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Peace Promotor: Local Futures

OVERVIEW

Name:  Local Futures LOcal futures         http://www.localfutures.org

Type:  Not for profit organisation,  established 1978

Mission Statement: Local Futures’ (ISEC) mission is to protect and renew ecological and social well being by promoting a systemic shift away from economic globalization towards localization. Through its “education for action” programs, Local Futures develops innovative models and tools to catalyze collaboration for strategic change at the community and international level

Peace-promoting activities:   Local futures provides support for communities to develop food security and other securities that underpin peace. Continue reading Peace Promotor: Local Futures

FILM: The Economics of Happiness

Watch a short excerpt for free

The Economics of Happiness describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, government and big business continue to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, all around the world people are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance—and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm – an economics of localization. Continue reading FILM: The Economics of Happiness

How the system has failed, not us

In this extremely educative video from the BBC, economics professor Steve Keen explains how the system we live under has failed us. If we have have bad debts, they should be forgiven because they come more from the system rather than a lack of prudence on the part of the borrowers.

Steve also explains how rising violence comes from systemic faults that need to be addressed.

Read more on Steve’s website Debunking Economics

Beta version of our Peace Bank released

We have set up a Peace Bank facility to help fulfill our mission of encouraging and supporting more activities to promote peace in the world . We have just released a beta version of our Peace Bank. The Bank holds details of organizations working to promote peace, and is under continuous development and update.

The Peace Bank also collects stories to inspire and inform us how people and their organisations came to build foundations for peace in different ways. In a short while we will publish stories you will be able to retrieve using a search function. In the meantime we have some demonstration stories here.

 

Visit our Peace Bank Page.

Investor in peace: Initiatives of Change

OVERVIEW

Name:  CAUX-Initiatives of Change Foundation (CAUX-IofC)

Type:  Foundation under Swiss law, established 1946

Mission Statement:  to provide a safe and privileged space to inspire, equip and connect individuals, groups and organisations from around the globe to engage effectively and innovatively in the promotion of trust, ethical leadership, sustainable living and human security.

Peace-promoting activities:  organizes and coordinates international and local conferences, seminars and training in Switzerland, primarily in its Conference Centre, the former Caux-Palace, bringing together a diversity of people.

Short description:

Peace Story: Post-WW2 reconciliation

Frank Buchman

TIME AND PLACE: CAUX, Switzerland post WW2

THE PEOPLE INVOLVED: Frank ND Buchman was the initiator of Moral Re-Armament, now known as Initiatives of Change.

SITUATION: Buchman returned to Europe after WW2, conscious that lasting worldwide peace could only be established on the basis of a change in personal and public relationships. At this time any contact with the Germans was extremely difficult.

WHAT HAPPENED: Moral Re armament opened an international conference centre in Caux, Switzerland, made possible through the generosity and hard work of hundreds of Swiss citizens. Over the next four years more than 3,000 Germans and 2,000 French came to Caux, and their

CAUX Conference Center

encounters became the basis of a massive development in reconciliation and reconstruction.

END RESULTS: Buchman was later decorated by both the German and French governments for his contribution to European reconciliation. The story of one them, Resistance leader Madame Irène Laure, is told on video – and is also available as a book. The conferences at Caux, and similar ones at Mackinac Island in the United States, achieved further public recognition through several other major contributions to international developments in the post-war years, notably the part played in the reconciliation of Japan with her South-East Asian neighbours, and in the achievement of independence by several African countries without major bloodshed. By the 1950s, casts of plays presenting MRA’s ideas were travelling all over the world.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

See the IOFC website under history