International Fellowship of Reconciliation
| Founded | 1914 |
|---|---|
| Type | Non-profit NGO |
| Location |
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| Fields | Disarmament - with one focus on nuclear weapons, work against rassism, work for gender equality, interfaith, campaigns, Ecosoc status with UN and representatives at UN in New York, Geneva and Vienna and at UNESCO in Paris. |
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Members
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Over 70 members all over the world |
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Key people
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Davorka Lovrekovic - President Lucas Johnson - International Coordinator |
| Website | http://www.ifor.org/ |
Davorka Lovrekovic - President
The International Fellowship of Reconciliation is a non-governmental organization founded in 1914 in response to the horrors of war in Europe. Today IFOR counts 72 branches, groups and affiliates in 48 countries on all continents. IFOR members promote nonviolence, human rights and reconciliation through public education efforts, training programs and campaigns. The IFOR International Secretariat in Alkmaar, Netherlands facilitates communication among IFOR members, links branches to capacity building resources, provides training in gender-sensitive nonviolence through the Women Peacemakers Program, and helps coordinate international campaigns, delegations and urgent actions. IFOR has ECOSOC status at the United Nations.
The first body to use the name "Fellowship of Reconciliation" was formed as a result of a pact made in August 1914 at the outbreak of the First World War by two Christians, Henry Hodgkin (an English Quaker) and Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze (a German Lutheran), who were participating in a Christian pacifist conference in Konstanz, southern Germany (near Switzerland). On the platform of the railway station at Cologne, they pledged to each other that, "We are one in Christ and can never be at war".
To take that pledge forward, Hodgkin organised a conference in Cambridge in 1915 and founded the "Fellowship of Reconciliation" (FOR England). The German branch, Versöhnungsbund, was founded later. It held its first conference in 1932, but in 1933, when Hitler came to power, it dissolved. Schultze was arrested twenty-seven times during World War I and was forced to live in exile during the Nazi period. FOR Germany was officially reestablished just in 1956 with Dr Siegmund Schultze as President. Shortly after the Cambridge conference, in the autumn of 1915, Henry Hodgkin went over to America and, the 11th and the 12th of November, the American Fellowship was founded during a Conference at Garden City, Long Island. More than a thousand members enrolled in the American Fellowship before and during the war, which, for the U.S.A., begun on April 6, 1917. Because of the war, it was not possible to travel to other countries and the Fellowship of Reconciliation focused its activities on trying to influence public opinion, to help victims of war and war prisoners. 600 people in England went to prison for helping more than 16.000 imprisoned during the war. When conscription began in Britain in 1916 and in the United States many FOR members refused military service.
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Wikipedia