Tony Blair and Belinda Stronach Join to Support Faiths Act Fellowship
TORONTO -- Rt Hon Tony Blair and Hon Belinda Stronach announced that they were joining forces to collaborate with representatives of a broad cross-section of the communities of faith and spiritual belief in Canada in a new proposed interfaith initiative.
Belinda Stronach and Tony Blair had the honour to meet in Toronto in a roundtable with some 30 representatives of faith and belief communities, including young people of faith, to share views and to form concretely a steering committee that will explore the launch of a new interfaith forum dedicated to advancement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
In adopting the Millennium Declaration in 2000, the global community through the United Nations committed itself to setting and meeting a series of basic overarching goals to improve the lives of all of humanity known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The original target for reaching these defining goals was 2015 and we are now half way along that path. Progress has been made but it has also been slow and uneven. The MDGs need grassroots champions the world over to push toward the targeted objectives now more than ever.
"I believe that people of different religious faiths and spiritual beliefs care about the issues of development and human justice captured in the MDGs, and have a remarkable ability to collaborate and mobilize resources at the community level. We are proposing here to try to tap into the energy and capacity of the faith and belief communities and encourage them to achieve even more together than apart," stated Tony Blair.
"We are looking to work with Canadians of faith and belief to build a secure and neutral public space in which to encourage and facilitate inter-faith cooperation on practical humanitarian matters where there is a large degree of consensus, starting with the MDGs. And the process of the interfaith collaboration itself is also an important endeavour," added Belinda Stronach.
Tony Blair and Belinda Stronach also affirmed that they are supporting together the Tony Blair Faith Foundation's programme Faiths Act Fellowship as a first concrete deliverable programme of the proposed interfaith initiative. This programme, developed in partnership with the Interfaith Youth Core based in Chicago, is an opportunity for young leaders of faith to become ambassadors for inter-religious cooperation achieving the Millennium Development Goals and ending deaths due to malaria. The Fellowship will allow thirty outstanding young people from, in the first instance, Canada, the U.K. and the United States to embark together on a ten month journey of interfaith service. Training begins with a two month intensive initiation that includes training in London and Chicago and fieldwork with primary health care partners in Africa. Fellows will return to their home countries for eight months to mobilize young people of faith to raise awareness and resources to promote the Millennium Development Goals. The forum proposed above will help in identifying and supporting young Canadian participants and seeking the best host organizations in Canada.
The steering committee would work going forward with staff of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and The Belinda Stronach Foundation to:
develop collaboratively a mandate and strategic plan for organization of the interfaith project with the structure it needs to be successful; and,
create programming with the organizational resources required to have real impact at the community level.
"Believers all know our Creator made us diverse peoples, following different paths in search of God's Grace throughout the world. Serving each other together transforms us into a community of Faith, despite our differences. The Faith of Life Network offers Mr. Blair and Ms. Stronach our heartfelt congratulations and support for their bold international initiative of positive change," said David Liepert, who represented the Canadian Council of Imams at the roundtable and is Founding Director of the Faith of Life Network.
"I fully endorse this worthwhile cause. If ever there was an endeavour worthy of the world's grassroots spiritual movements, this is it," declared Sayone Arasratnam, President of both the Hindu Youth Network and the Hindu Canadian Network.
Friday 05 December 2008
http://tonyblairfaithfoundation.org/2008/12/tony-blair-and-belinda-stronac.html