Dear Member Organisations of the Nonviolent Peaceforce,

Greetings on behalf of the International Governing Council of NP! We would like to use the opportunity of this long-overdue letter to begin a dialogue with you about the future of NP.

It has been nearly 18 months since we met in India to launch NP as an independent, international NGO composed of member organisations from around the world. In another 18 months we should be meeting again as the first Triennial Gathering of NP, to review our progress to date and set the direction of where we want the organisation to be in 2008.

We have accomplished a great deal in the past 18 months. In that time, we have recruited, trained and deployed our first international team to Sri Lanka, and they have been very busy there doing excellent work on our behalf. Attached is a report on the situation on Sri Lanka prepared by our team. We have continued exploring other possible sites for future NP projects in Israel/Palestine, Burma, Korea, Uganda and the Philippines. We have built up the infrastructure of the organisation to be able to develop and sustain this work, with a strong staff team in St Paul and offices in San Francisco, Washington DC, Brussels, Delhi and Guayaquil (Ecuador).

We have raised nearly $1 million dollars to support all this work over the past 18 months, and we have continued to build political and grassroots support in over 40 countries. We have even won a peace award in the short time we have been operating!

Although we have much to be proud of, we also have a lot of hard work ahead of us if we are to achieve the ambitions we set for ourselves in December 2002. We are still not, in reality or in the perception of others, a truly international organisation. At least 90% of our funding is still coming from sources in the USA and our international structures remain very weak. The flow of information between the different structures of NP is far from adequate and the various committees and working groups of the IGC are still not fully functioning.

These are issues which we, with your help, want to address over the next 18 months. We have absolute confidence in William Knox, his project staff and field team members to be getting on with the daily work of running our pilot project in Sri Lanka and helping to make a difference to the people in that country who have asked for our support. We have absolute confidence in Mel Duncan and the rest of our staff around the world to provide the necessary organisational back-up for the Sri Lanka project and to ensure the smooth and effective operation of the whole organisation. But the task of building a more international organisation with better channels of communication and decision-making falls to us: Member Organisations and their representatives on the IGC. We are ready to work with you on this.

Last month, 15 MOs from across Europe met in Scotland to discuss how best to organise support for NP in the region and how to improve decision-making and communication structures within NP generally. It was a positive and constructive meeting which produced many concrete ideas and offers of help. We will circulate the minutes of that meeting to the rest of NP for your information.

Although we recognise that other regions of the world may find it much more difficult to get together on a regional basis in this way, we feel it would be immensely valuable to have at least one regional meeting of MOs in each region prior to having a Triennial Gathering in 2005 or 2006. This would allow issues to be discussed in more depth at a regional level before attempting to reach agreement as a whole organisation.

In the meantime, we are preparing for the second meeting of the full IGC, which was postponed from March because of the political situation in Sri Lanka and will now take place during the first week of July. This is your opportunity as MOs to give us feedback and to raise concerns through your regional representatives on the IGC. Please make use of this opportunity to think about the future you see for NP and how you can help it to get there!

Many of you completed questionnaires for Christine Schweitzer’s One Year Review of NP. A summary of her findings will be circulated to you shortly. You have also received the draft By-Laws for the organisation. These have been discussed by European MOs and their proposed changes will also be sent to you in due course. We strongly encourage you to make your comments on them also.

Other issues for consideration at the next IGC meeting include the nature and limits of NP’s mandate in the field, proposals for further exploration work in various other parts of the world and the question of moving the international office out of the USA. We look forward to hearing from you about these and other matters which affect you as a member organisation of NP. Together, we will build an organisation that can make a difference in this world, and we all know how badly it is needed.


Yours,

Tim Wallis, Claudia Samayoa,
Co-chairs, NP International Governing Council

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