilde De la Sierra Chicago, IL August 25, 2007 Dedicated to Kovler Center On its twentieth anniversary Tierra Fértil

Esta tierra productiva, en donde el sembrador hace un surco y otro surco, tablón tras tablón esparciendo las semillas cuidadosamente; con el único propósito de construir una huerta llena de esperanza. Es una tierra regada con el llanto de sus hijos; llanto que hace de su vientre un lugar más fecundo. Esta tierra en donde las estaciones del año se viven a diario. En el otoño, las ramas caídas recogidas gentilmente son llevadas al huerto para que sirvan de abono,

Caring for Torture Survivors: The Marjorie Kovler Center y en el silencio de la noche el dolor de nuestros corazones se hace suave. Cuando el invierno llega, y el frío del sufrir se apodera de nosotros, el abrazo cálido y el mismo sufrir del sembrador nos levanta. Con la primavera, vemos el renacer de la vida, con una inquietud descubierta, con un gran deseo de sentir el aroma de lo nuevo, de lo bello, de lo perdido. Y bajo el candente sol del verano, se sube la cuesta de la soledad, con paso sordo y amargo, acompañado por el destierro y la tortura; pero atenuado por la sangre vital de la madre tierra. En esta tierra; cuando la tempestad, los truenos, el lamento de los bosques dominan lo más profundo de tu ser, siempre existe alguien que te recuerda de la danza de los vientos sobre los rios, del canto alegre y vívido de los pájaros, y el arco iris reluciente que deja ver su brillantez después de la tormenta. Esta tierra fértil realmente está tratada con amor. Sus sembradores mantienen encendida la llama perenne de entrega incondicional; desaﬁando el silencio de un día obscuro a sabiendas que a la espera de la madrugada se vislumbrará la salida del sol y, junto al roce delicado del rocío, traerán el perfume de la solidaridad, el respeto y la mutua comprensión. Tierra bella, gracias. Porque al entrar en tu espacio nace en nosotros, aunque sea por un instante, la aurora, porque de tu vientre germinan la paz, la bondad, la cordialidad, la compasión; porque el fruto de tu cosecha es el amor. Gracias sembradores por su trabajo arduo y continuo. Porque por su dedicación y cariño, de esta tierra se obtienen los mejores néctares. Matilde De la Sierra Chicago, IL Agosto 25, 2007

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186 Dedicado a Kovler Center Por su 20mo aniversario (Reprinted with permission.)

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Marjorie Kovler Center Founder/Executive Director: Mary Fabri Mission/Description: The Kovler Center provides comprehensive, communitybased 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 health care 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). Website: http://www.heartlandalliance.org/kovler/index.html Address: The Marjorie Kovler Center of Heartland Alliance 1331 West Albion Chicago, IL 60626 Phone: 773.751.4045 Fax: 773.381.4073 E-mail: [email protected]

REFERENCES Bogner, D., Herlihy, J., & Brewin, C. R. (2007). Impact of sexual violence on disclosure during home ofﬁce interviews. British Journal of Psychiatry, 191(2), 75–81. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Conroy, J. (2001). Unspeakable acts, ordinary people: The dynamics of torture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror, and Tsunami Relief, 2005. Public Law 109-13, 109th Congress (May 11, 2005). Retrieved October 9, 2007, from http://www.epic.org/privacy/id_cards/real_id_act.pdf. Fabri, M. (2001). Reconstructing safety: Adjustments to the therapeutic frame in the treatment of survivors of political torture. Professional Psychology: Research & Practice, 32(5), 452–457.

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Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery. New York: Basic Books. Immigration and Naturalization Service. (1984). Statistical yearbook (Table 3.3, p. 77). Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce. Kronenberg, F., Pollard, N. (2005). Overcoming occupational apartheid: A preliminary exploration of the political nature of occupational therapy. In F. Kronenberg, S. Algado, N. Pollard (Eds.). Occupational therapy without borders: Learning from the spirit of survivors (pp. 58–86). New York: Elsevier. Lifton, R. J. (2004). Doctors and torture. New England Journal of Medicine, 351(5), 415–416. McAndrews, R. K. (2002). Asylum Law Reform. New England Journal of International & Comparative Law, 8:1, pp. 103–124. Martin-Baró, I. (1994). Writings for a liberation psychology (A. Aron, S. Corne, eds.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. National Immigrant Justice Center (n.d.). National immigrant justice center: Home. Retrieved October 7, 2007, from http://www.immigrantjustice.org/. Ofﬁce of the United High Commissioner for Human Rights (December 10, 1984). United Nations Convention against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Retrieved October 7, 2007, from http://www.ohchr.org/english/law/cat.htm. Reagan, R. (May 9, 1984). Televised speech, Retrieved October 1, 2007, from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reagan/timeline/index_4.html. Scarry, E. (1985). The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world. New York: Oxford University Press. Timmerman, J. (1981). Prisoner without a name, cell without a number. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Whiteford, G. (2005). Understanding the occupational deprivation of refugees: A case study from Kosovo. Canadian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 72(2), 78–88. Wolf, E. R. (1999). Envisioning power: Ideologies of dominance and crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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International Center on Responses to Catastrophes Stevan Weine

For the past ﬁfteen years, I have conducted a program of services research concerning understanding and helping with the psychosocial needs of families impacted by the global catastrophes of war and forced migration. Since 2002, I have also led efforts at the University of Illinois–Chicago’s International Center on Responses to Catastrophes, to build an academic context for interdisciplinary approaches to services research concerning contemporary global catastrophes. This chapter describes this research and reﬂects on key aspects of the work including family resilience, community collaboration, services, cultural theory, and ethnography.

NEED FOR BROADER PERSPECTIVES Diffuse are the workings of violence and power. —W. G. Sebald (2003)

When I talk with those who have survived war and have become refugees or forced migrants, they tell me about the crushing problems they have encountered, which may include combat, siege, imprisonment, murders, atrocities, poverty, loss of their homes and communities, separation from family, loss of opportunities, health problems, and social and cultural isolation. But often enough, they also express hopes for the future, which are often focused on the young. We all wish we could provide them with what they need to improve their lives, be it better housing, jobs, schools, or neighborhoods, or just help them make it through a lonesome day. One thing that can be done to help is research. Research is a way of rigorously documenting these people’s experiences and systematically trying to understand how to offer effective help, perhaps through psychosocial interventions. We do 189

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this work because they deserve it, and because we believe the knowledge gained through research can make a difference in the helping efforts that either are, or could be, offered. Research with families impacted by war and forced migration is especially needed given the complexity of their situations, the intractability of some of the difﬁculties that they face, and the varied ways they manage to survive. For the past ﬁfteen years, I have been committed to helping families impacted by war and forced migration both through providing community-based services and through conducting investigations that better clarify how psychosocial interventions might be useful in addressing some of the difﬁculties that these families and we prioritize. I decided to do both service provision and research having encountered too many situations where the intent to do good through services has not resulted in demonstrable beneﬁt to those in need. I am also acutely aware that when academics conduct investigations with no apparent links to efforts to help, this may also be problematic. At best, the efforts at service provision and services research operate synergistically: helping and learning can go hand in hand. What bothers me is that even if I can do this research, it by no means guarantees that policymakers and programs in governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) will pay attention. So one chooses to do investigations that seem to have a reasonable chance of convincing decision makers to help affected families and communities. Sometimes I want to respond by studying every catastrophe that crosses my path; however, it would be foolish to try to do that. Thus, I have worked at being more disciplined, approaching catastrophes by conducting what may be called a program of services research. In conducting services research with families impacted by war and forced migration, one key challenge has been to set a broad interdisciplinary framework for this work that adequately addresses people coming from different geographical regions and cultures, out of different war and forced-migration experiences, and thus facing different mental and physical health problems, with different needs, strengths, and meanings. After having variously used the terms war, torture, refugee, genocide, migrant, poverty, and pandemic to deﬁne each situation, we have often used the term “catastrophes” as a reasonable framing device for the work that we have been doing. Catastrophes refer to wide-scale events, including human-made conﬂicts, pandemics, and natural disasters, which result in massive destruction, losses, and distress. Our work has focused primarily on human-made events, often related to war. Furthermore, since many of these events take place in global environments that involve cross-border and cross-cultural processes, we have sometimes used the term “global catastrophes.” Global catastrophes present a complex array of experiences and outcomes that emanate from events of mass violence, deprivation, displacement, and disease that are associated with long-term social instability. Global catastrophes exact grave tolls on individuals, families, communities, and societies. The variety of responses to such tragic events that exist in assortments of services, policies, and practices are too often fragmented, short term, and not supportive of local communities and cultures.

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I came to the issue of global catastrophes from the trauma mental health ﬁeld. It was through my experience leading the efforts to write International Trauma Training Guidelines for the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies in the late 1990s that I saw just how wed the trauma mental health ﬁeld has been to individual, psychopathological, and cognitive models. Through the consensus guidelines we developed (Weine et al., 2002), we hoped to change the attitudes and behaviors of professional experts who conduct international trauma trainings by encouraging them to adapt approaches that were more contextually broad. Our success was at best mixed, I believe, in part because the trauma mental health ﬁeld has had so few constructs and methods to work at levels other than the individual, the psychopathological, and the cognitive. This impacted my research career by making me further commit to a services research approach, which emphasized other levels of focus for services and research, especially family, community, culture, and resilience. To learn more about these areas, I had to go outside the refugee trauma literature to learn from other literatures such as those of prevention, public health, community psychology, and family therapy. I have seen evidence, not only from the trauma mental health ﬁeld, that investigations of catastrophes are too often approached within one sector, or from the perspective of a single discipline. Additionally, there is little empirical knowledge that attempts to understand the processes of vulnerability and resilience at the levels of families, communities, cultures, systems, and societies. Research into these experiences requires innovative perspectives that regard catastrophes as part of broader public health, social, cultural, and political crises. For governments and NGOs to develop and implement more effective helping efforts, I believe these dimensions must be better comprehended. I recognize that the term catastrophe is not without its disadvantages. In the era of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, when catastrophes appear regularly on the mass media, the term catastrophe has come to be associated with events that are deeply concentrated in time and require emergency and short-term responses. When I use catastrophes, I do not mean to imply any such restrictions in time or scope. Indeed, many catastrophes are prolonged, as are their ongoing and evolving consequences for individuals, families, communities, and societies, requiring long-term responses. Although there still exists some unease around the use of this term, we have found that it has been productive in building an interdisciplinary space in academic medicine within which it was possible to build knowledge that informs multisectoral helping efforts for families impacted by war and forced migration.

A PROGRAM OF RESEARCH For the past ﬁfteen years, I have led a program of services research designed to help families and communities that have endured several different types of global catastrophes. This program began at the time of ethnic cleansing in BosniaHerzegovina in 1992, with a focus on the issue of mental health services for

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Bosnian refugees in the United States, and extended into mental health services issues in post-conﬂict countries of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Beginning in 2001, this program of research expanded to focus on HIV/AIDS in predominately Muslim postwar societies (Kosovo and Tajikistan) because we found this was a priority public health issue that was not being comprehensively addressed or investigated. It has also expanded to focus on teenage refugees and their families from African countries, including Liberia and Burundi, now in the United States. To date, this work has been supported by multiple funders, including Yale University, the University of Illinois–Chicago (UIC), the State of Illinois Department of Human Services, the Ministry of Health of Kosovo, the U.S. Civilian Research & Development Foundation, several private foundations, and four grants from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). The overall intent of this program of research has been to (1) conduct studies that scientiﬁcally elucidate the basis for helping families impacted by war and forced migration through psychosocial interventions; (2) conduct investigations informed by social sciences and cultural theory of the social and cultural processes shaping families’ services experiences; (3) advocate for interdisciplinary research efforts that bridge intervention and cultural realms so as to more adequately address the real-world problems of families impacted by war and forced migration; and (4) assist service organizations in developing programs and policies that are better attuned to the psychosocial needs of families impacted by war and forced migration.

INTERNATIONAL CENTER ON RESPONSES TO CATASTROPHES Services research concerning families impacted by war and forced migration cannot occur without a proper research environment that provides research infrastructure, collaborators, consultation, training, supervision, mentoring, and resources. This type of research environment has been built through establishing a university-based center. The International Center on Responses to Catastrophes (ICORC) at UIC was established in 2002 in order to advance scholarship and services in this area of contemporary importance for the city of Chicago and the world. ICORC is a cross-campus unit organized through the Department of Psychiatry and the Ofﬁce of the Vice Chancellor of Research. Its primary mission is to promote interdisciplinary research and scholarship that contributes to improved helping efforts for those affected by catastrophes. The center is highly interdisciplinary in its approach, with university faculty from collaborating departments and colleges representing mental health and health services, humanities, and social sciences. Vital to the center’s work is building domestic and global collaborations with academic, advocacy, and services organizations. ICORC activities have three core realms of focus: •

Documentary: to document the human experiencing of global catastrophes through literary and multi-media approaches

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Ethnographic: to analyze the cultural and social dimensions of global catastrophes through ethnographic inquiries Intervention: to conduct innovative, family-focused, and community-based services research on the mental health consequences of global catastrophes In fulﬁlling its mission, ICORC

• • •

•

Conducts interdisciplinary, collaborative and original research on responses to global catastrophes Serves as a venue for regular scholarly dialogue on topics central to the documentation and improvement of responses to global catastrophes Promotes partnership and collaboration within UIC, as well as with other organizations and institutions conducting research and interventions in this area Prepares the next generation of scholars, scientists, documentarians, and policy makers through interdisciplinary education and training

In a subsequent section, I will provide summary descriptions of some of the projects that ICORC has undertaken thus far in fulﬁllment of this mission. Here, I want to highlight that although I am the author of this text, none of this work that constitutes the program of services research was or could be done alone. It has required many kinds of partnerships with interdisciplinary academics (from other health professions, the humanities, and social sciences), with community leaders, parent advocates, students, and trainees. Many, but not all, of their names are included as co-authors in the publications listed in the references. We think of ICORC as a place where conversations and collaborations that usually do not occur can take place. I have found it to be a helpful, although not uncomplicated, structure within which to work. For example, there is the ongoing concern of how to provide interdisciplinary training and mentoring to beginning investigators who come from different backgrounds and disciplines. Lest I give the impression that institutional arrangements are the only necessary elements to building a program of services research, allow me to mention a few words about how I became a services researcher. In 2006, when I was asked to speak at a roundtable of community psychologists, the organizer, Professor Ed Trickett of the UIC Department of Psychology, asked me to explain how I became a services researcher focused on these types of global catastrophes. The story that I told emphasized the role of mentoring. As much as I have imagined myself to be treading new paths, I have always known that as a researcher, I depended greatly upon others to help me reach destinations. Even the very things that we call “paths” and “destinations” need to be invented before they can be realized. You need to know that there is a place for you. You have to be able to see that place and the way that will get you there. You have to hope that you can make it. Just seeing or hoping is not enough. You need to actually do things to get there: talk a different talk or walk a different walk. I know that I could not have done any of these

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things on my own. Over the past twenty-ﬁve years, I have had many mentors. I found them in when I was in college, at medical school, completing a psychiatry residency, and serving as a faculty member. These mentors have included poet Allen Ginsberg, psychologist Daniel Levinson, psychiatrist Ivan Pavkovic, family scientist Suzanne Feetham, medical anthropologist Norma Ware, and ethnographer and rhetorician Ralph Cintron. Without my multiple and distinct mentors, I would never have been in a position to conduct a program of services research. RESEARCH PROJECTS A program of research is a series of research projects, each building on the ones before and aiming toward a focused understanding of several priority concerns. What follows are descriptions of some of those projects, arranged geographically and chronologically, with the key themes that have organized this work. Although I will not mention all of the names of my collaborators in this overview, it is important to again note that none of these projects were conducted alone. All required scientiﬁc and community collaborations in order to succeed. Bosnian and Kosovar Refugees in the United States Treatment and Services Studies I came to services research on refugee and migrant families via posttraumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) research (Weine et al., 1995(a); Weine et al 1995(b)), treatment research, and ethnographic and cultural studies. The treatment studies provided preliminary evidence that both Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (Smajkic et al., 2001) and testimony psychotherapy may lead to improvements in PTSD and depressive symptoms, and to improvements in functioning, among refugee adults (Weine et al., 1998). However, what was just as notable was how many refugees chose not to participate in treatment at all or, having received effective treatments, decided to drop out. This fact led us to conduct several studies of refugee mental health services, including a study of access (Weine et al., 2000) and an investigation of the roles of providers’ attitudes and approaches in the delivery of effective mental health services for refugees (Weine et al., 2001). This last effort revealed that among service providers, there was substantial misinformation and stigma concerning mental health symptoms of refugees and treatment for those symptoms. It also revealed that providers were not doing enough to educate individual clients, family members, or community members about the effects of trauma on individual and family mental health. We engaged in extensive ethnographic- and humanities-based studies of Bosnian survivors and their narratives. An ethnographic study of a Bosnian refugee family provided a close, detailed portrayal and analysis of how one refugee family used its own strengths and resources to heal and adjust (Weine et al., 1997). I also pursued book-length studies that focused on the narrative dimensions of survivors and refugees. My ﬁrst book investigated the Bosnian cultural value of

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merhamet, a self and group concept associated with multiethnic co-existence (Weine, 1999). A second book examined cases and theory concerning the use of survivors’ testimonies across several historical contexts and service sectors, drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the dialogic narrative (Weine, 2006). A third book, Our City of Refuge: Teens, War, and Freedom, tells the story of teenage refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina in the city of Chicago (Weine, under review). Intervention Research with Migrants and Refugees Insights derived from the aforementioned studies gave us an empirical basis to try to help refugees through focusing on helping their families. This led to developing a family intervention with narrative methods that aimed to improve access to mental health services and other sources of support. The Prevention and Access Intervention for Families (PAIF) was conducted with Bosnian refugee families in Chicago from 1998–2003 by a collaborative, multidisciplinary services research team at UIC (Weine, 1998). This NIMH-funded study investigated a Coffee and Families Education and Support Group (CAFES), which was a time-limited, multiple-family education and support group for Bosnian families. This condition was compared with a control group that received no such intervention. A group of survivors with PTSD and their families were randomly assigned to receive either the intervention or the control condition. Longitudinal assessments occurred every six months for eighteen months to document effects over time postintervention. Results showed that the CAFES multiple-family group was effective (1) in engagement (73%) and retention (Weine et al., 2005(b)); (2) as an access intervention in the overall sample (longitudinal increases in the number of mental health visits [p < .005]; both depression [p < .003] and family communication [p < .0159] enhanced the group’s access effect) (Weine et al., in press (b)); and (3) as a preventive intervention (with increased social support in subsamples of males, urban families, and the more highly traumatized) (Weine et al., 2004). Youth CAFES was an adaptation of CAFES to more speciﬁcally focus on the needs of teen refugees in Chicago that has been qualitatively studied (Weine et al., 2006). Tea and Families Education and Support (TAFES) was an NIMH-funded adaptation of the CAFES intervention for newly arrived Kosovar refugees in Chicago. The results showed increases in social support and psychiatric service use among participating families (Weine et al., 2003). In sum, these CAFES studies demonstrated that multiple-family groups with families postwar may be effective in increasing networking, knowledge, and communication, and to a lesser extent support. It showed that further investigation of multiple-family groups postwar is warranted, especially research focused on youth. Joining Multiple-Family Groups To improve the engagement strategies of preventive interventions for refugee families, this NIMH-funded study used mixed methods to investigate family

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factors and processes involved in engaging Bosnian refugees in multiple-family support and education groups (Weine, 2001). Refugee families that joined multiple-family groups were distinguished from families that did not in terms of differences in quantitative factors. Families that engaged had previously experienced statistically signiﬁcant more transitions, more traumas, and more difﬁculties in adjustment. Family processes that may be related to multivariate analysis of these quantitative factors in relation to engagement and retention were speciﬁed through qualitative investigation (Weine et al., 2005(b)). The ﬁndings indicated that engagement may be related not only to factual characteristics of families, but also to family members’ perceptions about strategies for responding to adversities. Families that engaged had concerns about traumatic memories that persisted despite avoidant behaviors. However, what they perceived as more of a problem were concerns regarding maintaining the family, supporting their children, and rebuilding their social life. This study underlined the importance of a focus upon engagement in conducting multiple-family groups with families that have experienced adversities related to political violence. Engagement strategies for multiple-family groups should correspond with the underlying family factors and processes by which refugee families manage transitions, traumas, and adjustment difﬁculties.

Kosovo Kosovar Family Professional Education Collaborative In May 2000, the Kosovar Professional Education Collaborative (KFPEC) was founded by Dr. Ferid Agani of the University of Prishtina, Dr. John Rolland of the University of Chicago, and myself (Rolland & Weine, 2000). The KFPEC aimed to support and enhance the family work of Kosovar mental health professionals and to design and implement family-oriented mental health services in Kosovo. The KFPEC chose to build family services centered on a psychoeducational, multiplefamily group program for severe mental illness. The KFPEC’s work was at the core of the mental health policy of the Kosovar Ministry of Health and its seven regionally based community mental health centers. The objective of one study was to describe the effects of a psychoeducational, multiple-family group program for families of people with severe mental illness in postwar Kosovo (Weine et al., 2005(c)). The subjects were thirty families of people with severe mental illnesses living in two cities in Kosovo. All subjects participated in multiple-family groups and received home visits. The program documented medication compliance, number of psychiatric hospitalizations, family mental health services use, and several other characteristics for the year prior to the groups and the ﬁrst year of the groups. The families attended an average of 5.5 (out of 7) meetings, and 93 percent of these families attended 4 or more meetings. Comparing the year of the group intervention with the year prior to the intervention, there were multiple signiﬁcant changes, including decreased hospitalization (p < .0001); increased

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medication compliance (p < .0001); increased use of combined oral and depot medications (p < .0003); increased family members’ use of mental health services (p < .0143). We also conducted ethnographic interviewing and observations with Kosovar and international providers and policymakers (Cintron & Weine, 2004; Weine, Agani, & Cintron, 2003; Weine et al., 2003) and with Kosovar adolescents, family members, and community members regarding HIV/AIDS (Weine et al., 2004). The KFPEC program also provided training for mental health professionals, led to policy change in the Ministry of Health, and resulted in successful dissemination of the multiple-family group program to ﬁve other community mental health centers. In addition, KFPEC has a many-year track record in providing contextually sensitive and culturally competent expert training and consultation on building family resilience–based mental health services in Kosovo. Kosovar Attitudes on Drugs and HIV/AIDS (KADAH) To specify the sociocultural issues impacting HIV prevention, our team conducted a multi-sited ethnography of illegal drugs and HIV/AIDS in Kosovo that included participant-observation initiatives in schools, community and service sites, and households, and in-depth interviews with Kosovar adolescents and families (Weine et al., 2004). This study speciﬁed the opportunities and obstacles for addressing HIV risk behavior associated with families’ “practical knowledge” (Scott, 1998). Several forms of families’ practical knowledge among parents and youth were identiﬁed, labeled, and deﬁned through analysis of ﬁeld notes and interview transcripts. For example, for Kosovar youth and parents, HIV/AIDS was “not a big problem” compared with the political, economic, social, and cultural crises. Kosovar youth saw HIV/AIDS risks from the vantage point of the “new reality” and its problems of “boredom” and the “cooler” lifestyle. Kosovar parents regarded HIV/AIDS as a “contemporary disease” that “assaults Kosovar tradition.” They feared “losing the youth.” Other selected sociocultural variables and their impact on key intervention realms were speciﬁed. For example, in showing how HIV is being storied by youth and families, it raised the question of how an intervention script should frame HIV/AIDS as a moral discourse. This study identiﬁed multiple key sociocultural variables that impacted youth and family behaviors as well as HIV prevention. KADAH also established a functioning interdisciplinary research team that demonstrated the feasibility of conducting ethnographic research concerning HIV/AIDS in Kosovo. Preliminary Adaptation of KFARY We developed an intervention, called Kosovar Families Addressing Risks in Youth (KFARY), which is an eight-session, multiple-family group that improves family support and diminishes youth prerisk and risk behaviors for thirteen to sixteen year olds at elevated risk. Seven sessions of multiple-family group interventions, a ﬁrst version of the KFARY intervention manual, was collaboratively

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written by the KFARY Kosovar and American investigators by incorporating elements of CAFES, CHAMP (McKay et al., 2000), and Be Proud! Be Responsible! (Jemmott, Jemmott, & Fong, 1998). Then the KFARY manual was “prepiloted” in Kosovo using ethnographic methods designed to analyze evidence regarding the intervention’s feasibility and acceptability in the Kosovar context. Speciﬁcally, we conducted a session by session run-through over ﬁve days with a group of Kosovar families that included fourteen-to-sixteen-year-old children. For each session, the KFARY ethnographic ﬁeldworker took notes of group sessions, as well as of the one-hour daily family feedback sessions and one-hour debrieﬁngs of the KFARY facilitators. This process generated ﬁeld notes that were then analyzed to yield select session-by-session ﬁndings. Several overall conclusions were that (1) families enthusiastically endorsed the KFARY groups as demonstrated in their full attendance and in their statements (e.g., “I didn’t imagine that I’d work with my son”); (2) the group will likely be more effective if it targets a subgroup of adolescents at elevated risk, such as those with school problems; (3) engagement and retention will increase for girls and women if babysitting is provided so that they do not have to stay home with younger kids; and (4) some key terms and scripts need to be adapted so as to have appropriate meanings for Kosovars, such as “self-respect,” “shame,” and “family strengths.” On the basis of this evidence, a second version of the KFARY manual was collaboratively written. In sum, prepilot evidence suggests that KFARY is feasible and acceptable to Kosovar youth and families. We are presently seeking funding for a wider implementation and evaluation of the KFARY HIV/AIDS preventive intervention.

Tajikistan Formation of Collaboration between American and Tajik Researchers In 2004 I met Dr. Mahbat Bahromov, a physician and public health ofﬁcial from Tajikistan, who was at the time completing a master’s degree in international health policy from Brandeis University. We traveled to Tajikistan and secured research permission from government authorities, identiﬁed a team of Tajik investigators, conducted site visits, and expanded the collaborative dialogue. Dr. Bahromov was awarded a Muskie Fellowship that allowed him to spend three months with the UIC research team to receive further training in qualitative data analysis and HIV/AIDS prevention research. He then returned to Tajikistan where he became employed in the Tajikistan HIV/AIDS Center as the HIV/AIDS coordinator of the National Coordinating Committee to Fight and Prevent HIV/AIDS, TB, and Malaria in Tajikistan. Dr. Bahromov and I formed a collaboration between ICORC/UIC and the Tajikistan HIV/AIDS Center to focus on the issue of Tajik migrants and HIV/AIDS. Between 2005 and the present, I visited Tajikistan and Moscow multiple times. Several collaborative pilot studies were conducted, including the following two pilot studies.

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Pilot Ethnographic Study of Married Male Migrants This pilot study aimed to preliminarily characterize married male migrants’ HIV/AIDS risk and protective knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors, as well as key contextual factors that would likely impede or facilitate a preventive intervention (Weine et al., in press (a)). This was a collaborative, multi-sited ethnography in Moscow that included minimally structured interviews with sixteen subjects and focus groups with a total of fourteen subjects. All invited subjects agreed to participate. The results suggested that many Tajik male migrant workers in Moscow were having unprotected sex with commercial sex workers. Although some of the migrants had basic knowledge about HIV, the migrants’ ability to protect themselves from acquiring HIV is compromised by harsh living and working conditions as a consequence of being unprotected by law in Russia. The migrant workers’ experience of being unprotected appears to diminish their self-efﬁcacy in ways that would likely also impede efforts at HIV prevention. For instance, it appears to interfere with their assessment of HIV risk. Tajik male migrant workers in Moscow also have important sources of religious, community, and family support that may facilitate targeted HIV prevention interventions. One example is the value of being the provider and protector of the family. To respond to HIV/AIDS risks amongst Tajik male migrant workers in Moscow, preventive interventions are needed that take into account their harsh living and working conditions and that mobilize existing sources of religious, community, and family support. Further study is needed to more comprehensively characterize HIV/AIDS risk and protective knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors, as well as key contextual factors that would likely impede or facilitate a preventive intervention. These results call for further systematic study of the relationships between masculine norms and HIV risk and preventive behavior. The issues of polygamy, socioeconomic independence, and risk awareness should also be points of focus. Ethnography, survey research, and intervention development is presently being conducted through the support of the U.S. Civilian Research & Development Foundation. For example, we are collaboratively developing and piloting an intervention for men to be conducted on the four-day train ride from Dushanbe to Moscow.

Pilot Ethnographic Study of Wives of Migrants This study aimed to examine the experiences of the wives of migrant workers in Moscow and to characterize their HIV/AIDS risk and protective knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors (Weine et al., 2005a). This was a collaborative ethnography in Dushanbe that included minimally structured interviews with twenty wives of migrant workers currently working in Moscow. No person refused to be interviewed. The results documented the wives’ concerns over their husbands’ safety and health in Moscow, and the many difﬁculties of wives living without husbands in Tajikistan. Wives give tacit acceptance to their husbands’ sexual

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inﬁdelity in Moscow. In a male-dominated society, gender norms limit wives’ abilities to protect themselves or their husbands. The wives had limited awareness of HIV as well as limited ability to speak about sexual activity, HIV/AIDS, and condoms, or to request HIV testing. Wives do not use condoms with their husbands and have no choice but to depend upon the husband’s role as protector. Wives turn to their in-laws or to their “circle of friends” for support, but seldom do these relationships focus on HIV/AIDS. To respond to HIV/AIDS risks among the wives of Tajik male migrant workers in Moscow, preventive interventions should consider enhancing knowledge among wives and seeking feasible ways to empower wives to talk with their husbands about HIV/AIDS risks and protection. We are presently collaboratively developing and piloting a preventive intervention with women from the circles of friends to be conducted through the community-based poly-clinics. Refugee Youth in the United States HOMES for Refugee Youth To address the concerns of refugee adolescents who come from other countries to Chicago, ICORC started Houses of Memories and Expectations (HOMES). In the summer of 2004 and 2005, HOMES recruited ﬁfteen Chicago high school students who were refugees from Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, India, Nigeria, and Congo. Visiting artists introduced the teens to writing and photography, and guided them in exploring themes of home, family, war, migration, identity, and the future. The teens explored Uptown neighborhoods, wrote stories, and took photographs. Nerina Muzurovic (a former adolescent refugee) and I assisted them with applying to college and helped them practice writing college essays. The teens built “houses of memories and expectations” that had a gallery exhibition and together compiled a “visual ethnography” of refuge that was published (Weine, 2004). The HOMES experience showed that creative arts offer potentially useful modalities for engaging and helping teen refugees. HOMES demonstrated that many of the central concerns of Bosnian refugee adolescents were also shared by other refugee adolescents, including trauma-related suffering, access to services, educational challenges, and family support. However, HOMES also showed that adolescents and their families from non-Western cultures have markedly different expectations regarding services and adolescence itself. HOMES demonstrated that it was possible to engage youth and families from new refugee communities and to form a productive group of adolescents from multiple cultural groups. A Services Approach to Preventive Mental Health for Adolescent Refugees This three-year ethnographic study, presently being conducted, in collaboration with Dr. Norma Ware of Harvard University, aims to develop contextual

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knowledge on (a) family and ecological resources that protect against mental health problems for at-risk refugee adolescents and (b) the service sectors working with this population (Weine & Ware, 2007). This knowledge will serve two purposes, one substantive and the other, methodological. Substantively, study results will inform the subsequent development of a preventive intervention for two African refugee groups. Methodologically, it will shed light on the nature and scope of ethnographic study needed for intervention development with new refugee populations. This study is guided by family eco-developmental theory; theories of resilience, trauma, and migration; and a services approach. The speciﬁc aims are to (1) examine, over time, the experiences of at-risk Liberian and Burundian refugee adolescents so as to characterize the family and ecological protective resources that may be enhanced by preventive services; (2) examine the service sectors working with these groups to reveal how service structure, processes of care, and practitioner knowledge and perceptions promise to facilitate or impede preventive interventions; and (3) conduct a meta-analysis of the study data and methods to clarify the type and extent of ethnographic study needed for intervention development with new refugees. This study collects data on refugee youth and families in Illinois and Massachusetts. Thus far, we have conducted observations and begun interviews with adolescents and families. The results of this ethnography will be documented as papers to elaborate new models for preventive interventions with newly arrived refugee teenagers as well as one or more actual interventions that can be collaboratively piloted and evaluated in the communities where the refugees live. Key Themes of Our Approach to Services Research Several key themes deﬁne our approach to researching with families impacted by war and forced migration related to global catastrophes. These include family resilience, community collaboration, services, cultural theory, and ethnographic methods. Family Resilience The family is arguably the most important life context for survivors of humanmade global catastrophes given that most have suffered severe losses to their connections to community and society. The results of our studies have detailed the struggles of families where multiple traumas and losses interacted with parental distress, social and economic difﬁculties, and cultural transition. Along with the stories of struggle, evidence of strength and resilience also emerged. The analytic ﬁndings from several studies have demonstrated a number of family resources that appeared to help shield youth, for example, from mental health and behavioral problems. These included (1) family communication about difﬁcult issues including trauma and mental health concerns, (2) parental monitoring and supervision of youth, (3) family emphasis on education, (4) parental school

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involvement, (5) conversion of the cultural capital of youth, and (6) parent advocacy for youth. Much of our family intervention work is based upon family strength and resilience approaches (Walsh, 1998). For example, CAFES tried to enhance existing family strengths such as family togetherness. Because families do not function in isolation, our conceptualization of families also encompasses ecological protective resources such are those involving the school and community. Thus, we use family eco-developmental theory, which envisions family members in the context of a family system that interacts with larger social systems (Szapocznik & Coatsworth, 1999). Our focus on the resources that exist in the family also has led to a focus on preventive interventions that may enhance these resources and reduce negative outcomes. One constant issue of concern is that the family is deﬁned very differently in varying sociocultural contexts, which means that family-focused interventions must always take into account these differences and not impose a deﬁnition of the family that does not ﬁt. Community Collaboration Our research is informed by a community-based, participatory research approach where community members, persons affected by the conditions under study, and other key community stakeholders are partners in each phase of the work from conception to dissemination of results. Key community-based, participatory research (CBPR) principles that we follow include (1) building on cultural and community strengths (e.g., family values); (2) co-learning among all community and research partners; (3) shared decision making; (4) commitment to application of ﬁndings with goal of improving health by taking action, including social change; and (5) mutual ownership of the research process and products (Israel, Schulz, Parker, & Becker, 1998; Schulz, Krieger, & Galea, 2002). We believe that a CBPR approach is necessary to address the speciﬁc mental and physical health challenges in refugee, migrant, and traumatized communities. Most important is giving families, youth, schools, and community leaders a real say in the development and implementation of interventions. Also essential is fostering collaborations with community, health, mental health, educational, and religious institutions. Thus, a CBPR approach should (1) make the voices of families impacted by war and forced migration heard and relevant to services and science; (2) increase the conﬁdence and competence of community-based providers, educators, and leaders; and (3) build a learning system that keeps knowledge ﬂowing and communication open between these communities, organizations, and researchers. Services Our research approach also prioritizes service sectors, which refer to an array of different organizations and groups, both community and clinical, whose work aims to address the needs facing families impacted by war and forced migration.

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We are interested in the different types of interventions that services provide for families impacted by war and forced migration, including both clinical and preventative interventions. We continually ask ourselves the core question that underlies services research: what works for whom, under what conditions, and toward what ends? (Hohmann & Shear, 2002). Because refugees, forced migrants, and other traumatized persons often do not have access to or may not seek traditional mental health services, we are especially interested in preventive and innovative intervention approaches. Our approach further focuses on showing how service structures, processes of care, and practitioner knowledge and perceptions can facilitate or impede effective interventions for families impacted by war and forced migration. We believe that it is essential to build empirical knowledge in this area if we are to be able to deliver effective psychosocial interventions to families impacted by war and forced migration in real-world settings. Cultural Theory Our approach incorporates cultural theory that offers a more contextual and nuanced view of the cultural changes relating to trauma and migration than current psychological formulations may do. For example, we have used the concept of “cultural capital,” derived by Bourdieu (1977, 1998), to analyze the social integration of immigrant youth in French schools. Cultural capital is deﬁned as the meanings, knowledge, customs, achievements, and outlooks that are related to a person’s social positions. This has led to an interest in the processes of converting cultural capital that can be observed and documented in refugee and migrants, especially in youth. It is common for social science researchers to use cultural theory to critique institutions and practices. What is unique about our program of research is that we seek to integrate this commitment to cultural theory–based inquires with a commitment to making better interventions. Thus, the objective is to promote deeper cultural understanding and also to promote better interventions. We do not believe that these are incompatible goals. Our experience has demonstrated that service providers and organizations, although sometimes reluctant to subject their work to rigorous cultural critique, have in several instances identiﬁed the beneﬁts of having learned to adapt their methods to better ﬁt with the particular cultural situations of families impacted by war and forced migration. Ethnographic Methods Our research uses ethnographic methods because they offer an appropriate way to address the challenges facing research being conducted in socially and culturally diverse settings. For example, one challenge is the lack of basic knowledge of what cultural norms matter for youth in predominately Muslim societies and how those norms impact HIV prevention. A second challenge is the lack of scientiﬁc knowledge about the process of adapting interventions. Our chances of

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meeting these challenges are increased by choosing ethnographic methods (Weine & Ware, 2007). Certain core principles guide most ethnographic research, especially (1) an iterative process, in which data are analyzed as they accumulate, and the resulting insights and questions subsequently are investigated as part of a single data collection effort; (2) collection of data over an extended period of time, often years; (3) immersion in the ﬁeld setting and collection of data through observations; (4) the use of informants, that is, people living in the setting who teach researchers about the phenomenon under study; and (5) a purposeful sampling strategy that involves selecting as informants those from whom we are likely to be able to learn most about the phenomenon under study. Ethnographic methods offer ways of analyzing the impact of culture and context upon experience, and the processes of change (Weine, Ware, & Lezic, 2004). Ethnographic methods have been productively used to complement quantitative research methods and in intervention development and evaluation (Hohmann & Shear, 2002).

TRAINING TOMORROW’S RESEARCHERS In June 2006, I sat in Buenos Aires for coffee with Dr. Derrick Silove, a leading researcher in refugee mental health from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia (Silove, 1999). Derrick told me he fears that many of today’s established researcher programs in refugee mental health may not survive beyond their leaders, and that their leaders’ expertise may not be adequately transferred to the next generation. I told Derrick that this critique could certainly apply to me, and that I was especially concerned about how to train the next generation of interdisciplinary researchers focused on psychosocial interventions with refugees and other traumatized populations. Although over the past ﬁfteen years I have mentored many beginning investigators who have been involved in writing papers, getting grants, traveling abroad, and providing services, I know I could be doing more. My own experience receiving mentoring tells me that to conduct high-quality research on traumatized populations requires more than a small dose of mentoring and research experience. It requires a continuous and concerted effort of mentoring, supervision, and research opportunities with capable interdisciplinary mentors. A few U.S. academic centers have federally supported programs that offer some research training in topics that include a focus on refugees. These include the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma, University of Chicago Program in Culture and Mental Health Behavior, and the Tulane-Xavier Minority Training in International Health. However, there are not many U.S. investigators conducting high-quality clinical or preventive research concerning families impacted by war and forced migration, and that includes few who are in position to provide specialized mentorship to beginning clinical investigators. Most mental health professionals and health professionals who are working with refugees do so as practitioners. They may have a wealth of information and practical experience, but they have few opportunities for obtaining high-quality

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research training and mentoring by more advanced researchers. Few beginning clinical investigators have opportunities to learn and conduct research with families impacted by war and forced migration. Yet many students, trainees, and junior faculty are highly interested in conducting research that helps develop evidence-based interventions for the large numbers worldwide who have been impacted by human-made and natural catastrophes. We have attempted to respond to these needs through ICORC, where we have created opportunities for beginning investigators to conduct research on families impacted by war and forced migration. However, I believe Derrick Silove’s concerns are correct, and that there is more those of us in the ﬁeld could do to make possible the kind of mentoring that beginning investigators need in order to ensure their continuing ability to build research knowledge and services on behalf of families impacted by war, forced migration, and other global catastrophes.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: International Center for Responses to Catastrophes Founder and Executive Director: Stevan Weine, MD Mission/Description: The primary mission of the International Center for Responses to Catastrophes (ICORC) is to promote multidisciplinary research and scholarship that contributes to improved helping efforts for those affected by catastrophes. The center, at University of Illinois–Chicago (UIC), is highly multidisciplinary in approach, with university faculty from collaborating departments and colleges representing mental health and health services, humanities, and social sciences. Vital to the center’s work is building national and international collaborations with academic, advocacy, and services organizations. Address: University of Illinois, College of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry 1601 W. Taylor Street, Fifth Floor, Chicago IL 60612 Phone: (312) 355-5407 Fax: (312) 996-7658 E-mail: [email protected]

REFERENCES Bourdieu, P. (1998). Practical reason: On the theory of action. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. In J. Karabel & A. H. Halsey. (Eds.). Power and ideology in education (pp. 487–510). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Cintron, R., Weine, S. M., & Agani, F. (2004). Exporting democracy. Boston Review.

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Hohmann, A., & Shear, K. (2002). Community-based intervention research: Coping with the “noise” of real life in study design. American Journal of Psychiatry, 159, 201–207. Israel, B. A., Schulz, A. J., Parker, E. A., & Becker, A. B. (1998). Review of community-based research: Assessing partnership approaches to improve public health. Annual Review of Public Health, 19, 173–202. Jemmott, J. B., Jemmott, L. S., & Fong, G. T. (1998). Abstinence and safer sex HIV risk reduction interventions for African American Adolescents. Journal of the American Medical Association, 270, 1529–1536. McKay, M., Baptiste, D., Coleman, D., Madison, S., McKinney, L., Paikoff, R., & CHAMP Collaborative Board. (2000). Preventing HIV risk exposure in urban communities: The CHAMP family program. In W. Pequegnat & J. Szapocznik. (Eds.). Working with families in the era of HIV/AIDS (pp. 67–88). California: Sage. Rolland, J., & Weine, S. M. (2000). Kosovar Family Professional Educational Collaborative. American Family Therapy Academy Newsletter, 79, 34–36. Schulz, A., Krieger, J., & Galea, S. (2002). Addressing social determinants of health: Community-based participatory approaches to research and practice. Health Education and Behavior, 29(3), 287–295. Scott, J. (1998). Seeing like a state. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Sebald, W. G. (2003). After nature. New York: Modern Library Paperbacks, 105. Silove, D. (1999). The psychological effects of torture, mass human rights violations, and refugee trauma: Toward an integrated conceptual framework. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 187(4), 200. Smajkic, A., Weine, S. M., Bijedic, Z., Boskailo, E., Lewis, J., & Pavkovic, I. (2001). Sertraline, Paroxetine and Venlafaxine in refugee post traumatic stress disorder with depression symptoms. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 14(3), 445–452. Szapocznik, J., & Coatsworth, J. D. (1999). An eco-developmental framework for organizing risk and protection for drug abuse: A developmental model of risk and protection. In M. Glantz & C. R. Hartel. (Eds.), Drug Abuse: Origins and Interventions (pp. 331–366). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Walsh, F. (1998). Strengthening family resilience. New York and London: Guilford Press. Weine, S. M. (1998). A prevention and access intervention for survivor families. (RO1 MH59573-01). Washington, DC: National Institute of Mental Health. Weine, S. M. (1999). When history is a nightmare: Lives and memories of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. Weine, S. M. (2001). Services based research with refugee families. (K01 MH02048-01) Washington, DC: National Institute of Mental Health. Weine, S. M. (2004). HOMES exhibition book. Chicago, IL: International Center on Responses to Catastrophes. Weine, S. M. (2006). Testimony after catastrophe: Narrating the traumas of political violence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Weine, S. M., Agani, F., & Cintron, R. (2003). International and local discourses on the public mental health crisis in post-war Kosovo. Bulletin of the Royal Institute of Interfaith Studies, 5(1). Weine, S. M., Agani, F., Cintron, R., Dresden, E., & Grifﬁth, V. (2003). Lessons of Kosovo on humanitarian intervention. Social Analysis, Forum series, First World Peoples, Consultancy and Anthropology (pp. 33–42). New York: Berghan Books. Weine, S. M., Bahromov, M., Brisson, A., & Mizroev, A. (2005a). HIV and male migrant workers in Tajikistan: Risks for the family. Poster presented at the NIMH International

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Conference on the Role of Families in Preventing and Adapting to HIV/AIDS, New York. Weine, S. M., Bahromov, M., Brisson, A., & Mizroev, A. (2008). Unprotected Tajik migrant workers in Moscow at risk for HIV/AIDS. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health. (Available online at http://www.springerlink.com/content/m62g2849385x5537/?p= 0d5359bd71a64bbdb3b9c8354f25b372&pi=3.) Weine, S. M., Becker, D. F., McGlashan, T. H., Laub, D., Lazrove, S., Vojvoda, D., & Hyman, L. (1995a). Psychiatric consequences of ethnic cleansing: Clinical assessments and trauma testimonies of newly resettled Bosnian refugees. American Journal of Psychiatry, 152(4), 536–542. Weine, S. M., Becker, D., McGlashan, T., Vojvoda, D., Hartman, S., & Robbins, J. (1995b). Adolescent survivors of “ethnic cleansing”: Notes on the ﬁrst year in America. Journal of the Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 34(9), 1153–1159. Weine, S. M., Cintron, R., Brisson, A., Agani, F., Berxulli, D., Arenliu, A., Landau-Stanton, J., & Ware, N. (2004). Families’ practical knowledge of preventing HIV/AIDS risk behaviors in post-war Kosovo. Poster Presented at the NIMH Conference on the Role of Families in Preventing and Adapting to HIV/AIDS. Atlanta, GA, July 2004. Weine, S. M., Danieli, Y., Silove, D., van Ommeren, M., Fairbank, J., & Saul, J.(2002) Guidelines for international training in mental health and psychosocial interventions for trauma exposed populations in clinical and community settings. Psychiatry, 65(2), 156–164. Weine, S. M., Feetham, S., Kulauzovic, Y., Besic, S., Lezic, A., Mujagic, A., Muzurovic, J., Spahovic, D., Rolland, J., Sclove, S., & Pavkovic, S. (2008). A multiple-family group access intervention for refugee families with PTSD. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 34(2), 149–164. Weine, S. M., Feetham, S., Kulauzovic, Y., Besic, S., Lezic, A., Mujagic, A., Muzurovic, J., Spahovic, D., Zhubi, M., Rolland, J., & Pavkovic, I. (2004). Family interventions in a services research framework with refugee communities. In K. Miller & L. Rasco. (Eds.). From clinic to community: Ecological approaches to refugee mental health (pp. 263–294). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Weine, S. M., Knaﬂ, K., Feetham, S., Kulauzovic, Y., Besic, S., Lezic, A., Mujagic, A., Muzurovic, J., Spahovic, D., & Pavkovic, I. (2005b). A mixed-methods study of refugee families engaging in multi-family groups. Family Relations, 54, 558–568. Weine, S. M., Kuc, E., Dzudza, E., Razzano, L., & Pavkovic, I. (2001). PTSD among Bosnian refugees: A survey of providers’ knowledge, attitudes and service patterns. Journal of Community Mental Health, 37(3), 261–271. Weine, S. M., Kulauzovic, Y., Besic, S., Lezic, A., Mujagic, A., Muzurovic, J., Spahovic, D., Feetham, S., Knaﬂ, K., & Pavkovic, I. (2006). A family beliefs framework for developing socially and culturally speciﬁc preventive interventions for refugee families and youth. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 76(1), 1–9. Weine, S. M., Kulenovic, T., Dzubur, A., Pavkovic, I., & Gibbons, R. (1998). Testimony psychotherapy in Bosnian refugees: A pilot study. American Journal of Psychiatry, 155, 1720–1726. Weine, S. M., Muzurovic, N., Kulauzovic, Y., Besic, S, Lezic, A., Mujagic, A., Muzurovic, J., Spahovic, D., Feetham, S., Ware, N., Knaﬂ, K., & Pavkovic, I., (2004). Family consequences of political violence in refugee families. Family Process, 43, 147–160. Weine, S. M., Pavkovic, I., Agani, F., Jukic, V., Ceric, I. (2006). Mental health reformer and assisting psychiatric leaders in post-war countries. In G. Reyes. (Ed.). International disaster psychology (pp. 65–84). Westport, CT: Praeger.

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Weine, S. M., Raijna, D., Kulauzovic, Y., Zhubi, M., Huseni, D., Delisi, M., Feetham, S., Mermelstein, R., & Pavkovic I. (2006). Development and implementation of CAFES and TAFES: Family interventions for refugee families from Bosnia and Kosovo. In G. Reyes. (Ed.). International disaster psychology (pp. 37–64). New York: Praeger. Weine, S. M., Raijna, D., Kulauzovic, Y., Zhubi, M., Huseni, D., Delisi, M., Feetham, S., Mermelstein, R., & Pavkovic, I. (2003). The TAFES multi-family group intervention for Kosovar refugees: A descriptive study. Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, 191(2), 100–107. Weine, S. M., Razzano, L., Miller, K., Brkic, N., Ramic, A., Smajkic, A., Bijedic, Z., Boskailo, E., Mermelstein, R., & Pavkovic, I. (2000). Proﬁling the trauma related symptoms of Bosnian refugees who have not sought mental health services. Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, 188(7), 416–421. Weine, S. M., Ukshini, S., Grifﬁth, J., Agani, F., Pulleyblank Coffey, E., Ulaj, J., Becker, C., Ajeti, L., Elliot, M., Alidemaj-Sereqi, V., Landau, J., Asllani, M., Mango, M., Pavkovic, I., Bunjaku, A., Rolland, J., Çala, G., Saul, J., Makolli, S., Sluzki, C., Statovci, S., & Weingarten, K. (2005c). A family approach to severe mental illness in post-war Kosovo. Psychiatry, 68(1), 17–28. Weine, S. M., Vojvoda, D., Hartman, S., & Hyman, L. (1997). A family survives genocide. Psychiatry, 60, 24–39. Weine, S. M., & Ware, N. (2007). A services approach to preventive mental health for adolescent refugees. (1 R01 MH076118-01A2) Washington, DC: National Institute of Mental Health. Weine, S. M., Ware, N., & Lezic, A. (2004). An ethnographic study of converting cultural capital in teen refugees and their families from Bosnia-Herzegovina. Psychiatric Services, 55, 923–927.

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International Trauma Studies Program Jack Saul

The International Trauma Studies Program (ITSP) is a training and research institute committed to enhancing the natural resilience and coping capacities in individuals, families, and communities that have endured and/or are threatened by traumatic events resulting from domestic and political violence, war, and natural disaster. ITSP pursues its mission through providing professional training, implementing and evaluating innovative community-based initiatives, offering technical assistance to international organizations, and helping to build a global learning community in the areas of trauma, mental health, and human rights. Dr. Soeren Buus Jensen of Copenhagen and I founded the International Trauma Studies Program in 1998. It is one of the few trauma programs committed not only to training professionals who serve survivors of all forms of traumatic events, but also to developing and evaluating family and community-oriented mental health and psychosocial services for survivors of massive trauma and loss. To best serve this population, it has been the mission of ITSP to advance the scientiﬁc understanding of the impact of catastrophic events on individuals, families, communities, and societies at large, as well as the corresponding pathways to recovery and resilience. Since its inception, ITSP has provided intensive, one-year (two-semester) training to more than 300 practitioners, who over the last ten years have developed numerous training programs, research projects, and clinical and psychosocial initiatives for populations of survivors in more than thirty countries. First established as an interdisciplinary program based at New York University (NYU) School of Medicine, ITSP now runs as an independent 501(c)(3) nonproﬁt organization afﬁliated with the Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, where I am currently an assistant professor of clinical population and family health.

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HISTORICAL OVERVIEW Background The International Trauma Studies Program grew initially out of the Bellevue/ NYU Program for Survivors of Torture, which I co-founded in 1995. The Bellevue program was established as a medical and mental health service for torture survivors. In developing a treatment philosophy, the program took a strengths-based approach. It regarded survivors as having resources and assets that have enabled them to survive their victimization; thus, the aim of treatment was seen as enhancing their re-empowerment. We recognized the necessity of using a culturally sensitive approach with clients, which drew on their own cultural and religious resources for healing from the effects of severe human rights abuses. In addition to intensive individual, group, and family psychotherapy, we focused on symptom reduction, assistance with social difﬁculties, and networking with community organizations. The rationale was that if the survivors were supported and given relief from immediate symptoms, they could mobilize their natural, inherent capacities for healing and coping. We saw the process of recovery from the trauma of torture as progressing in stages: from the sense of unpredictable danger to reliable safety, from dissociated trauma to acknowledged memory, and from stigmatized isolation to restored social connection. Within the ﬁrst two years of its development, the Bellevue program provided needed medical and mental health services to scores of torture survivors from over forty countries. As the program developed, there was a growing awareness of the need to develop a broader range of services for this population in metropolitan New York City. At the time, it was estimated that there were over 400,000 torture survivors living in the United States, with between 70,000 and 90,000 survivors living in the New York City area alone. Most of these survivors had already resided in the area for years with their families, living in immigrant enclaves, and likely had never received specialized services for the long-term affects of any severe traumatization they may have experienced. There was a need to develop programs outside the hospital setting in the communities in which the refugees resided, programs that could offer alternative psychosocial services to populations from cultures that were not always open to or could not beneﬁt from Western forms of psychotherapeutic intervention. For example, a support group of Tibetan refugees seen at the clinic wanted help in setting up their own nonproﬁt organization so they themselves could assist other Tibetan refugees with the myriad of social and economic challenges to adapting to life in New York. But the requirement of the hospital was that these refugees were to be diagnosed and treated for a mental health disorder in group or individual therapy. In the context of a growing need for a more comprehensive psychosocial approach to assisting refugee survivors of torture, as well as the need for more intensive training of staff and interns at the hospital in working with severely traumatized survivors of human rights violations, we began to look at the need to create opportunities for advanced training at NYU. It was then that I met Soeren

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Buus Jensen, a psychiatrist from Denmark, who had spent the previous three years (1994–96) working with the World Health Organization (WHO) in the former Yugoslavia during the war. He was the WHO program manager for mental health services and later the head of the overall Humanitarian Aid Program for WHO during the war (SR/special representative). Among his initiatives were the implementation of regional trauma-training programs for Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Macedonian mental health practitioners who were providing services for traumatized victims during the war, while they themselves were suffering from some of the same traumatic experiences and reactions. The so-called regional model provided training in thirteen different regions for thirty to thirty-two professionals (mainly psychiatrists and psychologists) through a one-year course. In some areas such as Mostar, Bosnia, practitioners were brought together under United Nations’ protection for joint training workshops. Dr. Jensen conducted the intensive training courses called PPT (Posttraumatic Therapy), which included didactic training in trauma theory and intervention, case supervision, and experiential work in supervised groups on how the practitioners could take care of themselves and prevent burnout while doing such emotionally demanding work. The training model was developed based on previous experiences gained from his training programs in Denmark and further inspired by his encounter with the Chilean Human Rights movement (1989–93). Dr. Jensen developed a network of international advisors on trauma training for a nongovernmental organization (NGO) he created called the International University Center for Mental Health and Human Rights, and was meeting with experts from around the world to learn about trauma-training programs. To his surprise, as he toured Europe and the United States, he found very few training programs. Jensen and I decided to develop an intensive trauma-training program at NYU similar to that run during the Yugoslavian war.

Phase One: 1998–2001 Initial ﬁnancial support to develop the ITSP was provided through a curricular development challenge grant from NYU’s Provost Ofﬁce. The goal was to create an interschool and interdepartmental program at the university that could provide postgraduate training as well as act as a catalyst for the development of academic courses in the study and treatment of psychosocial trauma. The nature and content of the training program was inﬂuenced from the beginning by our clinical and research experience with survivors of political violence—torture, war, state terrorism, and genocide. I had been a research assistant for Professor Hillel Klein, MD, from Hadassah Medical School and director of the Jerusalem Center for the Study of Psychosocial Trauma and Holocaust. Klein, a practicing psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor, had done pioneering work on the impact of massive trauma and loss on individuals, families, and society, and had been a proponent in the early 1980s of shifting attention in the trauma ﬁeld from a focus on the pathology of

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trauma to the understanding of the intra-psychic, familial, social, and cultural resources that were important in Holocaust survivors’ return to living productive lives—that is, their process of adaptation and revival (Klein, 2003). Prior to his work in the former Yugoslavia, Jensen had done research with survivors of state terrorism in Chile, where he became interested in the uses of testimony to promote the process of healing. As recalled in Trauma and Healing under State Terrorism (Agger and Jensen, 1993), psychologists in Chile found that survivors who had given testimonies, in the context of creating documentary evidence for later war crimes trials of those who had carried out torture and disappearances from the Pinochet era, were found to have improved mental health compared to those who had not given testimony and were still waiting in line to do so. Based on this work and what they saw as the importance of survivors having a purposeful context in which to construct a coherent narrative of their experience, Agger and Jensen developed a method of testimony therapy with refugee survivors of torture living in Denmark (Agger and Jensen, 1990). Jensen brought to the curriculum the human rights framework from South America, referred to by the acronym DITE—documentation, investigation, therapy, and evaluation. The mental health and human rights perspective advocated a position of therapeutic non-neutrality in working with victims of human rights violations: it was important in this work to establish an alliance in condemning the inhumane practices suffered by the victim. The training program began at NYU in the fall of 1998 with over forty students participating in the course in two separate tracks: one was a more intensive track was for clinicians and the other, requiring fewer hours, was oriented toward community-based practices and open to practitioners other than mental health professionals (e.g., lawyers, community activists, youth workers, managers of NGOs, United Nations personnel, and artists). The program revolved around workshops run by visiting faculty who were at the forefront of the trauma ﬁeld, and leaders at the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS), the most prominent organization promoting research and clinical practice in work with trauma survivors. The format of the training was divided into didactic work on trauma theory and intervention, case studies, and self-care. Students worked in small groups to discuss cases, engage in role-play and other experiential learning methods, and discuss the impact of the work on themselves as well as strategies for self-care. In the tradition of the Yugoslavian training program, students were required to carry out a project in order to complete the program. These projects ranged from workshops, to small clinical studies, to the development of citywide advocacy activities for trauma survivors. Three students teamed up the first year to create a program honoring survivors of torture on the UN day commemorating survivors. The development of the ITSP training program was enhanced by its participation in the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies Task Force on International Training, co-led by Drs. Stevan Weine and Yael Danieli (2003). The goal was the development of guidelines for training in mental health and psychosocial response in

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international contexts. At the time, there were tensions in the ﬁeld of trauma response. There was a critique of mental health professionals streaming into war zones and post-conﬂict settings to offer Western-oriented therapeutic techniques and concepts for trauma treatment, but ignoring the political, economic, social, and cultural contexts and hierarchy of needs of the recipient populations. This set of guidelines was one of the inputs for the development of recent guidelines on mental health and psychosocial response by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s recent report titled “IASC Guidelines on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings” (IASC, 2007). Community-Based Services for Survivors of Torture ITSP pursued its commitment to community-oriented work with survivors of torture and refugee trauma by establishing a nonproﬁt called Refuge, which established an alliance with other three other organizations assisting torture survivors in the New York area—Solace/Safe Horizon; Doctors of the World, USA; and the Cross Cultural Counseling Center of the International Institute of New Jersey (IINJ)—to form the Metro Area Support for Survivors of Torture Consortium (MASST). The MASST Consortium, under the leadership of the Solace/Safe Horizon director Ernest Duff, received a Torture Victims Relief Act (TVRA) grant from the U.S. Ofﬁce of Refugee Resettlement, and over the six years of TVRA funding support, the MASST Consortium developed a range of services for over 2,000 survivors of torture and their family members. Services included information and practical assistance; support for families and youth; referrals for legal, medical, and social services; educational and vocational development; individual, family, and group counseling; community development and capacity building; community arts and cultural programming; and medical and mental health evaluations for political asylum. Refuge’s role in the consortium was the provision of technical assistance to Solace/Safe Horizon and IINJ on the development of family-oriented clinical services, training of clinicians and community workers, and the development of a network of mental health professionals that provided pro bono therapeutic services to survivors of torture and their families. In 2000, Refuge became a member of the National Consortium of Torture Treatment Programs with the other members of the MASST Consortium. From the Clinic to the Stage One innovative project developed by Refuge in its work with refugee communities was Theater Arts Against Political Violence. The project was developed by Steven Reisner, a psychoanalyst and former actor and theater director; Robert Gourp, a theater director; and myself as the producer. In working with torture survivors, it became increasingly apparent that many of them desired a public forum to speak out about the injustices they had endured in their country of

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origin—and the injustices that were still taking place. Many had been student leaders and political activists before coming to live in exile in New York City. There is a lot of emphasis about working with the individual or family in the privacy of the therapy ofﬁce, where what is said does not leave the ofﬁce, but work that is done privately can leave out the political dimension. We began to see that there was a value in creating a public forum where survivors could speak about their experiences, and we felt there was a necessity to work in a fashion that created a nonhierarchical exchange with survivors. The program had its origin at Bellevue Hospital in a project with the then U.S. Department of Immigration and Naturalization Services to train asylum ofﬁces in methods of sensitively interviewing applicants who were severely traumatized. One thing we did was to hire a theater group and trained the actors to play traumatized refugees—something quite counterintuitive for actors who rarely had knowledge of such human rights violations in their own lives. The asylum ofﬁcers would role-play interviews with the actors, and we would freeze the action to speak about what was happening during each interview. After the training, the theater group expressed an interest in creating a play about the issue of human rights violations—and the collective responsibility we all share in relation to these violations. The theater group began to explore themes related to political violence and the refugee experience. Because this experience was foreign to most of the actors, despite the actors being a culturally diverse group, they began to invite refugees who had been political prisoners to meet with the theater group to talk about their experience, and eventually to engage in a collaboration with the director and actors to create a performance based on the survivors’ experience and creative input. We found that the refugees felt honored to have the opportunity to speak with artists about their lives. For many, it was ﬁrst time they had been asked by Americans about their experience. We brought Tibetans, Guatemalans, Africans, and eventually a group of Chileans to meet with the theater group. These Chileans had been living in the Bronx for over ﬁfteen years and had rarely spoken to Americans about their experience. The Chileans were very appreciative that we were offering them a space to tell their stories and then to have their stories represented theatrically. We started a collaborative process in which the Chilean survivors spoke about their experiences during the Pinochet era, their imprisonments and experiences of oppression and torture, and the actors engaged them in a dialogue. Then the theater group would go to work improvisationally on the material and bring back scenes to the survivors, who would critique the work and make recommendations: “You portrayed the pain effectively, but what we didn’t see were the moments of humanity, warmth, and humor that was so important to us when we were in prison.” The theater work opened up a dialogue among survivors, actors, and mental health professionals that had not been anticipated. The Theater Arts Against Political Violence performed at Tibet House in New York City during an event to honor torture survivors. By that time, the group of Chileans had begun to engage in conversations about their experiences as political

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activists and prisoners with members of their own families and community, and with other Latin American communities in New York. Two months later, they took the raw, unedited video of the theater work and the performance to Chile on their ﬁrst visit in ﬁfteen years. There, they met with other activists and theater groups to share their work. The theater work became part of an opening of communication within families and communities, and in the transnational community to which they belonged. In 2000 Theater Arts Against Political Violence was invited to collaborate with the International Organization for Migration on a project that integrated theater approaches in the training of psychosocial counselors in Kosovo. The project culminated in the production of a theater piece performed at the National Theater in Prishtina, Kosovo (Reisner, 2003). Internationally Based Training and Services In 2000 ITSP became a partner in the development of family- and communityoriented mental health services in postwar Kosovo. In May of that year, a collaborative team effort between American and Albanian Kosovar mental health professionals was initiated to address the enormous psychosocial and mental health needs of the Kosovar population following the end of the war in 1999. The project, called the Kosovar Family Professional Education Collaborative (KFPEC), was co-sponsored by the University of Illinois–Chicago (UIC), the University of Chicago, the American Family Therapy Academy, the International Trauma Studies Program at NYU, and the University of Prishtina. The Albanian Kosovar team based in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of Prishtina Medical School decided to develop a strengths-based mental health orientation in their hospital and emerging community mental health system. They decided to draw on existing resources in the Albanian Kosovar community to promote recovery after the period of oppression and war, as well as to address other public mental health concerns. In the aftermath of the war in Kosovo in 1999, the Albanian Kosovar society was faced with having to build a mental health system while at the same time having to contend with widespread experiences of loss, violence, and forced geographical displacement. The Serbian authorities had permitted very few formal health or mental health services in the previous ten years, and most mental health and social services for Albanian Kosovars had been provided by a parallel system of professionals and paraprofessionals who worked underground, usually without pay. A few mental health practitioners had been able to continue their education and provide services at University Hospital in Prishtina. This small group of psychiatrists, psychologists, and nurses took responsibility for building a mental health system and providing services to a large number of families in need. During the war, most of the Albanian Kosovar mental health professionals had ﬂed the country. Many had lived in refugee camps and had faced serious danger, as well as the loss of family members and friends.

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One of the innovative projects initiated after the war by Albanian Kosovar mental health professionals was the development of mobile teams. These teams went to some of the villages to work with families that had suffered major losses during the massacres that had been perpetrated on hundreds of villages in Kosovo. It is estimated that over 10,000 Albanian Kosovars had been murdered. The American and Albanian Kosovar group visited one of the small villages, where they had been working with a number of families. Slovia was a village where Albanian and Serbian Kosovars had lived together for decades. It was a small agricultural village of 2,000 people some thirty miles southwest of the capitol, Prishtina. One evening in May 1999, Serbian military forces entered the village. They sent a group of Serbians from the village to identify the male Albanian leaders there. The next day, Serbian forces entered the village, took males from the houses, and shot them, often in front of their families. One group of villagers managed to escape the village but were later caught and slaughtered. The violence lasted throughout the day. Bodies were buried in mass graves just outside the village. Days later, the Serbian forces returned to the village, and in an attempt to remove the evidence of their atrocities, dug up the corpses, placed them on trucks, and departed the area. On a hill above the village, half the graves of the ﬁfty-eight people who had been massacred were empty. It was not likely that the bodies would ever be retrieved. For many families, their grief at losing up to ﬁve members of their families was compounded by their not having the bodies available for a proper funeral according to Muslim tradition (Saul, Ukshini, et al., 2003). One of the consequences of the massacre was that with the death of the younger, stronger men of these families, the elders, often elderly women, had to take an active role in leading their extended families of widows and children. The Kosovar mental health professionals who had begun to work with these families took an approach that explored their sources of strength and resilience. During this initial phase of work with families, the Kosovar professionals were very interested in developing a mental health expertise based on strengthening family and community resilience. The KFPEC received funding in 2001 to develop a services-based training program aimed at developing psychoeducational groups for families of the severely mentally ill. This ﬁve-year project successfully led to the development of teams at each of the regional community mental health centers in Kosovo. In December 2006, the program became integrated into the Kosovo’s health system (Pulleybank-Coffee, Grifﬁth, et al., 2006). During this time, ITSP also worked with the Center for War, Peace and the News Media in implementing a diversity training program with Serbian and Albanian Kosovar media professionals. The program brought over forty media professionals together in Prishtina for a two-week training in investigative journalism, which included a two-day module on trauma reactions as well as strategies for interviewing victims of violence, addressing the journalists’ own traumatic stress reactions, and developing methods of self-care. The groups came together to work on a collaborative project on the families of the missing in each ethnic group.

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During this ﬁrst phase in the development of ITSP, a number of principles emerged. First, there was a shift from focusing exclusively on training in individually oriented clinical approaches to treating trauma survivors, to emphasizing the strengthening of the natural support systems of family and community. We learned from our work in the community with survivors in New York, with survivors in the context of theater, in the development of individual and collective narratives, in Kosovo, and through our international training faculty. By the end of the three years, we were bringing in approaches that derived from specializing with working with trauma survivors, or working with populations in non-Western contexts; in addition, we were questioning the efﬁcacy of mental health approaches to trauma response in Western contexts as well. This realization and critique was further crystallized as we experienced the events of September 11, 2001, in our neighborhood (where ITSP faculty lived and worked) and were faced with responding as professionals and as residents to one of the hardest-hit populations. By that time, we had trained more than 100 mental health and allied professionals in our nine-month training program in trauma theory and intervention. Many of those trained at ITSP ﬁlled the ranks of directors and managers of newly funded projects to work with the victims of 9/11 in hospitals, community mental health centers, and schools. Phase Two: 2001–2004 Before September 11, 2001, I could not anticipate that I would soon be bringing our professional expertise into my own home, my children’s school, and my local community. I live in downtown Manhattan and my children—ages ﬁve and eight at the time of the terrorist attacks—attended a public school two blocks from the World Trade Center site. It was in my children’s school that I began to work with other community members to address the needs of children, adults, and families as a community. A reversal took place: I was now the “local” and began to experience myself what my international colleagues had told me about post-disaster situations elsewhere: the ever-present print, radio, and television journalists chasing after the story; international relief organizations arriving on the scene and interviewing local professionals to inform their own funding applications; the missionaries and outreach workers offering support; and the inﬂux of trauma and grief counselors and body therapists of all kinds. Downtown Manhattan had become a spiritual and therapeutic supermarket. At the same time, the local population was engaged in numerous activities to assist others, yet their efforts to promote recovery, much as in international contexts, were undervalued and received very little direct ﬁnancial support. The capacity of local mental health professionals in the community, as well as organizations that had been working all along to assist youth and address other community problems, were often ignored (Saul, 2007). We anticipated, based on our international experience, that there would be an inﬂux of researchers and clinicians focusing exclusively on the symptoms and treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And in fact, quite quickly, a

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great deal of funding was directed toward training mental health professionals to treat individuals suffering from PTSD; at the same time, the grassroots efforts of professionals, community organizations, and community members addressing the ongoing needs of those around them only rarely gained the attention of private funders, relief organizations, and government agencies. We thus made a decision to focus our energies on developing both a community project in lower Manhattan and a disaster response training program that would bring to the New York mental health community the family and community approaches to trauma and disaster based on a resilience framework. Downtown Community Resource Center The week that the fourth year of our program started, our students could not pass the checkpoints in Lower Manhattan to get to class. Many of us living downtown had been directly affected, escaping from the falling buildings and the debris storms, and having to evacuate our homes for a period of time. But the class went on, and we added an emergency symposium for New York mental health professionals on trauma response with a presentation by Dr. Jensen, who had arrived in New York City that week to open the ITSP course. In order to address the needs of children and families in lower Manhattan, I joined a group of parents, some of who were mental health professionals, who teamed up to create family support committees in the schools. These school communities were on the west side of downtown Manhattan, just next to the World Trade Center site in the neighborhoods of Tribeca and Battery Park City. These communities comprised children, teachers, parents, residents, and workers who had experienced the greatest physical exposure to the events of 9/11: the deaths of friends and family members, direct threats to their own lives, emergency evacuations from workplaces and schools, physical danger from the debris storms, displacement from their home and businesses, and environmental contamination. With all of New Yorkers, they also faced a series of subsequent events, including the plane crash in the borough of Queens, going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the anthrax contamination, and numerous threats accompanied by heightened terrorist alerts. The family support programs formed a coalition across school communities to share ideas about how to address the emotional consequence of the events of 9/11 among children and parents. The initial approach of the New York City Board of Education to address the needs of children affected by these events had focused on screening them for PTSD and offering therapeutic services to those who were identiﬁed as having difﬁculties. As mentioned earlier, not only was very little attention paid to the impact of these events on teachers and parents, but neither group was asked for input regarding the children’s evaluations. Moreover, although the mental health of children became the focus of the school system’s efforts, there was initially no place for parents to discuss their own concerns as a group. To tackle this, the family support committees developed community

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forums where parents, teachers, and school staff from the downtown elementary schools could come together to address emerging concerns. ITSP’s communitybased work was supported and enhanced by the participation of Dr. Claude Chemtob, a child psychologist and disaster specialist, who moderated the community forums and advocated for the project with local funders. The community approach we used was based on the work of Dr. Judith Landau, a child and community psychiatrist, whose Link Model of Community Resilience became the inspiration for our work to promote recovery by engaging and supporting community members in their efforts to promote recovery (Landau and Saul, 2004). During one of the forums, a needs assessment was conducted, and members of the school community established as a priority creating a public space or resource center where community members could come together and share ideas, projects, resources, and their combined creativity. This center was to have the following goals: • • • •

To recognize and strengthen existing skills, resources and resilience in the community To enhance connectedness in families, neighborhoods, organizations, and occupational groups To promote mental and physical wellness in youth, adults, and families To create forums for public discourse and the expression of the multiplicity of community voices, viewpoints, and histories

We received funding from the New York Times Foundation to start a community resource center, and then worked with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Project Liberty for a contract to establish a resource center in the community that could support the efforts of community members and offer them stipends and administrative support to conduct programs. On a voluntary basis, many people living in lower Manhattan were already developing a variety of activities for children and families. The goal of the funding would be to support these activities, promote sustainability of these projects, and prevent burnout. Refuge was eventually awarded a substantial contract from FEMA to develop a demonstration project promoting community resilience through community engagement. Through the resource center, community members were able to engage residents and workers beyond the school community to develop a number of projects for youth and families. Two projects focused on promoting public discourse about the challenges and ways of coping with the impact of 9/11: a community video narrative archive and a theater project based on the oral histories of community members. Developed by downtown residents, the archive housed a diversity of community voices and experiences, and made the stories of downtown life available on the Web and in public places in the area. It became a site where people could hear others’ stories and gather to share and record their individual or family stories. The theater project was an adaptation of the previous work of Theater

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Arts Against Political Violence in its use of performance as a way of bringing together community members, artists, mental health professionals, and others in a collaborative mode for exploring, expressing, and representing experience as well as providing a public space for groups to reﬂect on that experience. The project involved the development of an ensemble of professional actors who collected community stories from group interviews following 9/11 and transformed them, through improvisation, into a theatrical performance. Ironically titled “Everything’s Back to Normal in New York City: Below Canal—A Work in Progress,” the piece was performed in the community, followed by discussions among the actors and the audience. During each subsequent performance, the ensemble incorporated the community’s reactions from the one before. As the work progressed, it followed and interacted with the shifting experience of people living and working in Lower Manhattan. The theater project was envisioned as an ongoing catalyst for community conversation during the coming year. Other projects initiated by community members and supported by the resource center included a communitybased disaster preparedness and response initiative that has produced a published manual; a community website; peer support programs, including one for artists and one for journalists directly affected by the terrorist attacks; and a Samba rhythm school for teenagers throughout New York City. The work of the resource center reinforced our view that by tapping into community competencies and resilience after major traumatic events, professionals

Figure 11.1 Scene from “Everything’s Back to Normal in New York City,” performed in the fall of 2003. Photo courtesy of Jack Saul.

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could best foster mental health. What we saw in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, in New York City is that a comprehensive approach that endorses connectedness and enhances resources at the levels of the individual, family, and community most likely will have the best chance of promoting a lasting recovery. Disaster Response Workshop Series Within a week after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, ITSP initiated a series of workshops for professionals on disaster and trauma treatment. Experts in the ﬁeld either volunteered or taught for very low fees, and donations for the training were used to support community projects in Lower Manhattan. The workshops broadly focused on individual, family, and community resilience perspectives. From September 2001–May 2003, over 3,000 professionals attended the workshop series. One unique aspect of the training was bringing in the experience of international presenters who had experience working in contexts dealing with the aftermath of violence and terrorism, including Palestinian and Israeli mental health professionals and colleagues from Kosovo, Africa, and Latin America. Nancy Baron presented a workshop titled “Turning the Tide? Working with Violence Affected Families and Communities from the Field in Africa.” The workshop reversed the usual expectation of knowledge transmission and examined the relevance of using helping models from developing countries with long-standing conﬂict in the work with communities in New York City. It examined comprehensive, community-based psychosocial and mental health interventions developed in Uganda, Sudan, and Burundi to assist populations affected by violence. These interventions build on the natural strengths of the traditional African society, empowering families and communities to manage members’ psychosocial concerns. One of the most important things we attempted was to address the gap between those specializing in developing and researching evidence-based approaches to trauma treatment, and those who had been working with families and communities that had suffered trauma. Judith Landau and I helped organized plenaries during the next year at the annual conferences of both the American Family Therapy Academy in New York City and the International Family Therapy Association in Istanbul. These conferences brought together prominent practitioners from the ﬁeld of trauma treatment with family therapists and international practitioners. Bridging these two ﬁelds was incorporated into the mission of ITSP and has since shaped the development of its curriculum, with the participation of prominent family therapists and systemic theorists who have been working with families that had suffered from child abuse, domestic violence, poverty, homelessness, and political violence. Phase Three: 2004–2007 The next phase in ITSP’s development was characterized by an intensiﬁed focus on international training, development, and evaluation of family and community resilience approaches with survivors of torture and refugee trauma in

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New York City. We also applied principles of community engagement and resilience to the development of supportive learning communities among current students and alumni of our training program. During this phase, we were responsive to the needs of organizations that were turning to us for help in facilitating staff welfare programs. One of the strengths of the program was the increasing linkage between training and ﬁeldwork in communities. Scholarships to the training program have been given each year to community activists from the former Yugoslavia, West Africa, Cambodia, and Latin America, who are developing programs for refugee populations in New York. As part of the training on community interventions, community leaders are often invited to class to engage in simulated community forums. Here, they are trained collaboratively with students in conducting needs assessments, enhancing community leadership and capacity, program development, and evaluation. By the beginning of the third phase of its development, ITSP had gained recognition as an organization with expertise in family and community approaches with traumatized populations. Members of our faculty were invited to give numerous international presentations, as well as host international visitors interested in learning more about the community-oriented work carried out in Lower Manhattan. Presentations and connections were made with organizations in the Middle East, including Iran, Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey, and Egypt. Throughout this phase, we received numerous requests from universities and NGOs for assistance in the development of a similar comprehensive trauma-training program. As our 9/11 work was winding down, and with numerous trauma-training programs and trauma centers having been developed in New York since 9/11, we were able to turn our attention back to working with communities that had suffered from the devastations of war and forced migration, and to begin to further develop international collaborations for training. In our work with New York refugee populations, we increasingly focused on addressing the needs of survivors of torture and refugee trauma. Our program, Refuge, continued to receive funding as part of the MASST Consortium with three other organizations. Our role had shifted over the years from providing training and technical assistance to refugee mental health professionals at our collaborating organizations to collaborative work with refugee communities in which there were high numbers of survivors of torture and other traumatic human rights abuses. In 2002 we initiated a partnership with leaders of the West African community in Staten Island. Following a community forum and needs assessment, we began working with community “links,” or change agents, to address the most pressing needs of this primarily Liberian and Sierra Leonean population (Landau, 2007). The leaders of this emerging community organization decided it would be best to operate as a project under the auspices of our nonproﬁt, Refuge. The ﬁrst priority was to establish a community space that was geographically accessible to refugees living in the housing projects in the Parkhill neighborhood of Staten Island. The housing management donated a space that was converted into a community drop-in

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center and named African Refuge. The links understood that many members of this community of over 4,000 refugees living in close proximity had not taken advantage of available health and social services. Under the leadership of Mr. Jacob Massaquoi, a torture survivor himself, who had managed to escape the civil wars in Liberia and gain political asylum in the United States, African Refuge began offering basic social services and acted as a much-needed bridge between community members and provider organizations. The center grew, organically responding to expressed needs of the refugees coming to the center, providing immigration assistance, access to health insurance and health care, job and educational counseling, computer education and access, informational forums, and case-work services. The strategy was to offer needed services to whoever came in to the center and ask for only a minimum of information from this highly suspicious population of refugees. They were not only dealing with the emotional aftermath of the war, and the loss of family members, home and property, but also the challenges of now living in one of the most impoverished and crime-ridden neighborhoods of New York City. A number of collaborative arts projects were implemented at Africa Refuge. One such project was Coming Home, an arts initiative that used photography and ﬁlm to connect older Liberians in the Diaspora with friends and family at home. A group of eight elders in Staten Island, NY, came together over the course of two months to create messages for the project coordinator, Serena Chaudhry, to carry to friends and family in Liberia. Then Ms. Chaudhry delivered the messages, ﬁlmed responses, and returned them to the Staten Island community. Coming Home culminated in a multimedia exhibit in December 2006 at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island. The exhibit featured stories, photos, and ﬁlms taken by the elders and their friends, families, and allies. The mission of African Refuge was to ﬁnd successful ways of delivering services to survivors of torture and war. Within two years, Mr. Massaquoi and his small group of community volunteers had managed to provide services and referrals for close to 600 community members. A survey of those attending the center for services found that over 80 percent of the adult participants had experienced the recent wars, and close to 50 percent of them reported personal experiences of having been tortured. With the success of the program, the housing management in Parkhill offered African Refuge another space to create a youth and family center. By 2007 African Refuge had created a collaborative, after-school tutoring program in partnership with the International Rescue Committee and was establishing a Youth Task Force in Staten Island to address the growing needs of African refugee youth and strategies to reduce tensions between these youth and other ethnic groups. With the establishment of the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Diaspora statement-taking program, African Refuge became an implementing partner with this commission, under the leadership of Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, in providing outreach, community sensitization, and psychosocial follow-up for statement givers. Responding to the need to promote improved intergroup relations and collaboration as essential

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ingredients in the African refugees’ adaptation to life in the United States, African Refuge widened its scope to address the needs of anyone from the neighborhood in need of services. ITSP would continue to provide technical assistance and capacity building in order to promote African Refuge as an African-focused torture and refugee psychosocial program. The year 2007 also saw the development of ITSP’s ﬁrst ﬁeld-based training program in Arua, Uganda, under the leadership of ITSP’s director of international training, Dr. Nancy Baron. The program was a response to the need to provide training in the development of psychosocial programs in developing countries as well as offer a train-the–trainer course. The site in Uganda could accommodate students from the United States and Europe as well as provide training for psychosocial staff working for NGOs in Africa and the Middle East. As we enter our tenth year, ITSP has reﬁned its mission to continue to research family and community resilience approaches with populations that have endured massive trauma and loss, and to build the capacity of a diverse group of professionals involved in this work on a national and international level. Over the past ten years, ITSP has developed an audio-visual library of over 600 hours of workshops, and is now pursuing the technology to make these resources, as well as current education activities, available to international groups requesting assistance and partnership in developing similar programs in their countries. The International Trauma Studies Program has also initiated an annual multidisciplinary conference in trauma studies for the general public. A conference in 2007, titled “Narratives of Suffering and Transformation,” brought together professionals and students from the ﬁelds of psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, literary and performance studies, human rights and law, journalism, and the arts to examine current constructions of social trauma and the War in Iraq.

WHAT HAS MADE ITSP DISTINCT? ITSP’s distinct contribution to the ﬁeld of trauma, mental health, and psychosocial response has been largely shaped by three factors: our focus on working with survivors of political violence from a systemic approach, our location in New York City, and our ﬁrsthand experience as responders to the World Trade Center attacks. Many of us at ITSP have come to trauma work with a theoretical perspective grounded in a family systems approach, as well as experience working with survivors of political violence. This has, from the beginning, led us to attend to the social and political dimensions of traumatic suffering and, in particular, to the social contexts in which people recover or are vulnerable to exploitation. Two members of our faculty, Esther Perel and Steven Reisner, both children of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, have brought an invaluable perspective to the program based on their ﬁrsthand knowledge of survivor families and communities, as well as their experience working in theater. Other faculty and advisors—Soeren Buus Jensen, Judith Landau, Nancy Baron, Nancy Wallace, and Donna Gaffney—

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have had extensive international mental health and human rights experience in diverse cultures, which has reinforced a comprehensive approach that includes interventions with populations at multiple levels of the individual, family, community, and society at large. As the program has developed in New York City, we have beneﬁted from resources and opportunities that have strengthened our international and multidisciplinary perspectives, including the presence of the United Nations, international humanitarian and human rights organizations, academic institutions, and the city itself as a center for media and the arts. New York City as an international crossroads has enabled ITSP to have ongoing exchanges with visiting scholars, practitioners, and students. The large and diverse immigrant population in New York City naturally challenges professionals working with diverse populations to articulate the cultural meanings, biases, and values underlying their work. Since we have been have working on the development of international mental health and psychosocial response during the past decade, our ﬁrsthand experience as a local population of residents and professionals dealing with the impact of 9/11 has provided invaluable experience of the challenges in doing this work. Even though our experience in New York was markedly different from the experiences of those in developing countries, where resources and systems of mental health care are almost nonexistent, there were some similar difﬁculties. We witnessed some of the same problems seen elsewhere in emergency response, such as the difﬁculties of coordination, responding to the needs of local populations, and the challenges of collaborative engagement with communities in developing systems of care. We saw the limits of U.S. national approaches to disaster and terrorism preparedness and response, and the conﬂicts of interest that are created when disaster response is outsourced to proﬁt-oriented companies. This experience has strengthened our advocacy for both top-down and grassroots approaches to disaster preparedness and response.

ORGANIZATIONAL CHALLENGES The greatest organizational challenge faced by ITSP as a small nonproﬁt organization has been making the choice to pursue only funding for research and program development that ﬁts our mission. We have had many opportunities to pursue available funding in the trauma ﬁeld, which focuses on the predominant scientiﬁc discourse, privileges symptom reduction, and tends to ignore the social and political environment of the affected populations. These avenues of revenue, while plentiful, would take us in a different direction than we believe is needed, so in the face of underfunding, we have chosen to ﬁnd independent, creative solutions. Just as in most places in the world where populations are recovering from disasters, we have had to be innovative and to rely on the goodwill of volunteers. Many senior professionals have devoted a great deal of volunteer time to our community psychosocial and arts projects. The lack of resources has also reinforced the need to engage survivors themselves as equal partners in the project of healing.

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This approach has enabled us to do pilot work that now informs current research proposals. Because of the focus on our work, we have also become a resource for an international network of professionals in the mental health ﬁeld that has been developing culturally sensitive family- and community-based approaches to trauma work. Another challenge we face is ﬁnding adequate funding for community-based organizations. This is illustrated in the current work we are doing with the West African refugee community where we are developing a task force to strengthen the capacity of the community to address the needs of their youth. Funding for this type of service is usually directed to large organizations, while very little funding goes where it is needed most: directly to community-based organizations. As a result of this situation, the large organizations outside the community have the ﬁnancial resources to do the work but do not have access to the local population. The community-based organizations, who are more in tune with the needs of the community members and have the greater ability to engage them in seeking services, have access but insufﬁcient resources to provide these services themselves. As we have learned, when a community-based organization such as African Refuge engages the community, the demand for services often stretches the organization beyond its resources. At the same time, the large provider organizations with funding look to the community organizations for help in referring clients to them, but are usually unable to fund the community organizations for this very time-consuming outreach work. The community organizations, consequently, often feel ethically compelled to provide unreimbursed outreach services to the large organizations, which depletes the smaller organization’s resources. We end up having to advocate for the community organizations so that their capacity is not undermined by the larger provider organizations. Over the years, our training program has relied on the contributions of senior professionals who have not been available to become part of an ongoing core group for the organization because of competing commitments. For the most part, it has not been ﬁnancially possible to fund such professionals to be available on an ongoing basis. Instead, we have been supporting the development of an alumni community that can contribute to the development of the organization as well as provide voluntary support and consultation for the organization’s activities. Still, there is need for administrative support to help maintain the program and provide a structure for continued education, project support, and referral for clinical services and workshops.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS Over the past ten years, the upsurge in interest in the psychosocial and mental health consequences to people who have suffered traumatic events has led to numerous training and intervention programs. These programs have been directed at the effects of torture, war, natural disasters, and the consequences of individual, familial, and communal violence. Experience and evidence has shown that there

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are few trained professionals capable of mounting an effective response to these situations. Experts rushing in from other countries frequently lack an understanding of the language, culture, and political context of the countries to whose needs they are responding, and their programs frequently are not integrated into existing response structures. These efforts, hastily organized, provide short-term interventions that leave people without support for their long-term needs. In response to the ongoing training needs, the International Trauma Studies Program is currently in the process of reﬁning its goals for the future. Based on a review of current research in the ﬁeld, the documentation of hundreds of hours of workshop presentations and discussions, and a body of clinical and community data collected in both our international and local work as well as through conversations with our network of faculty and program participants, a number of observations have emerged as starting points for our future direction. First, as we have seen in international responses to catastrophes in recent years, Western mental health perspectives and efforts often have suffered from an arrogance and a lack of self-criticism and openness that have led to ineffective and economically wasteful efforts worldwide, and in many cases, have been damaging because they have undermined local capacities and ways of coping with traumatic events. Fortunately, there has been an emerging consensus about core principles that should guide future international work, as well as a set of best practices, recently published in the IASC Guidelines on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings (IASC, 2007). The core principles of this work include the promotion of human rights and equity, maximizing the participation of local populations in humanitarian response, doing no harm, building on available resources and capacities, integrating support systems, and developing a multilayered set of complimentary supports that meets the needs of diverse groups. What we have advocated in New York in response to local mental health needs (such as work with refugees and response to the World Trade Center attacks) has been to learn from international expertise in dealing with catastrophe. This view has been further reinforced through exposure to numerous international programs as well as experience in the ﬁeld. We are in the process of making available through our website (www.itspnyc.org) training resources that can be accessed by international practitioners. There is currently a need for more research and development of evidence-based practices that focus on collaborative or participatory models of working with families and communities. Another observation that has been important in deﬁning our future direction is that promotion of psychosocial well-being is a process that in many contexts must be addressed in relation to the needs within a community to promote justice, reconciliation, and broader social development. One of the current challenges in our ﬁeld is how we might develop participatory approaches in post-conﬂict settings that are culturally and contextually appropriate. How do we engage with local communities so that they can develop their own solutions to redress past grievances and promote individual and collective healing? How can we address the larger social, political, and economic causes of suffering as an integral part of

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advancing psychosocial well-being. And what are the human resources and sources of resilience that may promote processes of coexistence between previously conﬂicted groups? These are some of the questions that will be central to future training and research initiatives at ITSP. A third observation that has already informed our work, as well as our training program, is that what may be the most effective tool in building capacity to address the needs of populations dealing with catastrophe is the development of supportive helper communities. ITSP has already engaged in a process of convening alumni groups and creating online communities of professionals and community workers in need of support and educational resources to enhance their work. We envision, during the next year, developing a global classroom that can bring professionals together from different countries for workshops and ongoing consultation, supervision, and peer support.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: International Trauma Studies Program Founder/Executive Director: Jack Saul Mission/Description: The_International Trauma Studies Program (ITSP) 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. ITSP is now a training and research program afﬁliated with 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 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 their 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. Website: http://www.itspnyc.org/ Address: International Trauma Studies c/o Jack Saul, Ph.D. 245 Fifth Avenue, Suite 2205 New York, NY 10016 Phone: 212-889-8117 Fax: 212-889-8117 E-mail: [email protected]

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REFERENCES Agger, I., & Jensen, S. B. (1990). Testimony as ritual and evidence in psychotherapy for political refugees. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 3(1), 115–130. Agger, I., and Jensen, S. B. (1993). Trauma and healing under state terrorism. London: Zed Books. Baron, N., Jensen, S. B., & de Jong, J. T. V. M. (2002). Mental health of refugees and internally displaced people. In J. Fairbanks, M. Friedman, J. de Jong, B. Green, & S. Solomon. (Eds.). Guidelines for psychosocial policy and practice in social and humanitarian crises (pp. 243–270). New York: Report to the United Nations. Fullilove, M., & Saul, J. (2006). Rebuilding communities post-disaster: Lessons from 9/11. In Y. Neria, R. Gross, R. Marshall, & E. Susser. (Eds.). September 11, 2001: Treatment, research and public mental health in the wake of a terrorist attack (pp. 164–177). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inter-Agency Standing Committee (2007). IASC Guidelines on mental health and psychosocial support in emergency settings. Geneva: IASC. Klein, H. (2003) Survival and trials of revival: Psychodynamic studies of Holocaust survivors and their families in Israel and the diaspora. Posthumous manuscript. Landau, J. (2007). Enhancing resilience: Families and communities as agents for change. Family Process, 46(3), 351–365. Landau, J., & Saul, J. (2004). Facilitating family and community resilience in response to major disaster. In F. Walsh & M. McGoldrick. (Eds.). Living beyond loss. New York: Norton. Pulleyblank-Coffey, E., Grifﬁth, J, & Ulaj, J. (2006). The ﬁrst community mental health center in Kosovo. In A. Lightburn & P. Session. (Eds.), Handbook of community-based clinical practice (pp. 514–528). New York: Oxford University Press. Reisner, S. Private trauma/public drama: Theater as a response to international political violence, In SF Online, 2.1 (Summer, 2003) (http://www.barnard.columbia.edu/sfonline/ ps/reisner.htm). Saul, J. (1999). Working with survivors of torture and political violence in New York City. Zeitschrift für Politische Psychologie, 7(1–2), 221–232. Saul, J. (2007). Promoting community resilience in lower Manhattan after September 11, 2001 [monograph]. American Family Therapy Academy: Systemic Responses to Disaster; Stories of the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Winter 2007, 69–75. Saul, J., Ukshini, S., Blyta, A., & Statovci, S. (2003). Strength-based treatment of trauma in the aging: An Albanian Kosovar case study. In J. Ronch & J. Goldﬁeld. (Eds.). Mental wellness in aging: Strength based approaches (pp. 299–314). London: Health Professions Press. Weine, S., Danieli, Y., Silove, D., Van Ommeren, M., Fairbank, J., Saul, J. (2002). Guidelines for international training in mental health and psychosocial interventions for traumaexposed populations in clinical and community settings. Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes, 65(2), 156–164.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Media Articles about Our Work Barry, E. (2007, October 31). Seeking hidden accounts of atrocity. Retrieved from New York Times website. June 4, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/nyregion/ 31reconcile.html?_r=1&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/B/Barry,%20Ell en&oref=slogin.

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Cohen, P. (1999, May 8). The study of trauma graduates at last. Retrieved from New York Times website. June 4, 2008, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A05 E0DD1F3CF93BA35756C0A96F958260. Riccardi, S. (2001, August 3). Where journalism strokes ethnic hostility. Retrieved September 24, 2003, from the University of Washington, Dart Center for Trauma and Journalism website, www.dartcenter.org. Rosenberg, T. (1997, December 28) To hell and back. Retrieved from New York Times website, June 4, 2008, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9807E5DC123EF93 BA15751C1A961958260. Saul, J. (2002, September 11). 2 pillars are crucial to helping children adjust. New York Times, p. 17. Schmitt, E. (1997, December 21). Asylum agents learn to assess tales of torture. New York Times, p. A1. Waters, R. (2004, November/December). The citizen therapist: Making a difference in the wider world. Surviving disaster: Jack Saul believes communities are the antidote for trauma. Psychotherapy Networker, pp. 40–41.

Video and Performance Saul, J. (producer), & Ray, J. (director). (2002). A partnership for kids: Post 9/11 coping strategies for the school community [video]. New York: International Trauma Studies Program, NYU. Saul, J. (producer), & Reisner, S. (director). (2000). Head soup: The work of Theater Arts Against Political Violence [theatrical production]. New York: Refuge. Saul, J. (producer), & Gampel, A. (director). (2003). Everything’s back to normal in New York City: Below Canal, a work in progress [theatrical production]. New York: Downtown Community Resource Center, International Trauma Studies Program, NYU.

Websites African Refuge. www.africanresilience.org. Coming Home: Connecting Older Liberians in the Diaspora with Family and Friends Back Home. www.itspnyc.org/african_refuge/cominghome.html. International Trauma Studies Program. www.itspnyc.org. Theater Arts Against Political Violence. www.itspnyc.org/theater_arts_against.html.

12

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

The Center for Health, Intervention, and Prevention (CHIP) is based at the University of Connecticut (UConn) in Storrs, Connecticut. Since its inception, CHIP has created new scientiﬁc knowledge in the areas of health behavior (understanding how and why people behave as they do with respect to their health) and health behavior change (understanding how to change individuals’ unhealthy behavior to embrace more healthy alternatives). This knowledge is used by CHIP to design, implement, and evaluate practical interventions to change unhealthy behaviors (e.g., sexual and drug use behaviors that can transmit HIV) in populations at risk for poor health and even death. Worldwide, many such populations are impoverished and disenfranchised, experience serious health disparities, and are urgently in need of interventions to help protect them from poor health. CHIP designs its interventions with substantial input from behavioral scientists, from those who will receive the interventions, and from those who will implement them (J. Fisher, Cornman, Norton, & Fisher, 2006). Its interventions are theory based, cost-effective, and designed to be widely disseminated to large numbers of individuals to maximize the interventions’ impact on seemingly intractable health problems. Work at CHIP helps to advance health promotion science and practice at the national and international levels. CHIP started as the University of Connecticut AIDS Risk Reduction Project (ARRP) in 1985, in an attempt to respond to the emerging international HIV pandemic. Since the early 1980s, HIV has killed approximately 27.1 million people worldwide (UNAIDS, 2007) and remains today an extremely serious global health threat. In CHIP’s early years as ARRP, its research was focused entirely on increasing HIV prevention behaviors in populations at risk. It was essentially the work of two brothers, Jeff and Bill Fisher. My brother Bill and I were born on the same day three years apart. We shared birthday parties as children and experienced sibling rivalry growing up. We both went to graduate school in social psychology at Purdue 231

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University, overlapping in our studies by one year. I became a professor at the University of Connecticut, and Bill became a professor at the University of Western Ontario. Our early HIV prevention research was funded by a single grant from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and we were assisted in our work by a few staff members. We had grown up in the 1960s (a “curse” in that we felt a need to do something to try to “change the world”), and both of us had become disaffected with some of the focus of social psychology, the ﬁeld in which we had received our doctorates. Although social psychology had the theoretical insights, methodologies, and statistical procedures to make important contributions to the solution of critical social and health problems, it tended to eschew such activities. In stark contrast, from our early days as graduate students, our orientation, nurtured by our mentor, Dr. Donn Byrne, had been to apply social psychological theories and experimental methods to address “real world” problems. We both had done early theoretical and applied work on human sexuality with Byrne, and had worked together and even jointly published a study on condom purchasing behavior while in graduate school (W. Fisher, Fisher, & Byrne, 1977). However, until the start of the HIV epidemic, the preponderance of my early career work had been on recipient reactions to help (e.g., exploring what types of help spawn the greatest subsequent self-help efforts by recipients), and most of Bill’s had been on pregnancy prevention and on the effects of sexual stimuli on human behavior. After about ten post-PhD years researching different areas, we began working together again early in the HIV epidemic on human sexual behavior—and especially on how to change HIV risk behavior. This work ultimately led to the creation of CHIP. I had been a professor at the University of Connecticut for over twenty years when CHIP began with the goal of creating a scholarly environment in which theory in social psychology and the behavioral sciences could be applied to address HIV risk behavior and other critical public health problems. CHIP’s work would have demonstrable applied implications for fostering health behavior change in those at risk. It would be a place where linking behavioral science theory, rigorous research methodology, and “real world” applications would be the norm, rather than the exception. CHIP would be a research enterprise in which such activity would be nurtured in any way possible. In many academic disciplines, application is paid little more than “lip service,” and in fact, is regarded as of secondary importance to theory. CHIP would be different. It would demonstrate repeatedly that applied problem- and solution-focused research questions are exceptional contexts in which to develop powerful theories that actually work to predict and change human behavior. CHIP would also be multidisciplinary, rather than adopting the typical structure of a university department, which supports only a single discipline. A multidisciplinary approach to health problems (e.g., involving behavioral scientists from different disciplines working together with physicians, nurses, and even patients) could produce sophisticated approaches to health issues, as

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well as considerable synergies. Many aspects of CHIP would foster multidisciplinary health behavior change research. CHIP would assist its members in forming multidisciplinary research groups, fund pilot work by these teams, and ultimately assist them to identify funders for the resulting large-scale research, intervention implementation, and/or dissemination projects. It would attempt to offer more administrative support to those with grants than did typical university departments so that researchers could focus on what they do best— research and application—rather than grants administration. In contrast to many university departments, CHIP would have a scholarly, an applied, and an entrepreneurial focus. It would also have a somewhat different culture: be faster paced, be more able to react quickly and outside the box administratively, and be more service oriented toward its afﬁliates. Universities sometimes create “centers” to serve these types of functions, and in some cases, provide them with signiﬁcant ﬁnancial support. The University of Connecticut already had several centers, but none of them performed the type of work I envisioned for CHIP. So I petitioned the university to start a new center with the characteristics outlined above.

CHIP’S PREDECESSOR Bill and I had been involved in HIV prevention research since the start of the HIV epidemic in the early 1980s. We planned our ﬁrst HIV-related research study sitting around our parents’ dining room table in Ohio one Thanksgiving, and we crystallized the ideas that ultimately were reﬂected in the theoretical model that would guide most of our health behavior change research at a breakfast table at an early HIV prevention conference in Vermont. Our ﬁrst HIV prevention research, and the initial work of CHIP’s predecessor, ARRP, in 1985, focused on the relationship between fear of AIDS and AIDS preventive behavior. It addressed the question, Was a particular level of fear of HIV associated with optimal levels of HIV preventive behavior? The research was funded with a $1,000 grant from the Society for the Scientiﬁc Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), followed by a $50,000 grant on this topic from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and several small grants from the University of Connecticut. ARRP’s—and our—ﬁrst large grant (for about $2 million) was from the U.S. NIMH, beginning in 1989 and extending to 1995. It focused on a theory-based approach to designing, implementing, and evaluating HIV risk behavior change interventions in college students. As part of that grant, we created an intervention for mixed-sex groups of college students—implemented in dormitories—that was effective in lowering students’ HIV risk behavior. The work was based on the Information, Motivation, Behavioral Skills (IMB) model of HIV risk and prevention (J. Fisher & Fisher, 1992; W. Fisher & Fisher, 1993; J. Fisher & Fisher, 2002; W. Fisher, Fisher, & Harman, 2003; J. Fisher, Fisher, & Shuper, in press) initially developed over breakfast in Vermont, which has since been very widely cited and used in health behavior change research at CHIP and internationally. From 1995

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to 2000 our work focused on using the IMB model to design, implement, and evaluate cutting-edge interventions to reduce HIV risk behavior in minority urban high school students. It pitted peer-based versus teacher-based HIV prevention interventions against one another in an effort to ascertain the most effective way to perform large-scale HIV prevention interventions in urban high schools. As part of this work, we developed a low-cost HIV prevention intervention for inner-city high school students that changed their AIDS risk behavior and maintained it at lower levels. The seeds of the much larger entity that CHIP comprises today were sown in 1997 when the university approved the formation of the Center for HIV Intervention and Prevention, the predecessor to the current CHIP. (So in a sense, this chapter is written on CHIP’s tenth anniversary.) By 1997 Bill and I were competing with much larger organizations for very substantial grants, and the name AIDS Risk Reduction Project (ARRP) was obsolete. Organizations with similar names were based in the community, not in academia, and were doing a very different type of work, so I asked the university for permission to start a new multidisciplinary center to replace ARRP. I believed this would help us win our next, much larger grant. This project focused on developing, implementing, and evaluating theory-based interventions to change HIV risk behavior in seropositive individuals (people living with HIV/AIDS). It was a huge departure for the HIV prevention ﬁeld since the bulk of extant HIV prevention interventions were done with seronegatives (people who did not have HIV). Typical interventions attempted to help prevent seronegatives from acquiring HIV but ignored seropositives, who—if they did not practice safer sexual and drug use behavior—could spread HIV and damage their own health by acquiring other pathogens. Clearly, a more complete approach to HIV prevention would have to involve interventions for both seropositives and seronegatives. Based on the strength of our previous work, in 1997 the university agreed to initiate the new multidisciplinary center, without committing any money, and with the stipulation that it must quickly succeed in acquiring substantial outside funding. The document authorizing the center stated that if substantial funding did not follow, the center could be closed. Fortunately, instead, $3.5 million for our seropositives prevention research project was provided by the U.S. NIMH. The project involved teaching physicians theory-based approaches to having effective conversations about prevention with their seropositive patients in order to help lower patients’ levels of risky sexual and drug use behavior. The physicianbased intervention was successful, and has since been modiﬁed for use by other types of health care providers with seropositive individuals. This intervention approach has been disseminated throughout the world. In addition to the seropositives prevention project, the grant proposals that CHIP submitted for other projects were also successful. Much to CHIP’s good fortune, in the next few years, critical new faculty and other PhDs with research interests and/or funding in HIV prevention were recruited to UConn, and they joined CHIP. Adding Blair Johnson, Kerry Marsh, Deborah Cornman, Rivet

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Amico, Mike Copenhaver, and Bede Agocha turned CHIP into a much more substantial operation. CHIP also began to receive institutional support from the Department of Psychology, the dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the vice provost for Research and Graduate Education (VPRGE), and began to thrive as an expanded entity. There were still critical unﬁlled needs for increased center support, so in 2002, CHIP began to negotiate a successor agreement with the university. Under this new agreement, CHIP would become one of a select few university research centers, and would receive substantial institutional support. The university would provide CHIP with newly constructed, 9,000 square feet of research and ofﬁce space as well as funds to create a shared research and administrative infrastructure. Since our ﬁrst grant, all CHIP research administration had been done solely by the Department of Psychology. It was important to have some of our own administrative staff located physically within the center so they could perform essential work “close to home” and still interface with the Department of Psychology. The agreement also included money for seed grants to fund pilot research to provide promising data and to lead to more successful, and larger, externally funded projects. Under the new agreement, CHIP’s charge was to become a major multidisciplinary center for health behavior change research throughout the University of Connecticut system. Consistent with this charge, CHIP undertook an extensive inventory to identify faculty with interests in health behavior change research across the several campuses of the university. Faculty with relevant interests were asked if they wanted to afﬁliate with the center, and CHIP went from having 5 afﬁliates in 2002 to over 115 at present. Also in 2002, with the help of the Psychology Department head, the dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the provost, we recruited Seth Kalichman, an important HIV prevention researcher, to come to UConn from Wisconsin Medical College. At that point, CHIP afﬁliates included psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, communications scientists, nursing scientists, kinesiologists, nutritional scientists, statisticians, physicians, psychiatrists, computer scientists, and others representing each school and college of the institution (Photo 12.1). In addition, graduate students who received their PhDs with CHIP faculty began to afﬁliate formally when they received their degrees and continued their afﬁliation from their new institutions. Faculty from other universities in the United States and abroad with interests in health behavior change joined CHIP as well. To accommodate this inﬂux of new afﬁliates, CHIP began to hire more of its own administrative personnel and took over a greater share of its administrative work. Yearly external grant funding for CHIP research grew geometrically. In 2002 total costs expended by CHIP on research comprised about $1.4 million. Dramatically, CHIP research funding has grown almost sixfold, to $8.3 million per year, since CHIP became a university research center in 2002. This was done in several ways. We “primed the pump” and stimulated additional research grant applications in existing CHIP faculty afﬁliates and research personnel by providing seed grants

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Figure 12.1 Some of CHIP’s Research Afﬁliates: from left, Bill Fisher, Michael Copenhaver, Jeff Fisher, Seth Kalichman, Leslie Snyder, Blair Johnson, Kerry Marsh, Bede Agocha, Deborah Cornman. Courtesy of Dollie Harvey, University of Connecticut.

for promising research likely to lead to external funding. Seed grant proposals are reviewed by a panel of CHIP experts using NIMH grant review criteria and rules, and mentoring reviews are provided to applicants. If a proposal is not funded, suggestions are given on how to make it stronger for the next round of seed grants. Moreover, we provide faculty with information on potential external grantfunding opportunities, form groups of researchers to pursue them (when necessary), and support these groups in any way possible. CHIP provides institutional funding for both substantive and statistical/methodological presubmission reviews of CHIP external grant applications by outside experts to give its afﬁliates an “edge” in the peer review process. CHIP also hosts an active, biweekly lunch time “health behavior change” speaker series with internationally known guest speakers who meet with interested CHIP faculty and students to discuss their interests and stimulate new research. Universities often do not provide faculty who have grants with adequate administrative support, and therefore having a grant can become a burden. CHIP attempts to provide excellent administrative support to its afﬁliates after their grants are funded. Because of CHIP’s very large increase in outside grant funds, since 2002 there has been substantial growth in the university’s funding of CHIP’s research infrastructure, which assists CHIP’s grant-funded faculty. In the past ﬁve years, the UConn administration has provided CHIP with several administrative positions to handle grant- and center-related ﬁnancial, personnel, and programrelated matters, and with additional monies to fund seed grants to support future faculty research. In 2002 the CHIP administrative team had only one employee; in 2007 there were eleven CHIP administrative employees (8.25 FTE). Overall, CHIP’s administrative and operations budget from the university has increased

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from about $350,000 in 2002 to about $800,000 in 2007. There has been a corresponding increase in grant-funded research employees. In 2002 CHIP had a relatively small number of these staff members, but in 2008, there were about 100 grant-funded research staff working on CHIP research projects in Connecticut and around the world. The more than twofold increase per year in university support and the sixfold increase per year in external grant funding (from $1.4 to $8.3 million) since 2002 have helped CHIP develop new HIV prevention interventions in South Africa, Mozambique, China, Uganda, India, Russia, Thailand, Vietnam, New Zealand, and Ukraine. This work has included HIV prevention interventions that focus on seronegative and seropositive individuals, as well as on heterosexual, homosexual, and injection drug using populations, among others. Other groups that have been the focus of CHIP’s HIV prevention interventions have involved adolescents, sexually transmitted disease clinic patients, soldiers in African countries, and prisoners. Some of CHIP’s intervention work is designed to beneﬁt a particular group of individuals in a particular place. But much more often and as a matter of principle, CHIP interventions are built from the very start so that that if they are found to be effective, they can be disseminated nationally and internationally, and reach very large numbers of people cheaply and effectively. Innovative work in this realm has involved interventions that have peers, rather than traditional interveners, intervene to help other peers practice safer sex and drug use. In addition to my own work, this type of intervention has been implemented by Bob Broadhead, Bill Fisher, and Seth Kalichman, among others. Peers have certain advantages as interveners, in that they can “walk the walk, and talk the talk” of the target population, have greater access to them, and perhaps have greater credibility with them than others might have. Peers also have a unique ability to advocate new behaviors and in so doing, to change group norms and expectations for what types of behavior are acceptable, which can help maintain behavior change over time. Although initiating new, healthier behaviors is critical to health behavior change, it is maintaining these new behaviors over long periods of time that is essential for substantial, sustained changes in public health. Effective peer-based interventions developed in CHIP have involved urban, minority, high school students intervening to promote HIV prevention in other students, and even having active injection drug users intervene to promote HIV prevention in other active injection drug users. We have also identiﬁed some unique situations in which peer-based interventions may fail (e.g., when peer networks are unstable, or when peer interveners begin to display, over time, antisocial behaviors inconsistent with what they advocated in the intervention). Peers have been used in other novel ways in CHIP’s HIV prevention interventions. We have found that individuals in some groups that practice risky behavior feel invulnerable to HIV—they believe they could never become HIV positive. When asked what it would take to make them feel vulnerable to HIV, these individuals often answer “show me someone who is ‘just like me,’ who practices the same risk behaviors that I practice, but who has contracted HIV,” or “show me that

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someone who I consider attractive, and could imagine myself having sex with, could be HIV infected.” This has led us to create powerful videos of real people living with HIV, some of whom are very attractive, who tell their stories and establish their similarities to high school or college student audiences. Each of these people contracted HIV in high school or college. We have found that exposure to these videos increases HIV testing behavior in the audience, and in concert with the other HIV prevention intervention components, leads to sustained behavior change in young people. Another area in which CHIP researchers have taken the lead is in interventions to promote safer sex among individuals living with HIV/AIDS. Historically, most HIV prevention interventions have focused on helping HIV seronegative individuals stay uninfected. The most effective way to accomplish this goal involves ﬁelding a “mixture” of interventions, some targeting seronegatives and others targeting seropositives—and promoting safer sex and drug use in both populations. Interventions for seropositives can help them practice safer behaviors, so they do not spread the virus to seronegatives or infect themselves with other pathogens. CHIP research on understanding the unique HIV risk dynamics of seropositives (which differ in important ways from risk dynamics among seronegatives), and on learning how to harness this knowledge and use it to change risky behaviors in this critical population, has been pathbreaking. The Healthy Relationships and Options interventions for seropositives developed at CHIP by Kalichman and associates, and by Bill, myself, and our associates, respectively, have been disseminated worldwide. Other interventions for seropositives developed at CHIP have involved helping them to adhere to antiretroviral medications (ARVs), which can save their lives. If people on ARVs don’t take the medicines about 95 percent of the time, and many do not, they can develop a resistant virus, which is difﬁcult to impossible to treat, and which can be transmitted to others through unsafe sex or drug use. People infected by these individuals may also contract difﬁcult to impossible-to-treat viruses. High levels of ARV adherence, which are critical to avoid developing a resistant virus and transmitting it through risky behavior, are very difﬁcult to maintain and must be sustained indeﬁnitely. Therefore, creating adherenceenhancement interventions is challenging and at the same time astoundingly important. Theory-based interventions by Kalichman’s team and our team, and by others in CHIP, have helped seropositive individuals increase and sustain their adherence to ARVs. One CHIP intervention program, funded by NIMH, involved creating software to assess the dynamics of each patient’s nonadherence, and offering highly engaging, interactive, tailored interventions to address and remediate the causes of poor adherence. With a strong presence in the HIV prevention and ARV adherence ﬁelds, CHIP moved to diversify to other health behavior change areas. This was motivated partly by the university’s mandate for CHIP to become a broadly based health behavior change center, partly by the fact that CHIP’s expertise could easily be applied in other health behavior change areas, and partly because, as in the stock market, a broad grant portfolio protects against a “downturn” in research funding

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in any one area. CHIP already had excellent research on issues related to research synthesis, by Blair Johnson and associates, in its portfolio. This research involves the use of sophisticated statistical procedures to assess across multiple research studies and determine what types of interventions are most effective for preventing a given health threat. Some of Johnson’s research synthesis work was in the HIV prevention realm, and some was in other health behavior change areas. Additional new research outside HIV prevention included work by Leslie Snyder and associates on using social marketing techniques to promote healthy behavior, work on cancer prevention and on assisting individuals to cope with cancer, research on reducing adverse self-medication behaviors in older adults, and work on pregnancy prevention, exercise genomics, and diet and exercise interventions for diabetics, among other studies. The move to diversify CHIP’s research portfolio is still under way, and is critical. In 2005 CHIP introduced the Center for Health Communication and Marketing (CHCM), headed by Leslie Snyder, which is a U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC)–funded “center-within-a center” in CHIP. CHCM, like CHIP, addresses health behavior change across several areas. It helps anchor CHIP in a broader domain of health behavior change arenas, expands its depth of expertise to communications sciences (CHIP had previously been especially strong in psychological approaches to health behavior change), and provides a greater diversity of funding streams (most previous CHIP funding had come from the U.S. National Institutes of Health [NIH]). Breadth of focus is important, and diversity of funders is crucial. As previously stated, CHIP expertise has the potential to beneﬁt public health in many realms, and it would be desirable to be able to do so. Moreover, diversiﬁcation across health behavior change areas and funders—involving both public funding sources (such as the CDC and NIH) and private sources (such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation)—is important. To date, CHIP’s external grant support has consisted predominantly of public funding. Although CHIP has been very successful obtaining such resources, future efforts to develop more privately funded research are important. Today, some of the most innovative and important prevention work worldwide is being funded by private organizations such as the Gates Foundation. Although we have attempted to diversify the breadth of CHIP’s research portfolio across health behavior change domains, we struggle with the question of how far to move beyond our roots in HIV prevention. In an ideal world, with unlimited funds and personnel, the answer would be clear. But university funds available to CHIP for additional expansion of its faculty and research are limited, and we have to make careful choices. Mostly, CHIP has to rely for new afﬁliates on faculty recruited to the university for another reason (e.g., the teaching and/or research needs of a university department), who then choose CHIP as the place to base their research. CHIP cannot dictate their areas of expertise, and is fortunate when new faculty interests correspond to CHIP’s needs. Such additions, while critical, do not permit CHIP to grow in new areas in a planful way.

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With a ﬁnite budget, planful growth could mean taking funds from some of our programs (e.g., seed grants, presubmission grant reviews, “brown bag” lectures) and investing them in a new area (e.g., a position to bolster CHIP cancer prevention research and coordinate cancer prevention activities). Should CHIP take resources from current areas of strength—which are providing support for the entire CHIP research enterprise—and put them into new areas, quite possibly at a cost to our current functions? Too much of this sort of activity could be risky. At this point, we have made a commitment to attempt to expand our foci in a few new, health-related areas; with more ﬁnancial support and the addition of new university faculty with interests in other health domains, broader-based expansion could become possible. One way for CHIP to diversify successfully and quickly is for it to recruit several new senior researchers with large—and already funded—grant portfolios in select new areas. Rather than being a “university department” hire with a CHIP co-afﬁliation, such a hire would be a CHIP hire ﬁrst, with departmental tenure and co-afﬁliation. This could quickly jump start research in a new domain. We are currently recruiting two senior faculty investigators with research interests in any of these areas: alcohol and drug abuse; prevention, treatment and management of chronic diseases such as cancer, obesity, or metabolic syndrome; health risk reduction in other areas; health communication marketing campaigns; dissemination of effective health behavior change interventions; and intervention cost-effectiveness analysis. Unfortunately, these types of hires are very rare for university centers. If we can use them to add new research foci and simultaneously add synergy to some of our current areas, we will be optimally successful.

THE UNIVERSITY’S MOTIVATION TO SUPPORT CHIP Aside from small “seed grant” projects, all of CHIP’s research expenditures are supported entirely by its success at winning external grants. Simply put, our grants pay the costs of our research. Since 2002 CHIP has successfully competed for over $54 million in new federal grants, and current annual CHIP research expenditures are about $8.3 million. Historically, about 60 percent of the external grant dollars CHIP researchers apply for are ultimately funded, which is an enviable rate of success. This is likely because of the quality of CHIP researchers and CHIP research, as well as the activities CHIP engages in to help its researchers succeed—seed grants, external presubmission reviews of grants by experts, and others. Outside of research expenditures, all of CHIP’s operating expenses have been borne by the University of Connecticut, which has invested about $3.1 million to cover these expenses (e.g., costs of funding personnel and equipment for CHIP administration; expenses for seed grants, furniture, ofﬁce supplies, and more) since 2002. The university has also invested about $4 million in constructing about 15,000 square feet of new space for CHIP researchers and administration during the past ﬁve years. This has made it possible for CHIP to have researchers from different disciplines under one roof, which creates a great deal of synergy in common physical and intellectual space.

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Why would a university make such an investment? Universities value research and teaching, as well as providing service to the community, the state, and ultimately the world. In fact, research, teaching, and service comprise a university’s stated mission. The work CHIP does is highly consistent with the research mission of a university, the most valued of the three by many academics. CHIP faculty afﬁliates have performed pathbreaking research with important conceptual and applied signiﬁcance, and published their work in top-ranking journals. This work has been highly inﬂuential in the health behavior change ﬁeld and has been widely disseminated. Within the research mission of a university, “basic” research has historically been afforded somewhat greater value than applied research— which is CHIP’s major focus. In addition to the research mission of a university, the type of work done at CHIP might also favorably impact on faculty members’ teaching, contributing new theoretical models and compelling applications and illustrations of them. Finally, research that impacts the public health is quite consistent with a university’s service mission. So in terms of consistency with the tripartite mission of a major research university, CHIP’s work is appealing, although perhaps not the most appealing type of activity in which faculty members might engage. So what else explains the university’s willingness to invest in CHIP over the past several years? In addition to serving the missions of the university, the type of work CHIP performs, which is funded by external sponsors (e.g., NIMH, the CDC, state governments, and private foundations) confers signiﬁcant ﬁnancial advantages to the university. Each grant carries a charge (termed “indirect costs” and ranging from 40 percent to over 60 percent, or even higher, depending on the institution), to pay for the facilities required to perform the work and other necessary activities such as business and accounting services. University research that is not externally funded requires the same types of expenditures (e.g., for facilities), but the costs are not paid by outside funders and must be absorbed by the university. Although one might not like to think of universities as businesses, in many ways they are. The money brought into the institution by the grants CHIP receives, and the prestige associated with these grants—in addition to the contributions of grantfunded work to the missions of the university—are major motivators for the institution to support the types of activities in which CHIP engages. When we initially applied to the university for center status in 1997, without requesting funding, the administration’s acceptance of the proposal was likely motivated by the fact that the work the new center would do could enhance the university’s mission. Another critical factor was likely that a successful center could attract substantial research funding and prestige. In 2002, after receiving several more very large grants, we petitioned the university for a new agreement requiring the commitment of substantial university resources: startup expenses to support a much larger multidisciplinary center, funds to cover the yearly costs of running the center (i.e., funds to cover the administrative costs of the center, seed grant funds, and other costs), and monies to build a facility to house the center. The 2002 request was for about $350,000 for the ﬁrst year (to provide startup administrative staff and seed grants), a percentage return on the indirect costs

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generated by new grants to the center, and a research/ofﬁce facility that would cost about $2 million. (In subsequent years, the base operating budget was increased, and the percentage return on indirect costs was dropped.) The university agreed to the request, likely because a strong center could help the institution meet the research and service aspects of its mission, but also because of the ﬁnancial beneﬁts associated with supporting a center that was clearly highly successful at winning grants and apt to become even more so. The same motivation likely was responsible for the funding of construction of an expanded CHIP facility in 2006 (6,000 square feet, opening in 2007, to augment the initial 9,000 square feet constructed in 2003) at a cost of about $1.5 million. A factor in this decision was also the likelihood that without additional space, it would be impossible for CHIP to continue to grow its grant portfolio. In 2007, to help ensure CHIP’s long-term growth and to assist it in expanding its research base, CHIP was provided with two tenure-track faculty positions, described above. What overall returns to the university can be used to justify these expenditures? CHIP’s grant portfolio has grown phenomenally since 2002, when the university began to support the center by funding its administrative operations and constructing space for CHIP. During the period 2002 to the present, yearly CHIP grant funding has grown sixfold. Over $54 million in new funding, some of which extends well into the future, has been obtained, which has supported a great deal of research activity by UConn scholars at CHIP. During the period 2002 to the present, yearly indirect cost returns to the university generated by CHIP’s grants, which under Connecticut law can be used by the institution to improve its research infrastructure (e.g., provide research funding to faculty without grants; purchase research equipment for university departments), have ranged from about $0.3 million in 2002 to about $1.9 million in 2007 and 2008, and have totaled in excess of $9 million. The home departments of CHIP faculty afﬁliates and their deans also beneﬁt from indirect returns from CHIP grants (i.e., each receives a percentage of the indirect costs generated by CHIP grants from members of their faculty). Other nonﬁnancial beneﬁts to the institution from CHIP grants involve producing exceptional scholarship, contributing to the solution of critical worldwide health problems, helping to recruit and retain excellent faculty and graduate students, and providing graduate assistantships and unique research settings to support training of a very substantial number of graduate students per year. During the 2002–8 interval, total operating cost expenditures on CHIP by the university have equaled $3.1 million, and construction costs for CHIP facilities have equaled $4 million. At this point in CHIP’s history, the university has expended about $7.1 million on CHIP operations and facilities ($3.1 and $4 million, respectively), and has had $9 million in indirect costs returned to it. At present, since CHIP has sufﬁcient space in which to grow, indirect costs recovered from new grants can continue to increase without additional facility costs, and the university may ultimately have made quite a reasonable investment return when considering

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ﬁnancial and other beneﬁts (e.g., to its standing among major U.S. research universities, to its research portfolio, to recruiting and retaining excellent faculty and graduate students, and to funding graduate student training). CHIP’s operating expenses over time, which are paid for entirely by the institution, have increased at a much slower pace than CHIP’s grant portfolio or its indirect cost returns. This suggests economies of scale and provides conﬁdence that, over time, indirect costs generated by CHIP grants will very substantially overtake the funds the university has expended on CHIP operating expenses and facilities construction. (In the years 2002 to present, CHIP’s indirect returns to the university from its grants have ranged from twice its operating budget from the institution, to over four times its operating budget).

EVOLUTION OF CHIP’S STRUCTURE OVER TIME As CHIP has grown over time, its structure has evolved. CHIP was “born” within the UConn Department of Psychology and performed its administrative functions with assistance from that department until September 2007. Until 2004 most major decisions were made by the CHIP director and the Psychology Department chair, with informal consultation from CHIP afﬁliates. In 2004 CHIP’s director began to report to the university vice provost for Research and Graduate Education (VPRGE), and CHIP continued to receive oversight and substantial administrative support from the Psychology Department. Most major decisions continued to be made by its director in consultation with the Psychology Department head and the VPRGE, again with informal consultation from CHIP afﬁliates. In a sense, CHIP was relatively “closely held” by the university. The reason CHIP initially received administrative support from the Psychology Department and did not function as an independent entity was because, as a young organization, there were economies of scale in “bundling” administrative services. In addition, CHIP did not have a sufﬁciently deep or mature business staff to become administratively independent until about 2006. The relationship with the Psychology Department to help administer CHIP’s business was critical in the early years; indeed, CHIP could not have thrived without the tremendous assistance it received from the Psychology Department and its chair, Charles Lowe. Later, as CHIP matured and became capable of functioning independently, it became clear that administrative efﬁciencies could be achieved from separating from the Psychology Department and running its own business operations. In 2007, in anticipation of becoming administratively independent, CHIP formed a more active executive committee made up of junior and senior CHIP afﬁliates. This committee meets four or more times a year and broadly advises the director and associate director on matters of interest and concern. One of the major challenges CHIP faces at present is becoming a center with a number of faculty and staff leaders, not just in research, but in administration. To this end, the position of CHIP associate director Deborah Cornman has been expanded in the past few years. CHIP is also involving additional faculty afﬁliates

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in its administrative leadership. Its founding director (the author of this chapter) will likely retire in the next ﬁve years, and for CHIP to continue to thrive, its leadership needs to become broader, deeper, and more decentralized. This is being done through having a vital executive committee and generally by becoming a more inclusive organization. Another element that could foster more broad-based leadership would be for CHIP’s structure to evolve, over time, to be more similar to traditional NIMH-funded research centers. This would involve the creation of several “cores” that perform critical functions for the center, each with its own leadership (CHIP is not, at this time, an NIMH-funded center, but it may aspire to become one in the future). In this context, CHIP might evolve to have an active administrative core (led by its director, associate director, and the CHIP business team leader) as well as a formal methods core, responsible for supporting CHIP researchers and ensuring that CHIP grants use state-of-the-science research methods and statistical procedures. CHIP could also develop a formal developmental core, charged with assisting CHIP scientists in the development of new research proposals. This group could also oversee the provision of seed grant funds and presubmission reviews of grant applications, and provide information about external funding possibilities. Since many CHIP afﬁliates have a serious interest in intervention dissemination— relatively unique among research centers—and since CHIP has had substantial success in this domain, adding a dedicated dissemination core, which would specialize in developing theory and research on the science of successfully disseminating evidence-based interventions, would also be desirable. A center organization in terms of cores, each with its own leadership, could broaden CHIP leadership and encourage more activity on the part of rank-and-ﬁle CHIP members, who would belong to the cores. It could create additional synergies within the center, provide new opportunities and beneﬁts for junior faculty, and position CHIP to apply successfully for NIMH or CDC center grant funds. Some of the challenges CHIP faces involve whether it will be able to continue to grow at its current pace in an environment in which federal grant funding is leveling off and in some cases decreasing (Loscalzo, 2006; Zerhouni, 2006). The fact that CHIP performs multidisciplinary research may help in this respect, since multidisciplinary work is consistent with the “NIH roadmap” and is not targeted for decreased funding (Zerhouni, 2003). As with grant funds, it may ultimately be a challenge for CHIP to continue to obtain increased operating funds from the university to support its programs. Assuming that CHIP can continue to increase its grant portfolio and operating funds, it is absolutely critical that the center not grow too fast. At times in its short history, CHIP’s growth has outstripped its ability to provide services to its afﬁliates, which has caused temporary difﬁculties. Geometric growth can create organizational problems and pressures for limited resources and physical space. Too much growth can also change the character of an organization which initially made it appealing. In sum, the challenge for us is to choose the right rate of growth in the face of a myriad of seemingly attractive opportunities.

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CONCLUSION It has been a privilege for me to have had the opportunity to start CHIP, and to have helped create and inﬂuence the development of an organization that attempts to aid others in need. In just a few years, CHIP has gone from having a couple of grants, a couple of researchers, and a couple of graduate students, in a couple of rooms on the second ﬂoor of the UConn psychology building, to a very substantial enterprise with its own facility. Along the way, I ﬁrmly believe that some of our efforts have beneﬁted the public health of vulnerable populations, and, hopefully, saved more than a few lives. For me, the University of Connecticut has been a place where I was able to have a promising idea (for CHIP) and receive the tremendous and continuing support needed to turn it into reality and to sustain it. Throughout my career, I have continuously been amazed at the “places I’ve been able to go,” to quote Dr. Seuss. Part of this success has been because of wonderful partners, such as my brother, Bill, and others too numerous to name, over a career of thirtythree years. All are terribly important to me, and some are among my best friends. I have had the good fortune to have had truly magniﬁcent collaborators, graduate students, and staff in my own research programs and wonderful staff within the CHIP administration. They wear many hats, work very long hours, and go beyond the call of duty daily. They are committed to the goals of our research and to the vision of the center. Among these folks, Deborah Cornman, associate director, has been an important part of the CHIP administration from the start. My wife and family have always been supportive of my work with CHIP. My career in psychology has given me the opportunity to contribute to science, build theory, and engage in an ever-changing array of extremely interesting projects with potentially great practical signiﬁcance. I have been able to have fascinating discussions about what promotes healthy and unhealthy behavior, apply for grants with extraordinarily talented groups of people, and obtain the funding needed for large-scale health behavior change intervention research projects that can beneﬁt public health. I have been a part of the creation of amazing teams of people, who have gone on to do almost unbelievable things. I have met and worked with wonderful people worldwide, and have immensely enjoyed being part of the growth of exceptional postdoctorate, graduate, and undergraduate students and staff at the university and elsewhere. It is a pleasure to watch people grow to do—consistently and well—what they at ﬁrst never thought they could ever do, just as it has been a pleasure to grow in these ways myself over the past thirty-three years. I have never been bored, even for a moment. Acknowledgments Thanks to William Fisher, Wynne Norton, and Beth Krane for the helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Thanks to NIMH for over twenty years of continuous research support.

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ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Center for Health, Intervention, and Prevention (CHIP) Founder/Director: Jeffrey D. Fisher Mission/Description: The University of Connecticut’s Center for Health, Intervention, and Prevention (CHIP) creates new scientiﬁc knowledge and theoretical frameworks in the areas of health behavior, health behavior change, health intervention, and prevention. It disseminates theory-based knowledge and new, cutting-edge interventions through research, capacity building, teaching, mentoring, and collaboration at the university, local, state, national, and international levels. Website: http://www.chip.uconn.edu/int_res_int.htm Address: Center for Health, Intervention, and Prevention (CHIP) University of Connecticut 2006 Hillside Road, Unit 1248 Storrs, CT 06269-1248 Phone: 860-486-5917 Fax: 860-486-4876 E-mail: jeffrey.ﬁ[email protected] [email protected] (Lisa Dunnack, administrative assistant) [email protected] (Sarah Bothell, webmaster)

REFERENCES Fisher, J. D., & Fisher, W. A. (1992). Changing AIDS-Risk Behavior. Psychological Bulletin, 111, 455–474. Fisher, J. D., & Fisher, W. A. (2002). The Information-Motivation-Behavioral Skills Model. In R. DiClemente, R. Crosby, & M. Kegler. (Eds.). Emerging Theories in Health Promotion Practice and Research (pp. 40–70). San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Fisher, J. D., Fisher, W. A., & Shuper, P. A. (In press). The Information-Motivation-Behavioral Skills Model of HIV Preventive Behavior. In R. DiClemente, R. Crosby, & M. Kegler. (Eds.). Emerging Theories in Health Promotion Practice and Research (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Fisher, J. D., Cornman, D. H., Norton, W. E., & Fisher, W. A. (2006). Involving Behavioral Scientists, Health Care Providers, and HIV-Infected Patients as Collaborators in Theory-Based HIV Prevention and Antiretroviral Adherence Interventions. JAIDS, 43, S10–S17. Fisher, W. A., & Fisher, J. D. (1993). Understanding and Promoting AIDS Preventive Behavior: A Conceptual Model and Educational Tools. Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, 1, 99–106.

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Fisher, W. A., Fisher, J. D., & Harman, J. J. (2003). The Information-Motivation-Behavioral Skills Model: A General Social Psychological Approach to Understanding and Promoting Health Behavior. In J. Suls & K. Wallston. (Eds.). Social Psychological Foundations of Health and Illness (pp. 82–105). United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishers. Loscalzo, J. (2006). The NIH Budget and the Future of Biomedical Research. New England Journal of Medicine, 354(16), 1665–1667. UNAIDS, (2007). 2007 AIDS Epidemic Update: Executive Summary. Retrieved December 2, 2007, from UNAIDS website: http://www.unaids.org/en/KnowledgeCentre/HIVData/ EpiUpdate/EpiUpdArchive/2007/default.asp. Zerhouni, E. (2003). The NIH Roadmap. Science, 302, 63-64, 72. Zerhouni, E. A. (2006). NIH in the Post-Doubling Era: Realities and Strategies. Science, 314(5802), 1088–1090.

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

REMEDY (Recovered Medical Equipment for the Developing World) is an organization dedicated to promoting the recovery of unused medical supplies for the purposes of providing aid, reducing waste, and promoting cost-effectiveness. As a catalyst for change, this group seeks to inspire through education, practice, and example. REMEDY is committed to cooperating with other charitable organizations engaged in similar activities. By working together, these organizations hope to more efﬁciently and reliably respond to those in needs.

BACKGROUND Founded in 1991 by William H. Rosenblatt, MD, professor of anesthesiology at Yale University School of Medicine, REMEDY is a group of health care professionals who promote the nationwide recovery of opened-but-unused surgical supplies. The end goal of their mission is to provide international medical relief and to reduce solid medical waste in hospitals. During the 1980s, Dr. Rosenblatt was a pediatrician in training at Stanford University in California. He was well aware of the Inter-plast program in Palo Alto: the ﬁrst program of its kind to perform cleft lip and cleft palate surgery for the indigenous peoples of Latin America. As a trainee in pediatrics, Dr. Rosenblatt did not have the opportunity to participate in mission trips, but when he came to Yale as a trainee in anesthesiology, he found that trip anesthesiology residents were in high demand. He started traveling to Latin America to provide anesthesia for cleft lip and cleft palate surgeries. These medical missions had a profound impact on him. He was exposed to the lack of adequate equipment and the problems

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that this created. With this new insight, he returned to a modern operating room and noted that the exact same equipment— excess supplies prepared for surgery— was being discarded without ever being used. As a result, Dr. Rosenblatt formed REMEDY in 1988. He began recovering unused supplies from operating rooms at Yale-New Haven Hospital. He discovered that nurses and doctors at other facilities had been attempting to collect unused supplies as well, but without a formalized program. The great disparity in the conditions between operating rooms in countries where medical supplies are lacking and in modern operating rooms where there is an excess of equipment reinforced Dr. Rosenblatt’s quest to ﬁnd a solution that would bridge this gap. The regulation of medical waste in the United States was also a factor that initially blocked the creation of REMEDY. At about the same time that Dr. Rosenblatt was formulating the concept of a recovery effort, reports of medical waste washing up on the shores of Long Island were appearing in the media. This created a public outcry. A similar mishap was documented at another hospital in Long Island. A barge that was carrying general household waste was found on inspection to be carrying a small amount of medical waste. Eventually, the hospital disposed of the entire barge as medical waste—a costly solution. Medical waste is typically treated chemically and either landﬁlled or incinerated. When there is chemical treatment, there is the potential for the chemicals to leech into the ground water. When medical waste is incinerated, toxins may also be produced. In the early 1990s, U.S. hospitals decided to no longer risk a small amount of medical waste being found in materials that were labeled “general” waste; instead, all hospital waste was labeled “medical” waste. Gloves, sutures, drapes, gowns, and many other items are prepared for use during surgeries, but not all are used. These supplies are discarded nevertheless because they are no longer considered to be “sterile.” This is true even if there has been no contact with a patient. Because of legal concerns, these supplies cannot be used in the United States, but they are enthusiastically accepted by many charitable organizations for distribution to healthcare personnel throughout the developing world. For years healthcare workers have voluntarily collected these supplies; however, such efforts are often erratic and can place both the individual and the institution at legal risk. In addition, these isolated efforts could not possibly recover the huge surplus that becomes available in U.S. hospitals. As a result of these concerns and new procedures, hospitals began producing a tremendous amount of what was designated “medical waste,” with a disposal cost six times that of normal hospital waste. If the hospital could send tons of materials to an organization such as REMEDY, a cost savings could result. REMEDY started as pilot project at Yale-New Haven Hospital (YNHH) in Connecticut. This location also served as a base for research studies conducted by Dr. Rosenblatt in collaboration with Dr. David Silverman. These studies demonstrated the efﬁcacy, cost-effectiveness, and environmental friendliness of supply recovery through the REMEDY program. After the studies were published, inquiries began to pour in from medical professionals from across the United States.

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REMEDY became a nonproﬁt organization committed to teaching about and promoting the recovery of surplus medical supplies. Drs. Rosenblatt and Silverman developed a comprehensive in-service teaching packet with all the information needed to start a standardized recovery program based on the REMEDY model, applicable to any surgical procedure in hospitals throughout the United States. Recovery protocols were designed for easy adaptability in operating rooms and for critical care routines. This educational packet is distributed free of charge to any requesting hospital. Materials can be found at REMEDY’s website, www.remed yinc.org/Content/Educational_Materials.asp.

PHILOSOPHY Rather than reinvent the logistics of charitable medical supply distribution, REMEDY suggested turning to the huge network of U.S.-based nonproﬁt medical charities to form partnerships. It is the mission of these groups to support and successfully deliver medical assistance and supplies to countries in need. These groups have the staff, knowledge, experience, funding, and overseas contacts to successfully deliver recovered supplies to appropriate medical professionals. REMEDY encourages each hospital’s recovery program to target donations to any organization or project they wish. As of June 2004, the REMEDY programs had donated many millions of dollars worth of supplies from operating rooms alone. This has resulted in a vast increase in medical aid sent from the United States to the developing world. To date, REMEDY has assisted more than 600 hospitals around the United States in program implementation and the identiﬁcation of potential recipient charities. REMEDY relies on the expertise of these U.S.–based nonproﬁt agencies to distribute these materials abroad. In 2004 REMEDY became an endorser of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Waste Wise program. By becoming a partner in this program, the REMEDY recovery programs are able to translate the amount of supplies recovered every year into greenhouse gas reductions. Waste Wise uses the EPA’s Waste Reduction Model (WARM) to estimate the amount of gas emissions prevented through an organization’s solid waste reduction activities. There is no fee for membership, and it allows groups to set their own goals that are feasible for their individual organizations. (For more information on Waste Wise, see www.remed yinc.org/Content/Wastewise.asp.)

SUPPLY RECOVERY PROGRAMS In addition to the accomplishments of the REMEDY pilot program at Yale, there has been signiﬁcant success over the years among the hospitals and groups that have requested the REMEDY in-service teaching packet. REMEDY follows up on all requests for teaching packets and on the progress of those initiatives. REMEDY is

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not a membership organization, so it can be difﬁcult to get regular feedback from those who have used REMEDY’s ideas or resources. Protocols REMEDY has developed recovery protocols that are designed to be quickly adaptable to the everyday operating room routine. Although these are the procedures developed for the active pilot program in the operating rooms of Yale-New Haven Hospital (YNHH), they can be modiﬁed to adapt to the demands and resources of each healthcare facility. YNHH uses a “case cart” system, where supplies for each surgical procedure are sent to the operating room on a prepared, wheeled cart. What Supplies Can Be Recovered? This is a sample list of the items commonly recovered through the REMEDY pilot program at YNHH. This list is offered only as an example, and does not imply that other organizations should recover these same items, nor limit their recovery to items that appear on this list. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

4 ⫻ 4 Sponge Absorbable Hemostat Absorbent Towel Ace Bandage Aortic Cannula Arthroscope Drape Burn Dressing C-Arm Drape Cast Padding Cautery Pad Cautery Pencil Cherry Sponge Chest Tube Cone Splash Shield Cover Sponge Disposable Vascular Clip Electrode Electrosurgical Dispersive Endotracheal Tube Extremity Sheet Femoral Irrigation And Suction Tip Set Foley Catheter Heel Protector

• Hemo Clip • Hemovacimpervious Split Drape • Intestinal Sucker • Irrigation Syringe • Iv Set • Jackson Pratt Drain • Lap Set 18x18 • Lap Set 4x18 • Large Drape • Magnetic Pad • Mucus Trap • Open Sponge • Open Sta-Tite • Other Syringe • Paper Towel • Partial Lap 4 ⫻ 18 • Peanut Sponge • Penrose Drain • Prep Solution Pack • Rolled Gauze • Salem Sump • Scalpel Blade (No Sharps Exposed/Foil Intact)

REMEDY

• • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Skin Graft Carrier Skin Marker Skin Staple Soft Suction Specimen Container Staple Remover Steri Strip Steridrape Sterile Gloves Stockinet Impervious Straight Catheter Suction Hose Surgical Gown Surgical Patties (In Package Set)

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• Suture (No Sharps Exposed/Foil Intact) Sponge-Package • Tape Roll: Cloth/Paper • Tissue Stapler And Reﬁll • Tube & Cord Holder • T-U-R-Y Set • Telfa Packaged • Urine Culture Tube • Urine Drainage Bag • Urine Meter • Vascular Occlusion • Vaseﬁne Gauze • Wet Pruf Packaged • Xeroform • Yankeur

CHALLENGES FOR STARTING THE PROGRAM REMEDY has experienced steady and positive growth. REMEDY typically works with one hospital staff member who is motivated to start a REMEDY program. Unfortunately, that individual may ﬁnd roadblocks at the facility. REMEDY works with invested individuals and helps work through any difﬁculties they might face. There are several problems a hospital may experience in creating a REMEDY program, but the most frequent problem is administrative. The administration has to have a clear vision of what needs to be done. One example that demonstrated a need for clear communication was a situation in a hospital in the state of Washington. Although one nurse was diligently working at collecting surplus supplies, the hospital administration thought the REMEDY Recovery Program reﬂected poorly on the hospital. The concern was that the hospital would be seen as wasting too much material. This was a concern shared by the YNHH administration prior to the start of the Yale pilot program. Fortunately, only positive reporting appeared in the media, the authors of which understood that waste is inevitably produced by hospitals, as in other industries. REMEDY was making good use of that so-called hospital waste. Other individuals meet resistance from the hospitals’ risk management services. The perception exists that the hospital could be held liable for injury to a patient abroad. A legal opinion from the Yale School of Law noted that without the sale of the items and with a clear statement that the materials were donated “as is,” the donating facilities were indemniﬁed. Storage is yet another issue. If a hospital is unable to ﬁnd a charity to take their unused materials on a regular basis, storage space (a premium in hospitals) is vital.

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How REMEDY Handles Challenges Although REMEDY has been successful, it has grown slowly. The program has been in place for seventeen years. Instead of making giant strides, Dr. Rosenblatt thinks REMEDY has plodded along. REMEDY has not sought to rush development after having seen similar types of programs fail when they tried to jump ahead too quickly. As Dr. Rosenblatt reﬂects over REMEDY’s past seventeen years, he wishes that he would have tried to secure funding earlier in an attempt to help the program grow faster. He also thinks the hospital projects are too independent, and wishes they would form tighter networks and maintain better communication and ties with each other. This would increase beneﬁts for all involved. The typical hospital’s cost of recovering these supplies has amounted to a minor expense of no more than $200 a year. Additionally, by avoiding the discarding of tons of solid medical waste, a hospital should realize a net savings for the length of time the hospital has participated in the REMEDY program. As a byproduct of the program’s in-house exposure at YNHH, hundreds of thousands of dollars in new disposables and capital equipment have also been donated to the REMEDY pilot program. The majority of these collected supplies have been donated to the following nonproﬁt organizations: • • • • • • •

New Haven/Leon (Nicaragua) Sister Cities Project Albert Schweitzer Institute New Haven/Hue (Vietnam) Sister Cities Project New Haven/Freetown, Sierra Leone, Sister Cities Project PUMA (Operation Blessing Nepal) Knightsbridge International Hand Carry Program

In addition to the accomplishments of the original REMEDY project at Yale, there has been signiﬁcant success in the hospitals that have developed programs based on the REMEDY model. REMEDY currently has 640 hospitals using the model in the United States. These are either established REMEDY hospitals or hospitals that are just joining the program. During the last six months, they have received REMEDY’s written materials and are developing their recovery programs.

REMEDY’S SHOOTING STARS REMEDY is delighted the following programs have embraced the full REMEDY philosophy, not only by running supply recovery programs but also by disseminating the ideas and methods to others: Duke Recovery, MED World, Supplies Overseas (SOS), Medical Bridges, and MedShare International.

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REMEDY TODAY REMEDY shifted from concept to reality by just doing it. Dr. Rosenblatt’s idea of distributing supplies was turned into a working model. Protocols were written and put into a book form to be sent to those interested in the program. There was not a lot of discussion and planning. It was just a question of doing it, and from there, REMEDY simply evolved over time.

HOW REMEDY SUPPORTS ITSELF REMEDY ﬁrst acquired funding through personal donations from medical colleagues and friends. At ﬁrst, efforts were local. The REMEDY annual appeal raises over $10,000 yearly from donators across the United States. Efforts now also include grant writing. REMEDY supports itself primarily through grants and family foundation gifts. A comprehensive list is available on the website at www.remedyinc.org. A teaching packet and a list of other ways in which individuals can contribute are also available on the website. REMEDY’s work is augmented in various ways, including • • • • • •

Online donations: https://payments.auctionpay.com/ver3/?id=w022042 Mail-in donations: www.remedyinc.org/Content/Mail_In_Donations.asp In-kind donations: www.remedyinc.org/Content/In_Kind_Donations.asp Shop online: www.remedyinc.org/Content/Support_Us.asp Wish list: www.remedyinc.org/Content/Wish_List.asp Medical supplies and equipment: make donations by visiting the Medical Equipment Donation Agency (Med-Eq) program at www.med-eq.org/

RAISING AWARENESS FOR REMEDY REMEDY creates educational opportunities for interested hospitals, organizations, and others. By participating in venues that raise awareness, REMEDY shows interested individuals how to start their own programs and network with similar organizations. REMEDY representatives attend several academic and professional meetings throughout the year. One such gathering is the Association of Operating Room Nurses (AORN). REMEDY attends this meeting annually, and has been doing so since 1993. REMEDY also attends the American Society of Anesthesiologists, the American Medical Students’ Association, and Clean Med’s annual meetings. Also, in the 1990s, REMEDY published academic articles that appeared in anesthesiology (1996, 1997), orthopedic (1996), and plastic surgery (1996) journals. Dr. Rosenblatt published two articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) (1992, 1993), and REMEDY received marked interest as a result.

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MEASURES OF SUCCESS Another indication of REMEDY’s success over the past seventeen years is the building of partnerships with students from Yale and other colleges who travel to developing countries for medical and educational projects. REMEDY supplies medical devices for these endeavors. For the Yale students, this is a wonderful opportunity to transport supplies and enhance their experience on these trips.

REMEDY ON DISASTER RELIEF When a natural disaster affects the world community, REMEDY makes no direct contribution to the relief aid in the affected region. REMEDY has long maintained that the millions of dollars of medical supplies collected by associate hospitals are best suited for the chronic shortages that affect the developing world and are not adequate for acute relief. A coordinated relief effort requires immense organization. Predictability and compatibility are of the utmost importance. When a doctor is working in a disaster area, he or she needs to know exactly what supplies are available and how they must be rationed. The healthcare worker has no use for the heterogeneous and often unpredictable supplies that can be donated through the REMEDY recovery process. There is nowhere to store these supplies until they can be used, and the funds used for shipment are better spent elsewhere. Sending boxes of supplies to a disaster region may make people feel good, but in all likelihood would pose a burden on the recipient. Perhaps REMEDY is missing an opportunity to request “disaster donations” from the public, and to receive media attention, but REMEDY believes that donor generosity would be misguided. So how does REMEDY respond to crises? After the acute events are over, the affected communities will continue to need help and the equipment and supplies provided through the REMEDY model. When the international community responds to the next tragedy, REMEDY will be there to help charitable agencies that already have an established long-term commitment to the region.

WHAT ARE THE NEXT STEPS FOR REMEDY? A REMEDY sister project called Med-Eq, which pairs more advanced materials and equipment with charitable agencies, was started in 2005. Begun as e-mail alert system in 1998 (AIRe-mail), Med-Eq is an interactive database website. Items that are not suited to general medical-surgical care are posted on the Med-Eq website. Agencies whose speciﬁc mission can deliver an item to an appropriate site are connected with the donor. REMEDY will be working on revisiting the need for the decontamination of recovered surgical supplies earmarked for donation and will continue its ongoing examination of the legal issues involved in the recovery of surgical supplies from U.S. hospitals.

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REMEDY invites readers to visit the website at www.remedyinc.org. Also, REMEDY networks with groups interested in initiating hospital supply recovery programs, such as • • • • • •

International relief/aid organizations Medical waste-reduction and environmental organizations/professionals Medical ethics groups Government agencies Associations of healthcare professionals and facilities Supply vendors

REMEDY collaborates with interested readers through the website email at www.remedyinc.org/Content/Contact.asp. Anyone interested in waste reduction in hospitals is encouraged to contact Dr. Rosenblatt.

AWARDS REMEDY HAS RECEIVED The prestigious Rolex Award for Enterprise was bestowed upon Dr. William H. Rosenblatt in May 1996. The ﬁve winners of this award (from an initial ﬁeld of 2,300) also received extensive international media coverage. As a result, REMEDY received requests for information from many U.S. hospitals as well as from facilities in Japan, West Africa, Mexico, France, Switzerland, India, Pakistan, Cameroon, Kenya, Canada, Germany, Grenada, the Netherlands, Romania, Philippines, and Ivory Coast. REMEDY received the Cost-effectiveness Award from Anesthesiology News (sponsored by an educational grant from Stuart Pharmaceuticals) in April 1994 for achievement in cost-effectiveness in the operating room. REMEDY has also been awarded the Green Ribbon Award from the New Haven Chamber of Commerce and the Committee on Environmental Issues. REMEDY won the Current Innovations Award (Anesthesiology News magazine) in 1992. In 1999 Alaska state legislature ofﬁcials honored REMEDY for the introduction of the program to hospitals throughout the state.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS William H. Rosenblatt, MD, president, is professor of anesthesiology at Yale University School of Medicine, the founder of REMEDY, its volunteer medical director, and primary author of the seminal articles on recovery published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and others. Dr. Rosenblatt has been the recipient of multiple awards for his work with REMEDY, including the 1996 Rolex Award for Enterprise in Science and Invention. Dr. Rosenblatt was nominated for the Ford Foundation Leadership for a Changing World Award (2000), the Conrad N. Hilton Award (1999), and the Points of Light Award (1999).

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David G. Silverman, MD, vice president, is professor of anesthesiology and director of clinical research, Department of Anesthesiology, Yale University School of Medicine. He is also medical director of the Yale-New Haven Hospital Pre-Admission Center. Dr. Silverman is a highly accomplished investigator with over seventy publications in major medical journals and numerous grant-funded studies; he is the co-author of the seminal articles on recovery published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and others. Chris Ariyan, MPH, director, is the program director for strategic planning with Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield’s East Region. Prior to joining Anthem, he was a healthcare consultant with Deloitte Consulting and Ernst & Young LLP. He was also co-founder and executive vice president of HealthInfo Corp, a Web-based patient and physician education service. Mr. Ariyan received his Master’s of Public Health degree with a concentration in healthcare management from Yale University and was the ﬁrst executive director for REMEDY (1992–97). Catherine Adcock Admay, JD, director, has been a member of the Duke Law School faculty since September 1996. She teaches comparative and public international law, directs the International Development Clinic, and is afﬁliate faculty of the Duke Center for International Development (DCID) at the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University. Prior to her appointment at Duke, she was a lecturer and co-director of the international development clinic at New York University Law School. She has worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Ofﬁce of the Legal Advisor in the United States Department of State, and with private law ﬁrms in Washington, D.C. Darryl Rotman Kuperstock, director, is a past executive director of REMEDY. During her tenure (1995–2003), the organization grew signiﬁcantly, and her service culminated with the development and launch of the current REMEDY website. She brings with her signiﬁcant, diverse professional and volunteer experience in the ﬁelds of management consulting, program and event planning, nonproﬁt organizational leadership development, editing, library science, and the visual arts. Allen Katzoff, director, has spent the past ﬁfteen years managing entrepreneurial initiatives in the nonproﬁt sector. Before that, he spent many years in executive marketing positions with high-technology companies and founded a start-up data compilation company. Currently, he serves as the director of the Center for Adult Learning at Hebrew College in Boston and is on the board of directors of the Vain and Harry Fish Foundation. He was an important advocate of REMEDY’s application to the Fish Foundation, which led not only to an initial gift but also to continued support. He has an MBA from Northeastern University. Mary Koto, PhD, director, has worked for more than twenty years in marketing, strategic planning, and operations in the medical industry.

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Most recently, she served as vice president of marketing for Accumetrics, a privately held cardiovascular diagnostics company. Prior to that, as vice president at LMA North America, she headed marketing and operations, and helped to launch two major anesthesia devices that have inﬂuenced standards of care worldwide. During her years there, she was responsible for LMA-NA becoming a signiﬁcant REMEDY corporate supporter—one of the earliest. Her most important contribution to REMEDY to date was her leading role in the ﬁrst REMEDY staff retreat in December 2004. At her own expense, she traveled from her home in San Diego to meet with the staff for a one-day session during which the REMEDY mission was focused and strengthened. She has a BA and MBA from Stanford University and a PhD in biology from Yale.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: REMEDY Founder: William Rosenblatt, MD Mission/Description: REMEDY, Recovered Medical Equipment for the Developing World, is a nonproﬁt organization committed to teaching about and promoting the recovery of surplus operating room supplies. REMEDY provides proven recovery protocols that can be adapted quickly to everyday operating room or critical care routines. As of June 2006, the REMEDY at Yale University program alone has 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 in the medical aid sent from the United States to the developing world. Website: http://www.remedyinc.org/ Address: 3-TMP, 333 Cedar Street P. O. Box 208051 New Haven, CT 06520-8051 Phone: (203) 737-5356 Fax: (203) 785-2802 E-mail: [email protected]

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14

Center for Global Initiatives Chris E. Stout

Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane. —Martin Luther King Jr.

The Center for Global Initiatives (CGI) is the ﬁrst center devoted to training multidisciplinary healthcare professionals and students to bring services that are integrated, sustainable, and resiliency based, with 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 as a synonym for overseas or international, but rather to indicate local as well as transnational disparities and inequities of health risk and illness outcomes. We seek to eschew the many disconnects between separation of body/mind, physical/mental, and individual/community, and offer instead a synthetic model of integration. CGI’s philosophy and approach is always that of a collaborator and colleague. No “West-Knows-Best” hubris. We learn as we teach. We feel as we treat. We focus on the complex healthcare issues involved in community crises, healthcare inequities, humanitarian emergencies, and relief situations, from the individual care level to a regional scale. All activities are grounded in science/evidence-based practice models and best practices in culturally diverse communities. We will focus on all underserved and economically disadvantaged populations, but hold a special focus on refugees and immigrants both in Chicago and globally. A fundamental approach to all of the center’s work is that individuals need to acquire a sense of control over their lives. We see ourselves as being members of a global community of hope, focusing on inherent 261

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strengths and augmenting recovery and resilience. The center also works via collaborative relationships with medical schools, graduate schools, undergraduate programs, and schools of public health to provide training that will result in an internationally recognized diploma/certiﬁcation in global health. Whew! This is the triumphal rant that one must so often banter in order to gain the coveted 501(c)3 status or the attention of foundations for funding. Put more simply, the CGI works to save lives and teaches others how to do likewise. Period. Full stop.

THE MOST UNIQUE ASPECTS OF THE CENTER Perhaps the most important aspects of the Center for Global Initiatives are the simplest: 1. We serve as an incubator and hothouse for new projects. We help to nurture, grow, and launch these projects as self sustaining, ongoing interests. 2. After a project has taken hold, we serve as pro bono consultants, fee-free Coopers & Lybrand’s, if you will. We help those now managing the work with whatever it is they may need: materials, medicines, case consultation, introductions. 3. About 90 percent of our projects have come about as a result of being invited to do the work. That is, we do not come up with project ideas or toss darts at a globe to determine where to go next. There seems to be a global line outside our door waiting to be the next one to work with us. When we are not a good ﬁt, we work to triage to a more suitable organization. 4. As best we can, depending on the project, we seek to blend primary care, behavioral health, and public health into an ultimately self-sustaining, outcomes accountable, culturally consonant result. And really, everything else is the details. So here are some of those.

THE PROBLEM Healthcare services, sciences, systems, education, and research all suffer from disconnections—globally and locally, biologically and behaviorally, in training and in practice—and health inequities are global in scale.

THE SOLUTION There has not been a truly integrated center that is at once mindful of all the complex aspects of global health inequities; focused on small, outcomes-oriented projects; and also agile, responsive, improvisational, and empowering in the clinical, training, and research domains.

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THE MISSION The Center for Global Initiatives reaches across disciplines and international borders to bring together partners to provide education, training, and research programs that crosscut with primary care, behavioral healthcare, and public healthcare services within a context of social justice that addresses health inequalities. The center works to •

• • • • •

• • • • • • •

Advance the education and performance of local and international health professionals and students in health-related ﬁelds to meet the challenges of health inequalities Maintain a philosophy and approach as that of a collaborator and colleague Foster a sense of control over the lives of those with whom we work Augment inherent strengths and resilience Improve preparedness for reacting to human-made and natural disasters and their aftermath Strengthen collaboration as well as the sharing of experience and knowledge among various stakeholders addressing global health inequities (primary care, behavioral healthcare, and public health) Improve people’s lives by decreasing premature death and disability with a special focus on the underserved, refugee, and immigrant populations’ needs Provide clinical services Augment existing medical, psychological, science education, research, and service capacity (including health education) Build capacity of local communities to improve health and healthcare access Motivate the public and private sectors to drive consensus and action for the improvement of health globally Fold in issues of behavioral health, violence, and prevention as public health concerns Integrate all the health sciences and services with policy and advocacy at both the governmental and nongovernmental levels in order to create appropriate funding methods and sources, capacity building, and sustainable development

HOW THINGS STARTED As a little boy, I was not what you would call much of an athlete. I was bit shy and bookish, and I was quite overweight (often the butt of teasing—it is not very cool to be fat and named Stout when you are a child). Adding to this, I had crooked teeth, and then braces (twice). But I somehow developed a spirit for adventure, perhaps in reaction to a rather sheltered (albeit quite loving) household. Fast-forwarding to today, I have taken up mountain climbing (as very much the amateur). In doing so, I have set out to do the Seven Summits—reaching the top of the highest mountain on each of the seven continents. I have been fortunate to have summited three of the easy ones so far: Mt. Kilimanjaro, Africa; Mt. Elbrus, Europe (Russia); and Mt. Kosciusko, Australia.

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After my first major climb, Mt. Kilimanjaro, I met a Tanzanian guide who was studying in the seminary. We kept in touch over the ensuing years, and he became involved in running an orphanage for children who had lost both parents to AIDS. I developed a project called Just ’Cause to collect toys and school supplies for them for Christmas. I was successful in amassing quite a shipment, but I was then faced with an unbelievable bureaucracy, high costs, and long delay in shipping everything over to them. So, I thought there had to be a better way. At about that same time, I went on my ﬁrst medical mission. It was for about three weeks in Halong Bay, Viet Nam, with the Flying Doctors of America (see Chapter 8 in this volume). I was so moved by doing that work, and I was so miffed at the hassles involved with trying to ship materials to Africa, that the seed for the center was planted. Also during this time, I was fortunate to have been selected to serve as a nongovernmental organization (NGO) special representative to the United Nations via Division 9 of the American Psychological Association. Thus, blending my background in clinical psychology with my UN experiences in sustainable development (I presented a paper that was the result of a year-long project on behavioral health’s role in health and sustainable development vis-à-vis a UN document known as the Copenhagen Declaration), mixing in what I had learned in Viet Nam and from the Flying Doctors’ organization, along with a passion for public health (as a board of health member for many years and later a public health fellow), in a context of battling the inequities experienced by those less fortunate, marginalized, or disenfranchised, the center was born. I have been involved in various healthcare start-ups, and I was reminded of what Susan Davis once noted: donors nowadays have recognized the value of entrepreneurial skills in managing a not-for-proﬁt, rather than running a want-ad.1 I believe that the center is an evolutionary progression from my clinical business ventures and international medical projects. I have been on medical missions with Flying Doctors of America to Vietnam, Peru, and most recently, to the Amazon basin. These impactful experiences taught me that active participation in international work is critical for a real understanding of others and of events.

WORKING TOGETHER TO RESPOND TO GLOBAL HEALTH INEQUITIES All CGI programs are developed and implemented with public and private, local and international, academic and community-based partners. The objective is to foster interdisciplinary collaboration, pool resources, and integrate methodologies and perspectives from other disciplines, institutions, peoples, and countries. Here are a few of the organizations and universities with which the center is currently collaborating: University of Illinois–Chicago, College of Medicine Flying Doctors of America (see Chapter 8 in this volume)

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International Center for Equal Healthcare Access (see Chapter 7 in this volume) Jamkhed (aka Comprehensive Rural Health Project—CRHP) (see Chapter 6 in this volume) Institute for One World Health (see Chapter 5 in this volume) Sustainable Sciences Institute (see Chapter 4 in this volume) Rush University’s Health Services Management Program University of Benin Argosy University/Illinois School of Professional Psychology Chicago School of Professional Psychology Adler School of Professional Psychology College of William and Mary University of Colorado Health Sciences Loyola University, Chicago’s Center for Experiential Learning

DELIVERABLES The ultimate deliverable is to save and improve the lives of those suffering from illness. A nice side effect is that we are developing new innovations in the process of doing our work, as in the SMART project: Sustainable Medical Arts, Research, & Technology (noted in detail below), wherein emergency ﬁrst aid and treatment algorithms were developed, including a training methodology and pictograms for generalizability in different countries that would minimize language and literacy limits. This work product can be adapted quickly for use in similar areas of need, globally. Part of our approach to funding and for being self-sustaining ourselves is to provide training for students and professionals. For students, we provide credits that their universities can consider as transfer or elective. For professionals, we are applying to be accredited and licensed to provide continuing medical education and continuing education credits. Volunteers may participate in optional international mission experiences. And in the near future, we hope to have completed construction of a global health fellowship that offers certiﬁcation in international development for U.S.-based students and professionals, and a healthcare and systems development certiﬁcate for international students and professionals. Similarly, we are designing a post-doctoral fellowship for graduates in clinical psychology that should blend clinical services with program development and also provide the appropriate supervision to qualify for sitting for the licensure examination in clinical psychology. And we like to track what we do and write about it, so book chapters such as this one would also be one of our deliverables. We also seek to provide position papers via our website, submit to peer-reviewed journals, and produce books. Use of the media via interviews also helps increase awareness of need and hopefully desire in the audience to volunteer for projects or participate in our educational programs.

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FUNDING RESOURCES It seems that with few exceptions, funding is always a challenge. When I started the center, I paid for everything out of my own pocket, as I think many founders do. Websites, domain name registration, e-mail accounts, a computer, mobile phone and service, Internet service, travel costs, pencils, and paper—you quickly learn there are a lot of expenses. It is just like opening a small business, which in a sense, any organization is. I have been fortunate to make ends meet in the nascent stages through making economical purchases, having lots of volunteer help (see Stafﬁng below), and having a “day job” to pay for the needs of the center as well as my family. But things have been pretty tight at times. As the cliché goes, “no mission without a margin,” and the following note some of the ways we are starting to fund our work. Stafﬁng costs are typically the biggest ﬁnancial challenge for any organization. Our solution is as robust as it is simple. We do not pay anyone. That is, all our staff members are volunteers, including me. We take no salary or beneﬁt other than enjoying the work we do. Now, honestly, this will not go on forever (we hope), but the work is getting done. We look forward to the day when we can spend less time chasing project dollars and more time doing the projects. Having come from a background of start-ups and having an entrepreneurial spirit, I am looking to ﬁll a need in the niche of those interested in international affairs and global health inequities—in particular from the discipline of psychology, what I know best. And the early returns are promising. In 2007 (the year this is being written), I had a number of speaking invitations for psychology undergraduate and graduate students and also for students in public health, medicine, and leadership programs. And the buzz seems to be building as evidenced by numerous media interviews (magazines, newspapers, and television), and a wonderful number of contacts from individuals, students, programs, and other organizations wishing to volunteer or collaborate. We plan to channel those interested in workshops and lectures into appropriate trainings that will be income generating. We also plan to seek seminar sponsorships via grants and provide continuing medical education and continuing education credits to licensed professional attendees. We also have plans to develop a certiﬁcate or diploma programs that integrate topics ranging from public health principles and primary care to behavioral healthcare and systems management. Tuition funds would support these programs with margins to additionally support other projects. Volunteers who wish to travel to work with a international project can deduct their associated travel costs from their taxes in many instances. Volunteers who are in school may be able to use student loan funds to support their travel costs if their universities allow them to gain elective credits for the experience (this often happens if they write a paper or give a presentation on their work and experience upon return). We worked with another organization I had founded, Summits for Others (see www.SummitsForOthers.org) in the summer of 2007 and embarked on a new approach to fundraising: sponsoring the center in a summit attempt of

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Mt. Whitney (the tallest in the continental United States) with graduate psychology students. We plan on doing more traditional types of fundraising as well, such as having various levels of sponsors, seeking good corporate citizens as benefactors, holding events such as in-home dinners and discussions, and seeking support from related organizations such as Rotary to help with travel funds. We also work for speciﬁc program funding via the “Adopting an Outcome” model, in which we calculate the cost of making an impact (e.g., twelve cents for an antimalarial to save a life) in order to educate potential contributors and thus hopefully motivate them to contribute in the process. Our board has also been a source of funding—both in providing funds and acting as conduits to funding sources and pro bono sources (“a penny saved . . .”). The center offers “Academic Memberships” to universities for a annual fee. Membership beneﬁts include the opportunity for students to participate in courses and workshops on International Travel Tools and Methods, Global Health Initiatives, International Humanitarian Interventionism, and others; local opportunities to work with international populations via clinical, research, and speciﬁc projects; opportunity for at least one international trip per year; provision of funding opportunities to help defray travel expenses of students; connections with other ongoing projects and learning opportunities; experiences on an individualized basis for students and faculty; opportunities to “seed” the start of ongoing projects; having the center serve as an ongoing resource and informational clearinghouse; student mentoring; access to a vast global network of contacts; collaborative project launching; and collaborative grant and donor procurement. Students from these universities who volunteer for center projects are eligible for center travel scholarships and possible elective credit. Students from nonmember universities do not qualify for such funding opportunities.

STAFFING MODEL I suppose you could describe our model as an ensemble. We are very fortunate to have many professionals volunteering as staff and on the board of directors (including Dale Galassie, MA, and Edith Grotberg, PhD). Our attorney, Carleen Schrader, JD, worked pro bono to complete all of our incorporation and not-forproﬁt paperwork, and even paid for all of the associated fees. My mentor, Ralph Musicant, JD, has guided me, encouraged me, and kicked me in the kiester through every step of the center’s development. I have been blessed with a volunteer fundraiser, Laura Welch, who has additionally taken on more leadership tasks to move the Center forward. All our projects are staffed by volunteers. Much of our research and development work is done by a wonderful group of graduate students from the Adler School of Professional Psychology’s Community Service Practicum Program. At the time of this writing, we are forging a relationship with Loyola University, Chicago’s new Center for Experiential Learning, which is very exciting and a wonderful additional resource.

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EXAMPLES OF PAST AND CURRENT PROJECTS CGI has been fortunate to be involved in many interesting and what we believe are impactful projects. These have been varied, and I expect they will continue to be. I would like to invite any interested reader to contact us if you have interest in learning more about any of the following projects. Also, please frequently check the Projects area of our website (see www.CenterForGlobalInitiatives.org) for the most current information on work going on or planned. Also, feel free to contact us and solicit help for a project you may be working on. We are always open to collaborating or make better connections. CONTACT (Coordination & ONline Tracking of Activities & Clinical Teams) The center is currently developing a freely accessible, Web-based database that will serve as a central warehouse of information for groups working in the Equatorial Amazon Basin. This pioneering database will provide the ﬁrst centralized location for details on medical missions, medication and equipment donations, and guidelines and protocols for services and programs that have proven results within the tribal communities. Our hope is to expand the database to other rural community projects worldwide. SMART (Sustainable Medical Arts, Research, & Technology) To combat the lack of primary and emergency care in rural areas of Cambodia, the center aims to teach indigenous women basic public health practices and emergency medical care to aid those in their villages. Women will be trained to stabilize and care for patients until ready for transport to the nearest medical facility. THRIVE (Tanzanian Health & Resilience Initiative Valuing Education) Expanding on the kindergarten for orphans created in Moshi, Tanzania, in 2005, CGI now aims to add healthcare education for the children and local medical care providers. In collaboration with doctors, nurses, and staff at Huruma Designated Hospital, the center will develop programs for nursing students, the orphans, and the community that focus on HIV treatment and AIDS prevention as well as on combating malaria, TB, and other illnesses endemic to that area. Project Niños In the summer of 2007, the center collaborated with Flying Doctors of America in a pioneering project within several Bolivian prisons. Currently, hundreds of Bolivian children live with their incarcerated parents in both minimum- and even maximum-security prisons throughout this South American country. After treating over 600 imprisoned men, women, and children, the center has begun

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developing a unique educational and social skills training program in cooperation with teachers in prison-run schools. In addition, programs in parenting skills, noncompetitive play, resilience development, music, and creative/expressive arts will be developed to improve the welfare of the inmates’ children in order to maximize the potential for improving their lives. For a look at our 2007 Project Niños beginnings, please visit http//homepage.mac.com/masonimage/ThreeDaysinaBolivianPrison/ index.html. WorldWise Through a collaborative with partners in rural India who have developed a comprehensive, community-based primary health care approach, CGI is a conduit for recruiting students for summer experiences that will provide a lifechanging perspective on healthcare. The project is called WorldWise, and it is being made available only to graduate students in any health discipline and to medical students. 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 health care. However, it is possible to make sure that all people have access to necessary and relevant health care. This concept is known as equity, and it is an important principle of this project. Health is not only the absence of disease but 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, but it is inherently 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. Health care includes promotive, preventive, curative, and rehabilitative aspects. The integration of these areas brings about effective health care. Working at the grassroots level with village health workers and community groups leads to the process of empowerment of women and communities in general. This is an important aspect of community-based health care. Once people have knowledge and can make informed decisions, they have power they can use in constructive ways to transform their communities. The majority of health problems in rural areas will be basic, but these problems can become worse and may even cause death if not identiﬁed and treated at the onset. To a large extent, the problems will be preventable and amenable to health detection. The project began with a view to develop a healthcare delivery program best suited to the needs and resources of this rural area. The essential element of the project is community involvement in the planning and in the activities of the project. The experience is for those interested in the exchange of learning; candidates must be able to handle rugged experiences/adventure, and they must be interested in global health in a pragmatic way.

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BASIS (Bio-pharmacogenomic Access & Sustainable Infra-Structure) Good friend and colleague Mariano Levin, PhD, of Argentina, a Howard Hughes Fellow, has received grant funding from the World Health Organization/Pan-American Health Organization (WHO/PAHO) South-South project to search for new drugs to ﬁght African and American trypanosomiasis. This project combines genomics, high throughput, and the design of novel drugs. The center seeks to help expand the resources and the outreach of his work. ENVOY (Enabled, Networked Ventures Optimizing Yields) This project focuses on neglected diseases and seeks to operationalize projects via collaborations with DzGenes, PAHO, Sustainable Sciences Institute (SSI), Institute for OneWorld Health (iOWH), and Xomix. I am intrigued by the clever Médecines Sans Frontières (see Chapter 1 in this volume) approach of buying cheaper copies of HIV/AIDS drugs in India and using them in Africa, as well as the Brazilian approach to medication patents. And, while it is genuinely wonderful what the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing, such an approach still smacks of dependency and almost a pharmaco-colonialism of sorts. Although it is immensely important that many such foundations will be providing monies for the global distribution of medications, and these palliative efforts will be indeed necessary, they will be just as surely insufﬁcient and shortsighted. I would offer that it would also be helpful for countries to be able to have the medical technology know-how to work on their own speciﬁc needs. We hear a lot about the problem of the “digital divide” between those with technology and those without—this typically refers to computer availability and Internet access. But there is also a divide between the haves and have-nots of medical technology and knowledge. The center would collaborate with countries to create sustainable medical solutions for their most pressing and neglected public health problems/concerns. In some areas, this may be providing medical services of all disciplines; it may be clinic and hospital establishment or reconstruction; it could be augmentation of medical and science education, research, and service capacity (including health education); or it may include the expansion of medical sciences education to include genomic sciences and drug discovery technologies, such as pharmacogenomics (request a proof-of-concept paper from the center’s website, or a reprint of my article on remedying neglected diseases published in the World Economic Forum’s journal World Link). Medical InterAction Contacts and relationships have been developed with colleagues in Benin that crosscut various areas: health and illness, poverty and sustainability, environmental concerns, traditional healing and medical sciences/health treatment, and education. We plan to develop a scientiﬁc and economic mechanism of

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researching the medicinal properties of speciﬁc plant materials used by our Benin partners (university scientists and traditional healers) to further develop medicines, use the resultant knowledge to reﬁne the compounds to have fewer side effects and improved dosing characteristics, and develop that intellectual property into concomitant economic value that will provide for economic sustainability, self-sufﬁciency, and independence for ongoing research. This would be within an overarching context of making resultant products available to those impoverished and in need. We seek to establish not only a groundbreaking mechanism to ensure the perpetuation of traditional medicines but also to further develop medicines for local and global beneﬁt. A current problem for the big pharma companies is that they have not been internally investing in new medication research—known as “the pipeline.” The results of our proposed work will not only serve to ﬁll this critical void via licensing and royalty agreements of the resultant intellectual property that are equitable and mutually beneﬁcial, but this project may also serve as a pilot study that can generalize and scale as a global model for others to mimic. Additionally, since Benin is a land in transition and under development, there is a new risk of the loss of the current richness of the biodiversity of the region. In order to ensure such losses will be avoided, we also seek to develop a literal “botanical garden” of the species of plants that are promising candidates for pharmacological research. Thus, this work provides an example of the intersection of science, pharmacological development, intellectual property rights offering economic sustainability and capacity building, environmental preservation, public health impacts, medical sciences education, and cultural traditions. BUILDING BRIDGES We often use the word “architecting” when we are in the nascent design phases of a project. It seems we do a bit of bridge building—between cultures, peoples, and disciplines—and honestly, this is a wonderful process. I personally enjoy this remarkably frustrating and difﬁcult work so very much. Next to my family, nothing affects me so deeply. I encourage you to honor your gift, and if the center can help you do so, please be in touch. BIOGRAPHIES Chris E. Stout Chris E. Stout, PsyD, is a licensed clinical psychologist who has the necessary entrepreneurial experience in healthcare center start-ups (chief operating ofﬁcer of YellowbricK and founding chief executive ofﬁcer of Timberline Knolls). He also is a clinical full professor in the University of Illinois–Chicago College of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry, a fellow in the School of Public Health Leadership Institute, and a core faculty member of the International Center on Responses to Catastrophes at the University of Illinois–Chicago. He also holds an

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academic appointment in the Northwestern University Feinberg Medical School, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences’ Mental Health Services and Policy Program, and was a visiting professor in the Department of Health Systems Management at Rush University. He served as an NGO special representative to the United Nations. He was appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce to the board of examiners for the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award. He holds the distinction of being one of only 100 worldwide leaders appointed to the World Economic Forum’s Global Leaders of Tomorrow 2000. 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 in three divisions of the American Psychological Association, past president of the Illinois Psychological Association, and a distinguished practitioner in the National Academies of Practice. He was appointed as a special (citizen) ambassador and delegation leader to South Africa and Eastern Europe by the Eisenhower Foundation. He is the series editor of Contemporary Psychology (Praeger), and Getting Started (Wiley & Sons). He produced the critically acclaimed, fourvolume set titled The Psychology of Terrorism. Dr. Stout has published or presented over 300 papers and 30 books/manuals on various topics in psychology, including the popular Evidence-Based Practice (Wiley & Sons, 2005, with R. Hayes). His works have been translated into eight languages. He has lectured across the nation and internationally in nineteen countries, and visited six continents and over seventy countries. 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. He has served as chief of psychology, director of research, and senior vice president of an integrated behavioral healthcare system during a ﬁfteen-year tenure. He served as Illinois’ ﬁrst chief of psychological services for the Department of Human Services/Division of Mental Health, making him the highest-ranking psychologist in the State of Illinois and a committed reformer of psychology within the governmental setting. He also served as chief clinical information ofﬁcer for the state’s Division of Mental Health in 2004—a state cabinet-level position. He is the ﬁrst psychologist to have an invited appointment to the Lake County Board of Health. The breadth of his work ranges from having served as a judge for Dean Kamen’s FIRST Robotics competitions, to serving on the Young Leaders Forum of the Chicago Community Trust. His humanitarian activities include going on international missions with the Flying Doctors of America to Vietnam, Rwanda, Peru, and the Amazon; War Child in Russia; working with the Marjorie Kovler Center for the Treatment of Survivors of Torture (see proﬁle in this volume), Amnesty International, Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, the Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust, and Psychologists for Social Responsibility. He founded a kindergarten for AIDS-orphaned children in Tanzania and continues as a consultant. He also was a delegate to the State of the World Forum in Belfast. He is a signatory to the UN’s 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human

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Rights. He is the inventor of the 52 Ways to Change the World card deck. He is listed in Fast Co.’s Global Fast 50 nominees and in Richard Saul Wurman’s 1000: The Most Creative Individuals in America. He currently serves on the Illinois Disaster Mental Health Coalition and the Medical Reserve Corp, and he is a member of the APA Disaster Response Network. His current interests are in the multidisciplinary aspects of global psychology and healthcare, complex systems, and battling mediocrity. He’s an ultramarathon runner, diver, and avid (albeit amateur) alpinist, having thus far summited three of the world’s seven summits and Mt. Whitney (tallest in the continental 49 states), and founded SummitsForOthers.org. Ralph Musicant Ralph Musicant is a Harvard Law School (1971) graduate who has founded and operated start-up companies in a variety of industries: coal mining, comic book and cigar magazine publishing, computerized multiple listing service for commercial ofﬁce space, and a behavioral health company offering telephone counseling by licensed therapists. He is currently managing director of Ideas and Methods Inc., a Chicago-based business consulting and acquisition ﬁrm. His academic career includes an appointment as the Martin C. Remer Visiting Distinguished Professor of Finance (1976) at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. Most recently, he was an invited speaker at a Colloquium on E-therapy presented by the Institute of Cybermedicine at Harvard Medical School. Edith Grotberg Edith Grotberg, PhD, spent ﬁve years in Sudan teaching at the Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman. There, she began her work on resilience, which culminated in an international study of the promotion of resilience, with data gathered from twenty-seven sites in twenty-two countries. Her books on resilience include A Guide to Promoting Resilience in Children: Strengthening the Human Spirit and Tapping Your Inner Strength: How to Find the Resilience to Deal with Anything; she was also editor of Resilience for Today: Gaining Strength from Adversity. She has conducted work with UNICEF, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), UNESCO, and International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). She has worked with colleagues in Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Brazil to enhance resilience skills and behaviors. Her current work involves life-long wellbeing in the Western Hemisphere. Carleen L. Schreder Carleen L. Schreder is an attorney and one of the founders of Levin & Schreder Ltd. in 1988. She graduated from Lake Forest College in 1979 and received her JD from the University of Chicago Law School in 1982. Her practice is focused in the

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areas of estate tax and income tax planning for individuals and businesses. In addition to her legal work, Ms. Schreder is active in community organizations. She was recognized for her community work by the Chicago Bar Foundation, which awarded her the 1988 Maurice Weigle Award as an Outstanding Young Lawyer. She is currently a board member of Chicago Foundation for Women and is a past board member and ofﬁcer of Chicago Legal Advocacy for Incarcerated Mothers and Chicago Abused Women Coalition. Ms. Schreder is an author and presenter on topics related to tax planning, including an article on Illinois estate tax apportionment, which appeared in the Illinois Bar Journal in June 2007, and a presentation on the same topic at the Chicago Bar Association Probate Practice Committee in November 2007. Dale W. Galassie Dale W. Galassie, MA, MS, has served as the executive director of the Lake County Health Department/Community Health Center since 1992, an organization that employs approximately 1,000 staff members with resources of $60 million. It provides a comprehensive array of public health, primary care, behavioral health, and environmental health services in Lake County. Dale previously served as the director of management services for the Health Department from 1981. His pre–public health life was in higher education, serving from 1975 to 1981 as business manager of Lewis University, a Christian Brothers institution in Will County, Illinois. His years of senior-level administrative experience are complemented by his academic accomplishments, including a Baccalaureate degree in political science and business, an MA in administration, and an MS in social justice from Lewis University; a fellow in the University of Illinois School of Public Health Leadership Institute and a Primary Care Fellow through the United States Bureau of Primary Health Care. He is chair of Midwest American Regional Public Health Leadership Institute, and as a self-committed, life-long learner, ABD in his doctorate degree in administration and leadership through Vanderbilt University. He routinely speaks to professional organizations, special interest groups, and legislative bodies. He has testiﬁed before numerous state and federal legislative committees as an outspoken member of the public health community to promote social justice. He is an active Adjunct Faculty member for Webster University since 1982, teaching graduate courses in Health Administration and Human Resource Management. He is also the proud father of three young adult daughters raised in Lake County, Illinois. His association afﬁliations include past chair of the Illinois Association of Public Health Administrators, President 1996–97; Illinois Public Health Association Executive Council, 1993 to 1996; Illinois Primary Health Care Association, past president, and currently serving on the Legislative and Public Policy Committee. He currently serves on the National Association of Community Health Centers Legislative Policy Committee. Other association activities include past co-chair of the Illinois Department of Public Aid, Medicaid Advisory/Managed

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Care Sub-Committee. He also serves on the National Association of County & City Ofﬁcials, Committee to Promote Public Health and Legislative Committees, National Association for Public Health Policy, and other public health advisory committees. He served as the vice-chair of the National Association of County and City Health Ofﬁcials (NACCHO), Metro-Forum Group, and maintains current membership in that group. He is also an active member of the Northern Illinois Public Health Consortium. Laura Welch Laura Welch is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a BA in arts administration. Her earliest work involved fundraising with American Players Theater in Spring Green, Wisconsin; serving as public relations director with the Peninsula Players in Door County, Wisconsin; and acting as the annual fund manager with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, where her team raised over $7.5 million. Her desire to be more socially active led Laura to create the Development Department for the Family Resource Center, a child abuse agency in St. Louis, where she initiated a capital campaign for a new building. She moved on to be director of development for the Women’s Self-Help Center, a counseling center for abused women in St. Louis. She also was asked to establish the annual giving and special events arm of the Good Samaritan Hospital Foundation in Corvallis, Oregon. She has volunteered extensively, including serving as chair of the Corvallis Arts Center board of directors, consulting on the capital campaign for the Majestic Theatre, also in Corvallis, Oregon, and as chair of the Beneﬁt of Hope for the American Cancer Society of DuPage County, Illinois. She is now home with her two children and husband in Naperville, Illinois, and continues her exciting work on a volunteer basis with the Center for Global Initiatives.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Center for Global Initiatives Founder and/or Executive Director: Dr. Chris E. Stout, PsyD Mission/Description: The Center for Global Initiatives (CGI) is at once mindful of all complex aspects of global health inequities while being focused on small, outcomesoriented projects so that it is also agile, responsive, improvisational, and empowering in clinical, training, and research domains. It is the philosophy of the center that the optimal way of successfully addressing these injustices and disconnects is by multiple, small-scale projects with a coordinated approaches and outcome accountability. CGI is the ﬁrst center devoted to training multidisciplinary healthcare professionals and students to bring services that are integrated, sustainable, and resiliency based, with publicly accountable outcomes, to areas of need

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worldwide via multiple, small, context-speciﬁc collaboratives that integrate primary care, behavioral healthcare, systems development, public health, and social justice. We seek to eschew the many disconnects between separation of body/mind, physical/mental, and individual/community, and offer instead a synthetic model of integration. The Center’s philosophy and approach is always that of a collaborator and colleague. No “West-Knows-Best” hubris. We learn as we teach. We feel as we treat. Perhaps the most important aspects of the Center for Global Initiatives are the simplest: 1. We serve as an incubator and hothouse for new projects. We help to nurture, grow, and launch them as self sustaining, ongoing interests. 2. After a project has taken hold, we serve as pro bono consultants—forever if need be. We help those now managing the work with whatever it is they may need— materials, medicines, case consultation, introductions. 3. About 90 percent of all of our projects have come about as a result of being invited to do the work. That is, we do not come up with project ideas or toss darts at a globe to determine where to go next. There seems to be a global line outside our door waiting to be the next one to work with us. When we are not a good ﬁt, we work to triage to a more suitable organization. Website: CenterForGlobalInitiatives.org Address: 120 North LaSalle Street, 38th Floor Chicago, IL 60602 USA Phone: +1.847.550.0092, ext. 2 Fax: none E-mail: [email protected]

NOTE 1. Susan M. Davis,“Social Entrepreneurship: Towards an Entrepreneurial Culture for Social and Economic Development” (July 31, 2002). Available at SSRN (http://ssrn.com/ abstract=978868).

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. Raj S. and Shobha Arole co-founded The Comprehensive Rural Health Project, Jamkhed, India, in 1970. Both Drs. Raj and Mabelle Arole had a deep commitment and compassion for the poor and marginalized. As medical doctors, with training both at CMC Vellore, India, and at Johns Hopkins in the United States, they 281

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returned to Jamkhed, India, to implement a community-based health and development program. As highly motivated public health specialists, their vision was to empower people, particularly the rural poor and women, to take their health into their own hands. Both the Aroles were the recipients of the Magasaysay Award for community leadership in 1979. Dr. Raj Arole also received the Padmabhushan (one of the highest honors in India) for commitment to the rural poor. In 1999, at the age of sixty-four, Dr. Mabelle Arole passed away from heart disease. The program now is still under the leadership of Dr. Raj Arole. Their daughter, Dr. Shobha Arole, is the associate director of the project, and their son, Ravi, is involved in administration. The Aroles were also chosen by the Schwab Foundation as social entrepreneurs in the ﬁeld of innovative, community-based health and development. The project is committed to empowering people, integrating health, promoting equity, and serving as a replicable and sustainable model for India and the world. Teresa Bartrum 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 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 is 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. Mary Black, MS, OTR/L, is an occupational therapist with the Marjorie Kovler Center of Heartland Alliance. Her responsibilities include assessment and intervention focused on enhancing the functional skills needed to perform meaningful occupational roles that have been compromised or abandoned as a result of torture, displacement, or injury. She has been extensively involved in working with refugee individuals, families, and children, using individual and group activities to help support the maintenance of cultural identity while coping with the multiple challenges presented in transitioning to an urban lifestyle in the United States. Ms. Black has over eleven years’ experience working with refugees and those seeking asylum in the United States, and has collaborated with many schools and numerous community programs including Casa Guatemala, the Community Culture Council of Dance Africa Chicago, Mioghar Eedee Ogoni (an Ogoni, Nigeria, children’s group), and Angelic Organics Farm. She has presented at numerous ISTSS conferences and at the National AOTA conference in 2003 and 2007. She

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has an MS in occupational therapy from the University at Illinois–Chicago and is licensed in the state of Illinois. Marie Charles founded ICEHA, the global leader in clinical skills rapid transfer to emerging nations in November 2001. Drawing on its pool of over 650 highly qualiﬁed infectious disease professionals from fourteen Western countries, ICEHA deployed into ten countries in Africa and Asia within three years of commencing operations, transferring at least 7,500 aggregate human-years of clinical expertise to local colleagues. As one of the world’s leading fourth-generation NGOs, ICEHA uses a unique funding model, whereby Western funding catalyzes 300 percent matched funding by recipient developing countries. In recognition of her professional achievements, Dr. Charles received the National Medal of Honor from the president of Vietnam at the opening of the Vietnamese National Assembly in Hanoi in June 2007. She was also named a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute in 2006 and served as adjunct professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs in 2004–2005. Joseﬁna Coloma is a senior research associate in the Division of Infectious Diseases in the School of Public Health at UC–Berkeley. She received a BA in biological sciences from the American College of Quito, Ecuador, in 1983 and a PhD in microbiology and molecular genetics from UCLA in 1997. Coming from a developing country and having had the opportunity to study in the United States, she felt that doing something about the large gap in scientiﬁc knowledge between the two was in part her responsibility. Dr. Coloma has been working with Dr. Eva Harris since 1993 to build scientiﬁc capacity in developing countries. Dr. Coloma helped envision and fund the Sustainable Sciences Institute (SSI) and has served on its board of directors since 2000. Dr. Coloma believes that her involvement with SSI allows her to give back to her native country of Ecuador some of what she has learned and experienced. Mary Fabri, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist and director of Torture Treatment Services and International Training for Heartland Alliance in Chicago, Illinois. She is the current president of the National Consortium of Torture Treatment Programs. Dr. Fabri provides consultation and training internationally on the consequences of severe trauma, cross-cultural psychotherapy, and secondary traumatization. Since 2004 she has been collaborating with Women’s Equity in Access to Care and Treatment (WE-ACTx) in Rwanda, addressing the needs of traumatized HIV-positive women. She has also conducted trainings in Guatemala and Haiti. She has published on topics pertaining to refugee mental health, cross-cultural treatment modiﬁcations, and the psychological consequences of torture. After receiving her doctoral degree in clinical psychology from the Illinois School of Professional Psychology in 1986, Dr. Fabri has devoted her career to working in the public health sector. She worked as a staff psychologist at Cook County Hospital until 1995 when she joined Heartland

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Alliance as the clinical coordinator for the Bosnian Mental Health Program; in 1997, she became the training coordinator for the Refugee Mental Health Training Program. In 2000 Dr. Fabri became the director of the Marjorie Kovler Center after fourteen years of providing pro bono services to torture survivors. 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 from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Jeffrey D. Fisher is a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut. He is the founder and director of its Center for Health, Intervention & Prevention (CHIP). Most of his work has involved theoretical and empirical work on social psychological factors that can affect the success of interventions to change human behavior. His early research (with Arie Nadler) focused on how to facilitate the seeking of needed help, and what types of help promote favorable and unfavorable recipient reactions to aid (e.g., self-sufﬁciency vs. continued help seeking; favorable vs. unfavorable reactions to the donor of help). More recent work has involved similar issues in the realm of health psychology. He has published extensively on factors associated with HIV risk behavior, and has done a great deal of conceptual and empirical work in the area of interventions to increase HIV preventive behavior. His work also focuses on designing theoretically based interventions to increase adherence to antiretroviral therapy, and on health behavior change in general. As principal investigator, he has been awarded seven major NIMH grants since 1989 on HIV risk reduction and medical adherence, totaling over $20 million, and he has lectured and consulted internationally in the area of HIV preventive behavior. Allan Gathercoal is the president and founder of Flying Doctors of America, which he established in 1990. He travels the globe, but his second home is in Latin America. He has been the team leader on more than 140 medical and dental missions. Allan is an ordained minister and holds a doctorate from Columbia Theological Seminary. He is a private pilot and an aﬁcionado of adventure sports. He was born in England. Mario González is the clinical supervisor of the Marjorie Kovler Center of Heartland Alliance in Chicago, Illinois. He is a native of Guatemala, where he studied and received his license in psychology from the University Rafael Landivar in 1984. He is bilingual and bicultural. In addition to clinical oversight of the Kovler Center program, Mr. González provides supervision to the case

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management and clinical staff, consultation to pro bono therapists and immigration attorneys, and evaluation services for forensic psychological documentation for political asylum applicants. He also provides psychotherapy to torture survivors and has special interests in diagnostics and cross-cultural psychotherapy. Prior to working with torture survivors, Mr. González was the director of the Instituto del Progreso Latino’s Gang Involvement Prevention Program, where community outreach was an integral part of the services provided. In addition to his training in psychology, Mr. González also earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting and administration from La Patria College, Guatemala, in 1970 and a master’s in education and psychology from the Universidad Rafael Landivar, Guatemala, in 1978. Victoria Hale established her expertise in all stages of biopharmaceutical drug development at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Drug Evaluation and Research and at Genentech Inc., the world’s ﬁrst biotechnology company. She presently maintains an adjunct associate professorship in biopharmaceutical sciences at the University of California–San Francisco, is an advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO) for building ethical review capacity in the developing world, and has served as an expert reviewer to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on the topic of biodiversity. Dr. Hale’s recent honors include being elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and being named a 2006 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Other recent achievements include being selected as an Ashoka Fellow for work in leading social innovation (2006) and as Executive of the Year by Esquire magazine (2005), and receiving the Economist Innovation Award for Social and Economic Innovation (2005) and the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship from the Skoll Foundation (2005). She was named one of the Most Outstanding Social Entrepreneurs by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship in Switzerland (2004). In 2004 Dr. Hale and OneWorld Health (iOWH) were included in the Scientiﬁc American 50, the magazine’s annual list recognizing outstanding acts of leadership in science and technology. Eva Harris is an associate professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases in the School of Public Health at UC–Berkeley. She received a BA in biochemical sciences from Harvard University in 1987 and a PhD in molecular and cell biology from UC–Berkeley in 1993. In 1997 Dr. Harris received a MacArthur “Genius” Award for her pioneering work developing programs and working to build scientiﬁc capacity in developing countries to address public health and infectious disease issues. To continue and expand this work, Dr. Harris founded the Sustainable Sciences Institute (SSI) in 1998. SSI is a San Francisco-based, international nonproﬁt organization that supports scientists and public health professionals in developing countries as they work toward meeting the public health needs of their communities. Dr. Harris has published over sixty-ﬁve peer-reviewed articles, as well as a book on her international scientiﬁc work.

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About the Editor and Contributors

Marianne Joyce is a clinical social worker at the Marjorie Kovler Center of Heartland Alliance. Since joining the staff in 2000, she has conducted clinical evaluations, supervised and trained graduate student interns, engaged survivors in healing therapies, provided consultation to volunteer therapists, and documented and testiﬁed to the psychological effects of torture in support of asylum claims. Her ﬁrst role with the Kovler Center in 1990 was as a volunteer interpreter and co-coordinator of a Guatemalan children’s group. She has been involved with survivors bringing lawsuits against perpetrators residing in the United States in collaboration with the Center of Justice and Accountability. She has trained health providers, attorneys, and interpreters in the United States on issues of sensitivity in their work with survivors. She has helped train health professionals from Guatemala, Haiti, and Iraq on treatment issues. She holds a BS in psychology from the University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign and an MA from the School of Social Services Administration at the University of Chicago. She has taught human rights at the School of Services Administration as adjunct faculty. Jordan Kassalow is a co-founder of Scojo Vision LLC and the Scojo Foundation. He is also the founder of the Global Health Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he served as an adjunct senior fellow from 1999–2004. 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 Brigham Young University’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 master’s 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. Katherine Katcher is a recent graduate of Columbia College, where she majored in anthropology and studied abroad in Dharamsala, India. She has traveled extensively through Eastern Europe, the Balkans, East Africa, and Latin America and is passionate about sustainable development and ﬁnding innovative approaches to ending poverty. Annie Khan, originally from Trinidad and Tobago, migrated to Toronto, Canada, in 1994. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto in neuroscience and psychology. While working in community-based organizations, she felt compelled to do more for disenfranchised populations. She pursued a master’s in counseling psychology at the Adler School of Professional Psychology and is currently working on her doctorate in clinical psychology. She worked at the Center for Global Initiatives as a placement student on The New

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287

Humanitarians: Innovations, Inspirations, and Blueprints for Visionaries book project. Graham Macmillan is senior director of Scojo Foundation, a leading social enterprise focused on reducing poverty and generating opportunity through the sale of affordable eyeglasses and complementary products. Prior to joining Scojo Foundation, Mr. Macmillan served as director of business development for the ChildSight program at Helen Keller International. He currently serves on the board of directors of the FISH Hospitality Program and is a member of the Micro-franchise Development Initiative at Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management. Mr. Macmillan was a 2006 fellow at the Global Social Beneﬁt Incubator at Santa Clara University’s Center for Science, Technology, and Society, and has been an invited judge with NYU Stern’s Berkley Center for Entrepreneurial Studies business plan competition as well as the Robert F. Wagner School for Public Service’s Catherine B. Reynolds Undergraduate Scholarship in Social Enterprise competition. He received his BA in international studies and history from Colby College and his MSc in management of international public service organizations from New York University’s Robert F. Wagner School for Public Service. Mr. Macmillan is currently pursuing an MBA through the TRIUM Program (NYU Stern, London School of Economics, and HEC Management School of Paris). 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 of 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. He is currently a counseling graduate student at the Adler School of Professional Psychology and is engaged in a community service practicum with

288

About the Editor and Contributors

Dr. Chris Stout at the Center for Global Initiatives. He intends to continue his studies and pursue a doctorate in depth psychology. Kevin P. Q. Phelan is a senior communications manager for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in the United States. Since 2001 he has worked with MSF in Angola, the Palestinian Territories, Iraq, Sudan, Haiti, Uganda, Nigeria, and Niger. Before joining MSF, he worked as a correspondent at Radio France International, as a teacher at the City College of New York, and as a social worker in the Bronx and Queens. William H. Rosenblatt is professor of anesthesiology, Yale University School of Medicine, the founder of REMEDY, its volunteer medical director, and primary author of seminal articles on recovery published by the Journal of the American Medical Association and others. Dr. Rosenblatt has been the recipient of multiple awards for his work with REMEDY, including the Rolex Award for Enterprise in Science and Invention given by the Rolex Foundation in 1996. Jack Saul is a psychologist who has worked for more than twenty years with individuals, families, and communities that have endured war, torture, and forced migration. Since 1997 he has directed the International Trauma Studies Program (ITSP), now afﬁliated with the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, where he is assistant professor of clinical population and family health. ITSP provides post-graduate training in trauma theory, treatment, and prevention in New York and Uganda. In 1995 Dr. Saul co-founded the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture and served as its ﬁrst clinical director. He helped establish the Metro Area Support for Survivors of Torture (MASST) Consortium and created a nonproﬁt organization, Refuge, which provides psychosocial services to refugee families and communities in New York City. Following the 9/11/2001 World Trade Center attack, Dr. Saul formed the Downtown Community Resource Center with Lower Manhattan residents, and was funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as a demonstration project in community resilience following catastrophe. Since 2000 he has worked with the Kosovar Family Professional Education Collaborative to develop community mental health services based on a family- and community-resilience approach. He is a member of the American Family Therapy Academy and received the 2002 Marion Langer Award for Human Rights and Social Change of the American Association for Orthopsychiatry. Patrick Savaiano is currently enrolled in the doctoral (PsyD) program at the Adler School of Professional Psychology (ASPP) in Chicago, Illinois. 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, he 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

About the Editor and Contributors

289

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 entitled The New Humanitarians: Innovations, Inspirations, and Blueprints for Visionaries. Mr. 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. Jennifer Staple founded Unite For Sight during her sophomore year at Yale University in 2000. Under her stewardship, the organization has grown from a community-based nonproﬁt organization in New Haven to an international nonproﬁt organization serving the medically underserved in twenty-ﬁve countries. She has created ninety chapters throughout the world, engaging more than 4,000 professionals and students. The goal of the organization is to create eye disease–free communities, and Unite For Sight has provided services to more than 600,000 people worldwide. Currently a medical student at Stanford University School of Medicine, she is a cum laude graduate of Yale University, where she received her bachelor’s degree in biology and anthropology in May 2003. For her commitment to public service and leadership, Ms. Staple has been featured in books and received many international awards. Miriam Stone is responsible for fundraising, communications, and developing franchise partner opportunities. Prior to joining Scojo Foundation, she worked as a consultant to a variety of international social enterprise organizations, including Solidaridad’s Latin America program and Tilonia, the U.S. fair trade distributor for the Barefoot College in India. She has also worked as a community eye health organizer in Guatemala and has traveled extensively throughout Latin America. The author of published articles, poetry, and a memoir, Ms. Stone graduated from Columbia University in 2003 with a degree in cultural anthropology and creative writing. Stevan Weine, a psychiatrist, is a researcher, writer, teacher, and clinician in the Department of Psychiatry and the Health Research and Policy Centers of the University of Illinois–Chicago, where he directs the International Center on Responses to Catastrophes. He is co-founder and co-director of the Project on Genocide, Psychiatry, and Witnessing, which provides family-focused, communitybased mental health services to Bosnians; conducts interdisciplinary research on survivors; and engages in mental health reform in postwar countries. His scholarly work focuses on familial, cultural, and historical dimensions of traumatization. Dr. Weine is principal investigator of a National Institute of Mental Health–funded research study “A Prevention and Access Intervention for Survivor Families” that is studying the effectiveness of the Coffee and Family Education and Support intervention with Bosnian and Kosovar families in Chicago, a

290

About the Editor and Contributors

resilience-oriented, multiple-family group intervention ﬁrst developed with CCFH. In 2001 he was awarded a Career Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health on “Services Based Research with Refugee Families” for which he is conducting an ethnography of Bosnian adolescents and their families. Weine is author of a book based upon survivors’ oral histories, When History is a Nightmare: Lives and Memories of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Rutgers, 1999). His new book, Living Histories, is a narrative inquiry of diverse testimony readings from within four different twentieth-century sociohistorical occurrences of political violence. Weine is also chair of the Task Force on International Trauma Training of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and principal co-author of the “Guidelines for International Trauma Training of Practitioners in Clinical and Community Settings.” He is co-founder of the Kosovar Family Professional Education Collaborative and Services, involving CCFH, and scientiﬁc director the Services Based Training for Kosovar Community Mental Health and Prevention, which is building family-focused, communitybased public mental health services in Kosovo. For more information, see his webpage at the International Center on Responses to Catastrophes. Martine Zoer, born and raised in the Netherlands, has lived in the United Kingdom and Canada. As a fundraising and publicity associate of the Sustainable Sciences Institute, she has written multiple grant proposals since 2003, including grant proposals for Big City Mountaineers, GirlVentures, National Children’s Literacy Group, Venice Arts, and WriteGirl. A proliﬁc writer, she has also published numerous articles in national and international publications as well as two children’s books, including The Kids’ Guide to Living Abroad. She is currently working on a book about Dutch war brides who married Canadian servicemen after World War II.

Index

Note: A page number followed by an f indicates that the reference is to a ﬁgure. AIDS Risk Reduction Project (ARRP), 233, 234 Albanian Kosovar community, and ITSP, 215–216 Alchemical process, 149–150 AlmaAta Declaration on Primary Health Care, 93 Altman, Michael, 154 Alvardo, Noel Flores, 49 AMB/ATT Program. See Applied Molecular Biology/Appropriate Technology Transfer (AMB/ATT) American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases’ (AASLD), 72 Amnesty International (AI), xxviii, 159, 160 Angelic Organics Learning Center, 176 Angola Angolan refugees, 8 conﬂicts in, 7, 13 CRHP operation in, 102 MSF operation in, 20–21 ANM. See Auxiliary nurse midwife (ANM) Antiretroviral medications (ARVs), 19, 122–124, 130, 238

1000: The Most Creative Individuals in America (Wurman), 273 52 Ways to Change the World, 273 9/11 attack. See September 11 terrorist attack (2001) AAI. See Accelerated Access Initiative (AAI) AASLD. See American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases’ (AASLD) Abbott, Grace, 158 Accelerated Access Initiative (AAI), 123–124 “Access to anti-AIDS medication,” 121 Access to Essential Medicines Campaign, 19–20 ACTs. See Artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) Addams, Jane, 158 Admay, Catherine Adcock, 258 Afghanistan, MSF aid operation, 11, 21–22 African Refuge, 223–224 African trypanosomiasis, 20 Agger, I., 212 AIDS. See HIV/AIDS

291

292 Antiretroviral medications (continued) in Rwanda and Burundi, 124 shortage of, 20 Applied Molecular Biology/Appropriate Technology Transfer (AMB/ATT) basic principles, 61 formation of, 59–60 Harris’s vision, formalization of, 62–63 manual ampliﬁcation of Vibrio cholerae, 61 objective of, 60 phases of, 60–61 training courses in different countries, 63 Architecting, deﬁned, 271 Ariyan, Chris, 258 Armed conﬂicts, victims of, 24–25 Arole, Mabelle background, 96 foundation of CRHP, 93 in memoriam, 109 in UNICEF, 107 Arole, Raj, xx at CRHP, 106–107 early life, 95–97 in Jamkhed, 97–99 at NRHM, 112 working abroad, 106–107 Arole, Shobha, xix–xx CRHP, role in, 106 in different countries, 108 training at Jamkhed, 107 Aroles in beginning in Jamkhed, 97–99 early life of, 95–97 founded CRHP in 1970, 93 future plans by, 112–113 involvement in training for primary health care, 108 lessons learned by, 111–112 questions and answers with, 113–115 as social entrepreneurs, 94 training VHWs as agents of transformation, 100–101 Aron, Raymond, 6 Artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs)

Index Amyris/Sanoﬁ-aventis, contribution to, 87–88 Artemisinin Project and, 87 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant, 88 scope of, 88 WHO recommendations, 88 ARVs. See Antiretroviral medications (ARVs) Association of Operating Room Nurses (AORN), 255 Associations de loi, French law, 4, 17 Atwell, Ed, 154–155 Auxiliary nurse midwife (ANM), 99 Bailey, Dan, 155 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 195 Bangladesh, 1, 4 Baron, Nancy, 221, 224 Barre, Siad, 14 BASIS (Bio-pharmacogenomic Access & Sustainable Infra-Structure), 270 Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture, 210 Belli, Alejandro, 59, 63 Berrie, Scott, xix, 48 Biafra, Nigeria genocide in, 3 MSF operation in, 4 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 239, 270 Binh Thanh OPC, Vietnam, 122 “Blenderfuge,” 62 Blindness in developing countries. See also Unite for Sight barriers in treatment, 31–32 Ghana (see Buduburam Refugee Camp, Ghana) Vision 2020 goals and, 32 Blum-Kovler Foundation, 162 A Boat for Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Emmanuelli), 7 Bolivia Flying Doctors of America in, 151–152 Sustainable Sciences Institute in, 66 Bolivian Women’s Prison Mission, 151 Bon Marché hospital, Bunia, 25

Index Boots, Nora, 107, 108 Borel, Raymond, 4 Bosnian and Kosovar Refugees, United States Intervention Research with Migrants and Refugees, 195 Joining Multiple-Family Groups, 195–196 Treatment and Services Studies, 194–195 Bosnian Serbs, 15 Boyle, Brian, 125 Braille Without Borders, xxiii Brand, Paul, 96 Brauman, Rony, 2, 7, 11 Brugeman, Walter, 154 Buduburam Refugee Camp, Ghana blindness due to atrocities at, 38–40 entrepreneurial skill building at, 40–42 establishment of, 37–38 James Clarke’s services at, 35–36, 39, 42 Karrus Hayes’ services at, 35, 36, 39 tragedy of blindness at, 36–37 Unite for Sight programs at, 35–36, 42 Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL), xxvi Bush, George H.W. (President), 13 Butare, Rwanda, 15 Byrne, Donn, 232 CAFES. See Coffee and Families Education and Support Group (CAFES) Caldwell, Gillian, xxvii Cambodia genocide, 11 ICEHA in, 140–141 Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, 233 torture victims (see Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture) Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture, 159 Carré, John le, 84 Carroll, Roseanne, 151–152 Carroll, Scott, 151–152

293 Caruso, Denise, xxvi CBPHC. See Community-based primary health care (CBPHC) CBPR. See Community-based participatory research (CBPR) CDC. See U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Center for Global Initiatives (CGI), xxii–xxiii Academic Memberships, 267 BASIS project, 270 collaboration with other organizations, 264–265 CONTACT project, 268 ENVOY project, 270–271 funding resources, 266–267 mission of, 263 organizational development, 263–264 philosophy and approach, 261–262 program development, 265 Project Niños, 268 solutions for health care-related problems, 262 stafﬁng model, 267 THRIVE project, 268–269 unique aspects of, 262 WorldWise project, 269 Centerforglobalinitiatives.org, 268 Center for Health, Intervention, and Prevention (CHIP), xxii, 231 cancer prevention and, 239 CHCM, establishment of, 239 foundation of, 231–232 grant from NIMH, 238 grant from University of Connecticut, 240–243 HIV prevention interventions, peerbased, 237 multidisciplinary approach to health problems, 232–233 organizational structure, development of, 243–244 research expenditures, 240 sexual and drug use behavior, research on, 234 Center for Health Communication and Marketing (CHCM), 239

294 Center for HIV Intervention and Prevention, 234 Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA), 168 Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), xxv Center for Victims of Torture, Minneapolis, 159 Center for War, Peace and the News Media, 216 CGI. See Center for Global Initiatives (CGI) CHAI. See Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative (CHAI) Chantilly Principles, 17 Charhon, Francis, 7 Charles, Marie, xx, 123 Chaudhry, Serena, 223 Chavan, Ratnamala Jaganath, 109–110 CHCM. See Center for Health Communication and Marketing (CHCM) Chemtob, Claude, 219 Chicago immigrants and refugees in, 158 Metropolitan Sanctuary Alliance, 160 physicians and psychologists in, 160 Religious Task Force on Central America, 160 Theological Union, 170 torture survivors in, 159 torture treatment center in, 161–162 Travelers and Immigrants Aid (TIA), 158, 160 Children healthcare education for, 268 mental health of, 218 CHIP. See Center for Health, Intervention, and Prevention (CHIP) Cholera epidemic, 16 Christian Medical College, Vellore Christmas card, 125 Churches, response to torture, 159–160 Cintron, Ralph, 194 CJA. See Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) Clarke, James and Unite for Sight, 31, 35–36, 39, 42 Clinical coaching, 137

Index Clinical competency, 134 Clinical mentor candidates, 140 Clinical mentoring, 132–133, 136–137, 141 Clinical protocols, 124 Clinical research, 123–124 Clinical skills, 121, 127–128, 140 Clinton, Bill (President) and Scojo Foundation, 53 Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative (CHAI), 132, 134 Clinton Global Initiative and Scojo Foundation, 53 Close, Glenn, 183 CME. See Continuing medical education (CME) Coffee and Families Education and Support Group (CAFES), 196 Coloma, Joseﬁna, 60 Coming Home, 223 Common Bond Institute (CBI), xxiv Community-based participatory research (CBPR), 202 Community-based primary health care (CBPHC), 107, 108 Community Relations Council, xxviii Community Resource Center, Manhattan, 218–221 Community Service Practicum Program, Adler School of Professional Psychology, 267 Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP), xix–xx, 93 and Ghodegaon, 103–106 health program by, 102–103 involvement in training for primary health care, 108 ofﬁcial campus of, 99 as organization, 94 principles of community-based primary health care, 110–111 rehabilitation center in memory of Marbelle, 109 sustainability and globalization, 106–109 training women as VHWs, 99, 107 transformation of individuals and communities, 94–95

Index village transformation by people, 103–106 Congo-Brazzaville Civil War, 25 Constant Gardener, The (Carré, John le), 84 CONTACT (Coordination & Online Tracking of Activities & Clinical Teams), 268 Contemporary Psychology (Stout), 271–272, 272 Continuing medical education (CME), 138 Cook County Hospital, Chicago, 160 Cooke, Hale, 97 Copenhagen University Hospital, Denmark, 159 Cornell Weill Medical College, 125 Cornman, Deborah, 243 Cranston, Alan, xxx CRHP. See Comprehensive Rural Health Project (CRHP) Cross Cultural Counseling Center of the International Institute of New Jersey (IINJ), 213 Crystal Eye Clinic, Ghana, 35–36, 37 Danieli, Yael, 212 Darfur, Sudan Darfur, Sudan, and MSF operations, 24 Davis, Susan, 264 Death and the Maiden, 183 Democratic Republic of Congo, and MSF, 25 Dengue, 67, 68 Department of Psychology, the dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 235 Deutsch, Ana, 159, 160 “Digital divide,” 270 Disaster response workshop series, and ITSP, 221 DITE (documentation, investigation, therapy, and evaluation), 212 Division of Infectious Diseases, University of Chicago, Berkeley, 68 DNDi. See Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) Doctors Without Borders. See Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)

295 Doll, Cassandra, 140 Don, Felipe, 50–51 Dr. Kutumbiah (consultant for president of India), 96 Drucker, Peter, 154 Dr. Wilson (MSF physicians), 19 Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), 20 Duff, Ernest, 213 Durenberger, Dave, 175 Dutch government, and MSF, 23 Eastern Pakistan, tidal wave victims, 1, 4 Eﬂornith, 20 Emergency Medical and Surgical Intervention Group. See Groupe d’Intervention Medical et Chirurgical d’Urgence (GIMCU) Emmanuelli, Xavier, 2, 14 Endeavor, xxv English as second language, 164, 167 technical course by Harris, 58 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Waste Reduction Model (WARM), 251 Waste Wise program, 251 ENVOY (Enabled, Networked Ventures Optimizing Yields), 270 EPA. See Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Epicentre, 10 Equal Healthcare Access, 121 Equity, health care, 269 Erkel, Arjan, 23 Erkert, Jan, 173 Ethiopia, and MSF, 12 Ethiopian government, refugee resettlement, 12–13 “Everything’s Back to Normal in New York City,” theater project, 220f Evidence-Based Practice (Stout), 272 Ex-army nurse. See Helenbai Exodus World Service, xxxi–xxxii Eye care, 35–36 Eye Clinic, Tamale Teaching Hospital, 35 Fabri, Mary, xxi Families, and effect of torture, 171–172

296 Family support committees, 218 FAR. see Rwandan armed forces (FAR) Farms and bees, 176 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 219 Federal Refugee Resettlement Program, 158 Feetham, Suzanne, 194 Felipe, Don, 50–51 FEMA. See Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Fertile Soil (poem), 183–184 52 Ways to Change the World, 273 Fisher, Bill, 231 Fisher, Jeff Fitzduff, Mari, xxviii Flying Doctors of America, xx–xxi, 145 adding physical therapy teams, 152 background, 145–147 Bolivia and Peru, mission in, 151–152 concept to reality, 149–150 current direction of, 152–153 funding, 150 future direction of, 153 integrating work with environmental groups, 153 medical team, 146f members, 148, 151 missions, 147–149 overcoming obstacles, 150–151 volunteers, 148 Fournier, Christophe, 24 FRC. See French Red Cross (FRC) French government, and Biafran genocide, 3 French Red Cross (FRC), 3 Galassie, Dale W., 274–275 Garcia, Lu, 108 Gathercoal, Allan, xx–xxi, 145 funding by, 150 mentors of, 154 mission, 147 motto for, 153 spiritual life of, 149 vision for Flying Doctors of America, 146, 151 Gathercoal, Allan M., 155

Index Gavhale, Angadrao, 104 Geekcorps, xxvii Genefke, Inge, 159 Geneva Conventions, 2 Getting Started (Stout), 272 Ghodegaon village and CRHP, 103–106 Gillies, Rowan, 22 Ginsberg, Allen, 194 Gland Pharma Limited, 84, 85 Global catastrophes, 190 “Global Health,” 121 Global health inequities, 262 Global Health Policy Program, 53 Global positioning devices (GPS), 69 Global Security Institute (GSI), xxx Global Village Engineers (GVE), xxiii–xxiv Goemaere, Eric, 19 González, Mario, 173 Gourp, Robert, 213 GPS. See Global positioning devices (GPS) Graves-Abe, Katie, 141 Grotberg, Edith, 273 Groupe d’Intervention Medical et Chirurgical d’Urgence (GIMCU), 4 Guide to Promoting Resilience in Children: Strengthening the Human Spirit and, Tapping Your Inner Strength: How to Find the Resilience to Deal with Anything, A (Grotberg), 273 Guram, Moses, 102–103 Hale, Victoria, xix Hanoi, 125–127 Harris, Eva, xix formation of SSI, 63 foundation of AMB/ATT Program, 60 learnings of, 72–75, 74f Leishmania, detection of, 58 and Peñaranda, 75f teaching Belli, 59 teaching molecular biology, 58–59 workshop with Coloma, 60 Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma, 159 Hayes, Karrus, 31, 35, 36, 39 Health by the People (WHO), 93 Health care community-based, 269

Index medical waste collection, 250 problems in rural areas, 269 HealthInfo Corp, 258 Healthy Relationships and Options interventions for seropositives, 238 Heartland Alliance. See Travelers and Immigrants Aid (TIA) Heartland Alliance for Human Needs & Human Rights, 158, 179 HEDO. See Highland Education Development Organization (HEDO) Heineken Breweries, 124 Helenbai, 98 Henry Dunant Center, 53 Hepatitis C virus (HCV), 66–67 Highland Education Development Organization (HEDO), 126 HIV. See HIV/AIDS HIV/AIDS, 127, 135–136, 142 ARV treatment, 19 characterization by using Ethnographic Study, 199 late-stage, 130 in Nepal, 134 obstacles in treatment, 18 pandemic, 121, 124, 128, 143 patients, condition of, 122–123, 125, 131 research on treatment, 122 virus, 130 among wives of Tajik workers, 200 HIV prevention conference in Vermont, 233 Hoetelmans, Richard, 124–125 Hollon, Thomas, 180 Hord, Allen, 155 Hull House, 158 Humanities Research Council of Canada, 233 Human Rights Campaign (HRC), xxx Hybrid Vigor Institute, xxvi IASC Guidelines on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergency Settings, 213, 227 IATEC. See International Therapy Evaluation Center (IATEC)

297 ICDDR, B. See International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research in Bangladesh (ICDDR, B) ICEHA. See International Center for Equal Healthcare Access (ICEHA) ICORC. See International Center on Responses to Catastrophes (ICORC) ICTs. See information and communication technologies (ICTs) IDA. See International Dispensary Association (IDA) Ideas and Methods Inc., 273 IHL. See International Humanitarian Law (IHL) IINJ. See Cross Cultural Counseling Center of the International Institute of New Jersey (IINJ) Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (1996), 166 Illinois Bar Journal, 274 Illinois Department of Mental Health, 158 Illinois Psychologists Association (IPA), 160 Illinois Refugee Resettlement Program, 180 IMB model. See Information, Motivation, Behavioral Skills (IMB) model Immanuel, Mabelle. See Arole, Mabelle Inconvenient Truth, An (Gore), 153 Indochina, communist takeover of, 7 Infectious diseases in tropics. See Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) Infectious diseases in tropics iOWH, role in prevention, 80 therapeutic drugs, 79 Information and communication technologies (ICTs), 68 Information, Motivation, Behavioral Skills (IMB) model, 233–234 Institute of OneWorld Health (iOWH), xix in Bihar (see iOWH in Bihar, India) business sustainability of, 89 Diarrheal Disease Program, 88 foundation story of, 80–81

298 funding model of, 82f Gates Foundation, partnership with, 83 and global inequities of accessing medicines, 90–91 goals of, 86–87 ICDDR,B, collaboration with, 88 idea behind, 80 malaria program of (see iOWH malaria program) organizational snapshot, 90–91 pioneering new business model, 82–83 proof of concept of, 89f strategy of networked innovation, following, 81–82 International Agency for Prevention of Blindness, 33 International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research in Bangladesh (ICDDR, B), 88 International Center for Equal Healthcare Access (ICEHA), xx, 121 clinical mentors of, 137, 138–140 co-investment deal for, 134–135 factors for success of, 141–142 foundation grant, 129 funding for, 128 future of, 142 in-country partners of, 134 initial focus of, 125 loyal visionary corporate donors of, 135 meeting in London, 130 passionate entrepreneurs of, 140–141 prevention of HIV transmission, 126 program model of, 129–134 quality control, 136–137 scope of, 121–122 summary of, 143 Vietnam-Lao Cai Province, 126 Western funders for, 136 International Center for Responses to Catastrophes, xxi International Center on Responses to Catastrophes (ICORC) approach of research, 201–204 HOMES project, 200–201 issue of global catastrophes, dealing with, 190–191

Index KFARY project, 197–198 primary mission of, 192–193 program of research, 191–192 research on Bosnian and Kosovar Refugees, 194–196 research on Kosovo, 194–196 research on Tajikistan, 198–200 research with war impacted families, 189–190 training for researchers, 204–205 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 2–3 International cooking group, 176–177 International Dispensary Association (IDA), 85 International donor funding, 124, 127 International Family Therapy Association, Istanbul, 221 International Humanitarian Law (IHL), 23 International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), xxxii International Rescue Committee (IRC), 6 International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS), 212 International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies Task Force on International Training, 212 International (Soviet-American) Professional Exchange, xxiv International Therapy Evaluation Center (IATEC), 123 International Trauma Studies Program (ITSP), xxi–xxii administrative and operations budget, 236 annual multidisciplinary conference in trauma studies, 224 audio-visual library workshop, 224 community-based services, 213 community resource center, 218 disaster recovery workshop, 221 distinct contribution, 224–225 founders, 209 goals for future, 226–228 historical background, 210–211 institutional funding, 236 International training and services, 215–217

Index organizational challenges, 225–226 organizational development during 1998–2001, 211–213, 211–213 psychosocial well-being, promotion of, 227–228 safer sex and drug use, 238 theater and, 213–215 in Uganda, 224 International Trauma Training Guidelines for the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, 191 International University Center for Mental Health and Human Rights, 211 Inter-plast program in Palo Alto, 249 Interpreters, 164, 170 Invisible Conﬂicts, xxv–xxvi iOWH. See Institute of OneWorld Health (iOWH) iOWH in Bihar, India conducting clinical trials, 84 delivering drugs to remote locations, 85 Paromomycin IM Injection, use of, 84, 89f reducing inequities in treatment, 85 value chain, pharmaceutical, 86f iOWH malaria program ACTs and, 87 Amyris and Sanoﬁ-aventis, partnership with, 87, 88 Artemisinin Project and, 87–88 Jay Keasling’s contributions to, 87–88 semisynthetic artemisinin, development of, 87 iOWH value chain, 86f challenges in drug delivery, 85 diarrhea program, 88, 89f drug delivery to remote places, 85 Gland Pharma Limited and IDA, partnership with, 85 goals of, 86 malaria program (see iOWH malaria program) IPA. See Illinois Psychologists Association (IPA) Iraq MSF aid operation in, 25–26

299 social trauma during War, 224 UN aid operations in, 13–14 Irene Pastoral Counseling Program, 170 ITSP. See International Trauma Studies Program (ITSP) Itspnyc.org, 227 Jamkhed, xix–xx, 97–99 Jamkhed: A Comprehensive Rural Health Project (Arole and Arole), 106 Jamkhed Institute for Training and Research in Community Health and Population, 107 Jean, François, 12 Jensen, Soeren Buus, 209 testimony therapy for torture survivors, 212 WHO, role in, 211 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, 63 Johnson, Blair, 239 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 255 Just Cause, 264 Kadam, Lalanbai, 94–95 Kalichman, Seth, 235 Karma, and past life belief, 173 Kassalow, Jordan, xix, 48 Katzoff, Allen, 258 Keasling, Jay, 88 KFARY. See Kosovar Families Addressing Risks in Youth (KFARY) KFPEC. See Kosovar Family Professional Education Collaborative (KFPEC) Khadka, Ramesh, 108 Khayletshia, South Africa, 19 Khmer Rouge genocide, 11 King Faycal Hospital, Kigali, 15 Kinzie, David, 159 Kirschner, Robert, 160 Klein, Hillel, 211 Kosovar Families Addressing Risks in Youth (KFARY), 197–198 Kosovar Family Professional Education Collaborative (KFPEC), 196–197, 215, 216

300 Kosovo Kosovar Attitudes on Drugs and HIV/AIDS (KADAH), 197 Kosovar Family Professional Education Collaborative, 196–197 Ministry of Health, 192 National Theater, Prishtina, 215 Preliminary Adaptation of KFARY, 197–198 Kosovo war (1999), 215 Kothari, Bansi, 97 Koto, Mary, 258 Kouchner, Bernard, 2, 4 Doctors of the World, foundation of, 7 Operation Provide Comfort, role in, 14 Kovler, Peter, 162 Kuperstock, Darryl Rotman, 258 Kurd refugees, 13, 14 Kusadgaon village, India, 105 Lalanbai. See Kadam, Lalanbai La Mancha, 26–27 Landau, Judith, 219, 221 Landuyt, Kate, 108 Langson Province, 126 La Paz, Bolivia, 152 Lavelle, Jim, 159 Laxmi, Vijaya, 49–50 Lebanon Civil war, 5, 24 MSF operation in, 6–7 Ledyard, Evan, xxv Leishmania cause of, 58 detection of, 59 Leishmania braziliensis, 62 Leishmaniasis. See Leishmania Lesotho, and HIV prevalence rate, 132 Levin, Mariano, 270 Levinson, Daniel, 194 Lewis, Robin, 125, 129 Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 223 “Libertés Sans Frontières,” 11 Link Model of Community Resilience, 219

Index Long Island hospitals, and medical waste, 250 Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), xxv Low-Cost Approach to PCR: Appropriate Transfer of Biomolecular Techniques, A (Harris), xix, 63 Lowe, Charles, 243 Loyal and Visionary Donors, 135–136 Loyola University, Chicago, 267 Lubetzky, Daniel, xxviii Luers, Wendy, xxxi Lyne, Sister Sheila, 161, 181 Lyons, Cathie, 107 MacArthur Award, 63 MacPherson, Dr., 96 Mahila Mandals, 102 Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, 209 Malhuret, Claude, 2, 6, 7 Mamani, Nataniel, 62 Manhattan, community projects, 218 Manuscript-writing workshops, 64–65 Maria, torture surivivor, 163 Marjorie Kovler Center, xxi case management, 176 clinical model for torture treatment, 164–170 community organization, formation of, 175 founders of, 157 funding, 175 relationships with torture survivors, 168 safety and trust to survivors, 165 services for torture survivors, 162–163 structure (location, ofﬁce and staff), 162 Therapeutic Accompaniment model, 169 Therapeutic Partnership model, 169–170 torture survivors, case study, 163–164 Marjorie (Kovler’s mother), 162 Marks, Susan, xxxi Martínez, Antonio, 161, 182

Index Martínez, Irene, 160, 181 Massaquoi, Jacob, 223 MASST. See Metro Area Support for Survivors of Torture Consortium (MASST) Material aid program, 65 Maternal and child health (MCH), 100 MCH. See Maternal and child health (MCH) M&E. See Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World), 7, 213 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), xviii, 1 Access to Essential Medicines Campaign, 19–20 in Afghanistan, 11, 21–22 aid in Cold War, 10–11 in Angola, 20–21 armed conﬂict victims, treatment for, 24–25 in Biafra, 3–4 “border-free” operations, 4 in Cambodia, 11 in Cambodian border, 8 dangers faced by aid workers, 22–23 dangers faced by volunteers, 22–23 early days, 4–6 Epicentre, Paris, 10 in Ethiopia, 12 in former Yugoslavia, 15 founders, 2 General Assembly (1979), 7 HIV/AIDS, prevention of, 18–19 humanitarian intervention, 13–15 internal crisis, 16–17 International Council, establishment of (see Chantilly Principles) La Mancha and social mission of, 26–27 legal issues, 23 in Liberia, 21 limitations, 12 logisticians, role of, 8–9 malnutrition, dealing with (see Nutritional crises and MSF) and media, 4

301 medical components, 9 medical guidelines and protocols, 9 meningitis vaccination campaign in Nigeria, 17 MSF Charter, 5 need for innovative medical tools, 26 Nobel Prize for Peace, 17–18 as nonproﬁt organization, 4 in North Korea, 13 organizational development, 9–10 pharmaceutical drugs, 9 private funding, 23–24 public recognition, 6 and Red Cross, 2–3 rehabilitation programs, 25 in Rwanda, 15–16 sexual violence victims, treatment for, 25 in Somalia, 14 split, tension within, 6–7 in Thailand, 8 United States, interest in, 6, 11 Med-Eq, 256 Media MSF opeartion and, 4 private funding with, 23 Medical Assistance Programs, 151 Medical InterAction, 270–271 Medical Mercy Missions, 147 Medical waste recovery of, 250 storage of, 253 Meningitis, treatment of. See Oily chloramphenicol Mental health cross-cultural, 169 refugees (see Refugee Mental Health Program) war and, 171 Mercy Hospital, 161 Merhamet, 195 Metro Area Support for Survivors of Torture Consortium (MASST), 213 Midwest Immigrant Rights Center (MIRC), 160, 180 Miles, Steven, 161, 182

Index

302 Ministry of Health, Congo Brazzaville, 129 Ministry of Health, Kosovo, 192 MIRC. See Midwest Immigrant Rights Center (MIRC) Mogadishu, Somalia, 14 Mohn, Sid, 158, 160, 179 Molecular biology, deﬁned, 58 Moll, Heidi, xxxi Mollica, Richard, 159 Monitoring and evaluation (M&E), 136 Mother Teresa, 145, 149, 154 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, 172 Mousin, Craig, 160, 179 MSF. See Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF); Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF) MSF-Belgium, 29–30 MSF Charter, 5 MSF clinics and hospitals, 18 MSF-France, 10 MSF-Holland, 10 MSF-Spain, 10 MSF-Switzerland, 10 MSF volunteers, 5 Musicant, Ralph, 267, 273

torture survivors in, 210 trauma centers, 222 New York Times Foundation, 219 New York University (NYU) International Trauma Studies Program, xxi School of Medicine, 209 Nicaragua, 57 earthquake of 1972, 5 Leishmaniasis in, 58 NIH. See U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) “NIH roadmap,” 244 NIMH. See U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) 9/11 attack. See September 11 terrorist attack (2001) Nonhierarchical organization of passionate entrepreneurs, 140–141 Nonviolent Peaceforce, xxix Nutritional crises and MSF, 26 NVBDCP. See National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme (NVBDCP)

“Narratives of Suffering and Transformation,” 224 Narrative therapy, 166, 174 National Consortium of Torture Treatment Programs, 213 National Immigrant Justice Center. See Midwest Immigrant Rights Center (MIRC) National Medal of Honor, 128 National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), 112 National Theater, Prishtina, 215 National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme (NVBDCP), 84 New England Journal of Medicine, 84 New Haven Chamber of Commerce and the Committee, 257 New York City, 220 Board of Education, 218 community resource center, 220 Family Therapy Academy, 221 immigrant population in, 225

Occupational therapy (OT), 177 Oily chloramphenicol, 20 Olweean, Steve, xxiv 1000: The Most Creative Individuals in America, (Wurman), 273 OneVoice, xxviii–xxix Orbinski, James, 17 Orrego, Cristian, 58, 59 OT. See Occupational therapy (OT) Our City of Refuge: Teens, War, and Freedom (Bakhtin), 195 Our Voices Together, xxvi–xxvii Pagé, Patrice, 23 PAHO. See Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), 66 Pannell, William, 154 Paromomycin IM Injection Gland Pharma Limited manufacturing, 84, 85

Index IDA and, 85 NVBDCP, inclusion in, 84 success of, 84 WHO, approval of, 84 PATH. See Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) Pavkovic, Ivan, 194 PCR. See polymerase chain reaction (PCR) PDAs. See Personal data assistants (PDAs) PDCS. See Pediatric Dengue Cohort Study (PDCS) PDVI. See Pediatric Dengue Vaccine Initiative (PDVI) Peace Brigades International (PBI), xxix Pécoul, Bernard, 20 Pediatric Dengue Cohort Study (PDCS), 67, 74f Pediatric Dengue Vaccine Initiative (PDVI), 68 Peñaranda, Maria Elena, 75f Perel, Esther, 224 Perpich, Rudy, 159 Personal data assistants (PDAs), 69 Peru detection of Leishmania in, 59 Flying Doctors of America in, 151–152 Sustainable Sciences Institute in, 59 Pﬁzer. See Pharmacia PharmAccess International, 124 Pharmacia, 83 Phillips, Timothy, xxxi Phnom Penh, Viet Nam, 11 Phuong, Do Nguyen, 127 Pinel, Jacques, 9 Polymerase chain reaction (PCR), 58–59 Population Services International (PSI), 53 Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 160, 172, 194, 217 Posttraumatic Therapy (PPT), 211 PPT. See Posttraumatic Therapy (PPT) Practice of accompaniment, 169 Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), 66 Program for Torture Victims, Los Angeles, 159

303 Project on Justice in Times of Transition, xxxi Provincial Health Authorities and Family Health International, 122 Provincial Health Department, 127 PSI. See Population Services International (PSI) Psychology and Human Rights Abuses (Martínez), 160 Psychology of Terrorism, The (Stout), 272 Psychotherapist, 169 Psychotherapy, 169–170 PTSD. See Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Quiroga, José, 159, 160 Raghunathan, Pratima, 63 Rastogi, Ruchi, 140 Ready-to-use foods (RUF), 26 Red Cross French Red Cross (FRC), 3 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 2–3 Refugee, refugee camps, 7–8 medical guidelines, 9 Rwandan, 16 theatre, interaction with, 214 in United States, 200 Refugee Act (1980), 158 Refugee Mental Health Initiative by the Ofﬁce of Refugee Resettlement, 158 Refugee Mental Health Program, 161 Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims (RCT), 159 Reisner, Steven, 213, 224 Religious Organizations in the United States: A Study of Identity, Liberty and the Law (Mousin), 180 Remedyinc.org, 257 REMEDY (Recovered Medical Equipment for the Developing World), xxii awards received by, 257 challenges faced by, 254 disaster relief, 256 historical background of, 249 hospital administration, 253

304 REMEDY (Recovered Medical Equipment for the Developing World) (continued) hospitals in United States, 254 medical devices supply, 256 and other organizations, 254 philosophy of, 251 pilot program at YNHH, 252–253 raising awareness for, 255 supply recovery programs, 251–253 support through grants and family foundation gifts, 255 Reniers, Kathy, 140 Resilience for Today: Gaining Strength from Adversity (Grotberg), 273 Rey, Héctor Guillermo Vilar, 155 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 239 Roberts, Guy, 63 Robin, Pat, 173 Room to Read, xxiii Rosenblatt, William H. awards, 257 formation of REMEDY, 249–250 medical waste recovery, 250–251 Rottenberg, Linda, xxv Rousseau, Christine, 63 Roux, Marcel, 13 RUF. See Ready-to-use foods (RUF) Rwanda AIDS patient in, 123 genocide, 15–16 Western physician in, 122 Rwandan armed forces (FAR), 16 Rwandan Patriotic Front, 16 Salcedo, Victor Conde, 151 Salvadoran and Guatemalan families, 159 Sanctuary Movement, 159 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 6 Saul, Jack, xxi, 209 disaster response workshop and, 221 experience of 9/11 terrorist attack, 217 Save the Children, UK, 14 Savimbi, Jonas, 52 Schlesinger, Susana Jiménez, 181 School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), 125 Schopper, Doris, xviii

Index Schreder, Carleen L., 267, 273–274 Schwab Foundation, 94 Schwimmer, Emy McCord, 140 Science, 60 Scientiﬁc Capacity-Building Program, 64, 65 Scojo Foundation, xix background of, 46 business skills to entrepreneurs, teaching, 47 Clinton Global Initiative, featuring, 53 core mission of, 49 empowering women, 47–48 initial problems faced by, 51, 52 Kassalow, Jordan, contribution of, 48, 53–54 learning process of, 52–53 measuring success of, 48–49 model of, 46 organizational snapshot of, 55 organized system of training, maintaining, 47 President Clinton endorsing, 53 programs, utility of, 52 providing reading glasses, 45 and PSI, 53 responsibility of, 45 Scojo Vision LLC and, 48 Scott Berrie, contributions of, 48, 54, 54f size of, 46–47 success stories of, 49–51 support from Franchise Partners, 46 support from Vision Entrepreneurs, 45, 47 Scojo Vision Entrepreneurs “Business in a Bag,” backpack for, 46 selling affordable reading glasses, 46 training for, 47 women empowerment and, 47–48 Scojo Vision LLC, 48, 53, 54, 286 Scott, Marianne, xxvi–xxvii Search for Common Ground, xxxi Secours Medical Français (SMF), 4 September 11 terrorist attack (2001) community resource center for victims, 218–221 disaster response workshop for victims, 221

Index ITSP’s role during, 217 Service research, Key Themes of Community Collaboration, 202 Cultural Theory, 203 Ethnographic Methods, 203–204 Family Resilience, 201–202 Services, 202–203 Sexual violence victims, 25 Share and Care, Nepal, 108 Shimkus, Chris, xxiii Sierra Leone, Liberia, 21 Silove, Derrick, 204 Silverman, David G., 250, 258 Silverman, Edwin, 158, 160, 180 SIPA. See School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) SIPAI (Immunization System Database), 68 Sleeping sickness. See African trypanosomiasis SMART (Sustainable Medical Arts, Research, & Technology), 268 Smith, Leïla, 63 Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, 223 Snyder, Leslie, 239 Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership (SWEEP), xxiv Society for the Scientiﬁc Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), 233 Solace/Safe Horizon, 213 Somalia civil war and violence, 13, 14 MSF operation in, 14 South Africa, HIV prevention programs, 19 Southern Poverty Law Center, xxx Soviet Union, and cold war, 7 Spahovic, Mirsad, 176 Spaulding, Tom, 176 SPSSI. See Society for the Scientiﬁc Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) SSI. See Sustainable Sciences Institute (SSI) Staple, Jennifer, xviii Staten Island, New York, 222, 223 Stokes, Christopher, 25 Stout, Chris E., 263

305 Sullivan-Knopf, Eva, 170 Summits for Others, 266 Survivors of torture accompaniment by psychotherapist, 169 asylum for, 166 Cambodian women, 173 case study of, 163 community-based services, 213 community support, 167, 174 cultural context of treatment, 172 demographics, 177–178 empowerment and, 168 encouragement and support, 175 expression of dissent, 168 families, 171–172 family therapy, 164 farming and bees, 176 Guatemalan, 173–174 legal process, dealing with, 166 occupational therapy, 177 recovery process, 172 rehabilitation (see Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims (RCT)) safety and trust to, 165, 171 self-care (see Occupational therapy (OT)) self-talk, 164 social condition, 165 spiritual support to, 170 symptoms and behaviors, 172, 175 treatment regimes, 165 Sustainable Sciences Institute (SSI), xix, 60 Board of directors creating core program, 63 characteristic of Managua deﬁned by, 73–74 creation of Scientiﬁc CapacityBuilding Program, 64 (see also Scientiﬁc Capacity-Building Program) early years of, 63–66 global solution for infectious diseases by, 70 growth of, 66–69 landmark study between Division of Infectious Diseases, MOH, and, 68

306 Sustainable Sciences Institute (SSI) (continued) launch of new database, 68–69 learnings of Harris in, 72–75 manuscript-writing workshops, 64–65 mission of, 64 and PDCS administration, 67 problems and achievements of, 69–72 providing networking among scientists, PAHO, PATH, and CDC, 66 small grant and material aid program, 65 strength of, 69 successes of, 71–72 TTF and, 67 TAFES. See Tea and Families Education and Support (TAFES) Tajik Researchers, 198–200 Tajikistan Formation of Collaboration between American and Tajik Researchers, 198 Pilot Ethnographic Study of Married Male Migrants, 199 Pilot Ethnographic Study of Wives of Migrants, 199–200 Tarun Shetkari Mandals, 102 TASSC. See Torture Abolition and Survivors’ Support Coalition International (TASSC) Taylor, Carl E., 97 Tea and Families Education and Support (TAFES), 196 Technical Training Foundation (TTF), 67 Tectonidis, Milton, 26 Thailand, and MSF operations, 8, 18 Theater Arts Against Political Violence, 213, 214, 215, 219–220 Theaters, and trauma survivors, 213 THRIVE (Tanzanian Health & Resilience Initiative Valuing Education), 268 Tibetan refugees, 210 Tibet House, New York City, 214 Tierra Fértil, 184–186 Timmerman, Jacobo, 165 Tonus, 1, 4 Torrente, Nicolas de, 22

Index “Torturable class” of people, 165 Torture. See also Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) deﬁnition, 171 effect on family, 171–172 emotional and physical pain, 157, 166 politics and, 170 US response to, 158–159 victims (see Survivors of torture) Torture Abolition and Survivors’ Support Coalition International (TASSC), 168 Torture Victims Relief Act (TVRA), 175, 212 Trauma. See also Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) abuse and, 162 impact of, 165 psychological consequences, 169–170 retraumatization, 166 traumatic event, 157, 174 traumatic experiences, 163–164 violence and, 172 Trauma and Healing under State Terrorism (Agger and Jensen), 212 Trauma stories, 171 Travelers Aid of Metropolitan Chicago, 158 Travelers Aid Society, 158 Travelers and Immigrants Aid (TIA), 158, 160 Treatment and Needs of Victims of Torture and Their Families (Martínez), 161 Trickett, Ed, 193 Trinh, Trinh Ngoc, 125 TTF. See Technical Training Foundation (TTF) Tuition funds, 266 “Turning the Tide? Working with Violence Affected Families and Communities from the Field in Africa,” workshop, 221 TVRA. See Torture Victims Relief Act (TVRA) “Twelve Parallel Lives,” 174 UConn. See University of Connecticut UN. See United Nations (UN)

Index UNHCR. See United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) United Nations (UN) aid operations in Iraq, 13–14 aid operations in Somalia, 14 deﬁnition of torture, 171 General Assembly, 158 peacekeeping operations in Angola, 21 Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture, 175 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 8, 35 United States aid to “win hearts and minds” and gather intelligence, 21 Bosnian and Kosovar Refugees, 194 Operation Restore Hope, launch of, 14 Refugee Youth, 200 regulation of medical waste, 250 Services Approach to Preventive Mental Health for Adolescent Refugees, 200–201 Somalia war and, 15 United Way, 158 Unite For Sight, xviii annual Global Health Conference, goals of, 32 entrepreneurial skill, building, 40–41 foundation of, 32 fundraising efforts for eye care, 34 global programs, 34 goals of, 33 James Clarke, contributions of, 35–36, 39, 42 Karrus Hayes, contributions of, 35, 36, 39 organization snapshot, 43–44 programs in refugee camps (see Buduburam Refugee Camp, Ghana) promoting ﬁnancial success of communities, 41–42 reducing these identiﬁed barriers, 33 scope of, 32–33, 42 steps behind building, 42–43 volunteers of, 34 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 158

307 University Hospital, Prishtina, 215 University of Connecticut AIDS Risk Reduction Project (ARRP), 231 grant support for CHIP, 240–243 University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC), 192 University of Maryland School of Medicine, 154 University of Prishtina Medical School Department of Psychiatry and Neurology, 215 Unorthodox Funding Model, 134–135 U.S. air force, aid operation, 13–14 U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 66, 239 U.S. Civilian Research & Development Foundation, 192 U.S. Department of Immigration and Naturalization Services, 214 U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), 192, 232, 244 U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), 239 V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, 66 Venice Family Clinic in Southern California, 159 VHWs. See village health workers (VHWs) Vibrio cholerae, 61 Vice provost for Research and Graduate Education (VPRGE), 235 Vietnamese healthcare providers, 122 Vietnamese refugees, boat to rescue, 6 Village health workers (VHWs), 99 agents of transformation, 100–101 impact of, 103 Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) Bihar, India, prevalence in, 83 deadly parasitic disease, 83 NVBDCP, India, and, 84 sand ﬂy, causing, 83 Vision of Race Unity Award, 147 Vision 2020 goals and “The Right to Sight”, 32 VL. See Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) Voices of South Asian Women (Arole), 107 Volunteer Ophthalmic Services to Humanity (VOSH), 48

Index

308 VPRGE. See Vice provost for Research and Graduate Education (VPRGE) Wade, Sherman, 155–156 Wakil, Adil Ed program on hepatitis C virus, establishment of, 66–67 role in SSI, 63 Ware, Norma, 194 WARM. See Waste Reduction Model (WARM) Waste Reduction Model (WARM), 251 Waste Wise, 251 Wayne, Seth, 35 Weine, Stevan, xxi, 212 helping families impacted by war and forced migration, 190 issue of global catastrophes, 191 mentors of, 194 program of services research by, 191–192 programs supported by, 24 research with war impacted families, 190–191 Welch, Laura, 267, 275 Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ, Chicago, 159

Wellstone, late Paul, 175 West African refugee, 222, 226 Western healthcare delivery, 132 provider, 123 WHO. See World Health Organization (WHO) Witness, xxvii Witness for Peace (WFP), xxix Wood, John, xxiii World Health Organization (WHO) Paromomycin and, 83, 84 Vision 2020 goals, 32 Wurman, Richard Saul, 273 Yale-New Haven Hospital (YNHH), 250, 252 Yale School of Law, 253 Yale University, 192 YNHH. See Yale-New Haven Hospital (YNHH) Youth Task Force, Staten Island, 223 Yugoslavia (former), and MSF, 15 Yugoslavian war, trauma victims, 211 Zuckerman, Ethan, xxvii

The New Humanitarians

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 2 Changing Education and Relief

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

9 8 7 6 5 4

3

2

1

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

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction by Chris E. Stout 1: Braille Without Borders: Do You Need Vision to Be a Visionary? Paul Kronenberg and Patrick Savaiano

xiii 1

2: Room to Read: The Democratization of Literacy John Wood and Patrick Savaiano

15

3: Global Village Engineers M. Christopher Shimkin and Annie Khan

31

4: Common Bond Institute: Vision and Journey Steve Olweean

43

5: The Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership Alice K. Johnson Butterﬁeld, Abye Tasse, and Nathan Linsk

57

6: Center for Urban Pedagogy Myron Panchuk and Patrick Savaiano

85

7: Endeavor: High-Impact Entrepreneurs, High-Impact Change Stephanie Benjamin, Teresa Barttrum, Annie Khan, and Valeria Levit

95

8: ACCION International Teresa Barttrum

111

9: Invisible Conﬂicts/The Dwon Madiki Partnership 129 Evan Ledyard, Nathan Mustain, Amy Nemeth, Katie Scranton, Morgan Smith, David Thatcher, Carolyn Ziembo, and Diana Zurawski

viii

10: Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL) Earl Martin Phalen and Teresa Barttrum 11: The Hybrid Vigor Institute: Relevant Knowledge, Innovation Solutions, and Better Decisions through Collaboration Denise Caruso

Contents

163

187

12: Our Voices Together Marianne Scott

203

13: IESC Geekcorps: Development for the New Millennium Donald Bernovich II and Kathy M. Tin

235

Afterword by Keith Ferrazzi

241

Series Afterword by Albert R. Roberts

243

About the Editor and Contributors

245

Index

255

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.

Acknowledgments

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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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• • • • • • • • • • • •

•

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?

1

Braille Without Borders: Do You Need Vision to Be a Visionary? Paul Kronenberg and Patrick Savaiano

“Dear parents, don’t worry about your children. The farm is clean and the food is excellent.” With these words, the deputy mayor of the city of Lhasa in Tibet saw a new group of blind students off to the Braille Without Borders training farm in Shigatse, accompanied by their parents and Wangchen Geleg, the vice president of the Tibet Disabled Persons Federation. The deputy mayor continued, “With the preparatory school in Lhasa and the vocational training center in Shigatse, Tibet’s blind will be in a position to integrate themselves into regular schools or professions.” In September 2002, Sabriye Tenberken and Paul Kronenberg changed the name of their organization to Braille Without Borders. This name carries two signiﬁcant meanings that serve as the foundation for their mission. First, the co-founders of Braille Without Borders (BWB) want to convey the organization’s willingness to work anywhere in the world. Second, and more importantly, the organization wants to create an environment for the blind and visually impaired that is “without borders.” In other words, BWB promotes the empowerment of the blind among all individuals and recognizes the right of all people to explore and set their own borders. BWB wants its students to gain the feeling that they belong in society, and that they have the right to exist and be treated as human beings. The blind and visually impaired often have borders and obstacles placed upon them, intentionally or not, by the sighted people of the world. This situation is accentuated in the developing areas of the world such as the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) in which the blind have traditionally been excluded from most social activities and opportunities. Based on World Health Organization (WHO) statistics, 161 million people live with a disabling visual impairment, of which 37 million are blind and 124 million have low vision. Every ﬁve seconds, someone becomes blind, and a child goes blind every minute. About 90 percent of these individuals live in developing countries 1

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The New Humanitarians

of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Paciﬁc regions. About 90 percent of the blind children in these developing countries have no access to education. Before Braille Without Borders began in the TAR, the region’s blind children did not have access to education. They led lives on the margins of society, with extremely few chances of integration. According to ofﬁcial statistics, some 30,000 of the 2.5 million inhabitants of the TAR are blind or highly visually impaired. This ﬁgure is an average that is well above that of most areas of the world. The causes of visual impairment or blindness are both climatic and hygienic: dust, wind, high ultraviolet light radiation, soot in houses caused by heating with coal and/or yak dung, and lack of vitamin A at an early age. Inadequate health care also plays a major role, and cataracts are widespread. The Tibetan government and private organizations have set up eye camps to train local doctors to perform appropriate surgeries, but there remains a signiﬁcant population of blind people in the TAR that cannot be helped in this way. Braille Without Borders was founded with the intention of empowering blind people from areas like the TAR so that they can set up their own projects, schools, and businesses for other blind people. In this way, the concept of eliminating the borders that are placed upon the blind can spread worldwide so that more blind and visually impaired individuals will have access to education and opportunities to integrate into society as they wish. BWB also hopes to change the perception of others who view blind people as being less able to ﬁt into society than sighted people. The hopeful and encouraging words spoken by the deputy mayor of the city of Lhasa exemplify an acceptance of the organization’s mission and a shifting perception toward blind people in Tibetan society.

HISTORY OF BWB In the summer of 1997, Sabriye Tenberken, a blind woman from Germany and co-founder of BWB, traveled within the TAR to investigate the possibility of providing training for the blind and visually impaired people of Tibet. She quickly realized that there were no programs in place for the education and rehabilitation for blind people in the TAR. She decided to take the initiative to found an organization that would alleviate this problem. A local school in the city of Lhasa provided space for the project, and a local counterpart took care of all of the ofﬁcial paperwork. Tenberken had realized that she was blind at the age of twelve, after she met another girl who said she was blind even though she saw more than Sabriye did. While attending a school for sighted kids, Sabriye had been picked on by other kids, but she had never known why. She was also treated in a different way by teachers and parents of other (sighted) children. They spoke to her in baby voices, gave her the largest piece of cake, and sometimes spoke to her in loud voices as if she were deaf. Sabriye had never seen very well, and the realization that she was “just” blind was a great relief to her. Now she knew why she had been treated differently than other children her age. She chose to be transferred to a special school for blind children and quickly realized that she was not the only one who was

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unable to see. At this school, she gained a lot of self-conﬁdence through activities such as mountain climbing, kayaking, downhill skiing, and horseback riding. Through this training, she developed a will to accomplish things that even many sighted children did not dream of doing. Tenberken originally became interested in Tibetology after visiting a special exhibition on Tibet as a teenager. She and her fellow students were allowed to touch the different artifacts, and she became interested in what Tibet was about. She applied to study the subject at Bonn University. Since Sabriye was the ﬁrst blind student ever to enroll in this course of study, no books in Braille were available. Even more signiﬁcant, a Tibetan Braille script did not exist. As an extremely motivated individual, Tenberken decided to develop a Tibetan script for the blind instead of withdrawing from the program at Bonn University. This script combined the principles of the Braille system with the special features of the Tibetan syllable-based script. Her script was submitted for close examination to an eminent Tibetan scholar, who found it to be readily understandable and easy to learn. Until Tenberken developed this script for her studies in 1992, the TAR had no script for its blind people. To this day, the blind and visually impaired people in Tibet continue to use Tenberken’s script. In the summer of 1997, Sabriye went to Tibet to study the situation of blind people. On this trip she met Paul Kronenberg, a Dutch engineer, who was backpacking through Tibet. She told him about her idea for setting up a project for blind people, and he was the only foreigner on the trip who did not think Sabriye was totally insane. They exchanged addresses, and nine months later, when Sabriye had all the paperwork ready to return to Tibet to start the ﬁrst school for the blind, she called Paul to say good-bye. Instead of responding with “I wish you good luck,” Paul said, “I will come with you.” The next day, he quit his job; only ﬁve days later, in May 1998, Sabriye and Paul left Europe to establish the ﬁrst Rehabilitation and Training Centre for the Blind in Tibet. They began their project with a preparatory school for blind elementary school children. They made the necessary arrangements for six children from different villages to board at the school. The children came from different parts of the TAR and had to get used to one another’s dialects. A local teacher was found and, within a matter of days, she was fully instructed in the Tibetan Braille script. The children learned the Tibetan Braille alphabet on homemade wooden boards with Velcro dots and, within just six weeks, they knew each of the thirty Tibetan characters and could count in the Tibetan, Chinese, and English languages. This immediate success helped provide the foundation for a hopeful future for BWB.

VALUES AND BELIEFS BWB holds several core values and beliefs that aid in driving its mission. The organization aspires to aid people with blindness and visual impairments worldwide, regardless of race, creed, national origin, sex, age, handicap, disease entity,

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The New Humanitarians

social status, ﬁnancial status, or religious afﬁliation. As mentioned above, the organization does not view blindness as a justiﬁable reason for placing borders around an individual’s opportunities. Blindness is not a reason to be socially excluded; it is a personal characteristic or quality and not a stain or deviance. BWB believes that blindness is no longer a disability when (1) society accepts blindness as a part of life that is equal to sightedness, (2) people with blindness have access to opportunities that afford them the ability to learn empowering techniques and methods that compensate for their inability to see, and (3) people with blindness and visual impairments organize and empower themselves and self-assuredly ﬁght for equal opportunities. BWB has organized its programs and mission to make headway in these areas, eliminate factors that contribute to the perception of visual impairment as a disability in society, and instill self-conﬁdence in its blind students.

PREPARATORY SCHOOL FOR THE BLIND The ﬁrst step toward accomplishing these goals was the establishment of a preparatory school in 1998. Since the blind population of the TAR is so widespread, BWB decided that it would be best to have the blind children boarded in Lhasa at the Preparatory School for the Blind so they would both live and be trained at the center. From ﬁnancial, organizational, and logistical perspectives, it would have been too complicated and difﬁcult to set up individual training programs in the remote areas of the TAR. With the children boarding at the school, training and education could be provided much more effectively. Adjusting to a new environment and being separated from familiar surroundings made it necessary for the children to accept and learn new techniques for the blind as quickly and efﬁciently as possible. Additionally, the children would have the opportunity to communicate with other blind people and exchange experiences of common difﬁculties they had at home. So from the beginning, the Preparatory School for the Blind has provided classes and lodging for children and adolescents between ﬁve and ﬁfteen years of age. It is the organization’s goal that during their one to two years’ training, the children will gain enough self-conﬁdence to cope independently with the difﬁculties of daily life. First, the students receive intensive training in orientation, mobility, and daily living skills. This training involves helping the students improve their orientation in a room and on the school compound, walk with a cane, eat with chopsticks, and develop daily hygienic skills. Orientation training is followed by training in the Tibetan, Chinese, English, and mathematical Braille scripts. In addition to the training in special techniques for the blind, the students are also instructed in basic colloquial Chinese and English language skills. The primary goal of the preparatory school is that after completion of the basic training, the young students will be able to integrate themselves into local “regular” elementary schools.

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PRODUCTION OF EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS Although Braille script is the basis of literacy for blind people worldwide, only a fraction of blind individuals are actually able to read it. As mentioned above, prior to Sabriye Tenberken’s invention of a Tibetan Braille script, there was no means for the blind people of Tibet to become literate. Through literacy, the blind can gain access to knowledge and skills, so BWB makes it a priority to train its students in reading Braille. The organization believes that once literate, the children will have access to education, and therefore be more able to increase their selfconﬁdence, learn a profession, and integrate into society. In order to provide reading and work materials for the students attending the school and the vocational training program, BWB established a workshop that produces Tibetan Braille materials. Eberhard Hahn, a blind German mathematician, developed a computer program to convert written Tibetan into Tibetan Braille script. Tibetan texts are typed into a computer through Wyle transliteration, and Hahn’s program converts this transliteration into Tibetan Braille. The ﬁrst Tibetan Braille books were produced through this process in August 2001.

VOCATIONAL AND SKILLS TRAINING Although helping children gain education through literacy has been BWB’s ﬁrst priority, the organization has also focused on many different skills that can be developed by the blind children. Many of these skills can be directly applied to the future professions of the children. For instance, children at the school can be trained in Tibetan and Chinese medical massage, pulse diagnosis, and acupressure. In the autumn of 2000, two blind, educated medical massage trainers were located and brought to start this program at the school. The students may also obtain musical training, and especially talented blind children are trained by a professional musician in singing, composing, and playing musical instruments. With the addition of the organization’s organic training farm in Shigatse, BWB is making great progress toward gaining viable vocational opportunities for its students. Beginning in the summer of 2004, students have been able to take animal husbandry training, including the production of milk, yogurt, and cheese as well as agricultural training in the cultivation of vegetables and grain. During that same summer, the students began to receive training in making handicrafts, including knitting, weaving, and basket making. Finally, the students began to be trained in the use of computers. Through vocational and skills training, BWB hopes to provide its students with self-conﬁdence as well as future career options. Training Farm in Shigatse As part of its mission to provide its students with vocational and skills training, BWB set up a forty-acre training “farm” in the Tibetan town of Shigatse,

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The New Humanitarians

about 250 kilometers west of Lhasa, in the spring of 2004. Although the farm is essentially a vocational training center for blind young adults in the neighboring counties around Shigatse, it also provides residential facilities for blind students who have gained admission to the nearby government “regular” school. In 2007, seven more blind students from the project in Lhasa joined the three original students at the regular school next to the farm. The teachers at the regular school were so happy with these students that they have requested that the farm send as many as it can. Having these additional academic, blind students resident on the farm has created or renewed an academic interest in the blind vocational students who were already living there. These original vocational students have begun freely attending the tuition classes that the farm offers to the academic students from Lhasa. The year 2007 marked the beginning of many new, exciting systems and programs on the farm. The training farm has goals to build up a quality dairy herd, improve the care and rearing of riding horses, and organize the piggery and poultry. The animal husbandry unit on the farm has been consolidated to one plot that used to be an army barracks. BWB has recently installed an environmentally sound toilet system that was pioneered by a German/Dutch association called Ecosan. This Ecosan system has been tested successfully in central Europe and Asia. Its central feature is the separation of urine from feces by means of a simple, yet clever, partition in the toilet bowl itself. Urine is directed into a holding tank so that it can be later used as urea on the ﬁelds. Feces are directed into a holding pit where they quickly compost. This system saves water by using materials such as leaves, ash, and earth instead, which are kept in containers nearby the toilets. By adding these materials to the feces receptacle after each use, the composting process begins more quickly. The students and staff were instructed in using and maintaining this new system, and learned about its advantages for the environment. It is a system that can be installed easily in the most remote, rural Tibetan homes. Furthermore, it provides input for organic agriculture and supports the importance of using organic methods in Tibetan soil, where the organic component can be less than 4 percent. In the autumn of 2007, BWB began the ﬁnal phase of its work on a composting factory at the training farm. The building was completed and features ten cubicles on one side for ten pairs of opposing composting boxes. This makes the compost much easier to turn, making it both blind friendly and sighted friendly. More cubicles line the other side for storing and mulching straw, grass, leaves, and paper. Mulching, cutting, and hacking machines in three different sizes are on-site as well. The new composting factory is situated adjacent to six organic greenhouses. Michael Parent from Canada, the third BWB Westerner, introduced the “Mini Square Meter Greenhouses.” These greenhouses work according to a method of kitchen gardening that has been practiced for many years on the terraced mountainsides of Darjeeling in India. This system is especially suitable for blind gardening. Each gardening bed is one square meter, and planting is accomplished by

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placing individual seeds through holes punched in a template. The beds are arranged adjacent to each other, and form a line as long or as short as required for the blind students who are gardening. The beds are separated from the path by a raised barrier to prevent the blind or sighted farmer from walking on the earth that contains the growing seeds. Since each bed is a meter wide, each plant in the bed can be attended to individually and conveniently. The beds are covered by shade cloth or plastic depending on weather conditions. This cloth or plastic is supported by arches, one meter high, that are made from any sturdy yet ﬂexible material. These mini-greenhouses are exceptionally easy to maintain and inexpensive to construct. One bed costs approximately ﬁve euros and can be replicated easily by rural Tibetan households. Several local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), as well as the Swiss Red Cross, have adopted this system and are implementing it in local villages. In addition to the greenhouses, the farm has also beneﬁted from the instruction of a German animal husbandry expert, Boris Schiele. In 2005 Schiele gave a course in the care of dairy cows to the staff and students. The emphasis was on diet as a main requirement in the production of quality organic milk. Students also learned how to use a computerized, individual feeding program made possible because BWB grows its own fodder in its own ﬁelds. The growing pattern of grains and fodder was reorganized with the dairy herd in mind. New stables were also constructed so that the blind could work there easily. The milk that is produced is used directly in BWB’s cheese production unit. The popularity of the organization’s organic cheese is growing. Two staff, one sighted and one blind, recently returned from a practical course in cheese production in Holland. Stores as far away as Shanghai have expressed interest in the unique blend of European and Tibetan cheeses being produced on the farm. BWB hopes that the sales of the cheese will help generate income to cover at least a portion of the organization’s running costs. Self-Integration Project Shortly after BWB began its projects at the preparatory school and training farm, the positive impact that was being made on the students became apparent. Children who came from backgrounds in which they were completely excluded from society discovered that they were not the only ones living that way. The students were able to share their experiences, and they were exposed to blind teachers, who were able to perform the tasks necessary to that profession. All the students were treated the same. Within a matter of days, the students’ will to learn grew stronger, and their self-conﬁdence increased considerably. If a student complained that he or she could not perform a certain task, the teachers and staff replied that the blind teachers and Ms. Tenberken were able to perform the task— so the student should be able to as well. The students showed that their increasing self-conﬁdence was an extremely important step toward possessing the courage to approach the daily tasks of life in society.

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The New Humanitarians

One day, a few of the students walked into the center of Lhasa, and some nomads very rudely shouted at them, “Hey, you blind fools!” Kienzen, the oldest of the small group, turned around and told the nomads that yes, he was blind, but he was not a fool. “I am going to school. I can read and write! Can you do that? I can even read and write in the dark! Can you do that?” The nomads were astonished: they could not read or write because they had never even visited a school. This experience sparked conversation and curiosity among the members of this nomadic group, and about six months later, they brought a blind boy from their region to the project. This example helps illustrate how important it is for all children to know and believe that they are valuable members of society. BWB wants its students to take pride in their blindness and to embrace it as a part of their quality as people. In other words, BWB hopes to have the children stand up in their societies and say, “I am blind. So what?” In the Tibetan society, as in many societies, it is believed that blindness is a punishment for something done wrong in a previous life. Through its work in the TAR, BWB is helping to modify this perception of the blind. Because of plenty of media attention given to the organization, the project is visited by numerous Tibetan and Chinese people who are curious to see ﬁrsthand what is going on there. When they are confronted with happy blind children, they wonder how it can be that these children are being punished for past wrongdoing. Instead, the staff tells visitors that the children are not being punished, but that they have been presented with a challenge for their next life. This call for a new perception of the blind is acceptable because it ﬁts within this cultural context. The visitors seem to be open to this idea and suddenly see the blind with newfound respect. Initially, BWB planned to train special ﬁeld workers to counsel the students through this signiﬁcant transition on a regular basis. They received help from some staff members of the organization Save the Children, who visited the school weekly. However, after only a few months, the staff at BWB noticed that the students were doing extremely well on their own, and that they had integrated themselves into their classrooms and school. BWB’s staff gave this some thought and realized that this process of integration the blind children were going through was an extremely important one. They wanted to name this process. They realized that they could not call it “re-integration” because the children had never before been successfully integrated. They also could not name the process “integration” because this did not fully capture the students’ experience. As the blind students began integrating with sighted children, the staff noticed that the blind students were willing to show those around them exactly what they were capable of doing. They were willing to ask for help from sighted children when needed, and they were willing to help sighted children when they were able. They made friends as well as competitors in class, demonstrating that the integration was real, and that the blind do not need to receive special treatment. To describe this process, BWB came up with the term “self-integration.” Ultimately, on their own, the blind children were able to gain a foundation of knowledge at the school and, more

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importantly, enough self-conﬁdence to integrate themselves into the school, a profession, and daily society. Massage Clinic An amazing success story that has resulted from BWB’s efforts in educational and vocational training was the opening of its Massage Clinic, which was founded in 2003 by the organization’s ﬁrst massage therapy graduates, Kyila and Digi. It is the worthwhile and promising result of more than three years’ training in massage and physiotherapy. The clinic’s founders have since been joined by three additional graduates, Tenzing, Tashi, and Drolma. The clinic has also expanded by renting and renovating ﬁve additional rooms. A variety of massages, including Chinese massage, Thai massage, physiotherapy, acupressure, and oil massage, are currently offered at the clinic. It is situated on the main road in the center of the city of Lhasa. The clinic has proven to be a star attraction for tourists, both Western and Asian, and has advertisements in the major hotels and restaurants of Lhasa. It has achieved a high degree of independence in that it no longer requires subsidies from BWB and handles its own accounting and management. Not only has the clinic grown into a successful business, but the manner of appointing management has evolved since its inception as well. Originally, the traditional Tibetan attitude prevailed in that positions of responsibility would go to the eldest. No special talents or qualiﬁcations were required to gain positions of responsibility other than the accumulation of years. The eldest were also expected to earn the most money and work the fewest number of hours. Eventually, however, it was agreed that the manager should be the individual who could motivate, encourage, and communicate most effectively with colleagues, customers, and ofﬁcials. Based on these criteria, seventeen-year-old Lobsang, the youngest among the staff at the clinic, was chosen to be manager, and the clinic has expanded under his leadership. It now boasts a neon sign overlooking the main road of Lhasa, and its staff members give numerous local TV and radio interviews.

TOTNES SCHOOL, ENGLAND Another inspiring story began in 2007 when two of the organization’s blind students took part in an English course at the Totnes School in England. Kyila, also co-founder of the Massage Clinic, graduated from the intermediate as well as the advanced intermediate courses offered by Totnes School. Nyima studied in the same school and graduated from the pre-intermediate section. They studied with sighted students from Europe and Asia, and the Braille script and learning materials that they used were partly printed in BWB’s Braille printing house, partly provided by the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB). Like their fellow sighted students, Kyila and Nyima were integrated with local host families and were soon able to ﬁnd their way around Totnes. Neither of them had problems ﬁnding friends, and thanks to the enthusiastic help of their teachers and hosts,

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The New Humanitarians

they were able to follow the classes successfully. They were soon able to make small trips on their own, and even traveled to London by themselves. During their stay in Totnes, Kyila and Nyima wanted to go to visit a school for the blind in England to get some ideas for their own school in Lhasa. BWB staff were uneasy at ﬁrst, fearing that those at the English school would get the impression that the school in Lhasa was rather backward in comparison. BWB did not want its students to be discouraged, but the staff was surprised to ﬁnd that the students’ reaction was quite different than expected. Understandably, the Lhasa blind students were amazed at the advanced computer equipment and the technical knowledge of the English blind students. However, the Lhasa students also seemed amused by the “interesting” but “unnecessary” gadgets the English were using, such as machines that tell the blind if a glass is full or not, whether or not it is raining outside, and whether or not the sun is shining. Kyila and Nyima mutually agreed on one point: their classmates at the school in Lhasa were more advanced in the use of Braille than the blind students they met during their stay in England. “They just work with talking books and speech synthesizers,” said Nyima. “This has nothing to do with real reading.” Kyila noted that although blind students in Tibet have no problem using a white cane as a walking aid, “blind people in England seem to be shyer. They don’t want to be acknowledged as a blind person and so they cannot imagine traveling independently.”

THE NEW INDEPENDENCE The observations noted by Kyila and Nyima are evidence that the organization’s goals are being achieved by its students. Not only are the students concerned with learning and integrating into society, but they see the real opportunity to lead independent lives. As part of this “help for self-help” mission and to augment the process of “self-integration,” BWB entered into a do-it-yourself phase in 2006 that continues to this day. This phase has marked an ongoing effort to put more responsibility in the hands of the Tibetan staff of the organization. For instance, important tasks that were once performed by founders Tenberken and Kronenberg, such as bookkeeping, scheduling, planning of curricula, and meeting with ofﬁcials, have been handed off for the most part to their Tibetan colleagues. This important step toward project independence has not come easily. In fact, some staff members could not cope with this new situation and the greater responsibilities that came with it, and unfortunately they chose to withdraw from the project. However, several former students of BWB have since stepped up and replaced those staff members. The new and very young colleagues of the BWB staff are highly motivated and engaged with the project. They have felt free and conﬁdent enough to work on developing new teaching methods and plans and in this way create new structures within BWB. The high level of motivation of the new teachers is not always welcomed by some older staff. “They’re still too young!” complained a longtime teacher about her new colleagues who were once her students. “I don’t want to be given orders

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by my former students,” grumbled another teacher. The cook moaned that it was never this strict before. “How old do you have to be to have your own ideas?” answered Kyila, who recently returned from her year’s study in England with interesting new ideas and plans for the project. Kyila, together with Yudon, a former student who has studied in a “regular” school in Tibet, have reformed the English and Chinese curricula and have organized new teaching materials. They have also, on their own, redecorated, rearranged, and reorganized the organization’s early childhood training, called the Mouse Class. Gyenzen, a former student, now heads the Braille Printing Division and takes care of the students’ needs for Braille textbooks. These young teachers have been called the Gang of Three, and they are attempting to break old, negative work habits that have been established over time. “We can run the project independently only if we work together,” agree Kyila, Yudon, and Gyenzen, who seem surprised and disappointed at the reaction of some of their older colleagues. Tenberken and Kronenberg have tried to stay out of these internal conﬂicts as much as possible, but they have reported feeling quite happy about the fresh air and the positive mood this new, young staff has brought to the project: “Their inﬂuence transfers to the kids. We hope and trust, too, that our rookie management will be open to advice from their elders while keeping their youthful enthusiasm.” Over the last decade, the co-founders of BWB have watched their mission take shape.

NEXT STEPS: THE INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS Given all that has been accomplished by BWB with relatively limited funding, it is amazing to consider the organization’s lofty future goals. The organization believes that the current situation—an extreme lack of education for blind people in the developing world—can be changed, particularly by visionaries who are blind or visually impaired. In order to make progress toward this ultimate goal, BWB has established the International Institute for Social Entrepreneurs (IISE) in Kerala, India, and hopes to ofﬁcially open this international center for social enterprises in January 2009. The IISE will train blind individuals (age eighteen and over) who have the right initiative, motivation, and skills, and who want to develop social projects in their own countries based on the model that has been established in Tibet. BWB recognizes that visually impaired people who have overcome obstacles in their lives, such as co-founder Sabriye Tenberken, are problem solvers. These individuals have great empathy toward social problems because they have experienced many ﬁrsthand. This is why BWB has chosen to focus on attracting IISE participants who are blind or partially sighted. The campus of the IISE is located in a pristine little village by the Vellayani Lake, approximately 15 kilometers from the center of Trivandrum, the capitol of Kerala state in India. It has been built in an environmentally friendly, ethnic style that is based on the ideology of the late, renowned architect Laurie Baker. The center has incorporated rain water harvesting, solar and wind energy, waste

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The New Humanitarians

management systems, and the Ecosan waste treatment system used at the training farm in Shigatse. It is built on two plots of land, one used for the school campus and the other to house the staff headquarters. The overall concept is to design this project as a model for all future institutions of its kind. BWB would like its applicants for training at the IISE to be creative, innovative, and motivated. The visually impaired and blind students must be able to read and write in either enlarged print or English Braille script. Thanks to the hard work of the local administrative director, Tigi Philip, and a highly motivated group of professors, the framework of the curriculum has been completed. Over a course of one year, the students selected to attend the IISE will be trained in fundraising, public relations, management, project planning, computer technology, English, and communication skills among others. The students will be given the tools necessary to set up their own schools for the blind or visually impaired, improve existing schools, or start other social projects in their own countries. To support Braille Without Borders with a donation, or volunteer your services, please visit their website at http://www.braillewithoutborders.org for more information.

BIOGRAPHIES Sabriye Tenberken studied Central Asian studies at Bonn University. In addition to Mongolian and modern Chinese, she studied modern and classical Tibetan in combination with sociology and philosophy. Since no blind student had ever ventured to enroll in these kinds of courses, she could not fall back on others’ experiences. She had to develop her own methods to come to terms with her course of studies. As a result, she decided to develop a Tibetan script for the blind. Sabriye coordinates and counsels the BWB project. She is responsible for the training of teachers and trainers for the blind, and initially she taught the children herself. Further, she selects and supervises all staff members. Sabriye is also responsible for fundraising and communication with ofﬁcial and sponsoring organizations. She has written three books in which she tells about the history of the project and the way she dealt with becoming blind: Mein Weg fuehrt nach Tibet (My Path Leads to Tibet ; Arcade Publishing, New York); Tashis’ New World; and Das siebte Jahr (The Seventh Year). The ﬁrst book has been published in eleven languages, including English. Paul Kronenberg has been working with Sabriye since May 1998 to establish the Rehabilitation and Training Centre for the Blind in Tibet. He also worked part-time as a designer and construction coordinator for the Swiss Red Cross in Shigatse. Paul has a technical background. He graduated in four different studies: mechanical engineering, computer science, commercial technology, and communication system science. For several summers during his studies, Paul worked for different organizations in development projects in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Tibet. Paul is responsible for all technical aspects and maintenance in the center’s

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program. He trains people in bookkeeping, ofﬁce work, and the use of computers. Along with being responsible for communications and fundraising, Paul started up the production of Tibetan Braille books and supervises all construction activities within the project.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Braille Without Borders Founders: Paul Kronenberg and Sabriye Tenberken Mission/Description: According to WHO statistics, 161 million people live with a disabling visual impairment, of whom 37 million are blind and 124 million have low vision. Every ﬁve seconds someone becomes blind, every minute somewhere a child goes blind. About 90 percent of these individuals live in developing countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Paciﬁc regions. Moreover, nine out of ten blind children in developing countries have no access to education. Braille Without Borders wants to empower blind people from 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 more blind and visually impaired people have access to education and a better future. Website: braillewithoutborders.org Address: Förderkreis Blinden–Zentrum Tibet—Braille Ohne Grenzen e.V. c/o Paul Kronenberg Im Auel 34, D-53913 Swisttal, Germany Phone: 0049-2226-913403 Fax: 0049-2226-913404 E-mail: [email protected]

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Room to Read: The Democratization of Literacy John Wood and Patrick Savaiano

MISSION Room to Read was founded on the belief that “World Change Starts with Educated Children,” and that education is the key to breaking the cycle of poverty. The organization strives to provide children with access to education, one child at a time, one school at a time, and one village at a time. The overall goals of the organization are best summed up in its mission statement: We partner with local communities throughout the developing world to provide quality educational opportunities by establishing libraries, creating local language children’s literature, constructing schools, providing education to girls, and establishing computer labs. We seek to intervene early in the lives of children in the belief that education empowers people to improve socioeconomic conditions for their families, communities, countries, and future generations. Through the opportunities that only education can provide, we strive to break the cycle of poverty, one child at a time.

Room to Read focuses on countries that lack the resources to educate their children. It currently operates in eight countries—six in Asia (Cambodia, India, Laos, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam) and two in Africa (South Africa and Zambia)—with plans to expand throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the years to come to better meet the needs of children throughout the developing world. John Wood, Founder and CEO, launched Room to Read after a trek through Nepal. He visited several local schools and was touched by the warmth and enthusiasm of the students and teachers, but also saddened by the shocking lack of resources that were available to them. Driven to help, Wood quit his senior executive position with Microsoft and built a global team to work with rural villages to build sustainable solutions to their educational challenges. He continues to be 15

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The New Humanitarians

inspired by meeting people around the world who have a thirst for education, such as witnessing children in Vietnam reading toothpaste tubes because they literally had no books. “What most inspires me is that this is one of the great challenges of today’s world,” says Wood. “Can we reach out to the 800 million people in the world who lack basic literacy and give them the tools they need and the opportunity to break the cycle of poverty through education? In itself it’s inspiring because it’s doable. We live in an age of unparalleled prosperity, yet something as basic as literacy is missing from this many people. So in a way it’s a very daunting task but also doable, and that inspires me. We as an organization, collectively, can make a huge dent and do something about this problem.” Individuals such as philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft), and President Jimmy Carter have helped inspire Wood to reinvent his career and create his vision to democratize access to books and education worldwide. In founding Room to Read, Wood interwove proven corporate business practices with his bold vision to provide educational access to 10 million children in the developing world. His novel approach to nonproﬁt management called for several factors to ensure its success. First, it required scalable, measured, and sustainable results. Second, it required low overhead, allowing maximum investment in educational infrastructure. Third, it required that challenge grants be put in place to help foster community ownership and sustainability. Finally, the organization required strong local staff and partnerships in order to create culturally relevant programs. Over the last decade, Room to Read’s staff and supporters have put his vision into practice.

HISTORY OF ROOM TO READ The Room to Read story begins in 1998 with Founder and CEO, John Wood. In 1998, Wood was an overworked Microsoft executive looking for the quiet solitude of a trekking vacation. While backpacking in the Himalayas, Wood met a Nepalese man who invited him to visit a school in a neighboring village. Hoping for a chance to see the real Nepal, rather than his tourist’s trek, Wood agreed. This short detour would change his life forever, for the man Wood met was a Nepalese education resource ofﬁcer. Wood soon discovered that despite this man’s huge heart and tremendous work ethic (traveling mountain passes on foot to visit his schools), he had very few resources to offer the schools in his charge. At the school, Wood came face to face with the harsh reality confronting millions of Nepalese children: there were almost no books. Wood was stunned to discover that the few books in the school library—a Danielle Steele romance, the Lonely Planet Guide to Mongolia, and a few other backpacker castoffs—were so precious that they were kept under lock and key to protect them from the children. As Wood left the village that day, the school headmaster made a simple request: “Perhaps, Sir, you will someday come back with books.” This request would not go unheard. After returning from his trek, Wood e-mailed friends to ask for their help in collecting children’s books and was overwhelmed with the response. Over

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3,000 books arrived within the next two months. The following year, Wood and his father ﬂew to Nepal, rented a yak, and returned to the village to deliver the books. Soon after that trip, Wood made the decision to leave the corporate world in order to devote himself to starting a new nonproﬁt. In his memoir, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, Wood explains, “Did it really matter how many copies of Windows we sold in Taiwan this month when there were millions of children without access to books?” In late 1999, Wood quit his executive position with Microsoft and started Room to Read. With Room to Read, Wood sought to combine the corporate business practices he had learned at Microsoft with an inspiring vision: to provide the lifelong gift of education to millions of children in the developing world. He contended that with nearly 800 million illiterate adults worldwide and more than 200 million children without access to school, a nonproﬁt “with the scalability of Starbucks and the compassion of Mother Teresa” was required. Beginning in Nepal, Wood and Dinesh Shrestha, future Nepal Country Director, began working with rural communities to build schools and establish libraries. To date, Room to Read has created over 440 schools and more than 5,100 libraries. In 2000 Room to Read began the Room to Grow Girls’ Scholarship Program after recognizing that many girls are denied access to education because of cultural bias. This scholarship fund targets young girls and provides a long-term commitment to their education that lasts an average of ten years. There are now more than 4,000 girls on Room to Grow scholarships. In the summer of 2001, Erin Keown Ganju joined the organization as CEO and was instrumental in its expansion into Vietnam, where she had previously worked for two years. Erin quickly became Wood’s partner as the two of them continued to push hard to expand Room to Read’s geographic and programmatic presence. With growing demand for Room to Read’s services, expansion continued into Cambodia in 2002, followed by India the next year. In 2003 Room to Read also began publishing local language children’s books, in addition to providing donated English language books used to stock its libraries. Room to Read works with local authors and local illustrators to develop new children’s books and publish them in-country. To date, 226 local language children’s book titles have been published. The year 2004 was also very signiﬁcant for Room to Read: the organization celebrated one of its ﬁrst major milestones on April 29 with the opening of its one thousandth library in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Later that year, just days after the December 26 Asian tsunami devastated thousands of villages, Room to Read launched operations in Sri Lanka in order to rebuild schools and help ease the suffering of children there. In addition to expanding into Sri Lanka in 2005, Room to Read also launched programs in Laos, its sixth Asian country. On September 2, just eighteen months after its one thousandth library ceremony, Room to Read opened its two thousandth library, once again in Cambodia. The year 2005 ended with another huge milestone, the donation of the millionth book. Room to Read’s

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The New Humanitarians

ﬁve-year strategic plan was completed in 2006, and in December 2007 the organization opened its ﬁve thousandth library in Nepal. Room to Read continues to expand its programs, locations, and capacity to carry out its mission into 2008 and beyond.

ROOM TO READ’S PROGRAMS Providing quality educational opportunities in the developing world is not a simple task. Each new country offers a unique set of challenges and opportunities, every region has its strengths and weaknesses, and every community has its own needs. For these reasons, Room to Read employs local teams led by a local director in each country. It hires local staff who are personally vested in their nation’s educational progress and empowers them to make key programmatic decisions. Team members speak the language, know the customs, and understand what it takes to implement each program successfully. They ensure that programs are of the highest quality and are designed to meet each community’s speciﬁc needs. With input from these local teams, Room to Read has developed a long-term, holistic, and multipronged approach to address a range of educational needs and create lasting change for children in the developing world. The organization’s ﬁve core programs include the School Room Program, the Reading Room Program, the Local Language Publishing Program, the Computer Room Program, and the Room to Grow Girls’ Scholarship Program. School Room Program Adequate schools are often scarce in rural areas of the developing world, a factor that contributes to poverty and limits economic development. It is not uncommon for young children to walk several hours each way just to attend school. Many of the schools that do exist are often ramshackle collections of crumbling bricks, loose sheet metal, and dirt ﬂoors. Although these structures are no longer safe for children, they continue to be used because the community has no alternative. In other villages, the school structure might be sufﬁcient, but classrooms are grossly overcrowded, with as many as eighty students jammed into a room designed for forty. Unfortunately, these schools cannot count on outside help because government funding for education is scarce. In many countries, the government does not sponsor certain components of education such as preschool, which is the building block for a successful primary and secondary education. Although many communities in the developing world are committed to universal education, they do not possess the resources to achieve that goal in the near future. To help address these issues, Room to Read’s School Room Program partners with local communities to build several types of schools to meet the speciﬁc needs of each village and culture. In Laos, Nepal, and Vietnam, Room to Read constructs four- to fourteen-room buildings for primary and secondary schools that currently have unsafe structures

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or overcrowded classrooms. The organization might assist in completing school construction projects that have been delayed or help to identify communities that are in need of schools. For example, Room to Read partnered with the local community to expand the Shree Janakalyan Lower Secondary School in the Dhadhing district of Nepal. In the past, young students who completed ﬁfth grade had to walk a minimum of one hour each way on a busy highway to reach a secondary school. Tragically, every year some students were killed in road accidents. As a result, the community and school began expanding the number of grades they offered in order to make it a full secondary school (grades 1–10). Room to Read partnered with the community to add an additional six-room building to facilitate this expansion. The vast majority of primary and secondary schools established by Room to Read include libraries, often the ﬁrst library the students have been able to use. These libraries provide extracurricular reading materials as well as games and activities that nurture intellectual curiosity and improve reading and critical thinking skills. In addition, these schools include adequate toilet facilities, also rare in many developing world schools. These facilities improve hygiene and increase privacy, which leads to increased student retention rates, especially among girls. In Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and, to a lesser extent, Laos, Room to Read also provides access to preschool. Educational studies demonstrate that early childhood learning makes a signiﬁcant and positive impact in the educational development of young students. Furthermore, preschools offer an organized learning environment in which small children can be nurtured. This arrangement frees up the time of parents, grandparents, and siblings (especially older sisters), who would otherwise be needed to provide care. Room to Read understands that a child’s education begins with an adequate learning environment. For example, in Vietnam, although the Education and Training Ministry understands the importance of preschool education, the funds to build preschools are simply not available. The government hopes that many of the poor local communities can contribute material and labor to construct community preschools on their own, but these communities are often too poor to do so. In the community of Tan Lap in Long An province, villagers realized that they urgently needed schools for their children. The villagers knew that if their young children could attend school, they could focus on farming and better support their families. In addition, a preschool would begin to teach the children the critical skills they need to improve their lives and lift themselves out of poverty. With the support of Room to Read, today thirty-one young students are learning, writing, singing, and dancing in their new preschool. A Room to Read preschool usually consists of a one- to three-room building and includes appropriately child-sized furniture as well as lavatory facilities. These structures are well built, include plenty of ventilation, and have a strong roof to withstand the heavy rains of the monsoon season. Many have a school yard with a fence and gate to provide security, and some—depending on location—even have a playground for the children. By setting high standards and expectations,

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The New Humanitarians

Room to Read has partnered with local communities to build over 440 schools to date. Thousands of young students are now learning in safe, child-friendly environments that encourage their mental, physical, and spiritual development. Reading Room Program The concept of a school library is virtually nonexistent in many communities throughout the developing world. Because so many people in the developing world survive on less than one U.S. dollar per day, children’s books are considered luxury items. In some cases, not a single book is available to children to encourage independent learning, intellectual curiosity, and passion for reading. Teachers lack the resources and expertise to establish libraries. Even when children have acquired the skills to read, many do not have access to books to practice these skills. Without the existence of a children’s book publishing industry, the variety of local language children’s books available to young readers in many of these countries is severely limited. Books that reﬂect local culture in an artistic and engaging style are in short supply. In addition, although many rural schools teach English, most have no English language books. If there are no children’s books to engage children and help them learn English, their curiosity, motivation, and ability to learn can be lost. Establishing libraries and ﬁlling them with children’s books, both in English and in local languages, through the Local Language Publishing Program continues to be a cornerstone of Room to Read’s mission. The ﬁrst step toward the lifelong gift of education is putting a book in the hands of a child. Room to Read’s Reading Room Program seeks to facilitate this by establishing a library in every new primary and secondary school it builds, as well as in many existing schools. Room to Read creates a child-friendly learning environment, complete with as many as 300 to 3,000 age-appropriate, local language and English language children’s books (the exact number depends on the country, the size of the space, and the type of library), furniture, games, puzzles, and posters. In these libraries, students ﬁnd books that expand their world, teach them new ideas, and equip them with critical life skills. Furthermore, Room to Read provides training on proper library implementation with three years of support, which includes the provision of additional children’s books and further training for staff. Room to Read establishes Reading Rooms in several different types of settings that include schools it has helped to construct, schools that have applied speciﬁcally for a library, and other environments where children have a need to learn, such as orphanages, children’s hospitals, schools run by other nonproﬁts, and community centers. The majority of libraries established by the organization are created within existing rooms and in partnership with a school or community. Because the school community provides a clean room, Room to Read is able to create a child-friendly learning environment quickly and relatively easily. One example of such a library is the Binh Xuan Primary School in Tien Giang,

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southern Vietnam. Here, the school board believed that having a library and books would boost the quality of education at the school and motivate the approximately 900 students and teachers. When they presented the idea to Room to Read’s Vietnam team, they also offered to appoint a dedicated librarian to run the program. Established in late 2005, the Binh Xuan Primary School Reading Room is divided into two parts: one area for bookkeeping and housing the books, and another area where students can sit and read. Located on the main ﬂoor of the school, the room was renovated and equipped with lights and electric fans to ensure a safe and comfortable environment for the students. All bookshelves, reading tables, and seats, sized for primary school students, are colorfully painted. A section of the ﬂoor is covered with bright foam where students can sit on soft pillows to play with educational games and read books. Over 600 English and Vietnamese books await the eager students. In addition, fun and educational posters are on the walls to attract students and inspire curiosity and an interest in reading. Several of Room to Read’s local teams have discovered that many highly populated schools want to become partners to establish larger libraries but simply do not have the capacity to dedicate rooms, because their schools are already too crowded. In 2005 Room to Read’s team in Cambodia came up with a new approach called Constructed Reading Rooms (CRRs). CRRs are stand-alone library buildings, which are constructed and then furnished in the same fashion as the library rooms. Special care is taken to construct these buildings as model facilities to further promote the value of education in the community. Buildings are designed using local architectural styles in order to foster local pride and ensure that they ﬁt in with their surroundings. Some of the CRRs are built in conjunction with Room to Read’s Computer Room Program and include fully furnished libraries as well as computer labs. One example of a CRR is the Teuk Thlar Primary and Junior High School located in the province of Banteay Meanchey in the northwest part of Cambodia. With nearly 2,000 students, the school’s tiny library—two shelves, one table, and 200 books—was far from adequate. Despite the relative dearth of books in the library, it attracted many students daily. Unfortunately, the number of books was very limited, and neither the school nor the community could afford to construct a good library building or improve the single, existing room. By partnering with the community, Room to Read helped to change this situation. With the community contributing funds, labor, and security, the library opened in September 2005 and received over 5,000 unique visits in its ﬁrst few months of operation. Room to Read expanded the CRR model to Laos and Nepal in 2006 and is continuing to grow this important type of Reading Room so that all children, regardless of their school environment, can access children’s books easily. Unfortunately, in many school communities there is simply not enough space to have a room that is fully dedicated as a library. To address these challenges, Room to Read’s local teams ﬁnd innovative solutions to best meet the needs of each

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The New Humanitarians

school or community. The organization has established libraries in classrooms and community centers, and it has created mobile book carts that can move from room to room to ensure that children have access to books. Room to Read has donated over 2.2 million books and published an additional 2 million books representing 226 new local language children’s titles to ﬁll the shelves of its libraries. In Nepal and Cambodia, not only is Room to Read the largest nonproﬁt importer of English language books, it is also one of the top publishers of both Nepali and Khmer children’s books. The vast majority of Room to Read’s children’s books in English are donated by or purchased at a steep discount from large publishers such as Scholastic and Chronicle Books. Room to Read is then able to ship thousands of books at a time to its partner countries. These English language children’s books are supplemented with self-published, local language books so that children have books in their own language as well as in English in order to foster a love for reading. Reading Rooms are typically established with an initial donation of several hundred books in order to evaluate how efﬁciently the books are used. Within six months to a year, if the libraries have a check-out system in place and children are spending time there to read, a second donation of books is provided. To date, Room to Read has established over 5,100 libraries in its partner countries. These libraries come in all shapes and sizes, but they have a common element: local teams work with the community to determine how best to provide access to children’s books and create a child-friendly environment. Local Language Publishing Program Although Room to Read has successfully established thousands of bilingual libraries in developing countries, this is just one component of its work. In 2002 the Nepal team discovered that Room to Read’s libraries were not being used to their fullest potential because students did not have access to quality children’s books in their local language. Before learning English, these children ﬁrst needed to learn to read Nepali in order to develop good literacy skills in the local language. Room to Read’s Nepal team quickly determined that there were simply not many quality Nepali children’s books available. Parents were too poor to afford reading material for their children, so publishers were not motivated to publish children’s books in the local language. To ﬁll this gap in high-quality children’s books in the local language, Room to Read boldly decided to launch the Local Language Publishing Program. With seed funding provided by the Skoll Foundation in 2003, this program was launched to create and publish new, local language children’s books, thereby giving children access to the type of books that will spark imagination, curiosity, and a desire to learn to read. To support its commitment to providing a lifelong education for all children, Room to Read began to produce age-appropriate and culturally relevant children’s literature in local languages, so that children in the developing world have the

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same opportunities as those who grow up surrounded by children’s books at home, at school, or in the local public library. The Local Language Publishing Program provides children with materials that will inspire them to read, expand their minds, and develop a lifelong love for reading and learning. Room to Read is signiﬁcantly increasing the quantity and diversity of children’s books currently published in eighteen local languages, as well as in English, by sourcing and publishing new children’s literature within seven of the eight countries in which it works (with plans to launch the Local Language Publishing Program in Zambia, the eighth operating country, in the near future). Many of the books that are published by the organization are bilingual English and local language children’s books that are especially beneﬁcial to children because they can be used throughout a child’s development. Initially, they can be read to stimulate a child’s imagination and, later on, to reinforce reading skills in the local language and to aid in the initial study of English. Room to Read works with local writers and illustrators to develop new, culturally relevant children’s books. Many of these stories are adapted from local folktales, while others are sourced from various writing competitions and writers’ workshops that are sponsored and held by Room to Read. The competitions and workshops are designed to promote a culture of writing, as well as reading, and to source and develop new creative talent. As a result, the books are appropriate to the local context, which is not always the case for children’s books written for a non-local audience. Of all the manuscripts submitted to Room to Read, only the very best are selected for publication. The books are often ﬁeld tested by children to garner feedback on plot, character development, and general suitability for the target age group. Bilingual books are subsequently translated into English, with the goal of maintaining the local ﬂavor and integrity of the story. All the local language books are printed within the respective countries in order to create local jobs and promote the local economy. Room to Read aims to provide a variety of content to children in the developing world by covering a wide range of themes, including beginning words and basic vocabulary, the environment, health, math skills and concepts, morals and values, animal life, family life, folktales, and rhymes and poems. Room to Read is currently one of the top publishers of local language children’s books in Nepal and Cambodia. Its goal is to be the “Dr. Seuss of the developing world.” To date, Room to Read has published over 226 titles and printed over 2 million books in eighteen local languages. Because the books are published within the countries in which Room to Read works, it is possible to keep costs extremely low, approximately US$1 per book. Most importantly, young children in the developing world now have new, high-quality books to read and enjoy. Computer Room Program Opportunity is inherent in technology, and although computer technology has brought huge numbers of people across the globe closer together, thus far it has failed to reach the millions who lack access to the necessary infrastructure.

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The New Humanitarians

Nowhere is the “digital divide” more evident than in the developing world, where computers are available to less than 2 percent of the population.1 Consequently, computer literacy is one of the largest unmet needs of educational systems, and it often holds young students back from being part of the global community and from improving their economic situation. Computer labs can have a life-changing impact on children. The access provided by the labs allows students to develop computer literacy skills that can lead to further learning and job opportunities. Research shows that when teachers integrate computers and other technology resources into daily instruction, these resources can improve test scores; build students’ communication and critical thinking skills; promote creativity, innovation, and collaboration among students; and increase students’ community and global awareness.2 Computer labs can have the added effect of improving attendance and reducing attrition rates by providing an incentive for students to stay in school.3 Overall, computer labs help improve the quality and relevance of education in developing world settings and equip children with skills they will need in the twenty-ﬁrst century. With this in mind, Room to Read has developed the Computer Room Program. It is one of the last programs launched in Room to Read’s partner countries, because it is beneﬁcial to establish a working relationship with communities through the School Room or Reading Room Programs prior to investing in this more costly and complex program. Room to Read works with government schools and local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to make computer access a reality. Computer labs are established in schools and NGO-run community centers. The labs consist of six to twenty-one new computers (depending on the country and the size of room) with warranties, universal power supply (UPS) units, networking equipment and wiring, learning software, and voltage stabilizers. Other basic needs, such as furniture and a whiteboard, are often included as well. An integral aspect to this program is the training provided to the computer lab teachers to help them develop a curriculum, improve their computer teaching skills, and ensure that hardware is maintained properly. The computer classes, and the teachers themselves, are periodically evaluated to quickly remedy any knowledge gaps and to reward successful programs with more computer resources. Over a three-year period, Room to Read provides follow-up training, as well as additional software and occasionally additional computers. Computer classes normally complement standard class time. In addition to teaching computer literacy and typing skills, the computers are used in conjunction with traditional classes to provide pragmatic application to relevant studies. Computer training and access are also often extended to members of the community after school hours. One story of a successful Computer Room initiative comes from Battambang, Cambodia, where Room to Read established a computer lab for the more than 4,000 students at Net Yang Secondary School, a government school that caters to students from the surrounding rural areas. With many of his students too poor to afford access to private computer labs, the school director approached Room to Read to establish a computer lab within the school. His desire was supported by

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the rest of the school administration, all of whom were highly committed to meeting and fulﬁlling the Challenge Grant requirements. After its completion in June 2005, the lab began serving many of the 429 students in grade 9, which has had the highest drop-out rate. Students use the lab twice for two hours each week to learn computer fundamentals and English and Khmer typing. One teacher, Mr. Neng Iv said, “[The] computer room will help students to stay at school. Children will gain a good beneﬁt by studying the life skill from this project. The gift from Room to Read Cambodia would improve the human resource in my school.” Through its Computer Room Program, Room to Read is providing thousands of students in the developing world their ﬁrst access to technology. Room to Grow Girls’ Scholarship Program For many reasons, including economics and cultural bias, families in developing countries often fail to educate girls. In Cambodia, for example, girls’ enrollment in school drops precipitously as they get older. At the primary level, 91 percent of girls are enrolled in school; at the secondary level, only 19 percent are enrolled; and at the upper secondary level (grades 9–10), the number drops to 7 percent. In Nepal, only 35 percent of women are literate. In India, the female literacy rate is 52 percent, and it is estimated that 35 million children are not attending school. If a family is able to send only one child to school, which is often the case in poor communities, it is almost without exception the oldest boy who is selected. In rural areas, girls are kept behind to work in the ﬁelds or in the home. They are often expected to marry and begin having their own children by adolescence. In urban settings, some girls leave schools to sell tourist items or work in factories; others fall into prostitution. Room to Read aims to keep girls in school, thereby empowering them to end the cycle of poverty. The Room to Grow Girls’ Scholarship Program has an immediate and direct impact on the lives of thousands of girls in the developing world. An education provides security and support to girls and empowers them to make informed life decisions. A solid education early in life is known to be a key ingredient for the improved status of women, which provides a ripple of positive effects throughout society. For every year a girl remains in secondary school, her wages increase 10–20 percent. An educated woman has fewer children, so population growth is slowed in resource-scarce countries. Infant mortality decreases by 8 percent for each year a woman stays in school. Family health and nutrition improve in the home of an educated woman. An educated woman is more likely to educate the next generation. These are all examples of how educating women can have a positive effect on families, communities, and countries. Room to Read makes a long-term commitment to each girl on scholarship: as long as she attends classes and receives passing grades, her education will be funded through the completion of secondary school. This promise provides an incentive for her to do well in school and for the family to support her through the process. Currently, the majority of Room to Read’s scholarship students range

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The New Humanitarians

in age from ﬁve to ten years. Depending on the country and region, the scholarship covers all the needs of a young girl, including monthly school fees, school uniforms, books, stationery, backpacks, a female Room to Read staff member to oversee the program and mentor the girls, additional tutoring as needed, transportation (such as a bicycle or bus fare) for girls living far from school, lunch money for girls who live too far from school to eat at home, medical checkups and expenses, and ﬁeld trips and workshops. The program ofﬁcers work closely with the Room to Grow scholarship recipients and give them the support they need to be successful. They actively help to remove roadblocks the girls may encounter by meeting regularly with the girls, their families, and the school administrators. Along the Vietnamese and Cambodian border, sex trafﬁcking of young girls is all too common. Some families struggling to make ends meet or feed themselves are often forced to make unthinkable choices, including selling a child into trafﬁcking. The ADAPT Program (An Giang Dong Thap Alliance for the Prevention of Trafﬁcking) is a joint venture among several NGOs that seeks to prevent the trafﬁcking of young women by enhancing their educational opportunities and improving their vocational options through a supportive web of services. Room to Read provides the scholarship component of this program. The ADAPT scholarship program is designed to be a collaborative commitment among the child, the adults in her life, the school, and Room to Read. The girl scholar commits to doing her best in her studies. In return, the parents commit to supporting her to continue her education. The school encourages her academic performance, and Room to Read covers the ﬁnancial cost of her education. In 2007, over 4,000 girls from underprivileged families in Cambodia, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and South Africa attended school as Room to Grow Girls’ Scholarship recipients. This program will continue to grow rapidly in the future so that more girls will have an opportunity to receive an education and improve their lives. “When you educate a girl, you educate the next generation.”

CHALLENGE GRANT MODEL A key aspect of John Wood’s vision for Room to Read has been the Challenge Grant Model through which communities co-invest with Room to Read, facilitating the long-term sustainability of its projects after the local teams have moved on to assist other villages. New villages often raise a signiﬁcant portion of the overall expenditure in the form of dedicated space, labor, materials, and/or small amounts of cash. These challenge grants act as catalysts for community building while also maximizing the local participation and expertise brought to the programs. In order to receive Room to Read’s services, a community must sign the Challenge Grant contract. For the School Room Program, for example, this contract stipulates that the village must assemble a construction committee that meets regularly to ensure progress. An agreed-upon blueprint must also be used, ensuring that schools are built safely and cost effectively. Finally, the village must donate funds, materials, land, and/or labor to the effort. This model of community ownership produces a deep sense of commitment and a lasting impact on education in rural areas. Because

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of this approach, Room to Read’s construction projects are sustainable institutions that are able to provide for the education of children in the long term. Local Room to Read teams generally do not seek out future locations. Instead, communities must apply to Room to Read for assistance with a construction project. Once a community has been chosen as a future site for a Room to Read program, it must make considerable contributions to the process. The village must also pass Room to Read’s thorough needs assessment. If a school would like to partner with Room to Read to establish a library, it is required to support the project by providing dedicated space, a dedicated librarian who commits to receiving Room to Read training in library skills, and, in the case of the library construction projects, materials and labor to aid in construction. If a school community has been chosen as a future site for a Room to Read computer lab, it must provide the teachers to run the lab (at least one teacher must go through Room to Read training), committed oversight of the ongoing project, and lab security. Furthermore, the school community is responsible for funding ongoing maintenance and electricity associated with the lab as well as Internet access, if available. Through the implementation of the Challenge Grant Model, and the intimate involvement of local communities, the organization helps to ensure that Room to Read’s programs are successful and sustainable.

MONITORING, EVALUATION, AND CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING Room to Read is committed to ensuring the highest quality programs so that it can have the greatest impact on the lives of children throughout the developing world. To this end, each project is subject to monitoring and evaluation (M&E), both internally and externally. The in-country staff visit the programs regularly and use a variety of methods, such as interviews and surveys, with key stakeholders, students, and teachers to gather information about program effectiveness. Through this internal monitoring, the staff are able to provide useful feedback and to highlight areas for future program improvements. In turn, Room to Read as an organization is able to make modiﬁcations when necessary based on the feedback of local teams, teachers, and students. In addition to its in-country M&E staff, Room to Read has hired a global program ofﬁcer devoted to overseeing M&E in all the countries and programs. This position exempliﬁes Room to Read’s focus on M&E and its commitment to systematically monitor and evaluate its work. As of 2007, a formalized, global monitoring system had been implemented that uses a mixed-methods approach to collect data across all countries related to access, use, and sustainability of Room to Read’s programs. Room to Read also conducted an independent, external evaluation in 2005 of all its programs in four countries (Sri Lanka and Laos were excluded because they were new to the partnership at the time). To investigate the effectiveness of the programs, this evaluation employed a sixty-six-item survey that focused on teachers’ and students’ perceptions, attitudes, and self-reported behaviors with regard to each Room to Read program in each country. The questions focused on teachers’ and students’

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The New Humanitarians

involvement in the programs, their perceptions of the quality of operations, and the value and impact of the programs. In each country across each program, students and teachers rated the programs highly: 91 percent and 87 percent of respondents rated the Room to Grow Girls’ Scholarship Program and the School Room Program, respectively, a four on a four-point scale; additionally, 82 percent, 80 percent, and 70 percent of respondents rated the Computer Room, Reading Room, and Language Room programs, respectively, a four out of four. In the Reading Room Program, students and teachers agreed that students were becoming better readers and were reading more often as a result of the program. The majority of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that each program was running well. John Wood admits that there are many things he would have done differently had he founded Room to Read with the knowledge he has now. First of all, he would have hired more people more quickly. Because Room to Read was a start-up organization, Wood was naturally worried about money, payroll, and similar issues, but this worry led to his personally printing receipts, licking stamps, and running to the post ofﬁce even two years into the project. He also wishes that Room to Read had begun investing in publishing local language children’s books earlier. The sooner a new organization starts making a difference, the sooner the organization can scale. In hindsight, Wood also recognizes the importance of setting up strong systems—every kind of system: customer databases, project databases, ﬁnancial systems, and more. Getting the programs started quickly became problematic once Room to Read realized that it had not put certain systems in place ﬁrst. Wood and Room to Read are constantly learning, and through ongoing evaluation are committed to continue making improvements within the organization.

AWARDS, HONORS, AND PRESS Over the past few years, Room to Read has received several distinguished awards, including the Fast Company/Monitor Group “Social Capitalist Award,” the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and the Sand Hill Group Foundation’s “Social Entrepreneurship” Award. In addition to these organizational awards, Founder and CEO John Wood has been selected for several honors, including the Draper Richards Foundation Fellowship, the “Young Global Leader” Award from the World Economic Forum, and Time magazine’s “Asia’s Heroes Award.” Room to Read has been featured in many prestigious newspapers, magazines, websites, and television shows, including the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Time, Town and Country, International Herald Tribune, Bloomberg Television, CNN, and PBS programs.

NEXT STEPS FOR ROOM TO READ Room to Read’s job is not done. There are currently more than 770 million illiterate adults in the world, two-thirds of whom are women and girls. In addition, there are over 70 million children not currently enrolled in primary school and more than

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150 million not enrolled in secondary school. The need for Room to Read’s educational programs spans the globe. To respond to this worldwide demand for its programs, Room to Read is committed to expanding geographically. In 2006 it expanded to a new continent by launching operations in South Africa. In 2008 it began programs in Zambia, and it hopes to expand into two additional African countries by 2010. The organization also plans to expand into two additional countries in Asia by 2010, beginning with a launch in Bangladesh later in 2008. In addition, it plans to conduct initial research on expansion to Latin America beginning in 2009. As Room to Read expands further into Asia and Africa, as well as to Latin America, it will simultaneously maintain its commitment to increasing its activities and support within the countries where it is currently operating. Within the next three years, the organization’s ambitious goal is to establish a total a 13,000 libraries and impact more than 5 million children. Ultimately, Room to Read’s mission is to bring the lifelong gift of education to 10 million children in the developing world.

TESTIMONIALS Your glorious help has changed our school, and inspired our students to improve their academic performance. The students at our school received some of the highest exam scores out of the Kaski district, the ﬁrst time our school received such distinction. We are very grateful to you all. —Udaya Karki, Principal, Harihar English School, Nepal Before I saw the colorful Room to Read books, I thought reading was only for homework. Now, I can read books that are fun and learn about other places and animals. —Puja, Class 6, Masbar, Nepal On behalf of the teaching staff and students at the Le Ngoc Han Secondary School, I want to thank all of you in Room to Read for your generous gift of a computer lab. Your support will help our young generation face the challenges of the future. —Dong Thi Bach Tuyet, Training and Educational Services, Tien Giang Province, Vietnam My name is Kun Nara. I am a student in grade 9 of Net Yang High school. I am very excited about the gift from Room to Read Cambodia because I’ve never seen and had the opportunity to use this kind of computer technology before. My family is very poor. I don’t have money to pay for the private computer school like some students in rich families. So this is a great opportunity for me to engage in this skill. Room to Read is amazing. I would like to say thank you to the donor who has offered great opportunities to the poor like us. —Kun Nara, Net Yank High School, Battambang, Cambodia My mother used to tell me that “girls who know how to read and write will only write love letters to boys . . . so it is better that girls do not go to school.” Times have

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changed since I was young and I know that going to school is the only way that [my granddaughter] will ever get out of this poverty we live in. —seventy-nine-year-old grandmother of a Room to Grow scholar, Cambodia

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Room to Read Founder and/or Executive Director: John Wood Mission/Description: Room to Read partners with local communities throughout the developing world to provide quality educational opportunities by establishing libraries, creating local language children’s literature, constructing schools, providing education to girls, and establishing computer labs. We seek to intervene early in the lives of children in the belief that education empowers people to improve socioeconomic conditions for their families, communities, countries, and future generations. Through the opportunities that only education can provide, we strive to break the cycle of poverty, one child at a time. Website: roomtoread.org Address: Room to Read The Presidio P.O. Box 29127 San Francisco, CA 94129 USA Phone: +1.415.561.3331 Fax: +1.415.561.4428

NOTES 1. Chinn, M. & Fairlie, R. (2006). “ICT use in the developing world: An analysis of differences in computer and Internet penetration.” NET Institute Working Paper No. 06-03 (http://ssrn.com/abstract=936474). 2. Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT). (1996). Changing the conversation about teaching & learning technology: A report on 10 years of ACOT research. Retrieved December 6, 2007, from http://www.apple.com/education/k12/leadership/acot/library.html. 3. Rusten, E. (2003). “Using computers in schools.” In Academy for Educational Development (AED)/LearnLink, Digital opportunities for development: A sourcebook on access and applications. Retrieved December 8, 2007, from http://learnlink.aed.org/Publications/ Sourcebook/home.htm.

3

Global Village Engineers M. Christopher Shimkin and Annie Khan

Global Village Engineers (GVE) is a nonproﬁt engineering initiative whose purpose is to create a global program through which highly skilled and experienced engineers can be of service to the world community and address vital worldwide social, economic, and civic needs. GVE is composed of a volunteer corps of professional engineers supporting the local capacity of rural communities in developing countries by demystifying aspects of public infrastructure construction and environmental protection projects. GVE’s engineers choose to volunteer their skills to assure the livelihood of these communities by building long-term local capacity, especially in situations requiring disaster prevention, rehabilitation, and/or environmental protection. We believe that infrastructure will best serve communities when they have the capacity to become involved from project inception through construction and ﬁnally with long-term maintenance. Governments and project sponsors often do not invest in communicating basic facts to a community about design, construction, and maintenance issues. Our mission is to ﬁnd these facts and develop the local capacity to understand such facts. We join efforts with knowledgeable nongovernmental organization (NGO) personnel, who use their new technical understanding to organize more effective public advocacy efforts. After GVE volunteers work in the ﬁeld to assess the engineering needs of a given project, they work with their NGO counterparts to formulate a strategy to impart the technical information in a simple and accessible manner based on cultural understanding and sensitivity. They also act as project catalysts and liaisons among the engineering designers, advocacy and environmental organizations, policy makers, and the impacted community organizations.

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The New Humanitarians

GVE VOLUNTEERS GVE volunteers also have the opportunity to practice speciﬁc skills and enjoy the satisfaction of teaching new skills to people who deeply appreciate their value in maintaining their very survival, not to mention setting the foundation for their economic development. GVE volunteers follow up their assessments and initial trainings with ongoing dialogue and additional trainings with the communities until community members feel comfortable acting alone. The volunteer corps of professional engineers is a vital component of our organization. GVE has developed an active network of technical professionals whose expertise extends across many engineering disciplines, including wastewater treatment, information technology, environmental impact, roadway design and construction, water and air quality impact, hydrogeology, storm water management, water supply, natural disaster preparedness, hazardous materials/waste, hydrology, hydropower, solid waste management, bridges/structures, and ﬂood control.

WHY IS GVE UNIQUE? Global Village Engineers is an organization that recruits and manages a volunteer corps of civil engineers, environmental scientists, and other technical experts who work with rural communities and NGOs in the developing world. Its unique mission is to empower these bodies through education and training on infrastructure issues that impact them so that they become effective advocates on their own behalf. This mission is based on the fundamental principle that people are powerless when self-doubt prevents them from participating in the political and social systems that bring infrastructure to their local environments. Today, there are organizations that mobilize engineers and engineering students to construct housing, small water-supply systems, and schools. These volunteers actually perform the work, and in doing so, supply a valuable development function. However, these groups tend to work on small, relatively uncomplicated projects; more importantly, they do not focus on educating and training their communities and NGOs about the scientiﬁc and engineering principles required to understand the technical details that describe a project’s impact on a particular community. In the GVE model, however, stakeholders learn from GVE volunteers how to integrate technical facts into their strategies for participating in the planning, design, and implementation of a project. It is this education that allows community members to deal effectively with the private and public agencies that all too often control or impact their local environments—often to their detriment. Another important and somewhat unique component of GVE’s strategy is to capitalize on seasonal downturns in the civil engineering industry by providing working engineers with meaningful volunteer work that enriches their professional careers. The small- to midsized ﬁrms that provide many of GVE’s volunteers rarely offer the international, cross-cultural experiences such as GVE’s that many excellent employees want.

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HISTORY M. Christopher Shimkin is the founder of GVE. The idea for GVE occurred to Christopher after his experiences in El Salvador in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch in 1992. Mitch caused unspeakable destruction to the homes and lives of people, especially in an area called Bajo Lempa near the Lempa River. To help prevent future devastation, funding was allocated to design and build a levee that would prevent the banks of the Lempa River from ﬂooding, thereby protecting the people in this area. The individuals involved with overseeing the levee project did not fully comprehend the intricate design structure and nuances of such a project; as a result, they were unable to effectively evaluate the situation. Christopher was asked to meet with these individuals to help bridge the gap between design and implementation. While assisting with this project, Christopher interacted with the local community, conveying some basic engineering concepts to them. The information he shared seemed to make a great deal of difference in the attitudes of these individuals. For example, he explained a basic protocol involved with building linear structures such as roads, levees, or bridges. Christopher explained that “stations” are used as guiding points. Stations are numbered stakes planted in the ground. Christopher explained to several community members what the numbers on the stakes meant. At the end of the trip, there was a summary meeting, and people were asked for feedback regarding what they learned. One farmer, who had limited formal education, stated that for the ﬁrst time in his life, he understood what the numbers on the stakes meant, and how they translated to the design map. Such knowledge made a lasting impression on this individual because now it was easier for him to make sense of at least one aspect of the project. For Christopher, this was the birth of the idea for GVE. Christopher was taken aback by the impact of basic engineering concepts and the power of such critical knowledge on these community members. Christopher experienced ﬁrsthand the implications of how empowerment of the local population, and how things that are taken for granted by some, can have a profound impact on the lives of others. Speciﬁcally, basic engineering knowledge can equip people with the ability to learn and understand how things are affecting their environment and, consequently, their lives. Furthermore, this knowledge can impact their rights and privileges, since their lives are directly affected. Christopher recognized the importance of information sharing: “If one person can be deeply affected by basic engineering information, then so can others.” Upon returning from his trip to El Salvador, Christopher proceeded to discuss his ideas with other engineering colleagues, who were also passionate about this plan. Christopher felt so strongly about the role he could play in helping others that he quit his job and founded Global Village Engineers. Everything came together, and it proved easy to inspire other engineers to join GVE. To date, there have been between 100 and 150 GVE volunteers. According to Christopher, “You’re an engineer for a reason, and the reason is that there is a human being

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The New Humanitarians

impacted by the work you do, and you need to understand that. You’re not just building a bridge—the bridge has a purpose and it has an impact, not just an environmental impact . . . it puts it in human terms.”

THE GVE MODEL As stated on the GVE website (www.gvengineers.org), “GVE’s mission is to support the local capacity of rural communities in developing countries to inﬂuence public infrastructure and environmental protection.” GVE acts as a consulting agency by taking on the role of empowerment, so that individuals feel like a part of the process. GVE helps the local population understand the reasoning and importance of building a structure a certain way in their town or village. Communicating with the local population about the changes that may occur in their community helps alleviate tension over facts that may be misunderstood or not understood at all. This is an important step in rapport building, which encourages community members to feel comfortable talking about and sharing their concerns, including having someone understand their point of view. According to Christopher, “We consult, we listen, we explain, we educate, and we ‘demystify’ the process.” GVE plays an integral role in breaking down communication barriers, thus empowering and helping communities collaborate for their own betterment. Christopher strongly believes in GVE’s role as a mediator and consultant, and he discourages the practice of having outsiders go into a country and build structures, since this would harm the country by taking away from their economy. GVE believes that these countries have qualiﬁed people available to work, and it is more important to work with the local populations.

GVE PROJECTS Levee Inspection and Maintenance Guide Training The damage inﬂicted on the people of the Lower Lempa by annual ﬂooding highlights the need to invest in long-term technical solutions and appropriate land-use decisions in the Lower Lempa region of El Salvador. As part of a comprehensive ﬂood prevention plan, an earthen levee is being constructed on both sides of the Lempa River. Accompanied by United Communities, a grassroots organization of community leaders, GVE continues to observe the levee’s construction. GVE emphasized the importance of ongoing inspection and maintenance to keep levees in good repair. Ultimately, levee maintenance is the responsibility of the Lower Lempa communities. At their request, our engineers demonstrated various levee maintenance techniques in the ﬁeld, and prepared a guide describing how to complete minor repairs and how to identify, record, and plan for major maintenance needs.

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Las Colinas Landslide Mitigation For the Santa Tecla, El Salvador, project, GVE is assisting communities that have been affected by the Las Colinas landslide as well as other communities that continue to be threatened by future landslides or mudslides. Over 500 residents died in the Las Colinas landslide. In addition to community participation in the project, the city of Santa Tecla has been an instrumental partner in working to ﬁnd practical solutions to mitigating the risks of the communities. Local interest in the development of this project is very high. Therefore, the local media are always on hand to get the most recent developments from Global Village Engineers.

GVE Mentoring Assistance Several projects illustrate the effects of GVE assistance and mentoring. One example involves a community in El Salvador that was built on the river banks. A hydropower facility was located close to this area, and community members thought the power facility was responsible for the frequent ﬂoods. People came to this conclusion because ﬂooding occurred on sunny as well as rainy days. However, the river on which this community was built is approximately 350–400 kilometers long and stretches through three countries. Therefore, if it rained in Honduras three days before, by the time the water traveled to this community, it could be a sunny day there. Individuals were unaware of this principle of watershed hydrology. GVE explained the hydrology mechanics to the community members, helping them understand the factors that impacted their environment and indirectly preventing conﬂict between the community and the hydro facility. In another example, GVE acted as a mediator. In engineering design, one of the main documents is called the design plan. One aspect of the overall design plan is the highly detailed technical speciﬁcations document, which lists all the technical requirements down to the sizes of different screws and the strength of metal required to sustain a structure. Someone had acquired the design plan for the levee in El Salvador, read that the levee was to be built for a “ten-year design storm,” and misinterpreted the information. The person thought that a ten-year design storm meant the levee would only last ten years. This information was published in the local newspapers, which resulted in a local upheaval. The community felt betrayed and undermined: they did not understand that a ten-year design storm is an engineering term meaning the levee was designed to sustain storms of a certain size and statistical frequency. Deciding on a ten-year storm designation affects the height of the levee, allowing it to handle a certain amount of water from a storm of a certain size that has a 10 percent chance of occurring in a given year. GVE was integral in helping to defuse a highly volatile situation by explaining the meaning of this term to the local communities. Another example of GVE at work involved a project in Nicaragua. GVE worked with a mayor who had many simultaneous projects and was having problems prioritizing the most important tasks, especially from a technical engineering

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standpoint. GVE guided her and informed her about the appropriate processes for hiring an engineer, the expectations she should have of an engineer, and the appropriate engineering costs involved. She was new to the position and the nuances of the role; GVE was there initially to help her organize and prioritize, and was also available for ongoing support when needed. Project Update: Lower Lempa, El Salvador In February 2005, GVE volunteers and the country director for Voices on the Border visited the United Communities of the Lower Lempa in El Salvador. The trip was focused on continued work with communities in Lower Lempa affected by annual ﬂooding and was a tremendous success. The main objectives of the visit were to consolidate ongoing community maintenance of the levee, promote more systematic inspections of the levee, and continue communication exchanges with the communities. Over thirty-ﬁve members from eighteen communities participated with GVE. Together, they reviewed the status of nearly half of the approximate 14.85 kilometers of levee already constructed. In the follow-up meeting, GVE volunteers reviewed basic levee construction and provided suggestions on maintenance concerns. GVE volunteers applauded community maintenance done so far, including the stone paving of ramps by communities on their own initiative. The second half of the meeting was an open discussion around the improved structuring of maintenance and inspection teams, and the collective development of a reporting form for levee conditions that will be centralized, compiled, and distributed to the Ministry of Agriculture (government agency responsible for levee construction), GVE, local police, city government, and others. Individuals Touched by GVE Concepcion (Conce) is a farmer, with a wife and two kids. He has a ﬁrst-grade education and lives in the Lower Lempa area of El Salvador. GVE has been working with Conce on the levee project for approximately two or three years. GVE taught Conce simple ﬁeld techniques to check if work should or should not be conducted on a levee at any given time. For example, an important aspect of a levee, which is made of soil, is that it should not have too much water or it should not be too dry. The method used to determine this involves rubbing some of the dirt together in one’s hand. If there is some dirt left on the hand, it means one thing, and if there is no dirt in the hand, it means something else. Conce was taught this method. One day, Conce was in the ﬁeld with an engineering inspector while work was being conducted on the levee. Conce decided to check the conditions of the levee by the method he had been taught. After conducting this basic inspection, he realized that the conditions were not appropriate to conduct work on the levee. At this point, Conce informed the bulldozer operator about his concerns and requested that he stop work. The bulldozer operator was demeaning toward Conce since he

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did not believe that Conce had the appropriate knowledge regarding levee construction. However, the engineering inspector vouched for Conce’s knowledge and demanded that the bulldozer operator stop working. Conce has repeated this story on many occasions because he felt empowered, important, and appreciated. The basic information he was taught gave him self-conﬁdence and respect. Another individual named Fernando was also personally touched by GVE. Christopher was at a meeting with representatives from the Japanese, American, and Salvadorian governments as well as various other community members. Someone asked Fernando what GVE had done for him and how the organization had helped him. Fernando said that two years previously, before the help of GVE, whenever he tried to contact various government representatives to request a meeting, he was ignored. After working with GVE for two years, Fernando gained the respect of the governmental representatives. As a result, he can now contact the government to request a meeting, and representatives would attend the meeting. Through the help of GVE, Fernando gained the respect needed so that he could participate in shaping the outcome of projects by gathering stakeholders on his own terms. A consistent theme with these stories involves respect, empowerment, and the “voice” individuals attain through their interactions with GVE. Christopher believes it is important not just to convey information but to take in information, “to sit down and just listen . . . through listening one can learn many unexpected details; it is fascinating to hear someone, and it’s exhilarating to be a part of the solution.” Christopher understands the importance of gaining trust and building a relationship in order to help others. This is an integral part of the GVE model: the people-oriented aspect is what separates GVE from private companies. GVE is invested in understanding the communities where it is working and in helping community members feel secure with GVE and its intentions.

SECRETS TO SUCCESS In order to obtain projects, GVE develops partnerships with big organizations such as Oxfam. Larger organizations have connections to smaller agencies in various countries where GVE works. Often, these larger agencies can connect GVE to other organizations and potential projects. In addition, Christopher has a network of people he contacts to determine if there are any projects where GVE can make a difference. Information about GVE is also spread by word of mouth, which is a testament to the work that GVE does. GVE charges for projects depending on the size and funding of the organization. For example, larger organizations typically have funding available for their projects; smaller agencies, such as the Share Foundation or Voices on the Border, have limited funds. GVE will often fund projects involving smaller agencies. Generally, the operation of GVE involves minimal overhead, and it is based completely on the generous work of its volunteers. Individual donations are the primary source of funding. Money is also provided through foundations and partnerships with various engineering companies.

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The New Humanitarians

Engineering companies will donate cash or give special compensation to their employees to work with GVE. For example, an employee can be granted three extra days of vacation, as long as he or she donates time to working on a project with GVE. In addition, volunteers donate their expenses, such as airfare and food. GVE actively hosts annual fundraising campaigns to obtain general funding.

THE GVE SUCCESS METER When a community asks GVE to return, that represents a powerful marker for success. Since it is difﬁcult to measure empowerment or the respect that community members gain, another measure is the number of individuals who actively maintain contact with GVE. However, this is also difﬁcult to measure, since individuals from the regions in which GVE works do not have telephones or electronic forms of communication. People beneﬁt from the GVE-related projects because they are big projects, in the sense that these projects geographically impact many communities and thousands of people. Communities may be oblivious to the help they have received, yet they may notice that a river has not ﬂooded in over three years. GVE worked on a project in Cambodia where the Sesan River runs out of Vietnam into the Mekong River, and every community on that river was impacted by the project. Although GVE did not meet with all those people, the project impacted them positively. Success also comes through inspiring engineers. A lot of present-day engineering designs are done in the ofﬁce, using computers. As a result, when engineers are granted the opportunity to travel and interact with various communities, it fuels their passion and helps them feel motivated about the work they are doing. According to Christopher, “It gives them a moral boost and makes them feel good about what they are doing by being able to go and share it with others.”

CHALLENGES FACED BY GVE Obtaining funding is difﬁcult, especially for Christopher because he exhibits a level of passion that others may not share. Christopher has worked tirelessly to obtain funding. For example, he was in competition for one particular fellowship for two and a half years and, unfortunately, was not awarded the fellowship. To Christopher this is the most challenging and frustrating aspect of his job: the disappointment of not feeling heard, the inability to comprehend why others cannot see the valuable work that GVE has done/is doing, and the disbelief that others do not feel the same about helping improvised communities. Such obstacles have not stopped Christopher from persisting. He continues to explain the beneﬁt of the services provided by GVE, in the hopes that others will understand. If someone is not interested, then he will move on to someone else or use another strategy. It is this level of persistence, motivation, and drive that makes GVE the organization that it is.

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To assist with GVE’s growth, Christopher has implemented a board of directors and a board of advisors. They represent a core group of people who understand the mission of GVE. They play a critical role in sharing information and formulating creative solutions because they provide different perspectives and resources to explore avenues to help the growth of GVE.

INFLUENCES AND INSPIRATIONS Christopher cites his parents not as mentors but as inspirational coaches. He describes his father as a self-inspired philanthropist and his mother as someone who understands the workings of philanthropy; passion from both parents to do right in the world has been instilled in Christopher. His parents helped to advise and guide Christopher when he ﬁrst created the idea for GVE. Christopher admires his parents’ ability to adapt and understand situations where one has no experience. Neither parent had the remotest technical background, yet both quickly embraced the GVE concept from a humanitarian point of view. His parents can take a concept that one may have difﬁculty understanding and help someone feel intelligent. Christopher is also highly self-driven. He explained that his inspiration comes from within. Since he is his primary source of inspiration, it is hard for him to grapple with the thought that others do not comprehend the mission of GVE. He believes that the best way to help others understand the importance of GVE’s work is to help them feel the frustration an individual from the community may feel. This is accomplished through role plays that Christopher has his audience participate in whenever he is guest lecturing. Christopher truly believes GVE’s mission; it represents a method of solving many problems while having a big impact on people’s lives.

WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN DONE DIFFERENTLY? In reﬂecting on what he might have done differently, Christopher believes he should have fully engaged the engineering societies. Many people are attempting to do the same thing but in different ways; communicating with the engineering community might have produced a collaborative effort that would have generated better results. Part of Christopher’s mission involved changing the culture of engineering. For example, in the legal profession, pro bono work is part of the culture; in the engineering ﬁeld, this is not the case, nor are most projects implemented with the full engagement of all stakeholders. Christopher’s idea was to recruit people and encourage longevity at work by asking employers to allot volunteers an extra week of vacation; in addition, he wanted to inﬂuence how engineers and engineering ﬁrms approach projects that have considerable community impact. Christopher’s ingenuity may be ahead of its time. GVE is focused not just on helping build physical structures but on building relationships with people and

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empowering them through communication and knowledge. Engineering ﬁrms are traditionally focused on concrete results. THE FUTURE OF GVE From an organizational point of view, there will be further development of the board of directors to support the growth of GVE. The GVE model has been proven, many people are embracing the concept, and the next important step is bringing engineering leadership at the board of directors’ level. Christopher has chosen a difﬁcult path. “It’s very hard, when talking about the funding stuff, when someone doesn’t believe it and you start to question yourself. . . . I gave up a whole profession and career of thirteen to fourteen years and jumped into this without experience, thinking this is a great idea [so] why isn’t everyone else jumping on the bandwagon?” Despite these challenges, Christopher has worked against the odds to empower others in developing countries, and his accomplishments speak for themselves. He is truly an inspiration to engineers and to anyone wanting to be a humanitarian. RECOMMENDED BOOKS The Civilized Engineer by Samuel Foreman The Introspective Engineer by Samuel Foreman The Existential Pleasures of Engineering by Samuel Foreman Christopher believes that these three books put engineering in perspective, especially the ﬁrst book, in terms of passion for human lives and human rights. M. CHRISTOPHER SHIMKIN M. Christopher Shimkin is a summa cum laude master’s graduate in business administration from Northeastern University. Mr. Shimkin was selected as one of the World Economic Forum’s 100 Global Leaders for Tomorrow for 2002. Since 1982 he has been directly involved in community service work. Beginning as a class agent for the Eaglebrook School and responsible for postgraduation class fundraising, he then moved into local community as well as broader international involvement concerning education and the environment. In 1992 Mr. Shimkin became a volunteer board member of the Millis (MA) Educational Resource Initiative Team and eventually was elected president. His success in attracting funds to support the initiatives of this nonproﬁt organization provided support for curriculum-enhancing programs within the local school system. In 1993 Mr. Shimkin became a mentoring tutor for the national MATHCOUNTS program as well as a volunteer member of the Charles River Rail Association, working toward improved rail service in the suburban Boston area. In 1996 and 1997, he was appointed by the town of Millis to serve on the Open Space Plan Committee and Drinking Water Committee.

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Mr. Shimkin has been an invited speaker at Oxfam America, the World Bank, Boston University’s Center for Energy and Environment, Tufts University, Roger Williams College, University of Massachusetts, Brandeis University, and Northeastern University’s Graduate School of Business Administration to speak about environmental professions and environmental impact evaluations. With regard to the engineer’s role in international sustainable development, Mr. Shimkin was a panelist at the Engineers Without Borders’ annual meeting, guest speaker at the Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW) annual meeting, and at the Cornell University ESW chapter. A graduate of civil/ocean engineering from the University of Rhode Island in 1989, he pursued a consulting career in environmental engineering, developing expertise in water quality evaluations, civil works infrastructure planning and design, and environmental regulatory compliance. His afﬁliations include • •

University of Massachusetts–Lowell: University of Massachusetts Sustainable Development Advisory Committee. Boston Network on International Development: Board of Advisors

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Global Village Engineers Founder and/or Executive Director: M. Christopher Shimkin Mission/Description: Global Village Engineers (GVE) is a volunteer corps of professional engineers supporting the local capacity of rural communities in developing countries to inﬂuence public infrastructure and environmental protection. GVE’s engineers choose to volunteer their skills to assure the livelihood of these communities by building long-term capacity, especially in situations requiring disaster prevention, rehabilitation, and/or environmental protection. They believe that infrastructure will best serve communities when community members 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 out these facts and develop the local capacity to understand such facts. Website: www.gvengineers.org Address: Global Village Engineers, Inc. 6 Seward Ave. Beverly, MA 01915 USA Phone: +1.978-927-0219 Fax: +1.978-927-0219 E-mail: [email protected]

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4

Common Bond Institute: Vision and Journey Steve Olweean

When vision is imbued with belief and presence in our day-to-day life, our actions serve to conﬁrm and root it in reality. —Steve Olweean, Founding Director, Common Bond Institute

Common Bond Institute (CBI) began essentially in the same form it has sustained throughout its existence. It began literally as a vision and intuitive journey. Over time, the journey increasingly required the creation of an organizational structure to allow the vision to be better planted in the corporal world for practical application. Quite appropriately, CBI has maintained itself as a living “idea” rather than a brick and mortar “place” by establishing itself as a web-based, virtual organization, using the vehicle of increasingly accessible grassroots global communications, particularly the Internet. Through its extensive international network, CBI is able to link the commitment, energies, and resources of many collaborating organizations, groups, and individuals around the globe, forming intentional community and strategic alliances to address humanitarian needs in troubled and underserved regions of the world. Collaboration is seen as the new standard for being an effective organization, and there is certainly a wealth of likely partners throughout the world these days. The daunting task of learning just how many like-missioned organizations exist at any one time increasingly underscores the fact that the world is experiencing an extraordinary surge in creative change agents coming forth and taking action to contribute to a palpable shift in consciousness toward a universal culture of peace. A beneﬁt of actually being in this stream is feeling the sheer presence and force of this escalation, and how it is changing the course of reality. 43

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The New Humanitarians

CBI’s particular story goes back to the 1980s and to an inspiring era of ﬂedgling citizen diplomacy efforts in a polarized world split between the United States and the Soviet Union. This was a time of unprecedented and often uncharted opportunities for individuals to take dramatic steps in bridging the chronic gap of a seemingly intractable Cold War. These were heady days of collapsing stereotypes and grassroots bridges that circumvented institutional chasms created by hostile governments heavily invested in maintaining an “enemy” mentality. CBI was just one of the products that emerged from stepping into this unfamiliar space and engaging personally with those who, for all purposes and intents, represented the well-publicized, entrenched image of “The Other.” The name Common Bond emerged intuitively from the personal experience of reaching past artiﬁcial barriers to ﬁnd and acknowledge our human commonality, and to experience a deep connection and belonging that neutralizes the energy of fear often felt when confronted with difference and the unknown. It also embodied the mission of traveling this same road through fear-based belief systems regarding the unknown within each of us that reﬂect outward into our relationships with others and the world.

HISTORY In August 1990, Steve Olweean was a practicing psychotherapist in Michigan when two important events occurred that led him to organizing CBI. One was the escalating tensions of war in the Middle East as Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the second was his becoming involved in coordinating an international professional exchange visit to the then Soviet Union. Steve’s own long history as an activist in civil rights, social justice, and antiwar efforts in the 1960s and 1970s naturally drew him to what intuitively felt like a next step in this same journey: contributing to bridges being built through citizen diplomacy between the two most polarized parts of the human community—the United States/the West and the then Soviet Union—and an equally polarized region that impacted daily on the rest of the world—the Middle East. In particular, his many years of working as a psychologist and outreach crisis intervention worker in community mental health services for high-risk, marginalized, and underserved populations prompted him to use that professional and personal experience in ﬁnding ways he might contribute to improving the level of human services in these troubled societies. The goal, then as now, was to seek ways to increase the capacity of local communities to empower and heal themselves. Kuwait The 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait brought with it a tragic impact on civilians caught up in the violence. By February 1991, when Iraqi troops left Kuwait, news of large numbers of civilians suffering from emotional, psychological, and physical

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trauma spread throughout the world. This suffering was compounded further by massive numbers of Iraqi civilian victims as a result of the Gulf War. While listening to a National Public Radio (NPR) interview, Steve heard a Kuwaiti doctor being asked if his hospital needed more medical supplies, equipment, and physicians. The doctor was blunt: his words were, “We don’t need equipment or supplies—we need therapists. There is an epidemic of psychologically traumatized victims that is growing every day, and we don’t know how to treat them.” Assuming there must be a relief effort in the works to address this great need, Steve called the Free Kuwait ofﬁce in Washington, D.C. As a father of two young children at the time, he was unable to volunteer to go to Kuwait for an extended period himself. However, based on his experience as a trauma therapist and his personal background as an Arab American Muslim, he was interested in orienting Western therapists to the Middle Eastern and Islamic culture they would need to be sensitized to in attempting to operate effective treatment services. In speaking to the director, Steve was surprised to ﬁnd that not only was there no such mental health relief effort under way, but that the ofﬁce was desperately trying to ﬁnd a way for one to be organized. After conversations with both the Free Kuwait ofﬁce and the Kuwaiti embassy, where he gathered details on what services currently existed in Kuwait and what relief organizations they were aware of, it became apparent that although there were numerous efforts to provide relief services and supplies for the physical needs of food, clothing, shelter, and medical supplies, there was little if any organized service at the time to address the intense psychological needs of the population. The Red Cross and other organizations, including the UN, had conducted surveys and determined trauma was pervasive, that there was indeed a great and growing need for help, and that the indigenous services were far lacking or nearly nonexistent to address the massive need. At the time, though, no organized program was in place to actually provide services. Over the weeks and months that followed, there were a number of small groups and individuals that traveled from the United States to Kuwait on their own to offer treatment services. Steve provided consultation to several of these groups and individuals. He linked the Free Kuwait ofﬁce, the Kuwaiti embassy, and the main hospital in Kuwait City with various trauma treatment groups and institutes to assist in generating more direct services. It was clear from these conversations that there was a profound lack of trained therapists in Kuwait, and that the true solution would be in providing vital practical training to local therapists rather than relying on bringing in outside services. It was during this time that Steve also realized the serious limitations of existing treatment models for situations like Kuwait, and he began exploring new models for providing emergency psychological trauma treatment to large populations of victims in regions where services are either underdeveloped or compromised by social upheaval. This would eventually lead to conceiving of the Catastrophic Trauma Recovery model used by CBI in its trauma treatment training

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The New Humanitarians

project serving local counselors in underdeveloped regions of conﬂict, including communities in the Middle East such as Palestine and Iraq. Soviet Union At the same time that the crisis in Kuwait was unfolding, Steve became involved with a Soviet-American professional exchange. In those early days, the level of practical training and skills in all areas of human services, and particularly in mental health, social work, and medicine, was seriously lacking in the USSR, and Soviet colleagues were desperate to obtain any skills possible to help them assist with the overwhelming and rapidly growing need for treatment services in a society literally teetering on the edge of collapse. Beginning in 1983, the Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP) had forged an immensely challenging, annual international professional exchange to the Soviet Union, initially shepherded by a core group of pioneers, including Fran Macy, Tom Greening, Anya Kucharev, and Paul Von Ward, and continued tenuously from year to year. The purpose of the exchange was to initiate contact with Soviet colleagues and nurture relationships that might be built on for future cooperation if the opportunity arose. These were difﬁcult years of intensiﬁed animosity and polarity between the two societies, with the saber rattling of a Star Wars weapons race and Ronald Reagan’s depiction of the USSR as the “Evil Empire.” As tensions rose, AHP became even more committed and determined to continue its exchange, even as the extraordinarily difﬁcult process of obtaining visas and travel permissions had to be reinvented each year in the face of many obstacles placed in the way by both U.S. and Soviet bureaucracies. Members of the delegations would push to make travel arrangements and then simply begin their journey, sometimes while still awaiting ﬁnal conﬁrmation that their visas would be accepted at the border. Citizen diplomacy was not only unvalued during this period; it also was suspect and considered an obstacle to other agendas. Ironically, there was agreement on this point by many citizen diplomats: that established political agenda of maintaining the logjam of mutual animosity was circumvented and jeopardized by grassroots citizens reaching out across both sides of a line drawn in the sand. This conclusion only motivated many citizen diplomats in general to redouble their efforts. In 1986 Carl Rogers, one of the founders of AHP, traveled to the USSR and drew national acclaim from Soviet government ofﬁcials. Even they were aware of this internationally renowned psychologist and peace-building activist. In 1987 Virginia Satir made the trip as travel logistics very slowly began to improve. On the heels of these visits, in 1990 Steve took on coordination of AHP’s exchange as the Soviet Union entered the years of Perestroika and Glazunov, and immediately began building on the vital groundwork previously laid by his colleagues. This was a period when it was increasingly possible to stay with Soviet colleagues in their homes—an act hereto illegal—and to begin

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cooperating on joint efforts together, rather than simply meeting brieﬂy from time to time once a year in a hotel or public place. It was also a time of rapidly increasing ability to communicate directly around the globe—initially by rare and expensive fax and phone, and eventually by the truly paradigm-shifting vehicle of the Internet. The realm of the possible rapidly and dramatically changed, and continued to change as new and expanded levels of cooperation opened literally from month to month. Steve led regular professional delegations to the Soviet Union one or two times a year on whirlwind, two- to three-week trips to St. Petersburg, Moscow, Vilnius, Riga, Kiev, Tblisi, Odessa, and other cities in the communist world, visiting colleagues hungry for professional contact with the West. Once there, meetings with Soviet colleagues were arranged based on who and what location was available at the time, often improvised from day to day. The mutual desire to be together and know each other was powerful and urgent, and it galvanized people into creating all sorts of arrangements to overcome the barrage of barriers and “ofﬁcial denials” to meeting. In retrospect, there was also an amazing degree of naïveté and daring, particularly on the part of the much more vulnerable friends and colleagues in these communist countries. Yet it is believed it was this kind of willingness to create such opportunities and to act on them, together with many such efforts occurring during this same pivotal period, that helped contribute to the rapid and unprecedented opening between the two polarized societies. In terms of his personal experience in this stream of activity and consciousness, it was the energy, promise, and practical hope of these early meetings that fed the dream from which CBI emerged. Between trips, Steve maintained ongoing communication with colleagues to continue planning and preparing for ever-expanding collaborative efforts and projects. Each visit was packed with a schedule of training workshops and seminars, and intense brainstorming meetings that always went very late into the night, with much planning for how to exploit the remarkably mounting opportunities for collaboration. There was truly a mutual milking of the preciously private, concentrated time allowed to the American and Soviet colleagues, where both creative and ambitious projects were spawned and deep personal relationships formed. It was, in fact, the personal relationships, trust, and commitments that were to be the seedbed for all future efforts. Following each exchange trip, Steve returned to the United States with an intense urgency to “do” something, to make use of these rare, new, and tenuous bridges while they were still at hand. Particularly since this was a time of great upheaval and crisis throughout the entire Soviet Union, and there was potential for both incredible new possibilities and devastating occurrences—including relapse into a closed dictatorial society—he was ﬁlled with a profound sense of urgency to act immediately before this tenuous opening might close. As the Soviet Union and its new incarnation, the Commonwealth of Independent States, convulsed, it was clear to anyone involved that the door could easily swing shut again at any moment on this entire region of the world.

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Steve thought that acting immediately, even hastily, was the only logical and practical option. There was no time to weigh factors, measure feasibility, or carefully consider the depth of the commitment being initiated. Without purposely crafting a detailed path in advance, he and his colleagues found themselves in a position of trusted responsibility to act. This was less a cognitive experience as one of heart and the soul. On some level, the decision seemed to have already been made, and the focus was more on ﬁguring out how to fashion the next step in implementing whatever was possible at the moment. It was not until he met with the AHP board again to present plans for moving forward with a list of collaborations that he realized a new chasm had opened, this time between the board and him. Steve came to the AHP board with a great deal of enthusiasm and a barrel full of proposals and calls for action, fully expecting the ideas to be grasped and moved on immediately. However, most of the board—which had not been directly engaged in the exchange or vision—was unable to fully relate to the situation and was overwhelmed by the breadth of proposals. The fear of liability and of diverting time and resources from the organization’s other activities caused great concern for many board members. As a result, the proposals were not accepted, and he left the meeting disappointed and frustrated. This was to become a discouragingly repeated experience in future board meetings. Since at the time he was coordinating the International Professional Exchange and was also in the role of International Liaison for AHP, however, Steve was given latitude for whatever energies he wished to personally put into international relations and activities, as long as these efforts did not obligate the organization, put it at legal risk, or require its time and resources. After the third AHP board meeting addressing the action proposals, it became evident that the vision Steve was following had outgrown the parameters of what the larger organization saw as its immediate priorities and capabilities, creating an impasse within the organization he had called his professional home in doing this work in the world. At the same time, those on the board who were sympathetic and supportive of his work counseled him to consider formally moving forward on his own, because, in reality, he had already been doing so for some time. It was at this point that Steve transformed the vision he had been carrying and following all along into a separate organization and mission. Common Bond Institute was created as a leaner, faster, and bolder vehicle for continuing to follow and realize the vision in ways that put it into concrete practice in the world. Relieved of the liability concerns and conﬂict with other organizational priorities, AHP was happy to move into the role of being a primary endorsing and supporting organization that did not need to engage its own resources. The fall of the Soviet Union created more opportunities for open collaboration, and in summer 1992, Steve organized a three-month professional exchange visit to the United States for four key psychologists—three from HARMONY Institute for Psychotherapy and Counseling in St. Petersburg, Russia, and one from the Lithuanian School Psychology Service in Vilnius. Over the course of these three months, with an intense schedule of meetings, conferences, presentations,

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and networking conducted in a number of cities across the United States, a new and even deeper level of professional collaboration and friendship was forged. One of the key products of this time together was the creation of the ﬁrst Annual International Conference on Conﬂict Resolution (ICR), and the launching of a larger vision of what they were co-creating together. The ICR Conference was ﬁrst conceived as a half-day seminar for perhaps ﬁfty people to be held during Steve’s next exchange visit to Russia. After a long discussion of possible topics for this new seminar, lasting into the early morning hours at Steve’s kitchen table, the planning group decided that the focus would be the very process they had all experienced together: overcoming and bridging the initial artiﬁcial barriers between them to reach a common place of understanding, deep connection, and trust. The main topic was to be conﬂict resolution, and the subtitle was “Sharing Tools for Personal and Global Harmony.” The summer exchange ended in mid-August when the four colleagues returned home to Russia and Lithuania. During the interim months leading up to Steve’s next trip to St. Petersburg in May, the only means of communication were rare faxes, brief phone calls, and hand-delivered letters. As news of the conference was publicized—primarily by distributed notices and word of mouth—the idea quickly took on a life of its own. The event site was changed twice from HARMONY’s modest ofﬁces to a hotel, and then a larger hotel as the number of participants rose, and the dates were expanded to accommodate what was becoming a program of several days. Between August 1992 and early May 1993, the conference concept grew remarkably, from a modest half-day seminar for Russian and American participants to a six-day international conference with nearly 450 participants attending from a number of countries around the world. When Steve and his colleagues again met each other as the conference opened in St. Petersburg, they shared their astonishment at what had been created. They realized then that their effort had hit upon a vital topic, time, and place to which many were drawn. As participants enthusiastically volunteered their perceptions of what the purpose of the conference was, it became obvious that each person brought with him or her a piece of the experience to invest in the community of the conference, and that the event itself was more of a vehicle for synthesizing the many diverse experiences into a common, co-created one for all. This was an invaluable lesson and set the frame for all future conferences, including the ﬁfteen Annual ICR Conferences that have occurred to date, a number of related conferences on separate topics, and CBI’s most recent initiative in launching another major annual international conference in 2006 and occurring each year since— the Annual International Conference on “Engaging The Other”: The Power of Compassion. The image of a mandala has been used ever since as a working model: creating the center structure of programs, with opportunities built in for the participants to add to and complete the process. In much the same way as these conferences, over the course of its history CBI’s nature has been shaped by the metaphor of a mandala in pursuing its work in the

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world, through crafting possibilities for creative expansion and development of its programs, and inviting others to co-create new, innovative reﬂections of a core design.

COLLABORATORS An account of CBI’s history could not be complete without including the indispensable contributions of three key, long-time collaborators who have been involved in this journey from its beginning. From very early on, literally in the formative days when CBI was just coalescing as an idea, Steve’s daughters, Jehan and Jessie, contributed a phenomenal amount of their time, energy, skills, and heart to ensuring the often tedious nuts and bolts of organizing CBI’s many efforts were accomplished. As they literally grew up in the midst of a ﬂurry of activity surrounding these nonstop proceedings, each began to also grow into her own individual purpose for remaining a part of this work in the world, by taking on her own piece of the mission for herself. Today, while each pursues her own professional career, both continue to assist CBI as seasoned conference organizers and contributors to the programs and mission. Sandra Friedman, past president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology and an early participant in AHP’s Soviet-American Professional Exchange, as well as the co-founder with Steve of the International Humanistic Psychology Association, has been a strong supporter and consultant throughout CBI’s existence. Along with Mark Pevzner and Alexander Badkhen of HARMONY Institute, Friedman has been a key contributor to the formulation of the conferences and training projects of CBI.

ORGANIZATION STRUCTURE, MISSION, AND STYLE Structure CBI is an international, nongovernmental, nonpolitical organization. It creates educational, training, conﬂict transformation, and humanitarian relief programs in various regions of the world, in collaboration with local partner organizations and groups. Its orientation is multidisciplinary and multicultural, and throughout its history it has been operated primarily by volunteers, in cooperation with other like-missioned organizations, large and small. Funding for its programs is obtained through conference registrations, donations, and occasional grants. Philosophy and Mission Cultivating the fundamental elements of a consciousness of peace along with local capacity building are seen as natural, effective antidotes to small-group, radical extremism and large-group despair, as well as the hardships and suffering of the human condition. To this end, enabling each society to effectively resolve and

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transform conﬂicts; satisfy core human needs within communities; and construct effective, holistic mechanisms for self determination, self esteem, and fundamental human dignity and worth is the purpose of CBI’s work. CBI is grounded in the application of humanistic psychology’s principles in its commitment to capacity building at both the grassroots and social institutional level. It actively works to form strategic alliances and partnerships with organizations, groups, and individuals dedicated to nurturing global relationships while creating and promoting an authentic world culture of peace. Style By design, CBI’s efforts are fundamentally collaborative for a larger impact. It maintains an extensive and expanding global network of partner organizations and groups that cooperate in pulling the requisite pieces together to create and operate programs, while minimizing the drain on individual group resources. CBI follows the principles of creating intentional community: all efforts, and particularly conferences, are designed to be living laboratories for creating and participating in deep, authentic community as a common ground of reference for exploring core themes and integrating formal learning. The conferences offer a dynamic microcosm of the larger, diverse global community and a ﬁrst-hand, personal experience of moving beyond artiﬁcial barriers to the reality of what is both possible and practical. The purposeful use of intentional community is a central element of CBI’s work. It assumes the basic drive/need for integration through interconnectedness and belonging that can be nurtured to develop conscious intent toward harmony and peace in our relationships.

PROGRAMS AND ACTIVITIES CBI organizes and sponsors international conferences, professional training programs, humanitarian relief projects, and professional exchanges; has assisted in establishing and developing locally based professional schools in human services; and actively provides consultation, networking, coordination support, and professional materials to assist newly emerging human service and civil society organizations in post-communist and developing countries that are regions of conﬂict. The focus is on improving local capacity for peace and healing through increasing skills and services, exploring human relationship dynamics, and expanding public dialogue and awareness of critical issues. Conferences Over the last sixteen years, CBI has organized a number of international, multicultural, and multidisciplinary conferences, many in collaboration with HARMONY Institute for Psychotherapy and Counseling in Russia and the International Humanistic Psychology Association (IHPA), and some in cooperation

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with other organizations, such as the Jane Goodall Institute. CBI maintains an extensive international network through its programs. Examples of conferences include The annual International Conference on Conﬂict Resolution (ICR), which has been held each year in Russia since 1993, is a major international event that has received support over the years from the presidents of the United States and Russia, is endorsed by over ninety organizations internationally, and is open to participants globally. It brings together hundreds of presenters and participants from around the world for skills training in conﬂict resolution and for exploration of the essential elements of conﬂict, transformation, and healing. The ICR conference also serves as a major networking and recruiting source for training projects. The annual International Conference on “Engaging The Other”: The Power of Compassion (ETO) was ﬁrst established in 2006 and quickly became an annual event. It examines concepts of “The Other” from a universal, crosscultural perspective to promote wider public dialogue about images of “Us and Them.” The conference addresses the roots of negative belief systems, stereotyping, prejudice, polarization, and enemy images; how to move past artiﬁcial barriers of misunderstanding and distrust to cultivate compassion and capacity for appreciation of diversity, reconciliation, and peace; and how to apply the results to the current state of world relationships. It is held in conjunction with the development of an edited book (in progress) addressing psychosocial concepts of “The Other” in a cross-cultural forum. The ETO conference, like the edited book and training project in progress, is an integrated collaboration to examine this fundamentally subjective phenomenon with an inclusive, multicultural eye. The International Youth Conference on the Ecology of War and Peace was established in 2004 for participants from various societies around the world fourteen to eighteen years of age to address negative stereotypes, prejudice, and the demonizing and dehumanizing of “The Other.” Working in cooperation with the Jane Goodall Institute, the theme of ecology has been integrated as a common link that resonates with all parties as they delve into personal interactions and, as a community, explore these relationship dynamics. CBI has also organized and cooperated on a number of international conferences in Russia, Spain, Germany, and the United States. Conferences serve multiple purposes, including offering a highly charged milieu for engaging with others on a personal and professional level to share perspectives, information, and experiences; receive skills training; network; and develop cooperative action plans for putting principles to work in the world. The conferences are forums for teachers and learners alike, and they invite teachers to become learners and learners to become teachers. Each year, important partnerships emerge from these conferences. Some directly involve CBI and its partners in organizing and operating programs, such as the proj-

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ects described later in this chapter. Others involve individuals and organizations that meet at the conferences and pursue their own collaborations, and where CBI may simply play an initial role in facilitating these connections for a time. This supporting match-maker role has come to be a valuable service that CBI offers. Integrated International Conference Series In 2004 CBI initiated an experiment in coordinating an integrated series of five international conferences in three countries that shared a focus on exploring and advancing the consciousness of peace, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Although each was independent with variations in partners, content, and goals, all events in this series were programmatically linked to build on each other for an energetic flow and larger impact. Following the success of this model, CBI has continued the process, inviting other conferences to join the network to maximize the energy and products of each event and promote an expanding, proactive network of social activists and healers for greater mutual benefit. Training Projects As direct products of these conferences, CBI has organized a number of professional training projects in trauma recovery, conﬂict transformation, and civil society for professional and paraprofessional groups intended to raise the skill level of local colleagues in underserved regions of conﬂict. Among recipient groups are local mental health and relief workers, peace activists, school and university faculty and staff, and civil society service providers. Catastrophic Trauma Recovery Project (CTR) As a result of working with colleagues from Balkan countries during the Balkan Wars in the late 1990s to assist them in accessing treatment services for trauma victims, it soon became evident that there was little available to adequately meet the massive need. It was also determined that direct services offered by outside providers were sorely limited and short term at best, and that a far more effective route lay in increasing the treatment capacity of local relief workers and counselors—those who were already involved in assisting the large populations of victims within their communities. In response, CBI developed the Catastrophic Trauma Recovery (CTR) training model, a comprehensive, integrated training/treatment model for working with large populations of catastrophic trauma victims that is simple, standardized, repeatable, time sensitive, easily taught, and culturally sensitive. The CTR model, which is included in a contributed chapter to the book Psychological Impact of War Trauma on Civilians, edited by Dr. Stanley Krippner, became the design for CBI’s trauma training efforts. In 1998 it established a humanitarian relief effort tailored to provide

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intensive train-the-trainer initiatives in catastrophic trauma recovery skills, provided by expert teams of mental health specialists to local professionals and relief workers in regions of conﬂict where services are underdeveloped and the society’s infrastructure have broken down. Since then, CBI has organized trauma trainings in cooperation with HARMONY Institute for Psychotherapy and Counseling in Russia, the EMDR-Humanitarian Assistance Program, and other professional training organizations serving communities in the Balkans, Middle East, Caucasus, and Russia. The relief effort is endorsed and supported by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) within the regions served. As part of the training structure, CTR trainings are also typically attached to the ICR conference and conducted immediately after. Current Training Projects under Development 1. Bait Al Hayat/House of Life: a project to establish a children’s trauma treatment center in Nablus, West Bank, Palestine, to assist children suffering from trauma as a result of war and violence. Currently, there are no such trauma treatment services available, particularly for children, in the Nablus region. 2. “Engaging The Other”: a training program growing out of the annual International Conference on “Engaging The Other,” intended to promote increased public awareness, understanding, and sensitivity to the dynamics of negative stereotyping, prejudice, and fear-based belief systems. It is geared to the lay public (schools, community centers, universities, etc.). Like the conference, the goal is to promote a wider dialogue on these dynamics within communities and to address local issues. 3. Capacity For Peace and Democracy—Palestine: a collaborative project with Palestinian universities in Gaza and the West Bank to establish a Center for Conﬂict Resolution and Human Rights that would support visiting professors and provide a curriculum in human services (psychology, social work, health science, education) and civil society (democratic studies, conﬂict resolution/mediation, government, political science, economics/business). The purpose is to help prepare future Palestine leaders and local professionals to be skilled in providing critical human services to the population, all to increase capacity for a viable, peaceful Palestinian nation. Another aspect is to create opportunities for NGOs and universities in Palestine and Israel to cooperate on issues that promote understanding, reconciliation, and forgiveness. Publications in Development “Engaging The Other”: an edited book project in conjunction with the international conference, “Engaging The Other.” The book will include contributions by authors representing a diversity of cultures and societies around the world, exploring the fundamentally subjective phenomenon of “The Other,” each through a unique cultural eye.

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“Engaging The Other”: a documentary ﬁlm project of in-depth interviews, presentation excerpts, and community experiences compiled from the ETO conferences. Journal of Conﬂict Transformation: a virtual, web-based journal compiling conference proceedings and articles addressing conﬂict transformation and healing. Professional Exchanges Early in CBI’s development, when restricted travel created greater barriers to personal encounter, a number of professional exchanges were operated to promote this invaluable contact, primarily between post-communist or Middle Eastern societies and the United States. As a result of easier access and the presence of a number of available conferences and programs, today travel is more related to direct participation in these planned activities rather than separate exchanges. Other Projects and Efforts Growing out of Conferences A number of collaborations, projects, and even organizations initiated by participants have grown out of CBI’s conferences over the years. A new project is underway to archive these various efforts to better track the conference products and to promote cooperative networking links between them.

THE POWER OF VISION Sharing a vision is seen as essential to the purpose of CBI, because vision instills us with both hope and power, and a fortitude beyond ourselves that guides and moves us to action, particularly action for a better world. At the same time, one of the central accomplishments of CBI that has come to be appreciated is providing itself as a concrete example of putting legs on vision, and providing the reality of individual, grassroots empowerment and initiative in creating positive change in the world around us. It is the kind of idea we all have the capacity to create and possess at some time and to some degree, and then bring into the world if we choose. The essential element is in taking the step of believing the possibility is real, and then the next step of acting as though it is real, until there is no difference. When vision is imbued with belief and presence in our day-to-day life, our actions serve to conﬁrm and root it in reality. CBI’s ﬁrst and lasting achievement, then, has come to be its own existence and presence as a creative change agent among a rapidly growing number of similarly creative agents in large and small examples around the globe that share a common characteristic: personal empowerment expressed through empowering others.

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ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Common Bond Institute Founder and/or Executive Director: Steve Olweean Mission/Description: Common Bond Institute (CBI) is a U.S.-based, nongovernmental organization 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 international conferences, professional training programs, relief efforts, and professional exchanges, and actively provides networking and coordination support to assist newly emerging human service and civil society organizations in developing countries that are regions of conﬂict. In its mission, cultivating the fundamental elements of a consciousness of peace and local capacity building are seen as natural, effective antidotes to small-group, radical extremism and large-group despair, as well as to the hardships and suffering of 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 CBI’s work. Common Bond Institute is grounded in the application of humanistic psychology’s principles in its commitment to capacity building at both the grassroots and social institutional level. It works to actively form strategic alliances and partnerships with organizations, groups, and individuals dedicated to nurturing global relationships while creating and promoting an authentic world culture of peace. Website: www.cbiworld.org Address: 12170 South Pine Ayr Drive Climax, MI 49034 USA Phone: +1.269.665.9393 Fax: +1.269.665.9393 E-mail: [email protected]

5

The Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership Alice K. Johnson Butterﬁeld, Abye Tasse, and Nathan Linsk

Our story is about the development of social work education in Ethiopia. It is about the power of our shared vision, leadership, and collaboration. It is about global networking and our efforts to capitalize on available and plentiful human resources from around the world and use them in an environment of scarce resources in Ethiopia. Our story is about the power of one person connecting with another to develop new programs to meet human needs, establish international partnerships in higher education, and bring about social change.

ONE PERSON CONNECTING WITH ANOTHER Long before any of us thought about working in the development of social work education in Ethiopia, the seed for our involvement began with the adoption of three children from Ethiopia by Richard and Kay McChesney of St. Louis, Missouri. When taking their son, Leul, to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church for services, Kay met Dr. Enagaw Mehari, a medical doctor, who at the time was a visiting professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Through the People2People organization, Dr. Mehari was organizing a delegation of medical experts in HIV/AIDS from universities around the United States to travel to Ethiopia. The purpose of the visit was to meet with university, government, and health care ofﬁcials in Ethiopia with the objective of identifying potential areas of collaboration in HIV/AIDS prevention and research between universities. In discussing the planned visit by medical faculty, Dr. McChesney asked a simple question: “What about the children—the orphan victims of HIV/AIDS?” Dr. Mehari responded quickly and invited Kay, a sociologist and family therapist, to join the delegation. Kay declined because of work, the newness of the adoption, and family responsibilities; she suggested that Alice Butterﬁeld would be someone to substitute in her place. Alice had worked as a social work faculty member in child welfare projects 57

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in Romania, and also had personal experience in international adoption. Kay had ﬁrst met Alice at a public health conference, and later, they worked together on a family homelessness project in St. Louis and became friends. Alice received an e-mail inviting her to go to Ethiopia for seventeen days in May 2001 as a member of a delegation led by former ambassador to Ethiopia, David H. Shinn (2001). A decision had to be made quickly. Dean Creasie Finney Hairston of the University of Illinois–Chicago approved her trip. Upon accepting the invitation, Alice clariﬁed that her participation with the People2People delegation would be to represent the Jane Addams School of Social Work, where she was a professor. From her perspective, Alice was particularly interested in the role of social work in Ethiopia. What was the need for social work? Did the profession exist? Searching the academic literature, she found articles from the 1960s with reference to social work in Ethiopia (Sedler, 1968a; 1986b; Stein, 1969). There was a School of Social Work at Haile Selassie I University, which offered a bachelor’s degree beginning in the late 1950s (Sedler, 1968c). During that time, the school was recognized in Ethiopia and throughout Africa as a center of excellence. Three young faculty were sent to the United States to obtain doctorates in social work as part of a plan to build the capacity of Ethiopian faculty. The next reference to social work in Ethiopia was in an article written by Katherine Kendall (1986), which noted the closing of the School of Social Work and its replacement by a degree in applied sociology: The social theory is heavily Marxist. . . . In addition to a course on Marxist thought and practice, students take courses on Marxist sociology and anthropology. . . . While there are no methodological courses in the social work sense, research and statistics are given considerable emphasis. . . . There is one course on the history of social welfare which is explored within the context of class struggle. Study visits have replaced ﬁeld work. (p. 18)

Now the facts were evident. When the Derge military regime came to power in 1974, the school was closed. By deﬁnition, social problems did not exist within a socialist state; it was the purpose of government to meet all human needs. Social work was bourgeois—and did not have a place in Ethiopia.1 “All reference to social work was discouraged on the grounds that it was reformist and represented a bourgeois machination to keep the working classes in a perpetual state of dependence” (Gebre-Selassie, 1999, p. 7). But who were the doctoral students who came to the United States to study social work? Would it be still possible to ﬁnd them? Searching the Internet gave no clue, so Alice turned to a network of colleagues who are members of the Association for Community Organization and Social Administration (ACOSA) (http://www.acosa.org). She sent out an e-mail that asked if anyone knew about social work education in Ethiopia or knew any social workers in Ethiopia. She got one reply—an e-mail from Dr. Rosemary Sarri, an emeritus faculty from the University of Michigan. Her former doctoral student, Seyoum Gebre-Selassie, had

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gotten his doctorate in sociology and social work in 1976, obtained a teaching position at the University of Wisconsin, and then went back to Ethiopia in 1979. Although the School of Social Work there had been closed, he had been a dean and also had served in university administration. She had lost contact with him over the years, but Rosemary was sure he was still in Ethiopia. Alice should contact Seyoum. Finding Professor Seyoum was not difﬁcult. It seemed that “everyone” she met in visits to the community or in meetings at Addis Ababa University knew him. Alice met Professor Seyoum Gebre-Selassie in May 2001. He conﬁrmed the 1960s accounts about social work in Ethiopia written in the International Social Work journal. He and his longtime friend and colleague, Professor Andargatchew Tesfaye, were two of the three students sent for doctoral study to the United States. With his country reeling from the takeover by the military regime, Seyoum made a decision to return. “I did not want to be asked by someone in the United States as to what I did about it when my country was in deep peril. . . . I was ridden with doubt whether I was right in deciding to come back. But, in hindsight, I knew I made the right decision” (Surafel, 2001). Back at their university, now named Addis Ababa University, the two professors were successful in “hiding” six courses in macro social work in the sociology and anthropology curriculum at Addis Ababa University. Some thirty years later in 2001, only this remnant of social work education remained. Professor Seyoum estimated that fewer than ﬁfty social workers with baccalaureate degrees from Haile Selassie I University were still practicing in Ethiopia. Many had left Ethiopia, and most of those who remained were nearing the end of their careers. Nonetheless, these senior social workers were leaders in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and had mentored many applied sociology graduates who had followed them in the ways of social work. Also, within the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology (SOSA), professors Seyoum, Andargatchew, and younger colleagues such as Tefari Abate, Ayalu Gebre, and Melese Getu had successfully placed the goal of developing a master’s degree in social work in the university’s ﬁve-year strategic plan. Later, this ofﬁcial statement in university documents became important in convincing an external funding agency to support a planning process for a graduate degree in social work. In just a few sentences over coffee at the Dessalgn Hotel, Professor Seyoum set the objectives for the next several years: We need to start the profession of social work in Ethiopia. We should start a School of Social Work—because that is the history here. Social work and law were the two strongest schools at Haile Selassie I University. But, ﬁrst, we’ll start with a master’s degree.

SOCIAL WORK EDUCATION IN ETHIOPIA PARTNERSHIP (PROJECT SWEEP) Together, Addis Ababa University and the University of Illinois–Chicago wrote a proposal for seed funds to Higher Education for Development (HED), the intermediary organization established in 1992 as the Association Liaison Ofﬁce for

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University Cooperation in Development (ALO). HED assists the nation’s six major higher education associations in partnering with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). HED has funded over 250 university-touniversity partnerships since its inception, from education, law, agriculture, and other disciplines. The proposal submitted by the Jane Addams College of Social Work and Addis Ababa University was the ﬁrst social work program to receive funding. The college received $99,000 to partner with Addis Ababa University to establish Ethiopia’s ﬁrst ever master’s degree in social work. A ﬁve-year Memorandum of Agreement was signed by the two universities to collaborate in teaching, research, and service. This small amount of seed funding and the higher education partnership it represented were essential in providing the funds and mechanism for the ﬁrst part of realizing our partnership’s dream of graduate social work education in Ethiopia. Beginning in 2002, a planning committee from Addis Ababa University (AAU) and the University of Illinois–Chicago (UIC) met several times in each country. We named our partnership the Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership (Project SWEEP). We worked together using a strategic planning approach with several phases, including an in-country needs assessment followed by curriculum development, faculty exchange, and program planning. We set up an advisory committee in Ethiopia, which consisted of social workers with BSW degrees from the previous program in social work and some with later degrees in applied sociology from the program that had replaced social work. A second advisory committee of local social work leaders in Chicago, including representatives from the Ethiopia Community Association, provided guidance, responded to requests for material goods, and assisted in exchanges of Ethiopian faculty to Chicago (for a complete report, see Johnson Butterﬁeld & Linsk, 2005).

LEADERSHIP AT ADDIS ABABA UNIVERSITY The planning and curriculum development process that began through Project SWEEP was at the grassroots level. As our small planning committee of UIC and AAU faculty worked to develop the MSW program, the AAU members of the team, particularly Professor Seyoum Gebre-Selassie, brought the project to the attention of the new president of Addis Ababa University, Professor Andreas Eshete, UNESCO Chair for Human Rights and Democracy. President Andreas put his power behind social work education. He valued the future degree and its potential role as part of the country’s effort to reduce poverty through social and economic development. By the second year of our planning process in 2003, decision makers at the highest level of university administration had decided that social work would be started at Addis Ababa University as an independent school, not as a department-based program. In part, this decision revolved around the difﬁculty of “grafting” a graduate degree in social work into the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology (SOSA). After professors Seyoum and Andargatchew retired, no SOSA faculty had been trained in social work. The brain

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drain also had had its effect: SOSA had sent three young staff to the United States and Canada to study social work, but none had returned. In addition, the department was already accepting many students, and to add a third discipline at the graduate level without an undergraduate degree in place would be difﬁcult. With this change of auspices, the work of the Project SWEEP partnership, and its plan for graduate social work education, gained the full support of AAU ofﬁcials. At this time, the power shifted from a grassroots effort, driven by a small group of people and a planning grant, to ownership of the initiative by Addis Ababa University. From this point onward, the involvement of President Andreas was a major reason why Project SWEEP was successful. He championed the development of social work education, noting its relevance to afﬁrmative action; the rights of women and children, including areas that intersect law and social work; and the need for counseling for students in their transition to urban, college life. President Andreas has continued to afﬁrm the importance of social work as a profession, including its expansion to the baccalaureate and doctoral levels at Addis Ababa University, and in the future, its replication in regional colleges and emerging universities in Ethiopia. In assessing the importance of leadership at Addis Ababa University, we doubt that starting a new School of Social Work from scratch would have become reality if it were not for the synergistic involvement of Dr. Abye Tasse, former dean of the Institut du Développement Social (IDS) in France, and an international leader of social work education. Abye’s migration back to his native country is quite remarkable. He ﬂed Ethiopia at sixteen when the Derge military regime came to power. He was in refugee camps in Sudan for two years, then migrated to Egypt and ﬁnally to France, where he got a scholarship to study political science. He was in need of a job to help support himself, and so he began his career in social work as a youth worker in a poor community. He eventually went on to obtain his master’s degree and doctorate, and served at all levels of the university—from lecturer to dean of one of the top three schools in France. Returning to Ethiopia for the ﬁrst time in thirty-three years, Abye visited Addis Ababa University, initially just to see what was happening in higher education. He met President Andreas, and soon thereafter, became involved bringing about university reforms. In 2004 Abye took what was to be a two-year sabbatical. President Andreas appointed Abye as dean of social work and associate vice president for International Affairs. Abye brought leadership in international social work to Ethiopia. In October 2004, he was elected president of the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW). Prior to that, he chaired the Katherine Kendall Award, given to an international social work educator by IASSW and the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW). Thus, in just two years—from planning to the start of a graduate degree—Ethiopia went from a country without an educational program in social work to a country with a School of Social Work led by a dean who was the president of the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW). Dr. Abye brought reality to the vision of social work education in Ethiopia. His leadership style espoused a “can do” attitude. In practical terms, this meant

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starting the new school without anything—without a faculty, computers, ofﬁce space, budget, or even approval for the degree through Addis Ababa University processes. Abye went to work immediately. Over a six-month period in early 2004, the curriculum was approved by the Graduate Council at AAU. Admissions criteria were developed, and exams were given and graded by the UIC-AAU faculty team. Forty students were admitted. With the leadership of President Andreas Eshete’ and Dean Abye Tasse, the school had secured computers, ofﬁce equipment, and classroom and library space for the School of Social Work in a new building on the university’s main campus by the start of classes in September 2004. However, since university budgets must be approved more than a year in advance, the school opened without budgeted funds for the ﬁrst year of operation. How did Addis Ababa University move so quickly to start a new School of Social Work in a resource-poor environment without faculty lines or budgets in place? As noted previously, the commitment of leaders at the top administrative level of Addis Ababa University was principally important. Secondly, a small part of this answer is that Project SWEEP grant funds were extended for an additional year. UIC took no overhead or administrative costs for managing Project SWEEP, so all the $99,000 grant was used for program development and implementation. Grant funds were conserved throughout the two-year planning process by not paying salaries for the time team members worked on Project SWEEP, and by providing only hotel and travel costs, plus $12 per day per diem for UIC faculty. Initial activities included community visits; a needs assessment of graduating seniors, agency staff, and possible employers; as well as assistance in developing a ﬁeld education manual by Faith Bonecutter, the director of ﬁeld education at the Jane Addams College. In 2004 HED allowed the remaining funds to be used for travel for UIC professors Nathan Linsk, Donna Petras, and Alice Johnson Butterﬁeld to teach intensive courses in the ﬁrst year of offering the MSW degree at AAU. AAU dean Abye Tasse and associate dean Melese Getu taught courses above their regular workload in the new MSW program. Resident international faculty included Dr. James Rollin, an assistant professor at UIC, who was recruited by Teachers for Africa and joined the AAU faculty in 2004, followed by Dr. Deborah Zinn, in 2008. AAU hired two additional faculty, Dr. Sandhya Joshi from India in 2004 and Dr. Charlla Allen from Cleveland, Ohio, in 2006, to staff the new program.

LACK OF CLARITY AND CHANGES IN HIGHER EDUCATION Two other factors were also essential in advancing the rapid development of social work education in Ethiopia: a lack of clarity about what social work was in the Ethiopian context and how it should be developed, and the rapidly changing context of higher education in Ethiopia. These factors intertwined to create an advantageous setting for the immediate development of social work education. First, the environment that we began working in certainly could be described as one that lacked clarity about social work education and how it

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should be developed. This confusion led to an open situation that allowed for innovation, often bypassing the formal system of organizational change, based on the vision of restarting social work education in Ethiopia. This lack of clarity combined with the felt need of something else. We felt a call for this new “thing” but nobody knew what it was really was or what it was supposed to be. Then, the idea clicked. As we started to work with the idea of social work, we realized that our “new idea” was reminiscent of the past history of social work education in Ethiopia. It drew on the reputation and accomplishments of the previous graduates of social work and applied sociology who served the country for many years in high positions of authority. The idea also developed as a response to the NGO reference to social work—calling it “social work” as what they were doing—but not really knowing social work. In this vacuum and confusion, all were ready to ﬁnd ways to help. (Tasse, Johnson Butterﬁeld, & Linsk, 2007, p. 8)

Second, this lack of clarity existed within a larger policy environment of change rapidly taking place in higher education. Historically, Ethiopia’s 1 percent participation rate in higher education was one of the lowest in the world. Beginning in the 1990s, higher education became a national priority through strategic planning, national conferences, and new initiatives. “In addition to its traditional role of educating, creating knowledge and developing the mind, it is increasingly asked to train, be student-centered, practice-oriented, society-focused, and to teach professions that require skills and hands-on training” (Yizengaw, 2003, p. 7). The University Capacity Building Program (UCBP), a joint venture of the Ministry of Capacity Building and the Ministry of Education, began constructing thirteen new/extended universities throughout Ethiopia. By 2002, the larger environment of the university system in Ethiopia was rapidly expanding from its base of six universities and ﬁve colleges/institutes to nineteen public universities. When completed in 2009, the new universities will enroll more than 121,000 new students. In addition, a Higher Education Proclamation approved by the Ethiopian parliament initiated new reforms, including increased autonomy for institutions of higher education, a priority for developing new degree programs, and expanding graduate education to increase the number of Ethiopian academics (UCBP, 2008). The government’s priority of higher education positively inﬂuenced our ability to start two new graduate degrees—the master’s in social work (MSW) in 2004 and a PhD in social work and social development in 2006—within the larger university system. Innovation and creativity were valued over bureaucracy and red tape. During planning and the start-up of the new graduate degree, our challenge was to ﬁgure out how to offer the classes or design the exam, or develop admissions criteria, or prepare a new student orientation—all the tasks associated with new program development and educational administration—and then do it. Much leeway was allowed for the AAU-UIC team to design new and innovative ways of delivering graduate education. When university approvals were required—such as in senate approval for the curriculum, or for the admissions criteria and processes—the university administration was prompt, professional,

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and attentive to urgent deadlines. All in all, our experience within the university environment was one of innovation and development. In this environment, the UIC-AAU partnership served as a catalyst that inﬂuenced the larger university by example through new ways of doing things related to graduate education. In the next section, we discuss some of the innovations that were part and parcel of the new MSW degree that were different ways of doing things from the traditional educational processes at Addis Ababa University.

THE PARADOX OF THE POOR AND EDUCATIONAL INNOVATIONS As noted above, the establishment of the new Graduate School of Social Work (GSSW) ﬁt well within the overall policy goals of higher education in Ethiopia. In addition to this alignment with the context of higher education is what we call the paradox of the poor: “the poor who have nothing, yet we have everything” (Tasse, 2007, p. 1). What does “the paradox of the poor” mean? We learned a lot about what this meant from watching Professor Seyoum at work. On short notice, he could make a few phone calls and pull key players together for an important meeting “before the Jane Addams group left town.” It was he who identiﬁed many members of the advisory group, and all those he invited got involved and stayed involved over the years. His network was expansive and extensive. As we met people in Ethiopia and sought to introduce ourselves, we could not count the number of times that just the mention of Seyoum Gebre-Selassie’s name elicited the following response: “He is my professor.” He brought the UIC team into his network of colleagues—a network that he built in a resource-poor environment through his inspiration, work, and service. It was Professor Seyoum who worked diligently behind the scenes at AAU as the champion of social work education. Our core UIC-AAU team has often reﬂected on the fact that Addis Ababa University’s decision to start the social work program as an independent school was a blessing in disguise. We did not have to navigate our way through the processes of integrating a new program into a department’s existing policies and procedures. Innovation could occur more rapidly because there was no need to deal with the typical turf issues and professional dispositions that make up academia in any part of the world. The challenge was to ﬁgure out what we needed and strategize how to obtain it. Since it would be impossible to start a new graduate program without teaching faculty, this was our partnership’s ﬁrst strategic concern. Thus without “anything,” we turned to what we had—a network of professional colleagues and organizations around the world that might have interest in contributing to the development of social work education in Ethiopia. We imagined mobilizing a diverse network of social work faculty from around the world to contribute their time and expertise to the school. Dean Abye sent an e-mail invitation letter to our colleagues in our UIC and IASSW networks (see Figure 5.1). In a few candid sentences, this was the dean’s offer: “Come to Ethiopia. Pay your own way. Give a seminar. Teach. Live in my guest house and share my food.” Over

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Rouen/Addis Ababa March 2004 Dear colleagues and friends, First of all, I would like to thank you all personally and on behalf of Addis Ababa University, for the spontaneous and generous help you offered to my request of participation in seminars that my colleagues of Addis Ababa University and myself, intend to organise at the new Graduate School of Social Work, which will start in September 2004. I know that all of you have many activities and large engagements in different areas, and I appreciate your commitment to contribute and enrich our seminars with your experience. As I have mentioned with each of you in our previous exchanges, the Addis Ababa University has decided to open a new School of Social Work; and I have been nominated to be the first Dean of this School. The mobilisation of the entire university administration to give a high profile for this new school is, as I can see it, tremendous. This project elaborated by Addis Ababa University in co-operation with Jane Addams College of the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the first graduate school of social work ever in Ethiopia. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the dedication of the faculty of Addis Ababa University, (particularly Seyoum Gebre-Selassie, Andargatchew Tesfaye, and Melese Getu) and of the University of Illinois at Chicago (especially Alice K. Johnson and Nathan L. Linsk) for their tireless engagement in this venture. It is in this context that we wish to organise several seminars. The main objective of the seminars (12 seminars a year of a maximum of a week) is to give a wide opportunity for our graduate students, faculty members and partners from multiples agencies (public and private) a high level of input by distinguished social work educators and specialists on issues related to social work education from around the world. Each seminar organised under this program will be in relation to the courses that we are going to teach in this new school. Based on an interactive method of teaching, the seminars will provide a unique opportunity for our students and faculty members to elaborate knowledge on social work education in the country. Beyond the direct interest to build a school with a high standing, this will also help, I am sure, to form deep relations among social work educators around the world with colleagues from Ethiopia teaching in this new school, will also develop institutional relations between the Addis Ababa University and your institutions. I know your dedication for international solidarity in the field of Social Work Education and beyond, and I thank you again for agreeing to contribute to the development of a new school of Social Work in Africa and to build a new and unique kind of partnership. Best wishes, Abye Tasse P.S. As I have mentioned to you, there is no problem on accommodation for your venue in Addis. If you need a letter of support from the Addis Ababa University in order to find funding for your travel, please feel free to contact me.

Figure 5.1 Letter Inviting Colleagues to Give Seminars and Secure Their Own Funding

sixty people from around the world answered the invitation. Many have come to Ethiopia at their own expense—exactly as they were invited—and provided a workshop or taught a course at no charge. International seminars were integrated with regular courses, and students were expected to attend. Table 5.1 shows the international faculty who went to Ethiopia to share their expertise. We also used our network to ﬁll the gaps in teaching that could not be covered by faculty in Ethiopia. One of the major innovations was the use of a block teaching model for offering MSW and PhD courses at Addis Ababa University. Courses

Table 5.1 International Seminars International Trainer

Title of Seminar

Linked with MSW Course

Dorothy Faller, MSW, Faller International Training LLC, Cleveland, Ohio, USA. Prof. Ralph Brody, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA. Prof. Ariella Fridman and Dr. Miriam Golan, University of Tel-Aviv, Israel. Prof. Lena Dominelli, Past President of the International Association of School of Social work, Director, Center for International Social and Community Development, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. Prof. Shimon Peres, Tel-Aviv University, Israel.

Organizational Management, September 27–Oct 5, 2004. Seminar in Management, October 18–22, 2004. Seminar on Psychology of Women and Gender, December 6–10, 2004. Seminar on Social Policy & Ethics, January 10–14, 2005.

SSWA 601 Integrated Practice Methods I.

Asst. Prof. Gurid Aga Askeland, Diakonhjemment College, Norway. Senior Lecturer Greta Bradley, The University of Hull School of Nursing, Social Work and Applied Health Studies, England. Professor of International Social Work Karen Lyons, Department of Applied Social Sciences, London Metropolitan University. Dr. Rena Feigin, Bob Shapell School of Social Work, Tel Aviv University, Israel. Prof. Nancy L. Green, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), France. Prof. Richard Kordesh, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, University of Illinois–Chicago.

Seminar on Evaluation Research, May 16–20, 2005. Seminar on Reﬂexive Research Methods, May 9–13, 2005. Seminar on Reﬂexive Research Methods, May 9–13, 2005.

SSWA 621 Management & Leadership. SSWA 611 Social Problems & Community Health. SSWA 631 Social Policy & Ethics.

SSWA 642 Research Methods. SSWA 642 Research Methods. SSWA 642 Research Methods.

Lectures on Globalization, Regionalism, and Social Work; Migration and Social Work; Child Care in an International Context—October 2005. Seminar on Breaking Through: Family Coping with Illness and Disability: An Integrative Treatment Concept. February 3, 2006. Seminar on Comparative Migration History, SSWA-672 Social Mobilization: Food February 2006. Security & Refugee Resettlement. Seminar on Family-Based and Asset-Based Approaches to Community Development, Dec. 17–21, 2007.

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typically feature an intensive, adult-learning block approach, which allows students to focus on the content of one course for one month at a time, four days a week. The format allows faculty from outside of Ethiopia to teach a complete course over a three- to-four-week period. This has been an important innovation because support from international faculty is necessary until the capacity of Ethiopian faculty is built. Overall, the use of international faculty also led to innovations in teaching pedagogy through the use of interactive teaching methods in the classroom. Methods include working in groups, role plays, simulations, community projects, group exercises, guest speakers, and so on. These pedagogical methods are different from the usual didactic lecture and exam format typical of teaching at AAU (see, for example, Askeland & Bradley, 2007). With the start of the PhD in social work and social development in 2006, we expanded our network to include expert social work faculty from other universities in the United States. Those who taught courses at the School of Social Work at AAU include Robert Miller, University of Albany, Qualitative Methods; Valerie Chang, Indiana University, Teaching and Pedagogy in Social Work; Margaret Adamek, Indiana University, Writing for Publication; Richard Kordesh, University of Illinois–Chicago, Program Evaluation and Policy Analysis; Rosemary Sarri, University of Michigan, Advanced Assessment for Action Research; Larry Kreuger, University of Missouri, Quantitative Methods; Klaus Serr, Australian Catholic University, Community Practice & Capacity Building; Donna Petras, Practice with Children & Families; Nathan Linsk, University of Illinois–Chicago, Social Problems and Community Health, Advanced Counseling Skills, and Meta Evaluation & Dissemination; and Alice Johnson Butterﬁeld, University of Illinois–Chicago, Integrated Practice I: Groups and Communities, Action Research & Models of Social Change and Knowledge Building in Social Work and Social Development. Some colleagues on the list above were granted release time by their deans for teaching in Ethiopia. Some sandwiched teaching courses in Ethiopia between teaching semesters in the U.S. system, or used their summer vacation for teaching. Others were retired from formal academic positions and had more ﬂexibility to teach during regular semesters in Ethiopia. Two from UIC ﬁelded their sabbatical research in Ethiopia. Nathan was awarded a Fulbright African AIDS Research Program Award in 2006–7, and Alice carried out research on eight HED-funded higher education partnerships in Ethiopia during her sabbatical in 2007–8. In fact, the development of research, especially action research, has been a hallmark of the program. Linsk was able to use the Fulbright award to conduct a study of the initial scale-up of HIV/AIDS antiretroviral drugs made possible by funding from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the Global Fund for Tuberculosis, Malaria and HIV. Although funds were coming quickly, it remained unknown whether people with HIV could use the treatments and adhere to care regimens. The study, made possible through a team of MSW students and volunteers, demonstrated that rates of adherence were high, but that the cultural context of adherence required redeﬁnition to improve antiretroviral treatment (Linsk, Gosha, Getu, Aklilu, & Prabhughate, 2007). In addition, the

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Figure 5.2 Field visit to rural Ethiopia. Courtesy of Alice K. Johnson Butterﬁeld.

thesis requirement of the MSW provided a range of research products in diverse areas including HIV/AIDS, adolescent issues, homelessness, social networks, divorce consequences, water use, and a range of community development approaches, to name a few. Butterﬁeld’s continuing research on single women and their needs, strengths-based approaches, and university partnerships is providing vital data on community needs and ways to address them. The PhD program (see below) augments research productivity, creating a whole ﬁeld of social work research that did not exist previously. Other educational innovations also occurred. The School of Social Work was the ﬁrst to include ﬁeld education (internships) as part of its academic program. A Memorandum of Agreement was signed by AAU and the Christian Relief & Development Association (CRDA), a nonsectarian umbrella organization of over 200 NGOs. CRDA played an active role in developing ﬁeld placements for AAU students. Three social work students were also placed on the standing committees of Parliament: Committee on Social Affairs, Committee on Finance and Community Development, and the Committee on Rural Development. The placements were so successful that the idea has now expanded to include other schools and colleges of AAU, such as economics and gender studies, with twentysix interns placed in 2007. Future plans include developing a part-time program speciﬁcally for members of Parliament. Sixty-seven Parliament ofﬁcials have reg-

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istered to take the exam for admission to the master’s in social work program. Thirty Parliament members representing all political parties will be accepted. The School of Social Work requires a different admissions process than is usual at AAU. It includes a personal statement and a résumé in addition to the usual information about the applicant; three letters of reference (a form for writing a short paragraph about the applicant and signing it); sponsorship through government, NGOs, or self; bank statement; GPA; and exam. The process of admission includes a two-part point system: (1) pre-screening using the personal statement and other applicant information, and (2) blind review of the exams by the AAU-UIC faculty team. Efforts are made to assure that disadvantaged groups are represented among students in the MSW program, including women, those working in public welfare, those working in NGOs in rural areas, persons with disabilities, and persons with an interest in preparing for roles as social work faculty in Ethiopia. Admission requirements have been broadened to include the BA degree in social and/or health sciences or other disciplines, with weight given to work experience in NGOs or public welfare organizations. Another new admissions policy was a three-day student orientation and assessment program, which we called the Privileged Method of Learning. Sessions included the privileged process of learning, student and faculty expectations, methods of personal organization, and preferred modes of assessment for student learning. Students spend the weekend preparing an individual assessment, and then meet with their faculty advisor to discuss their learning plan. Overall, this intensive orientation has been valuable in dialoguing with students, establishing a culture of learning and mutual support, and sharing the development of the school, our vision of social work, and the future of the profession in Ethiopia. These sessions were also designed to orient students to the “different ways of doing things at the School of Social Work” when compared, perhaps, to the traditional type of educational experiences with which they were familiar. Efforts were also made to take the university to the community and bring the community into the university. Field trips took students and faculty to rural communities, and ordinary people who had established local NGOs and their own microenterprise associations were invited to come to the classroom to share their expertise. For example, women from the Kechene Potters Association participated in a community assessment project in 2005; they presented their pottery products and the work of their association to students and professors. The beneﬁts of this type of collaboration were mutual. In the case of the Kechene Potters, their engagement with the university resulted in a thesis project (Yeneabat, 2006), which in turn brought the potters’ situation to the attention of a businessman from Cleveland, Ohio, who was participating in the Ethiopian Workforce Entrepreneurship Training Program. In 2007 he donated $5,000 to purchase grinding and clay mixing machines that will vastly improve the number and quality of pots the women can produce. In just two years, eighty students with MSW degrees have graduated from AAU, with seventy students currently enrolled in the two-year, full-time program.

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Graduates are highly sought by government, international NGOs, and local NGOs. Some graduates are now working with embassies and international aid organizations throughout Ethiopia. In recognition of the work of the UIC-AAU partnership, Addis Ababa University’s School of Social Work and UIC’s Jane Addams College of Social Work received the Partners in International Education Award from the Global Commission on Social Work Education, Council on Social Work Education in 2006. In 2007 the Council of International Programs USA received the same award for their more than ﬁfty years of international training and exchange programs, including their collaborative role with Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia.

A DOCTORAL PROGRAM IN SOCIAL WORK AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT In retrospect, much of the work of the partnership has rested on the good will and voluntary service of many people from around the world. This type of project is sustainable as long as the vision of social work education holds, and people are able to stay involved. From the ﬁrst planning meeting through Project SWEEP, the issue of sustainability was discussed. The words of Professor Seyoum still ring true: “Sustainability is built on the capacity of the faculty.” We knew from then on that ultimately there must be a doctoral program in place to prepare faculty for positions at Addis Ababa University and other universities in Ethiopia that may develop social work programs. This idea became our vision of sustainability. In 2006 Addis Ababa University decided to start a doctoral program in social work and social development. David Moxley, formerly of Wayne State University and now on the faculty of the University of Oklahoma, Alice, Abye, and Melese collaborated on a grant proposal to the Ministry of Education for funds to start the PhD program. Addis Ababa University was successful in obtaining US$141,000 for the new doctoral program from the Development Innovation Fund of the Ministry of Education, through funds from the World Bank. In 2006 eight of the ﬁrst MSW graduates were admitted to doctoral study. In 2007 seven additional students were admitted, including three with MA degrees in ﬁelds other than social work. These doctoral students represent faculties at Awassa University, Bahir Dar University, and Addis Ababa University’s Department of Psychology. They plan to return to their home universities upon completion of their degrees. In this way, the doctoral program is attempting to build faculty capacity in social work and related ﬁelds at other public universities in Ethiopia. Typically, doctoral students are appointed as lecturers, so their roles will include coordinating ﬁeld education, advising students, serving as assistant deans, participating in strategic planning, and co-teaching courses with international faculty. The curriculum plan for the PhD program combines ideas brought by the Ethiopian and international faculty who were involved in its development. According to Johnson Butterﬁeld (2007, p. 6),

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A challenge faced by the international team which developed the doctoral curriculum was combining their various views about what doctoral education should entail. The two Ethiopian members of our team had received doctorates in France and England; another professor obtained her doctorate in India; I had obtained mine in the United States. The British experience leaned toward individual work with a faculty chairperson and extensive individualized readings; the French experience included lively “discussion and debate” seminars with the great minds of the university; the program in India focused on applied research. My experience at Washington University in St. Louis involved interdisciplinary courses and research practicum. As we sought to create a plan for doctoral education in Ethiopia, each of us brought our biases to the table. . . . We also knew that the new doctoral program had to address the difﬁcult problems of Ethiopia and the urgent need for faculty. . . . we sought a way to streamline the doctoral educational process without compromising quality. Our work together became synergistic.

The doctoral program at Addis Ababa University is a year-round program. Students complete all required courses over the ﬁrst calendar year, so they are eligible to teach in the second and third years of study. A qualifying assessment based on the portfolio approach and an oral presentation to a faculty committee replaces the typical written exam. The dissertation can follow a traditional monograph format, or a set of three published articles that document the student’s research and scholarship on a social issue of local, regional, or national importance. AAU faculty and its international team may design team-based or action-research projects that may include undergraduate and master’s degree students who are participating directly in research. Based on faculty expertise and existing national priorities within Ethiopia, the doctoral program outlines four potential project areas: •

•

•

•

Capacity Building: augmenting the capacity of local communities to reduce poverty through comprehensive community development involving literacy, microenterprise, youth development, housing, rural development, and soil and water conservation, and using best practices from social development and participatory approaches Child Welfare: fostering improvements in child welfare, including orphan care, international and in-country adoption, nonformal education, gender equity, the reduction of harmful traditional practices, juvenile justice, divorce, and child custody Health: abating the transmission of HIV and addressing other public health issues (e.g., malaria, TB, blindness, polio, birth defects, water-born diarrhea diseases, malnourishment) by using best practices in outreach, prevention, treatment, and medication adherence (especially for antiretroviral therapies), community collaboration, and awareness building Refugees and Migration: improving humanitarian responses to displacement, migration, and refugee resettlement; conﬂict resolution; decreasing stigma and marginalization among vulnerable groups, including persons with disabilities, women, homeless persons; and so on.

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SOCIAL WORK AS A COMPONENT OF CHANGE From the beginning planning phase of Project SWEEP, the general situation of poverty in Ethiopia resulted in a very quick acknowledgement that social work was not a solution in and of itself. The needs of the country of Ethiopia are very great. As one of the poorest countries in the world, an estimated 80 percent of its 70 million people live on less than $2.00 a day. Most of Ethiopia’s people are farmers in a country where droughts and famine recur. The literacy rate for adults over age seventeen is approximately 42 percent. Malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and other diseases contribute to a life expectancy at birth of about forty-eight years. Approximately 1.3 million persons (3.5 percent of the population) are living with HIV/AIDS. An estimated 870,000 children have been orphaned by the virus (UNAIDS, 2008), and the total number of children orphaned because of all causes is 4,800,000 (UNICEF, 2005). These problems require interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and multifaceted approaches and solutions. Our vision was that social work alone was not sufﬁcient. Rather, social work should be a component of change—a catalyst for mobilizing other systems to respond to Ethiopia’s wide-ranging needs in community development, child welfare, health, food security, and so on. Our efforts to make social work a catalyst for change include a variety of collaborative efforts with other groups and organizations working in Ethiopia. Our collaboration

Figure 5.3 Primary-school children in Ethiopia. Courtesy of Richard Kordesh.

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takes varied forms. In simple terms, what makes our partnership work is an ongoing effort to communicate and build synergy among and between various projects and activities taking place in Ethiopia. The next section discusses social work as a component of social change in Ethiopia through collaboration with other organizations.

COLLABORATION WITH OTHER ORGANIZATIONS Our efforts at making social work a catalyst for change often took the form of collaboration with other groups and organizations with similar interests or work in Ethiopia. These efforts were not preplanned or strategically decided. They occurred through the opportunities and synergies that were created as a result of the overall process of bring people representing organizations from around the world to contribute to the development of social work education in Ethiopia. In addition, as we drew on our network, and as that network expanded, there were new opportunities for collaboration and partnerships. Without staff to keep all of these efforts organized, the connections between various people and projects were sometimes open and very visible, and at other times, not everyone was informed of the connections and opportunities that various members of our core group of UIC-AAU faculty were pursuing or developing. However, through e-mail, phone calls, and face-to-face meetings at international conferences, we tried to keep everyone informed. Collaboration is subject to the availability of at least some resources. UIC’s main resource was faculty with a continuing interest in building the social work and educational capacity of Ethiopian institutions. So, one of the major foci of the UIC faculty involvement has been the identiﬁcation of other organizations with in-kind resources to help build the capacity of the Ethiopian institutions. All of the collaborative relationships described below share a similar goal, which is to help build the capacity of Ethiopian institutions. The list below brieﬂy summarizes how various organizations collaborated over the six-year period between 2002 and 2008. Additional information is available on the SWEEP website at http://www.aboutsweep.org. •

•

Books For Africa collects, sorts, ships and distributes books to Africa. Books for Africa shipped forty-two boxes of books to Addis Ababa University in 2007. In February 2008, a forty-foot container (approximately 35,000 books) was shipped to Ethiopia for our partnership work with Addis Ababa University, Bahir Dar University, Gedam Sefer, schools, and other projects (http://www. booksforafrica.org). Council of International Programs USA (CIPUSA) is a nonproﬁt international exchange organization that brings well-qualiﬁed professionals to the United States for practical training experiences. CIPUSA hosted Ethiopian faculty that came to the United States through Project SWEEP, and received two grants from the U.S. Department of State for starting the Community Work

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•

•

•

•

•

•

•

The New Humanitarians

and Life Center at AAU, and the Ethiopian Workforce Entrepreneurship and Training Program (http://www.cipusa.org). Christian Relief and Development Association (CRDA) is a nonpartisan organization of more than 200 indigenous and international NGOs and faith-based agencies operating in Ethiopia. CRDA provides technical support, training, information, and capacity building support to NGOs. CRDA has played a major role in the ﬁeld placement of social work students (http://www.crdaethiopia.org). Community Work & Life Center (CWLC) at Addis Ababa University provides career development and counseling for students at AAU. This grant expanded the SWEEP partnership to involve the Career Center at Cleveland State University, a comprehensive career development center that provides educational and career development opportunities in collaboration with university and community partners (http://www.aau.edu.et/communityworks/index/home.htm). Ethiopian Workforce Entrepreneurship and Training Program. Based on the success of the Community Work and Life Center, CIPUSA received U.S. State Department funds for entrepreneurship training with the Ethiopian Employers Federation (EEF). This project was linked with the CWLC at AAU. Two interns from the School of Social Work worked on the project, and many social work students participated in the week-long training. EEF signed a Memorandum of Agreement with AAU to provide linkages for student internships with the business community (http://www.cipusa.org). Ethiopian North American Health Professionals Association (ENAHPA) is a nonproﬁt organization established in 1999 by Ethiopian-born professionals now living and working in the United States and Canada. In 2005 ENAPHA shipped about 3,000 books and journal sets to Addis Ababa University for the School of Social Work (http://www.enahpa.org). Higher Education for Development (HED) promotes the involvement of U.S. higher education in global development. In 2007 HED provided funds to support a doctoral research assistant for research on eight higher education partnerships in Ethiopia (http://www.hedprogram.org). Teachers for Africa Program of the International Foundation for Education and Self Help (IFESH) is a nongovernmental, nonproﬁt, charitable organization that permits teachers, school administrators, and professors from the United States to spend an academic year in Africa to improve the educational systems. IFESH’s Teachers for Africa (TFA) program has provided faculty for the School of Social Work at Addis Ababa University for four years (http://www.ifesh.org). Linking Lives. Anna Hovde, MSW, a social worker who participated with Alice in the original visit to Ethiopia, was integrally involved in developing SWEEP and guest lecturing in the MSW program. She has established an NGO that focuses on mental health and substance abuse issues at two hospitals and one community site in Addis Ababa, and has been a catalyst for the newly established Alcoholics Anonymous group.

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NEXT STEPS AND DIRECTIONS Our attempts to link the development of social work education in Ethiopia with the work of other organizations or projects in Ethiopia have built the capacity of our loose network to a new level. We call this level the evolution of the UIC-AAU partnership to other endeavors. This phase of the UIC-AAU partnership is just beginning. It builds, however, on the same basic idea that social work should be a catalyst for change—and one among many other disciplines and players that are needed to bring about such change. Thus, this second area related to making social work a catalyst for change includes new projects that build from the original partnership base, but extend to new areas or partners. This next section provides a brief overview of two emerging outreach projects: the development of an international university-community partnership with the Gedam Sefer community in Ethiopia and a tri-partnership linking Addis Ababa University, the University of Illinois–Chicago, and the Institute of Social Work in Tanzania. Looking to the future, we have also reconceptualized the meaning of the Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership. Evolution of the UIC-AAU Partnership to Other Endeavors Gedam Sefer is an urban slum area of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In 2004 social work students at AAU conducted a community assessment in Gedam Sefer. A research project in the summer of 2005 assessed the skills and capacities of a random sample of 100 female-headed households living in slum housing (Johnson Butterﬁeld & Kebede, 2007), followed by thesis research on social networks and livelihoods (Gessese, 2006; Kebede, 2006). In 2007 PhD students at AAU continued the engagement with the Gedam Sefer community through action-research miniprojects. Thus, the work with Gedam Sefer that ﬁrst started as a class assignment, evolved to form the basis for an international university-community partnership with the community (see Figure 5.4). Improving child and family outcomes is interwoven into the university-community partnership in Gedam Sefer and its intervention strategy in both process and outcomes. The ultimate goal of the new partnership with the community is to improve the lives of women and children, particularly those subject to abuse and sexual exploitation. To do this, the university-community partnership brings together the people of the Gedam Sefer community with AAU’s School of Social Work, UIC’s Jane Addams College of Social Work, and the Love for Children Organization in Ethiopia. Our partnership promotes and implements a strategy known as AssetBased Community Development (ABCD) (c.f., Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993). This strategy does not bring predeﬁned projects to the community for their acceptance and participation. Rather, we are working with residents to (1) understand, document, and organize the community’s inherent strengths and capabilities; (2) prioritize issues, develop methods of planning, and organize “the community’s own projects”; and (3) implement these projects and evaluate results using participatory, action-research methods. Thus, the university-community partnership is

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This project establishes a new university-community partnership between the Gedam Sefer community, Addis Ababa University School of Social Work, the University of Illinois at Chicago—USA, and Love for Children Organization. It builds on action research projects that AAU students and faculty have undertaken in cooperation with leaders and residents in the Gedam Sefer community. It grows from innovative efforts already underway in Gedam Sefer that show great potential for strengthening the community. Through a partnership of residents, leaders, graduate students and faculty, this initiative will empower the community to set goals for its improvement and create its own projects to improve the lives of children, youth, and families. Goals 1) To organize a stable, diverse core group of community leaders. This group will include local government leaders, men and women who have been active in solving community problems, youth who wish to become productive participants in improving the community, school leaders, business leaders, and others. 2) To build the community’s capacity to develop and promote sound community revitalization plans in partnership with local government. 3) To document and communicate the community’s many assets. 4) To promote productive roles for families in community building. 5) To establish a model university-community partnership that can be applied to other areas of Addis Ababa. Structure 1) The core group of community residents and leaders will number between thirty and forty members. It will serve as the participatory body through which community priorities are established and projects will be selected for implementation. 2) A larger network of community residents will be invited to participate in the project at forums, planning meetings, in project teams, and in action research projects. 3) There will be three full-time staff: a project coordinator and two outreach workers. These staff will be hosted by the Love for Children Organization, the fiscal agent for the project’s startup grant. 4) A team of AAU doctoral and graduate students will assist with the project’s implementation while carrying out action research projects. 5) Faculty from Addis Ababa University and the University of Illinois at Chicago will be involved as trainers, advisors, and evaluators. Areas of Focus Capacity building for communities own projects such as micro-enterprise, development of a community library and community center, child protection projects, youth-led enterprises, and others as they emerge from the community. For more information, contact: Mulu Yeneabat, MSW, Project Coordinator [email protected]; or Alice K. Johnson Butterfield, PhD [email protected]

Figure 5.4 Gedam Sefer Action Research and Development Project: A UniversityCommunity Partnership. Courtesy of Alice K. Butterﬁeld and Mulu Yeneabat.

community owned in that the community identiﬁes its strengths, prioritizes its needs, makes a plan, and implements it through the investment of its assets and its participation in every process of the project. At this time, we are working with several groups, including women’s and men’s garbage collector associations, youth associations, car washer associations made up of former juvenile delinquents and street youth, and traditional community leaders. We expect leadership opportunities to become available for local

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residents, especially among poor, semi-illiterate women and unemployed youth living in the Gedam Sefer community. Microenterprise, housing, the development of home-based businesses, a community library, literacy, and school-linked educational projects are some areas of interest among the community groups. For example, citizens in the Gedam Sefer community formed an association and started a community library with only four books. Addis Ababa University, the British Consulate, and Christian Children’s Fund provided 1,400 additional books. Approximately 300 children and youth use the library each day. Our project will be working with the library in a summer tutoring project and will provide approximately 4,000 additional books through the Books for Africa shipment in 2008. The Gedam Sefer Community-University Partnership will be a central force in action-research education at Addis Ababa University. Students working in the Gedam Sefer community are being taught how to do action research, which not only leads to the development of knowledge and the writing of scholarly papers, but also focuses on empowerment and capacity building in partnership with the communities where the research is taking place. The ABCD effort promotes, recognizes, and honors the contribution of the community throughout all phases of the work, and we expect to show outcomes directly tied to improved social functioning among poor families in Gedam Sefer. With the action research component that underlies the project, the project has potential for scaling up the strengths-based approach for university-community engagement with poor communities. Tri-Partnership: UIC-AAU-ISW in Tanzania One spin-off of Nathan Linsk’s sabbatical at AAU GSSW was the request by the American International Health Alliance Twinning Center to partner with the Institute of Social Work (ISW) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The partnership focuses on developing capacity at ISW to provide continuing education as well as to help develop an MSW and a future PhD program at ISW. ISW’s history is a mirror image of AAU’s social work programs. At the same time that the previous social work program in Ethiopia was closing, ISW was established as a technical school to equip the country with social workers to work in the child welfare system. Over the next thirty years, several certiﬁcate and higher diploma programs emerged under the auspices of social work, but the school lacked qualiﬁed faculty to teach at higher levels as well as higher degree programs. However, in 2005, ISW began its bachelor’s in social work degree program. Nathan Linsk was approached to try to use some of the lessons from Project SWEEP to help enhance the ISW program as well as help them provide a community-based, paraprofessional social work training program in Tanzania. The program is now operational in order to enhance curriculum offerings, resources, an HIV training and counseling center, and ﬁeld instruction, as well as to provide training to the Department of Social Welfare.

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In 2008 a three-way partnership is being established among AAU’s School of Social Work, ISW’s programs, and the Jane Addams College of Social Work. This partnership will allow ISW to use the AAU model to jump-start graduate social work in Tanzania, using the same visiting faculty model, as well as provide opportunities for ISW faculty to begin doctoral study in Ethiopia. In addition, AAU’s School of Social Work PhD students may obtain teaching and research opportunities in Tanzania. Forming a South-South interaction to enhance social work education incubated by the resources of Jane Addams College is an unheard of effort, where Americans facilitate local collaboration rather than impose their own programs in-country, particularly with respect to orphans and vulnerable children as well as HIV/AIDS.

Reconceptualizing Project SWEEP The development of social work education in Ethiopia that has occurred over the past six years has outgrown our original conceptualization of the Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership. Initially, SWEEP referred to a grant-funded planning project between the University of Illinois–Chicago and Addis Ababa University. Today, the concept of SWEEP is much more. From its base in social work and higher education, SWEEP has evolved into an informal network representing faculty and students from other universities, professionals from various disciplines, and NGOs—all of which are engaged with various institutions and organizations in Ethiopia for education, social work, capacity building, and development purposes. With this in mind, in 2008 we redesigned and restructured the SWEEP web page to capture the dynamic nature of our loosely organized network and reﬂect the synergy of a variety of collaborative efforts by people and organizations from around the world. The revised SWEEP web page emphasizes two broadly deﬁned focal areas: education and social work. Our deﬁnition of education particularly includes the role of higher education partnerships in Ethiopia and Africa. Our deﬁnition of social work is one that is based on partnership engagement with communities and organizations, and on organizing and community development. It encompasses work in areas of community health, orphans and vulnerable children, refugee resettlement, and poverty reduction. The SWEEP web page at http://www.aboutsweep.org provides reports of activities and projects, as well as resources for the advancement of education, research, training, and service delivery in Ethiopia and Africa.

MENTOR, INFLUENCER, AND INSPIRATION: PROFESSOR SEYOUM GEBRE-SELASSIE Our story began with meeting Professor Seyoum Gebre-Selassie in Ethiopia, and this chapter closes with bidding him good-bye. He was our mentor, inﬂuencer, and inspiration. We wonder what the chance would have been for social

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work education to start at the professional level had it not been for the tireless and ongoing work of Seyoum over the many years that he served his country as a professor, researcher, and social worker. Of a surety, his role in restarting social work education in Ethiopia was central and essential. In some respects, his tireless work in Ethiopia kept the foundation for social work strong in Ethiopia. To honor him, those who knew him in Ethiopia and the United States are in the process of starting a fund for scholarships and community support for the poor in Ethiopia in collaboration with the Ethiopian Society of Sociologists, Social Workers and Social Anthropologists (ESSSWA; http://www.essswa.org). We share here a short listing of some of his accomplishments and contributions to social work in Ethiopia. (See Figure 5.5.) In closing our story about SWEEP and the development of graduate social work education in Ethiopia, the words of Professor Seyoum are ﬁtting. In 1969 he represented Ethiopia and Africa in a panel discussion on teaching and social work values at an international conference. The chair was Dr. Herman D. Stein, a social work pioneer, who had worked with the young Seyoum in Africa. The question raised was “whether social work educators should undertake a conscious effort to promote changes in the value system of their society” (Stein, 1969, p. 33). Seyoum’s answer reﬂects his view of social work education at Haile Selassie I University:

Professor Seyoum Gebre-Selassie June 5, 1936–February 10, 2007 Professor Seyoum Gebre-Selassie entered into rest after a short illness on February 10, 2007. He was born and lived for much of his life in Addis Ababa. He was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology (SOSA) at Addis Ababa University (AAU). He earned his BA in 1959 (Ethiopia), his 1st MA in 1961 (India), his 2nd MA in 1975 (USA), and his Ph.D. in 1976 (USA). Professor Seyoum had extensive teaching, research and administrative experiences. He served as a Director of the Awassa Community Development Training and Demonstration Center, a Registrar of AAU, a Dean of the School of Social Work (Haile Selassie I University), a Dean of the College of Social Sciences at AAU, and a Chairman of the Department of Sociology at AAU. Prof. Seyoum co-founded various professional organizations and played leadership roles in most. Some of the organizations in which he made noble contributions include the Family of Guidance Association of Ethiopia, the Association for Social Work Education in Africa, the Ethiopian Society of Sociologists, Social Workers, and Anthropologists (ESSSWA), the Pastoral and Environmental Network for the Horn of Africa, and the International Association of Schools of Social Work (http://www.essswa.org.et/professor_seyoum_gebreselassie_h.htm).

Figure 5.5 Professor Seyoum Gebre-Selassie

Professor Seyoum Gebre-Selassie (June 5, 1936–February 10, 2007). Adapted from the webpage of the Association of Sociologists, Social Workers, and Social Anthropologists.

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In Ethiopia, we have made a start in exposing students to experiences which help him to learn by doing. . . . When the student is exposed to a situation where he is forced to interact with people outside his “class,” he discovers that people are not after all as stupid as he thought. He discovers that useful ideas can come from them. It is interesting to note that it is after such exposures that students start demanding more rights for self-determination for the people and for themselves. . . . They often express strong feelings about the importance of involvement and participation of the clientele in problem identiﬁcation, decision making and action. (Stein, 1969, p. 31)

Nearly forty years later, this is the vision that Seyoum Gebre-Selassie brought to the AAU-UIC partnership: “The social worker is not one who sits on a pedestal and pontiﬁcates. The social worker works with the people. Not for the people, with the people. This is the important distinction.”2

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership (SWEEP) Founders/Executive Directors: Alice K. Johnson Butterﬁeld and Nathan L. Linsk Mission/Description: The Jane Addams College of Social Work, University of Illinois–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 NGOs in Ethiopia to develop social work education and practice. Website: www.aboutsweep.org Address: Jane Addams College of Social Work University of Illinois–Chicago 1040 West Harrison Street (M/C 309) Chicago, IL 60607 USA Phone: +1.312.996.0036 Fax: +1.312.996.2770 E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

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NOTES 1. In Karl Marx’s theory of class struggle, the bourgeoisie (merchants and artisans) were originally viewed as a progressive force in overthrowing the feudal system. Later, however, the middle class becomes “a reactionary force as it tries to prevent the ascendancy of the proletariat (wage earners) in order to maintain its own position of predominance” (High Beam Encyclopedia, 2008). 2. From Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership, a documentary ﬁlm produced by Moges Tafesse and co-produced by Alice K. Johnson Butterﬁeld and Nathan Linsk (2004). Synergy Habesha Film Production: An Independent Social Media, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

REFERENCES Askeland, G. A., & Bradley, G. (2007). Linking critical reﬂection and qualitative research on an African social work master’s programme. International Social Work, 50(5), 671–685. Gebre-Selassie, S. (1999). The genesis and development of the Department of Sociology and Social Administration. Proceedings of the Founding Conference of E.S.S.S.W.A.: The Ethiopian Society of Sociologists, Social Workers and Anthropologists (pp. 6–8). Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: Addis Ababa University, Sociology Department. Gessese, A. (2006). Human strengths approach for sustainable livelihood. Unpublished MSW thesis, School of Social Work, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. High Beam Encyclopedia. (2008). Bourgeoisie. In Columbia Encyclopedia (6th ed.), 2008. Retrieved February 2, 2008, from http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-bourgeoi. html. Johnson Butterﬁeld, A. K. (2007). The internationalization of doctoral social work education: Learning from a partnership in Ethiopia. Advances in Social Work, 8(2), 1–15. Johnson Butterﬁeld, A. K., & Kebede, W. (2007). Asset based community development: Assessing women’s skills in slum households in Ethiopia. Paper presented at the International Consortium for Social Development, 15th International Symposium, Hong Kong, China. Johnson Butterﬁeld, A. K., & Linsk, N. (2005, August). Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership—Project SWEEP. Final Report. Association Liaison Ofﬁce for University Cooperation in Development. USAID. Retrieved May 30, 2008, from http://www. aboutsweep.org/ALOReport-Final-AKJ.pdf. Kebede, W. (2006). Social networks and communication among female householders. Unpublished MSW thesis, School of Social Work, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. Kendall, K. A. (1986). Social work education in the 1980s: Accent on change. International Social Work, 29(1), 15–28. Kretzmann, J. P., & McKnight, J. L. (1993). Building communities from the inside out: A path toward ﬁnding and mobilizing a community’s assets. Chicago: ACTA. Linsk, N. L., Gosha, M., Getu, M., Aklilu, M., & Prabhughate, P. (2007). Adherence and treatment support in Ethiopia, Paper presented at 2nd Annual International Treatment Adherence Conference, Jersey City, NJ. Sedler, R. F. (1968a). Social welfare in a developing country: The Ethiopian experience. International Social Work, 10(1), 1–12. Sedler, R. F. (1968b). Social welfare in a developing country: The Ethiopian experience: Part II—Social welfare service. International Social Work, 11(1), 9–22.

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Sedler, R. F. (1968c). Social welfare in a developing country: The Ethiopian experience: Part III—The role of social work education. International Social Work, 11(1), 36–44. Shinn, David H. (2001, July). HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia: The silence is broken; the stigma is not. Center for Strategic and International Studies, Africa Program. Washington, DC. Retrieved February 9, 2008, from http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/anotes_0107.pdf. Stein, H. D. (1969). Teachability and application of social work values: A panel discussion. International Social Work, 12(1), 23–34. Surafel, G. (2001). Professor Seyoum Gebre-Selassie: Of an age and its worries. Addis Tribune Archives. Retrieved February 7, 2008, from http://www.addistribune.com/ Archives/2001/03-08-01/Professor.htm. Tasse, A. (2007, July 17). The role of social work education in facilitating social development. Plenary Session, International Consortium for Social Development, 15th International Symposium. Hong Kong, China. Tasse, A., Johnson Butterﬁeld, A. K., & Linsk, N. (2007). Higher education partnerships for global development: Social work as a development actor. Paper presented at APM Council on Social Work Education, San Francisco, CA. UNAIDS. (2008). Ethiopia. Retrieved February 2, 2008, from http://www.unaids.org/en/ CountryResponses/Countries/ethiopia.asp. UNICEF. (2005). Ethiopia Statistics. Retrieved February 2, 2008, from http://www. unicef.org/infobycountry/ethiopia_statistics.html#30. University Capacity Building Program (UCBP). (2007). Ministry of Education & Ministry of Capacity Building, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Retrieved February 1, 2008, from http://www.ucbp-ethiopia.com/. Yeneabat, M. (2006). Pottery production: An asset for women livelihood: Case study on Kechene women potters in Addis Ababa. Unpublished MSW thesis, School of Social Work, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. Yizengaw, T. (2003). Transformation in higher education: Experiences with reform and expansion in Ethiopian higher education. Keynote paper prepared for Regional Training Conference on Improving Tertiary Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: Things that Work! Accra, Ghana, September 23–25, 2003. Retrieved on February 2, 2008, from http:// siteresources.worldbank.org/INTAFRREGTOPTEIA/Resources/teshome_keynote.pdf.

CONNECTIONS For more information about the Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership, visit the web page at http://www.aboutsweep.org. We welcome collaboration and networking with other individuals, groups, and organizations in education, social work, and other disciplines through training, research, and program development. Contacts in the United States and the Ethiopia are Alice K. Johnson Butterﬁeld Professor Jane Addams College of Social Work University of Illinois–Chicago 1040 West Harrison Street (M/C 309) Chicago, IL 60607 Email: [email protected]

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Abye Tasse Associate Vice President for International Affairs Dean of Social Work Addis Ababa University P.O. Box 1176 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Email: [email protected] Nathan Linsk Professor Jane Addams College of Social Work University of Illinois–Chicago 1040 West Harrison Street (M/C 309) Chicago, IL 60607 Email: [email protected] Websites Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership (Project SWEEP). This website provides a history of SWEEP and its accomplishments. It provides information and resources for those interested in the advancement of education, research, training and service delivery in Ethiopia and Africa. http://www.aboutsweep.org Addis Ababa University (AAU) is the oldest institution of higher education in Ethiopia. AAU’s mission is to develop and disseminate knowledge relevant to solving basic problems of development through teaching, research, scholarship, and services to the community. AAU started the ﬁrst-ever MSW degree in social work in Ethiopia in 2004, and a doctoral program in social work and social development in 2006. http://www.aau.edu.et African Child Policy Forum is an independent advocacy organization working on behalf of African children. http://www.africanchildforum.org Ethiopian Society of Sociologists, Social Workers, and Anthropologists (ESSSWA) promotes professional competence and ethics through the professions of sociology, social work, and anthropology. http://www.essswa.org.et/ University of Illinois–Chicago is actively engaged in several projects linking social work, teacher education, training, research, and community development in Ethiopia. • The Jane Addams College of Social Work, http://www.uic.edu/jaddams/ college/ • College of Education, http://education.uic.edu/ • Great Cities Institute, http://www.uic.edu/cuppa/gci/ • Midwest AIDS Training and Education Center, http://www.matec.info/

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Center for Urban Pedagogy Myron Panchuk and Patrick Savaiano

The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is a nonproﬁt organization that is interested in how social movement evolves and inﬂuences legislation concerned with urban development. Our mission is to create community education about places and how they change. One of CUP’s ﬁrst exhibits was held on the centenary of the promulgation of the ﬁrst building code of the city of New York in 1901, which mandated an indoor bathroom for every two families. The exhibit was hosted by the Storefront for Architecture and Art, and presented a contemporary look at the relationship between civic government and the needs of the people it serves. This exhibit was not a traditional “retrospective,” but rather a ﬁrst-time look at the guiding principles, directions, needs, and concerns of the urban dweller and his/her habitat. The result was to create a new reference point, a framework that critically evaluates the intricate interplay of need and function, code and environment, and even urban decay and renewal. For the Center for Urban Pedagogy, the city itself is a school from which we learn; its citizens, policy makers, and diverse social groups the architects, who design, create, destroy, and build.

PHILOSOPHY The work of CUP stems 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. What can we learn by investigation? By learning how to investigate, we train ourselves to change what we see. CUP creates educational projects about places and how they change. 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 85

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partners work with CUP staff to create projects ranging from high school curricula to educational exhibitions. CUP also works with youth on collaborative projects that explore the urban environment. Educational projects build on the everyday experiences of young people and help them learn about democracy, civic participation, and social justice. Civic engagement requires a new kind of civic education, one that explores how decisions are made, what is at stake, and how residents can be involved in this critical process. By implementing the tools of art, design, and technology, we draw the connections that exist between everyday life and the decisions that give it form. The approach of project-based learning brings youth face to face with the people who make the decisions that affect their lives: community advocates, government ofﬁcials, and businesspeople. Students then work with our staff to create educational projects that integrate their knowledge and share their insights with the general public. For example, at City-as-School High School, an alternative public school in lower Manhattan, CUP organized a semester-long investigation into how New York City deals with its garbage. Students visited garbage sites and conducted interviews with garbage experts, community activists, and government ofﬁcials. As a result of this investigation, the class created a thirty-minute documentary and a series of educational posters to communicate what they had learned to the broader community. CUP works in school, after school, and outside of school to reach students where they are. Programs range from single-session workshops to semester-long projects.

HISTORY The seed for this organization was planted during two of the earliest projects. The ﬁrst project was about building codes. The purpose was to engage a wide cross section of people who were involved in building code issues, such as community activists, policy analysts, and even local artists. This included a diverse tapestry of people who were involved in the regulatory process that impacts code legislation: those who uphold codes, those who wish to change them, and even those who evade them. The fruit of this effort was a highly effective and successful exhibition in which the different social sectors concerned with this issue came together and were engaged in a creative process of dialogue, input, and reﬂection. This was a very exciting moment in the work of this group because it actually produced an opportunity for reﬂection that had never existed in our city. People who were interested in architecture and art began to think about the politics of design in a way that was not just didactic, but that also created a unique occasion for understanding the actual social impact of design itself. The second project that was critical in CUP’s development focused on garbage and waste. The city was shutting down its only garbage dump, and since there was no long-term resolution in sight, we began to wonder how we could address this

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growing problem. A group of ﬁfteen students was engaged to start investigating this issue. After a semester of visiting recycling stations, waste transfer points, and dumps, a number of educational projects were crafted (including a video presentation, a model, and poster art) to communicate what had been learned. A video documentary was screened at a local theater, and the students moderated a panel discussion about the future of the city’s trash problem. By investigating the infrastructure, students uncovered a variety of political issues, not only the issue of where the trash actually goes and how it is shipped, but even who pays the health costs incurred in having trash nearby. This approach to urban concerns became the method and basis of most of our youth programs. The focus was on a single urban concern about which little was known; through investigating the issue, students were able to uncover an entire civic, political, economic, and social reality. When one looks around a city and tries to investigate why things are the way they are, much is learned about all the persons involved in shaping the urban landscape. In 1997 CUP published the results of its ﬁrst project in a small booklet entitled A How-To Guidebook for Urban Objects. At that time, CUP was an informal group of people with diverse backgrounds but a shared interest in undertaking interpretive projects about the city. Since then, CUP has grown organically as a vehicle for collaboration. CUP received its nonproﬁt status in 2002 and hired its ﬁrst fulltime staff members in 2005. CUP has organized or participated in exhibitions at Storefront for Art and Architecture, Anthology Film Archives, Apex Art Curatorial Program, City University of New York Graduate Center, and PS 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York; Mess Hall and the Chicago Architecture Foundation in Chicago; and Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna. CUP has partnered with other nonproﬁts such as Sustainable South Bronx, Place in History, the Municipal Arts Society, the Fifth Avenue Committee, REPO History, Temporary Services, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Global Kids, the Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES), the Public Housing Residents of the Lower East Side (PHROLES), the Legal Aid Society, the Community Service Society of New York, the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, the Fiscal Policy Institute, the Met Council on Housing, and the New York City Public Housing Residents Alliance. Since 2001 CUP has worked with over 700 students from institutions and organizations such as the city-run Tier-II shelters, City-As-School, the Academy of Urban Planning, Math and Science Upward Bound, the Heritage School, Monroe High School, Parsons the New School of Design, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the Wyckoff Houses, and PS 164.

FOUNDER AND STAFF Damon Rich is the founder of CUP. There are three other individuals centrally involved with the organization: Rosten Woo, Valeria Mogilevich, and Lize Mogel. Each provides connections to other organizations with which CUP is involved

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and plans long-term goals with them. CUP also provides the staff for the projects, creates the best teams possible to make a projects happen, and works with volunteers to implement them. CUP engages an extensive network of volunteers. At any given time, there are probably about thirty individuals engaged with some aspect of the organization. These volunteers are involved in a diversity of tasks, including proofreading, writing e-mails, creating informative pamphlets, providing art direction, conducting TV shoots, and researching. Some get involved maybe once or twice a year; others work on projects for weeks and months at a time. What makes CUP interesting is the variety of backgrounds represented, and the many talents volunteers bring to the collaborative efforts. Some have backgrounds in architecture and design, some in public policy, and others in media studies. Everyone beneﬁts from a wealth of talent, a diversity of skills, and a multiplicity of inﬂuence.

SUCCESSFUL PROJECTS: A SAMPLER OF THE WORK OF CUP THROUGH THE YEARS Mapping the Concourse The Grand Concourse, a central thoroughfare in the Bronx designed to be the Park Avenue of the Bronx, turns 100 years old in 2009. In anticipation of this centennial, the Bronx Museum of Art asked CUP to design a charrette for high school students to study the Grand Concourse. In April 2007, CUP trained eight high school students from the Bronx High School for the Visual Arts to lead an all-day charrette for their peers. The charrette’s goal was to produce a portrait of the neighborhood around the museum and brainstorm visions for its future. The project is ongoing and will continue through 2009. This series of workshops will introduce young people in the Bronx to urban planning and urban design concepts as well as democratic participation schemes such as the connecting of physical design with the politics of implementation. The workshops will build on one another to produce a thorough, compelling, and adaptive vision of the concourse, the neighborhood, and the future. Knoxville: Building Communities The Art Gallery of Knoxville, Tennessee, invited CUP to explore the urbanism of its hometown. CUP’s resulting installation drew upon various plans to re-energize Knoxville and included a sculpture of Knoxville’s odd shape, which is the result of annexing smaller municipalities in order to raise tax revenues. Wall text and photographs documented these development plans with archival material from the city library and the Beck Cultural Exchange Center, which is dedicated to preserving African American history in Knoxville.

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Schoolyard Visions Planning should not be stale and monotonous. It should sound like a captivating beat over which other sounds, rhymes, and melodies can be played. In this class, we examined the exterior spaces that surround the Academy of Urban Planning. Our job is not to take things for granted, but to question why things are the way they are and propose new directions. This is a theoretical project: it probably will not be built, so participants can dream a little, and make outrageous and new proposals. Green Information Center “When is recycling day?” “Where can I get a bike map?” “What kind of trees are on my street?” All of these questions and many more can be answered by visiting the Green Information Center, a roaming booth made by youth at the New Settlement Apartments in New York City. Students in the Bronx Helpers summer program created a mobile recycling information center out of recycled materials. The information center was packed with bicycle route maps, recycling and sorting information from the NYC Department of Sanitation, proposals for local tree planters, and green zines that catalogue the students’ experiences during an entire summer of investigating tree-related environmental issues. The Connection between Abandoned Buildings and Homeless People Ecologists study the environment and how it changes. This class decided to look at environmental problems in New York City, such as abandoned buildings and homeless people—buildings without people and people without buildings. Participants in this project interviewed four people who work with abandoned structures and homeless people in New York City. To understand housing issues and how old buildings can be remodeled, they then spoke with Carmen Vasquez at Hope Community and Nellie Hester Bailey at the Harlem Tenants Council. Kristen Simpson of the NYC Department of Homeless Services and Lindsay Davis at the Coalition for the Homeless were also interviewed. After that, the group transcribed the interviews, took pictures, made collages, drew maps, studied what had been found, and discussed their thoughts. The project provided vital information for those who want to make a difference in this critical area of social justice. Abuse of Power: The SPURA Story The story of Manhattan is not only the story of the powerful crushing the weak, or sometimes the weak beating all odds to defeat the powerful. It is also the story of the weak becoming strong enough to screw the weaker.

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Since the 1950s, the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA), bounded by East Broadway, Willett, Essex, Delancey, and Grand streets, has been the center of divisive land-use politics. Today, it contains the largest publicly owned undeveloped site in Manhattan below 96th Street, locked in a ﬁght between the partisans of low-income housing and the champions of economic development. Taking advantage of a ﬁftyyear-old history of unrealized plans, CUP produced a booklet on SPURA’s history. In March 2006, for The Dimes of March exhibit at the Reena Spaulings Fine Art Gallery located in SPURA, Damon Rich created a set of pavement markings indicating surrounding sites of unrealized plans for housing, community spaces, and commercial facilities. In March 2007, CUP installed elements of this project in Lost and Found City, an exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture that was curated by students at the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies. In conjunction with the exhibit, Damon Rich led a walking tour of SPURA and its environs, featuring several guest guides who had been directly involved with the SPURA conﬂict. What’s Poppin’ at Fulton Mall? In partnership with the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s Design Your ’Hood program, CUP’s Damon Rich and Amber Yared worked with Alex Gilliam to develop and teach an eight-week course on architecture and design for New York City high school students at Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall. This is an area that has been the target of city planning as well as constant efforts to try to improve this area. This course began as a public-history project to take a look at what was on this mall already, without considering what might be needed to improve it. Fulton Mall is actually one of the most commercially successful streets in New York City, but the quality of merchandise marketed and the types of consumers catered to are on the lower end of the economic spectrum. There was a discriminatory sense of the worth of this space in a statement made that “this low-class space needs to be improved.” Our project focused on the cultural signiﬁcance of this area, and that if it were going to be revamped, it should be done in consultation with the people who live and do business there. This project consisted of stories and photographs. A year and a half later, a series of articles published in the New York Times and the Daily News addressed the unique cultural signiﬁcance of the Fulton Mall area and created a needed perceptual shift in the consciousness of the public. Students explored the area through sketches, drawings, photographs, interviews, and general social interaction. Back in the studio, they translated their observations into drawings, collages, skits, models, and a photocopied zine. These were displayed at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Big Up, Jamaica! What if information about the future of a community could be as sexy, alluring, and as much fun as shopping? In the Jamaica Food Court, a small bulletin board

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displays information about plans for Jamaica’s future in a quiet, uninviting, and unexciting way. No alternative visions of the future were presented—only matterof-fact architectural renderings of the plan as an established fact. The nearby retail shops of Jamaica Avenue, in marked contrast, celebrated the investigation of alternatives. You could get green with blue high-tops, Velcro, or lace-ups, or . . . ? As part of the exhibition, Jamaica Flux, organized by the Jamaica Center for Arts and Culture, CUP built an experimental urban planning community outreach module using a pair of Nike Terminator high-tops with an embedded video screen, and installed it in the Sneaker Mart at the Gertz Mall. The screen displays thoughts from Jamaica residents on the past, present, and future of their neighborhood. On the street, a large poster announced the outreach initiative: Jamaica’s Future. Public Housing 101 Where did public housing come from? Who lives there? Who makes the decisions? What does it look like? What are some of the issues facing public housing today? These questions guided three CUP educators and eight City-as-School students through a semester of collaborative learning. They ﬁrst conducted interviews with a group of public housing stakeholders, including tenants, administrators, elected ofﬁcials, researchers, architects, and organizers. A series of educational posters and a set of three video pieces were created to try to capture what had been learned. CUP SERVICES Educational Programming CUP creates and implements project-based curricula for high school and college students. We love to work with inspired instructors and administrators to bring students face to face with issues that shape neighborhoods. We are excited by the challenge of working in different contexts, from afterschool math and science enrichment programs to Regents-based biology classes, in high school art classrooms and college architecture studios. Potential programs can range from semester-long, project-speciﬁc curricula to single-session workshops. Professional Development CUP provides workshops for teachers and administrators—helping educators connect students to their communities through art and design. Exhibition Design and Development Even in the Internet age, physical exhibitions retain a special power to bring together people and ideas. Working with historical museums, art institutions, professional organizations, and community groups, CUP curates, develops, and

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designs educational environments on a variety of scales, from kiosks to museums. Call or e-mail Damon Rich to discuss CUP’s ability to help you bring your audience together with your ideals. Video Production CUP produces videos that bring clarity to complex questions, using techniques from documentary ﬁlm and digital animation.

MEASURING SUCCESS Because we work in the interpretive sphere and not in direct advocacy, or direct services, the success of our work is not directly measurable by standard metrics. Certainly, we measure success by the number of people who attend our events, complete our programs, and order/use our tools. We believe that we have built many coalitions and have had a positive effect on the politics of the city. Quite often our work is interpretive. Since we do not build buildings or create new structures, we attempt to help people understand the problems that exist within the urban environment where those structures might be built. This hopefully will lead to policy reassessment and to positive change. A prime example of this was the project we did in downtown New York City called What’s Poppin’ on Fulton Mall, proﬁled earlier in this chapter.

FUNDING CUP is funded primarily through foundations and contracts with schools and organizations that hire its services. A smaller amount comes from private benefactors and donors. CUP’s largest grants this year will be about $25,000. The annual budget is around $200,000. When it started in 2002, CUP had a budget of $5,000. Its ﬁrst project was funded by a gift from a local radio station, Hot 97, which donated a mixer we sold on eBay. Until about two years ago, all projects were worked on by volunteers.

NEXT STEPS, NEW OPPORTUNITIES We are always trying to produce work that is geared to the speciﬁc needs of the local community. Our collaborative research teams are considering new ways of designing exhibits that are more durable and long lasting. At the same time, we keep trying to ﬁgure out how we can produce models and exhibitions that are nimble and can be easily assembled and disassembled. There is also a need for more Web design and media projects. We would like to get more people involved in our efforts, and to be a resource for activists that want to do more design work. We are producing new programs that are speciﬁcally designed to attract such talent to our organization.

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FOUNDER AND STAFF Damon Rich is the Founder and Chair of CUP, a nonproﬁt organization that educates communities about design, planning, and politics. After training as an architect at Columbia University, Damon worked for New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation, eventually becoming the chief of staff for capital projects. Since leaving the department in 2000, in addition to running CUP, Damon has taught design at schools including Parsons the New School of Design, Heritage High School, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, and the Queens Library Adult Learning Center. He also writes regularly about architecture and politics for publications including the Village Voice, Nation, Metropolis, and Architecture. Recently, Damon was awarded a New York State Council on the Arts award for his work with adult literacy and architecture, as well as a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony for his work on the history of urban renewal. From 2007, Damon has served as a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Rosten Woo, Executive Director, has been producing public educational projects with CUP since 1999. He teaches design history and theory at Parsons the New School for Design and produces historical research and writing on history, design, and public policy for Place Matters, the Municipal Arts Society, Metropolis magazine, and the Village Voice. He has also worked as a researcher and policy analyst for a variety of nonproﬁt organizations, including Common Ground Community and the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center. He serves on the boards of like-minded nonproﬁts, Place in History and Groundswell Community Mural Project. He received his BA in government from Cornell University. Valeria Mogilevich, Program Manager, a native New Yorker, coordinates the execution of design and education projects about the city’s inner workings as CUP’s Program Manager. She comes from a background in visual studies and film as well as architectural theory, with a degree from Brown University in modern culture and media (magna cum laude, 2004). In addition to working many years in the nonproﬁt sector, she is an independent ﬁlm curator specializing in scientiﬁc ﬁlms. Valeria is also on pest-control patrol in the CUP ofﬁce. Lize Mogel, Development, Associate/Artist, is an artist who makes maps, distributing and inserting her projects into urban public space. She has produced site-speciﬁc cartographic projects for transit shelters in Los Angeles and for former World’s Fair sites in North America. Lize also has worked with the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles. As a fundraiser, she was a grants ofﬁcer at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles from 2002–4, where she was responsible for foundation and government giving. She works as a grants consultant for the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT and Good Old Lower East Side, among others.

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ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) Founder: Damon Rich Mission/Description: The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) creates educational projects about places and how they change. Their 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. Website: anothercupdevelopment.org Address: CUP At the Old American Can Factory 232 Third Street #B402B Brooklyn, NY 11215 USA Phone: +1.718.596.7721 E-mail: [email protected]

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Endeavor: High-Impact Entrepreneurs, High-Impact Change Stephanie Benjamin, Teresa Barttrum, Annie Khan, and Valeria Levit

MISSION STATEMENT Endeavor transforms the economies of emerging markets by identifying and supporting high-impact entrepreneurs. High-impact entrepreneurs have the biggest ideas and most ambitious plans. They have the potential to create thriving companies that employ hundreds, even thousands of people, and generate millions in wages and revenues. And they have the power to inspire countless others. Endeavor targets only these high-impact entrepreneurs. Endeavor helps them to break down society’s barriers to success, offers world-class strategic advice, and open doors to capital. With Endeavor’s guidance, these entrepreneurs become role models, encourage others to innovate and take risks, and create sustainable economic growth. Together, Endeavor and high-impact entrepreneurs change industries, communities, and entire countries.

HISTORY Ten years ago in Latin America, economic interests were focused on the two extremes of the population: the poor and the very successful. Microﬁnancing helped the poor population get loans to start small businesses, which were needed to survive. At the other end of the spectrum, investors focused on large, national multiconglomerates. There was an overlooked segment of emerging markets made up of middle-sized companies that were not being offered any type of mentorship or guidance. Linda Rottenberg, a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, saw there was opportunity in the emerging markets that was going unnoticed. In order to spur economic growth in emerging markets and bridge the gap between microcredit organizations and large-scale public-works projects, Linda Rottenberg co-founded Endeavor, along with fellow Yale Law 95

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School graduate Peter Kellner, in 1997. They realized that if they conﬁgured a model that fused these segments of the emerging market economics together, a sizeable momentum for middle-sized businesses could be created. This momentum would enable the small- to middle-sized companies to expand, thereby enhancing private-sector development in Latin America and providing the opportunity for vast economic growth and expansion. Endeavor grew around the goal of making an impact one entrepreneur at a time. The founders believed that if you inspired one entrepreneur, that person would inspire the next, and then each of these would inspire others, creating waves of change. Endeavor’s founders were not looking at change on a national scale; rather, they were looking at change in human terms: human capital and the ability for human beings to change things. To initiate the waves of change, Endeavor planned to go into Latin American countries and partner with the local business leaders where they would focus on two main goals. The ﬁrst goal was to create jobs where employment was challenged. Endeavor wanted to scale companies in order to create a sizable number of jobs so that more people could work. Second, Endeavor wanted to alter the perception some of the cultures had when it came to taking risks. Entrepreneurship was not a viable option in many of these emergent market countries because of the cultural aversion to failure. Initial funding for Endeavor came about from Linda Rottenberg knocking on investors’ doors and presenting them with the issues facing entrepreneurs in Latin America. People called her crazy for doing this, but she stuck with it and continued to show people the value that Endeavor could bring to communities in these countries. She framed the proposition in this way: “You’re a business leader and you’re an Argentinean; you have an obligation to help bring your country to a level where the currency is not collapsing and the economy is sound.” Her persistence with this argument eventually led to a couple of business leaders taking a risk on her dream, and funding was provided by an Argentine business leader and from the AVINA group. AVINA’s mission, which can be found at www.avina.net, states, “We contribute to sustainable development in Latin America by encouraging productive alliances based on trust among social and business leaders and by brokering consensus around agendas for action.” With this initial investment, Rottenberg and Kellner introduced Endeavor in Argentina and Chile.

THE ENDEAVOR APPROACH Endeavor’s plan for helping midsized companies followed this comprehensive, ﬁve-step approach: (1) identify high-growth, innovative entrepreneurs lacking systemic support; (2) support selected Endeavor Entrepreneurs by supplying mentoring, training, networks, and access to capital; (3) unite investors, mentors, and entrepreneurs in a network bound by shared values and goals; (4) disseminate best practices in entrepreneurship through conferences, media, case studies, and online tools; (5) promote local entrepreneurial role models to encourage belief

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that individuals living anywhere, from any background, can turn ideas into worldclass ventures. Endeavor also identiﬁed ﬁve barriers to entrepreneurship that prevent ideas from becoming high-impact businesses. These include lack of role models, limited knowledge about new venture creation, limited access to smart capital, lack of trust, and lack of management expertise and contacts. Their ﬁvestep approach, explained in detail below, addresses each of these barriers. The ﬁrst part of Endeavor’s plan required locating innovative, high-impact entrepreneurs. Rottenberg and Kellner sought out the ones who had the biggest ideas and most ambitious plans. They looked for candidates with the potential to create thriving companies that could employ hundreds, even thousands of people, and generate millions in wages and revenues. And they looked for entrepreneurs who would have the power to inspire countless others. The process of locating the entrepreneurs who will become Endeavor Entrepreneurs currently takes six to eight months in each country. Rottenberg and Kellner analyze hundreds of entrepreneurs in search of the best emerging-market role models. Endeavor is not out to save companies that are struggling and rarely works with companies that are start-ups. They identify middle-sized companies that are between three and ten years old, are already generating a sizable amount of income, and appear to have the potential to expand exponentially. Each potential company goes through a very rigorous search and selection process. The guidelines for the search criteria include the categories of entrepreneurial initiative, business innovation, values and ethics, role model potential, development impact, and overall ﬁt with Endeavor. According to Endeavor, the criterion of entrepreneurial initiative focuses on whether the entrepreneur has demonstrated the vision, persistence, and drive to transform a new venture into a successful business. Readiness to take the business to the next level is also an essential component to the selection process. Exploring the likelihood of the business being able to change or improve a particular industry within the country or region is also an aspect of the criterion of business innovation. Each business must demonstrate its integrity and respect for the rule of the law, making their values and ethics clear to investors and consumers. The development impact criterion involves judging if the business has the potential to have substantial economic value through revenues, wages, and job creation. Finally, Endeavor must be able to see how its assistance can substantially increase the entrepreneur’s chance for success. The entrepreneur needs to be able to accept input from and also give back to Endeavor in a mutually beneﬁcial fashion. Candidates are scouted by proactive research done by the Endeavor staff, from recommendations through the Endeavor network, or by nomination through the Endeavor website. The process of selection involves several levels of increasingly difﬁcult interviews and reviews. The initial interview is conducted by the Endeavor staff to assess viability as a candidate. Then, a second opinion review takes place, during which senior-level VentureCorps advisors conduct multiple interviews with each candidate, probing business strategy, innovation, growth potential, and the entrepreneur’s personal qualities. A local selection panel made up of ten to ﬁfteen

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VentureCorps and local board members interview candidates, deliberate, and select candidates for an international panel. The ﬁnal review involves a managing director from another Endeavor ofﬁce, who interviews the candidate, and a ﬁnance expert, who reviews the prospective company’s ﬁnancials. If an entrepreneur passes through all these levels, the company can then be presented to the International Selection Panel, made up of international business leaders. Only after the International Selection Panel interviews, deliberates, and unanimously votes on candidates can they then become Endeavor Entrepreneurs.

TAKING ENDEAVOR ENTREPRENEURS TO SCALE Endeavor differentiates itself from others in the entrepreneurship-support sphere in two critical ways: who it identiﬁes and how it supports them. At selection, Endeavor Entrepreneurs typically run young businesses with $0.5 million to $15 million in revenues and with high-growth potential. These businesses are caught in development’s no-man’s land. Endeavor steps in because these entrepreneurs need far more than a small loan from a microﬁnance institution, but they are not yet big enough or proven enough to attract the attention of multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank or private equity ﬁrms. As of 2005, 198 Endeavor Entrepreneurs from 140 companies have been certiﬁed through Endeavor’s rigorous search and selection process, screened from a pool of 14,044 applicants. The second part of Endeavor’s approach is to establish a support system for the selected entrepreneurs. Endeavor provides them with the world-class resources they need to achieve the greatest impact. After designing a customized, eighteenmonth assessment plan, Endeavor provides the speciﬁc tools and services these entrepreneurs will need to thrive. This means offering access to mentors and to strategic consulting, both on-site and off-site. To help these entrepreneurs confront their most serious business challenges, Endeavor matches them with business professionals in its network with relevant expertise, knowledge, and contacts. These VentureCorps advisors give critical feedback and guidance to the entrepreneurs on an ongoing basis. Endeavor’s VentureCorps is made up of high-level consultants, investment bankers, lawyers, accountants, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and corporate executives. Whether a company’s need is raising capital, revamping a business model, or looking to franchise out a business plan, Endeavor identiﬁes the tipping point that is preventing each company from going big. Endeavor gives the companies an entrée into a network of individuals they otherwise would not have had access to, including top business leaders both in their countries and from the United States. Endeavor recruits top MBA students from leading U.S. business schools to spend their ten-week summers working on-site with the entrepreneurs to help them develop a business plan or market entry strategy. The projects include honed business plans, analyses of company growth options, and market feasibility studies. Endeavor also engages MBA students throughout the year in off-site

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consulting projects through partnerships with programs such as MIT’s Global G-Lab and Harvard Business School’s Field Studies, among others. In several Latin American countries, Endeavor has partnered with the Boston Consulting Group in order to provide further strategic guidance to the chosen Endeavor Entrepreneurs.

THE ENDEAVOR GLOBAL NETWORK The third component of the model is another key to the success of the Endeavor Entrepreneurs, and it revolves around peer and professional networking. Endeavor unites their Endeavor Entrepreneurs with each other, creating a global community of peers. Each month, Endeavor countries arranges meetings for the Endeavor Entrepreneurs to share experiences, give each other advice, and discuss the challenges common to entrepreneurs in their country. For many emerging-market entrepreneurs, this is the ﬁrst time they have met with others who understand their commitment and drive to create something new. One result of arranging these contacts between companies is that an entire community has developed where everyone involved is encouraged to think big and take risks. This has helped to circumvent certain barriers that have historically prevented local business from thriving in Latin American countries. Having access to an empathetic community of like-minded entrepreneurs is very important since there has traditionally been a marked stigma attached to failure; the aversion to risk has prevented other entrepreneurs from following through with original business ventures. Other barriers have included a lack of mentors and a lack of readily available networking opportunities. Endeavor overcame these obstacles by setting up a local board of directors in each country, again with the top business people, and then by setting up a network of companies or other individuals who spend the time helping each company go to scale. The fourth component of the model involves organizing exclusive workshops, seminars, individual presentations, and other special events for the selected entrepreneurs. These events occur locally on a monthly basis, and globally in Endeavor’s annual New York City Leadership Forums and bi-annual Entrepreneur Immersion Tours. By directly assisting these selected entrepreneurs, Endeavor seeks to promote entrepreneurship on a broader local scale and also to bring Endeavor Entrepreneurs onto the international playing ﬁeld. Endeavor works to increase local awareness about entrepreneurship and share best practices of the business creation process by partnering with local universities and the media, and by implementing policy reform. To encourage entrepreneurship among young people, Endeavor works with local business universities to develop entrepreneurship curricula. Endeavor convenes events for their entrepreneurs to present their companies to local university students. In addition, Endeavor works with professors at the top U.S. business schools to write case studies on Endeavor Entrepreneurs in order to share the lessons of the emerging-market entrepreneurship with a global academic community.

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Through partnerships with major media publications, Endeavor promotes a culture of entrepreneurship to a mass audience. In Argentina, Endeavor produces a sixteen-page monthly newspaper section with La Nacion, the nation’s most prestigious newspaper, which relates real histories of Argentine entrepreneurs. In Brazil, Endeavor and leading business magazine Voce S.A. sponsor the Entrepreneurs of the New Brazil award to recognize Brazilian entrepreneurs who have potential to become leaders in the Brazilian economy. Endeavor is also working in partnership with the multilaterals to examine the policy and legislative changes that emerging-market governments can make to facilitate the development of incentives for new business creation and venture capital investing. In every country in which they operate, Endeavor and its entrepreneurs have met with government leaders to lobby for necessary infrastructure changes.

CONTRIBUTING TO WORLDWIDE SOLUTIONS Endeavor saw the reality that it is not just one person or one solution to solve a problem. Issues such as global development or poverty are not going to be addressed just by issuing microﬁnance; there has to be a series of steps in thinking about how to get countries toward development, which is essentially one of the areas that Endeavor addresses. Endeavor offers alternative and additional solutions to other programs that are out there; it tries to ensure that the solutions being worked on compliment other organizations—not compete with them. Endeavor attempts to work in synchrony to make progress in global development. Private-sector solutions have become a priority in the world, and people are seeing the increased importance of creating jobs, helping to show how the growth of the private sector is a solution to getting people out of poverty. Endeavor ensures that its entrepreneurs are being connected with other corporations based on the prospective goal of having the companies work together to address global problems, such as poverty and a struggling economy, from a united front. The last part of Endeavor’s ﬁve-step model focuses on the goal that each Endeavor Entrepreneur will ultimately be able to give back to his or her community, and also inspire others in the community to become entrepreneurs. In the United States, entrepreneurs have become community leaders and philanthropists, donating time, money, and knowledge to their local communities. Endeavor aims to foster this same philanthropic tradition in emerging markets. In every Endeavor country, Endeavor Entrepreneurs have begun reinvesting in the local ofﬁce through voluntary ﬁnancial donations that help make the in-country operations self-sustainable. As community leaders and role models, these entrepreneurs also mentor other earlier-stage entrepreneurs, share their stories to inspire future generations, spearhead socially responsible business initiatives, and launch their own nonproﬁt organizations. With Endeavor’s guidance, the entrepreneurs become role models; they encourage others to innovate and take risks, and they create sustainable economic

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growth. The entrepreneurs do not just spend a year or two working with Endeavor, and then the relationship is over. Once an entrepreneur’s company has achieved a certain level of growth, Endeavor’s goal is that the company will continue giving back to the community and always being aware of and promoting further economic expansion well into the future. These may seem like lofty plans for midsized companies, but this model is hard to argue with when looking at Endeavor’s record of success at helping entrepreneurs reach their potential.

ENDEAVOR’S VALUE PROPOSITION Full potential, according to Endeavor, does not just mean accumulation of monetary capital for the company. Endeavor has created a “value proposition,” demonstrating how stimulating entrepreneurship can transform entire emergingmarket societies. The value proposition breaks down the combined effects of Endeavor working with a high-impact entrepreneur into ﬁve different categories of capital: ﬁnancial, human, social, intellectual and cultural. Financial capital creates new jobs and wealth by unleashing new talent. With Endeavor’s backing and active support, 55 percent of Endeavor Entrepreneur companies have collectively raised approximately $908.4 million in equity ﬁnancing. Human capital develops leaders through hands-on training and advising. One measure of human capital is that 86 percent of Endeavor Companies provide in-house training and education to employees. Social capital mobilizes networks to attract investors and business mentors. An example of social capital is the 23,334 hours of one-on-one mentoring given by top professionals in Endeavor’s VentureCorps. Intellectual capital produces cutting-edge research and sparks innovation. There have been 246 major entrepreneurship awards received by Endeavor and its entrepreneurs, illustrating how well their positive inﬂuences around the world have been recognized. Lastly, cultural capital showcases role models to generate opportunity and inﬂuence policy. Currently, 80.8 percent of Endeavor Entrepreneurs are ﬁnancially giving back to Endeavor, promoting the program’s continued expansion and growth. Endeavor measures its own success by looking at the success of each the companies with which it works. Today, 96 percent of Endeavor Entrepreneur companies are still operating in countries where the vast majority of entrepreneurial ventures typically close within forty-two months. Sixty-eight percent of Endeavor Entrepreneurs were the ﬁrst in their communities to receive outside ﬁnancing or institutional support. Over 1,000 angel investors and venture capitalists recognize Endeavor’s seal of approval. Endeavor’s goal of expanding private sector development in emerging market economies is growing fast, especially if one looks at the fact that 380,593 people have already received entrepreneurial education directly through Endeavor. Aside from numbers, Endeavor also measures its success by observing how Endeavor Entrepreneurs continue to think big and creatively, and continue to expand and grow. They inspire others in their communities to open businesses and become entrepreneurs, thus continuing the cycle of economic expansion.

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THE IMPACT OF ENDEAVOR ENTREPRENEURS Endeavor offers evidence that high-impact entrepreneurs produce signiﬁcantly more jobs than the average small-to-medium-sized (SME) companies. The average number of people employed by Endeavor Entrepreneurs is 263. High-impact entrepreneurs create high-value jobs that pay well, with beneﬁts. Endeavor Entrepreneurs have created 79,386 jobs paying on average ten times the national minimum wage, generated US$1.9 billion in revenues during 2006 alone, and with Endeavor’s support, secured close to US$1 billion in ﬁnancing. Ninety-one percent of Endeavor Entrepreneurs provide more beneﬁts than those required by law. High-impact entrepreneurs develop innovations that improve the quality of life. Innovation has been proven to lead to increases in the minimum wage and other measures of the standard of living. Of Endeavor Entrepreneurs, 81 percent invest in research and development, with 50 percent having secured, or are in the process of securing, patents. High-impact entrepreneurs attract investment capital, encouraging a virtuous cycle of growth. Even in the United States, fewer than half of new ﬁrms survive past the four-year mark. High-impact entrepreneurs are role models. Endeavor Entrepreneurs know approximately 5,800 people whom they have inﬂuenced to start high-impact businesses. With Endeavor’s ongoing support, Endeavor Entrepreneurs generated revenues of US$1.9 billion in 2006. Yet Endeavor operated in 2006 with a worldwide budget of only US$6.87 million. This 276 multiple illustrates how Endeavor effectively leverages its services and support to help entrepreneurs achieve success. Endeavor is in the top 2 percent of employers at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and is one of the most successful recruiters at the Harvard Business School. In 2007 alone, Endeavor screened over 350 MBA candidates, selecting 33 from ten top business schools to work for Endeavor Entrepreneurs and local Endeavor afﬁliates. In the United States, access to professional support networks is commonplace. Endeavor Entrepreneurs cite lack of access to key networks as their number one obstacle prior to working with Endeavor. Millions of citizens have heard the stories of Endeavor Entrepreneurs in classrooms, conferences, and local media. Internationally, these entrepreneurs are writing books, becoming regular commentators on CNNenEspañol, and taking part in politics; Endeavor Entrepreneurs are becoming real leaders in their countries and are being recognized as role models around the world. There are 117 case studies on Endeavor Entrepreneurs being taught in universities around the world, and 3,497 youth in emerging markers have taken up the entrepreneurial path directly because of an Endeavor success story. Endeavor Entrepreneur: OfﬁceNet One example of a private-sector business that Endeavor helped catapult into being a large, multinational company is OfﬁceNet, an ofﬁce supply company started in Argentina by Andres Freire and Santiago Bilinkis. Andres and Santiago

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ﬁnished their undergraduate studies at a top Argentine university and joined the majority of their peers as middle managers at Proctor & Gamble. Every Thursday night from 1995 to 1996, the twenty-four-year-old aspiring entrepreneurs met in a Buenos Aires bar to brainstorm ideas even though they had few local role models, no education on the entrepreneurial process, and little encouragement from family and friends. One day, they hit upon the idea of creating the Staples of Latin America—taking advantage of the fragmented, inefﬁcient ofﬁce-supply industry and resolving to transform it through technology, reliable service, and modern marketing strategies. They spent months studying each aspect of the U.S. business and learning the Argentine market. They named their ofﬁce supply company OfﬁceNet. Rather than launching retail stores, which had high capital requirements, Ofﬁce Net was designed to be entirely delivery based. The concept of using telemarketers and catalogs was rarely employed in the Argentine market. Every time Andres and Santiago approached an investor, they were immediately refused. Finally, in the spring of 1997, they convinced a wealthy businessman to give them $50,000 in exchange for 100 percent ownership of the ﬁrm. Andres and Santiago seized the deal. Six months later, in 1998, when Endeavor ﬁrst discovered the young entrepreneurs, OfﬁceNet had twenty-two employees and annual sales projections of $2 million. With the help of Endeavor’s network of venture capitalists, Andres and Santiago renegotiated a deal with their investors and went from zero ownership to 35 percent equity participation. Endeavor provided mentoring on ﬁnancing, growth, and leadership development. Endeavor sent a Stanford MBA to develop a business model for regional expansion. Endeavor introduced the entrepreneurs to investors in Brazil, opening doors for OfﬁceNet’s expansion into that country as well. Today, OfﬁceNet is the largest and fastest-growing ofﬁce supply company in Latin America. In 2004 Andres and Santiago sold the business to Staples. They have won numerous awards and are frequently featured in newspapers and television. They have shared their story with thousands of people at Endeavor conferences and university-sponsored events. Andres and Santiago were the ﬁrst Endeavor Entrepreneurs to take active roles in giving back to Endeavor. Santiago became the ﬁrst Endeavor Entrepreneur to join the board of Endeavor Argentina, and Andres recently joined Endeavor’s Global Advisory Board. OfﬁceNet currently serves 40,000 companies in Argentina and Brazil; there are currently 520 employees and annual revenues total US$57.4 million. OfﬁceNet is good example for how Endeavor chooses and works with companies. OfﬁceNet had a fairly well-established business, but it was only with the help of Endeavor that it was able to expand into another country, and the owners were able to gain 35 percent equity in their company.

THE LEARNING CURVE Endeavor is the only nonproﬁt of its kind, and it has not been without its failures and lessons. It has had huge learning experiences, especially when Endeavor

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ﬁrst started selecting entrepreneurs. Endeavor recognized different categories of entrepreneurs; some were considered to be diamonds in the rough, and others were seen as sure-ﬁre successes. The big lesson Endeavor learned was that some of the entrepreneurs selected as sure-ﬁre successes did not necessarily need help to become successful. Endeavor began to hone its search to focus on those entrepreneurs who really needed Endeavor in order to reach their maximum growth potential. Endeavor is not just looking to join up with a company because it is going to become successful; rather, the goal is for there to be a mutually beneﬁcial relationship. Fundamentally, Endeavor operates on the belief that there are entrepreneurs in every corner of the world and opportunity for great growth in all emergingmarket countries. Endeavor operates in countries where it believes it will have the cooperation and support of the people who are going to be responsible for helping to take the middle-sized companies to scale. This includes identifying countries with stable economic growth and low corruption levels. Endeavor works with top business leaders, who not only provide the ﬁnancial means for Endeavor to establish presence, but also agree to work and identify the entrepreneurs that are selected and helped to become the success stories that their countries really need. Endeavor Entrepreneur: Geomar Another example of an Endeavor Entrepreneur going from a midsized company to a large-scale success can be seen by looking at the story of Javier Donoso from Chile, who now exports seafood products to Asia, Europe, and the United States through his company, Geomar. Javier had taken over his family’s clothes manufacturing company to pay for his college tuition, and he signiﬁcantly increased revenues and employees by 400 percent and 7,000 percent, respectively. Years later, after visiting Asia, he saw an opportunity to export nontraditional seafood products from Chile; this vision soon became transformed into Geomar. Geomar produces gourmet, canned seafood products. The company purchases fresh seafood from the local ﬁshing industry along Chile’s 3,000 miles of coast and immediately processes the products in its Conception-based plant. Within twelve hours of arrival, the products are de-shelled; cut to market speciﬁcations; classiﬁed by color, size and type; and sterilized and packaged. The company has invested heavily in intense quality control, close interaction with clients, and value-added processes to build long-term brand loyalty in its target markets. Despite initial resistance from distributors to promoting a foreign brand, Geomar had established a strong presence throughout Asia when Endeavor met Javier. An Endeavor MBA student and the G-Lab teams from MIT researched international expansion opportunities for Geomar. Endeavor Chile’s board of directors and VentureCorps mentors helped Javier raise capital and negotiate with shareholders. Endeavor mentors provided guidance on internationalization, including currency transactions and capital structure. Endeavor mentors also helped develop a market penetration strategy and then forged business leads for the U.S. market.

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Endeavor’s ﬁnancial restructuring enabled Geomar to experience 225 percent sales growth and 193 percent job growth. Javier subsequently received ﬁnancing from a large Chilean investment group. He has had successful expansion into Spain and into the United States. He presented at the New York Fancy Food Show in 2004–6. Today, Javier is a local leader in the Entrepreneur Network and a great role model; he has been spearheading Endeavor Chile’s Entrepreneur Reinvest Program. As evidenced by Javier’s experience, local and international growth as well as increased numbers of jobs are all hallmarks of Endeavor Entrepreneurs.

LOCAL AND INTERNATIONAL GROWTH Endeavor went from concept to reality based on the unfaltering belief held by the founders that entrepreneurs exist everywhere. Entrepreneurs inspire people to think big, and they also go out achieve results themselves. Endeavor is proactive about helping the entrepreneurs and also about recording and reporting results. Endeavor does this in order for the entrepreneurs to see how they have changed and grown, and also to illustrate how much more they can achieve. For a company to be able to see its recent growth in speciﬁc facts and ﬁgures and to be able to visualize its future potential is a motivating factor for each Endeavor Entrepreneur. In terms of opportunities and obstacles, Endeavor is unique in that is sees them as being the same thing: both provide the chance to grow and thrive. When it comes to the cliché about the glass being half-empty or half-full, Endeavor always sees its glass as being half-full. It approaches challenges with a positive attitude, and by promoting a working environment where there is a lot of support available, Endeavor helps entrepreneurs treat their own obstacles as opportunities. Every problem that arises can be solved in an innovative matter, and Endeavor tries to inspire entrepreneurs to think in those terms as well. The entrepreneurs internalize this way of thinking, and then they can instill positive thinking in other people in their communities. Another way that Endeavor is unique is that its model can be easily molded to the individual needs of each client regardless of where the client is located. Endeavor’s assistance is practical and useful since it encourages original thinking and adapts to the speciﬁc need faced by each individual entrepreneur. Endeavor encourages innovative thinking, and it practices what it preaches. The CEO, Linda Rottenberg, is a leader who believes in listening to and being very supportive of her staff. She solicits advice from all those around her and believes that is a large reason for the success of Endeavor. When it comes to thinking about entrepreneurship in emerging markets, she cited Golda Meir as being one of her inﬂuences because Meir was a really strong woman who led Israel during a very precarious time. Within these emerging-market countries, Endeavor is considered the “go to” organization for entrepreneurship: governments have approached Endeavor to draft policies; investors rely on Endeavor’s seal of approval; universities partner

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with Endeavor to create case studies; and individuals attend Endeavor-sponsored conferences and download materials to learn concrete steps on the entrepreneurial process. The organization produces impact reports every year that contain a very extensive metrics page focused on measuring Endeavor’s impact on these countries in terms of job creation and education received through entrepreneurial workshops. The numbers are measurements used to illustrate the continuing success of Endeavor and are a testament to the efforts of business leaders and government ofﬁcials around the world. Countries outside of Latin America have taken notice of these success stories, and Endeavor expansion plans are going to be at the heart of the organization’s focus for the coming years. The organization has been approached by the president of Ghana, who said they need Endeavor in Ghana. Business leaders in Lebanon, Egypt, India, and throughout Asia and the Middle East have been clamoring for Endeavor to bring its model to their countries as well. Endeavor sees this as proof in and of itself that it is succeeding. After only ten years of operation, Endeavor currently operates in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey, and Uruguay, and Endeavor India will be opening next. The ambitious expansion plan the organization is embarking upon has the goal of reaching twenty-ﬁve emerging markets, including countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, all within the next decade. Endeavor Entrepreneur: Stitch Wise One of the Endeavor Entrepreneurs who reﬂects Endeavor’s growing global impact outside of Latin America is Natalie Killassy. She has been able to reduce the number of rock fatalities at AngloGoldAshanti’s Mines in South Africa. Falling debris is a major cause of injuries and fatalities, and the stitching that Natalie designed prevents rocks from falling out of mining bags. In 1997, Natalie Killassy began a sewing company on the Western Deep Levels mine in the Gauteng Province of South Africa. Struck by the substantial number of men who were made paraplegics though mining accidents, and who no longer capable of mine work, she persuaded AngloGoldAshanti to provide machines and workspace for a new venture called Stitch Wise. After customizing sewing machines to suit disabled workers, she chose protective rainwear as the company’s ﬁrst product. Realizing that many of her workers’ injuries stemmed from rock falls, Natalie spent eighteen months in a deep, underground mine test site to develop improved equipment to prevent roof collapse. Her solutions included improved backﬁll bags that support overhead rock. These products are now industry standard and are critical to the industry. “Without backﬁll bags, we’d be out of business,” said one senior manager at AngloGoldAshanti on a National Geographic documentary. Made from woven polypropylene fabric, Stitch Wise backﬁll bags are more resilient and safer than the typical wooden supports used in mines. Endeavor ﬁrst met Natalie in mid-2004 for her ﬁrst screening interview. She attended the ﬁrst panel in South Africa in Cape Town in December 2004.

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Endeavor mentors helped Natalie hone her business strategy to stimulate new growth. Endeavor board members and mentors steered Natalie through critical negotiations with mining companies and the establishment of a new factory in Klersdrop. Endeavor sent three MBA interns: the ﬁrst two MBAs helped simplify ownership structure, and the third MBA helped design an employee ownership plan. Today, Natalie has 145 employees—nearly half of whom are paraplegics. With Endeavor’s mentorship, she has redeﬁned her business strategy and now has a proﬁtable business with US$5.9 billion in revenues in 2007—proving that a socially conscious business can compete on price and quality. Natalie supplies 12,000 patented backﬁll bags a year to the mining industry—50 percent of the South African market. The South African Bureau of Standards recently retained Natalie to write the industry’s speciﬁcation for backﬁll and retention materials. Natalie was the ﬁrst of Endeavor’s South African Entrepreneurs’ class to make a signiﬁcant cash donation to Endeavor South Africa as part of the Entrepreneurship Reinvestment Program. With the recent registration of two new patents, Natalie and Stitch Wise are poised for new growth and broader impact with safety equipment, training, and the employment of differently abled workers. Natalie Killassy provides a good example to highlight some of the multifaceted ways Endeavor chooses and helps its entrepreneurs. Natalie had started up her own company, which focused on helping those in her community by providing jobs that could be adapted for handicapped people, and she also recognized the market for safer products. This matched Endeavor’s goal of increasing community production and revenue. Her story also provides examples of how Endeavor operates. It explains how Endeavor goes about improving a company’s business and expansion plans. Natalie’s company can continue to grow and create new products because of the help that Endeavor provided for Stitch Wise. The story of Stitch Wise shows that Endeavor is open to helping all different types of companies, in all different regions of the world, no matter how speciﬁc the entrepreneur’s needs and goals may be. It also shows how Endeavor Entrepreneurs reinvest in their local Endeavor ofﬁce, helping to ensure the program’s continued success.

MEDIA MENTIONS AND AWARDS Endeavor has attracted quite a lot of media attention. It is estimated that 381.6 million people have been reached through media content about Endeavor and Endeavor Entrepreneurs. In July 2007, in an updated and expanded paperback edition of The World Is Flat (pp. 495–496), the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman called Endeavor’s model for high-impact entrepreneurship “the best anti-poverty program of all.” Friedman praises Endeavor’s “mentor capitalist” model for helping midsize entrepreneurs expand and create jobs, and for supporting innovation in developing countries worldwide. “As important as it is to help make poor people into small business people,” Friedman says, “it is just as important to make small business people in a developing country into

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big business people who can employ lots of their neighbors.” Friedman goes in to explain that “it is precisely these sorts of middle-class start-ups and small businesses that create the most jobs and the greatest innovation in a society.” This is the “pro-entrepreneurship” example that Friedman says has the “inspirational power” to encourage individuals in the developing world, where role models are scarce, to think big. “There is no greater motivator for the poor than looking at one of their own who makes it big and saying: If she can do it, I can do it.” Endeavor’s “mentor capitalist” model breaks down economic and cultural barriers through rigorous screening and strategic advising from its network of worldclass business leaders. With their guidance, 266 Endeavor Entrepreneurs have created 79,000 jobs and generated $1.9 billion in revenues. Endeavor is the only nonproﬁt that supports high-impact entrepreneurs in emerging markets. At the White House Conference on the Americas in July 2007, Secretary of Commerce Carlos M. Gutierrez stated, “We must work to ensure that there is equal opportunity for everyone in the Americas, not just those at the top of the economic ladder.” He then cited Endeavor as being one of the top new companies working to help ensure equal opportunities for all people that “has hundreds of case studies of successful Latin pioneers.”1 Endeavor has received numerous awards and notable recognitions for its work. For the ﬁfth year in a row, Endeavor received the Social Capitalist Award, which recognizes it as one of the forty-ﬁve top-performing nonproﬁts in the world by Fast Company/Monitor Group. Some other recent awards include being named by NuWire Investor as one of the Top 15 Charities for Investors for 2007. Endeavor co-founder and CEO Linda Rottenberg won the 2007 Organization of Women in International Trade’s Woman of the Year Award, which recognizes women around the world for their efforts in international trade and development. She also was honored among those receiving the 2007 Women of Worth Award from the Worth Collection LTD, which celebrates women who have achieved extraordinary success in their professional pursuits.

FUNDING Linda Rottenberg started out with two businesses, and since then, Endeavor has grown exponentially. Endeavor’s aim is to become a fully self-sustaining organization of, by, and for entrepreneurs. Currently, Endeavor has established an Entrepreneur Give-Back Program that asks Endeavor Entrepreneurs to donate a portion of equity or incremental revenues back to the organization in order to help the next generation of high-impact entrepreneurs succeed. The goal is to have each Endeavor ofﬁce self-sustaining ten years after launch. In markets where there is not a strong tradition of philanthropy, Endeavor is changing the cultural mind-set and jump-starting a virtuous cycle of giving back. Sustaining Endeavor ﬁnancially, at both the local and global levels, involves a combination of several factors. This model requires an active board of directors and mentors. Each member on the board of directors pays to be on the board,

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which provides much of Endeavor’s funding. Funding also comes from other places, including corporate donations. The mentors in Endeavor’s VentureCorps are an essential part of the organization’s entrepreneurial services; they contribute to Endeavor ﬁnancially and through their time. Endeavor runs as a decentralized model: its global ofﬁce operates separately from its afﬁliate ofﬁces in each country. This is similar to a franchise model, where each of the ofﬁces runs their own budgeting. This helps ensure that each ofﬁce is able to focus on the individual needs of each company without having to conform to a greater global model. Endeavor continually sets the bar incredibly high, ensuring that investors and other companies are able to trust the value of the entrepreneurs that Endeavor connects them to. Endeavor does not bend the rules when it comes to choosing their entrepreneurs; every entrepreneur must reach the very high threshold deﬁning what qualiﬁes as a high-impact Endeavor Entrepreneur.

ADVICE TO FUTURE ENTREPRENEURS These high standards have helped Endeavor have an impressive ﬁrst ten years, and the organization is grateful for all its success. However, it does not regret the mistakes and slipups along the way. Endeavor believes that becoming successful requires falling down a few times, being able to pick yourself back up, and learning from your mistakes. There is nothing in Endeavor’s trajectory that the organization would have done differently, and it is willing to offer advice to others who are interested in learning about entrepreneurship. Although Endeavor’s main headquarters in New York has only sixteen staff members, they are interested in answering questions about entrepreneurship and in collaborating any way that they can with all interested people. If someone is interested in becoming an entrepreneur and working with emerging markets, Endeavor highlights the importance of understanding what communities do and the importance of listening to people. It promotes getting out into the world and understanding the mechanics of different communities. Endeavor describes entrepreneurs as humans who are inspired by ideas, and says that ideas are the underlying point of any successful venture. For further reading, Endeavor suggests two books. The ﬁrst one is The Business of Changing the World by Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler. It talks about how cooperative efforts can engage corporations such as Starbucks with private-sector development and help emergent market countries get to where they need to be. Endeavor is also a big advocate of The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman; quotations from the book were mentioned above, and in the book, Friedman talks further about the importance of Endeavor’s current projects. Endeavor’s website, www.Endeavor.org, has much more information, including a data bank of articles related to private-sector growth in emerging market communities. Renowned institutions such as the World Economic Forum, World Bank, Harvard Business School, and the Wall Street Journal, as well as legendary entrepreneurs Michael Dell and Jerry Yang (Yahoo!), have all recognized Endeavor for its cutting-edge model for private-sector development. Endeavor is transforming

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the economies of emerging markets by identifying and supporting high-impact entrepreneurs. The rise of social entrepreneurship inspires people with business skills to solve social problems. This solution disrupts the status quo and leads to long-term, sustainable economic growth all throughout the world.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Endeavor Founder: Linda Rottenberg Mission/Description: Established in 1997, Endeavor is a global nonproﬁt organization that targets emerging-market countries transitioning from international aid to international investment. Endeavor helps transform the economies of emerging markets by identifying and supporting high-impact entrepreneurs. High-impact entrepreneurs have the biggest ideas and most ambitious plans. They have the potential to create thriving companies that employ hundreds, even thousands, of people, and generate millions in wages and revenues. And they have the power to inspire countless others. Endeavor targets only entrepreneurs with high-impact potential. They scour a country for these entrepreneurs, and they help them break down a society’s barriers to success, offer world-class strategic advice, and open doors to capital. With Endeavor’s guidance, these entrepreneurs become role models, encourage others to innovate and take risks, and create sustainable economic growth. Together, Endeavor and high-impact entrepreneurs are changing industries, communities, and entire countries. Website: www.endeavor.org Address: Endeavor Global 900 Broadway, Suite 600 New York, NY 10003 USA Phone: +1.212.352.3200 Fax: +1.212.352.1892 E-mail: [email protected]

NOTE 1. http://www.commerce.gov/NewsRoom/SecretarySpeeches/PROD01_003157

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ACCION International Teresa Barttrum

The mission of ACCION International is to give people the tools they need to work their way out of poverty. By providing “micro” loans, ﬁnancial services, and business training to poor women and men who start their own businesses, ACCION’s partner microﬁnance organizations help people work their own way up the economic ladder with dignity and pride. With capital, people can grow their own businesses. They can earn enough to afford basics such as running water, better food, and schooling for their children. In a world where 3 billion people live on less than $2 a day, it is not enough to help 1,000 or even 100,000 individuals. ACCION’s goal is to bring microﬁnance to tens of millions of people—enough to truly change the world. ACCION knows that there will never be enough donations to do this. That is why the organization has created an anti-poverty strategy that is permanent and self-sustaining. ACCION was founded to address the desperate poverty in Latin America’s cities. Begun as a student-run volunteer effort in the shantytowns of Caracas, ACCION today is one of the premier microﬁnance organizations in the world, with a network of lending partners that spans Latin America, the United States, Africa, and now Asia. Over the last four decades, it has built a tradition of developing innovative solutions to poverty. Although ACCION’s approach has changed over the years, the driving force behind its mission remains the same: It is still the people served, the women and men of impoverished communities, who shape its work. It is their courage and ingenuity, and the tremendous power of their dreams, that continues to inspire ACCION and to renew its dedication to the search for new and better solutions to poverty. HISTORY: A RETROSPECTIVE ACCION International was founded in 1961 by an idealistic law student named Joseph Blatchford. 111

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An amateur tennis player, Blatchford had just completed a goodwill tennis tour of thirty Latin American cities. He returned haunted by the images of Latin America’s urban poor: the crowded shantytowns, the open sewers, the hungry and hopeless faces. Determined to help, Blatchford and his law school friends raised $90,000 from private companies to start a new kind of organization: a community development effort designed to help the poor help themselves. In the summer of 1961, Blatchford and thirty volunteers ﬂew to Venezuela and set to work. Initially greeted with skepticism, the ﬂedgling “ACCIONistas” were soon working closely with local residents to identify the community’s most pressing needs. Together, volunteers and residents installed electricity and sewer lines, started training and nutrition programs, and built schools and community centers. Over the next ten years, ACCION started programs in three more countries: Brazil, Peru, and Colombia. During that time, the organization placed over 1,000 volunteers and contributed more than $9 million to development in some of the poorest communities of Latin America. Microlending Begins By the early 1970s, ACCION’s leaders were becoming increasingly aware that their projects did not address the major cause of urban poverty in Latin America: lack of economic opportunity. “We began to sense that a school or a water system didn’t necessarily have long-term impact. We were simply reorganizing the resources that a community already had within it, rather than increasing their resources,” former ACCION director Terry Holcombe remembered. The employment situation in the urban centers was dire. Drawn by the mirage of industrial employment, thousands of rural migrants were ﬂocking to the cities each year. Once there, however, they found that jobs were scarce. The few that were available often did not pay a living wage. Unable to ﬁnd work, and lacking a social safety net, many of these urban poor started their own small enterprises. They wove belts, banged out pots, and sold potatoes. But they had no way to grow their tiny businesses. To buy supplies, they often borrowed from local loan sharks at rates as high as 10 percent a day. Most of their proﬁts went to interest payments, leaving them locked in a daily struggle for survival. In 1973 ACCION staff in Recife, Brazil, noticed the prevalence of these informal businesses. If these small-scale entrepreneurs could borrow capital at commercial interest rates, they wondered, could they lift themselves out of poverty? ACCION’s Recife program coined the term “microenterprise” and began issuing small loans. To ACCION’s knowledge, these ﬁrst loans helped launched the ﬁeld of microcredit. The experiment in Recife was a success. Within four years, the organization had provided 885 loans, helping to create or stabilize 1,386 new jobs. ACCION had found a way to generate new wealth for the working poor of Latin America.

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Expanding Opportunity: Building a Model Over the next decade, ACCION helped start microlending programs in fourteen countries in Latin America. ACCION and its partners developed a lending method that met the distinct needs of microenterprises: small, short-term loans built conﬁdence and a credit record; site visits replaced paperwork. With a loan repayment rate of 97 percent, ACCION’s clients soon shattered the myth that the poor were bad credit risks. Given access to affordable capital, they could and would improve their lives. ACCION soon found that microlending had another revolutionary quality: it paid for itself. The interest each borrower paid helped cover the cost of lending to another. The ability to cover costs, augmented by ACCION’s new loan guarantee fund, the Bridge Fund, enabled ACCION’s partners to connect with the local banking sector and dramatically increase the number of microentrepreneurs they reached. Between 1989 and 1995, the amount of money loaned by ACCION’s Latin American Network multiplied more than twenty times. Yet, all the while, ACCION knew that it was reaching less than 2 percent of the microentrepreneurs in need of its services. The organization remained convinced that microlending had the potential to transform the economic landscape of Latin America. To do so, however, ACCION knew that microlenders would need access to a much larger pool of capital. In response, ACCION helped create BancoSol, the ﬁrst commercial bank in the world dedicated solely to microenterprise. Founded in Bolivia in 1992, BancoSol is a bank of the poor: its clients are market vendors, sandal makers, and seamstresses. Yet today, BancoSol offers its 82,000 active clients an impressive range of ﬁnancial services, including savings accounts, credit cards, and housing loans— products that just ﬁve years ago were accessible only to Bolivia’s upper classes. In 1994 ACCION helped BancoSol sell certiﬁcates of deposit in the U.S. ﬁnancial market, certiﬁcates backed by nothing more than the good word of a woman selling oranges on the streets of La Paz. For the ﬁrst time, the world’s premier ﬁnancial institutions invested in microenterprise, not out of charity, but because it was good business. BancoSol is no longer unique: more than ﬁfteen ACCION-afﬁliated organizations are now regulated ﬁnancial institutions, and others are on their way. With the power to access the ﬁnancial markets, they have the potential to reach not just thousands, but millions, of the poor.

Bringing Microlending “Home”: The U.S. Initiative In 1991, concerned about growing income inequality and unemployment in the United States, ACCION brought its microlending model home, launching a program in Brooklyn, New York. Like the underprivileged microentrepreneurs helped by ACCION abroad, the diverse population of small business owners in

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the United States is faced with a speciﬁc set of barriers to accessing business ﬁnancing: having no credit history, having damaged credit, or needing a loan that is too small for a bank to make. These are the people that ACCION aimed to help so that they, too, could work their way to economic success in a digniﬁed manner. Over the next ﬁve years, ACCION worked to adapt its lending model to the very different social and economic context of the United States. In 2000 ACCION’s U.S. initiative was renamed ACCION USA, which today has ofﬁces in Atlanta, Miami, New England, and New York, as well as licensees in California, Illinois, New Mexico, and Texas. In 2005 the organization expanded its reach nationwide when it launched its Online Small Business Loan Application, enabling ACCION USA to offer its small business loans to entrepreneurs throughout the United States. Together, ACCION USA and its licensees make up the U.S. ACCION Network, the largest microlending network in the country. By year’s end 2007, the U.S. ACCION Network had loaned more than $206 million to more than 21,000 low-income entrepreneurs in forty states and Puerto Rico. A nonproﬁt subsidiary of ACCION International, ACCION USA is a community-based organization whose mission is to make access to credit a permanent resource for small business owners. To reach even more low-income business owners in need of credit, ACCION USA is centralizing loan processing, deploying Internet-based lending and call centers, and opening new lending ofﬁces. ACCION USA also capitalizes on innovative partnerships to provide credit and training to support small business development. ACCION USA has worked with banks such as Bank of America, Citizens Bank, and Wachovia to promote referrals of clients who do not meet standard bank requirements. In Miami, community partner AXA Financial provided funding for ACCION USA clients to receive one-on-one marketing and accounting training. ACCION Expands to Africa In October 2000, ACCION began working in partnership with microlending organizations in sub-Saharan Africa, marking its ﬁrst initiative outside the Americas. Recognizing the vital need for microcredit throughout Africa, ACCION committed itself to reaching increasing numbers of the continent’s poor, selfemployed men and women in the years to come. Currently, ACCION is providing technical assistance to microlenders in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, with plans to enter Cameroon and Senegal in 2009. ACCION Expands to India In 2005 ACCION reached further, to help even more working poor in one of the world’s most populated countries, India, through the Unitus-ACCION Alliance for India. Since then it has also established partnerships with microﬁnance institutions YES Bank, Swadhaar Finaccess, and Grameen Koota.

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ACCION’S MOTIVATION According to William Burrus, president and CEO of ACCION USA and former executive director of ACCION International, “My inspiration comes directly from the people we serve. Their stories are full of courage, hard work, and dreams.” These feelings are shared by each staff member at ACCION. ACCION remains a mission-driven organization, and the people they serve are the driving force behind its success. When introduced to staff members, one quickly realizes that ACCION’s mission is the primary reason why people work here. They feel as if they are making a difference; they feel as if they are cultivating an important tool for global poverty alleviation.

WHY MICROFINANCE? Most of the world’s 3 billion poor people cannot ﬁnd work. Few jobs are available where they live, and those that are often do not pay a living wage. To survive, they must create their own jobs by starting tiny businesses or microenterprises. They make and sell tortillas, sew clothes, or sell vegetables in the street—anything to put food on the table. Microentrepreneurs work hard—sometimes eighteen hours a day. Yet with no capital to grow their businesses, they remain trapped in a cycle of poverty. To open their businesses each day, they are often forced to borrow from loan sharks, who charge as much as 10 percent a day, or they pay higher prices to buy goods on credit. Any proﬁt they earn goes to others, leaving them locked in a daily struggle for survival. What they need to break free is working capital: a loan as small as $100 at a fair rate of interest. But most banks will not lend to them. The loans they need are often considered too small for banks to justify the time and expense to administer them, and microentrepreneurs lack the collateral and credit history required by traditional lenders. That is why ACCION began issuing microloans over forty years ago. A small loan can cut the cost of raw goods or buy a sewing machine. Sales grow, and so do proﬁts. With a growing income, people can work their way out of poverty. In the United States, microﬁnance helps people move out of welfare, rebuilds inner city neighborhoods, and provides a viable alternative for those left behind by factory closings and corporate downsizing. Microﬁnance is a smart strategy because it builds on the one asset found in even the poorest communities: the power and determination of the human spirit.

HOW ACCION WORKS Historically, anti-poverty programs have not been able to help more than a tiny fraction of the world’s poor. There simply is not enough charitable money in the world to adequately address the challenges, and there never will be. That is why ACCION is leading the effort to create a permanent answer to poverty. Unlike

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traditional charities and many other microlending efforts, ACCION’s partner programs are designed to cover their own costs. It works like this: borrowers pay interest on their loans, enough to cover the expense of making a loan. In this way, each borrower helps ﬁnance the cost of lending to the next. The more people the program reaches, the more resources it has to reach others. This focus on ﬁnancial sustainability has helped ACCION’s partner programs increase the number of people served from 13,000 in 1988 to over 3 million at the end of 2007. We now know that microﬁnance can help the poor and be proﬁtable. In Mexico, ACCION’s partner Banco Compartamos now serves over 838,000 poor and low-income entrepreneurs while making a proﬁt. With proﬁts, microﬁnance institutions can break free of the limitations of donor funds because they can attract private investment. In other words, microﬁnance has the potential to access billions of dollars in the international ﬁnancial markets to help the very people our system has traditionally left behind. ACCION’s goal is to make this potential a reality. WHO ARE THE BORROWERS ACCION’S WORK SERVES? In Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, ACCION and its partner programs work with poor, self-employed men and women who rely on microenterprise as their main source of income. These individuals range from the very poor to those who have some assets but remain marginalized from the mainstream economy and society. ACCION’s Latin American, Caribbean, African, and Asian borrowers • • • • •

Are among the regions’ poorest people at the time of their ﬁrst loan Usually have no collateral May not be able to read or write May not have enough capital to open for business every day Are 65 percent female

In the United States, ACCION USA works with low- and moderate-income borrowers who have their own businesses but are economically marginalized and have no access to commercial business loans. They are often unable to afford formal training and frequently have no forum for forming business contacts or receiving peer support. They are single mothers on public assistance and storefront owners with small but well-established businesses. Many are recent immigrants. ACCION USA borrowers • • •

Are 86 percent minority Are 42 percent female Own businesses such as restaurants, retail, computer services, beauty salons, and taxi services

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Often rely on their microbusiness for 50 percent or more of their family income Often have business assets of less than $5,000 Often have no personal or business credit, or have bad credit prior to receiving an ACCION loan

THE ACCION MICROFINANCE MODEL ACCION’s partner programs provide small, short-term loans at interest rates that reﬂect the cost of lending. ACCION’s loan methodology and range of ﬁnancial services have been designed both to meet the needs of microentrepreneurs and to ensure that the microﬁnance organizations it works with are ﬁnancially sustainable. Best of all, the model has enabled ACCION’s partners’ clients to work their own ways up the economic ladder, with dignity and pride. ACCION considers microentrepreneurs skilled business people, not recipients of charity. Like traditional banks, ACCION partner programs evaluate potential borrowers using measurements such as business assets—which could be as small as a tin stall in the market—amount and cost of goods sold, cost of raw materials, and household expenses. But unlike traditional banks, the partner programs do not make loans based on revenue or collateral alone. Often, ACCION clients need only demonstrate a need for the loan and the will to achieve their goals. Because of the poverty of its clients and their lack of credit history, ACCION sends loan ofﬁcers to meet potential borrowers in their places of work, where they also weigh intangibles such as references from customers and neighbors, and the loan ofﬁcer’s own “gut feeling” about the microentrepreneur’s drive to succeed. This character-based lending allows us to go “beyond the numbers” and develop a more complete picture of a potential borrower than a traditional credit score. The character-based lending involves traditional techniques, such as reviewing the business’s prospects, examining any business plan that has been created, and determining if there is a market need. However, the model takes the lending process one step further. Loan ofﬁcers working with ACCION will interview neighbors to see if the potential borrower pays his or her bills on time; check the potential borrower’s character with neighbors, family, and business associates; and secure household items as collateral. Borrowers either apply for loans individually, or if they lack physical collateral or a co-signer, they team up with a few other borrowers. Known as solidarity group lending, this method allows members to cross-guarantee one another’s loans in lieu of collateral. This works well for those individuals who live in extremely poor or rural regions. It allows the group members to hold each other accountable for the loan repayment and provides additional support for each individual solidarity group member. Successful members of the solidarity group can then apply for further loans. For example, ten women might take out a $1,000 loan via solidarity group lending, and each individual woman would receive $100 of the total loan. The women may meet once a week to discuss business best

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practices and submit the loan payment that is due. If one group member is short on her payment that week, all the other members can pool funds to cover for that person, with the understanding that she will make it up to the group over time. ACCION spearheaded this approach in Latin America in the 1970s to help bring microlending to the poorest of the economically active population. First loans start small—often as low as $100 in Latin America. Borrowers who repay their loans on time are eligible for increasingly larger loans. This process, called stepped lending, keeps initial risk at a minimum while allowing microentrepreneurs to carefully grow their businesses and increase their incomes.

THE ACCION APPROACH ACCION’s goal is to bring microloans to enough people to have a signiﬁcant impact on poverty. There will never be enough charitable donations to accomplish this. It has been estimated that it would cost over $250 billion to reach 500 million poor people—a ﬁgure well beyond the reach of donor funds. That is why ACCION is leading the effort to make microlending ﬁnancially self-sustaining. Although ACCION understands that this is only one of many solutions for addressing the problems of global poverty, its members remain motivated and driven toward this cause. As mentioned, microlending programs have the potential to cover their own costs. The interest each borrower pays helps to ﬁnance the cost of lending to another. In most other poverty alleviation efforts, often driven by direct aid, every person helps bring the program closer to its ﬁnancial limits. Successful microlending programs, on the other hand, generate more resources with each individual they help. As a result, well-managed microlending programs generate more income than they spend, allowing them to expand and reach more marginalized microentrepreneurs. And, once they become economically viable ﬁnancial institutions, they have the ability to access much broader sources of lending capital—the billions of dollars invested in the world’s ﬁnancial markets. Several of ACCION’s partners have already made the transition from nonproﬁt, charity-dependent organizations to banks or other regulated ﬁnancial institutions. The three largest (Banco Solidario of Ecuador, Banco Compartamos of Mexico, and Mibanco of Peru) each reach over 100,000 poor and low-income microentrepreneurs. These pioneering microlending institutions have led the way for the microﬁnance industry, demonstrating that it is possible for a commercial lender to both serve the poor and be proﬁtable. As a result, commercial banks that previously served only the upper class are increasingly opening their doors to microentrepreneurs. ACCION has helped ﬁve commercial banks—SOGEBANK (Haiti), Banco del Pichincha (Ecuador) and Banco ABN-AMRO Real (Brazil), YES Bank (India), and Ecobank (West Africa)—begin lending to the selfemployed poor.

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ACCION’s emphasis on commercial viability and institutional growth— known as the commercial approach—has helped its partner microﬁnance institutions (MFIs) reach scale and ﬁnancial self-sufﬁciency. To help its partners attain these goals, ACCION provides technical assistance to improve operations and efﬁciency, as well as loan guarantees to help access commercial capital. This model has changed over time, and currently rests with the idea that ACCION acts as a technical consultant to those organizations they help establish as the initial source for microlending in each particular country. Typically, ACCION sets up a working relationship with one organization that then works with their own countrymen and women to establish microlending situations. At this point, ACCION will offer support and guidance and may make an investment in the company. This, in turn, allows the organization to further their investments in microentrepreneurs locally. ACCION continues to offer this support and assistance via assigned advisors in the designated countries. ACCION currently has thirty-ﬁve international partners, resulting in one of the most well-established microﬁnance networks in the world. In the United States, by contrast, loans are made directly by ACCION USA.

WHERE DOES ACCION WORK? ACCION partners with more than thirty-ﬁve microﬁnance organizations throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa, as well as serving U.S. microentrepreneurs through the U.S. ACCION Network. For a more detailed description of locations see Table 8.1, and for regularly updated statistical information visit the ACCION website (www.accion.org).

ACCION KEY STATISTICS ACCION’s goal is to bring the full range of ﬁnancial services to ever-increasing numbers of people, in order to have a signiﬁcant impact on alleviating global poverty. ACCION’s partners and afﬁliates operate in twenty-ﬁve countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the United States. Since 1997 ACCION’s afﬁliated programs have issued $12.3 billion in microloans to more than 4.94 million people, with a historical repayment rate of over 97 percent. (See Table 8.2.) As part of ACCION’s commitment to rigorous reporting standards and strong ﬁnancial performance, the following reports are now available as PDFs on the organization’s website. Some of the documents offered online include historical annual statistics of ACCION partners in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and the United States since inception. They also include quarterly statistics by program of the ACCION Network in Latin America and the Caribbean, including data on new borrowers, active borrowers, amount disbursed, and active portfolios.

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120 Table 8.1 ACCION Microﬁnance Partners North America

South America

United States U.S. ACCION Network

Argentina Columbia Microcrédito (Banco Columbia)

Mexico ADMIC Compartamos Banco

Brazil CrediAmigo (Banco do Nordeste) Real Microcrédito (Banco ABN AMRO Real)

Central America El Salvador Apoyo Integral

Bolivia BancoSol

Guatemala Génesis Empresarial Banrural

Colombia Cooperativa Emprender FINAMERICA Fundación Mario Santo Domingo

Honduras Banco Popular Covelo (Bancovelo) FINSOL

Ecuador Banco Solidario CREDIFE (Banco del Pichincha) Fundación Ecuatoriana de Desarrollo

Nicaragua Financiera FAMA Caribbean Dominican Republic Banco Ademi

Paraguay El Comercio Financiera Fundación Paraguaya

Haiti SogeSol (SOGEBANK)

Peru Mibanco Venezuela BanGente Africa Ghana EB-ACCION Savings & Loan Nigeria ACCION Microﬁnance Bank, Ltd Tanzania Akiba Commercial Bank Uganda Uganda Microﬁnance Limited Asia China Inner Mongolia Microcredit Company India Grameen Koota Swadhaar YES SAMPANN (YES Bank)

Source: ACCION International.

HOW IS ACCION SUSTAINED? ACCION has been sustained in a variety of ways since its inception in 1961, and this remains true today. It is sustained through individual philanthropy, private foundation grants, public grants, and investments. It is reported that the bulk of revenue comes from private contributions but an approximate breakdown can be seen in Table 8.3. Table 8.2 2007 Statistics for ACCION Partner Programs

Active clients Total amount disbursed Active portfolio

Latin America and the Caribbean

Africa

Asia

Totals

3.03 million $5.01 billion

88,538 $123 million

1,976 $382,000

3.12 million $5.14 billion

$2.89 billion

$81.6 million

$169,000

$2.97 billion

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Table 8.3 ACCION Revenue Sources, 2007 Source Private contributions Contracts and training fees Investments and fee income Dividends from investments AIMCO management fees

Percentage of Operating Revenue 43% 21% 29% 14% 4%

ACCION is a 501(c)(3) nonproﬁt, and is committed to minimizing its administrative and fundraising expenses, consistently keeping these expenses at a level below 25 percent of total costs. For example, in 2007 ACCION (in terms of percentages of expenses) spent only 12 percent on administration and 12 percent on fundraising, while 76 percent was spent on program services.

HOW DOES ACCION MEASURE SUCCESS? ACCION measures success in a variety of ways. One can measure success by looking at the number of clients the organization is reaching and by the growth in the number of clients served. Another measure of success is the active loan portfolio of the ACCION partner network. All of these numbers, regardless of which you choose to use as a benchmark, are increasing. ACCION admits it took a long time to get to this point—over thirty years—but now that the ball is rolling, growth has accelerated sharply. ACCION’s website contains its annual report, which portrays the growth of the organization from its earliest days to the immediate past. For example, the report shows that it took ACCION three decades to reach its ﬁrst 1 million clients. The second million were reached three years later, in mid-2006, and the third million in half that time, by the end of 2007. ACCION also measures its success by going out to the communities, villages, and cities where their clients live and work, and asking them directly about the impact of microﬁnance on their lives. María Otero, ACCION president and CEO, tells a story of how one of ACCION’s Central American clients responded when María asked her, “How has microﬁnance helped you?” The woman brought María into the next room. There, hanging proudly on the wall, were her children’s diplomas from school. She replied, “This is how it’s affected my life!” She had been able to pay the school fees and to sustain a reliable income over time to allow her children to ﬁnish school. She herself had never been able to ﬁnish school, and she had always prioritized education in her children’s lives. Yet another example is Jose Antonio Sanos of Villa de San Antonio, Honduras, a client of ACCION partner Banco Popular Covelo (Bancovelo). He and his family live in a small village just outside of Comayagua, about ninety minutes north of Tegucigalpa. Axel and Dana, ages 4 and 7, race around their backyard climbing on, over, and through stacks of cement blocks. Jose reﬂects on the business that will

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someday send them to college. “Like any businessman, I want to grow,” he declares. “Like any father, I want to send my children to school.” Ten years ago, Jose started a cement block business with his brother and father. His father had mastered cement block making early in Jose’s life and wanted to pass on the lessons of the trade to the next generation. For many years, they worked as a team, but sustained growth was hard to come by on a tight budget. Nevertheless, consistent local demand for the blocks told Jose their business was a good one. Even when his father and brother left to work in construction in Comayagua, Jose carried on. His persistence paid off when he learned about ACCION partner Bancovelo’s ﬁxed asset loans for small businesses. After an enthusiastic conversation with the local Bancovelo loan ofﬁcer, Jose knew that progress for his business was now within reach. With a ﬁrst loan of 10,000 limpiras, or US$550, Jose was able to buy updated tools and better quality sand and cement mix. Within a matter of months, he had paid the loan off and had taken out a second one for 30,000 limpiras, or US$1,600, to buy the shiny blue truck that he now uses to deliver orders. With the right tools and materials, and a reliable vehicle, Jose is now surpassing his competition in quality and customer service, all thanks to access to capital through Bancovelo. He has more clients than ever and is employing two nephews to help him between their classes at the local high school. “Someday, when Dina and Axel are old enough,” he promises me, “they will help me too, but only after they get their studies done!” Juan Pirir, a client of ACCION partner Génesis in Guatemala City, Guatemala, has another story of success to share. When Juan was a boy, he had to work in the ﬁelds to help support his family instead of attending school. With little opportunity in his small village in rural Guatemala, he continued working the same ﬁelds into adulthood. But in order to support his six children, Juan needed to supplement his meager income. So he began to dabble in woodworking. Soon, he was spending his mornings on the farm, and his afternoons and nights building couches and chairs. He started selling them on the side, but the process was slow and the returns low. “I only had a couple of tools, and they were all manual.” he recalls. “I would work for three days to build just one couch.” Then Juan heard about ACCION’s partner, Génesis. With his ﬁrst small loan, he invested in an electric saw. Sixteen loans later, he has a full workshop of tools, including a modern table saw. Employing several neighborhood boys part-time, he can now turn out one couch a day. Several nights a week, Juan travels two hours each way to sell his furniture in Guatemala City. The proﬁts from his business have enabled Juan to add a room and a tin roof to his concrete house. But most importantly, he is able to provide an education for his children. “When I was young, I had to work. Now all of my children are in school,” he smiles. “It makes me happy to give them an opportunity I never had.” Alice Nkugwa is a client of ACCION partner Uganda Microﬁnance Limited (UML), and she can tell you that a successful business is not just about making enough money. “When the business is good, you don’t get tired,” she says with a

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smile. Alice, age 36, and her two employees work long hours, serving meat, beans, and chips at the carryout she opened three years ago. After working for seven years as a seamstress and dressmaker, Alice realized something critical: she would never “make enough money” in that line of work alone. Today, in addition to sewing shirts and dresses at home, she is dedicated to keeping her carryout open Monday through Saturday—and even some Sundays. Alice received her ﬁrst loan from UML in 2002, buying cooking oil, ﬂour, and meat with the precious cash. Since then, she has received four other loans, the most recent for 1 million shillings, or approximately $550. The sum is more than she has ever handled, but she’s not worried: “I have conﬁdence in my business.” “We would be badly off without the loans,” Alice says. “I’m not only running a business, I’m supporting my three children and four of my brother’s, too.” With a growing savings account and the experienced UML staff supporting her, Alice has peace of mind about her business—and ambitious plans for the children’s futures. “I want them to learn so they can get a job to work.” With business this good, Alice’s energy is boundless. She is planning on opening another carryout soon. And her plans do not stop there: “Someday, I will build a house to rent out. You can make good money with that, too,” she says proudly. Yet another client eager to share her success story is Lucila Mendoza Moisin, a client of ACCION partner Fundacion Ecuatoriana de Desarrollo in Otavalo, Ecuador. Lucila wanted to give her children everything she never had: a decent house, an education, and the skills to land a good job. But Lucila knew she could never realize that dream on her maid’s salary. So when she became pregnant with her ﬁrst child, she opened a business of her own, a craft stand in Otavalo’s famous market. To buy inventory, Lucila and her husband had to turn to a neighborhood loan shark. Soon they were spending most of their proﬁts on interest payments. Lucila’s dream began slipping away. Then she found an alternative: Fundacion Ecuatoriana de Desarrollo. She borrowed US$100, paid off their debts, and stocked up on inventory. Today, after three loans, the couple has earned enough money to buy a small house of their own. Now Lucila is optimistic about her children’s future. “My parents didn’t have enough for me to study,” she says. “With my children, it will be different.” You can ﬁnd similar ACCION success stories around the globe. All of ACCION’s microentrepreneurs have the same dreams and hopes: the chance for a better life for themselves and their families.

HOW HAS ACCION DEALT WITH CHALLENGES? ACCION concedes that the road has not been without bumps. The organization has had to adjust—sometimes in a major way—how it operates several times over the forty-ﬁve years of its history. One major obstacle surfaced early in the life of the organization, and remains a challenge for it and all nonproﬁts. Then executive director John Hammock was on a fundraising trip to Pittsburgh as Bill Burrus visited New York, both attempting, on the same day—a day later referred to as

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“Black Friday”—to secure signiﬁcant and much-needed grants that would keep ACCION aﬂoat. Both were turned down, and neither had any idea how they were going to make payroll the next week. Perseverance and determination gained the upper hand, though, and proved that ACCION was much more than an idea and that it would continue to prove viable. After that day, Burrus and Hammock decided they needed to be more creative and experiment with different ways to help solve the funding problem. According to Bruce Tippet, another founding member, they began examining their work in Brazil, where they had begun experimenting with microlending. Although the business world did not believe poor clients had the resources or “moral fortitude,” to quote Tippet, to pay back loans, ACCION had a different impression because the organization had had ﬁrst-hand experience with members of the community, and believed in their integrity. Within that ﬁrst year of microlending, 1973–74, ACCION discovered something that has proven to be a cornerstone of microﬁnance and has made it an effective tool in helping to alleviate poverty: the poor can be good credit risks. When the numbers came in, ACCION found that its clients were repaying their loans at a rate of 99.9 percent. Once the organization had proof that microlending could be effective, the next major obstacle to overcome involved expanding the model—to help more people. ACCION wanted to reach millions of people, not merely the hundreds their Brazilian pilot program had begun to assist. Over the years, ACCION persisted in its beliefs and practices, but remained ﬂexible—ultimately achieving what many had previously thought to be impossible. More than forty years later, ACCION continues to grow and adapt to ever-changing times and world conditions, and successfully: at the close of 2007, the number of active clients served by its partners was over 3 million, in no fewer than twenty-ﬁve countries. Until recently, ACCION had never had the ﬁnancial reserves to be truly conﬁdent that it could build a sustainable organization over time. But one of the hallmarks of the organization has always been its adaptability, which has allowed it to change its approach time and again to suit needs and market conditions. ACCION has evolved from community developer, to microlender, to loan guarantee provider, to investor, and to more, and in so doing, it has grown independent of some of the major sources of funds that initially sustained it. Today, public funds account for only a tiny fraction of operating revenue. ACCION has increased private contributions, together with corporate philanthropy, enormously. For example, in September 2006, ACCION received a grant of over $5 million from insurance giant American International Group Inc. (AIG). As it expands, ACCION knows that developing and providing new ﬁnancial tools for the poor, such as microinsurance, in order to allow microﬁnance to move beyond credit, is critical to help achieve scale. The AIG grant is assisting ACCION to realize that goal. Perhaps even more signiﬁcantly, ACCION has recently realized major assets from an investment in Mexican MFI partner Compartamos, which ACCION made through its Gateway Fund in 2000. Compartamos’s enormously successful

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IPO in April 2007, which underscored the viability of commercial microﬁnance and the deep interest of capital markets in the ﬁeld, not only proved a seminal event for microﬁnance overall, but provided ACCION with a far, far stronger ﬁnancial foundation. ACCION today is growing exponentially, compared to the past. By the end of 2007, the organization had already expanded to over 200 employees, and microﬁnance had more than made its way into public awareness. One employee said recently that two and a half years ago, barely anyone was acquainted with the word “microﬁnance”; today, it is a term recognized by most individuals at the grocery store. With this growth rate, ACCION admits it will need to remain ﬂexible as the pressures rise. Nonetheless, it admits there are things it could do, or could have done, better. “If there was one thing I would have done differently, it would have been to change our name early on to something more ‘marketable,’” says Bill Burrus. “We’ve suffered over the years because our name is not pronounceable by many people, and others just assume we’re a Latin organization.” Also, “I wish I had understood how to better raise the proﬁle of ACCION for fundraising and recognition purposes,” he concedes. “Over the years, we’ve been a well-kept secret that has often limited our ability to do our work. We’ve always been resource starved, in part, because we didn’t market ourselves aggressively to the public.”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR ACCION? ACCION’s approach is called the commercial model of microﬁnance. By ACCION’s estimates, anywhere from 30–50 million people currently use microﬁnance to improve their lives, mostly through working capital loans. ACCION believes, however, that for microﬁnance to reach the billions of people that could beneﬁt from it, a more scaleable and sustainable model of microﬁnance must be followed. ACCION is expanding the parameters of microﬁnance by helping to engage commercial partners such as major banks and insurance companies, and helping its partner monetary ﬁnancial institutions (MFIs) to tap capital markets. Now that the poor have proven to be credit worthy, ACCION’s goal is to continue to demonstrate, as the Compartamos IPO has shown, that the industry is investment worthy. Microﬁnance as a viable asset class allows an MFI in a developing nation to issue bonds or equity to fund its growth and build its organization, reaching more and more of the entrepreneurial poor. ACCION believes that only through this commercial approach can microﬁnance truly scale to reach the hundreds of millions of people who could beneﬁt from access to ﬁnancial services.

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS BY ACCION ACCION has published books, reports, and monographs that can be downloaded from the Publications section of their website. The topics range from predictions for microﬁnance in the next ten years to summaries of ACCION’s

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conference series, Cracking the Capital Markets. ACCION says that the organization takes a great deal of pride in its thought leadership and industry expertise, and this manifests itself in the publications it produces.

MANAGEMENT AT ACCION María Otero María Otero is president and CEO of ACCION International, a leading global microﬁnance institution that seeks to open the ﬁnancial systems in developing countries to reach the poor. Ms. Otero ﬁrst joined ACCION in 1986 as director of its lending program in Honduras, where she lived for three years. She became the president of the organization in 2000. Ms. Otero is a leading voice on sustainable microﬁnance and has published extensively on the subject, including as co-editor of The New World of Microﬁnance published by Kumarian Press. Ms. Otero chairs the board of ACCION Investments, a $20 million investment company for microﬁnance, and co-chairs the Microenterprise Coalition. She also serves on the boards of directors of microﬁnance institutions in Latin America. Ms. Otero serves on several other boards as well, including that of the Calvert Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, and BRAC Holding of Bangladesh, the largest nongovernmental organization (NGO) in the world. From 1995 to 2005, Ms. Otero served as the chair of the MicroFinance Network, a global association of 30+ lending microﬁnance institutions. She chaired the board of Bread for the World from 1992–1997. In 1994 President Clinton appointed Ms. Otero to serve as chair of the board of directors of the Inter-American Foundation, a position she held until January 2000. She has also served in an advisory capacity to the World Bank’s Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest (CGAP). Since 1997, Ms. Otero has been an adjunct professor at the John Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS). In 2000 she received Hispanic magazine’s Latina Excellence Award, and was also featured in Latina magazine. In 2005 she was proﬁled in Newsweek’s special report “How Women Lead” as one of twenty inﬂuential women in the United States. María Otero has an MA in literature from the University of Maryland and an MA in international relations from John Hopkins SAIS. She was born and raised in La Paz, Bolivia, and resides in Washington, D.C. William Burrus In June 2000, William Burrus was named president and CEO of ACCION USA, a nonproﬁt organization created to fulﬁll ACCION’s mission in the United States. Previously, Mr. Burrus had served as executive director of ACCION International from 1980–1994, a period of dramatic organizational development. In 1994 he

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agreed to lead ACCION’s U.S. initiatives in the newly created position of senior vice-president of the U.S. division. Mr. Burrus has dedicated most of his professional career to international development with a focus on Latin America. He began his career as a volunteer with the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic. He and his wife later served as co-directors of an integrated rural development program in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico, sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee. In 1973 Mr. Burrus joined ACCION in Costa Rica as regional director for Central American and the Caribbean. By the end of 1994, when Mr. Burrus began to focus his efforts on the United States, ACCION had developed a network of afﬁliated microenterprise programs in thirteen Latin American countries and ﬁve U.S. cities. By 2006, the U.S. ACCION Network had grown to ﬁve separate licensee organizations, three direct lending ofﬁces, and an Internet lending capability that, together, enabled the organization to lend nationwide. Mr. Burrus holds an undergraduate degree in sociology from Arizona State University and a master’s in international management from the Thunderbird Graduate School of International Management. Mr. Burrus has received the Warren Award, Service to Humanity from Verde Valley School, and a Career Achievement Award from the Thunderbird Alumni Association.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: ACCION Executive Director: María Otero Mission/Description: ACCION International is a private, nonproﬁt organization with the mission of giving people the ﬁnancial tools they need—microenterprise 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. Website: www.accion.org Address: ACCION International & ACCION USA Headquarters 56 Roland Street Suite 300 Boston, MA 02129 USA Phone: +1.617.625.7080 Fax: +1.617.625.7020

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Invisible Conﬂicts/The Dwon Madiki Partnership Evan Ledyard, Nathan Mustain, Amy Nemeth, Katie Scranton, Morgan Smith, David Thatcher, Carolyn Ziembo, and Diana Zurawski

INTRODUCTION Evan Ledyard Invisible Conﬂicts is a student organization at Loyola University in Chicago; it started out with only ten people, and within two years rapidly expanded to over 100 members. After uncovering heartbreaking atrocities in Northern Uganda, these students took the initiative to facilitate change in the lives of individuals living in zones of conﬂict worldwide. With limited resources, experience, time, and knowledge, the group did what it knew how to do best—build friendships. After creating personal relationships with the community in Gulu, Uganda, Invisible Conﬂicts launched the Dwon Madiki Partnership—a program that provides twenty war-torn orphans with an education, emotional support, health care, and more. The following pages contain the personal stories of the individuals who created Invisible Conﬂicts and the Dwon Madiki Partnership, and the people who inspired them. It begins with the story of the cofounder, Nathan Mustain.

FOUNDER’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY Nathan Mustain I am a high-school dropout and recovering addict. But now, instead of cocaine and speed, I thrive on justice and love. On a Habitat for Humanity work trip, I found the reason to clean up my life: love. This encounter with love challenged me to become a better person. In this new life, I now have the pleasure and privilege of working with my friends to make the world a better place—one life at a time, through Invisible Conﬂicts.

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HISTORY OF THE WAR Nathan Mustain (research by Amy Nemeth) In the fall of 2005, I read an article in Smithsonian titled “Uganda, the Horror.” The piece described a twenty-year-long civil war in northern Uganda1 that spawned a disaster that Jan Egeland, United Nations Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs in 2003, described as “the world’s biggest neglected humanitarian crisis.”2 The war between the Ugandan government in the South and the rebel army, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in the North, has persisted since 1986. This conﬂict has devastated the area in northern Uganda known as Acholiland3 and created a horror for the children of this region. With the people of northern Uganda growing weary of war, the rebels resorted to kidnapping children to ﬁll their ranks. The LRA targeted children between the ages of ﬁve and fourteen. They did so because children are easily brainwashed and big enough to carry guns, but small enough to sneak into villages and schools to kidnap more children. Once they were taken into the bush, the children were immediately desensitized, forced to watch other abductees being tortured and brutally killed, and often forced to partake in the killings themselves.4 Their victims were often mutilated, for example, left alive without toes, ﬁngers, or lips. Vaginas and lips were punctured and padlocked shut. Children were forced to lick the spattered brains off their friends’ cracked and crushed heads, which they were forced to beat to a pulp as they screamed and begged for mercy.5 To ensure that the children did not escape, the LRA commanders sometimes forced them to kill their own parents, eliminating any possibility of returning home.6 Since 1986 more than 30,000 children have been abducted.7 To escape nighttime abduction by the LRA and its brutal army of children, the children of Acholiland began to commute every night to Gulu, the main town in northern Uganda. Every night, thousands of children, called “night commuters,” would ﬂock to Gulu to sleep in the streets, under verandas, in the bus park, and in hospital corridors.8 The war in northern Uganda created a generation of children too afraid to sleep in their own homes. At the same time, they have been robbed of a formal education. As the war dragged on, the LRA’s raids on villages and schools grew more gruesome. In an attempt to counter the insurgency in 1996, the Ugandan government forcibly displaced all northern Ugandans who lived in rural areas and moved them into internally displaced person camps (IDP) camps. According to the government, such extreme measures were necessary to protect the civilian population and to cut off the rebels’ access to small farming villages, which were their main source of food and child soldiers. The government gave the Ugandan people twenty-four hours to uproot their lives and move into these camps.9 Anyone found outside the camps after the deadline would be treated as hostile rebel combatants. As of 2006, about 1.5 million Ugandans lived in the IDP camps where diseases, such as ringworm, malaria, and HIV/AIDS, run rampant as a result of the horrendous conditions in the camps.10

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People living in camps rely completely on foreign aid, such as from the World Food Program, for survival since the Ugandan government provides almost nothing.11 After I ﬁrst learned of the crisis, there were two things that especially horriﬁed me. First, I was repulsed at the thought of children being brainwashed, mutilated, and forced to kill. Upon further reﬂection, what began to haunt me even more was the fact that I had never heard about this war. I had always made it a point to stay up with news. I read the New York Times, listened to NPR and the BBC, and considered myself relatively well informed. But this war had been going on for two decades, and I had never heard of it. Why was the world not outraged at this holocaust? It was not as if people didn’t know. If Smithsonian could publish such a revealing article about it, the governments of the developed world must also have known. Why were the media reporting nothing? Why were the powerful governments of the world doing nothing? I decided I would make it my business to talk about this conﬂict. I would do my part to bring it into the public eye. I made quite a nuisance of myself. At the gym, between classes, and at parties, I was constantly saying to my peers, “So, have you heard about what’s going on in Northern Uganda?” I read everything I could ﬁnd about the conﬂict and its history. I made it my personal mission to tell this story to anyone and everyone who would listen. And in contrast to the stereotype of the apathetic American student, people did care. My fellow students wanted to do something to stop these crimes against children, but they felt powerless. I constantly heard “Wow, I really want to help, but what can one person do?” My inevitable response was “Maybe one person can’t do much, but if we work together, there’s no limit to what we can accomplish.” Yet in order to gather crowds of like-minded people together, I needed a way to tell this story to many people at once. I discovered it by accident as I continued to bring up the topic of children soldiers at parties when people were having a good time. One time during spring break, at a University of Texas party, I made my usual comment, “You’ll never believe what’s going on in Northern Uganda . . . ,” when someone replied, “Yeah, I know, I just saw this incredible documentary about it called Invisible Children.” He told me that his fraternity brothers had watched this movie together, and it had gotten them ﬁred up to take action. As soon as I got home, I visited the Invisible Children website and ordered a copy of the DVD. When it came in the mail two weeks later, I watched it and was ﬂoored. It was more than a documentary. It was a call to action. I knew I had my medium for telling this story to my peers.

INVISIBLE CHILDREN Amy Nemeth Invisible Children is a youthful, grassroots organization that began in 2003 when three college-aged American men decided to travel to Africa. Originally, Laren, Jason, and Bobby set out to document the story of refugees from Darfur, Sudan. However, because of the war, they could not ﬂy into southern Sudan, and

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ended up in northern Uganda instead. Gulu, the largest city in northern Uganda, is the center for the United Nations Peacemaking Mission to Sudan. The three ﬁlmmakers decided that this would be a good starting point for their story. One day, as they were traveling to Sudanese refugee camps, the truck in front of them was shot up by Ugandan rebels, members of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and they were forced to turn back and stay in the town of Gulu for the night. The city was completely overrun by unsupervised children, sleeping in every place imaginable—under porches, in the bus park—and hundreds of them were packed like sardines on the ﬂoors of a local hospital. The three ﬁlmmakers began asking them questions, and realized that they had never heard of the civil war in Uganda. The story they discovered “shocked and inspired” them.12 These three ﬁlmmakers soon learned that northern Uganda’s conﬂict had ravaged the region since 1986. The rebel LRA, led by Joseph Kony, aimed at overthrowing the Ugandan government to institute a government based on the Ten Commandments. Having little support from the people of northern Uganda, the LRA resorted to kidnapping children as young as ﬁve to ﬁll their ranks. It is estimated that up to 90 percent of the LRA are children.13 Laren, Jason, and Bobby made a documentary to tell the story of the “invisible children”14 of northern Uganda, who have become both the weapons and the victims of this conﬂict. After the ﬁlmmakers returned to the United States, they intended to share this documentary with their family and friends only. But soon they began screening it across the nation. At each screening event, people kept asking them, “What can we do?” Out of a need to do more, Jason, Laren, and Bobby created Invisible Children Inc. The mission of Invisible Children is “to improve the quality of life for waraffected children by providing access to quality education, enhanced learning environments, and innovative economic opportunities for the community.”15 The ﬁlm is exciting and entertaining, and helps audiences connect to the humanity of the children affected by the war in a way that our over-stimulated MTV generation can apprehend. I contacted the ofﬁces of Invisible Children in San Diego and asked them for promotional materials so I could hold a screening at Loyola University in Chicago, where I was a sophomore at that time. It turned out that Invisible Children was on a national tour, and they had a team visiting Chicago the following January. I thought that in the meantime, I would hold a screening myself. THE FIRST SCREENING Nathan Mustain I tried to reserve a room on campus for the screening, but the ofﬁce in charge of such matters informed me I could not do that unless I belonged to an ofﬁcially recognized student organization. At that time, I was not part of any campus organization. I was a science geek. I spent all my free time holed up at the gym or with my nose in a book. I had not plugged into any of the campus clubs that were involved in social justice work. When I approached these campus groups, none of

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them showed interest, since they were all busy with their own projects. That was understandable, but very frustrating. How could I do it alone? So I tried being a little sneaky, and set a precedent for Invisible Conﬂicts’ MO for the future: “It is easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.” I knew my friend Joey had started a campus club called Sangha before he graduated the previous year. So I called and asked him what I had to do in order to become a member. He said, “I hereby dub thee president.” I now had authority to sign contracts with Invisible Children, reserve rooms, and put up promotional material on campus, all under the name of Sangha. Little did the university know, but Sangha had never held an ofﬁcial meeting or a single event. I made banners and put up posters all over campus, on coffee shop bulletin boards, and in various spots in the local community. I e-mailed every professor on campus. I invited them and their classes to attend the screening, and explained why they should care, with different arguments for different disciplines. I wrote e-mails tailored speciﬁcally to political scientists, biologists, psychologists, and sociologists. I wanted everyone to know. Although I put my phone number on all the posters with a note inviting people to help with the screening, only two people responded. One was Morgan Smith, a sophomore transfer student who had been in the process of organizing a screening of the ﬁlm herself. We joined forces, and together we promoted the screening more effectively. Dr. David Kanis was the other person to call after seeing a poster at a local coffee shop. Dr. Kanis explained that he had been to Uganda several times, had in fact taught at a university in the heart of the conﬂict region, and knew the ﬁlmmakers of Invisible Children personally. He offered to come to the screening along with a couple of his Ugandan friends, and to respond to audience questions. On a cold night in January 2006, Morgan Smith, my friend Jeremy John, and I sat in Loyola’s Galvin Auditorium (we had been joined by the crew of the Invisible Children national tour) and waited to see if our efforts had paid off. Morgan brilliantly thought to ask everyone for their e-mail addresses on the way in. It was her thinking that enabled the founders of Invisible Conﬂicts to come together. The auditorium ﬁlled to capacity, with nearly 300 people. By the end of the screening, there was not a dry eye in the crowd. Then Dr. Kanis came to the front with his Ugandan friends, including a six-year-old boy named Joshua, recently from Gulu, and said, “This is the face of the war in Uganda. This child right here would be a prime target of the LRA rebels. It is children just like him who are being abducted every day and subjected to horror and brutality beyond anything we could imagine.” At that point, the crying in the audience became audible. I was struck by how powerful it was to put a human face to the stories we had just heard. It was on this night also that I ﬁrst met Caroline Akweyo, a beautiful and soft-spoken woman from Uganda who had been abducted by the LRA three times, suffered immensely, had her family sliced to pieces before her eyes, and ﬁnally made it to the United States where she received political asylum. Caroline shared her story in a very quiet and gentle way that demanded the attention of the audience. She further drove home the point that

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the people hurt by this war were just like the people in the audience, with real hopes and fears, people who feel pain and joy, and whose lives have been shattered by the bloody chaos of this war. CAROLINE AKWEYO’S STORY Interview conducted by Dave Thatcher; recorded by Amy Nemeth In 1986, when the war began, I was nine years old. My ﬁrst memory of the war was the killing of my uncle’s wife. She was a local brewer, and one of the rebels accused my uncle’s wife of poisoning him. The rebels came and cut her into pieces before the whole clan as I was forced to watch. The rebel movement was growing stronger in my village, so my father decided to construct a structure outside of the village where we went to sleep at night to avoid abduction. As time went on, abductions were more frequent, so my brothers were sent to a boarding school. In 1988 my father was arrested and interrogated by government soldiers because we had a large farm in our village that had become the center for the village. They suspected my father of supporting the rebels. After they found him innocent, they warned him not to return to our village. My father then moved the rest of my family into Gulu-town, which was about thirty miles from our home. We had no food in Gulu; so my mother, Grace, my sister, Florence, and I had to go back to our farm to collect food. The rebels ambushed us on our way and took Florence and me—they left my mother because she was older. Luckily, my mother was a school teacher, and one of the rebels was a former pupil who recognized her. My mother was able to arrange the release of Florence and me. I was eleven years old at the time of my ﬁrst abduction. When I ﬁnished primary school, I was sent to Aboke Girl’s Secondary [high school] in the Lira District. The war had gotten a lot worse. The rebels were cutting off the legs, ears, and other limbs of civilians, and they were killing people for minor infractions. At Aboke, the rebels would go and abduct girls. While I was in school, there were three different abductions. The school was run by Catholic nuns who would follow the rebels into the bush and attempt to secure the release of the students by bribing the rebels with money. The girls from Aboke were valuable to the rebels because they were educated. Many of the rebels had very little or no schooling, but the abducted girls were still treated as property. When I was sixteen, I was abducted from Aboke. The school had steel doors in [an] attempt to keep the rebels out. The rebels would shoot at the buildings and threaten to bomb them unless the doors were opened. Once the rebels got into the school, they would walk among us and choose the ones who were tall and slender. The rebels believed the tall and slender girls would be able to walk the longest distances and were also the smartest. I was abducted along with eighty-nine other girls. For the ﬁrst few days, we were forced to walk and run long distances. We had to resort to stealing food in order to survive. The rebels immediately attempted to interrogate and brainwash us—we were always under constant threat. The rebels

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would not let us [the Aboke girls] stay together because they feared that we would try and plot an escape. They paired us up with older girls who had already been in the bush for awhile and had already been brainwashed. Once in the bush, I was given to a commander to be his fourth wife. While in the bush, I had to watch people being killed, and I was not allowed to show emotion. As a wife, I was treated as property and was expected to stay with the commander at all times. Because I was the wife of a commander, younger girls were given to me and my fellow wives to cook and clean for us. I was able to escape while we were on the move between Kitgum and Lira. We were attacked by government soldiers and were commanded to lie in the grass until nightfall. After the ﬁghting, everyone got up and continued on the road. I stayed hidden in the grass and did not move or speak for the whole night. The next day, I walked to the nearest village and found the local counselor, who got me in touch with the government. I returned home in 1997 and discovered I was pregnant. I was sixteen years old. In 1999 I was invited to Chicago on a scholarship to learn how to become a Montessori teacher. When I arrived in the USA, I applied for political asylum and was granted asylum status.

INVISIBLE CONFLICTS BEGINS Nathan Mustain With Morgan’s list of e-mail addresses from the ﬁrst screening, we sent out an invitation for everyone to meet once again. Based on what we had heard and seen from the audience at the screening, and on what we had been thinking and discussing, I sent out this e-mail: Dear Friends, You are reading this email because like so many others, you have heard the cry of children living under the weight of terror, oppression and injustice, and you have decided to do something about it—i.e., you gave us your email address at the screening of Invisible Children last week. This is the call to action. This is an invitation to join the struggle for justice. This is our chance to live for something more. Perhaps like me, when you watched that amazing ﬁlm, several questions came to mind, such as 1. WHY didn’t I hear about this before? 2. WHERE are the western media? 3. WHAT is our government’s stance on the Ugandan conﬂict, and what is it doing to help bring about a just peace? 4. HOW can I help? Of particular concern to us is question #4, and answering this question will be the focus of our endeavors. We want to know how we can help. In the near future, a group of people just like you (and including you) will join forces to found an

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alliance dedicated to answering this call to action we heard so powerfully last Monday night. This group will be dedicated to being part of the solution by attacking the problem in several ways: 1. Raising awareness—it is vital that people hear the stories that our media are ignoring. It is up to us to spread the word. If we are silent, these children will remain invisible, and the murder, rape and abduction will continue. If we tell their story, people will hear. People will act. 2. Raising support—as a group, we will explore ways in which we can raise ﬁnancial, moral, and political support for those working on the ground both in Uganda, and here in the U.S. This is NOT a political group, but we WILL make it a point to tell our leaders that we want action. We will stand united, in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Africa. 3. Answering the call—ultimately, we would like to provide opportunities for those who feel called to go to the areas of conflict and work “in the trenches.” As Dr. David Kanis said last Monday, “I guarantee you that if 25 thousand American college students show up in Uganda over the next year, we will have MAJOR change.” We believe in this vision, and we want to be a part of that ﬁrst 25 thousand. We are also aware that Uganda is not the only sight of Invisible Conﬂict, and thus we will not limit ourselves to advocacy on behalf of that country. Rather, we will keep our minds, hearts, eyes and ears open to the cry of invisible conﬂicts and their invisible victims the world over. Uganda is where we begin. As they say, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” We will not stand by while evil men have their way. We have been inspired by the story told by Jason, Laren and Bobby, three regular guys about our age who decided to make a difference and use their talents to “be the change” they wanted to see in the world. This is our chance to do the same. We all have talents that were given to us for a reason. When we join forces and dedicate our skills and energy to making a difference, there is no end to what we can accomplish. Since this group has not yet formed, this is your chance to help shape it. We are open to suggestions and dependent on you to bring your ideas to the movement. You can make this your thing by bringing your unique talents to the table. Again, now is the time for creativity. Now is the time to educate ourselves and the world. Now is the time to start a movement. Let’s remember the boy at the end of the ﬁlm who said, “Hopefully since you have a camera; you can’t forget about us.” We won’t. Earlier, I listed four questions I had after seeing this ﬁlm. There has been, however, one other burning question that has been with me ever since I saw the ﬁlm one year ago: WHEN DO WE START? I am very happy to say, that time is NOW. Please let us know if you want to be removed from this list. IMMEDIATE NEEDS I. PHASE ONE: DIAGNOSIS: To hold an open forum open to all those who desire to help found this alliance. At our ﬁrst meeting, we will work on the following: A. Identify the problems we will attack B. Outline our response to those problems

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C. Determine how we’ll execute our response II. PROGNOSIS—the nasty details A. Discuss how we’ll pay for the execution B. Brainstorm various roles, ofﬁces, administrative and procedural needs, i.e., the nitty gritty —(i.e. What’s the problem, what’re we gonna do about it, who’s gonna do it, how’re we gonna pay for it; recognize those experienced in dealing with university administration in order to get our club ofﬁcially recognized by Loyola University.) C. Draft a constitution D. Elect ofﬁcers E. Get university recognition F. Establish a schedule and timetable for the movement III.EXECUTION—our movement hits the streets A. First ofﬁcial meeting as club B. First action C. First blood.

At our ﬁrst meeting, about thirty people showed up and we spent a few hours sharing what was on our hearts and minds. During that time, and at the next two meetings, we laid down a few basic tenets we would follow as we formed the culture and structure of our organization. The following is a summary of the vision that took shape during those ﬁrst meetings. First, we had to decide whether to focus just on Uganda, or to expand our focus to include other conﬂicts that are ignored by wealthier and more well-developed countries. We quickly found that the room was charged with passion, and that people hungered both to learn more about other places where unreported conﬂicts ravaged people’s lives and to take action to stop the violence. But we also wanted to focus our energy effectively on the conﬂicts we learned about. There was an intense desire in the room to know more, to expose the truth, and to ﬁght evil, whether in Uganda or in our own backyards. We felt our generation was sleeping, and we wanted to help wake it up. In order to remain ﬂexible so that we could expand our work to focus on other conﬂicts in the future, we named our new organization Invisible Conﬂicts: “Invisible,” because we realized that the world was full of conﬂicts ignored by powerful governments, western media, and college campuses. It was also a tribute to the people of Invisible Children, whose “hip,” fun, youthful, and positive approach to changing the world inspired us so much. Next, we dedicated ourselves to learning all we could about the conﬂicts we would address. It was important to read history and current news from all perspectives, and especially to engage people from the conﬂict zones—to hear their stories, get to know them, and help them tell their stories. We believed that if our peers heard these stories, they would want to take action. Our organization would be an ampliﬁer for the voices of victims. We would not speak for anyone, but rather empower people to speak for themselves. We would do this through art, ﬁlm, public gatherings, political advocacy, and the establishment of personal relationships with people from conﬂict zones.

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We did not want to stop at telling stories. We all felt a strong compulsion to take concrete action. Many of us were frustrated with abstract theoretical discussions about how to make the world a better place. We wanted to create a positive change in the world. Most of us were not from the typical “social justice” crowd. We were average college students from many different walks of life, faiths, political afﬁliations, and world views. We were united by a passion and a common desire to take action in order to change the world. To encourage people to join us, we needed to overcome several obstacles. Lack of awareness was the ﬁrst obstacle that we tackled by educating ourselves as much as possible. Next, we set out to overcome the feeling of powerlessness that infects our generation. To combat this sentiment, we worked out several strategies. First, we would tell these stories in a culturally relevant way. There can be no better example of a group that uses this approach than Invisible Children. Their documentary and other educational videos are done in a fast-paced, hip, and playful style that speaks to our MTV generation in its own language and urges viewers to take action. So we used their movie to help us tell the story of northern Uganda. Another obstacle to greater involvement among our peers was the existence of an “enlightened inner circle,” a phenomenon that infects many groups. From the very beginning, the people of Invisible Conﬂicts made a commitment to reject a culture of exclusivity, and to foster an environment in which people from any socioeconomic, political, or religious background could come together to work for peace. We believed that if change is to happen, we needed to help our peers in making the quest for a better world a part of everyday life. We wanted to enable the future leaders of America, the lawyers, businessmen and women, and accountants to be a part of this movement without feeling ostracized for not selling all they owned and moving to Africa to live in a mud hut. This is why we seek to put the tools for making concrete change in people’s hands, making it as simple as possible to make a difference. The earlier people see that their actions can change the world, the more likely they are to integrate the quest for justice into their everyday lives as they move on to build careers and raise families. We believe everyone can help. That is why we resolved to encourage creativity and even to get a little crazy if necessary. We would remain positive, but never deny the horriﬁc nature of the conﬂicts we sought to end. We were a group of everyday optimists, realists, and idealists, and we knew we could change the world, one story at time. But it was not enough to tell these stories. We wanted to be changed by them, and to become a part of them. We came to realize that it is one thing to ﬁght for peace on behalf of “poor children” in Africa, but it was another to do so for one’s friends. That is why we dedicated ourselves to establishing personal relationships between people in our own community and those in conﬂict regions. By using technology and art to communicate, we would build friendships with people in northern Uganda. We would also send people to the region to gain empathy and understanding, and to make friends. Fostering relationships in conﬂict regions has been an extremely important part of our work. The things we have learned and gained through these friend-

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ships have transformed us and brought us both pain and joy. From the beginning, we agreed that our guiding principle would be humility. We were not anyone’s “savior,” and we rejected the hierarchy of paternalism. We have resources to share as wealthy Americans from a nation of power and privilege. Yet we were plagued by problems ourselves and, therefore, had much to learn from our friends in conﬂict regions. We were never under the illusion that we had the answers to all the world’s problems. Rather, we wanted to make friends, to help them where we could, and to allow them to help us. Once we established that we had much to learn, we agreed that we would not wait to act until we felt “qualiﬁed.” We would take action whenever possible. All our actions were guided by our mission: We recognize that the world is full of invisible conﬂicts ignored by mainstream media and governments. We enable the victims of these conﬂicts to tell their stories, and we establish real and personal relationships between communities of power and privilege and those of poverty and oppression. Through the mutual exchange of values and knowledge, we ﬁnd practical ways to help one another, and transform communities, both at home and in conﬂict regions. Committed to cultural relevance and positivity, we encourage everyday people to take action by giving them simple and concrete ways to make a difference. By taking action ourselves, we lead the way for our peers.

TAKING ACTION: ENDING A WAR Nathan Mustain and Morgan Smith We had identiﬁed the problem: There had been a war targeting children ravaging Uganda for twenty years, and most of the world did not know about it. The people of Uganda needed to tell their stories, and the world needed to help them stop the war and bring about a just and prosperous peace. How could the problem be solved? The Sudanese government needed to stop funding and arming the LRA rebels. The people of America had to speak together and give our leaders the political capital they needed to take a stand for northern Uganda’s children. If the United States pressured the Sudanese government to stop ﬁnancing the war, and pressured the Ugandan government to take serious measures for peace, the war could be stopped. We needed to mobilize the American people and harness the power of the media. Our ﬁrst actions were to hold public screenings of the ﬁlm Invisible Children. Afterwards, our new friend and advisor, Caroline Akweyo, shared with the audience about her life in Uganda. This was always a powerful experience that enabled the audience to connect with what they had just seen in a human way. To everyone who walked through the door, we gave a pamphlet listing simple things everyone could do to make a difference. With the pamphlet were blank sheets of paper and pens, with which we encouraged everyone to write a letter to the government representative of their choice—right then and there. We projected a sample letter

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onto the screen at the front of the auditorium, but encouraged people to speak from their hearts about what they had just learned from Caroline and the documentary. This tactic helped audiences see the power that individuals can have when they come together. Then we collected the letters as people left, stamped them, and mailed them. Since the ﬁrst screening of Invisible Children, we have mailed nearly 1,000 letters to government ofﬁcials. In addition to a large letter-writing campaign, Invisible Conﬂicts began a campaign to ask Oprah Winfrey to cover the crisis on her show: we sent her sixty roses, with a note stating that each rose represented 500 children that had been abducted in northern Uganda. Naturally, we cannot take full credit for the segment about northern Uganda and Invisible Children on her show just months after our campaign began, but we did receive a call asking us to stop sending Oprah e-mails— they had gotten the picture. Noting the success of our group at organizing large screenings, the Invisible Children organization asked us to arrange and promote a peace vigil in Chicago as part of a worldwide event they were planning called the Global Night Commute. We provided volunteers to run the event, and promoted it all over Illinois. Over 2,000 people showed up, and most stayed all night in Grant Park, despite a constant downpour of frigid rain. We also bombarded the media with press releases and got coverage by most major news outlets in Chicago. In cities throughout the world, nearly 100,000 people participated in the Global Night Commutes. That night, almost everyone wrote a personal letter to their state representatives and to President George W. Bush, asking for the promotion of peace in northern Uganda. It is said to be the largest demonstration concerning African issues in U.S. history. The Senate took note and issued a joint resolution calling for peace in Uganda. They promised to allocate more resources to peace efforts, to increase humanitarian aid, and to help the Ugandan government rebuild infrastructure once peace came. The rebels and the Ugandan army signed a cease-ﬁre shortly thereafter, which, though tenuous, has held a fragile peace in place ever since.16 Aware that the work was not over when the guns fell silent, Invisible Conﬂicts has continued to work for a lasting and just peace in northern Uganda. In October 2006, we sent a delegation to Washington, D.C., for the northern Uganda lobby days. The weekend was packed with speakers, including Betty Bigombe, the ambassador from Uganda, and Ugandans who had been abducted by the LRA. The last day was spent talking to Illinois senators Barack Obama and Richard Durbin, as well as U.S. Representative Jan Schakowsky’s (D–IL) representatives about supporting the peace talks that were taking place in Uganda. The trip revitalized our understanding of the importance of raising our voices and asking for change. The organizations sponsoring the lobby days held a symposium for the students so that they could get a better understanding of the war in Uganda. As informative and important as it was to comprehend the situation, we got frustrated with everyone trying to theorize why there is such chaos in Uganda. It reminded us why we love Invisible Conﬂicts: we want to know the kids that bear

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the stories of the country. We want to make relationships and partner with them so that they know they are not alone. Uganda lobby days reiterated for us the importance of (1) building a strong connection with the people of Uganda and (2) taking political action as often as possible. The weekend in Washington, D.C., showed us that both are valuable and needed in order to create change. Our efforts to open the eyes of our community to the atrocities occurring in northern Uganda paid off. Since 2003, when Invisible Children made their documentary, night commuting and child abduction in northern Uganda have ceased. In 2006 a cease-ﬁre was declared and peace talks have ensued between the Ugandan government and the LRA. Because of pressure from civil society, many international actors, including the United States, have sent envoys to Uganda to show their support for the peace talks. One remarkable thing we learned from the many Ugandans we met through our advocacy work was what they wanted for their country. Whenever we met Ugandans, we made it a point to ask what they thought their country needed. Every single time they replied, “Education.” If Ugandans wanted education, we would do our best to help them get it.

THE DWON MADIKI PARTNERSHIP Dwon Madiki Beginnings Katie Scranton My ﬁrst taste of Uganda was in the Chicago home of Caroline Akweyo. Caroline had been attending screenings of the documentary Invisible Children for months, willingly sharing her unfathomable stories of being abducted by the LRA in Uganda. Invisible Conﬂicts had invited Caroline numerous times to share her experiences, and she always humbly accepted. As in any relationship, it took time before we could all become friends with Caroline, our new Ugandan acquaintance. I spoke to her only brieﬂy after screenings, ﬁlled with curiosity as to how a woman could survive war, cross an ocean, and so effortlessly speak to entire audiences of college students, professors, and locals. During the following summer, two of the founding members of Invisible Conﬂicts, Morgan Smith and Nathan Mustain, began meeting with Caroline in hopes of forming a personal connection between the Chicago-based college group and the children of Gulu, Uganda. Caroline told them that her mother, Grace, was a teacher in Gulu and had always dreamed of starting an orphanage for children affected by the war. Because of limited resources, Invisible Conﬂicts decided to put quality over quantity by supporting a small number of children instead of attempting to build a large orphanage. Providing about ﬁfteen kids with an education at the primary level was, initially, the most realistic task for the group. The next fall, Morgan and I often visited Caroline’s home in Rogers Park, a north-side neighborhood of Chicago, to discuss the vague, unformed ideas of supporting the education of a few kids in Gulu. First, we had to narrow down

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which children we would sponsor. Ultimately, we decided to support those that were most vulnerable—children orphaned by the war or by the AIDS pandemic. Our talks about the evolving partnership in Gulu were often interrupted by the smell of homemade Acholi food as Caroline would appear from the kitchen insisting that we eat dinner. We soon learned to show up at Caroline’s without a tight schedule or a full stomach. The side conversations between Caroline and her family in Luo, the food we were eating, and the unhurried pace of our visits made Morgan and me feel as if we had left the United States for a few hours and landed in Gulu. We were becoming friends with a woman of shocking history and immeasurable strength. Even after all she had been through, Caroline did not stop sharing her story and cooking dinner for us. On the day of the Gulu Walk, Caroline and members of Invisible Conﬂicts joined many others in solidarity with the people of Uganda by walking eight miles through the streets of Chicago. Morgan and I were strolling down the sidewalk casually talking to Caroline when an idea surged. We asked Caroline, “How do you say ‘the voice of tomorrow’ in the Acholi language?” She paused to think for a few moments. After searching the language of her childhood and her far-off home, she replied, “I guess that would be something like Dwon Madiki.” A name for the growing project had been born. The naming of the Dwon Madiki Partnership was not simply the choosing of a few words—it was creation of a vision. Our hope increased as we realized that our efforts would amplify the voices of children who had been robbed of a say in their own futures. A year later, Caroline’s daughter, Stella, said that in Gulu, the name Dwon Madiki “has a ring to it when people hear it there . . . the name is like poetry.” The ﬁrst responsibilities of brainstorming for the Dwon Madiki Partnership were passed on to Morgan and to me. Who were we to design a framework for a program in a country we had never visited and for children we had never met? We did not speak their language. We did not know their names. We were not acquainted with the protocols and procedures of an international nongovernmental organization (NGO). We did not even know how to call Uganda, let alone start an educational partnership. Later, Morgan and I arrived at a local café on Sheridan Road, ordered sandwiches, found a table, and let our minds wander. Our conversation was a whirlwind of ideas and theories and visions and themes we had each individually thought of for some time. How do we support these kids . . . we should amplify their voices . . . we can’t speak on their behalf . . . we need to let them do the talking . . . how can they express themselves to us . . . if they take pictures of their lives and do art, we could use it here somehow . . . we could do art exhibits . . . we could invite people and make it a fundraiser . . . how many kids can we support . . . what are we even doing . . . we’ve never done this before . . . how could we . . . we’re only college students . . . what’s the ﬁrst step . . . how do we move from theory to reality? Without the chance to dialogue and build off of each other’s inspiration, we would not have been able to piece it all together the way we did. And even then, our plan was not totally straightforward or even feasible.

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At our next Invisible Conﬂicts meeting, Morgan and I felt as if we would burst. We had been ﬁlled with some indescribable sense of direction that I would attribute to no one more capable than God. We entered the room that Thursday night at eight o’clock with overwhelming anticipation. The development of it all had unfolded before our eyes, and it was now time to update the group on progress. Since both of us were somewhat hesitant to speak in front of everyone, we talked to each other before the meeting. How much do we tell? Our ideas are not very well formed yet. Should we wait to update everyone until we have a more concrete vision? Our hesitancy was probably the result of more than just shyness or insecurity. When I asked myself why I would be apprehensive to tell such exciting news to the group, I had to confront a deeper, more personal possibility. The moment Morgan and I opened our mouths, the vision for the partnership would no longer be ours. In fact, it never was ours in the ﬁrst place, but in that moment, we were reminded that this belongs to everyone. This indeed is a partnership because it is held together not just by Morgan and me, but by Caroline and Grace and everyone in Invisible Conﬂicts, and especially by the children in Gulu. Morgan began that night, uninhibited. She shared the ideas of exchanging art and exhibits. She told of the new name, the Dwon Madiki Partnership, which even uses the Acholi’s native language, Luo, to capture the vision of amplifying the voice of Ugandans. The secret was out. And to our relief, the responsibility was no longer on our shoulders alone. We were joining forces. Our excitement had spread to all corners of the room. Our ideas were not judged for their likelihood or perfection. Instead, they had been welcomed as the ﬁrst steps toward the formation of a relationship with strangers across the world. I heard the voice of Uganda for the ﬁrst time late one night in a tiny Chicago apartment. I had never used an international phone card before. It was about midnight when I called because I was told it would be early morning in Uganda. The number was so long I almost forgot why I was calling, and the sound the phone made was so foreign to me that I was not sure if it was a ring or a busy signal. I heard the bright, accented voice of a woman answer while roosters sounded in the background. About a year before, I did not even know where Uganda was in Africa, and now I was calling to that distant country, trusting that there was actually a woman there named Grace, and that she would be expecting a call that morning before she left for school. We stumbled through the conversation because of the delay, but our delight to ﬁnally speak to each other dispelled any awkwardness. Soon after, Grace began informing us of their needs and hopes for the partnership. They agreed on the name Dwon Madiki, and she said that the ﬁrst move was to rent a small ofﬁce across from Lacor Hospital in Gulu and buy a sign to put out front. The estimate was $30 a month to rent the ofﬁce and about $10 to have a sign printed (see Photo 9.1). This was the ﬁrst time that Invisible Conﬂicts had to be ﬁnancially conscientious. Paying rent every month meant we were entering into a long-term commitment. There would be no turning back. Our ﬁrst wire transfer to Grace was just enough for the rent, a sign, and a few ofﬁce supplies, such as a stapler and a desk.

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Photo 9.1 The Dwon Madiki Partnership ofﬁce is located in the Labor Trading Center in Gulu-Town, Uganda. It serves as both ofﬁce and center for the after-school program. Courtesy of David Thatcher.

I’ll never forget the photograph Grace e-mailed to us of her in the ofﬁce, with nothing but a stapler on the desk. Yet that simple photograph captured the determined spirit of a woman in circumstances we had never known. The photo captured the face of a new friend and the beginnings of our journey as a partnership. We took the ﬁrst step to get to know the kids. One afternoon, we invited Invisible Conﬂicts members to write and decorate short questionnaires for the kids. We brainstormed fun, innocent questions to ask the kids, and we let them know they could answer either in writing or in pictures or both. Our desire was to include all the kids, so we asked Grace to help those who were too young to write. That day, about seven of us ﬁnished more than a dozen colorful sheets of paper, full of questions for the children, and mailed them off, eager to hear back from the kids. As a group, we felt that we could initially provide for ﬁfteen kids at the primary school level. That fall semester, we started meeting with Caroline to narrow down the category of children we would sponsor, deciding that we would support those that were most vulnerable. We regularly communicated by e-mail and occasionally by phone. Grace had chosen which kids would be included in the partnership based on criteria such as need, loss of parents, and trauma from experiences with the LRA. One day we got an e-mail with an attachment. All the little pictures and short biographies had

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been taped onto a sheet of paper, scanned, and e-mailed to us. There on a bright computer screen at Loyola University Chicago were ﬁfteen beautiful faces with names. These were the faces of Dwon Madiki. Weeks later, a thick package arrived in the mail ﬁlled with little drawings and our questionnaires—complete with answers to our questions in the delightful crayon scrawls of children. The drastic variety of their pictures stirred us. Some were of young girls cooking and boys playing soccer, while others were of soldiers, machetes, severed limbs, helicopters, bullets, blood, and death. The answers to our questions were just as varied. Some wrote that their favorite thing to do was eat or play, while others wrote that their favorite thing to do was ﬁght. In response to the question, what makes you laugh, some had simply written “ﬁghting,” or had drawn two men with guns (see Photo 9.2). We all held their art in awe and could ﬁnally feel a bit of these kids’ reality. It was clear we could not simply stop at exchanging art. It was time to move forward with the children’s education. Grace, as always, did work before we even asked her to. She had already found local schools for each child and had arranged their placements with the teachers. Now all that was lacking was money. It was early November; their school fees were due by January, or else the kids would miss out on an entire term of schooling. While Grace was putting the program together in Uganda, the students here in the United States were working on fundraising. How would we make enough money to get these kids through the year? Most of our money had come from small donations from the screenings, bake sales, and T-shirt sales. We discussed increasing bake sales and T-shirt sales, but knew that these alone would not be enough. So, in keeping with the young, innovative, and certainly ridiculous approach of Invisible Conﬂicts, we ﬁgured out how to raise the $6,000 in less than two months. Late one night at Morgan’s apartment, about a dozen of us gathered to brainstorm over some take-out Mexican food. An idea appeared out of nowhere. Partly as a silly joke, and partly out of frustration for lack of a better idea, I shouted, “Why don’t we just jump in the lake?” After a brief moment of silence, Nathan replied, “Why not?” Soon everyone was convinced that it was the best, most insane way we could raise $6,000 in two months. We were now going to jump into freezing Lake Michigan in the dead of winter. The name I.C. Plunge was cleverly coined. We divided up tasks such as who would research the safety, who would contact lifeguards, who would begin drafting an I.C. Plunge information packet, and so on. Who would have thought that too much Mexican food, a joke of an idea, and a few inspired college students would add up to the birth of an educational partnership in Gulu, Uganda? I.C. Plunge 2006 Morgan Smith December 2, 2006, was the day of the ﬁrst annual I.C. Plunge. After barely a month of planning the day’s activities, creating art to reﬂect our goals and desires

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Photo 9.2 The Dwon Madiki Partnership offers an after-school program for the children of Dwon Madiki and the surrounding community. This artwork was made by Aciro Mercy, a child in the after-school program. Courtesy of the Dwon Madiki Partnership.

for Dwon Madiki, and raising capital, the I.C. Plunge came into existence. Over thirty-ﬁve people jumped, and two hundred showed up in support. Together, we raised over $7,000, exceeding our goal by $1,000. The level of collaboration between students, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Metropolis Coffee Company, and bagel shops that occurred in such a short period of time was humbling. Many people

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took action right away and pursued various avenues of creativity to assist in the dynamic production of the I.C plunge. Students from schools all over Illinois, including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Illinois–Chicago, showed up ready to jump into the cold water. Invisible Conﬂicts members facilitated the sign-in and money collection, and dispersed information about the Dwon Madiki partnership. At around one o’clock in the afternoon, all thirty-ﬁve plungers headed outside into the frigid December air to take part in an idea that started off as a joke and would end up transforming lives of twenty students in another country. The jump was exhilarating. That something so silly could change someone’s life created an odd sensation. After we warmed up, ate some food, and drank hot chocolate, the amount of money raised was announced. It was shocking enough that we actually met our goal, but raising $1,000 above that opened our eyes to the possibilities that exist when we are courageous enough to be adventurous with our creativity.

The Establishment of Dwon Madiki Dave Thatcher and Diana Zurawski Before the plunge, the Dwon Madiki Partnership was little more than an idea. On December 2, after the participants had dried off, the costumes had been judged, and the money had been counted, the idea became a reality. By early January, Invisible Conﬂicts had deposited over $7,000 in the bank and had four members preparing for a summer trip to northern Uganda to set up the partnership. During the months of January to May 2007, the foundations for the partnership were laid. Dwon Madiki evolved from the mere ﬁscal sponsorship of education to a holistic program with integrated after-school and holiday-break components. Equipped with little knowledge of how to set up such an organization and program, a couple of members spent long hours on the phone communicating with Grace Odonga, the director in Uganda, trying to evaluate the immediate logistical costs needed to get started. We began by wiring money to pay for school uniforms, scholastic materials, and school fees, allowing the kids to begin their ﬁrst trimester of the year. Next, money was sent for basic start-up costs. We purchased a computer, printer, desks, and other needed supplies for the ofﬁce. Slowly, a legitimate ofﬁce and program began to emerge. The kids started to come to the ofﬁce after school, and Grace, along with four volunteers she had recruited, began to provide them with activities such as art, traditional music, and dance training. As the months went on, Invisible Conﬂicts continued to receive packages of the kids’ artwork. They were beautiful, heartbreaking, and endearing. Drawings of guns and war were scattered in between sketches of children playing and families cooking. All twenty-one of the kids were victims of a war that had robbed them of a childhood and of the most basic human rights, such as adequate housing, nutrition, health, and security. This realization powerfully hit home when at some point, one of the children, Jimmy Komakech, mysteriously disappeared. To this day, we have no idea where he is or what happened to him.

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With so many factors working against the kids’ capacities to succeed in life, we realized that just paying for their school fees was not enough. How could they do well in school and in life beyond if they received only one meal a day? Could the children succeed if they were exposed to debilitating sicknesses and diseases? How could we deal with guardians who are never fully invested in their education? It was these early insights that helped us to understand the need for a more comprehensive framework and a holistic program that would address the myriad issues affecting the kids. As this framework was developed with Grace and her volunteers, the mission and vision of the Dwon Madiki Partnership was born. VISION The Dwon Madiki Partnership (DMP) works for a world where orphan and vulnerable children of northern Uganda are provided the necessary resources, support and environment to succeed in school and achieve holistic development of self, family and community. MISSION The DMAP empowers children to succeed in school and life through • • •

provision of quality education engagement in & access to holistic development, activities, resources and mentorship fostering of personal relationships with students in Chicago through media, art and technology

In addition to the vision and mission, an ethos, or a set of guiding principles, also emerged regarding how we would accomplish the mission and operate a successful program. These guiding principles reﬂect that the program is a partnership, and not a charity. We call them The Four E’s: Guiding Principles—The Four E’s Educate ourselves and others Engage in meaningful, concrete, and sustainable ways to be catalysts for change Exchange ideas, stories, and wisdom to foster real and personal relationships Empower ourselves and others through education, engagement, and exchange

Following the establishment of the framework, vision, and mission, another important expansion of the partnership occurred when Invisible Conﬂicts teamed up with the Gear Up Alliance—a federally funded program that works with failing inner-city schools to prepare kids for postsecondary education. Invisible Conﬂicts members spent time with kids from failing inner-city Chicago schools during a summer camp operated by Gear Up. Members of Invisible Conﬂicts, Diana Zurawski and Laura Morales, talked with the kids about conﬂict, violence, and conﬂict resolution in their own communities. The culmination of the program was a conference call between the Dwon Madiki children in Gulu and the Gear Up kids in Chicago, during which they dialogued and connected over

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common experiences, hopes, and appreciation of hip-hop star 50-Cent. The ﬁnal question of the event was particularly poignant: a thirteen-year-old Chicago student inquired, “Do you ever get afraid to walk alone at night?” His voice had a certain sense of familiarity as though he, too, knew the fear he spoke of. The students on the other end of the line answered truthfully, explaining how war has affected their daily lives. Because we felt it was not enough to carry on a distant relationship if the program was going to succeed, in the summer of 2007, we sent four members, Dave Thatcher, Amy Nemeth, Lauren Springstroh, and Monica Mormon, to ﬁnally meet our friends in Gulu, Uganda. As the departure for the summer trip drew closer, the group began to organize fundraising events, donation drives, and sensitization campaigns. Donations included cameras, art supplies, clothes, toys, a web cam for the ofﬁce, vitamins, toothpaste and toothbrushes, soccer balls, and more school supplies. All together, the four traveling group members had a combined total of twelve bags (nine of which arrived in Uganda two weeks after the travelers did). The traveling team left on May 31 and arrived in Uganda on June 1. The kids in Gulu were extremely excited to meet the students, and wrote and sang this song for them: “I woke up in the morning and heard that my school fees were paid/For, that someone would care for my life so far away in the States/I wish, I wish that the angels, that the angels would never depart/And if it is possible to open our hearts, for you to see our love for you.” Seeing the program ﬁrsthand and witnessing the social, physical, and economic conditions within which the kids lived was a life-changing experience for the group. It was an experience of paradoxes: bubbling happiness arising from kids who lived in a sea of suffering. At the ofﬁce, the kids seemed to play happily as if they had not a care in the world, but it was in talking to their guardians and in visiting their homes that the atrocities of the war and the dire needs it had created became apparent. Besides the horrible economic and physical conditions the war had created, every child in the program had a personal experience of violence. Many had been born in the bush to mothers who had been abducted. Some had been forcibly made to witness torturous killings. Others had friends or family members who had been abducted, never to be heard from again. It all constituted a trauma-ridden life, through which the kids were astoundingly resilient. So how were college students, some just eighteen years old, supposed to understand and develop—in partnership with a school teacher a thousand miles away with her small cadre of young volunteers—a program that could address such issues? Was it even possible? During their stay, the team collected data from surveys conducted with the kids, their guardians, and their teachers. These interviews, supplemented by pictures and voice and video recordings, recorded the plight of children in northern Uganda. This documentation provided not only vital information as to how the program could be improved, but it also allowed the group to help the children by telling their stories in the United States and advocating on the kids’ behalf.

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The team was invited as guests on the main radio station in the North—Mega FM—to speak about the Dwon Madiki Partnership. The following day, the ofﬁce was ﬂooded with members of the community who had children they wanted to enroll in the program. After a summer of listening to and documenting stories of the war, engaging the community, spending time with the kids and their guardians, and seeing ﬁrsthand the IDP camps, the team returned with a wealth of knowledge concerning what needed to be done to empower the kids in Uganda in order to make the partnership more effective. Four developmental categories were identiﬁed to structure the after-school activities. These activities would address a range of issues impeding the kids’ ability to succeed in life, focusing on holistic development of self, family, and community. A speciﬁc vision and mission was created for each category: Health Vision: The DMP works for a world where orphan children of northern Uganda will perform basic hygiene, have adequate nutrition, practice proper disease prevention, respond in a healthy manner to emotions, and acknowledge their self-worth. Mission: DMP will provide supplies, adequate meals, education of disease process and preventive measures, emotional explanation and support, and encouragement. Social Values Vision: The DMP works to help children develop a positive self-image in order to encourage healthy social relationships with family, peers, and community. Mission: The DMP will help through multimedia activities, community events, and fun activities that encourage teamwork. Nurture and understand cultural values Develop a strong sense of self-worth Create modes of communication between children and community members Life Skills Vision: DMP works to provide children in northern Uganda with the necessary resources to help them envision their goals and future aspirations. Mission: This will be achieved through motivation: Provide exciting learning and multimedia tools Encourage goal setting through steps Cultivate positive self-image Develop a self and community value system Education Vision: The DMP strives for an environment in which children in northern Uganda would receive quality education, internalize its worth, and have access to the necessary support in order to achieve their academic goals. Mission: The DMP will Pay school and lunch fees Provide school supplies, uniforms, and tutoring Facilitate relationships with positive role models in the community Provide educational, interactive activities Cultivate the value of education with family and peers

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Uganda Trip, Winter 2007 Amy Nemeth and Carolyn Ziembo To build on this momentum, we knew that we needed to continue developing the program. In the fall of 2007, we began planning for another trip to Uganda. Three members volunteered to go during the month of December—Amanda Fuentes, Graci Willis, and Kate Reynolds. By assessing the situation in Uganda from the previous trip, we had determined the kids lacked proper health education. In order to give the children of Dwon Madiki the proper tools to be successful in life, we decided to prioritize a health initiative for the trip. The main goal was to implement a health program—which worked out well since Amanda and Kate were both pursuing nursing in school. The girls left with a mission to incorporate health instruction and health care into the children’s after-school program. This was to help facilitate basic health skills, such as learning facts about germs and how to ﬁght infection in everyday life circumstances. Other objectives of the trip were to re-evaluate the after-school program and progress of the kids, conduct more documentation and needs assessment surveys, and begin recording the kids singing, playing instruments, and reciting poems for a CD project.

I.C. Plunge 2007 Morgan Smith To make the winter trip feasible and to sustain DMP for a second year, it was time for another chilly swim. Since group membership had more than quadrupled, and in light of the previous I.C. Plunge’s astounding monetary result and the large number of plungers, we decided to challenge ourselves by raising our goal to $12,000. Unlike the previous year, we had time to prepare. During the entire fall semester, we vigorously encouraged college students, high school students, church congregations, and Loyola University faculty members to join in the I.C. Plunge. The teamwork that took place to prepare for the event was outstanding. We even involved local polar bear clubs, radio stations, and newspapers to help spread the word about the fundraiser. After all, the I.C. Plunge had been added to the “Top 100 Things to do at Loyola.” With the amount of time we had to organize the event, at the I.C. Plunge reception, we were able to demonstrate to the participants the signiﬁcance of the partnership through artwork and our own video documentary. To demonstrate the four developmental categories of DMP (health, social values, life skills, and education), pictures of the children in their daily activities were displayed by each category throughout the entire room. But the artwork was not just there for show—it was interactive, allowing people to respond to the kids by sending them their thoughts, encouragement, and prayers. The kids in Uganda even gave the plungers some encouragement. One DMP orphan was

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asked, “How do you feel about all them jumping into a freezing lake for the I.C. Plunge?” He said, “To me they are doing it because they love us, like they are suffering for us.” Eventually it was time for the plunge, and roughly 300 people were waiting at the beach for support. The weather was terrible. It was snowy, icy, and incredibly windy. Braving the harsh conditions, sixty-ﬁve plungers stormed into Lake Michigan, shouting and laughing—and for the ﬁrst time in her life, our dear friend Caroline Akweyo stepped into a body of water. Once all the donations were counted—the vast majority in $10s and $20s—we had surpassed our goal of $12,000 by raising over $15,000.

Amplifying Voices Carolyn Ziembo The artwork at the I.C. Plunge 2007 was an enormous success, and since we have made it a point to empower and amplify the voices of the unheard, Invisible Conﬂicts was given a unique opportunity to let the children of DMP tell their stories with an exhibit at the Push Pin Gallery in the Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA) in the spring of 2008. This public exhibit featured drawings and poems by the children, photographs taken by and of them, and other media, including bracelets and banana leaf creations all crafted by the Dwon Madiki kids. The LUMA exhibit was a thrilling opportunity for the children to explain and illustrate their stories through their own work. One of Dwon Madiki’s tenets remains to engage; thus, the exhibit asked viewers of the gallery how they felt about what they had seen, and explained what they could do to help and empower the children of the DMP. By allowing the children to tell their stories to people from across the world and by engaging these people in Invisible Conﬂicts’ mission, the LUMA exhibit brought inspiration to many guests because of the children’s spirit and faith against all odds.

VISION FOR THE FUTURE The Dwon Madiki Partnership Carolyn Ziembo Invisible Conﬂicts and DMP plan to continue evolving and improving. In November 2007, we purchased a plot of land near our Gulu ofﬁce. The land, in conjunction with a previously owned plot, will combine to create more free space for the children to play. On this land, Invisible Conﬂicts wants to build a soccer ﬁeld, net-ball ﬁeld, school, and eventually a new ofﬁce. In addition to these improvements, we would like to move all the DMP children into top Ugandan schools in the area. With increased funding, the children will receive better education in private schools, and have better resources and more qualiﬁed teachers.

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We have chosen to provide a sustainable means of education and empowerment, making sure each child successfully ﬁnishes his or her schooling. A quality and stable education prepares children to achieve and discover their goals in life. Thus, Dwon Madiki plans to make sure each child in the program completes secondary school. The Dwon Madiki Partnership has become a positive force in the community of Acholi people. They come from around the area to watch the children dance and sing songs. The hopeful nature of the children has brought together all kinds of people, especially in difﬁcult times. Eventually, we plan to increase the economic sustainability of Dwon Madiki in Gulu by fostering successful revenueproducing endeavors, therefore lessening the partnership’s reliance on our ﬁnancial assistance. We hope that our Ugandan partners will be able to sustain the program on their own in the future.

The Democratic Republic of Congo Amy Nemeth Another vision we have is to expand beyond Uganda and establish programs similar to the Dwon Madiki Partnership in other conﬂict regions. Since our establishment in 2005, we have been looking into other areas that have yet to be exposed to the Western world. In 2006, we were told the story of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) struggle and knew we could not turn our back on the DRC. Four times larger than France, the Democratic Republic of Congo is situated in the Great Lakes region of Africa.17 The DRC has vast mines of diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt, coltan,18 and cassiterite.19 Its history has been one of conﬂict and instability, inﬂuenced by the foreign policies of its neighbors and by policies of Western countries such as the United States. In 1998 it was the center of a war that involved six other African nations. The Second Congo War (1998–2002) also ushered in a period of foreign investment, during which many contracts made with Western or multinational corporations were done through third parties. Very little proﬁt from these resources found its way back to the Congolese people.20 It is estimated that three million people died during the Second Congo War.21 Because the conﬂict that still plagues East Congo is an international one, we believe that the international community has the responsibility to bring peace to the DRC. Peace in the DRC would greatly facilitate the establishment of peace in the rest of Africa.22 At Invisible Conﬂicts, we believe that, with knowledge and the right tools, people have the power to make a difference in the world. On November 30, 2006, we hosted the investigative journalist Keith Harmon Snow at Loyola University–Chicago. Before an audience of Loyola students and faculty, Snow enlightened the community on the atrocities that are committed daily in the DRC, and he also gave us concrete ways to stop these atrocities.23

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We ﬁrmly believe that a partnership between communities of power and privilege and communities of poverty and oppression is necessary to bring about positive change; thus, we strive as much as possible to listen and to partner with people from regions of conﬂict. In 2006 we partnered with Nugalula Kela, a member of Friends of the Congo,24 and Jacques Bahati, a member of Africa Faith and Justice Network,25 in order to better educate ourselves. Invisible Conﬂicts also seeks to lead by example. In 2006 we participated in the Run for the Congo 5K walk and run event in Lincoln Park, Chicago. Through this event, we showed our solidarity for the Congolese and raised awareness among the Chicago community. In 2007 we formed a DRC committee that is dedicated to ﬁnding ways to educate ourselves and our community on the situation in the DRC. We hope to screen documentaries about the DRC to the Loyola community and to host more speakers to talk about the DRC. The DRC committee has also provided us with a sample letter and key contacts in the political and business communities that have the power to inﬂuence an end to the atrocities being committed in the DRC. In 2008 we are planning to participate in the DRC lobby days in Washington, D.C., to encourage our legislators to make the DRC a priority.

CONCLUSION Evan Ledyard, Katie Scranton, and Dave Thatcher As the partnership between the students at Loyola University–Chicago and the community in Gulu continues to grow, Invisible Conﬂicts has expanded to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The UIUC chapter of Invisible Conﬂicts, led by Nathan Mustain’s brother, Patrick Mustain, in the United States and by Deacon Leonsyo in Uganda, has formed a partnership with the community of Pajule, Uganda; the group plans to create a program similar to the Dwon Madiki Partnership. Establishing more partnerships between other universities and communities around the world is what Invisible Conﬂicts hopes to witness in the future. By building more partnerships around the globe, more relationships will be formed and more lives impacted. You may hear people say that some situations are hopeless. But it is never hopeless. With the relationships Invisible Conﬂicts has formed over the past three years, the group has seen the faces of real people in these situations staring back with hope. It is easy to just write off devastating situations as hopeless, but we ﬁnd hope through our relationships with others—and that takes a lot of time, trust, openness, and commitment. Members of Invisible Conﬂicts have learned that creating change requires many small steps, and that the Dwon Madiki Partnership did not evolve without guidance or hard work. As Invisible Conﬂicts has demonstrated, doing big is not always the best way to foster change, but that big change can be found in the smallest of actions. However, the important thing is simply to act. Recognizing the importance of action, a member of Invisible Conﬂicts, Katie

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Scranton, has said, “I know that I cannot touch everyone’s life. I know that I am capable of so little. And yet in response to such a crisis, I have to make a decision. Either I love one person fully, or I love no one at all. Either I speak to one person with hope, or I speak not at all. Either I enter into service and uncertainty, or I move not at all. Either I become friends with a woman in Uganda that I’ve never met, or I come to know no one at all. Either I see hope in the foreground of despair, or I truly see nothing at all.” It is of this kind of belief and passion that the late Senator Robert Kennedy spoke in an address to the University of Cape Town. He said, “Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation. . . . It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is thus shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance” (Day of Afﬁrmation Address, June 6, 1966). We are standing up. We are raising our idealistic voices against injustice. Tiny ripples of hope are emanating from bake sales, screenings, letters, and summer adventures, carrying themselves from the shores of Lake Michigan to the heart of war-torn Uganda. These ripples are traveling the thousands of miles between shores on currents of intimate, personal, and empowering relationships. And they are gaining momentum. This is our story. It is a story of countless small actions and of the development of true friendships. This is a story in which a few hundred small donations opened a world of possibility, and where lives were changed on both sides of the Atlantic. Its success lies in the enduring, purposeful relationships that were established and that give so much meaning to life. In the very act of empowering others, in helping some to overcome the structures of poverty and oppression, we have in turn been empowered. The children of Dwon Madiki have empowered us with hope and with understanding. We have learned so much through our interactions with them. As they have recounted their stories of growing up in the midst of war, we have been able to glean what it means to embody courage and strength. This has carried over to all that we do and has given us the courage to continue forward. As the kids’ grades continue to improve and as three meals a day become a constant occurrence in their lives, the ripples continue to spread. Our ﬁrst child graduated from middle school this past year and will be moving on to high school. Her name is Joan, and she wants to be a doctor. She has discovered empowerment for the ﬁrst time, and her story is our story. To quote the social activist Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever does.”26

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APPENDIX: WHAT YOU CAN DO Act with Invisible Conﬂicts–Loyola: Participate in the I.C. Plunge Donate to us online at www.invisibleconﬂicts.org Start a chapter of Invisible Conﬂicts at your church, high school, or college E-mail us to see how you can get involved at invisibleconflicts. [email protected] Act on YOUR Issue/Passion: SMALL Ways to Make a Difference Educate Yourself: Research the issue Google alerts Talk to people from the conﬂict regions (from local NGOs, etc.) Gather People: Find others concerned about a similar issue Talk to local schools with likeminded groups Contact churches Send out e-mails Make Facebook groups Put up posters in café Begin to Act: Screen documentaries Present at functions Meet people from conﬂict zones Ask them how to partner Contact local art stores for supplies Write to the government (go to http://www.congress.org/congressorg/home/ to ﬁnd the contact information for your ofﬁcials in Congress) Links Websites: Uganda www.invisibleconﬂicts.org www.invisiblechildren.com http://www.ugandarising.com/home.html http://www.ugandacan.org/ http://www.enoughproject.org/uganda

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Websites: Democratic Republic of Congo http://www.afjn.org/d.r.congo/overview/ http://www.enoughproject.org/congo http://www.friendsofthecongo.org/ http://www.runforcongowomen.org/ Sample Letter: Uganda Dear _______________, I write to express my deep concern about the conﬂict in northern Uganda. For more than twenty years, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has been ﬁghting to overthrow the government of Uganda. The LRA rebels have captured more than 30,000 children to use as frontline soldiers and sex slaves. Fear of abduction causes thousands of children to ﬂee their rural homes each night. The conﬂict has uprooted at least 80 percent of northern Uganda’s population, and up to 1.3 million people live in squalid camps that usually lack adequate clean water and sanitation. Leadership from the United States can bring peace to this troubled region. I respectfully ask that you advocate for the following: The U.S. must support and strengthen the Juba peace process. Peace talks are at a critical time right now and need support from the U.S. and the international community to succeed. Call the State Department, urging them to publicly support the peace talks. • •

Increase humanitarian and development assistance for northern Uganda. More than 1.3 million people are displaced by this conﬂict and are dependent on international assistance. Please see that U.S. aid will not be decreased even though there is now relative peace in the region. • Please call for and participate in public hearings to examine the crisis in northern Uganda. Your attention to this urgent matter can drastically improve the lives of those in northern Uganda —especially those of children. Sincerely, ____________________

Sample Letter: Democratic Republic of Congo Dear _____________ Although in recent months peacekeeping efforts in Darfur and Northern Uganda have been gaining greater media attention, one conﬂict has remained under the radar. Violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo has reached a critical point.

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According to the Enough! Project (www.enoughproject.org), 260,000 people have been displaced, and dozens of innocent bystanders have been injured or killed as a result of factionalized militant groups such as the Rasta militia. The relations between these many groups are incredibly complex; among the militias are groups led by Hutu rebels who were involved in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Many of these militias have been involved in brutal atrocities against villagers in the DRC. Adding to the complexity of the military operations are the UN peacekeeping missions, which have been reduced to barely more than an observer role. The time to act is now. The United States, a leading player on the global stage, needs to work with our allies and the UN in order to press the Congolese government to neutralize these militant groups and develop an aid plan, including the stabilization of both the political and humanitarian crises in the DRC. More detailed information on this and other conﬂicts is available at www.enoughproject.org. As one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations in the world, the United States government needs to step up its awareness and aid of all conﬂicts, not just those gaining media attention. Sincerely, ____________________ Thank you!

Acknowledgments All of us at Invisible Conﬂicts would like to express our thanks to •

•

•

•

•

• •

Invisible Children, whose moving documentary inspired us at Loyola University–Chicago to take action. We have learned so much from your organization, and we thank you for your courage and insight. Dr. David Kanis, our exceptional resource for the conﬂict in northern Uganda. You have taught us so much, and we can not express our gratitude for your patience in our journey to establish our group. Caroline Akweyo, your strength has been an inspiration to us all. You have become a wonderful friend and advisor to our group. Without Caroline, the Dwon Madiki Partnership would not be in existence. Grace Odonga, our director in Uganda, who has dedicated countless hours and resources to helping us make the Dwon Madiki Partnership a reality. We cannot thank you enough for opening up your heart and home to the children of Dwon Madiki. The volunteers at the Dwon Madiki Partnership: Kevin Opira, Paul Onono, Lily, Robert Komakech, and Simon Ojara for your dedication to the success of the Dwon Madiki Partnership. Drew Tessler, our dear friend from the Gear-Up Alliance. Your kind heart and hard work is what has connected lives between students in Chicago and DMP. Jacques Bahati, our invaluable contact into the horrors of the conﬂict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Your passion has aroused us all at Invisible

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• •

•

•

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Conﬂicts to take action to help end the conﬂict in the DRC. Thank you for opening our eyes to another tragic conﬂict in the world. Dr. Patrick Boyle, who was our faculty advisor for the ﬁrst two years. Thank you for putting your faith in our brand-new group. Dr. Chris E. Stout, a new friend to Invisible Conﬂicts. We thank you for giving us the opportunity to be a part of this project. We look forward to years of alliance and mentorship in the future. Dr. John Donoghue, our new friend and faculty advisor. Your encouragement and support has meant so much to us; it gives us hope for the future of Invisible Conﬂicts. Our families and friends of Invisible Conﬂicts. Your love, support, and prayers have made us who we are today. Thank you for your patience and understanding, despite our constant bombardments for things such as pledges to jump into Lake Michigan in December.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Invisible Conﬂicts/Dwon Madiki Partnership Founder: Nathan Mustain Mission/Description: 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 over 30,000 Ugandan children, forcing them to be sex slaves and ﬁght as soldiers. Because of these atrocities, all of the Dwon Madiki Partnership–sponsored children live in squalid conditions in and around the many displacement camps. Since 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. The Dwon Madiki Partnership, by funding the education of these children and addressing their developmental needs, offers them a chance to succeed and in turn give back to their communities, thus helping break the cycles of poverty and violence caused by the war. Website: www.invisibleconﬂicts.org Address: Invisible Conﬂicts Crown Center 6525 North Sheridan Road Room 546 Chicago, IL 60626 USA Phone: (412) 5807284 E-mail: invisibleconﬂ[email protected]

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NOTES 1. P. Raffaele, “Uganda: The Horror,” Smithsonian (February 2005) (retrieved from http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/uganda.html?c=y&page=1). 2. Uganda Conﬂict Action Network, “Religious Sign-On Letter for Peace in Northern Uganda” (2006) (retrieved December 22, 2007, from http://www.ugandacan.org/ signonletter.php). 3. C. Mansour (writer), and L. Poole and J. Russell (directors), Invisible Children [motion picture], (USA, 2005). Acholi is an ethnic tribe from Uganda. Many Uganda simply call northern Uganda “Acholi-Land” because the majority of the population from northern Uganda are Acholis. 4. Invisible Children, 2005. 5. P. Raffaele, “Uganda: The Horror,” Smithsonian (February 2005) (retrieved from http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/uganda.html?c=y&page=1). 6. P. McCormack (writer), and P. McCormack and J. J. Miller (directors), Uganda Rising [motion picture] (Canada: Mindset Media, 2006). 7. Uganda Conﬂict Action Network, “The Conﬂict” (2006) (retrieved December 21, 2007, from http://www.ugandacan.org/history.php). 8. Invisible Children, 2005. 9. Invisible Children, History of the War (retrieved October 11, 2007, from http://www.invisiblechildren.com/about/history/). 10. K. Drews, “A Long Way Gone: Four LU Students Volunteer in Uganda.” Phoenix, closer look (September 12, 2007). 11. D. Thatcher (producer/writer), Freezin for a Reason [motion picture] (USA, 2007). 12. Invisible Children, 2005. 13. Invisible Children, History of the War. 14. These children are “invisible” because “they roam distant battleﬁelds away from public scrutiny, because no records are kept of their numbers or age, because their own armies deny they exist” (Invisible Children, 2005). 15. Invisible Children (retrieved October 11, 2007, from http://www.invisiblechildren. com/theMission). 16. Invisible Children (retrieved January 5, 2008, from http://www.invisiblechildren. com/theMovie/media/). 17. History of the War, DR Congo’s Life or Death Transition [Motion picture] (USA: Catholic Relief Services 2006). 18. Coltan, or colombo-tantalite ore, is used to make pinhead capacitors and is an essential component used in all cell phones. Congo contains 80 percent of the world’s reserves of coltan. 19. Cassiterite, or tin oxide, is a mineral used for electronic circuit boards. It is the most traded metal on the London Exchange. 20. Natural Resources in Conﬂict: Democratic Republic of Congo. (n.d.), Global Witness (retrieved January 2, 2008, from http://www.globalwitness.org/). 21. Country Proﬁle: Democratic Republic of Congo (2007, October 13). British Broadcasting Company (retrieved January 2, 2008, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/ country_proﬁles/1076399.stm). 22. J. Bahati (2007, November 3). Interview with Jacques Bahati. Interview presented at lunch with Invisible Conﬂicts. 23. W. Barrett (2006, December 6). Hidden Reality: Award-winning journalist Keith Harmon Snow visits Loyola to discuss. Phoenix, news (retrieved January 2, 2008, from

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Loyola University Chicago website: http://media.www.loyolaphoenix.com/media/ storage/ paper673/news/2006/12/06/News/Hidden.Reality-2523951.shtml). 24. http://www.friendsofthecongo.org/. 25. http://www.afjn.org/. 26. The Institute for Intercultural Studies (retrieved June 12, 2008, from http://www.inter culturalstudies.org/faq.html#quote).

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10

Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL) Earl Martin Phalen and Teresa Barttrum

Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL) is a nonproﬁt educational organization that runs academically focused programs for children. The organization deﬁnes education broadly but divides it into three main categories: the mastering of the basic skills, the development of social skills (in terms of how people interact as a community), and the knowledge of self. BELL recognizes the pathway to opportunity for children lies in education. BELL transforms children into scholars and leaders through the delivery of nationally recognized, high-impact summer and after-school educational programs. BELL exists to dramatically increase the academic achievements, self-esteem, and life opportunities of children living in low-income, urban communities. BELL pursues a goal that 100 percent of their scholars will achieve academic and social proﬁciency in their formative elementary school years. It is the organization’s hope that BELL scholars will graduate from college and pursue meaningful career paths. They will, hopefully then, give back to their community. They will be great fathers and mothers, friends and mentors, leaders and citizens. BELL is one part of a larger movement of social entrepreneurs dedicated to the evolution of society and the achievement of a more equitable and just world. BELL sees itself as a part of the civil and human rights movement. The organization’s leaders believe in persistence, unyielding faith, and acknowledgment of past sacriﬁces. Earl Martin Phalen, BELL’s cofounder and CEO, refers back to the days of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. Individuals risked their security and their children’s security for something that was right. Therefore, Phalen believes that when individuals are able to step back and immerse themselves in history, in terms of recognizing the sacriﬁces others are making to achieve a particular goal, individuals quit complaining because they realize that what individuals do today does not even come close to the sacriﬁces that were made to open

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doors for us today. This recognition underlies the patience and drive for BELL’s success today. 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.” BELL was founded in 1992 by a group of black and Latino students from Harvard Law School as a community service project conducted at the Agassiz School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Led by Earl Martin Phalen and Andrew L. Carter, the law students wanted to give back to the community in the same way others had given back to them or had opened opportunities for them in their lives. The students began a small tutoring program in a local school in Roxbury, Massachusetts, where most children could not read, write, or do math at gradelevel proﬁciency. The students quickly discovered it was easy to get their scholars’ aspirations to rise, but most of the children in the program had not mastered the basic foundation of academic skills that would allow them to meet their heightened dreams. After the ﬁrst pilot program with its initial group of twenty scholars, Phalen and his colleagues were motivated by their results. They then partnered with a group of parents and decided a need existed to formalize a program. Phalen believed the mentoring portion of the program inspired children and helped them to believe in themselves, so this portion of the pilot program remained. A rigorous academic program was added to help make sure the scholars mastered the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. BELL was able to follow this initial group of twenty scholars and discovered that every member had enrolled in or graduated from college, compared to only 30 percent of their peers. In 1993 BELL partnered with both the Agassiz Elementary School in Cambridge and the Tobin Elementary School in Roxbury, and established itself as a nonproﬁt organization. Co-founder Earl Martin Phalen continues to lead BELL, and Phalen’s mentor, Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree Jr., served as board chair for thirteen years before transitioning to board chair emeritus. BELL evolved and complemented its BELL After School Program with the BELL Summer Program in 1996 to achieve an even greater impact on children’s lives. BELL soon began making partnerships, winning awards, and maintaining quality service as it evolved. It was not long before BELL found itself expanding to other cities. In 1997 BELL expanded to New York City and two years later began work to Washington, D.C. As of 2007, BELL has 12,180 scholars in the summer and after-school programs. BELL now runs programs in Baltimore, Boston, Detroit, New York, and Springﬁeld (MA). BELL’s original group of twenty volunteers has expanded to approximately 1,200 employees; 1,000 of these are part-time positions. Of the 1,000 employees, 50 percent are teachers, and the other 50 percent are college and

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Figure 10.1 BELL hopes, in pursuing its mission, that their impact on children is not limited to the reach of their programs, but that they also present models to be replicated and applied throughout the world to help thousands or even millions of children excel. Courtesy of BELL.

graduate student tutors. The remaining are full-time employees who handle administration and lead the school-based sites. In pursuing its mission, BELL hopes the impact on children is not limited to the reach of the programs, but that the programs also present models to be replicated and applied throughout the world to help thousands, even millions, of children excel. There is no limit to the impact BELL can have on education; there is no limit to what a child can achieve with the support and guidance of caring tutors and mentors. BELL’s vision is centered on a belief in the limitless potential of all children. By providing the best after-school and summer educational programs, BELL is helping children develop the core reading, writing, and math skills children need to succeed in school and in life. BELL does not limit its work to teaching children academic skills; rather, BELL seeks to instill, through mentorship and high expectations, a strong belief among all children that they can pursue their dreams. BELL also believes that engaging parents in the education process will strengthen schools, and engaging young adults in meaningful service experience will strengthen communities. BELL provides support for parents to engage as advocates and facilitators of their children’s education. BELL celebrates the values of community and diversity, and helps

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children, families, and adults take ownership of their shared resources and vision for their communities. BELL programs offer tutoring in literacy and math with research-based and multicultural curricula. The scholars are mentored by positive adult role models to build self-esteem and respect for others. BELL maintains a staff of committed, certiﬁed teachers and trained college-age tutors. The programs are run in small groups and consist of experiential learning through guest speakers, ﬁeld trips, and service projects. In BELL programs, scholars excel. In each of the last ﬁve years, every child entering BELL at the failing level in reading and math advanced to a higher academic level. More than 80 percent of BELL scholars achieved proﬁcient or advanced levels in core skills, compared to 30 percent of their peers. Originally, the BELL After School Program was a two-day-a-week program. Over time parents began voicing their desire to have the program offered more days a week. The summer program operates ﬁve days per week, eight hours per day; and now the after-school program operates three, four, or ﬁve days per week, based on the school system. With that schedule in place, BELL expanded and made the transition from volunteer staff to paid positions to allow the program to operate more days per week. This transition to paid staff was made for two primary reasons. First, with BELL expanding, the organization realized that in order to make this commitment, it would need consistent staff. This would ensure the curriculum would be covered thoroughly and consistently, and would help provide quality services. In order to have this consistency in staff, BELL would have to create paid positions. Second, BELL found it difﬁcult to maintain mentors of color for the program. Phalen and others were approached by students of color who loved donating their time to mentor and tutor children, but they often found themselves needing paid part-time employment. They were forced to quit volunteering in order to ﬁnd paying jobs. It was very important to BELL to maintain a majority of students of color as tutors so the BELL scholars can see role models, who may not be from Baltimore, Boston, Detroit, New York or Springﬁeld (MA), but who may be from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston. These tutors grew up in tough communities, and they, too, aspired to attend college. They made this one of their goals and were living that goal. BELL wanted to make sure kids saw living, breathing examples that looked like them and who could inspire them to work hard. To creatively overcome this obstacle, BELL applied to have mentors and tutors paid through work-study positions. As it continued to grow, BELL began to pay its tutors directly. BELL has continued to pay staff in order to ensure consistency of instruction and also to maintain a majority of role models of color. When BELL ﬁrst started, people thought the idea of using after-school time and summer hours for academics were ridiculous. Many voiced concerns that these hours were best used for art, music, and play because children had already worked hard in school. Phalen believes children need a holistic education, and BELL’s summer program has that: morning is academics and afternoon is art,

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drama, ﬁeld trips, guest speakers, music, and service projects. Phalen illustrates his point by the following example: If your child could not read, and you had the choice of helping him or her learn to read for two hours or play basketball for two hours, which would you rather the child do? Phalen responds to his own example by saying, “Quite frankly, I don’t care what your answer is because these scholars are like my children, and I know when they are sixteen and seventeen, and I see them on the streets and they say, ‘Mr. Phalen you didn’t prepare me with what I needed to be successful.’ I don’t want to do that to them. We are going to teach them how to read and raise their self-esteem about who they can become and make sure they understand that when they move on to do great things, they better turn around and give back to others.”

BELL AFTER SCHOOL At BELL, learning does not stop when school is over for the day. The BELL After School Program is a supplemental educational program designed to boost children’s academic and social achievements in a safe and supportive environment. BELL After School meets on weekdays for 2.5 hours per day at school-based sites. In the program, scholars receive a nutritious snack before certiﬁed teachers and highly trained university students provide one hour of literacy tutoring to scholars in small groups (see Table 10.1). BELL staff use a skills-based, multicultural curriculum to help scholars learn core reading and writing skills. Literacy tutoring is followed by forty minutes of homework help, with an emphasis on math. Scholar-choice enrichment completes the day, and includes activities such as art, drama, dance, and physical education. Special activities such as guest speakers and cultural presentations contribute to scholars’ healthy social development.

BELL SUMMER BELL recognizes that one of the best strategies for impacting children’s achievements is to provide educational opportunities when they are on summer vacation. That is why the organization developed the BELL Accelerated Learning Summer Program (BELL Summer). Summer learning programs such as BELL Summer help children use the summer season to advance their academic performance and broaden their understanding of the world. Every year, BELL’s summer outcomes show the impact the program has on the academic achievements and social development of the scholars. In the program, scholars gain an average of six months in grade-equivalent reading, writing, and math skills (see Figure 10.3). Today, researchers have ﬂocked to quantify the effectiveness of summer learning programs on the academic and social developments of children. Most recently, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation released a report titled The Learning Season: The Untapped Power of Summer to Advance Student Achievement. Among their key

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168 Table 10.1 Typical Day in the BELL After School Program* Daily Schedule 3:00–3:30

Snack and Community Time

3:30–4:30

Literacy Activities

4:30–5:10

Homework and Math

5:10–5:30

Enrichment Activities

5:30 Fridays

Session ends Mentor Fridays

Description Community Time provides scholars the opportunity to develop positive, supportive peer relationships through group activities. Literacy tutoring uses skills-based curricula and a leveled readers’ library of more than 100 multicultural children’s books. Literacy activities also include journal writing, independent reading, and guided reading. Math tutoring uses a skills-based curriculum and a variety of manipulatives to develop an understanding of basic math concepts and skills. BELL also provides individualized help with school-assigned homework. Scholars end the day engaged in educational games and team-building activities. Session ends, and parents pick up children. Special activities, including cultural, athletic, or performing arts activities, art workshops, community service projects, and ﬁeld trips.

*Schedule varies by location. Source: BELL After School Program Description (2007).

ﬁndings, one is strongly aligned with BELL’s own assessment of the impact of outof-school-time educational opportunities: The summer months represent a unique slice of time, when children can learn and develop in myriad ways that will help them in school and far beyond. Summer learning is not just about retaining information; it is about problem-solving, analyzing and synthesizing information, generating new ideas and, working in teams, learning to be with all kinds of people—all skills that help building learning in a broad way, and can, at time when schools are narrowing their curriculum, lend breadth to student learning.

BELL’s eleven-year experience with summer education has shown the unique and powerful opportunities the summer months provide for learning. On average, American students spend 180 days in school during the year, which is significantly less than their peers in Europe and Asia. For example, children in India and China attend school somewhere between forty to seventy additional days each year. Over twelve years, that amounts to three to four additional years of schooling. BELL Summer is a full-day, ﬁve-day-per-week program. In the morning, scholars learn core reading, writing, and math skills from a highly trained staff of

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Figure 10.2 Summer learning programs like BELL Summer help children use the summer season to advance their academic performance and broaden their understanding of the world. Courtesy of John Abbott.

professional teachers and teacher assistants (see Table 10.2). In the afternoon, scholars focus on strengthening social skills through daily enrichment activities such as art, music, drama, and dance. On Mentor Fridays, scholars learn from guest speakers and cultural presentations, visit museums and parks, and engage their community in service projects. In 2007 BELL’s summer program served nearly 4,000 scholars in the three regions of Baltimore, Boston, and New York City. This is double the number of scholars served the previous year. Most of this growth was in the newest region, Baltimore, which has been experiencing phenomenal success since 2005. BELL Summer in Baltimore had the distinct honor of being selected among six nationally recognized programs by the Baltimore City Public School System to implement a district-wide summer education initiative. This newly developed partnership with the city provided the opportunity for 2,000 children in twelve Baltimore public schools to experience the impact of BELL Summer’s program. The consistent endorsements of summer learning only validate the importance of supporting high-quality programs such as BELL Summer. BELL is delighted to announce that the STEP UP Act, in which BELL was cited in as a model for effective

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Figure 10.3 BELL summer scholars’ academic gains, by month, all cities combined. Source: Tiffany M. Cooper (2003), “BELL Accelerated Learning Summer Program: 2003 Program Outcomes,” 7; H. Cooper et al. (1996), “The Effects of Summer School Vacation on Achievement Test Scores,” Review of Educational Research 66 (3):227–268.

summer learning programs, was signed into law by President Bush on August 9, 2007. As part of the America COMPETES Act, the legislation will provide nearly 70,000 children across the country with high-quality, summer learning programs similar to those offered by BELL and the Center for Summer Learning. This triumph is a victory for BELL’s scholars, parents, staff, and community supporters, whose passion for education has created greater opportunities for all children across the nation. They, too, will now have the chance to realize their potential through summer learning initiatives. Phalen believes that in ﬁve years from now, summer learning will be the core cornerstone to American public education. He thinks BELL will be one of the quiet contributors to moving the country in that direction, and this makes him feel proud.

WHERE DOES PHALEN’S INSPIRATION COME FROM? Earl Martin Phalen is proud to say he was adopted and was in foster care for two years. He calls his family amazing. He calls his mother and father role models and mentors. He is touched by how, even though they had seven children of their own, they chose to give yet another child a chance at a better life. He was deeply affected by how his parents chose to live their lives and the values that guided them. Phalen believes the love his parents taught him and had for each one of their children

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Table 10.2 Typical Day in the BELL Summer Program* Daily Schedule 8:30–9:00

Breakfast Community Time

9:00–11:00

Literacy Instruction

11:00–12:00

Math Instruction

12:00–1:00 1:00–4:00

Lunch & Recess Enrichment Activities

4:00–4:30

Community Time & Dismissal Mentor Fridays

Fridays

Description Community Time provides scholars the opportunity to develop positive, supportive peer relationships through group activities. Literacy tutoring uses skills-based curricula and a leveled readers’ library of more than 100 multicultural children’s books. Literacy activities also include journal writing, independent reading, and guided reading. Math tutoring uses a skills-based curriculum and a variety of manipulatives to develop an understanding of basic math concepts and skills. BELL also provides individualized help with schoolassigned homework. Art, music, physical education, dance, and drama. Session ends, and parents pick up children. Special activities, including cultural, athletic, or performing arts activities, art workshops, community service projects, and ﬁeld trips.

*Schedule varies by location. Source: BELL Summer Program Description (2007).

helped craft and shape him into the person he is, and that love has prepared him to be a good leader. He recognizes his opportunities in life have been because of the talent God bestowed upon him, but also because somebody cared enough to give back. Phalen feels his personal life journey is intimately linked to the organization’s history and what it tries to provide for their scholars today. The turning point in Phalen’s life that motivated him to incite positive change for something he feels passionately about occurred during his ﬁrst summer break from law school. He originally attended law school because he wanted to become involved in politics. Phalen mentioned that he always thought he would end up being a mayor somewhere and use his political status to promote social justice. Typically, ﬁrst year law students spend their ﬁrst summer vacation working in a law ﬁrm and learning the basics of the profession. Phalen was encouraged by a mentor of his during this period to spend his summer doing something creative instead. He mentioned that Phalen could always pick up working in a law ﬁrm his second summer.

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Phalen found himself in Kingston, Jamaica, that summer, working for the Jamaican Council for Human Rights. He and his colleagues were performing habeas corpus work. He liked the work and loved the people he worked with, but he told his supervisor that he really missed being around children. He is from a big family, has thirty nieces and nephews, and found himself missing their company. His supervisor encouraged him to volunteer at Maxﬁeld Park Orphanage, a local orphanage in Kingston. On his ﬁrst day volunteering there, Phalen found himself teaching a ﬁrst grader how to add. He admits he struggled with it at ﬁrst, but once she understood that if you took one pencil and one crayon and counted them, 1 ⫹ 1 ⫽ 2. Phalen recalls seeing her eyes light up and knew, at that moment, this was his personal calling. He decided to use the rest of his experience in law school to build an organization that would help many more children’s eyes to light up as that girl’s did. Along Earl Martin Phalen’s path, others have helped mentor and shape the individual he is today. One such individual is Professor Charles Ogletree. He is considered one of the most inﬂuential lawyers in the country and has played a signiﬁcant role in high-proﬁle cases, such as the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, and helped draft the South African Constitution. Phalen is inspired by Professor Ogletree’s drive and motivation. As a leader and friend, Phalen believes Professor Ogletree had the greatest non-family member inﬂuence on him because Ogletree put his name behind BELL. His name allowed funding doors to open that would not otherwise have existed for BELL. Phalen believes Ogletree has constantly been there for BELL, helping the organization get bigger, stronger, and better. Phalen ﬁrmly believes BELL’s association with Professor Ogletree has given BELL credibility in the eyes of others. Dr. Robert Peterkin is another mentor of Earl’s who had a great impact on BELL. Dr. Peterkin has been on the board of BELL since the beginning. Phalen stresses the importance of Dr. Peterkin’s role in BELL’s development because he was able to provide expert advice on creating strong educational programs. In the 1980s, Dr. Peterkin founded the ﬁrst schools for African American boys in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, school district, and he has been the superintendent of several school districts. Another signiﬁcant person in Earl’s life was Ruth Batson. She was a civil rights leader whose importance and impact has her featured in the acclaimed television series Eyes on the Prize. Ms. Batson passed away two years ago. Phalen was touched by her passion toward children, fairness, equality, and justice. She was deeply committed to social justice, was uncompromising in her ﬁght for justice and equality, and ﬁrmly believed in what this country has the potential to be. She informed Phalen that he was the next generation of leadership. She told him that somebody had helped her out and had given her opportunities when she began ﬁghting for social justice, and her passing knowledge on was her way of continuing the united effort of struggling for equality. She inspired Phalen to see the difference a small group of people—when united and willing to risk everything—can make. She inspired him on how to really be the kind of David in the David and Goliath ﬁght and come out victorious.

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A large amount of Phalen’s inspiration comes from his belief in God and his spirituality. He credits his parents with instilling these values within him. He believes if you boil things down to good and evil or right and wrong, he is trying to be on the side of good. He is trying to live a life he believes God would look favorably upon. He admits he is not doing it perfectly but uses his spirituality as a daily guide. It continues to drive him forward and to help him remain committed. His love of history has also been a source of inspiration. For example, while in St. Louis to present at the National Urban League’s annual conference in July 2007, he visited the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas. It had the Emancipation Proclamation on display. He feels seeing a piece of history like this and others help one better understand the struggles of our ancestors. He also listens to Martin Luther King Jr.’s tapes and Malcolm X’s tapes. He tries to stay connected. He feels individuals can easily “fall asleep” in regard to others’ plight. The things that keep him “awake” are history, time with his family, and time with scholars. Last year he was only able to visit program sites for fundraising visits. This year he made a point to return to several schools and be a mentor for scholars because spending time with scholars and seeing their eyes light up inspire him to work harder to ﬁnd ways to create communities that are safe and allow everyone to pursue the best this country has to offer.

BELL’S OUTCOME INITIATIVES From the beginning, BELL has aggressively pursued ways of measuring its services for quality and impact. Phalen states BELL wanted to know what was working for their scholars. The staff wanted access to immediate feedback so they could change their program if it was not working. BELL recognized it had made a commitment to the children and wanted to ensure the program had the ability to fulﬁll that commitment. Phalen fears we live in a society where a vast majority of the nation does not believe the children BELL serves have any intellectual capacity or potential. BELL wants to make a case statement that all individuals need to do is challenge children, support them, have rigor, hold them to high expectations, and love them. He believes children will rise to the highest of highs, and BELL wanted to build a body of evidence to prove that even though these are the lowest-income urban communities, the lowest-performance schools, the children in the program are doing very well. The second phase of BELL’s motivation to collect extensive outcomes came in the 1990s. People began to realize school alone was not enough to appropriately educate the youth of America. The new question became how to help all students achieve high marks. Those who originally had objected to BELL’s use of afterschool time and summer time were now recognizing these as valuable times that were underused. Individuals began researching this topic and found BELL had already established some signiﬁcant statistics. Now, when foundations were

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looking for the outcomes, BELL was able to provide relevant statistics for evaluation to support this initiative. This rigorous collecting of outcomes has set BELL apart from other organizations. BELL’s scientiﬁc study put it in the top one-tenth of 1 percent when measuring outcomes. This has separated BELL and helps the organization acquire resources and funding today. People now know if you want a serious academic after-school or summer program, BELL is the one that has been doing it and doing it well for ﬁfteen years.

BELL’S SUCCESS BELL measures success by reviewing two main areas: outcomes and scholars’ success. As mentioned earlier, BELL is very rigorous about assessment and evaluation. BELL recognized the need to develop its own system to evaluate the scholars’ academic abilities. BELL found many scholars received As and Bs in school, but none were able to read or write on grade level, and in fact, only one of its ﬁfth graders was able read above a ﬁrst-grade reading level. These children were doing “well” on their report cards, their parents thought they were doing well, and even the children thought they were doing well. BELL is aggravated with the false sense of conﬁdence that has been developed in children—and that most, without some intervention, will lack even the most basic skills they will need in life. Therefore, in the beginning, BELL tried to prove the case to itself, the scholars, their families, the school systems, and society at large. BELL was attempting to prove that when scholars are given academic rigor, encouragement, structure, and love, they are going to meet and exceed high standards. So ever since, BELL uses a nationally normed diagnostic test (pre- and post-) to measure where program scholars start and where they end up (see Figure 10.4). There are monthly quizzes given during the after-school program as well as mid-summer quizzes given during the summer program to plot scholars’ individual progress. BELL does not hide from these data but instead use them to improve programs. Children in the six-week summer program gained an average of four and half months in reading, writing, and math skills. Two years ago, BELL realized its own outcomes looked promising and began looking into hiring an independent evaluator, the Urban Institute, to see if the outcomes could be duplicated. The study proved what BELL already knew: BELL’s programs have a statistically signiﬁcant impact on reading scores, and the programs also increased parental involvement in children’s education, two of BELL’s top goals. Acquiring long-term data to support BELL’s success is more anecdotal. For example, it is known that 100 percent of BELL’s ﬁrst class of twenty scholars are in or have graduated from college because BELL did a Where Are They Now survey of those scholars. After the ﬁrst few years, it became difﬁcult to remain in touch with scholars as the organization grew. BELL recognizes the missed opportunity for gathering outcomes, so it is now in the third year of tracking “alumni”

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Figure 10.4 Reading performance levels. Source: Tiffany M. Cooper (2005), “BELL Outcomes Report: After School Program 2004–2005.”

scholars. BELL has started an initiative to track where the scholars are now, how they are doing, how they are progressing long-term, and how they were impacted by the program. BELL would like to maintain contact with each scholar roughly twice a year to obtain updates on the scholars’ lives. One Scholar’s Story: Kourtney Lewis Although Kourtney always believed she was academically talented, her performance did not place her anywhere near the top of her class. She spent ﬁrst, second, and third grades at a public school in her neighborhood, where she felt her teachers were ill equipped to feed her curiosities. “When I was in elementary school, my teachers didn’t push me,” she says. “They knew that I was different from other students, and that school wasn’t a challenge for me, but they couldn’t do anything for me.” At the age of ten, Kourtney transferred to a new school district as part of Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO), a voluntary desegregation program. The move ultimately afforded Kourtney opportunities she never had at her local school. Her new school district had a smaller student-to-teacher ratio and provided more resources per student than Kourtney’s neighborhood school. When she arrived at her new school, Kourtney was placed in a remedial program. For a student who craved greater intellectual challenge and stimulation, being in remedial education was difﬁcult. “When I was in the remedial class, I wanted to be independent and I wanted to learn more, which made it really hard for me.” It took the help of her mother, a mentor, and an intensive summer program to move Kourtney from the remedial program into advanced courses, where she has since excelled. With high expectations from those around her, Kourtney now says, “I know what I have to do to get an A.” And Kourtney has found earning top marks not just possible but probable. In 2006 she was recognized by METCO for earning the highest grade point average of all students in her grade in the Boston-area program.

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Now in her sophomore year at a public high school in Lincoln, MA, Kourtney has her sights set on attending Stanford University or a historically black college or university when she graduates. She wants to pursue a career in law.

BELL’S STRUGGLES WITH FUNDING BELL has undergone three phases of funding over the past ﬁfteen years. The ﬁrst phase of funding for BELL was the initial funding of the organization with an echoing green foundation grant. This foundation funds many young social entrepreneurial organizations, such as Teach for America, City Year, Jump Start, and ACE. Many of these organizations, both then and now, were started by students just graduating from college who were willing to do high-risk work. The echoing green Foundation ﬁnds young, hungry students whom they think are talented and have a solid idea that will signiﬁcantly improve society. They gave Phalen and BELL an award of $12,500, which was BELL’s budget for the ﬁrst year of operation. At that time, BELL consisted of two employees: Phalen and Arlene Hudson. The salary budget was split between the two equally, and the remaining money was spent for educational supplies, food, and ﬁeld trips. Some supplies, such as books, were donated. The ﬁrst year was not sustainable. Phalen admits that an annual income of $5,000 is not enough for an individual to live successfully. Phalen calls Hudson a saint because she had complete faith and trust in him and in the mission of BELL. They both strongly believed in BELL’s concept, so they both felt the sacriﬁce was worth it. Phalen’s parents owned a condo and were able to allow him to live there rent free. It immediately became BELL’s headquarters. A big break for BELL came in the second year and brought the organization to the second phase of funding. An article in the Boston Globe was published in October 1993 pertaining to BELL. It ran on the front page of the learning section. This was at a time where BELL had just sent out proposals to 100 local foundations. BELL received a couple of no’s, and then some other foundations wanted to know what other funders were supporting BELL. BELL did not have any, so it was not able to provide any names. Nevertheless, the State Street Bank stepped forward and said it would invest $15,000. The Charles Hayden Foundation also came forward and donated $33,000. A third signiﬁcant donation of $15,000 came from the Boston Foundation. These and several individual gifts increased the budget from $12,500 the ﬁrst year to $87,500 the second year. This funding allowed the organization to survive and provided basic sustenance pay to its employees. BELL took on an additional staff member but kept each salary at $20,000 a year. BELL never wanted people to question the organization’s integrity or motives. The three employees then accounted for $60,000 of the annual budget, and the rest was put into programming. The infusion was actually a lifesaver for the staff, who were just scraping by. The following year, BELL’s budget went up to $212,000. Cambridge College, a local college, served as an incubator for BELL. BELL now had six staff members

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working out of Phalen’s living room and one-bedroom apartment. It was overcrowded and did not provide good working conditions. Cambridge College said they loved the work BELL was doing. They offered BELL a professor’s ofﬁce and covered phone, fax, mailing, and ofﬁce space for BELL for the next four years. The ﬁrst two funding phases for BELL consisted of a “hold tight and the money will come” mentality. The signiﬁcant donations were regarded as BELL’s salvation by Phalen. The next phase of funding for BELL was to continue to have great outcomes, but to share those outcomes and raise money based on those outcomes: a sign of business maturity. Phalen admits that his belief set was partly to blame for BELL’s initial funding struggles. He always had believed nonproﬁts should not make money. Phalen admits not recognizing at that time that being nonproﬁt is a tax status, and that if you do not have some kind of surplus, programs cannot be offered. BELL came to the realization in the last four years that. like any good business, it needed a business model. The business model BELL settled on allows it to take advantage of supplemental educational services under the No Child Left Behind Act. The children who qualify for these services are children in low-performing schools who are income eligible for free or reduced price lunch; those are exactly the children BELL serves. BELL has now set itself up so it can receive vouchers parents have and use the vouchers as the primary economic driver for its work. Currently, BELL’s funds are 60 percent from government and 40 percent from philanthropy. Since BELL made the conscious choice of ﬁnding a business model and delivering on it, in the last four years, its business has gone from $4 million to $31.4 million in annual revenue. This steep growth obviously entailed several other simultaneous developments within the business. BELL had to build the infrastructure and build organizational capacity to realize this growth in service to scholars and revenues. During this period, BELL expanded from 1,000 scholars to 12,000 scholars. Phalen believes the last phase has really been about understanding how to run a business, and understanding that every business needs a strong economic engine if it wants to succeed. He now understands it is not about how much money an organization makes, but rather it is about the predictability and the reliability of renewing those funding sources. Phalen also believes that how an organization invests resources is critical. Investment in providing superior services and building the organization for long-term sustainability is the key to success.

BELL’S BIGGEST CHALLENGE BELL’s growth and expansion were not always this simple and easy year after year. BELL’s biggest challenge, thus far, was in their middle years of 1996 and 1997. During this time, BELL had two years of $200,000 plus deﬁcits. BELL had to have board members, friends, and supportive individuals dig into their own pockets to help keep the organization aﬂoat. This was a very difﬁcult period for BELL.

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BELL’s motivation and drive as an organization was not dampened. Everyone involved simply believed that if BELL was destined to exist, it would succeed. They simply focused on how many children they were going to serve the following year. Once that was decided, they would simply not stop until the money was raised, and they accepted the deﬁcit budgets. BELL would take into consideration which schools were interested, and this is how the organization would budget: this school wants us and this school wants us, so we’re going to grow to X number of kids this year. This approach was not like BELL’s current ﬁnancial planning, where the organization has a budget, staff tracks budget versus actual monthly, and a reasonably well-developed system is in place to help forecast revenues. BELL makes some reasonable assumptions about the funding it can raise, but that is based on ten years of historical evidence. It is also based on a percentage of the renewals the organization will get back from the previous year, given the fact it delivered on its promise. BELL admits that this method is not fully predictive, but it is much more so than in the past. In the past, the organization may not have always met its goals because of a lack of funds. For a period of two and half years, the organization basically survived from pay period to pay period, but the determination and faith mentality that everything would work out helped pull BELL through this period.

BELL’S APPROACH TO CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING AND OVERCOMING CHALLENGES BELL thinks everyone’s complete faith in their organization’s success is quite creative itself. They refused to accept no for an answer. Where others might have crumbled, BELL persisted. BELL has also learned to create opportunities. For example, Professor Ogletree, board chair and Harvard Law School professor, secured a meeting with the new owners of the Red Sox baseball team when they came to town looking for an educational program to support. As a result, now every year, up to twenty-ﬁve BELL graduates each receive a $10,000 college scholarship from the Boston Red Sox. BELL also created a ﬂag football event with the New England Patriots, called the BELL Bowl, which raises hundreds of thousands of dollars to support BELL’s summer program. BELL has also been very good about creating partnerships. The Urban Institute study was a way to do that. Despite educating 12,000 scholars annually, BELL knows that over 13 million children in the United States live in poverty. Those involved at BELL wanted to know what they could do to reach these other children. They wanted to ﬁnd an avenue that would get their knowledge out to the rest of the world. BELL staff members went on a conference circuit where they knew there would be educational inﬂuencers. One such individual was Senator Barak Obama of Illinois. He picked up on BELL’s idea and helped create legislation known as the STEP UP Act. The STEP UP Act points out that America’s youth are undereducated and in school less time per year than students in some other countries.

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Obama was interested in a great summer learning model to help children in America compete. He picked up the BELL Summer model, and it is now written into legislation. The Act became law on August 9, 2007, as part of the America COMPETES Bill. Now each year, $100 million worth of summer funds will go to approximately 70,000 children throughout the United States. As an organization, BELL is opportunistic about improving its program, but it also wants to help the 13 million children in this country living in poverty. BELL staffers feel responsible to take what they know and help more and more of those children realize their potential and have access to the American dream. Another example of BELL’s creative outreach is the partnership with Houghton Mifﬂin, a book publishing company. When BELL wanted to improve its curriculum, it sought out Houghton Mifﬂin and asked about a partnership. This partnership, and the curriculum, evaluation materials, and assessment tools, have taken BELL’s educational services to an even higher level. BELL is also extremely thankful for its partnership with New Proﬁt Inc. (NPI). NPI helps organizations scale. NPI was critical in helping BELL revamp the structure of its board of directors, reﬁne its growth strategy (with the support of Monitor Group), attract several major six- and seven-digit donors, and use policy as a way to expand social impact. This partnership was the key to BELL’s capacity efforts and to BELL’s rapid growth. BELL’s continued growth and expansion were accelerated by the newly reconstructed board of directors. From 1992 through 2004, BELL’s board served in an advisory capacity. Directors helped facilitate entrée into new communities, informed the program model and service objectives, and reviewed quarterly and annual ﬁnancial statements to ensure the organization’s health. As BELL began to standardize and apply business practices to its operations, this board was restructured and became an active governing body with subcommittee working groups. Since 2004 BELL’s governing board has been responsible for holding the organization accountable and helps the senior management team think through critical issues of strategy, fundraising, ﬁnances, and social impact. Subcommittees comprised of directors and a senior management liaison carefully analyze policies, goals, and results for each functional area of the organization. The Red Sox Program in Further Detail Imagine the excitement of walking onto the ﬁeld at Fenway Park in front of a sell-out crowd. David Ortiz pats you on the back and Manny Ramirez gives you a high-ﬁve. You have reason to celebrate: you are a Red Sox Scholar. The Red Sox Scholars Program is an innovative partnership between BELL, the Boston Red Sox, and presenting sponsor Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Centered on the basic premise that every child can excel and reach his or her full potential given support and the right resources, the Red Sox Scholars Program provides $10,000 college scholarships to twenty-ﬁve ﬁfth-grade scholars each year. In addition, doctors, nurses, and staff members from Beth Israel Deaconess

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Medical Center, the program’s presenting sponsor, volunteer to serve as mentors to support the scholars through middle school, high school, and on to college. Every year, the Boston Red Sox kick off the program with an annual ceremony at Fenway Park to honor the scholars’ hard work and commitment to their education in front of the entire Red Sox Nation. The ceremony is also televised on the New England Sports Network, reaching the scholars’ peers, teachers, principals and approximately 3 million other homes in New England. During the academic year, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center hosts professional “Shadow Days” and other educational and experiential activities for the scholars and their mentors. To ensure the ongoing success of the program, BELL and the Red Sox Foundation host the annual Field of Dreams Gala fundraiser, a gathering of business executives, community leaders, and Red Sox owners and legends. On this inspirational night, Boston welcomes the new class of Red Sox Scholars and reafﬁrms its commitment to providing children with the support they need to succeed in the classroom and in life. In the three years since the program’s inception, seventy-ﬁve shining stars have become Red Sox Scholars. BELL, the Red Sox, and Beth Israel Deaconess look forward to continuing this amazing partnership and helping many more future leaders achieve their full potential in school and in life.

IF I HAD KNOWN THEN WHAT I KNOW NOW As mentioned earlier, Phalen once believed that in order to show your commitment and success, you had to act like a saint. He does not think so anymore; rather, commitment and success are what BELL delivers to children, families, and the nation. BELL started by trying to just raise enough to get by and not to have too much in the coffers. Phalen uses the organization Teach for America to exemplify his point. This organization originated around the same time as BELL, but the founder raised $300,000 before the organization opened its services up to the public. With those resources in place, the founder could focus more energies on building an organization and executing the plan. With BELL’s initial $12,500, the vast majority of BELL’s early years were focused on survival. Phalen recognized success is about a good business plan. An organization needs to create a well-written plan and then market that plan. Individuals need to go out and get the money they need to in order to execute the plan. He believes smart people raise the money as fast as they can, gather what they need to run the business (or at least close to that), and then they grow the business. Phalen believes an organization needs to understand what its business model is, raise the funds to support the business plan, be passionate about the plan, and not make it about the leaders’ personal sacriﬁce—make it about what the organization brings to the community, what the end result is for children and families. Phalen also said he had the false belief that money would cure all the organization’s problems, and that once BELL had the money, everything else would fall into place. Phalen found this did not hold true. When BELL doubled the size of

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the staff, the organization actually became less productive, outcomes and quality went down, and the culture was lost. All this happened because he did not know how to manage people effectively. Phalen mentioned the social entrepreneur myth. Many people who engage in social justice work do it because they love kids, for instance. They are not great business people, and they are not entrepreneurs, but they are great educators. They are not passionate about building a business that can educate children; they are passionate about working directly with children. In the early years, Phalen wished he would have gone to business school rather than law school. He recognizes he built a business that focuses on education, and that business skills would have come in helpful in the long run. He has picked up many of the skills along the way, but feels BELL’s growth could have been accelerated if it had been guided better. Phalen feels the social entrepreneur myth helps account for the fact that there are a million and a half nonproﬁt organizations in the world, and 92 percent of them have budgets of less than $1 million. Other than museums, hospitals, and universities, fewer than 1 percent of nonproﬁts have budgets over $20 million. Only 144 of these nonproﬁts have grown since 1970 to revenues of $50 million dollars or more. Many people do not have the desire or skills to grow an organization. The nonproﬁt capital markets—how organizations are funded—also prevent others who do have the desire and skill from realizing their dreams. There are also some misconceptions regarding how to acquire funding. Stanford University released a study that is counterintuitive to common beliefs. Most people believe organizations should diversify their funding in order to succeed. Stanford studied those 144 nonproﬁt organization mentioned above and found that 142 had only one major stream of funding, either from the government or individuals.1 Phalen encourages organizations to get professional support to help them understand the economics of their business, and help them learn what their economic engine is. This has the potential to have a transformative impact on their work.

BELL’S NEXT STEPS In terms of BELL’s next steps, the organization just ﬁnished its strategic plan for 2008. BELL plans to double in size from 12,000 scholars to 25,000 scholars over the next ﬁve years. BELL also wants to expand into three to ﬁve new communities throughout the country. BELL hopes to continue to use both partnerships and politics to expand its social impact. BELL looks to be a major player under the STEP UP Act. BELL plans on helping to ensure that legislative bills are passed to provide training, technical assistance, and quality assurance accreditation to those who will receive the $100 million from this Act. BELL wants to help maintain best practices in the ﬁeld and make sure children receive great services. BELL was excited to launch a new program in the summer of 2006: BELL BOYS. This is partnership with the Charles Hayden Foundation. BELL is

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developing the summer enrichment program, modeled after BELL Summer, specifically to address the interests and needs of black and Latino boys, the most vulnerable student population. Implementing innovative and effective models such as this, and researching the impact, continues to be important to BELL’s future.

BELL’S AFFILIATE PROGRAM Another attempt at reaching more children and expanding BELL’s impact is through its afﬁliate program. Nonproﬁt organizations have afﬁliates just as forproﬁt organizations have franchises. BELL maintains partnerships with afﬁliates, which further expands and promotes BELL’s after-school and summer programs. BELL signs up afﬁliates who want to take the BELL program content, training, technical assistance, and assessment tools and implement the BELL model in their own facilities or programs. The afﬁliates pay BELL a small fee for these services. Last year BELL had a pilot program with the Boys and Girls Club in Palo Alto, California, for 500 children. It was very successful. As a result of this success, BELL hopes to gain ﬁve to ten more afﬁliate partners in the coming year. BELL will continue to work out any kinks in this program and hopes to continue its expansion. BELL is excited about this program because it has the potential to reach many more children than BELL programs alone. BELL will be serving approximately 25,000 children directly, but then potentially serving an additional 25,000 children through their afﬁliates. The afﬁliate program would then create a network that would bring organizations together to share best practices and discuss new trends in the ﬁeld.

AWARDS AND HONORS BELL HAS RECEIVED BELL was awarded the 2006 Social Capitalist Award by Fast Company magazine and the Monitor Group. The award recognizes the top organizations changing the world that use innovation and entrepreneurship to create sustainable solutions to urgent social issues. BELL was selected by President Bill Clinton from a national pool of 3,600 nominees to receive the 1997 President’s Service Award, the most prestigious award for national community service. The award reﬂects the importance the president placed on community service, and is presented in recognition of outstanding service directed at solving critical social problems. The BELL Summer Program was recognized as one of the best educational summer programs in the nation by Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Summer Learning. BELL CEO Earl Martin Phalen won the Red Cross of Massachusetts Bay’s Clara Barton Humanitarian Award in recognition of his service to children and families.

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BELL’S BOARD OF DIRECTORS Nicholas Bogard, president of J. Nicholas Arthur, one of the nation’s leading executive search ﬁrms. Mr. Bogard contributes a wealth of business experience to BELL. He is the chair of BELL’s Development Committee. Mr. Bogard spearheads special events fundraising and leads major searches for executives within BELL. Gene Guill, managing director in the Loan Exposure Management Group (LEMG) of Deutsche Bank’s Global Banking Division based in New York. Mr. Guill is the past chairman of the International Association of Credit Portfolio Managers and a past president of the New York Chapter of the Risk Management Association. He holds a BA from Davidson College and a PhD in economics from Duke University. He serves on BELL’s Finance Committee. Kathleen Kelley, global macro portfolio manager at Kingdon Capital Management. Ms. Kelley is an experienced and highly successful hedge fund manager and economist. Ms. Kelley serves on the board of the Bedford-Stuyvesant “I Have A Dream” Program and the Iris House, a center for women and their children. She holds a BA in math and economics from Smith College and a general course diploma from the London School of Economics. Ms. Kelley serves on BELL’s Development Committee. John J-H Kim, president and CEO of Rakuten USA. He brings to BELL a wealth of experience growing educational organizations. He is the founder and chairman of the District Management Council. Mr. Kim was also president of Kaplan Learning Services. He was a founder and CEO of Chancellor Beacon Academies. Mr. Kim is vice chairman of BELL’s board and chair of its Governance Committee. Deb Knez, trustee of the Richard and Susan Smith Family Foundation. Ms. Knez is an engaged philanthropist with considerable experience in nonproﬁt development. She is an overseer of the Boston Children’s Museum, a board member of United Way of Massachusetts Bay, and works closely with the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Ms. Knez sits on BELL’s Development and Program committees. She spearheads BELL’s individual giving campaigns. Donald Manekin, co-founder of Seawall Development Company. Mr. Manekin is a driving force in community-focused real estate development. He currently sits as regional president and national board member of the National Association of Industrial and Ofﬁce Properties and works with civic organizations, including Teach for America and the Open Society Institute. Former chief operating ofﬁcer of Baltimore City Schools, Mr. Manekin brings substantial experience in education and civic leadership to BELL’s board of directors. Soren Oberg, managing director and member of the Operating Committee at Thomas H. Lee Partners. Prior to joining THL, Mr. Oberg worked at Morgan Stanley in the Merchant Banking Division and in the Global Strategists’ ofﬁce at Cowen & Company. He serves on the board of several private companies

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and is a Founding Board Member of the Canada Wide Virtual Science Fair. Mr. Oberg serves on BELL’s Finance Committee. Professor Charles Ogletree Jr., chair emeritus of BELL’s board. Professor Ogletree is a professor of law at Harvard Law School and the founder of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. He is a highly esteemed legal scholar, civil rights lawyer, and leader. Professor Ogletree is deeply committed to serving public schools and institutes of higher education. Earl Martin Phalen, co-founder and CEO of BELL. Earl Martin Phalen serves as the organization’s president. He is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School. Mr. Phalen has earned several awards in recognition of his commitment to children and the achievements of BELL, including the President’s Service Award and the 2006, 2007, and 2008 Social Capitalist Awards. Chris Piela, regional vice president of Montgomery Insurance and a member of the Liberty Mutual Group. Mr. Piela brings a wealth of business and ﬁnancial experience to BELL’s board of directors. He is a former CFO of Specialty Risks at Liberty Mutual. Mr. Piela sits on the Governance Committee and oversees BELL’s ﬁscal management as chair of its Finance Committee. Dr. Lauren Smith, pediatric hospitalist and the medical director of the MedicalLegal Partnership for Children at Boston Medical Center. She is focusing her research on the impact of public policy on vulnerable children’s health. Dr. Smith also serves as medical director of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and as associate professor of pediatrics at the Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Smith is the chair of BELL’s Program Committee. Laurene Sperling, BELL’s current board chair. Ms. Sperling is an accomplished philanthropist with a background in corporate ﬁnance and investment banking. She is the former vice president at Cowen & Company. Ms. Sperling lends her expertise to universities, independent schools, and public schools as well as to BELL’s Governance, Development and Program committees.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL) Founder: Earl Martin Phalen Mission/Description: BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life) 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 summer and after-school 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.”

Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL) Website: www.bellnational.org Address: BELL Headquarters 60 Clayton Street Dorchester, MA 02122 USA Phone: +1.617.282.1567 +1.800.305.0671 (Toll Free) Fax: +1.617.282.2698 Email: [email protected]

NOTE 1. See http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/creating_high_impact_nonproﬁts/.

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The Hybrid Vigor Institute: Relevant Knowledge, Innovation Solutions, and Better Decisions through Collaboration Denise Caruso

The Hybrid Vigor Institute is dedicated to the proposition that collaboration is the key to solving society’s most complex problems. Introducing experts to each other’s work has long been known to be a powerful catalyst for breakthroughs in scientiﬁc research. But Hybrid Vigor’s operating belief is that systematic, skillful collaboration can also speed solutions to the intractable problems that exist outside the lab, in the real world. Whether addressing such pandemic diseases as avian ﬂu, the threat of biological terrorist attacks, or our growing need for secure and sustainable food and energy supplies, research shows that experts and stakeholders working together can produce the most relevant knowledge and innovative solutions to address such problems. Together, they also can make the best possible decisions about how those solutions should be adopted and used by society. An independent nonproﬁt founded in 2000, Hybrid Vigor was named to represent metaphorically the cross-pollination between the wild and the cultivated at the edges of a ﬁeld, which can increase the strength and vitality of crops. In that same way, a systematic approach to collaboration can infuse new vitality and creativity into the process by which problems are solved. This approach requires a new mechanism for producing knowledge that works in conjunction with, but does not depend upon, the university, the corporation, the government, the philanthropic sector or any other institution. That new mechanism might best be thought of as networked communities of practice, each a kind of Roman forum for research, organized around a series of individual topics or problems. Although Hybrid Vigor’s projects and program areas have evolved over the years, the organization has remained steadfastly focused on its original, twin goals: one, to build a global network of diverse thinkers who embrace collaborative, boundary-crossing inquiries; and two, to establish new methods and best 187

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practices for collaboration by and across many sectors—including academia, private industry, philanthropy, and public policy. While adamant about the need for and advocating the advantages of interdisciplinary research, Hybrid Vigor does not pit collaboration against expertise. Specialized knowledge is, should be, and will remain vitally important. But at the same time, collaborative approaches are required to synthesize and contextualize society’s vast stores of specialized knowledge in service of real-world problems and issues.

BEGINNINGS The catalyst for what was to become the Hybrid Vigor Institute was a 1998 meeting between Denise Caruso and Richard Solomon. Caruso, a veteran technology analyst and journalist who was then serving as the technology columnist for the New York Times, had known Solomon for many years as a senior scientist and telecommunications policy expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Long interested in machine vision systems, he had been a key ﬁgure in the development of the high-deﬁnition television standard in the United States. Solomon also had been instrumental in the creation of the ﬁrst super-highresolution video camera, for the Polaroid Corporation. At their 1998 meeting, he told Caruso that something about the camera had been troubling him. Its imaging capabilities were beyond anything else in the world at that moment in time, but why was it that this powerful new device still could not replicate the properties of human vision? To answer his own question, Solomon had begun prowling the literature of disciplines that studied vision. He discovered that many ﬁelds—including neurophysiology, psychophysics, quantum mechanics, and biochemistry—study aspects of vision, but none of them were communicating with each other about their ﬁndings. In fact, those whose ﬁelds were related enough to even know each other’s work existed tended to consider each other as competitors for scarce research funding, and guarded their ﬁndings rather than pooling their knowledge. But Solomon, not beholden to any particular disciplinary perspective, found a treasure trove of new ideas in the context of his questions. As he synthesized them, he was inspired to begin working with a trio of colleagues—one from the private sector, one from academia, and one from a government agency—to design an entirely new set of machine vision technologies based on their research. Today, he is the chief technology ofﬁcer at Creative Technology LLC, where he is working to commercialize the new technologies that his interdisciplinary foray yielded. Inspired by Solomon’s story, Caruso began designing an organization that could bring experts together to address their common problems. Also a successful publisher, editor, and conference producer, she had founded and produced three executive newsletters and conferences that had chronicled the nascent convergence of computers, communication, and information and had introduced its executives. Two years later, with $225,000 in seed funding from

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three private donors, she resigned from the Times and incorporated Hybrid Vigor as a nonproﬁt. Within weeks, Diana Rhoten, an associate professor at Stanford University with a PhD in social sciences, policy, and educational practice, approached Caruso. She had heard about Hybrid Vigor through a colleague and wanted to join the organization. Her interdisciplinary approach had already been funded by grants from the Fulbright Commission, the Stanford University Center for Latin American Studies, and others. Rhoten’s knowledge and experience in academia were the critical ingredients to move Hybrid Vigor from a project to a real research organization; as co-founder, she grounded Caruso’s vision in the realities of modern interdisciplinary practice. Hybrid Vigor has made its mark by selecting topics of practical relevance and bringing together the best people to work on them. Its ﬁrst project, with Diana Rhoten serving as principal investigator, was born of the idea that although interdisciplinary research has tremendous anecdotal value, no common evaluation metrics had yet been developed to reﬂect the improved results with which collaboration is credited. In order to start to understand the problem, Rhoten designed a one-year pilot study of the social networks and anthropological conditions at eight interdisciplinary research centers in the United States. Funded by an interdisciplinary program at the National Science Foundation, A Multi-Method Analysis of the Social and Technical Conditions for Interdisciplinary Collaboration was one of the very ﬁrst studies to provide empirical data on how interdisciplinary research is practiced on the ground.1 Although Rhoten has since left the organization, she continues her afﬁliation as a Hybrid Vigor Fellow and serves as director of the Knowledge Institutions program area at the Social Science Research Council in New York. In addition to an ongoing NSF-funded project studying interdisciplinary graduate students, during 2007 and 2008 she took a temporary position with the National Science Foundation as a program director in the areas of Virtual Organizations and Learning & Workforce Development for the Ofﬁce of Cyberinfrastructure, and works with various academic and non-academic organizations on the design, implementation, and assessment of new organizational forms of research and training. Denise Caruso’s ongoing study of risk and technological innovation has also brought the institute to the attention of scientists, policy makers, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) around the world. In February 2002, Hybrid Vigor published a monograph by Caruso, titled “Risk as Continuum: A Redeﬁnition of Risk for Governing the Post-Genome World,”2 an unconventional, interdisciplinary argument for redeﬁning risk in the context of biotechnology that included expert ﬁndings in the ﬁelds of molecular biology, sociology, communications, science and technology studies, law, public policy, ecology, and economics. The article was selected as a Book of the Month and was distributed to members of the Global Business Network. Based on the ﬁndings in “Risk as Continuum,” in October 2002, Hybrid Vigor published a Rockefeller Foundation–commissioned

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white paper by Caruso that further explored the terrain, titled “Risk: The Art and the Science and Choice.”3 In 2006, as a direct result of this work, Caruso completed the book Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet, which won the silver medal for science writing in the 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Published under the auspices of Hybrid Vigor Press, Intervention was reviewed by a wide range of publications, including the international science journal, Nature.

FOCUS ON THE SHARED TOPIC A hybrid itself, the Hybrid Vigor Institute today is part think tank, part research institute, and part consultancy. Whether it is working to change public policy, conducting a research project, or helping a client assemble the right group of people for a collaboration, the organizing principle for all the institute’s work is the shared topic or problem. An ideal Hybrid Vigor topic is one that is studied by several disciplines (preferably in both the social and natural sciences), affects multiple sectors of society, and has the greatest need or potential for a shift in traditional thinking by way of collaboration or integrating disciplinary knowledge. Using the topic or problem as its focal point, the institute actively seeks out and connects experts and stakeholders from a range of ﬁelds to exchange information and/or work together. This approach calls into service three complementary activities to encourage learning, deliberation, and collaboration. They include publications, working symposia, and the development and deployment of methods that support or require collaboration. Publications lead the list for one simple and obvious reason: research and problem solving are as much about literature as they are about inquiry. No matter what tools or metrics individuals may use to gather data for their work, no matter whether they “agree” with collaborative approaches or not, they all write— and read others’—reports about their ﬁndings. Publications that bring together a variety of perspectives are the best and most universal way to engage experts’ and the public’s interest in a particular issue or problem. And because all experts are laypeople when outside their home disciplines, all Hybrid Vigor publications are written and edited to be understood by a non-technical, non-academic audience. With the exception of its books, Hybrid Vigor’s publications are free and available from Hybrid Vigor’s website to anyone with an Internet connection. Books and other media are available at market costs far below the cost of books from a traditional academic press. So far, Hybrid Vigor has published one book (the previously mentioned Intervention) and several well-received journals, study reports, and white papers on topics ranging from the role of clouds in climate change to the role of collaboration in philanthropy and the deﬁnition of risk in the context of technological innovation.

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The institute’s ﬁrst publication, in 2001, was a white paper written by Caruso and Rhoten on the roadblocks to interdisciplinary research, titled “Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way: Sidestepping the Barriers to Effective Practice of Interdisciplinarity.” In it, they detailed the latest data and thinking about speciﬁc roadblocks to interdisciplinary practice, including the strong institutional bias against interdisciplinarity at most universities, the challenge of getting access to crossdisciplinary data and publications, and competition and the “geopolitics” of knowledge within the academy. In addition to Caruso’s risk reports, Hybrid Vigor released three other publications in 2002. One was the ﬁndings from a Surdna Foundation–funded study by Rhoten, which examined the workings of the internal networks of individuals, teams, and programs within a foundation, called “Organizing Change from the Inside Out: Emerging Models of Intra-Organizational Collaboration in Philanthropy.” Given that such collaborations are not formal or typical enough to study directly, Rhoten’s study and report focused on more preliminary issues, including emerging forms of collaboration within foundations, and if (and how) internal collaborations affected the process and performance of grantmaking. The Institute’s next publication, titled “The Living Skies: Cloud Behavior and Its Role in Climate Change,” was authored by the London-based Hybrid Vigor fellow Oliver Morton, a well-known science writer, who is presently news and features editor for Nature. Morton tapped the work of researchers in several disciplines for a fascinating exploration of the climatic effects of clouds—the second largest source of energy for the atmosphere—on an atmosphere with signiﬁcantly higher levels of greenhouse gases. In “The Living Skies,” Morton explained why today’s computer-driven models of the climate system, which make use of a physics-based understanding of its various processes, may be producing large errors. He also explored other, more controversial potential problems with the models—for example, the possibility that bacteria and various aerosols may also play a critical, yet unexplored role in climate change. The month after Morton’s report was released, CNN published a news story about the British scientists he had cited, noting their theory that certain bug species may have evolved the ability to manipulate the weather in order to secure their own survival. “As If You Were There: Matching Machine Vision to Human Vision” was authored by Richard Solomon when he was serving as a senior scientist for the Program on Vision Science & Advanced Networking at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Communications and Information Science and Policy. The paper explores the themes he discussed with Caruso in 1998— speciﬁcally that compared to older theories based on psychophysical measurements, many of the results recently published in the neurological literature about how the human vision system works are surprising and counterintuitive. The new research challenges long-held assumptions about how electronic transmission components, cameras, displays, processors, and even audio speakers should work. With this new information, engineers could begin to

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design more accurate electronic systems that would replicate a scene as if the observer were present. To complement its publication strategy, the institute hosts or co-hosts invitation-only working meetings or symposia, each organized around a focal topic or problem. Attendees include experts and established researchers from a range of disciplines and, as funding permits, their graduate students and protégés, as well as relevant stakeholders. These meetings are generally organized as either a prelude to a formal project collaboration, or as part of the collaborative learning process for an ongoing project. For example, the institute has co-hosted two meetings on risk and genetic engineering—one in advance of submitting a grant proposal, and one to present ﬁndings from its NSF-funded methodology study. Along with the epidemiologist Larry Brilliant (now the director of Google.org), Global Business Network, the Seva Foundation, and several schools of public health from several major universities, including Columbia and Stanford, Hybrid Vigor also co-hosted one of the earliest meetings on preparedness for pandemic inﬂuenza, Pandefense 1.0. The meeting was attended by top inﬂuenza experts from academia, government, and the World Health Organization, as well as by representatives of private industry, the investment community, and public health organizations such as the Red Cross. Hybrid Vigor also develops and deploys sophisticated techniques to improve collaboration across both disciplinary and/or geographic boundaries. Most recently, the institute began a collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University to test the feasibility of a new methodology for assessing and characterizing unprecedented risks. To pursue this, the Decision, Risk, and Management Sciences program of the National Science Foundation awarded Hybrid Vigor an exploratory research grant for the project, called “Understanding Genomics Risks: An Integrated Scenario and Analytic Approach.” Since the project’s completion and subsequent publication of its ﬁndings, the published results have attracted the attention of practitioners in government and private industry who are considering the approach for cases ranging from bioterrorism to health care and identity theft.4

CATALYTIC COLLABORATION Although it is one of the only organizations that is focused wholly on the practice of collaboration, Hybrid Vigor is far from the only voice that insists upon its value. Its beneﬁts, and the shortcomings of deconstructing and “understanding” the world primarily through the narrow ﬁlters of specialization, have been apparent for several decades. Great discoveries and shifts in traditional thinking are commonly attributed to researchers crossing disciplinary boundaries. Interdisciplinarity has been hailed as the wellspring for innovation by many of the most respected intellectuals and scientists of history, including the biologist and theorist Edward O. Wilson, the physicist Werner Heisenberg, and the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn.

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Upon learning that he had received a 2000 Nobel Prize in chemistry, Alan MacDiarmid of the University of Pennsylvania said unequivocally that the challenges and stimulation of struggling to exchange ideas with people from other disciplines will lead to major scientiﬁc breakthroughs. “When people with completely different scientiﬁc backgrounds get together to solve a common problem, you have to learn a different way of speaking, a different language,” said Dr. MacDiarmid. “It’s much tougher. It takes you out of your comfort zone. But it’s more rewarding.”5 But interdisciplinary research and collaboration is not important simply because it is personally rewarding, or even because it will lead to the discovery of more interesting ideas. Because it so dramatically increases the explanatory power, the immediate relevance, and the practical application of research to real-world problems, it can no longer safely be considered as just an option. Instead, Hybrid Vigor maintains that collaboration across disciplines should be considered as the required partner to traditional, specialized inquiry. Within the university, the best immediate evidence of the popularity and utility of crossing disciplinary boundaries comes from the growing numbers of new, hybrid disciplines that are being formed. Given the growing acceptance of such ﬁelds as bio-anything, industrial ecology, the cognitive sciences, and scores of others, there is obviously great potential for relevant discourse and discovery in the spaces between traditional disciplines. The Human Genome Project is a relatively recent example, where physicists, computer scientists, biologists, and others worked together to invent better methods for determining the sequence of the hereditary information encoded in human DNA. In fact, the entire ﬁeld of biotechnology is a cross-disciplinary, cross-sector endeavor. An older but equally powerful example is the now-ubiquitous graphical user interface for computers that drove consumer acceptance of personal technology, as well as the laser printer and many other now-commonplace devices. The staff of Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center, the birthplace of these advances, notably included cognitive psychologists, anthropologists, computer programmers, architects, cultural theorists, artists, and others from many more ﬁelds of expertise. Even far outside the realm of science and technological innovation, child welfare groups also insist that interdisciplinary, collaborative discussions in child protection cases—which include judges, administrators, case workers, healthcare providers, and defense counsel—yield substantively better outcomes for abused and neglected children. Many other successful examples exist outside the traditional research setting as well, such as the ongoing National Atmospheric Deposition Program, formed in 1978 to determine trends in the chemical climate of the United States. Composed of a group of scientists from many different disciplines, public and private universities, industries, and environmental protection organizations, the data the group gathered via agreed-upon sampling and methodology protocols were an

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important part of the motivation and scientiﬁc foundation for the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990. Yet despite the hosannas offered to the practice, our culture continues to overwhelmingly favor specialized expertise. Hybrid Vigor’s ﬁrst challenge was to understand this paradoxical phenomenon: What forces are at work here? Why do so many continue to pay such high praise to collaboration, while at the same time they consistently make decisions based on tightly bounded, limited expertise? It found that most of today’s existing institutions throw up barrier after barrier to collaborative research and problem solving, and the problem starts on the training ground for specialized expertise: the university. For example, collaboration emphasizes the goal rather than individual achievement,6 but a university department confers professional legitimacy solely upon the basis of individual achievement, and provides both funding models and the rewards and requirements for career advancement—including tenure and publishing quotas—to sustain them. In this context, the march toward institutional acceptance of hybrid disciplines, such as the cognitive sciences, makes sense. When they were still considered “interdisciplinary,” their practitioners were dancing on the razor’s edge of illegitimacy. But when they yielded sufﬁcient individual achievement that a funding structure, rewards, journals, and publishing requirements could be snapped into place around them, they then became “accepted” disciplines in their own right. The myriad of ways in which universities strongly discourage the crossing of disciplinary boundaries are too lengthy (and disheartening) to list, but one of the most problematic roadblocks is the logistics and the semantics of collaboration, particularly for obtaining funding or publishing research results. In some ﬁelds, collaborative research is not even tolerated. For example, the Journal of the American Society for Information Science published a survey of authors from various scientiﬁc disciplines who published papers with an interdisciplinary focus.7 What they discovered was that co-authors who were in the same discipline or subject area were ofﬁcially considered “collaborators,” while researchers outside that discipline were listed as “consultants,” no matter how integral their contribution. The authors claimed this was only way they could circumvent the roadblocks of peer review and not damage their chances to be considered for tenure and promotion. Another sticky cultural problem is that what constitutes a success for practicing interdisciplinarity is often radically different from success in disciplinary work. Scientiﬁc disciplines in particular usually require quantitative or measurable results, but a successful collaboration is based upon exploration and curiosity in the service of solving a problem or answering a question, which may or may not yield the kind of tangible “product” expected from traditional research. The prevailing, disciplinary approach to problem solving is often tightly bounded, simplistic, and linear, calling into play what Margaret Somerville and David Rapport call the “symptom-treatment” coupling, which most often fails to address the more fundamental issue of basic causes. Collaboration by deﬁnition

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encourages more iterative, “out of the box” thinking, since the boxes (i.e., areas of expertise) have been at least mightily perforated, if not removed entirely.8 In the preface to their 2000 book, Transdisciplinarity: reCreating Integrated Knowledge, Somerville and Rapport also noted that disciplinary projects are often so tightly deﬁned that it would be unusual not to produce a result, but it is difﬁcult to conﬁdently predict whether a proposed collaborative project will succeed. Instead of setting up a traditional result as a condition of success, they said, it might be more useful for collaborators to pinpoint the larger, meta-reasons why a collaborative project might fail—the personal, organizational, psychological, or intellectual barriers that could cause a project to implode. In that way, they can set the boundary conditions for success by avoiding obvious disaster.

THE CHALLENGE OF COMMON TOPICS AND LANGUAGE From an organizational perspective, the identiﬁcation of a topic common to all participants—as opposed to the transfer of an accepted problem from an already established discipline, to be solved by the group—is considered a prerequisite for the success for any collaborative endeavor.9 Working on a common problem has been the de facto mode of successful collaboration in the technology industries, and more recently in biotechnology, where the intricacies of designing and building computers and software—and now, adapting them for use in biological systems—bring together people of disparate backgrounds to solve complex problems as a team. Within the university setting, the International and Area Studies program at the University of California–Berkeley has met with great success by conducting a regular workshop, using faculty from several disciplines, to help doctoral students hone their dissertation theses. The workshop, according the program’s executive director, has “accelerated the completion of dissertations; created intense and highly productive inter-disciplinary discourse across the social sciences, humanities, and professional schools; fostered wider audiences for their individual projects; and created on-going intellectual communities and collegiality on campus, and beyond.”10 Workshop participants do signiﬁcantly better in some funding competitions, and other organizations are using the workshops as a model for their own projects. Most encouragingly, numerous participants say that the workshop “charged, or re-charged, their intellectual batteries and signiﬁcantly accelerated their research and writing.”11 A more cautionary tale comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established by the United Nations in the late 1980s to advise governments of the processes and likely consequences of global climate change. The group was composed of a diverse group of scientists who, according to observers, were overly concerned with assessment orthodoxy and political propriety, and thus never managed to rise above the level of their disciplines to agree on how to approach and/or narrow the common problem.

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As a result, researchers did not consult each other about extremely complex questions, such as how to achieve an integrated assessment of the cost and impact of climate change, thus the phenomenon was never discussed in a way that allowed policy makers and interested lay people to appreciate the nature of the problem. Although much disciplinary data and committees and subgroups have since been generated, no synthesis has taken place to date, and overall, the IPCC is perceived as a wasted opportunity. The lack of common understanding between disparate ﬁelds and sectors that use different vocabularies and modes of inquiry is widely acknowledged as the most signiﬁcant personal challenge to collaboration for experts who are accustomed to great ﬂuency and literacy within their own specialized areas. What may be even worse than simply not understanding the jargon of another’s discipline is another problem that surfaces frequently: disciplines may use a common pool of language to construct their unique metaphors. For example, the economist David Wear points out, when an economist says “competition,” or an ecologist says “niche,” the economist thinks “neoclassical production theory” and the ecologist thinks “identiﬁable components of ecosystems.” But an ecologist’s use of “competition” is about the forces that exclude all but the best-suited species from a “niche”; for the economist, the niche is a competitive market that supports several ﬁrms. There are countless similar examples in the literature. Needless to say, this can be not only very confusing, but can lead to serious misapprehensions, project evaluations gone awry, and unwarranted assumptions of ignorance by (and about) the unwary boundary-crossing researcher. As a result, members of a collaborative team, or a researcher who intends to communicate results to an interdisciplinary audience, must reach agreement not only on the interpretation of the data (which already highlights differences in backgrounds and traditions) but also on the way every term is deﬁned and used. As one researcher wrote, “This certainly increases the heaviness of the research process, not to mention the difﬁculties in communicating the results. I am tempted to mutter, ‘If one can only speak to those who use the same words as oneself ’”12—which, of course, would defeat the purpose of collaborating in the ﬁrst place. Unfortunately, there is no silver-bullet solution to this problem. The best practice for collaborators is to ﬁrst invest in a common understanding of disciplinary jargon and methods. Beyond that, or outside of a team environment, researchers must be hyper-vigilant about language, taking extra effort to explain themselves rather than expecting their team members to translate between the various shorthands of lingo and metaphor, shared scholarly references, and assumptions. Related but separate from the issues of common language, gaining access and familiarity with other experts’ published work is also a serious barrier for collaborative work. When asked how they seek interdisciplinary information, only 52 percent of the scientists interviewed in a 1997 study published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science said they scan journals in other subject areas themselves.

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The reason is astonishingly prosaic. Physically, the journal collections of different disciplines are generally housed in departmental libraries, usually within departmental buildings. Constraints of time and attention seem to dictate that these geographic boundaries are seldom crossed by those from outside disciplines or subject areas. In addition, very few of the thousands of academic journals published today are available in full text via the Internet and World Wide Web, narrowing their accessibility even more. When they are available, subscriptions tend to be prohibitively expensive—even more so than their print counterparts. Conceptually, it is an unspoken but well-known practice that researchers generally “don’t go where they don’t know.” Thus, the journals of other disciplines are often terra incognita, presenting vast foreign landscapes of linguistic, theoretical, and methodological difference. What is more, these journals may continue to be unknown for other, more dire reasons. Because of the high (and rising) cost of academic journals, each year university libraries reduce their journal and monograph collections—even as the production of scholarly information is growing exponentially. Create Change, a project sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, claims that “the free ﬂow of scholarly information, the lifeblood of scholarly inquiry and creativity, is being interrupted.”13 As a consequence, scholars and students around the world have access to less and less intellectual output each year. Ironically, at the same time that access to quality material is narrowing, the inﬂux of unﬁltered, unsolicited publications to the inboxes of researchers is increasing. How to cull the wheat from the chaff for anyone wanting to reach across disciplinary boundaries presents a signiﬁcant challenge and opportunity for the practice of collaborative work.

COMPETITION, TURF, AND TRUST The ability for individual researchers to overcome the psychological barriers of turf and competition—dubbed “the geopolitics of knowledge” by a leading transdisciplinary scholar, Julie Thompson Klein—is key to the success of any interdisciplinary venture, and a key to Hybrid Vigor’s “institute without walls” approach. In fact, good interdisciplinary work is more likely to occur when there are several persons present who have both eclectic knowledge and a disregard for boundaries of others’ intellectual turf.14 On an institutional level, “de-turﬁng” these boundaries is the idea behind the growing number of university-hosted interdisciplinary centers, including recent entrants such as Stanford University’s Bio-X Program for Bioengineering, Biomedicine, and Biosciences; the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and UC–Berkeley’s Health Sciences Initiative.

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A long-running example of how transcending boundaries can work is the McGill Centre for Medicine, Law, and Ethics, established in 1986. At the start of the process, three faculty deans, from medicine, law, and religious studies, were fully committed to transdisciplinarity and to “unselﬁsh cooperation beyond their faculties,” according to the center’s founding director. Several other important reasons were also responsible for its success, including the trust that McGill University placed in individuals and the center as an institution, and the risks they allowed the center to take by launching into large, complex, controversial, highly sensitive, and difﬁcult projects, including assessment of the threat of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the mid-1980s.15 The Natural Resources Research Center at North Carolina State University was less fortunate. Despite a promising start, when three schools joined together— and quickly obtained funding—to build a center to house an interdisciplinary program, it did not take long before internal wrangling over the allocation of equipment grants and space, as well as internal politics, began chipping away at the cooperative spirit between the schools. Today, there are some collaborative contacts and cooperative programs, but as one faculty observer noted, “the dream of a highly creative Natural Resources Research Center is dead—killed off by continuing worry and unhappy memories about . . . trying to work together when there was not enough communication and trust among the parties to overcome the inevitable problems of living together in the same outstandingly useful physical facility.” The verdict: opportunity lost.16 The nascent university centers mentioned above, and others of their ilk, would do well to heed the warnings inherent in both these examples. Obtaining the funds and building an interdisciplinary center are apparently the easiest parts of the task; keeping the key players on equal footing, all pulling toward the same goals, requires ongoing and sustained effort in order to achieve long-term success. Trust is closely related to issues of turf and competition, particularly since it may be true that disciplines serve to discipline trust more than anything else—by their distinctive vocabularies, the ideas they advance, and the standards of proof they accept.17 This explains why one specialist’s perspective is often greeted skeptically by another. It has little to do with the “other” per se; it has to do with the degree of trust we confer upon those whose perspectives we already know. But learning to trust is absolutely essential if collaboration is to consistently yield the kinds of discoveries and unexpected connections that it has in the past. Those working together to solve a common problem cannot look for the similarities or matching patterns between their works and others’ unless they are willing to risk their position as “experts” long enough to actually focus on another expert’s perspective. We will never know how many signiﬁcant discoveries have never seen the light of day because of this brand of intellectual insecurity. Although trust may seem like an intangible, excessively psychological goal, it is cited consistently in the literature as a reason many collaborative projects break down. The various participants in a collaboration must trust that they are respected and considered as equals to those outside their ﬁelds—and that they are,

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in fact, in the presence of equals—in order to feel secure enough to engage in the process. (This is particularly true with researchers from the natural sciences, who tend to believe their focus on quantitative data is superior.) Cultivation of trust also creates a critically important aura of credibility around any collaboration.

FUNDING PROCESS, NOT PRODUCT Given the breadth and depth of the kinds of challenges that an individual or team faces entering a collaboration, it is obviously not the easier, softer approach. Collaborative work requires tenacity and a tolerance for ambiguity that many traditional thinkers ﬁnd difﬁcult to maintain. Unfortunately, that tenacity must extend to ﬁnding sustainable ways to ﬁnance collaborative inquiry. Despite its many signiﬁcant successes in biological systems, in social and economic interactions, in artiﬁcial life and evolutionary dynamics— successes that have truly changed the course of how research in many disciplines is conducted—organizations such as Hybrid Vigor continue to struggle with convincing funders of the value of collaborative processes. Most funding organizations, from government agencies to private foundations, clearly prefer discrete, narrowly focused projects with unambiguous, measurable results to those that put an equal emphasis on the process by which a project is accomplished. Even if they are inclined toward a process-oriented proposal, reviewers generally make their evaluations based on the expectations and metrics of traditional expertise, rather on the more inclusive philosophies and practices of collaboration. This practice more often than not prevents interdisciplinary and collaborative projects from being funded, and continues to relegate them to undeserved, second-class status. For example, in 2001, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) invited grant applications for Centers of Excellence in Cancer Communications Research (CECCR). The Request for Applications stated that CECCR applicants were expected to propose and conduct research that would lead to major scientiﬁc advances in knowledge about cancer communications and their translation into practice. This mission included several overarching goals that were speciﬁcally interdisciplinary in nature and criteria. Of the twenty proposals submitted—including one in which Hybrid Vigor was a participant—none were funded. According to reports from NCI and rumors from informants, none received high enough scores from the peer review because of the turf wars, disparate expectations, language issues, and so on—all well-known barriers to interdisciplinary research, but apparently not factored into the review process. We expect that, eventually, agencies and foundations will learn how to evaluate and adequately fund these kinds of inclusive approaches. But in the meantime, like many other organizations that focus on a process rather than a product, Hybrid Vigor has had to become adept at maximizing impact on a small and perpetually uncertain budget. Its early decision, for example, to keep the institute “virtual”—that is, bringing together collaborators only on a per-project basis, rather than

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maintaining a full-time staff and ofﬁce—was designed to keep Hybrid Vigor always pushing for the freshest and most relevant topics and co-investigators, but it has proven to be a wise ﬁnancial strategy as well. The institute continues to receive project grants from foundations and government agencies, but has also begun actively seeking out general operating funds from select philanthropies and private individuals that understand the importance of promoting and supporting collaborative problem-solving processes. A newly minted consulting practice is also helping to underwrite the organization’s less lucrative projects and operations, while allowing clients to exploit the organization’s expertise in a variety of areas, including facilitating collaborations and meetings, writing white papers and articles, and assembling research teams. And at the end of 2006, the institute transformed its website, Hybridvigor.org, from a resource center for publications into a blog. It is building a roster of guest bloggers known for their afﬁliation with various interdisciplinary topics or methods, such as risk assessment. As they bring their constituents to Hybrid Vigor, they will raise their own proﬁles as well as the organization’s. No one anticipated that an organization such as Hybrid Vigor, designed from the ground up to be collaborative in nature, would end up dealing so directly with the same realities—that is to say, the same difﬁculties—of established institutions that are trying to learn the art and the science of collaboration. But its enthusiasm for the task it has undertaken is undiminished by the slings and arrows of fortune, or lack thereof. It remains committed as ever to developing the methods and facilitating the collaborations that will result in a new knowledge ecology—one that conjoins specialized information and expertise with accountability, complex understanding, and enduring impact.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: The Hybrid Vigor Institute Founder and/or Executive Director: Denise Caruso Mission/Description: The Hybrid Vigor Institute is an independent, not-for-proﬁt research organization and consultancy based in San Francisco that is dedicated to interdisciplinary research and collaborative problem solving. It is focused on two goals: 1. To establish new methods, tools, and best practices for collaboration and knowledge sharing that can satisfy the demands of both the natural and the social sciences, and that can accommodate the important and underused contributions of the arts and humanities 2. To build a global network of diverse thinkers from both public and private sectors who are comfortable with these kinds of boundary-crossing inquiries, and who meet the highest standards of professional performance in their respective ﬁelds

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As a result, the Hybrid Vigor Institute will make signiﬁcant contributions toward solving some of today’s most intractable problems threatening the health, well-being, and quality of life of people and the communities in which they live. Website: www.hybridvigor.org Address: Hybrid Vigor Institute 1459 18th Street, Suite 189 San Francisco, CA 94107 USA Phone: N/A E-mail: [email protected]

NOTES 1. Diana Rhoten, A Multi-Method Analysis of the Social and Technical Conditions for Interdisciplinary Collaboration, Final Report, National Science Foundation BCS-0129573. 2. Denise Caruso, “Risk as Continuum: A Redeﬁnition of Risk for Governing the PostGenome World,” Hybrid Vigor Journal (February 2002), http://hybridvigor.net/ health-determinants/publications/. 3. Denise Caruso, “Risk: The Art and the Science of Choice,” Hybrid Vigor Journal (October 2002), http://hybridvigor.net/health-determinants/publications/. 4. Baruch Fischhoff et al., “Analyzing Disaster Risks and Plans: An Avian Flu Example,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 33 (2006): 131–149; W. Bruine de Bruin, et al., “Expert Judgments of Pandemic Inﬂuenza Risks,” Global Public Health 1.2 (June 2006): 178–193. 5. Denise Caruso and Diana Rhoten, “Lead, Follow, Get Out of the Way: Sidestepping the Barriers to Effective Practice of Interdisciplinarity,” Hybrid Vigor White Paper, April 2001; 7. 6. Desmond Manderson, “Some Considerations about Transdisciplinarity,” in Transdisciplinarity: reCreating Integrated Knowledge, ed. Margaret Somerville and David Rapport, 86–93 (Oxford: EOLSS Publishers, 2000). 7. Jian Qin, F. W. Lancaster, and Bryce Allen, “Types and Levels of Collaboration in Interdisciplinary Research in Sciences,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 48.10 (1997): 893–916. 8. Caruso and Rhoten, 9–10. 9. S. T. A. Pickett, William Burch Jr., and J. Morgan Grove,“Interdisciplinary Research: Maintaining the Constructive Impulse in a Culture of Criticism,” Ecosystems 2 (1999): 302–307. 10. David L. Szanton, “Dissertation Workshops at U.C. Berkeley,” March 2001 (accessed at http://www.grad.washington.edu/envision/practices/practices/dw2.html, July 2008). 11. Ibid. 12. Liora Salter and Alison Hearn, Outside the Lines: Issues in Interdisciplinary Research (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 53. 13. Caruso and Rhoten, 12. 14. Anthony McMichael, “Transdisciplinarity in Science,” in Transdisciplinarity: reCreating Integrated Knowledge, ed. Margaret Somerville and David Rapport, 207.

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15. Margaret Somerville,“Transdisciplinarity: Structuring Creative Tension,” in Transdisciplinarity: reCreating Integrated Knowledge, ed. Margaret Somerville and David Rapport, 100. 16. Ellis Cowling, “Transdisciplinarity: Philosophy, Practice, and Future,” in Transdisciplinarity: reCreating Integrated Knowledge, ed. Margaret Somerville and David Rapport, 154. 17. Roderick Macdonald, “Transdisciplinarity and Trust,” in Transdisciplinarity: reCreating Integrated Knowledge, ed. Margaret Somerville and David Rapport, 61–76.

12

Our Voices Together Marianne Scott

We should offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors . . . we can offer parents a vision that might give their children a better future. 9/11 Commission Report recommendation

The task of changing a hate-ﬁlled world belongs to each one of us. Mariane Pearl, A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband Danny Pearl

Early on September 11, 2001, Norma Steuerle boarded Flight 77 at Dulles Airport outside of Washington, D.C. She was heading west to cross the Paciﬁc for a family vacation. Her husband, Gene Steuerle, an economist, was attending a conference in Asia where their daughter, Kristin Steuerle, a pediatrician on active duty with the U.S. Navy, was stationed. A little over an hour after takeoff, terrorists took control of the plane carrying Norma and crashed it into the Pentagon. Following 9/11, in the wake of initial widespread global solidarity against terrorist tactics and the outpouring of goodwill they received from strangers as well as neighbors, Gene and his daughters, Kristin and Lynne, realized they now had a special voice. It was one that they did not ask for or even want, one they would gladly give up to get Norma back, but a special voice nonetheless. This voice could effectively transmit a message that was so very different from the message the terrorists were trying to send. This voice was most evident in action. By responding in ways that demonstrated the oneness of humanity, that reciprocated the outpouring of generosity they had received, and that were in line with the way 203

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Norma had lived her life, they could defy the terrorists’ intent to divide through fear, and they could honor her. Acts of compassion could send an alternative message to the message of hate propagated by terrorists. Their voices and actions could help build a safer, more compassionate world. It was this global spirit of community and the power of these simple acts of compassion that motivated the family of Norma Steuerle to form Our Voices Together. The Steuerle family began reaching out to other families who had lost loved ones on September 11 (see Table 12.1). They found people working to improve conditions in Afghanistan because of the direct tie between that country’s tragic history and the loss of their loved ones. Joyce Manchester and David Stapleton were supporting healthcare for mothers in Afghanistan in honor of friends also killed on Flight 77. Sally and Don Goodrich were building a school in memory of their son Peter, a passenger on the second plane to hit the World Trade Center. Susan Retik, widowed and pregnant on 9/11, was reaching out to widows in Afghanistan. Table 12.1 Our Voices Together Family Proﬁles Terrorist acts create devastating loss. Nonetheless, these families, like many others, are determined to generate more good in the world out of tragedy. These are the stories of a few of the families who make up Our Voices Together. The Steuerle Family Norma Steuerle was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 77; her plane was hijacked and ﬂown into the Pentagon. In response to the outpouring of goodwill her husband Gene and daughters, Lynne and Kristin, received and to honor the goodness and understanding Norma brought to the world, Gene, Kristin, and Lynne Steuerle decided to donate 100 percent of their federal Victim Compensation Fund settlement to start two charities: Our Voices Together and the Alexandria Community Trust, a community foundation that serves as a catalyst to increase charitable investment in Alexandria, VA. Eric Gardner Eric Gardner’s brother, Jeff, was an insurance executive with an ofﬁce in the World Trade Center. Jeff also was an avid participant with Habitat for Humanity both at home in New Jersey and in Latin America. Asked why he volunteered, he remarked that he knew his life was privileged and he did not want to forget that. After his death on September 11, 2001, the Gardner family—parents, the late David and Eileen Gardner, and siblings, Eric Gardner and Amy Beth Kassan—established the Jeffrey Brian Gardner Scholarship fund to allow college students to continue Jeff’s work with Habitat for Humanity International’s Global Village program. To date 174 college students have received Jeff Gardner scholarships to enable them to help build homes in Central America, the Caribbean, and Africa. The Alderman Family Elizabeth and Stephen Alderman lost their youngest son at the World Trade Center. To honor his life, the family created the Peter C. Alderman Foundation to help walkingwounded victims of terrorism and mass violence who had survived but because of traumatic depression could no longer function. They realized they could not bring Peter back but could help heal others as a living memory to him. One billion people, one sixth

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Table 12.1 (Continued) of the world’s population, have directly experienced terrorism, mass violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. The Peter C. Alderman foundation has trained doctors from twelve countries on four continents to heal the wounds of victimized populations. It runs Peter C. Alderman Mental Health Clinics in Cambodia and Uganda. Their goal is to train doctors and establish a network of clinics in post-conﬂict countries. As the Aldermans say, “It’s a personal matter: we are victims of terrorism helping victims of terrorism.” www.petercaldermanfoundation.org Sally and Don Goodrich Sally and Don Goodrich’s son Peter was on United Airlines Flight 175 on 9/11; it was the second plane ﬂown into the World Trade Center. Don Goodrich, an attorney, serves as the chair of the board of Families of September 11th, working to prevent terrorism while preserving civil liberties in the United States. Sally, an educator, wanted to respond with the kind of love and cross-cultural exploration that Peter had shared with the world. She has been the driving force in the development of the Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation, which works primarily in the Pashtun provinces of Afghanistan supporting education and addressing the fundamental needs of fragile populations. Among its activities, the foundation has built a school for girls, supports orphans in Wardak, and hosts several Afghan exchange students at high schools and colleges in the United States. www.goodrichfoundation.org Susan Retik Susan and her husband, David, were expecting their third child when David was killed on September 11. In November 2001, Dina was born. After David’s death, Susan was very appreciative of the ﬁnancial and emotional support she received from around the world. Recognizing the importance of a generous community, she realized that many Afghan widows are victims of the same war that had claimed the David’s life. Susan co-founded Beyond the 11th to reach out to widows in war-torn areas, especially in Afghanistan, and offer mutual support. Beyond the 11th began with an annual fundraising bike ride from Ground Zero in New York City to the Boston Commons. www.Beyondthe11th.org Joyce Manchester and David Stapleton David and Joyce were close friends of Leslie Whittington, Charles Falkenberg, and their young daughters, Zoe and Dana, all of whom were passengers on American Flight 77 that was ﬂown into the Pentagon. Read about their ongoing philanthropic efforts to support education in Afghanistan in the story of the Afghan Education Giving Circle of Northern Virginia in Appendix 1 of this chapter. Len Burman Len Burman and Leslie Whittington had been colleagues and fellow economists on the faculty at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute. A few years after her death, Len read Tracy Kidder’s book Mountains Beyond Mountains, about Paul Farmer’s medical work in Haiti. Inspired by his work and in memory of the Whittington-Falkenberg family, Len and his son, Paul, cycled across America in 2005 raising over $100,000 for Dr. Farmer’s organization, Partners in Health. www.Ride4Haiti.org Marilynn M. Rosenthal (deceased) Joshua Rosenthal, son of Dr. Marilynn M. Rosenthal, professor emerita at the University of Michigan–Dearborn, worked in the World Trade Center’s south tower. After his death,

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Table 12.1 (Continued) she established the annual Rosenthal Lecture at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and traveled to the United Arab Emirates to meet with the family of the young hijacker who had piloted the plane that crashed into the south tower. When she lost her battle with cancer in August 2007, she was turning her investigation into a book. “I’m not justifying what he did. He’s a murderer. But if you just hate . . . and you don’t try to understand, all you do is perpetuate the hate and the wars and the killing over and over again. I don’t know any way to do it except through understanding. That doesn’t mean forgiving. For me, it’s not a matter of forgiveness. It’s a matter of understanding.” Her intellect, her warmth, her courage, her determination, her optimism, and her search for truth and understanding are greatly missed.

The Steuerle family already knew Len Burman, who was bicycling across the United States to raise funds for Haiti in memory of a friend and colleague killed on 9/11. He introduced them to Eric Gardner, whose family had set up a scholarship to enable college students to volunteer abroad building homes in poor communities, one of his brother’s passions before he was killed at the World Trade Center. They recognized that coming together could amplify these voices, and in the long run, help to diminish terrorism by reaching out in friendship to those very communities around the world from which terrorists recruit. With a few more families and friends of 9/11 victims, this core group formed Our Voices Together in Washington, D.C. As Gene Steuerle said when launching Our Voices Together on the fourth anniversary of 9/11 in 2005, “Terrorists today are using their resources to do enormous harm. We are trying to use our resources to do enormous good.” Our Voices Together advisory board member Nikki Stern, whose husband worked on the ninety-fourth ﬂoor of 1 World Trade Center, aptly noted that on September 11, the plane went crashing into her husband’s life brieﬂy and into her own life permanently. Those planes went crashing into all of our lives permanently. Our Voices Together recognizes that we do not have to allow those who sought to destroy to be the ones to wholly deﬁne the legacy of this permanent crash. We can shape the legacy of that day by bringing good out of tragedy and building a safer, more compassionate world.

THE GLOBAL CHALLENGE AND OUR VOICES TOGETHER’S VISIONARY RESPONSE At no point in history has America’s national security depended as much on our ability to be a respected and integral part of the world community. Effective counterterrorism requires more than military force, intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland security measures. These efforts, while signiﬁcant, do little to diminish the popular appeal of violent tactics or the underlying hatred that excuses such actions.

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We know terrorists lose their ability to coerce if they lose their ability to recruit. The message and strategy of global extremist groups such as al Qaeda can be powerful only as long as they gain supporters. In Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Robert Pape of the University of Chicago observed, “An individual can die. Only a community can make a martyr.”1 The challenge is more than just stopping those who are bent on destruction through terrorist tactics. Of course, these individuals must be stopped before they take more lives. A comprehensive counterterrorism strategy also must include engaging communities in those places where would-be martyrs ﬁnd fertile support—in other words, helping to build a world where the appeal of lives lived in dignity, opportunity, and safety triumphs over the allure of extremism and its terrorist tactics. In the sixth year of the War on Terror, the U.S. military ﬁnally institutionalized this doctrine. The December 2006 Army and Marine Corps’ Counterinsurgency Field Manual says, “At its core, [counterinsurgency] is a struggle for the population’s support. The protection, welfare, and support of the people are vital to success.”2 Among the paradoxes of counterinsurgency, it notes that “sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is.”3 This new counterinsurgency ﬁeld manual was followed in October 2007 by the ﬁrst ever joint Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard cooperative strategy for sea power. It focuses on humanitarian missions and stresses “that preventing wars is as important as winning wars.”4 In November 2007, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates delivered the Landan Lecture at Kansas State University and became the ﬁrst secretary of defense to call for “a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security.” He said, “One of the most important lessons of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that military success is not sufﬁcient to win: economic development, institutionbuilding and the rule of law, promoting internal reconciliation, good governance, providing basic services to the people, training and equipping indigenous military and police forces, strategic communications, and more—these, along with security, are essential ingredients for long-term success.”5 Secretary Gates also noted that the military had taken on these burdens but that this was no replacement for “the real thing—civilian involvement and expertise.” Our Voices Together is part of a growing number of people who know that “citizen involvement and expertise” is our nation’s best asset. Ordinary citizens are one of the most powerful and most underappreciated elements of our national inﬂuence abroad. Our Voices Together understands that to achieve a safer future, we must build mutual trust and respect around the globe. Our Voices Together recognizes the vast potential in engaging our entire nation in diplomacy by connecting communities. A nonproﬁt, nonpartisan network of people and organizations, Our Voices Together promotes the vital role of people-to-people efforts to help build better, safer lives and futures around the world through three principal program areas. 1. The “Agenda of Opportunity”—promoting global philanthropy and volunteerism to empower Americans to respond to terrorism with meaningful,

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positive global action, such as hosting foreign students, engaging in interfaith and international service projects, or providing job skills, school supplies, and medical care to communities abroad in need. 2. A network of good out of tragedy—Our Voices Together supports and helps others support a growing network of organizations and individuals providing hands-on services as a constructive civilian response to terrorism. Many of these organizations have grown out of 9/11. 3. Building a safer, more compassionate world—Our Voices Together is working to reframe the public discussion concerning terrorism away from fear and toward actions that engage rather than disenfranchise communities worldwide. The Safer, More Compassionate World public awareness campaign promotes citizen diplomacy as a critical part of our nation’s efforts to counter terrorism. Our Voices Together is not so naïve as to believe that such efforts are the single antidote to terrorism. They are a component of a comprehensive strategy. As 9/11 Commission chairman Thomas Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton wrote in the Washington Post, “America’s long-term security relies on being viewed not as a threat but as a source of opportunity and hope.”6 1. An Agenda of Opportunity: Promoting Global Philanthropy & Volunteerism Recommendation: A comprehensive U.S. strategy to counter terrorism should include economic policies that encourage development, more open societies, and opportunities for people to improve the lives of their families and to enhance prospects for their children’s future. 9/11 Commission Report 7

Poverty and lack of education are not root causes of terrorism. Most terrorist leaders are not poor or uneducated, and poor, uneducated people are not more likely to become terrorists. Yet the ﬁnal report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission Report) called for the United States to offer an “Agenda of Opportunity” of education, employment, and the prospect of a brighter tomorrow. Poverty, exclusion, and ignorance create fragile conditions and foster resentment, which extremists then exploit and use to rationalize terrorist tactics. As the 9/11 Commission Report noted, “When people lose hope, when societies break down, when countries fragment, the breeding grounds for terrorism are created.”8 Gene Steuerle wrote in a letter to the editor published in the July 17, 2007, edition of the Wall Street Journal: There are two reasons to ﬁght poverty as a response to terrorism. First, it offers an alternative vision of how to work for a better society and how to unite those who are

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divided. Second, terrorists depend upon the emotional support of their communities, and these communities are much less likely to exhibit hatred toward those who are actively engaging with them to construct better lives. I work with a group of families who have lost loved ones to terrorism and are trying to make a difference by devoting their own resources to activities like building schools or clinics in poor areas of the world, often those communities most affected by terrorists. Our work complements, not competes with, the sacriﬁces of those who serve as police or ﬁreﬁghters or military.9

Terrorists realize that in our modern world, each one of us has tremendous power. They use theirs to hurt others. Our Voices Together asks people not to downplay their own power to make better the lives of many others. What more powerful statement can there be about our nation that that of our people, interested in the world around them, personally reaching out to provide education or medical care or jobs? Our Voices Together offers tools to help people to engage in global philanthropy and actively promotes international volunteer opportunities. Gifts That Count is Our Voices Together’s alternative, online gift shop that encourages people to change the way they “gift.” The idea is simple: instead of buying birthday, holiday, or other gifts that friends may not need, give something in their name to those in need. When individuals donate through Gifts That Count, they are giving directly to the projects of Our Voices Together network organizations and can customize an e-card to be sent to the person in whose name the gift was selected. Gifts That Count has raised over $200,000 for featured projects in two and a half years. Global Giving Circles offer an opportunity for small groups of friends to get more substantially engaged in global philanthropy. A giving circle is commonly deﬁned as “a group of individuals who pool grant making resources to pursue common goals in a particular interest area and who commit to learn with each other and with leaders and activists in the ﬁeld.”10 In partnership with the Clarence Foundation, Our Voices Together promotes giving circles as a response to terrorism. For example, the Afghan Education Giving Circle of Northern Virginia, started by Our Voices Together board members David Stapleton and Joyce Manchester, is committed to supporting two primary schools outside of Kabul over three years. (See the story of the Afghan Education Giving Circle of Northern Virginia in Appendix 1 of this chapter.) Think Big, Act Big FunRaisers are online tools set up by Our Voices Together to enable community and youth groups to hold local fundraising events for the charities and causes featured in Gifts That Count. During the program’s ﬁrst year and a half, two basketball Hoop-a-thons in California to support anti–child slavery efforts in the carpet industry in India, a long-distance bike ride in Canada for schools in Pakistan, and an art event in Wisconsin for women’s projects in Afghanistan, took place. Our Voices Together also points people toward volunteer opportunities in the United States and abroad, such as the Jeffrey Brian Gardner scholarship for college students who want to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity International. From

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2002 to 2007, 174 college students—mostly of them low income who would not have otherwise been able to afford the experience—received Jeffrey Brian Gardner scholarships to build homes in Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean. In 2003 this scholarship helped ﬁnance a special youth exchange: twelve students from Haiti and twelve from the Dominican Republic built for a week in the Dominican Republic and then traveled together to Haiti to build for a second week. 2. A “Counterterrorist” Network of Good out of Tragedy Al-Qaeda, Arabic for “the base,” is an international terrorist network today only nominally led by Osama bin Laden. As leading terrorism expert and Our Voices Together advisory board member, Bruce Hoffman told Congress in early 2006, “It has become a vast enterprise—an international franchise with likeminded local representatives, loosely connected to a central ideological or motivational base, but advancing the remaining center’s goals at once simultaneously and independently of each other.”11 It is a coalition of extremist groups and individuals who have chosen to use terrorist tactics to achieve common aims. Al-Qaeda holds the twisted view that force, intimidation, and hatred are the way to improve the lives of Muslims around the world. And they have shown, they are willing to make extraordinary personal sacriﬁces of their own resources and lives to do so. Out of the horror of their violent methods another network is growing. This network of “counterterrorists” is a network of private citizens using largely their own resources to generate good will and hope (see Table 12.2). These are people who understand that the battle against terrorism is a very long one, and who recognize that people everywhere around the world are looking for ways to improve lives. They see that alternatives to the extremists’ message of hatred and their agenda of violence occur when one village meets another in acts of compassion. The Our Voices Together network empowers people with ideas and opportunities to take positive, concrete actions. Our Voices Together is nothing more and nothing less than people reaching out in kindness to other people around the world. As families meet families, networks of friendship, understanding, and mutual respect are formed. Our Voices Together started from a core group of families who are making a positive difference in honor of lost loved ones. The formal network has grown to more than twenty-four organizations providing hands-on services as a constructive civilian response to terrorism. These groups provide education in rural regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, facilitate interfaith dialogue, organize global volunteering opportunities, run international exchange programs, provide physical and mental health care to people who are suffering, conduct global public opinion polling, and in many other ways increase cross-cultural understanding. By fostering collaboration across these groups and spreading word about their work, Our Voices Together is working to increase their impact and to multiply the

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Table 12.2 Our Voices Together Network Organizations • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Alfred Friendly Press Fellowships American Councils for International Education: ACTR/ACCELS Beyond the 11th Central Asia Institute Clarence Foundation Daniel Pearl Foundation Families of September 11 GlobalGiving Foundation Global Volunteers Grassroots International Green Village Schools Help the Afghan Children Institute for International Education Interfaith Youth Core Manjari Sankurathri Memorial Foundation Peter C. Alderman Foundation Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) Save the Children Seeds of Peace Terror Free Tomorrow: Center for Public Opinion Unity Productions Foundation—20,000 Dialogues Women for Women International Zade Foundation for International Peace and Understanding

number of people engaged in responding to terrorism in this way. Our Voices Together provides the following free services to organizations in the network: •

•

•

•

Visibility for the work of network organizations as a response to terrorism. The work of network nonproﬁts is featured on the Our Voices Together website and in Our Voices Together’s nationwide campaign promoting citizen diplomacy. Networking. Opportunities to collaborate on innovative solutions to common challenges, including an annual conference in Washington, D.C., and periodic peer-to-peer support and networking virtual meetings are available through Our Voices Together. Online fundraising portal. Our Voices Together encourages international philanthropy as a practical and innovative response to terrorism and promotes network participants’ fundraising efforts via online tools. Online action portal. Our Voices Together’s online community of people interested in responding to terrorism through positive actions has grown to nearly 6,000. Our Voices Together enables organizations to take full advantage of this

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community by disseminating opportunities for the public to get involved with their work. The Action Center is divided into four major categories: Build Understanding—opportunities to reach out in friendship through interfaith service projects, select books for book clubs, and participate in music and other events of network organizations Give/Donate—online tools to facilitate ﬁnancial support for projects organized by organizations in the network through alternative gifts and other forms of philanthropy Volunteer—opportunities to host an exchange student or international visitor, volunteer abroad, or organize a Safer, More Compassionate World event Raise Your Voice—advocacy and other efforts whereby individuals can engage their elected ofﬁcials, the media and the general public •

Tailored organizational support services. Our Voices Together also supports the smaller organizations in the network through tailored organizational, marketing, and media support. This has included help designing their websites, brochures, and other outreach materials, as well as organizational support. A good example of this was the 2006 “Roads to You: Celebration of One World” international young musicians’ assembly sponsored by the Zade Foundation. Our Voices Together organized the Washington, D.C., leg of this tour of thirty young adult musicians from Tunisia, Iran, Turkey, Canada, the UK, China, Malaysia, Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere. The Assembly’s month-long tour to Washington, D.C., Houston, and Los Angeles used music to combat cultural ignorance and intolerance, and to promote respect for diversity. To increase direct cross-cultural interaction, Our Voices Together worked with a team of Washington, D.C., area groups to organize home stays with local families and visits to local schools, community centers and places of worship for the musicians. The home stays and concerts sparked lasting interfaith and cross-cultural friendships, and the effort reached close to 4,000 people in the Washington area.

3. Building a Safer, More Compassionate World Awareness Campaign Our Voices Together’s signature program, the Safer, More Compassionate World campaign, is aimed at reframing public dialogue about counterterrorism from an overwhelmingly fear-based focus on strategies of force and coercion, to include strategies of positive action and global partnerships, and to offer substantive opportunities for citizen action (see Table 12.3). This effort began with the ﬁfth anniversary of September 11 in 2006. Our Voices Together members realized early that year that on college campuses across the United States, tensions and differences were running very high over the war in Iraq and concerns about the impact of the War on Terror on civil liberties and human rights. University administrators were asking themselves how they could

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Table 12.3 Terrorism Terrorism is • A tactic used by extremists to coerce opponents and to gain supporters. • The use of violence by an organization other than a national government to cause intimidation or fear among a civilian target audience. • A global threat to human rights, fundamental freedoms and democracy, as well as the territorial integrity and security of nations. • Condemned by every single member of the United Nations. The United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy was adopted on September 8, 2006. • Supported by some groups who see violent acts as justiﬁable. Terrorism isn’t • Associated with any particular religion, nationality, or ethnic group. • Caused by poverty. Most terrorists are not poor, and poor people are not more likely to use terrorist tactics. Yet exclusion and poverty give rise to grievances that are often exploited by terrorists. The UN’s Counter-Terrorism Resolution recognizes that development, peace, security, and human rights are interlinked and mutually reinforcing. • Quelled through one nation’s military or homeland security measures alone. International cooperation is required to disrupt terrorist ﬁnancing, expose networks, and bring terrorists to justice. The resonance of extremists’ message must also be addressed. Economic and educational opportunities, interfaith and cross-cultural respect, and international exchanges are effective ways to do so.

mark this anniversary in a way that did not inﬂame these tensions. Our Voices Together reached out to colleges to encourage them to think beyond memorial services and disaster preparedness training in order to rekindle the solidarity and goodwill that existed in the days following the attacks. Our Voices Together proposed that universities organize panel discussions on/around September 11 with scholars and family members of 9/11 victims talking about responding to terrorism through a multipronged strategy with an emphasis on positive actions individuals could take to help diminish the hatred underlying the attacks. The ﬁfth anniversary forum series asked and answered the question, What can I do to help stop terrorism? The series fostered a paradigm for individuals to respond to terrorism through positive works and to encourage a comprehensive strategy of global engagement and understanding. Topics included engaging communities abroad, sustainable development, building international understanding, and U.S. relations with the Muslim world. Through fairs or expos in conjunction with the panel discussions, the events also sought to increase student participation in study/volunteer abroad opportunities in developing countries, to encourage cross-cultural studies and study of international development issues, and to engage more students in interfaith dialogue and alternative gift giving. In September 2006, on eighteen university campuses nationwide, students and faculty explored these issues through town hall meetings, information fairs, and good-deeds events. Build a Safer, More Compassionate World events reached

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approximately 2,500 people directly and thousands more indirectly via C-SPAN and other media coverage, offering concrete actions that students—indeed, everyone—could take to act as forces for positive change. Participating universities were large and small, public and private, and included Brandeis University, the University of Michigan, American University (Washington, D.C.), Cornell University, East Central University (OK), and others. In addition, on and around September 11, 2006, organizations that are part of Our Voices Together were featured in almost thirty print, television, radio, and Internet news outlets around the world. Fifth anniversary activities were not limited to college campuses. Our Voices Together encouraged people everywhere to mark the ﬁfth anniversary of 9/11 by helping to build a safer, more compassionate world; community events included a concert and talk at the American Center in Munich, Germany. Our Voices Together offered the ﬁrst step of signing the Statement of Global Responsibilities petition (see Table 12.4.) Over 6,000 people signed the petition that fall. In this successful series, Our Voices Together recognized the kernels of a larger Safer, More Compassionate World campaign. Public opinion polling was consistently showing that people around the world viewed Americans as hardworking but also arrogant, greedy, selﬁsh, and violent. Polling indicated that majorities in developing countries, in particular, felt left out of the world’s growing economic prosperity, trampled by America’s overwhelming presence globally, and not listened to by the United States. When terrorist tactics are employed to “make” the United States pay attention or to pull back internationally, these negative perceptions of our nation turn lethal. Table 12.4 Our Voices Together: Responsibilities in the Global Community Statement We believe in an interdependent world there is a pressing need to recognize and act on moral obligations to the global community. These responsibilities include • Striving to create opportunities for longer life, dignity, prosperity, equality, and freedom for all people • Promoting cross-cultural and interfaith understanding • Protecting individuals from pervasive threats We believe that addressing the existing disparity in living standards worldwide is central to reducing terrorism—not because terrorists are poor or because poor people are more likely to become terrorists, but because poverty creates fragile conditions and resentment which extremists exploit. Over time, greater equity, greater interfaith and cross-cultural interaction, and acts of goodwill neutralize the ability of terrorists to polarize communities and manipulate popular support for their actions. And they offer a contrast to terrorist tactics as forces for change. We believe that we can and must learn from our past. Each of us can make a difference. While terrorists use their resources to cause enormous harm, each of us can marshal our resources and pool them to generate enormous good. We, the undersigned, join Our Voices Together in building a safer, more just and compassionate world.

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By using our nation’s core strengths—generosity, volunteerism, and entrepreneurship as well as our diversity of religions, ethnicities, cultures, and countries of origin—to build relationships one person at a time, these perceptions could be changed. This is the basic tenet of the concept of citizen diplomacy: in a vibrant democracy, “the individual citizen has the right, even the responsibility, to help shape United States foreign relations, one handshake at a time.”12 Many of today’s major international exchange organizations (such as the Institute for International Education, an organization in the Our Voices Together network) were founded in the aftermath of World War I by private citizens as part of the effort to seek ways to prevent future wars. In this same spirit, Our Voices Together designed its Safer, More Compassionate World campaign, consisting of nationwide forums, online strategies, and advocacy. The 2007 forum series started with a panel discussion featuring four international journalists from Egypt, Bangladesh, Brazil, and Kenya discussing anti-Americanism worldwide, xenophobia in the United States, and strategies for bridging the gaps and fostering understanding between the United States and the world. “Hearts and Minds: Foreign Perceptions of the U.S. & American Understanding of Foreign Cultures” took place at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., before a standing-room-only crowd of approximately 150 people and was broadcast live on C-SPAN, where thousands more watched it. Over the fall of 2007, twenty-three more Safer, More Compassionate World events took place on university campuses and in community centers from upstate New York to southern California, reaching approximately 1,500 people directly and thousands more via media coverage of the events. Sixteen of these were hosted and coordinated by each state’s local and state League of Women Voters, through a formal collaboration with the League of Women Voters Education Fund. Our Voices Together wrote a Forum Toolkit and offered it free to any community or student group interested in exploring these themes through a public discussion. The toolkit offers step-by-step instructions to organize a forum, including discussion questions for panelists, tips for working with the media, checklists for organizers, evaluation forms, and strategies for moving the audience beyond discussion into action. By spring of 2008, ﬁfty Safer, More Compassionate World events had taken place across the country. Using the forums as a starting point, Our Voices Together employed online methods to further engage the public. The Our Voices Together Blog continues provocative, in-depth conversations about long-term security, citizen involvement, and counterterrorism. Our Voices Together experimented with many of the online social networking websites, asking people to send in their stories of how they are helping to build a safer, more compassionate world, encouraging people to spread the word to their friends, and challenging them to take action. Our Voices Together also adopted its ﬁrst targeted advocacy efforts, lobbying for the Global Service Fellowship Act as a member of the Brookings international service coalition that catalyzed this legislation. Introduced in the House and Senate in 2007 as part of efforts to confront terrorism, the bill seeks

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to establish a new Federal fellowship program to provide funding for lowerincome international volunteers.

OUR VOICES TOGETHER: ORGANIZATIONAL EVOLUTION OF AN IDEA The Steuerle family started with an idea. When Our Voices Together launched in 2005, it was among the ﬁrst organizations to recognize and to try to harness the vast potential in engaging our entire nation in helping to create a safer, more compassionate world as a response to terrorism. In less than three years, Our Voices Together has •

•

• • •

Pioneered the role of individuals to counter terrorism through compassionate actions globally, such as visionary philanthropy, interfaith understanding, and international volunteerism and service Led by example by providing critical ﬁnancial, media, and in some cases, operational support to save lives, educate children, protect the environment, and in other ways make a vital, positive difference in the world Provided millions around the world with a different image of 9/11 families and an alternative vision of how to counter terrorism Succeeded in giving people concrete ways to respond to terrorism that get them beyond the fear Provided critical elements of an innovative and truly comprehensive paradigm for counterterrorism to policy makers and citizens alike

The Steuerle family recognized that there were already inspiring people and organizations making a huge difference on the ground around the world addressing international poverty, building international understanding, and engaging in interfaith dialogue. There were also families that had been directly affected by terrorism and wanted to help address the underlying hatred and poverty so often used as an excuse to justify terrorist tactics. The Steuerles saw the value in not creating yet another direct service organization, but in networking those existing organizations and voices. Together, they could provide an answer to all those people who had been asking, “What can I do?” that was not based in fearful, defensive actions, but on creating goodwill, much as Norma Steuerle had done during her life. The Steuerle family provided start-up funding for Our Voices Together from the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund settlement they received. The Our Voices Together organization began as a project of the Community Foundation of the National Capitol Region and became independent in 2005. Over the organization’s short lifespan, individuals have sustained the organization; most of the major donors have lost a family member or friend to an act of terrorism. In 2007 the Wallace Global Fund supported Our Voices Together’s operations through a small general support grant.

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With an operating budget below $300,000 annually, including direct ﬁnancial support for network organizations through fundraising, Our Voices Together has relied on a tremendous amount of volunteer time from an extremely dedicated board of directors as well as others, and on in-kind and discounted services. A small, all-volunteer core consisting of Gene, Lynne, and Kristin Steuerle; Eric Gardner; Joyce Manchester and David Stapleton; Len Burman, along with Norma Steuerle’s best friend, Rev. Claudia Merritt; and Leslie Whittington’s sister-in-law, ﬁlmmaker Susan Koch, worked with nonproﬁt and international service consultant Zahara Heckscher and Marianne Scott, an accomplished former Foreign Service ofﬁcer and former executive director of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, as well as with interns to set up the organization and develop the website and early programming. Throughout, this team relied on wisdom and suggestions from an illustrious advisory committee. (See list and bios of committee members at the end of this chapter.) As of this writing, the organization has two staff, Marianne Scott as executive director and Cecilia Snyder, an experienced nonproﬁt communications specialist, talented graphic artist, and webmaster, as director of communications and e-initiatives. Three members of the 9/11 Commission are members of the honorary committee: Chairman Thomas H. Kean, Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton, and member Bob Kerrey. As a pioneer, the organization had to learn some things through trial and error. For example, Our Voices Together’s model of offering fundraising tools for events turned out to be extremely labor intensive on a small scale. Although events such as the Hoop-a-Thon organized by a California high school student enabled him to use his love of an American sport to help children he has never seen, in a country he has never visited, and planted the seeds for his long-term interest in eliminating child labor around the world, a few of these events annually were just not ﬁnancially sustainable for Our Voices Together. Another example of trial and error was the structure of the citizen diplomacy awareness campaign. Our Voices Together initially unveiled a Learn, Act, Share structure to the online campaign, encouraging people to begin a journey that starts with becoming globally informed, moves to taking actions at home or abroad, followed by sharing what they have done with their communities, elected leaders, and others. Feedback indicated this structure was catchy and understandable. Our Voices Together collected online curriculum, news, and book resources for all ages on topics ranging from fostering tolerance and cross-cultural understanding to undermining terrorist networks. However, since Our Voices Together is focused on the second step—Act—people moved away from OurVoicesTogether.org to other websites and organizations for the ﬁrst step and then did not come back to take steps two and three; as a result, Our Voices Together was unable to track whether people had continued along the three-step journey. As a network that promotes direct service and giving abroad, Our Voices Together needed to measure actions in order to evaluate its own effectiveness. A new, online Action Center solved this problem, and Our Voices Together found that the critical challenge is moving Americans from embracing the concept of

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citizen diplomacy as an important part of countering terrorism to becoming citizen diplomats themselves. The major challenges faced by Our Voices Together have been in scale and resources. Collaboration with other organizations and an incredible group of committed volunteers and wonderful interns have very successfully stretched its impact and helped spread the core message, but exponentially, more Americans will need to take personal responsibility for citizen diplomacy to make a major difference in global public opinion. Our Voices Together has continued to look for more “voices.” Many people who did not suffer a personal loss on September 11, 2001, still found it to be a profound turning point in their own lives. Our Voices Together has heard from students studying Arabic to be able to communicate directly with people in a part of the world they just had not given much thought about before; professionals who left the corporate sector to follow a passion for international service; international journalists who renewed their commitment to their profession as they realized the vital role balanced reporting plays in informing the world; people who reached out to estranged family members in a spirit of reconciliation; and many people who recommitted themselves to their own faith and, in so doing, gained new respect for other faiths. It is the potential power of bringing these individual experiences together in a way that ampliﬁes their impacts and thus blunts the long-term effectiveness of terrorist tactics that Our Voices Together seeks to harness. Terrorist tactics will cease to be used when they are no longer effective. The more we can show that each of us refuses to be cowed by these tactics and that instead of driving us apart, they drive us together, the closer we will get to the day when terrorist tactics are no longer used. In late 2007, Our Voices Together began thinking more creatively about how to address these challenges and about expanding its reach and impact exponentially. As a result, Our Voices Together decided to take another bold and rather unusual move: During the summer of 2008, Our Voices Together will merge with fellow nonprofit Americans for Informed Democracy (AID), a student-focused, Baltimore-based group that seeks to build a new generation of globally conscious leaders; AID works on more than 1,000 university campuses across the United States and in more than ten countries worldwide. Both Americans for Informed Democracy and Our Voices Together were born out of the tragedy of 9/11 to encourage citizens to build bridges internationally and to recognize their individual power to make a positive difference in our interdependent world. Beginning in the fall of 2008, a new “Rethinking Counterterrorism” initiative at AID will continue Our Voices Together’s Safer, More Compassionate World forum series on university campuses, and AID will launch new programming aimed at reframing the public discussion concerning terrorism. The merger will also provide greater opportunities for students, in particular, to get involved with the organizations that have been the heart of the Our Voices Together network. Parallel to this merger, Our Voices Together’s global philanthropy program will unveil a new home at www.GlobalGiving.org as the Safer, More Compassionate World Fund. The Global Giving Foundation uses online technology to link grass-

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roots projects improving lives and driving change in communities around the world with the people who can support them. Global Giving has been part of the Our Voices Together network and Gifts that Count since 2005. Enabling them to grow the Safer, More Compassionate World global philanthropy initiatives will provide an economy of scale to expand online giving as a response to terrorism. Thus, although the voices of Our Voices Together will move into two new homes, the expectation is that this will make them even more effective at building a safer, more compassionate world. Our Voices Together believes that, although government policies and support are absolutely vital, ultimately it is ordinary people who are most effective at building trust across cultures and in stimulating the hope that is required to build a better, safer future, one in which people do not embrace tactics that destroy but adopt tactics that construct. In the eloquent voice of Argentinean bilingual poet, novelist, peace activist, and educational psychologist Maria Cristina Azcona that she lent to Our Voices Together, “peace needs hope to grow” (“Peace and Hope” by Maria Cristina Azcona. Our Voices Together, 2005. http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewpoetry.asp?AuthorID=2933&ID=131894. Reprinted with permission). Peace and Hope By Maria Cristina Azcona, Argentina Peace needs hope to grow. Hope is an open window. Through it, pain breathes. A sorrowful heart Needs a mouthful of air, Nothing more than that. The North and the South, The West, the East and the rest To be only one. An emerald sea, A golden sun reﬂected. Humanity hand by hand.

Special thanks to Teresa Barttrum for her outstanding effort in compiling the initial draft of this story of Our Voices Together. APPENDIX 1: THE STORY OF THE AFGHAN EDUCATION GIVING CIRCLE OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA. Joyce Manchester and David Stapleton On September 11, 2001, we lost good friends and a former colleague on the plane that terrorists crashed into the Pentagon. Leslie Whittington, Charlie Falkenberg, and their two small children, Zoe (8) and Dana (3), were on their way to Australia where Leslie was to spend a semester on sabbatical.

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Around the time of the ﬁrst anniversary of 9/11, David felt strongly that he wanted to do something in memory of Leslie and her family. The war in Afghanistan was in the news, but people like us—upper-middle-class and upper-middle-aged Americans—had not been asked to contribute to the effort in any substantial way. We decided to honor Leslie, Charlie, and their family through a response that would be in keeping with Leslie’s life work and help address the conditions in Afghanistan that had allowed terrorists to take hold there. Leslie Whittington taught at Georgetown University. Her academic research often focused on how public policy affects the lives of women and their families. She was one of many economists who argue that providing economic opportunities to women in developing countries and investing in them through education and health care are critical to establishing their rights, improving living standards, and promoting political stability. Since we are both also economists, supporting a real-life implementation of such an approach appealed to us. We initially supported the Safe Motherhood Initiative in Afghanistan, a program that trains women to be birth assistants. This program offers career opportunities for women and has already contributed to substantial reductions in Afghanistan’s extraordinarily high maternal and infant mortality rates. Soon another fellow economist, Gene Steuerle, contacted us about Our Voices Together. We became founding board members and helped develop the online alternative gift shop known as Gifts That Count. We saw the gift shop as a way to encourage middle-class households to do what we had done: support development in countries that were, or could become, hotspots for terrorism. At the same time, the gifts would raise awareness of the needs of the developing world. But the gift shop did not catalyze the larger donations we knew those households were capable of making, the kind that would have a profound people-to-people impact. So we kept investigating other ways to get those households involved. We were convinced by Greg Mortensen, author of Three Cups of Tea and founder of the Central Asia Institute, and by a volunteer with a small nonproﬁt, that providing better educational opportunities for Afghans was more than an act of good will. We felt strongly that opportunities based on education would have greater appeal to young people and their communities than opportunities offered by the extremists. We were taken by the idea of building a school in Afghanistan. We also learned about giving circles, found the concept appealing, and decided to organize one for the purpose of building schools in Afghanistan. Marc Manashil of the Clarence Foundation, a nonproﬁt dedicated to supporting global giving circles and a member of the Our Voices Together network, gave us practical advice about organizing our giving circle. We invited four households, mostly in our northern Virginia region, to join our giving circle with the understanding that each would make a substantial contribution to one or more mutually agreedupon projects. The group decided on a six-month time frame of monthly potluck dinners, rotating homes until we had made our ﬁrst grants. At our ﬁrst meeting in January 2007, over a delicious dinner of Afghan food from recipes we found on the Internet, we talked about what we wanted to do, our

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desire to establish a long-term connection with the project(s) we supported, and how we could best evaluate our impact and effectiveness. We agreed that as we learned more about Afghanistan, our own approach might have to adjust, but that we wanted concrete evidence that we were making a positive difference in people’s lives. We agreed to focus on supporting one or more community education projects in Afghanistan and to consider funding complementary community infrastructure projects if needed. We wrote a Points of Agreement document to solidify our starting position. At our second potluck dinner in February, we agreed to make decisions by consensus. We developed a process to put together a formal Request for Proposals (RFP), identify organizations to receive the RFP, and work formally with the Clarence Foundation. Members of the giving circle took on individual assignments. Members spent the next month drafting the RFP, reading, searching the Web, and calling nonproﬁt organizations working on educational projects in Afghanistan. At our third dinner meeting in March, we discussed the draft RFP. We agreed to emphasize the ongoing nature of the relationship we would like to build with the chosen organization, as well as a requirement of strong community support for the project. Our original idea of building a school was challenged as we found many existing schools in need of structural repairs and improvements, curriculum development, teacher training, or other academic support. We also thought hard about the security situation in the location of our project. Children in areas that continue to be hit by violence desperately needed education, but did we want to jeopardize their lives, the lives of their teachers and families, and the success of the investment by providing American funding for a school? We considered starting in an area that was reasonably secure and where the probability of establishing a long-term relationship with a community was relatively high. With those issues in mind, we narrowed the list of organizations to ﬁve and sent our draft RFP to Marc Manashil of the Clarence Foundation for comment and review. At our fourth meeting in late April, good weather allowed us to enjoy an outdoor barbecue together. Our RFP was now in excellent shape. We agreed to send it to the ﬁve organizations we had identiﬁed and ask for responses by June 1 so that we could make our decision by the end of the month. We discussed ways to ask foundations and corporations for support of giving circles with an international focus. We realized that our circle needed a name and brainstormed possibilities. By our ﬁfth meeting in June, we had received four attractive proposals. One organization declined to submit. Because two of the proposals were substantially closer to what we were looking for than the others, it was not difﬁcult to reach consensus on the two winning projects. We decided also to make small grants to the other two organizations, to show our support for the work they are doing for the children of Afghanistan and our appreciation of their effort to submit proposals. Although we had not made our June deadline, we were very pleased to have come so far in a little over six months.

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As it turned out, our two winning projects also allowed us to conduct a small grant-making experiment. One project was organized by a large, well-established, widely respected international NGO, and the other was the initiative of a talented and energetic American woman who had been working in Afghanistan as a volunteer for several years. That contrast presented an opportunity for us to better understand the relative strengths of those two types of nonproﬁts in connecting our giving circle to a school and its community, and putting our grant funds to good use. By the end of August 2007, the Clarence Foundation had received signed agreements from the two nonproﬁts and had sent the initial grant money to each of them. The grants call for the two organizations to report on progress periodically, with the ﬁrst reports due within six months. At the time of writing the grant letters, we ﬁnally settled on our name. We are the Afghan Education Giving Circle of Northern Virginia. We look forward to helping the children and communities of our two schools for a long time to come. Summaries of the Two Selected Projects The exact names and places of the schools are not mentioned to protect their security. School #1 under the Direction of a Small Nonproﬁt The small nonproﬁt works in the economic hub of northern Afghanistan, a “melting pot” of languages, cultures, and religious practices. The area is relatively secure, and the nonproﬁt has developed strong relationships with the communities and the Ministry of Education. In 2007 we contributed $20,000 to pay for water systems and hygiene training at three rural schools north of Mazar-i-Sharif that together serve about 3,000 boys and girls. We also promised additional support for a co-ed school of 800 students, built in 2005 with the help of a U.S. corporation. The school is located in a village that is home to two ethnic communities. Abandoned during decades of war, it now has a high percentage of returned refugees. The village elders had shown a strong commitment to establishing a school for their children, allowing classes to be held in a mosque, then later in an abandoned house, until the new school was completed. School #2 under the Direction of a Large International Nonproﬁt The large nonproﬁt proposed that we help an existing girls’ primary school in a community outside of Kabul that needs signiﬁcant support. Despite the area’s close proximity to Kabul, only two thirds of boys and one third of girls in the area are enrolled in school. The girls’ school offers grades one through seven but has been unable to provide an acceptable level of education because of inadequate funds. Our group is committed to providing $74,000 over a three-year period to enable the staff of the large nonproﬁt to work with school staff, the community,

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and the Ministry of Education to repair and maintain the school, train and support school staff, promote community-based activities to support enrollment and attendance, and design and start to implement an approach aimed at increasing the number of female teachers. We also hope to fund the addition of grades eight and nine. APPENDIX 2: CELEBRATE THEIR LIVES: OUR INSPIRATION Our Voices Together is inspired by the lives and spirits of loved ones lost to acts of terrorism. Peter C. Alderman Elizabeth and Stephen Alderman Our son Peter was twenty-ﬁve years old, standing on the threshold of a bright and promising life. Suicidal terrorists stole his future. That it would have been glorious was guaranteed by his history. Peter literally had hundreds of friends. People gravitated toward him. He was bright. He was witty. And he knew how to have a good time. But most importantly, Peter deeply cared for his friends. Each of them believed that they had a special connection to him. Eight days after Peter was killed, we held a party for his friends at our home. More than 200 friends came from all over the United States, many of whom he had known since kindergarten. We celebrated Peter’s life, toasting him with champagne and beer (his preferred drinks), eating his favorite foods, and telling Pete stories. We laughed and we cried, and no one slept and no one seemed able to leave. The celebration began at one in the afternoon and lasted well into the next day. We knew that Peter enjoyed and was challenged by his job at Bloomberg LP, but we never really knew how he was regarded at work. We should have known. Not only was he responsible, but people at all levels looked to Peter for support. He was generous with his time: solving their problems, helping them to learn new techniques, getting them through training programs and even helping them ﬁnd new apartments. His superiors expected great things from him. Taking his job seriously, Peter arrived early for the Risk Waters conference at Windows on the World on September 11, 2001. Peter died too young to leave his mark on the world. We believe that the work of the Peter C. Alderman Foundation will leave a profound and indelible mark that Peter existed on this earth. Peter would be proud. (Excerpts from Elizabeth and Stephen Alderman, Celebrate Their Lives: Our Inspiration—Peter C. Alderman. Our Voices Together website, 2006. Reprinted with permission.) Jeff Gardner Jeffrey Brian Gardner was born on June 1, 1965, and was raised in Livingston, New Jersey. Although he received his bachelor’s degree in Food Science from

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Rutgers University in 1987, Jeff spent his professional career in the insurance industry with an ofﬁce in the twin towers in New York City. Jeff was an avid participant with Habitat for Humanity. On any given weekend he could be found at a Habitat build site in Newark, New Jersey, but he had also gone to Honduras and Brazil to build homes with Habitat’s Global Village Program. Asked why he did so, he remarked that he knew his life was privileged and he didn’t want to forget that. At the time of his death on September 11, 2001, Jeff had already planned his next Global Village build. He was preparing to head back to Latin America, this time as a team leader to raise awareness of the burden of poverty and to build a decent, affordable house for a family. Peter Goodrich The following reading from the Qur’an, preceded by remarks from Peter Elvin, close family friend and Rector of St. John’s Church, Williamstown, MA, are from the Vermont memorial service held for Peter Goodrich: In the early hours of recoiling from the news that Peter Goodrich was on board Flight 175, someone was heard to say, “For Christ’s sake, he read the Qur’an!” I saw his copy of the Qur’an on Monday. It is full of markers, where passages crossed his threshold of wondering. Would that our Bibles had as many markers. His Bible does, by the way. It is in tribute to Peter’s wide-embracing search for answers, as well as for his profound respect for questions, that our ﬁrst reading today is from the Qur’an, which we have cause to say Peter did read for Christ’s sake, to be a peacemaker in our time. This is a reading from a portion entitled “The Dinner Table”: In the name of Allah, the Beneﬁcent, the Merciful. “O you who believe! Be upright for Allah, bearers of witness with justice, and let not hatred of a people incite you not to act equitably; act equitably, that is nearer to piety, and be careful of your duty to Allah; surely Allah is aware of what you do. Allah has promised to those who believe and do good deeds that they shall have forgiveness and a mighty reward.”

Daniel Pearl Danny, as everyone called him, was born on October 10, 1963. He grew up in Los Angeles and attended Stanford University, where he co-founded a student newspaper and graduated at the top of his class. A gifted writer and musician from a very young age, Danny joined the Wall Street Journal in 1990 and traveled around the world with his violin and his laptop, searching for truth and making friends along the way. He started in the Journal’s Atlanta bureau and then moved to the Washington bureau, followed by the London bureau, where he served as a Middle East correspondent. He met his wife, Mariane, a Buddhist, French-Dutch-Cuban journalist, in Paris in 1998 and moved there; a year later, they were married. In 2002 Danny and Mariane moved

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to Bombay, India, where Danny became the South Asia Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal. Danny was in Karachi, Pakistan, in January 2002, retracing the steps of “shoe bomber” Richard Reid when he was abducted by terrorists for being a journalist, an American, and a Jew. For weeks, millions around the world—from heads of state, to religious leaders and ordinary people—rallied for Danny’s release. His murder was conﬁrmed on February 21, 2002. Two days before his abduction, Danny learned that Mariane, who was expecting their ﬁrst child, was carrying a baby boy. He chose a universal name for their universal son. In May, just three months after his murder, Mariane Pearl gave birth to Adam Pearl. David Retik Dave Retik, a general partner and founding member of Alta Communications, was one of the few people who was able successfully to strike the perfect balance between work and family life. Although Dave enjoyed numerous career successes in his eight years as part of the Alta/BEDCo family, everyone within the Alta family most remembers Dave for his warm smile, loyal friendship, hard work, and relentless practical jokes, and for his dedication to the beneﬁts of casual dress within the ofﬁce. The true joy of Dave’s life was his family, which included his wife, Susan, and children, Ben (4) and Molly (2). Dave was excitedly awaiting the birth of his third child, for Susan was seven months pregnant at the time of his tragic death on September 11, 2001. Dave was a devoted father who was most happy when playing with children. He had the unique gift of being able to put a smile on any child’s face. Joshua Rosenthal Josh had a natural talent for negotiating the big and the little exigencies of life, and he had a streak of the whimsical as well. More than anything, he had a gift for friendship, and he treasured the many friends he had in his lifetime. Josh was working at Fiduciary Trust International when his life tragically ended at the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. Josh grew up, safe and suburban, in Michigan. His was a sunny childhood. He was much inﬂuenced by a family tradition of interest in public affairs. Majoring in political science and economics, he spent two summers as a congressional intern in Washington, D.C., and a year as an aide to a member of the British parliament. Josh received his AB from the University of Michigan in 1979. Josh’s ﬁrst job was as special assistant to the new president of the New York Mercantile Exchange. He then moved on to Amarada Hess, JP Morgan, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art (as associate treasurer), Grantham, Mayo in Boston, and back to New York City. Continuing his work in the ﬁeld of international ﬁnance, Josh was a senior vice president at Fiduciary Trust International.

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Norma Steuerle Norma Steuerle was a talented family therapist, a loving mother and wife, and a dedicated volunteer with her church and community. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the oldest of three daughters of Norman and Helen Lang, Norma loved to discover the world around her from the very beginning. In 1970 Norma Lang married Gene Steuerle, and early in 1971, they moved to Madison, WI, where Norma literally talked her way into the psychology department midyear. With her indomitable spirit, Norma managed to ﬁnish within four years, earning her PhD in social psychology. Norma and Gene also started a family at this time. Their ﬁrst child, Kristin, entered the world in 1973, and their second daughter, Lynne, arrived in 1977. Norma established a thriving counseling private practice when the family moved to Alexandria, VA. Norma loved her work, combining deep concern for her patients with common-sense wisdom and a great sense of balance, conveying a deep spiritual notion about what is important in life. Her dedication, skill, and competence were evidenced by the number of those who sought her out. Most of all, she loved her family, and nothing excited her more than to visit or be visited by them. Leslie Whittington, Charles Falkenberg, Dana, and Zoe Leslie Whittington’s passions included family, teaching, and a quest for knowledge. Leslie had a heart full of love for her husband, Charles, whom she had met in high school in Colorado. “Charles was a bike-riding, mountain-climbing, loveto-be-at-home-with-his-girls kind of dad,” says Reverend Barbara Wells. He promoted his vision of socially responsible business though his work at ECOlogic. Their daughters, Zoe and Dana, were a source of delight and the center of their lives. Dana, age three, loved dressing up as a princess. Zoe, age eight, enjoyed soccer, singing, dancing, and Girl Scouts. “I would hope that all families could learn to live together with as much joy as this family did, and that all children could be as cherished as these children were,” says their grandmother, Ruth Koch. Leslie was so full of life and energy and so skilled as a teacher that she won awards even for teaching statistics—part of her work as associate professor and associate dean at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute (GPPI). According to GPPI Director of Policy, Judith Feder, “She believed profoundly in educating students that wanted to change the world. She saw it as her job to be sure they had the skills to do so.” One of those students was Alan Berube. “Most people remember their favorite teacher in life as an elementary or high school teacher. I had my favorite teacher at age twenty-ﬁve in Leslie,” says Alan. “There are some people who just make the world function better. Leslie was one of them.” The family was traveling to Australia, where Leslie planned to spend her sabbatical furthering her research on women, families, and work. As always, her own family was an integral part of her journey. Kenner Stross, best friend and godfather says simply, “They were a family, and they left as a family.”

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APPENDIX 3: WHO IS WHO AT OUR VOICES TOGETHER Board of Directors Eric Gardner is the data analysis advisor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, where he was a colleague of Leslie Whittington, who was killed on American Airlines Flight 77. His brother, Jeffrey Brian Gardner, was killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11. His family established the Jeffrey Brian Gardner Memorial Scholarship Fund at Habitat for Humanity International in Jeffrey’s memory. They are also supporting the building of a house with the Newark, NJ, chapter of Habitat for Humanity. He received a BA in history from Rutgers College and an MPP from Georgetown University. Joyce Manchester is a supervisory economist at a federal agency in Washington, D.C. She has a PhD in economics from Harvard University and graduated from Wesleyan University. She previously served as an economist at the Social Security Administration, Congressional Budget Ofﬁce, the World Bank, and as assistant professor at Dartmouth College. She and her spouse, Our Voices Together board member David Stapleton, have two teenage daughters. Joyce Manchester is a co-founder of the Afghan Education Giving Circle of Northern Virginia. Rev. Claudia W. Merritt is an Episcopal priest serving at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Miller’s Tavern, VA. She received a BA in economics from Carnegie Mellon University, an MBA from Vanderbilt University, and an MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary. She has been involved with organizations addressing issues of homelessness, racial equality, and poverty. She currently resides in Richmond, VA. Lynne Steuerle Schoﬁeld is special assistant to the dean of the College of Education at Temple University. Lynne holds two master’s degrees from Carnegie Mellon University: an MS in statistics and an MPhil in public policy. Lynne is working on her doctorate in statistics and public policy. David Stapleton is an economist and the director of the Center for Studying Disability Policy at Mathematica Policy Research in Washington, D.C. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin. He and his spouse, Our Voices Together board member Joyce Manchester, have two teenage daughters. Together they started the Afghan Education Giving Circle of Northern Virginia which funds school projects in Afghanistan. Gene Steuerle is a founder of Our Voices Together, and the Alexandria Community Trust, a community foundation. He is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, the author or co-author of eleven books, a former deputy assistant secretary of the treasury, and former president of the National Tax Association. Kristin Steuerle Swanson is a pediatrician in northern California. Until late 2007, she was on active duty with the U.S. Navy. A native of Alexandria, VA, she graduated from Princeton University with a BA in molecular biology and from the University of Virginia Medical School in 2000. Since medical school graduation, she has been on active duty in pediatrics and also spent one year overseas

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with the Marines, organizing medical support for a small humanitarian mission to Pohnpei, Micronesia. Staff Marianne Scott, executive director, came to Our Voices Together from the Daniel Pearl Foundation. She was the ﬁrst executive director of that nonproﬁt organization, which she helped the Pearl family start in honor of her college friend Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in 2002. Before working with the Daniel Pearl Foundation, Marianne worked with the American Committees on Foreign Relations and served sixteen years as a career Foreign Service ofﬁcer specializing in international academic and professional exchanges and cultural affairs. From the late 1980s to the late 1990s, she lived and worked in Latin America and Africa. She was the executive director of the Instituto Guatemalteco Americano, an educational and cultural binational center in Guatemala City, Guatemala, and served in the cultural affairs sections of the American embassies in Mexico City, Mexico, and in Nairobi, Kenya. She is the author of A Citizen’s Guide to Global Economic Policymaking, published by the League of Women Voters Education Fund in December 2002. She is a Stanford University graduate. Cecilia Snyder, director of Communications and e-initiatives, has worked for ﬁfteen years in the international development ﬁeld using electronic media as an advocacy tool, and focusing on education and outreach through new technologies. Prior to joining Our Voices Together, Cecilia Snyder was director of new technologies at the Communications Consortium Media Center and executive editor of several online news services for journalists, including PLANetWIRE.org, PUSHJournal.org, and SavingWomensLives.org. Cecilia used websites, electronic listservs, RSS feeds, and targeted e-mail bulletins while working at Bread for the World Institute, the Panos Institute, the Centre for Development and Population Activities (CEDPA), and the Population Council. Cecilia has also designed several print publications and scientiﬁc posters for hard copy and electronic distribution. These products reﬂect an informatics perspective, which values effective dissemination of data. She received a master of liberal arts degree from Georgetown University in 2002 (focusing on image ethics of nonproﬁt advocacy organizations) and a bachelor’s of science in sociology from Virginia Tech in 1992. Honorary Board The Honorable Lee H. Hamilton Member, Homeland Security Advisory Council, 2002–present President and director, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1999–present

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Co-chair, Iraq Study Group, 2006 Vice Chairman, 9/11 Commission, 2002–2004 U.S. Congress, Ninth District, Indiana, 1965–1999 The Honorable Thomas H. Kean President, Drew University, 1990–2005 Chairman, 9/11 Commission, 2002–2004 Governor of New Jersey, 1982–1990 The Honorable Bob Kerrey President, The New School, 2001–present Member, 9/11 Commission, 2002–2004 U.S. Senator, Nebraska, 1989–2001 Governor of Nebraska, 1983–1987 Advisory Board Ambassador Akbar S. Ahmed, the Ibn Khaldun chair of Islamic Studies and professor of international relations at American University. Washington, D.C., is the former high commissioner of Pakistan to Great Britain. He has advised Prince Charles and other world leaders on Islam. Dr. Ahmed is a distinguished anthropologist, writer, and ﬁlmmaker. He has been actively involved in interfaith dialogue for many years. He has published many books, including Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization, and co-edited After Terror: Promoting Dialogue among Civilizations. The Daniel Pearl Dialogue for Muslim-Jewish Understanding features Dr. Ahmed and Daniel Pearl’s father, Dr. Judea Pearl. Stephen J. Alderman co-founded the Peter C. Alderman Foundation (PCAF) with his wife, Elizabeth, his daughter, Jane, and his son, Jeffrey. He was a member of the steering and executive committees of 9/11 Families United to Bankrupt Terrorism. Dr. Alderman graduated from the State University of New York Upstate Medical Center–Syracuse with an MD. He chaired the Radiation Oncology departments at Roosevelt–St. Luke’s Hospital and Catholic Medical Center in New York City, and at the White Plains Hospital Center in White Plains, NY. Elizabeth Alderman, co-founder of PCAF, has served as co-chair of the Memorial Committee for Families of September 11th. Since September 11, 2001, Ms. Alderman has made numerous appearances on television, including NOW with Bill Moyers, the Today Show with Katie Couric, and American Morning with Paula Zahn. On November 4, 2004, Ms. Alderman was honored by Court TV with their annual Everyday Heroes Award. Ms. Alderman graduated from Syracuse University with a BS degree in special education. She taught mentally challenged and emotionally disturbed children for ten years.

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Bob Boisture is a member of Caplin & Drysdale’s Washington, D.C., ofﬁce. Mr. Boisture is the leader of the ﬁrm’s exempt organizations practice group and currently serves as president of the ﬁrm. Mr. Boisture joined the ﬁrm in 1979; from 1986 to 1992, he served as associate general counsel and then director of public policy for the YMCA of the USA, rejoining Caplin & Drysdale in 1992. Mr. Boisture also serves as director of YMCA Activate America, a national leadership initiative to strengthen YMCA’s capacity to help Americans ﬁnd healthier ways to live. Mr. Boisture is a graduate of Oxford University and Yale Law School. Leonard E. Burman is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. He is also a visiting professor at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute, where his friend and colleague, Leslie Whittington, who died on American Airlines Flight 77, was associate dean. Dr. Burman is an expert in public ﬁnance and modeling the effects of government policies. He has held high-level positions in both the executive and legislative branches, serving as deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis at the Treasury Department from 1998–2000 and as senior analyst at the Congressional Budget Ofﬁce. Mimi Evans’s extensive experience in philanthropy includes strategic planning, major gifts, foundation and corporate relations, special events, public relations, and marketing. She is currently the director of development at NOW, a public affairs show seen weekly on PBS. She has directed fundraising efforts and raised millions of dollars for many prestigious institutions, including the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Hunger Project, the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, the New York Philharmonic, Yale University, Williams College, and Trinity College. Prior to her fundraising career, she founded Bailey & Company Communications in Albany, NY, which specialized in corporate and association public relations. A graduate of the State University of New York–Albany, Ms. Evans is also a freelance consultant and a talented graphic designer, editor, and writer. She is the mother of two sons who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan (one as a U.S. Marine and one as a humanitarian aid worker). Elliot Gerson is responsible for the Aspen Institute’s seminars and public programs and activities, including programming for the International Freedom Center to be created at the World Trade Center site. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and Yale Law School. Louis W. Goodman is dean and professor of international relations at American University’s School of International Service, positions he has held since 1986. Previously, Dr. Goodman served on the faculty of Yale University’s Department of Sociology and as director of the Latin American and Caribbean programs of the Social Science Research Council and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The author of numerous books and articles, Dr. Goodman currently focuses on research on democracy building and civilian control of the armed forces in Latin America.

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Sarah W. Goodrich is a Title I/Reading First coordinator and reading specialist in the North Adams, MA, public schools. She is a member of the Bennington School District Board, the board of the Reading Institute in Williamstown, MA, and deacon of First Congregational Church, Old Bennington. Ms. Goodrich lost her son, Peter M. Goodrich, on 9/11. She co-founded the Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation. She is the mother of Foster Hetherington and Kim Trimarchi and grandmother to Ben, Sarah, James, and Eamon. She is married to Don Goodrich, chair of the board of Families of September 11th. Bruce Hoffman has been studying terrorism and insurgency for thirty years. He is currently a tenured professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Washington, D.C. Professor Hoffman previously held the corporate chair in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency at the RAND Corporation and was also director of RAND’s Washington, D.C., ofﬁce. From 2001–2004, he served as RAND’s vice president for external affairs, and in 2004, he also was acting director of RAND’s Center for Middle East Public Policy. Professor Hoffman was adviser on counterterrorism to the Ofﬁce of National Security Affairs, Coalition Provisional Authority, Baghdad, Iraq, during the spring of 2004, and from 2004–2005 was an adviser on counterinsurgency to the Strategy, Plans, and Analysis Ofﬁce at Multi-National Forces-Iraq Headquarters, Baghdad. He was also an adviser to the Iraq Study Group (Baker-Hamilton Commission), serving on the Military and Security Experts Working Group. Thomas S. Johnson is chair of the board for the Institute for International Education, an organization in the Our Voices Together network. His son, Scott, worked at the World Trade Center, where he was killed on September 11, 2001. Mr. Johnson has served as president and director of Chemical Bank and Chemical Banking Corporation, Manufacturers Hanover Corporation, and chairman and CEO of GreenPoint Financial Corporation and GreenPoint Bank. Mr. Johnson is the chairman of the board of trustees of Trinity College and a trustee of the Asia Society, the Cancer Research Institute of America, Religion in American Life, the United Way of New York City, and WNET Channel 13. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and former chairman of the board of directors of Union Theological Seminary. Mr. Johnson is also a director of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation board. Christopher Koch has an extensive experience producing, writing, and directing nonfiction programming and documentaries for television and radio. Mr. Koch has directed and produced award-winning programs on history, science, technology, current events, and the environment. His documentary ﬁlm Blacklist: Hollywood on Trial received the ﬁrst presidential Emmy Award for superior programming. He directed and wrote Normandy: The Great Crusade, which received the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award. He is the former executive producer of NPR’s evening news program, All Things Considered, and public television’s series on journalism, Inside Story. He began his television career at KQED, the public television station in San Francisco, and at the

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ABC documentary unit, Close Up. Mr. Koch received a master’s degree with honors from Columbia University on a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship and a BA from Reed College. He is a member of the Producers’ Guild of America. He is a relative of Leslie Whittington and her family, passengers on American Flight 77. Susan Koch, Emmy and Peabody Award–winning documentary ﬁlmmaker, has produced and directed award-winning documentaries and nonﬁction programming for worldwide distribution and television broadcast. Her work has appeared on ABC, NBC, HBO, PBS, MTV, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, American Movie Classics, and the Learning Channel. Ms. Koch directed City at Peace, which premiered at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and at Lincoln Center in New York City, and was broadcast on HBO. Before forming her own company, Susan Koch was a producer at NBC News. Susan Koch began her television career at WETA-TV, the public television station in Washington, D.C. In September 2002, Koch produced an ABC/ Nightline special, Remembering a Family, on her four family members who were killed on the ﬂight that crashed into the Pentagon. The program focused on what family and friends are doing to honor their lives. Ms. Koch serves on the board of the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children. Charles MacCormack is currently president and CEO of Save the Children Federation, a nonproﬁt, nonsectarian, humanitarian organization. He currently serves as co-chair of the Basic Education Coalition and the Campaign for Effective Global Leadership, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Executive Committee of InterAction, the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid, and the Food Security Advisory Committee. He received his doctorate and master’s degrees from Columbia University and graduated from Middlebury College. He was a Fulbright Fellow at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas. He has also participated in a special three-year program at the Harvard Business School on Leadership of Global Nonproﬁt Organizations. Susan Retik is the co-founder and director of Beyond the 11th, a charitable organization devoted to supporting widows in war-torn areas, especially in Afghanistan. She received her BA from Colgate University. While living in New York City, she worked in marketing at Scholastic. On September 11, Ms. Retik already had two children, Ben (3) and Molly (2). She was seven months pregnant, and two months later she gave birth to a second daughter, Dina. Nikki Stern was most recently executive director for Families of September 11th, a national outreach and advocacy group founded by families of victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks. A communications consultant, Ms. Stern, whose husband was killed on 9/11, has been active in facilitating discourse among and between various constituencies on issues ranging from Ground Zero in New York to the recommendations of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission). Ms. Stern is currently consulting on communications and organizational development while working on a book.

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Zade Dirani is a young Jordanian composer and pianist, passionate about playing his compositions that blend Eastern Arabic scales with Western contemporary inﬂuences. Dedicated to using his music to bring people together, his efforts have resulted in his CDs charting on Billboard, prestigious awards, friendships forged worldwide, and accolades, including a feature in People magazine. To continue cross-cultural understanding through the arts, Zade launched the Zade Foundation for International Peace and Understanding, aimed at helping young musicians share with the world a deeper understanding of their cultures by offering them a unique opportunity to expand their roles from musicians to become proactive peace builders and future community leaders.

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: Our Voices Together Founders: C. Eugene Steuerle, Lynne Steuerle Schoﬁeld, and Kristin Steuerle Mission/Description: Our Voices Together holds a vision of a world where the appeal of lives lived in dignity, opportunity, and safety triumphs over the allure of extremism and its terrorist tactics. Our Voices Together sees a future where terrorist tactics are not condoned by any community worldwide and understands that to achieve this, trust must be built on mutual respect around the globe. It recognizes the vast potential in engaging the people of the United States in diplomacy by connecting communities. To this end, Our Voices Together promotes the vital role of people-to-people efforts to help build better, safer lives and futures around the world. Website: www.ourvoicestogether.org Address: Our Voices Together 1730 Rhode Island Ave. NW, Suite 712 Washington, DC 20036 USA Phone: +1.202.223.0080

NOTES 1. Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005), p. 80. 2. David H. Petraeus, The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, FM324/MCWP3-33.5, James F. Amos (Foreword) (Department of the Army, December 15, 2006), pp. 1–28. 3. Ibid., pp. 1–27. 4. Marine Corps, U.S. Navy, U.S. Coast Guard, A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower (October, 2007, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/maritime/maritime_ strat_oct07.pdf ), p.4.

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5. Robert M. Gates, Landan Lecture, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS (November 26, 2007). 6. Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, “Are We Safer?” Washington Post (September 9, 2007), B01. 7. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), p. 379. 8. Ibid., p. 378. 9. Wall Street Journal, Letter to the Editor by Gene Steuerle, July 17, 2007. 10. S. J. Clohesy, Donor Circles: Launching and Leveraging Shared Giving (San Francisco, CA: Women’s Funding Network, 2004). 11. Bruce Hoffman, “Combating Al Qaeda and the Militant Islamic Threat: Testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities on February 16, 2006” (RAND Corporation, 2006). 12. Coalition for Citizen Diplomacy, http://www.coalitionforcitizendiplomacy.org/.

13

IESC Geekcorps: Development for the New Millennium Donald Bernovich II and Kathy M. Tin

Picture a Peace Corps volunteer working in some far, remote area helping improve crop production or teaching children in a small schoolhouse. Now picture the volunteer with a pocket protector and laptop working to connect a remote village to the digital community. This is a volunteer from IESC Geekcorps. Founded in 1999 by Ethan Zuckerman and Elisa Korentayer, IESC Geekcorps follows the Peace Corps’ model of sending volunteers and consultants to countries lacking digital infrastructure to help build up their information/communication technology (ICT) capacity. Essentially, the goal is to move a country from being a technology backwater to becoming a leading ICT-enabled country.

INSPIRATION The inspiration for Geekcorps originally came from Ethan Zuckerman, who studied music in Ghana on a Fulbright Fellowship (Dewan, 2000). In 1993, while visiting the University of Ghana library, he noticed that it did not have any books newer than 1957, the year Ghana had gained its independence from Great Britain. He thought that if only there were an Internet connection, the library could virtually double its collection. Thus, Geekcorps was started to help countries lacking in ICT resources. When Geekcorps goes into a country, the Geek staff works with private and public companies and provides technological training and resources so that these organizations can function digitally.

PREPARING THE GEEKS Just sending a group of Geeks into a developing country is not enough. They need to be prepared for the new culture they will be living in and learn other skills as well. IESC Geekcorps recognizes that the Geeks they recruit already have the 235

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technical know-how to get the job done, but they may need some training in how to teach their skills to others (Harkins, 2001); thus, there is a need to prepare the volunteers about the culture they will be living in before they leave. Most of IESC Geekcorps volunteers and consultants do only brief assignments in-country, so there is no luxury for providing cultural immersion training once they arrive. Therefore, cross-cultural training begins before they leave on their assignments. Once they arrive, a short in-country orientation is provided that teaches the basics of living and working in the new culture. A second component of the training for every Geek is focused on teaching exercises (Harkins, 2001). Since the volunteers and consultants are only spending a short time developing the project, they need to train locals on how to maintain and work with the technology afterward. Finally, training on expectations—those of the IESC Geekcorps managers, the volunteers and consultants, and the businesses— is provided. This is done to ensure that volunteers and consultants remain realistic and do not become disheartened because of overblown expectations and goals.

FIRST FEW YEARS Geekcorps’ ﬁrst project was in Ghana since that was where the idea for the organization originated. Called Ghana 2000, this project envisioned sending in six tech volunteers to set up an operating base, and then rotating groups of volunteers in and out over short periods of time. When the call went out for the ﬁrst six volunteer slots, Geekcorps received almost 150 applications. Over the next three years, seven teams of approximately six volunteers each were sent to Ghana to help local partnering agencies gain Internet connections, improve computer infrastructure, and become current with the digitized world. These partnering agencies included an art gallery, a graphic design ﬁrm, and Ghana’s Internet service provider (ISP). Geekcorps began with about $300,000 from the founder’s own pocket as well as donations from others within the dot.com community at the time (Grow, 2001). These funds did not last long with all the work going on in Ghana. Donations were requested from private donors and foundations, but something more was needed for Geekcorps to survive and grow. In August 2001, the International Executive Service Corps (IESC) acquired Geekcorps, which turned it into IESC’s Information and Technology Division. IESC is a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that specializes in economic development programs worldwide. IESC started in 1964, sending American business experts on missions to furnish, upon request, technical and managerial advice to businesses in developing countries. Over the years, IESC has implemented more than 200 integrated development programs in more than 130 countries, generating over 25,000 technical assistance activities using both volunteers and consultants. Like Geekcorps, many of IESC’s core programs use volunteers, thus enabling IESC to take advantage of the synergy in the acquisition of an ICT division into its portfolio. Likewise, by joining IESC, Geekcorps expanded its reach through

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IESC’s international programming experience via IESC’s United States Agency for International Development (USAID)–funded projects, which totaled $22 million a year (Grow, 2001). In return, IESC beneﬁted from Geekcorps’ technology skills to help ensure that IESC would develop projects geared for the information age. Therefore, the integration into IESC has been a tremendous beneﬁt in allowing Geekcorps to expand its mission and reach far more places than previously. This was the beginning of the new chapter in the life of Geekcorps, now called IESC Geekcorps.

SINCE IESC’S ACQUISITION OF GEEKCORPS In the beginning of 2002, IESC Geekcorps began one-month placements for software engineers and programmers in Armenia. These volunteers engaged in information technology (IT) development and marketing projects with small- to medium-size ﬁrms that had been identiﬁed as potential up-and-comers in the global market. About the same time, opportunities arose in Soﬁa, Bulgaria, for volunteers to go in, carry out assessments, and make recommendations to improve IT for four local ﬁrms. In mid-2002, a total of eight Geeks were sent to Mongolia over the course of twelve months to provide networking and programming/software expertise for local businesses. Rapidly, over the next few years, Geeks were also sent to Thailand to work on an ambitious database development project, to Zimbabwe to implement a new high-tech communication tool (Control-F1), and to begin work in Lebanon to help bring the local tourism industry into the information age. In November 2003, IESC Geekcorps began a unique adventure in Mali. There, Geekcorps set up a new ofﬁce and was tasked with ﬁnding technological options to connect more than 145 radio stations in Mali. This connected network would enable the radio stations to exchange development information and content, and strengthen the reach that radio had in this West African nation. In 2003 IESC Geekcorps went to Senegal. Senegal’s ﬁnancial services infrastructure was primarily limited to the main urban centers, with little or no penetration in rural areas. As a result, the majority of small- to medium-size enterprises (SMEs) in rural areas faced major challenges when trying to access even the most basic ﬁnancial services. This situation led to nonuniform economic development concentrated in Senegal’s major urban centers and an associated rural-to-urban population migration. In addition, a large section of the Senegalese population remained “unbanked,” with little knowledge of or insight into even the most basic ﬁnancial instruments, such as interest-based saving, investing, and other services available on an individual or community basis. IESC Geekcorps deployed approximately ﬁfteen volunteers over the next year to Senegal to work in the following areas: initiating e-ﬁnance, strengthening operations and management of SMEs through ICT, improving SME access to market via ICT tools, and strengthening telecenters and cyber cafés.

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GEEKCORPS TODAY Although Ethan Zuckerman left IESC Geekcorps in 2004 to work for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and the Open Societies Institute (OSI), IESC Geekcorps continues to grow and prosper. In 2005 IESC Geekcorps volunteers started working with USAID’s East and Central Africa Trade Hub to create a common interface between systems in order to share and store information between the Kenyan and Ugandan border control agencies in Mombasa, Nairobi, the Malaba Border Post, and Kampala. A team of four Geeks was sent out to do ﬁeld research on existing systems, and to design a platform to meet international standards as per World Customs Organization rules in the Revised Kyoto Convention. IESC Geekcorps proved to be as busy throughout 2005 and 2006 as in previous years. The organization had great success in Mali by empowering community radio stations with Internet connectivity, and along the way made technological leaps in the process with the development of BottleNet, a do-it-yourself antennae designed to be constructed from basic materials easily found in Mali (i.e., plastic water bottles, window screen mesh, used valve stems from motorbikes, television and low-cost coaxial cables) that could receive wireless transmissions up to 2–3 GHz. The organization also designed a software integration system to ease transportation bottlenecks in East Africa; coordinated a “Who’s Who” of Sudanese Diaspora for the government of southern Sudan; developed training courses to make technology fun, exciting, and most importantly, proﬁtable for microentrepreneurs worldwide; and designed the Desert PC to withstand a high-heat, high-dust, lowelectricity environment. Continuing the momentum into 2007, IESC Geekcorps was able to send Microsoft development experts to Lebanon to participate in IESC-led Access to International Markets through Information Technology (AIM-IT) program, which worked to improve the capacity of SMEs specializing in technology products or services, and also harnessed technology to increase tourism into the region. Also in Lebanon, an ICT Academy program was developed to mobilize ICT skills in the country so that Lebanon could recover from recent devastation and provide affordable access to the Internet in rural areas by connecting ICT training centers to the Internet, and by providing ICT training to residents in rural areas in Lebanon. Other successes include further building of radio stations in Mali for USAID in several regions throughout the country. Through IESC Geekcorps assistance, these community radio stations have become self-sustaining by using established connections primarily to send e-mail, access the news, and deliver information. To make the stations more sustainable, IESC Geekcorps also developed the Cybertigi, a mini cyber café that allows affordable and accessible ICT services. The Cybertigi design allows Malians in even the remotest regions to have access to laser printers, scanners, digital cameras, and photo printers, as well as to have the ability to play video games, burn CDs, and transfer music from cassette tapes to CDs or MP3 players.

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Currently, IESC Geekcorps is expanding opportunities for both ICT volunteers and consultants to participate in its programs through short-term assistance. ICT usually ﬁnds its way into many of IESC’s core practice areas, such as trade, SME development, tourism, and ﬁnancial services. IESC Geekcorps has expanded its programming to include developing ﬁnancial service software, working with education centers to help them incorporate ICT into their students’ curriculum, and ﬁnding ways to introduce ICT into programs to bring about peace and prosperity around the world. Thus, what started as one man’s dream to bring ICT resources to developing countries has evolved into a reality where IESC Geekcorps Geeks are paving new paths and bridging the digital divide in those countries.

STAFF IESC Geekcorps has program staff in the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the International Executive Service Corps and full-time ﬁeld staff managing the larger country programs. Washington, D.C.: • Merove Heifetz, Geekcorps associate • Gladys Villacorta, AIM-IT program manager • Lina Parikh, Smarter Seminars consultant Bamako, Mali: • Olivier Alais, Geekcorps Mali program manager Beirut, Lebanon: • Mohammed Bensouda, AIM-IT country director • Mahmoud Elzein, AIM-IT deputy country director

ORGANIZATIONAL SNAPSHOT Organization: IESC Geekcorps Founders: Ethan Zuckerman and Elisa Korentayer Mission/Description: IESC Geekcorps is an international 501(c)(3) nonproﬁt organization that promotes stability and prosperity in the developing world through information and communication technology (ICT). IESC Geekcorps’ international technology experts teach communities how to be digitally independent: they are able to create and expand private enterprise with innovative, appropriate, and affordable ICTs. International technical volunteers are the Geekcorps difference, offering a signiﬁcant focus on the transfer of skills—a task that is often not possible with consulting agreements where specialists focus only on deliverables, not on capacity building or sustainability.

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Website: www.IESC.org Address: IESC Geek Corps 1900 M St. NW Suite 500 Washington, D.C. 20036 Phone: 202-326-0280

REFERENCES Dewan, S. (2000, October 19). A techie volunteer corps. New York Times. Retrieved January 8, 2008, from http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/featured_articles/ 001019thursday.html Grow, B. (2001, August 15). Trying to spread the tech wealth. Business Week. Retrieved January 8, 2008, from http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2001/ tc20010815_833.htm Harkins, A. M. (2001, May 1). Training digital divide warriors. Linux Journal. Retrieved January 8, 2008, from http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4595

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 245

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About the Editor and Contributors

worked at 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. Originally from North Pekin, Illinois, Donald Bernovich II has traveled and worked in a number of different locations. For the past ﬁve years, he lived in Rapid City, South Dakota, where he worked as a work-life consultant at Ellsworth Air Force Base. Prior to this, he lived in Malaysia, were he worked as a volunteer English instructor and counselor for a year. He received his BA from Benedictine University in 1997 and his MS from Capella University in psychology in 2005. Donald is currently a doctoral student in clinical psychology at the Adler School of Professional Psychology, located in Chicago, Illinois. Alice K. Johnson Butterﬁeld is professor at the Jane Addams College of Social Work, University of Illinois–Chicago. Her scholarship includes international social work education, the nonproﬁt sector in Romania, participatory community change, and asset-based community development in Ethiopia. She is co-editor of University-Community Partnerships: Colleges and Universities in Civic Engagement (2005) and Interdisciplinary Community Development: International Perspectives (2007), published by Haworth Press. Dr. Butterﬁeld is a leader of ACOSA, and a member of the Council on Social Work Education’s Commission on Global Social Work Education. Her research includes international higher education partnerships in Ethiopia, funded by the Great Cities Institute and HED, and the Gedam Sefer University-Community Partnership. She is co-PI of a project with Bahir Dar

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University to establish an MEd for school directors in Ethiopia. In 2007 she received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Washington University–St. Louis. Denise Caruso is executive director and co-founder of the Hybrid Vigor Institute in San Francisco, an independent, not-for-proﬁt research organization and consultancy dedicated to interdisciplinary and collaborative problem solving. In December 2006, she published her ﬁrst book, on risk, public policy, and biotechnology, titled Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet, which won a silver medal in the science category of the 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards. She continues to work on projects both in academia and the private sector to improve critical-thinking and decisionmaking processes, with a special focus on science- and technology-related innovations. Caruso is a former New York Times columnist, an afﬁliated researcher at the Center for Risk Perception and Communication at Carnegie Mellon University, and a director emerita of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; she also serves on the boards of the Independent Media Institute and the Molecular Sciences Institute. Caruso also serves on the advisory boards of Public Knowledge, which advocates for a vibrant “information commons”; London-based SustainAbility.com, the world’s leading business consultancy on corporate responsibility and sustainable development; and the Graduate Program in Design at California College of the Arts. She is a graduate of California Polytechnic State University–San Luis Obispo. 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. Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, Annie Khan migrated to Toronto, Canada, in 1994. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto in neuroscience and psychology. While working in community-based organizations, she felt compelled to do more for disenfranchised populations. She pursued a master’s in counseling psychology at the Adler School of Professional Psychology and is currently working on her doctorate in clinical psychology. She worked at the Center for Global Initiatives as a placement student on The New Humanitarians: Innovations, Inspirations, and Blueprints for Visionaries book project. Since May 1998, Paul Kronenberg has been working together with Sabriye Tenberken to establish the rehabilitation and training center for the blind in Tibet. He also worked part-time as a designer and construction coordinator for the Swiss

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Red Cross in Shigatse. Paul has a technical background, having completed studies in mechanical engineering, computer science, commercial technology, and communication systems. For several summers during his studies, Paul worked for different organizations in development projects in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Tibet. Paul is responsible for all technical aspects and maintenance at Braille Without Borders. He also trains people in bookkeeping, ofﬁce work, and the use of computers. In addition to being responsible for communications and fundraising, Paul began the production of Tibetan Braille books and supervises all construction activities within the project. Evan Ledyard graduated from Loyola University–Chicago. He majored in psychology with a minor in communication. He joined Invisible Conﬂicts in 2006 and was co-vice president from 2007–8. In the future, he hopes to continue being part of Invisible Conﬂicts and travel to Uganda to help further develop the Dwon Madiki Partnership. Valeria Levit was born in Donetsk, Ukraine, and grew up in the Crimean Peninsula. Growing up in the family of doctors, Valeria was groomed for a route of excellence in education and was accepted into an academy for musically talented children at the age of seven. At the age of thirteen, she transferred to the Medical Lyceum to study medical and biological sciences with the goal of medical school in the future. However, after ﬁnishing one year at the Lyceum, Valeria immigrated with her family to Chicago, Illinois. She graduated from Stevenson High School with honors and was accepted to Loyola University of Chicago. Valeria was on the Dean’s list each semester at Loyola and graduated with a major in psychology and minor in pre-medicine. During her undergraduate studies, Valeria volunteered at a hospital and several not-for-proﬁt organizations. It did not take her long to realize that she has a passion for studying the human mind. After graduating from Loyola, Valeria was accepted to the Adler School of Professional Psychology. During her ﬁrst year in the graduate school, Valeria fulﬁlled her community service practicum at the Center for Global Initiatives, which is dedicated to ﬁghting against health disparities around the world. At the age of twenty-two, Valeria is a second-year student at Adler and is greatly interested in the mind/body aspect of psychology. Valeria is a member of the Golden Key Honors Society and the American Psychological Association. Currently she resides in Morton Grove, Illinois, with her family. Nathan Linsk is the principal investigator of the Midwest AIDS Training and Education Center at the Great Lakes Addictions Technology Transfer Center. He is professor of social work at the Jane Addams College of Social Work, University of Illinois–Chicago. Dr. Linsk has extensive clinical experience serving individuals with HIV/AIDS in a number of settings, and has been involved in the training of HIV/AIDS healthcare providers nationally and internationally for ten years.

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In 1994 he co-chaired the International Society for AIDS Education conference. His international consultation includes Romania (PI on World AIDS Foundation Grant, 1991–4), Namibia, Malawi, and Ethiopia. He was awarded a Fulbright Research Award in Ethiopia in 2006. His latest work in Africa is a partnership project in Tanzania on social work education and training on HIV/AIDS and the orphan situation. Nathan Mustain is a graduate of Loyola University–Chicago who studied biology, graduating in May 2008. He is the co-founder of Invisible Conﬂicts and served as president from 2005–7. Nathan is now working as a spokesperson, political advocate, and adviser to Invisible Conﬂicts. He plans on becoming a physician and to work with the world’s poor, who are also the world’s sick. In working with them, he seeks to understand what keeps them poor and sick. Then he hopes to change these “distal” causes of disease and poverty by helping people to ﬁnd wellness, and by partnering with educators and lawmakers to change the educational, political, and economic systems that keep people sick and poor. Nathan also dreams of traveling the world and connecting communities of wealth and power with those living under oppression and poverty. Amy Nemeth, a student at Loyola University–Chicago, is expected to graduate in May 2009 with degrees in history and secondary education with a focus in political science and peace studies. After joining Invisible Conﬂicts in the fall of 2005, she traveled to Uganda in the summers of 2007 and 2008 to volunteer at the Dwon Madiki Partnership. She was co-president of Invisible Conﬂicts from 2007–8. She hopes to travel back to Uganda and other war-torn areas as well as to inspire future students to get involved with Invisible Conﬂicts. Steve Olweean is founding director of Common Bond Institute, a founder and president of the International Humanistic Psychology Association (IHPA), past president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, founder of the Annual International Conference on “Engaging The Other,” and co-founder of the Annual International Conference on Conﬂict Resolution and the Global Youth Conference on the Ecology of War and Peace. He has written and presented internationally on concepts of “The Other,” the social/psychological dynamics of group paranoia, victim identity, inherited communal trauma, negative belief systems, cross-cultural dialogue, forgiveness and reconciliation, conﬂict transformation, and building capacity at the grass roots and social institutional level for an authentic world culture of peace. His current book project is Engaging The Other, a compilation of chapters by diverse authors each exploring concepts of The Other from their unique cultural perspectives. He received his degree in clinical psychology from Western Michigan University, and is a psychotherapist with a treatment focus on recovery of victims and perpetrators of abuse, trauma recovery, and healing negative belief systems. He developed

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the integrated Catastrophic Trauma Recovery (CTR) treatment model for treating large populations victimized by war and violence in developing countries that are regions of conﬂict. 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 healthcare 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 over 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 which provides baby formula for orphans in Ukraine. He 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. Earl Martin Phalen is the co-founder and CEO of BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life), a nonproﬁt organization created to dramatically increase the educational achievements, self-esteem, and life opportunities of black and Latino children living in low-income, urban communities. BELL operates high-quality summer and after school educational programs for 12,000 children in Baltimore, Boston, Detroit, New York City, and Springﬁeld, MA. BELL provides direct services to children and works to change the systems that impact children. As a result of these efforts and a partnership with Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the STEP UP Act was voted into law in August 2007. STEP UP will bring $100 million worth of high-quality summer learning programs to children throughout the country. Mr. Phalen is unswerving in his commitment to helping children excel. As a young adult, Mr. Phalen participated in the Lutheran Volunteer Corps as the assistant coordinator of a homeless shelter for women in Washington, D.C., and served as a summer law associate at the Jamaican Council for Human Rights.

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In 1997 President Clinton awarded Mr. Phalen and BELL the President’s Service Award for outstanding community service. Mr. Phalen currently sits on the advisory board for the Center for Summer Learning at the Johns Hopkins University and serves on the education advisory committees of Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. Mr. Phalen holds a BA in political science from Yale University and a JD from Harvard Law School. 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, he 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. Mr. 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. Marianne Scott helped start Our Voices Together and has led the organization since fall 2005. Before this she was the ﬁrst executive director of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, which she helped the Pearl family start in honor of her college friend Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in 2002. Marianne spent sixteen years as a career Foreign Service ofﬁcer with the United States Information Agency (USIA) and the Department of State, specializing in international academic and professional exchanges and cultural affairs. Eleven of these years, she lived and worked at U.S. embassies and American cultural and educational centers overseas in Latin America and Africa. She is the author of A Citizen’s Guide to Global Economic Policymaking, published by the League of Women Voters Education Fund in December 2002. She is a graduate of Stanford University. Katie Scranton is a student at Loyola University–Chicago majoring in bilingualbicultural elementary education with a minor in Spanish language and literature. She has been involved with Invisible Conﬂicts since 2006 and is constantly impressed by the dedication and passion of those involved in the group. She was co-president of Invisible Conﬂicts from 2007–8. She plans to travel to Uganda to ﬁnally meet the children and volunteers of the Dwon Madiki Partnership. Katie expects her involvement in the work and vision of Invisible Conﬂicts to continue far into her future.

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M. Christopher Shimkin is a summa cum laude master’s graduate in business administration from Northeastern University. Recently, Mr. Shimkin was selected as one of the World Economic Forum’s 100 Global Leaders for Tomorrow, and he currently serves on several nonproﬁt and engineering advisory boards. A graduate in civil and ocean engineering from the University of Rhode Island in 1989, he pursued a consulting career in environmental engineering, developing expertise in water quality evaluations, civil works infrastructure planning and design, and environmental regulatory compliance as a senior engineer. Morgan Smith is a student at Loyola University–Chicago. She is a student in the Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing and hopes one day to use her nursing skills in Africa. She has been to South Africa to observe that healthcare system through a program called International Scholar Laureate, which deepened her interest in returning to the continent to assist in the healthcare shortage. In 2005 she co-founded Invisible Conﬂicts with Nathan Mustain, as well as the Dwon Madiki Partnership with Katie Scranton in 2006. Abye Tasse is associate vice president for international affairs, and dean of the School of Social Work at Addis Ababa University. He is president of the International Association of Schools of Social Work. He has also worked to develop social work education in Romania and Cameroon. His scholarship includes research design in social sciences and in immigrant and refugee matters, comparative research on migration, policy work on social work education, and the monitoring, evaluation, and restructuring of higher education institutions. He is the author of Ethiopians in France and the United States: New Forms of Migration. Sabriye Tenberken studied Central Asian Studies at Bonn University. In addition to Mongolian and modern Chinese, she studied modern and classical Tibetan in combination with sociology and philosophy. Since no blind student had ever before ventured to enroll in these kinds of studies, she could not fall back on the experiences of anyone else, so she had to develop her own methods to come to terms with her course of studies. It was thus that a Tibetan script for the blind was developed. She coordinates and counsels the Braille Without Borders project. She is responsible for the training of teachers and trainers for the blind, and she initially taught the children herself. Further, she selects and supervises all staff members. She is also responsible for fundraising and communication with ofﬁcial and sponsor organizations. Tenberken has written three books in which she tells about the history of the project and the way she dealt with becoming blind: Mein Weg fuehrt nach Tibet (My Path Leads to Tibet; Arcade Publishing, New York); Tashis’ New World; and Das siebte Jahr [The Seventh Year]. The ﬁrst book has been published in eleven languages, including English. David Thatcher is a student at Loyola University–Chicago pursuing a dual degree in economics and international studies. He has been involved with Invisible

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Conﬂicts since 2006, serving as Dwon Madiki Partnership’s lead coordinator and ﬁnancial adviser. In this capacity, he organized and led the ﬁrst trip of students to Gulu, Uganda, where they spent the summer setting up the Dwon Madiki Partnership (DMP) ofﬁce and documenting the program. Upon graduating from Loyola University–Chicago, Dave plans to obtain a master’s degree in international development and continue to work with and develop the DMP. Kathy M. Tin is a development professional with more than six years of experience in both new business development and program management, as well as seven years in software development. Ms. Tin’s particular expertise is in developing programs using information and communications technology (ICT) as an enabling tool to promote economic and social development. She currently serves as a director with the International Executive Service Corps (IESC) Geekcorps division. Prior to joining IESC, Ms. Tin worked at CARE in several capacities and also as a Peace Corps volunteer in Romania. John Wood is founder and CEO of Room to Read, an international nonproﬁt that partners with local communities in the developing world to build educational infrastructure. John left a distinguished career at Microsoft to lead the Room to Read team in constructing over 5,600 schools and libraries with more than 3 million books and sponsoring over 4,000 scholarships for girls. Author of Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, John marries the “scalability of Starbucks with the compassion of Mother Theresa” to create one of the fastest-growing, most effective, and most award-winning nonproﬁts of the last decade. Carolyn Ziembo is a student at Loyola University–Chicago. She is expected to graduate in 2010 with degrees in English and history. She has been involved with Invisible Conﬂicts since 2006 and was secretary from 2007–8. In addition to helping with other Dwon Madiki and Invisible Conﬂicts projects, she led the development of the art exhibit at LUMA. In the future, she hopes to travel to Uganda and meet the children of the Dwon Madiki Partnership. Diana Zurawski is a student at Loyola University–Chicago majoring in elementary education. She has been involved with Invisible Conﬂicts since 2005 and is visiting Uganda in the summer of 2008 to assist in curriculum development of the Dwon Madiki Partnership. Diana hopes to teach in the Chicago Public Schools and looks forward to establishing new connections between students in Chicago and Gulu.

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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. approach of, 111, 118–119 BancoSol, creating, 113 Central American clients of, 121 dealing with challenges, 123–125 foundation of, 111–112 future approach of, 125 goal of, 111, 116, 118 growth of, 125 India, expanding to, 114 investment in Compartamo, 124–125 key statistics, 119 Latin American Network, 113 management at, 126–127 microﬁnance and, 115 microﬁnance model, 117–118 microﬁnance partner programs, 120t microﬁnancing, discovering cornerstone of, 124 microlending 118–119 microlending programs in Latin America, 113 mission of, 111 motivation of, 115 organizational snapshot, 127 overcoming challenges, 123–124 partner programs of, 116–117, 120t

9/11 Commission Report, 208 9/11 terrorist attack ﬁfth anniversary of, 212–214 fourth anniversary of, 206 victims of, 206, 213 AAU. See Addis Ababa University (AAU), Ethiopia AAU-UIC partnership Gedam Sefer Community-University Partnership, 75–77, 76f Project SWEEP (see Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership (Project SWEEP)) success and award for, 69–70 ABCD strategy. See Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) strategy Access to International Markets through Information Technology (AIM-IT) program, 238 ACCION International, xxv–xxvi ACCION Revenue Sources, 2007, 121 ACCION USA and, 114 additional comments by, 125–126 Africa, expanding to, 114

255

256 ACCION International (continued) revenue sources, 2007, 121t staff in Recife, Brazil, 112 success stories of, 121–123 survival of, 120–121 U.S. initiative of, 113–114 working strategy of, 115–116, 119 ACCION International, history of ACCION’s U.S. initiative, 113–114 BancoSol, 113 Blatchford’s contribution, 111–112 Bridge Fund and, 113 developing new lending method, 113 expansion to Africa and India, 114 microlending, beginning of, 112 ACCION Microﬁnance Model, 117–118 “ACCIONistas,” 112 ACCION Partner Programs, 116, 120t ACCION’s Recife program, 112 ACCION USA beginning of, 113–114 borrowers of, 116–117 mission of, 114 Acholiland, Uganda and civil war, 130 ACOSA. See Association for Community Organization and Social Administration (ACOSA) Action Center, Our Voices Together, 211–212, 217 Adamek, Margaret, Indiana University, 67 ADAPT Program. See An Giang Dong Thap Alliance for the Prevention of Trafﬁcking Program (ADAPT Program) Addis Ababa University (AAU), Ethiopia doctoral program in social work and social development, 70–71 educational innovations in (see Educational innovations in School of Social Work, Ethiopia) Gedam Sefer Community-University Partnership, 75–77, 76f MOA with CRDA, 68–69 MSW program in, 61–62, 63 (see also Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership (Project SWEEP)) UIC-AAU-ISW in Tanzania, 77–78 UIC partnerships, 59–60

Index Adler, Carlye, 109 Afghanistan improved conditions in, 204 safe motherhood initiative in, 220 Agassiz Elementary School, Cambridge, 164 “Agenda of Opportunity,” Our Voices Together, 207 Gifts That Count, 209 Global Giving Circles, 209 9/11 Commission Report, 208 pointing toward volunteer opportunities, 209–210 recommendation for, 208 Think Big, Act Big FunRaisers, 209 AHP. See Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP) Ahmed, Akbar S., 229 AID. See Americans for Informed Democracy (AID) AIG. See American International Group Inc. (AIG) AIM-IT. See Access to International Markets through Information Technology (AIM-IT) program Akweyo, Caroline, 133–135 Alderman family, 204t–205t Alderman, Elizabeth, 229 Alderman, Peter, 204 Alderman, Stephen J., 229 Allen, Charlla, 62 ALO. See Association Liaison Ofﬁce for University Cooperation in Development (ALO) Al-Qaeda, 210 American International Group Inc. (AIG), 124 Americans for Informed Democracy (AID), 218 American International Health Alliance Twinning Center, 77 An Giang Dong Thap Alliance for Prevention of Trafﬁcking Program (ADAPT Program), 26 AngloGoldAshanti’s Mines, South Africa, 106 As If You Were There: Matching Machine Vision to Human Vision (Solomon), 191–193

Index Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) strategy, 75–76 Association for Community Organization and Social Administration (ACOSA), 58 Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP), 46–47, 48 Association Liaison Ofﬁce for University Cooperation in Development (ALO), 59–60 AVINA, mission of, 96 Azcona, Maria Cristina, 219 Badkhen, Alexander, 50 Bailey, Nellie Hester, 89 Bait Al Hayat (House of Life) project, Palestine, 54 Baker, Laurie, 11 Ballmer, Steve, 16 Banco Compartamos, Mexico, 116 Banco Popular Covelo. See Bancovelo, ACCION partner BancoSol, Bolivia, 113 Bancovelo, ACCION partner, 121–122 Batson, Ruth, 172 Barttrum, Teresa, 219 Beck Cultural Exchange Center, Knoxville, Tennessee, 88 BELL Accelerated Learning Summer Program (BELL Summer). See BELL Summer program BELL After School Program, 164–165 working strategy of, 166–167 typical day in, 168t BELL BOYS, 181–182 BELL Bowl, 178 BELL. See Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL) BELL’s success scholars’ academic abilities, evaluating, 174–175, 175f Lewis’s experiences, 175–176 BELL Summer, 164 impact on scholars, 167 schedule, 168–169, 169f scholars’ academic gains, 170f success of, 169–170 typical day in, 171t

257 Benioff, Marc, 109 Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, 238 Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, 180 Bi-annual Entrepreneur Immersion Tours, 99 Bilinkis, Santiago, 102–103 Binh Xuan Primary School Reading Room, 20–21 bin Laden, Osama, 210 Bio-X Program, Stanford University, 197 “Black Friday,” New York, 123–124 Blatchford, Joseph, 111 Bobby, 131–132 Bogard, Nicholas, 183 Boisture, Bob, 230 Bonecutter, Faith, 62 Books for Africa, 73 Boston-area program, 175 Boston Globe, 176 BottleNet, 238 Braille script, Tibetan, 3, 5 Braille Without Borders (BWB), xvi-xvii, xxiii beliefs of, 4 do-it-yourself phase of, 10 educational materials, producing, 5 goal of, 2 history of, 2–3 IISE, establishing, 11–12 inception of, 1 infusion of young teachers, 10–11 organizational snapshot, 13 Preparatory School for the Blind, establishing, 4 signiﬁcance of name, 1 success stories of, 9–10 TAR, importance in, 1–2 Tibetan Braille materials, production of, 5 Totnes School, England and, 9–10 values of, 3–4 vocational and skills training 5 (see also BWB vocational and skill training) Brazilian entrepreneurs, Endeavor, 100 Brazilian pilot program, ACCION, 124 Bridge Fund, 113

258 Brilliant, Larry, 192 Bronx Helpers summer program, 89 Bronx High School for Visual Arts, 88 Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL) afﬁliate program of, 182 approach to creative problem solving, 178–180 awards and honors received by, 182 BELL After School Program (see BELL After School Program) BELL Summer program (see BELL Summer) board of directors of, 183–184 challenges faced by, 177–178 Charles Hayden Foundation and, 181–182 creative outreach of, 179 education, deﬁning, 163 expansion in 1997 to New York City, 164 foundation of, 164 funding struggles of, 176–177 future plans of, 181–182 helping children, 163–164 holistic education for children, 166–167 organizational snapshot, 184–185 outcome initiatives of, 173–174 paid staff in, 166 partnerships, 164 programs, 166 pursuing its mission, 165, 165f STEP UP Act and, 169–170 strong belief in children, instilling, 165–166 success, 174–175, 175f vision of, 164 Burman family, 205t Burman, Len, 206, 217 Burman, Leonard E., 230 Burrus, William, 115, 123–124, 126–127 Bush, George W. (President), 140 Business of Changing the World, The (Benioff and Adler), 109 Butterﬁeld, Alice Johnson, University of Illinois–Chicago, 57–58, 67 BWB. See Braille Without Borders (BWB)

Index BWB self-integration project initiation of, 8–9 modifying perception of blind, 8 positive impact on students, 7, 10–11 BWB training farm, Shigatse animal husbandry unit, consolidation of, 6 composting factory, 6 Ecosan toilet system, installation of, 6 establishment of, 5–6 “Mini Square Meter Greenhouses,” 6–7 Schiele, Boris, contribution of, 7 BWB vocational and skill training massage clinic, 9 self-integration project of, 7–9 (see also BWB self-integration project) training farm, establishment of, 5–7 (see also BWB training farm, Shigatse) Cambridge College, 176 Capacity For Peace and Democracy, Palestine, 54 Carnegie, Andrew, 16 Carter, Andrew L., 164 Carter, Jimmy (President), 16 Caruso, Denise Hybrid Vigor, founding (see Hybrid Vigor Institute) study of risk and technological innovation, 189f CBI programs and activities conferences, 51–53 miscellaneous projects, 55 organizational snapshot, 56 professional exchanges, 55 publications in development, 54–55 training projects, 53–54 (see also CBI training projects) CBI. See Common Bond Institute (CBI) CBI training projects Bait Al Hayat, Palestine, 54 Capacity For Peace and Democracy, Palestine, 54 CTR and, 45, 53–54 ETO training, 54 CECCR. See Centers of Excellence in Cancer Communications Research (CECCR)

Index Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), xxv exhibitions, participation in, 87 founder and staff of (see Center for Urban Pedagogy, founder and staff) funding of, 92 history of, 86–87 measuring success of, 92 mission of, 85 new opportunities of, 92 organizational snapshot of, 94 partnerships with nonproﬁts, 87 philosophy of, 85–86 services of, 91–92 (see also CUP services) successful projects of, 88–91 (see also CUP projects) working with students, 87 Center for Urban Pedagogy, founder and staff, 87–88 Mogel, Lize, 93 Mogilevich, Valeria, 93 Rich, Damon, 90, 93 Woo, Rosten, 93 Center for Urban Pedagogy, history of codes building project, 86, 87 garbage and waste management, 86–87 nonproﬁt status, receiving, 87 vehicle of collaboration, 87 Center for Urban Pedagogy, philosophy of educational projects, creation of, 85–86 project-based learning, approach of, 86 urban environment, exploration of, 86 Centers of Excellence in Cancer Communications Research (CECCR), 199 Challenge Grant Model, 26–27 Chang, Valerie, Indiana University, 67 Charles Hayden Foundation, 176, 181–182 Chile, Endeavor in, 96 Christian Relief & Development Association (CRDA), 68–69, 74 CIPUSA. See Council of International Programs USA (CIPUSA) Civil war in Uganda between LRA and Ugandan government, 130–131 plight of children during, 130, 131, 132

259 Clarence Foundation, 209 Coalition for Homeless, New York City, 89 Common Bond Institute (CBI), xxiv–iv CTR model, 45, 53–54 history of (see Common Bond Institute, history of) naming of, 44 organizational snapshot, 56 organizational structure of, 50 origin of, 43–44 philosophy and mission of, 50–51 power of vision of, 55 programs and activities of (see CBI programs and activities) style of, 51 Common Bond Institute, history of collaborators of, 50 Kuwait, services in, 45–46 Olweean’s initiative, 44 (see also Olweean, Steve) Soviet Union, services in, 46–50 (see also Soviet Union during1980s to1990s) Community Work & Life Center (CWLC), Addis Ababa University, 74 Compartamos, 124–125 Computer Room Program computer labs, establishing, 24 development of, 24 history behind, 23–24 Net Yang Secondary School, Cambodia, 24–25 training computer lab teachers, 24 Concepcion and GVE, 36–37 Constructed Reading Rooms (CRRs) concept of, 21 expansion of, 21–22 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and CUP, 90 Council of International Programs USA (CIPUSA), 73–74 “Counterterrorists” network, Our Voices Together Al-Qaeda and, 210 free services given to, 211–212 good will and hope, generating, 210–211, 211t Create Change project, 197

260

Index

CRDA. See Christian Relief & Development Association (CRDA) CRRs. See Constructed Reading Rooms (CRRs) CUP. See Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) CUP and developmental plans in Knoxville, 88 CUP and Green Information Center, New York City, 89 CUP projects abandoned buildings and homeless people, connection between, 89 Design Your ’Hood program, partnership with, 90 Fulton Mall project, 90 Grand Concourse mapping, 88 Green Information Center, 89 Jamaica Flux, 90–91 Knoxville community building, 88 public housing, collaborative learning on, 91 schoolyard visions, 89 SPURA project, 89–90 CUP services educational programming, 91 exhibition design and development, 91–92 professional development, 91 video production, 92 CWLC. See Community Work & Life Center (CWLC), Addis Ababa University Cybertigi, 238

Digi, 9 Dirani, Zade, 233 DMP. See Dwon Madiki Partnership (DMP) Donoso, Javier, 104 DRC. See Democratic Republic of Congo, the (DRC) Durbin, Richard, 140 Dwon Madiki Partnership (DMP), 129 Aciro Mercy’s artwork, 146f beginnings, 141–143 children of, 155 children’s education program, 145 developmental categories of, 150 establishment of, 147–150 faces of, 144–145 framework of, 148 future vision of, 152–153 Gear Up Alliance and, 148–150 guiding principles of, 148 I.C. Plunge, 145–147, 146f laying of partnership foundations, 147 mission of, 148 naming of, 142 ofﬁce and sign, 144, 144f positive force in community, 153 responsibilities of brainstorming for, 142 Uganda Trip, 149–150,151 vision of, 148 Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Pape), 207

Daniel Pearl Foundation, 217 Das siebte Jahr (The Seventh Year) (Tenberken), 12 Davis, Lindsay, 89 December 2006 Army, 207 Decision, Risk, and Management Sciences program, 192 Democratic Republic of Congo, the (DRC) conﬂict and instability, 153 Invisible Conﬂicts in, 153–154 (see also Invisible Conﬂicts) Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology (SOSA), Addis Ababa University, 59, 60–61

East and Central Africa Trade Hub, USAID, 238 Ecosan toilet system, 6 Educational innovations in School of Social Work, Ethiopia action research, development of, 67–68 admission processes, 69 block teaching model, 65–67 ﬁeld education, inclusion of, 68–69, 68f interactive teaching methods, 67 international faculty, 67 reaching out to community, 69

Index Educational opportunities in developing countries lack of, 16, 18 Room to Read and (see Room to Read) ENAHPA. See Ethiopian North American Health Professionals Association (ENAHPA) Endeavor, xxv advice to future entrepreneurs, 108–109 in Argentina and Chile, 96 barriers in way of, 97, 99 culture of entrepreneurship, promoting, 100 economic growth of, 103 and Endeavor Entrepreneurs (see Endeavor Entrepreneurs) ﬁve-step approach of, 96–98 founders of, 95–96 Friedman praising “mentor capitalist” model of, 107 funding for, 108–109 in Ghana, 106 global network, 99–100 goal of, 101 as “go to” organization, 105–106 Gutierrez comment on, 108 high-impact entrepreneurs, 102 (see also OfﬁceNet) history of, 95–96 learning experiences, 103–104 (see also Geomar) local and international growth of, 105–106 (see also Stitch Wise) media mentions and awards, 107–108 “mentor capitalist” model,” 108 mentors, 104, 107 mission of, 95 network, 97 network of venture capitalists, 103 organizational snapshot, 110 recognition from renowned institutions, 109 Rottenberg’s contribution in success of, 105 staff, 97 value proposition, 101 worldwide solutions, contribution to, 100–101

261 Endeavor Entrepreneurs advice to future, 109–110 contributions to society, 100–101 ﬁrst, 103 Geomar, 104–105 high-impact of, 102 lesson learned by, 103–104 locating, 96–97 OfﬁceNet, 102–103 special events helping, 99 success of, 101 support system for, 98–99 VentureCorps advisors, role of, 97–98 Endeavor, plan of, 96–97 Endeavor’s South African Entrepreneurs, 107 Engaging The Other, book project, 54 Engaging The Other, documentary ﬁlm project, 55 “Engaging The Other,” training program, 54 Entrepreneur Give-Back Program, 108 Entrepreneur Network, 105 Entrepreneurship Reinvestment Program, 107 Eshete, Andreas, 60, 61 Ethiopian North American Health Professionals Association (ENAHPA), 74 Ethiopian Workforce Entrepreneurship Training Program, 69, 74 ETO. See International Conference on “Engaging The Other” The Power of Compassion (ETO) Evans, Mimi, 230 Falkenberg, Charles, 205, 226 Farmer, Paul, 205 Fernando and GVE, 37 Forum Toolkit, 215 Freire, Andres, 102–103 Friedman, Sandra, 50 Friedman, Thomas L., 107–108 Fuentes, Amanda, 151 Fulton Mall, Brooklyn, 90 Fundacion Ecuatoriana de Desarrollo, Otavalo, Ecuador, 120t, 123

Index

262 Galvin Auditorium, 133 Ganju, Erin Keown, 17 Gardner family, 204t Gardner, Eric , 217, 227 Gardner, Jeff, 223–224 Gates, Robert, 207 Gear Up Alliance and Invisible Conﬂicts, 148–150 Gebre-Selassie, Seyoum, 79f “paradox of poor,” 64 social work education in Ethiopia, 58–59, 60 SWEEP and, 78–80 Gedam Sefer Community-University Partnership, 76f ABCD strategy, 75–76 improving lives of women and children, 75, 76–77 Geekcorps and “Who’s Who” of Sudanese Diaspora, 238 Génesis, ACCION partner, 122 Geomar expansion opportunities for, 104 ﬁnancial restructuring, 105 Gerson, Elliot, 230 Getu, Melese, AAU, 62 Gifts That Count, 209 Global Giving Circles, 209 Global Giving Foundation, 218–219 Global G-Lab and Harvard Business School, 99 Global Night Commute, 140 Global Service Fellowship Act, 215 Global Village Engineers (GVE), xxiii–xxiv challenges faced by, 38–39 history of, 33–34 individuals helped by, 36–37 inﬂuences and inspiration behind, 39 model, 34, 37 NGOs and, 31, 32 organizational snapshot of, 41 partnerships with organizations, 37 projects, 34–36 (see also GVE projects) purpose of, 31 scope of, 31 sources of funding of, 37–38 success meter of, 38

uniqueness of, 32 United Communities and, 34, 36 volunteers of, 32 Goodman, Louis W., 230 Goodrich family, 205t Goodrich, Peter, 224 Goodrich, Sarah W., 231 Graduate School of Social Work (GSSW), AAU, Ethiopia educational innovations and (see Educational innovations in School of Social Work, Ethiopia) establishment of, 61–62, 63 paradox of poor, 64–65, 65f, 66t success of, 69–70 Grand Concourse mapping and CUP, 88 GSSW. See Graduate School of Social Work (GSSW) Guill, Gene, 183 Gulu, Uganda Acholiland children ﬂeeing commuting to, 130 Lacor Hospital in, 143 partnership between Loyola University students and Chicago community in, 154 sustainability of Dwon Madiki in, 153 trip to, Invisible Conﬂicts members, 149–150, 151 Gutierrez, Carlos M., 108 GVE. See Global Village Engineers (GVE) GVE mentoring assistance, 35–36 GVE projects assistance and mentoring responsibilities, 35–36 helping individuals, 36–37 Las Colinas landslide mitigation, El Salvador, 35 Levee inspection and maintenance training, El Salvador, 34 GVE volunteers, 32 Gyenzen, BWB, 11 Hahn, Eberhard, 5 Hamilton, Lee H, 208, 228–229 Hammock, John, 123 Harlem Tenants Council, New York City, 89

Index HARMONY Institute for Psychotherapy and Counseling in St. Petersburg, Russia, 48, 49, 51 HED. See Higher Education for Development (HED) Heckscher, Zahara, 217 Heisenberg, Werner, 192 Higher Education for Development (HED), 74 formation of, 59–60 MSW program in AAU and (see Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership (Project SWEEP)) university-to university partnerships, funding, 60 Hoffman, Bruce, 210, 231 Holcombe, Terry, 112 Hoop-a-Thon, 217 Hope Community, New York City, 89 House of Life project (Bait Al Hayat), Palestine, 54 Hovde, Anna, 74 How-To Guidebook for Urban Objects, A (CUP), 87 “How Women Lead” ( Newsweek), 126 Hudson, Arlene, 176 Human Genome Project, Xerox Corporation, 193 Hybrid Vigor Institute, xxvi beginning of, 188–189 catalytic collaboration of, 192–195 challenges of, 194, 195–197 competition, turf, and trust, 197–199 foundation of, 187 funding process for, 199–200 goals of, 187–188 organizational principle of, 190 organizational snapshot of, 200–201 publication strategy of, 192 publications, 190–191 signiﬁcance of, 189–190 IASSW. See International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) I.C. Plunge in 2006, ﬁrst annual, 145 in 2007, 153 artwork at, 154

263 coinage of, existence of, 146–147 ICR Conferences. See International Conference on Conﬂict Resolution (ICR) ICT Academy program, 238 IDP. See Internally displaced person (IDP) camps IDS. See Institut du Développement Social (IDS) in France IESC Geekcorps, xxvii early years of, 236–237 expansion of, 237, 239 ﬁrst project of, 236 inspiration for, 235 organizational snapshot, 239–240 present status and success of, 238–239 staff of, 239 training, 235–236 IESC. See International Executive Service Corps (IESC) IFESH. See International Foundation for Education and Self Help (IFESH) IFSW. See International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) IHPA. See International Humanistic Psychology Association (IHPA) IISE. See International Institute for Social Entrepreneurs (IISE), Kerala, India Institut du Développement Social (IDS) in France, 61 Institute of Social Work (ISW), Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 77 Information/communication technology (ICT), 235, 236 Informed Democracy, 218 Internally displaced person (IDP) camps, 130–131 International and Area Studies program, University of California–Berkeley, 195 International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW), 61 International Conference on Conﬂict Resolution (ICR), 49, 52 International Conference on “Engaging The Other” The Power of Compassion (ETO), 49, 52

264 International Executive Service Corps (IESC), 236 acquisition of Geekcorps, 237 International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW), 61 International Foundation for Education and Self Help (IFESH), 74 International Humanistic Psychology Association (IHPA), 50, 51 International Institute for Social Entrepreneurs (IISE), Kerala, India eco-friendly campus of, 11–12 establishment of, 11 scope of, 12 International Professional Exchange, 48 International Selection Panel, 98 International Youth Conference on Ecology of War and Peace, 52 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 195 Internet service provider (ISP), 236 Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet (Caruso), 190 Invisible Children formation of, 131 mission of, 132 Invisible Children (ﬁlm) ﬁrst screening of, 133–134 at Grant Park, public screening of, 140 inspiration behind, 132 on national tour, 133 Invisible Conﬂicts, xxv–xxvi actions taken in Uganda, 139–141 beginning of, 135–137 creating changes in lives, 154–155 in Democratic Republic of Congo, 153–154 DMP, launching of, 129 (see also Dwon Madiki Partnership (DMP)) and DMP plan, 152–153 DRC committee, formation of, 154 fostering relationships, 138–139 founding members of, 141 Gear Up Alliance and, 148–150 guiding principle of, 139 members of, 148, 149 mission of, 137–138, 139 naming of, 137

Index organizational snapshot, 159 peace vigil in Chicago, promoting, 140 public exhibition at LUMA, 152 Run for Congo 5K walk, participation in, 154 UIUC chapter of, 154 ISP. See Internet service provider (ISP) Jamaica Center for Arts and Culture, 90 Jamaica Flux and CUP, 90–91 Jane Addams College of Social Work, 60, 62 Gedam Sefer Community-University Partnership, 75–77, 76f UIC-AAU-ISW in Tanzania, 77–78 Jason, 131–132 Joey, 133 John, Jeremy, 133 Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS), 126 Johnson, Thomas S., 231 Joshi, Sandhya, 62 Journal of Conﬂict Transformation, Webbased journal, 55 Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 194, 196 Kanis, David, 133, 136 Kean, Thomas H. 208, 217, 229 Kechene Potters Association, 69 Kelley, Kathleen, 183 Kellner, Peter analyzing entrepreneurs, 97 founding Endeavor, 96 Kerrey, Bob, 217, 228 Kidder, Tracy, 205 Killassy, Natalie Endeavor’s global impact and, 106 Stitch Wise and, 106–107 Kim, John J-H, 183 Klein, Julie Thompson, 197 Knez, Deb, 183 Koch, Christopher, 231–232 Koch, Susan, 232 Komakech, Jimmy, 147 Kony, Joseph, 132 Kordesh, Richard, University of Illinois–Chicago, 67 Korentayer, Elisa, 235

Index Kreuger, Larry, University of Missouri, 67 Krippner, Stanley, 53 Kronenberg, Paul, 1, 3, 12–13 Kuhn, Thomas, 192 Kylia, 9, 10–11 Lake Michigan and I.C. Plunge, 145, 152, 155, 159 La Nacion, 100 Laren, 131–132 Las Colinas landslide mitigation and GVE, 35 Latin America, Endeavor in, 96, 100 Latina magazine, 126 Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way: Sidestepping the Barriers to Effective Practice of Interdisciplinarity (Caruso and Rhoten), 191 Learning Season: The Untapped Power of Summer to Advance Student Achievement, The, 167 Leaving Microsoft to Change the World (Wood), 17 Leonsyo, Deacon, 154` Lewis, Kourtney, 175–176 Linsk, Nathan, University of Illinois–Chicago, 67, 77 Linking Lives, 74 Lithuanian School Psychology Service in Vilnius, 48 Living Skies: Cloud Behavior and Its Role in Climate Change (Morton), The, 191 Local Language Publishing Program, 20 culture of writing, promoting, 23 “Dr. Seuss of developing world,” goal of, 23 launch of, 22 literature in local languages, production of, 22–23 Loyola University, Chicago Invisible Children, screening of ﬁlm, 133 Invisible Conﬂicts, 129 (see also Invisible Conﬂicts) Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA), 152 LUMA. See Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA)

265 Luo, 142, 143 Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) nighttime abduction of children, 130, 132 peace talks with Ugandan government, 141 war between Ugandan government and, 130–131, 132 Love for Children Organization in Ethiopia, 75, 76f Lower Lempa, El Salvador GVE’s ﬂood prevention plan, 34 updation of ﬂood prevention project of, 36 Lower Lempa levee inspection and maintenance and GVE, 34, 36 LRA. See Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) MacCormack, Charles, 232 MacDiarmid, Alan, 193 Manashil, Marc, 220 Manchester family, 205t Manchester, Joyce, 209, 217, 227 Manekin, Donald, 183 Marine Corps’ Counterinsurgency Field Manual, 207 Masters in Social Work (MSW) program, AAU, Ethiopia action research, development of, and, 67–68, 68f (see also Gedam Sefer Community-University Partnership) block teaching model, 65–66 government’s role, 63–64 representation of disadvantaged groups, 69 success of, 69–70 SWEEP and (see Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership (Project SWEEP)) McChesney, Kay, 57–58 McGill Centre for Medicine, Law, and Ethics, establishment of, 198 Mehari, Enagaw, 57 Mein Weg fuehrt nach Tibet (My Path Leads to Tibet) (Tenberken), 12 Meir, Golda, 105 Mercy, Aciro, 146f Merritt, Rev. Claudia W., 217, 227

266 METCO. See Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO), 175 Mexican MFI partner Compartamos. See Compartamos MFIs. See Microﬁnance institutions (MFIs) and ACCION “microenterprise,” ACCION, 112 Microﬁnance/microlending, 115 organizations, 111 results of, 118 Microﬁnancing, 95 Microﬁnance institutions (MFIs) and ACCION, 119 Miller, Robert, University of Albany, 67 “Mini Square Meter Greenhouses,” 6–7 Mogilevich, Valeria, 87, 93 Mogel, Lize, 87, 93 Moisin, Lucila Mendoza, 123 Morales, Laura, 148 Morton, Oliver, 191 Moxley, David, 70 MSW program. See Masters in Social Work (MSW) program, AAU, Ethiopia Multi-Method Analysis of the Social and Technical Conditions for Interdisciplinary Collaboration, A, 189 Mustain, Nathan autobiography of, 129 emails to audience of Invisible Children, 135–137 ﬁrst screening of Invisible Children, and, 133–134 and history of civil war in Uganda, 130–131 Mustain, Patrick, 154 My Path Leads to Tibet (Mein Weg fuehrt nach Tibet) (Tenberken), 12 National Atmospheric Deposition Program, 193 National Cancer Institute (NCI), 199 Natural Resources Research Center (North Carolina State University), The, 198

Index Nature, journal, 191 NCI. See National Cancer Institute (NCI) Nellie Mae Education Foundation, 167 Net Yang Secondary School, Cambodia, 24–25 New Proﬁt Inc. (NPI), 179 New York City Leadership Forums, Endeavor, 99 New York Times, 107, 131, 188, 247 9/11 Commission Report, 208 9/11 terrorist attack ﬁfth anniversary of, 212–214 fourth anniversary of, 206 victims of, 206, 213 Nkugwa, Alice, 122–123 NPI. See New Proﬁt Inc. (NPI) NYC Department of Homeless Services, New York City, 89 Nyima, BWB, 9–10 Obama, Barack, 140, 178 Oberg, Soren, 183–184 Odonga, Grace, 134, 141 Dwon Madiki Partnership, and, 142–145 ﬁnding schools for children, 145 providing children with activities, 147 OfﬁceNet, expansion of, 102–103 Ogletree, Charles, Jr., 164, 172, 178, 184 Olweean, Steve AHP and, 46–47, 48 CBI emergence in Soviet Union, 48 civil rights activist, role as, 44 ICR conference and, 49 International Professional Exchange and, 48 services in Kuwait, 44–46 Online Small Business Loan Application, 114 Open Societies Institute (OSI), 238 Organizing Change from the Inside Out: Emerging Models of IntraOrganizational Collaboration in Philanthropy (Rhoten), 191 OSI. See Open Societies Institute (OSI) Our Voices Together, xxvi–xxvii Action Center of, 211–212, 217 advisory board of, 229–233

Index AID, merging with, 218 blog, 215 board of directors of, 227–228 family proﬁles of, 204t–206t formation of, 203–204, 206 free services of, 211–212 funding of, 216–217 global challenge, responses to (see Our Voices Together and global challenge) Global Giving Foundation and, 218–219 Global Service Fellowship Act, 215–216 honorary board of, 228–229 inspiration behind, 223–226 launch of, 216 Learn, Act, Share structure of, 217 major challenges faced by, 218 networking, 210–212, 211t organizational snapshot, 233 principal program areas of, 207–208 responsibilities in global community statement, 214, 214t staff of, 228 Statement of Global Responsibilities petition, 214, 214t volunteer’s contribution to, 217 writing Forum Toolkit, 215 Our Voices Together and global challenge “Agenda of Opportunity,” program, 207–208, 208–210 counterterrorist network, 208, 210–212, 211t people-to-people efforts, promoting, 207 Safer, More Compassionate World campaign, 212–216 terrorism challenge, 206–207 Our Voices Together Blog, 215 Otero, María, 121, 126–127 Palo Alto Research Center, 193 Pape, Robert, 207 Parent, Michael, 6 Peace Corps, 235 “peace needs hope to grow” (Azcona), 219 Pearl, Daniel, 224–225

267 PEPFAR. See President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) PhD program in social work, AAU curriculum plan of, 70–71 four potential project areas of, 71 initiation of, 70 Ministry of Education’s funding of, 70 Moxley’s role, 70 vision of sustainability and, 70 Peterkin, Robert, 172 Petras, Donna, 67 Pevzner, Mark, 50 Phalen, Earl Martin, 163, 184 and BELL struggle for funding, 176–177 illustrating use of BELL, 166 inspiration of, 170, 173 lessons learned by, 180–181 mentors of, 164, 172 signiﬁcant moment of, 171–172 Philip, Tigi, 12 Piela, Chris, 184 Pirir, Juan, 122 President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), 67 Proctor & Gamble, 103 “pro-entrepreneurship,” Endeavor, 108 Program on Vision Science & Advanced Networking, University of Pennsylvania, 191 Project SWEEP. See Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership (Project SWEEP) Psychological Impact of War Trauma on Civilians (Krippner), 53 Push Pin Gallery, 152 Rapport, David, 194 Reading Room Program CRRs and 21–22 establishing libraries, 20–21 Local Language Publishing Program, 20 Scholastic and Chronicle Books, contribution of, 22 Red Sox Foundation, 180 Red Sox Nation, 180 Red Sox Scholars Program, 179–180

268 Request for Proposals (RFP), 221 Retik family, 205t Retik, David, 225 Retik, Susan, 232 Revised Kyoto Convention, 238 RFP. See Request for Proposals (RFP) Rhoten, Diana, 189, 191 Rich, Damon, 87, 90, 93 Risk as Continuum: A Redeﬁnition of Risk for Governing the Post-Genome World (Caruso), 189 Risk: The Art and the Science and Choice (Caruso), 190 RNIB. See Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), 9 Rogers, Carl, 46–47 Rollin, James, 62 Room to Grow Girls’ Scholarship Program, 17 ADAPT Program, 26 empowering girls, 25 impact of, 25 long-term commitment, making, 25–26 Room to Read awards and honors for, 28 Challenge Grant Model of, 16, 26–27 focus of, 15 future plans of, 28–29 global monitoring system of, 27 history of, 16–18 (see also Room to Read, history of) mission of, 15–16, 23 organizational snapshot, 30 programs of (see Room to Read programs) project evaluating system of, 27–28 Wood, John, vision of, 15–16 Room to Read, history of donation of millionth book, 17 expansion of, 17 ﬁve-year strategic plan, completion of, 17–18 Ganju’s contribution, 17 one thousandth library, opening of, 17 Room to Grow Girls’ Scholarship Program and, 17(see also Room to Grow Girls’ Scholarship Program) start of, 17

Index two thousandth library, opening of, 17 Wood’ s Nepal experience, 15–16 Room to Read preschools, 19–20 Room to Read programs Computer Room Program, 23–25 (see also Computer Room Program) educational opportunities, providing, 19 Local Language Publishing Program, 20, 22–23 Reading Room Program (see Reading Room Program) Room to Grow Girls’ Scholarship Program, 17, 25–26 School Room Program (see also School Room Program) Rosenthal family, 205–206t Rosenthal, Joshua, 225 Rosenthal, Marilynn M., 205 Rottenberg, Linda analyzing entrepreneurs, 97 co-founding Endeavor, 95 contribution in success of Endeavor, 105 receiving Woman of the Year Award, 108 Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) Safer, More Compassionate World campaign, Our Voices Together, 208 activities of, 213–215 aim of, 212 events, 215 Global Service Fellowship Act and, 215–216 Our Voices Together Blog, 215 starting of, 212–213, 213t Statement of Global Responsibilities petition and, 214, 214t SAIS. See Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Sangha, 133 Sanos, Jose Antonio, 121, 122 Sarri, Rosemary, University of Michigan, 67 Schakowsky, Jan, 140

Index Schiele, Boris, 7 Schoﬁeld, Lynne Steuerle. See Steuerle, Lynne School Room Program providing access to preschools, 19–20 completing school construction projects, 18–19 libraries, establishment of, 19 (see also Room to Read, history of) relevance in developing countries, 18 School of Social Work, AAU establishment of, 60–62 factors helping, 62–64 “paradox of the poor,” and, 63–64 educational innovations in (see Educational innovations in School of Social Work, Ethiopia) success and recognition, 69–70 Second Congo War, 153 Scientiﬁc disciplines and Hybrid Vigor, 194 Scott, Marianne, 217 Scranton, Katie, 141–142 Simpson, Kristen, 89 Social Capitalist Award, 108 Serr, Klaus, Australian Catholic University, 67 Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA), 90 Shimkin, M. Christopher and GVE, 33, 34, 37, 40–41 Shrestha, Dinesh, 17 Small-to-medium-sized (SME) companies, 102 Smith, Morgan, 133 Smith, Lauren, 184 Snow, Keith Harmon, 153 Snyder, Cecilia, 217, 228 Social work education in Ethiopia Butterﬁeld, Alice, and, 57–58 educational innovations used in (see Educational innovations in School of Social Work, Ethiopia) factors, expediting development of, 62–64 Gebre-Selassie, Seyoum, contributions of (see Gebre-Selassie, Seyoum) GSSW, establishment of, 61–62, 63, 64 HED and, 59–60, 62

269 “paradox of the poor” and, 64–65, 65f, 66t Project SWEEP and (see Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership (Project SWEEP)) seed for developing, 57 Tasse, Abye, contributions of (see Tasse, Abye) UCBP and, 63 Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership (Project SWEEP) AAU-UIC planning committee and, 60–61 collaboration with other organizations, 73 Eshete, Andreas, contributions of, 60, 61 formation of, 59–60 future plans and directions of, 75–78 HED, contributions of, 60, 62 MSW program at AAU, 60, 62, 63–64 organizational snapshot, 80 PhD program at AAU, 70–71 School of Social Work, start of, 61–62 (see also School of Social Work, AAU) Seyoum, Gebre-Selassie, contributions of, 60, 64 Tasse, Abye, contributions of, 61–62 (see also Tasse, Abye) vision of change and, 72–73, 72f Solomon, Richard Hybrid Vigor, founding (see Hybrid Vigor Institute) literary work of, 191 Somerville , Margaret, 194, 195 SOSA. See Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology (SOSA), Addis Ababa University South African Bureau of Standards, 107 Soviet Union during1980s to1990s AHP, contributions of, 46–47 CBI emergence, 47, 48, 49–50 human services, lack of, 46 ICR Conferences in, 49 Virginia Satir1987 trip, 46 Sperling, Laurene, 184 SPURA. See Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA) Staples of Latin America and OfﬁceNet, 103

270 Stapleton family, 205t Stapleton, David, 209, 217, 227 State Street Bank and BELL, 176 Statement of Global Responsibilities petition, 214, 214t STEP UP Act, United States of America, 169–170, 178 Steuerle family, 204t formation of Our Voices Together, 206 funding for Our Voices Together, 216 reaching out to other families, 204 starting with idea, 216 Steuerle, Gene, 203, 208, 217, 227 Steuerle, Kristin, 203, 217, 227–228 Steuerle, Lynne, 203, 204, 217, 226, 227 Stern, Nikki, 206, 232 Steuerle, Norma, 203, 226 Stitch Wise, 106–107 Swanson, Kristin Steuerle. See Steuerle, Kristin SWEEP’s future plans and directions reconceptualizing, 78 UIC-AAU partnership to other endeavors, 75–77, 76f UIC-AAU-ISW in Tanzania, 77–78 TAR. See Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) Tashis’ New World (Tenberken), 12 Tasse, Abye leadership style of, 61–62 invitation mail to UIC/IASSW colleagues, 64–65, 65f Teach for America, 180 Teachers for Africa Program of IFESH, 74 Tenberken, Sabriye creating Braille Without Borders, xvi– xvii, 2–3 developing Tibetan script for blind, 3 biography of, 12–13 Terrorism, 212t Tesfaye, Andargatchew, 59 Teuk Thlar Primary and Junior High School and CRR, Cambodia, 21 Think Big, Act Big FunRaisers, 209 Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) BWB in (see Braille Without Borders (BWB))

Index problems of visual impairment in, 1–2 Tibetan Braille script, development of, 3, 5 Tippet, Bruce, 124 Tobin Elementary School, Roxbury, 164 Transdisciplinarity: reCreating Integrated Knowledge (Somerville and Rapport), 195 UCBP. See University Capacity Building Program (UCBP) Uganda civil war in northern, 130–131 Invisible Conﬂicts in (see Invisible Conﬂicts) Uganda Microﬁnance Limited (UML), 122, 123 “Uganda, the Horror” (Smithsonian), 130 UIC. See University of Illinois–Chicago (UIC) UIUC. See University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) UML. See Uganda Microﬁnance Limited (UML) “Understanding Genomics Risks: An Integrated Scenario and Analytic Approach,” 192 United Communities, 34, 36 United States Agency for International Development (USAID), 236 United Nations Peacemaking Mission in Sudan, 132 University Capacity Building Program (UCBP), Ethiopia, 63 University of California–Berkeley, International and Area Studies program, 195 University of Illinois–Chicago (UIC), AAU partnerships, 59–60 (see also Social Work Education in Ethiopia Partnership (Project SWEEP)) University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign (UIUC), 147, 154 U.S. ACCION Network, 114 USAID. See United States Agency for International Development

Index Vasquez, Carmen, 89 VentureCorps advisors, 97–98 Victim Compensation Fund, 216 Visual impairment BWP, services toward (see Braille Without Borders (BWB)) WHO’s report on, 1–2 Voce S.A., 100 War on Terror civil liberties and War on Terror, 212–213 sixth year of, 207 Washington Post, 208 Wear, David, 196 Western Deep Levels, South Africa, 106 Whittington, Leslie, 205, 226 WHO. See World Health Organization (WHO) Willis, Graci, 151 Wilson, Edward, 192

271 Winfrey, Oprah, 140 Wood, John nonproﬁt management, approach to, 16 vision of, 15–16, 28 Woo, Rosten, 87 World Customs Organization, 238 World Food Program, 131 World Health Organization (WHO) visual impairment report, 1–2 World Is Flat, The (Friedman), 109 www.GlobalGiving.org, 218 www.goodrichfoundation.org, 205 Yudon, BWB, 11 Zinn, Deborah, 62 Zuckerman, Ethan Geekcorps, founding, 235 as inspiration for Geekcorps, 235 leaving IESC Geekcorps, 238 Zurawski, Diana, 148

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The New Humanitarians

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 3 Changing Sustainable Development and Social Justice

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

9 8 7 6 5 4

3

2

1

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

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction by Chris E. Stout 1: WITNESS Gillian Caldwell

xiii 1

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

17

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

51

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

65

5: Nonviolent Peaceforce: A Realistic Choice for the Future Mel Duncan, Mark Zissman, and Patrick Savaiano 6: Peaceful Bodyguards: Nonviolent Action in War Zones for the Protection of Human Rights: Lessons from Three Decades with Peace Brigades International Barbara J. Wien 7: Witness for Peace: Transforming People—Transforming Policy Stephanie Benjamin and Teresa Barttrum, interviewing Melinda St. Louis

89

105

123

viii

Contents

8: Southern Poverty Law Center Myron Panchuk and Patrick Savaiano

137

9: Human Rights Campaign Trevor Thomas and Myron Panchuk

157

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

177

11: Search for Common Ground John Marks and Susan Collin Marks

191

12: The Project on Justice in Times of Transition Tim Phillips

213

13: Exodus World Service Heidi Moll Schoedel

239

14: A Successful Institution in a Struggling System: The Story of the International Institute for Sustainable Development and Sustainable Development in Canada Lillian Hayward

263

Afterword by Keith Ferrazzi

287

Series Afterword by Albert R. Roberts

289

About the Editor and Contributors

291

Index

301

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.

Acknowledgments

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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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• • • • • • • • • • • •

•

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

Introduction

xv

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

xvi

Introduction

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?

1

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

2

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

6

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

8

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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15

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]

2

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.

17

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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?

From Violence to Agreement

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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

22

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

24

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

From Violence to Agreement

25

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

26

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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27

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

From Violence to Agreement

29

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,

The New Humanitarians

32

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

From Violence to Agreement

• • • •

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

34

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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35

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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37

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

38

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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•

39

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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The New Humanitarians

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

42

The New Humanitarians

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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43

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

The New Humanitarians

44

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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2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

45

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

46

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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3

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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5

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]

8

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.

9

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 •

•

•

•

•

•

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).

12

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: •

• • •

• •

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: •

•

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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•

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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: •

•

•

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. •

•

•

•

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.

14

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

$3,000,000.00 Environment Canada CIDA Province of Manitoba

Amount of Funding

$2,500,000.00

$2,000,000.00

$1,500,000.00

$1,000,000.00

$500,000.00

19

90 / 19 91 91 / 19 92 92 / 19 93 93 / 19 94 94 / 19 95 95 / 19 96 96 / 19 97 97 / 19 98 98 / 19 99 99 / 20 00 00 / 20 01 01 / 20 02 02 / 20 03 03 / 20 04 04 / 20 05 05 /0 6

$0.00

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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

Operating Grants

$8,000,000.00

Amount of Funding

$7,000,000.00

$6,000,000.00

$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

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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

The New Humanitarians

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

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$0.00

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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

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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

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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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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)

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