Alvin Odins is currently working as a programme officer with a humanitarian organization. His focus is on implementing stabilization policy within the context of peace and security. Outside work he is engaged with information technology, reading, cooking and mentoring young people. He enjoys personal quiet time
Georgina Flores and Lorena Mier y Teran are the founders of We Love From (WLF), a letter-writing initiative which they run from their hometown in Merida, Mexico. They met during the Creative Leadership conference in 2020 and struck up a friendship when they discovered that they lived in the same city.
A couple of months after the conference finished, Georgina came up with the idea of sending letters of love and hope to people across the world who are facing difficult situations. Lorena loved the idea and together they founded We Love From.
They reached out to their friends and family and even to schools, asking people to create handwritten letters to Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Honduras and Colombia. The response was amazing and surprising. Those who received the letters were so filled with joy, they expressed their gratitude on social media.
‘I would never have thought that with a piece of paper, a pencil and a little bit of your time and effort, you can really make a difference in someone else’s life!’ says Lorena.
This experience has taught Georgina to ‘never underestimate the power of [my] ideas, even if they seem small’.
I would never have thought that with a piece of paper, a pencil and a little bit of your time and effort, you can really make a difference in someone else’s life!
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We took the opportunity to ask Georgina and Lorena a few more questions:
How did the idea of We Love From come about?
We wanted to give emotional support to people who were far away – and this was a relatively easy way to do so. We also wanted to engage as many people as possible, and to increase awareness of what is happening all across the globe. Letter-writing achieves both of these goals.
How do you implement the project?
We ask people from Mexico to write letters of hope and encouragement to a different destination each time. We send their letters to someone we know in the country concerned and they distribute them to shelters, NGOs, random people on the street, etc.
How do you choose the destinations?
Initially we talked to friends in different countries and planned all the logistics with them, making sure they would be able to receive and distribute the letters. Now that more people are interested in the project, we have received messages from people asking for their country to be a WLF destination and offering themselves as receivers and distributers.
What is the biggest lesson you have learnt from the process?
One of the biggest lessons is that something as simple as a pencil and a paper can really change a person’s day or perspective. It can make someone feel hugged and create connection even if the writer is not physically there.
Lorena, you have mentioned that reading the cards before sending them off is your favourite part. Why?
I love reading words that come from the heart, from children, youngsters and adults, and the creativity which makes each letter unique. It makes me very happy to think of people taking time to write a letter to a stranger, sending them good wishes and support, and to think that someone will smile the way I did when reading the letter.
Georgina, what is your favourite part and why?
My favourite part is when the people receive the letters (even though we haven’t been there to experience it). We love it when people go to the trouble of letting us know that they received a letter and felt moved by it, and that it brought them hope and made their day. Then you know it is all worth it.
What are your future plans for We Love From?
We want to explore more destinations and make the project bigger and to create more awareness about situations around the world. One challenge is how to sponsor the shipping cost for each destination. We are working on this.
What advice would you give anyone who wants to start a project?
Start first, worry second. There will always be problems you didn’t anticipate but that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to solve them. Start and you will figure things out as you go. If you never start you will never know where you could end up. If you believe in your project and you are passionate about it, people can feel that. As they get moved and excited, more and more people will join you.
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Since 2007 Rob Lancaster has worked on trustbuilding projects and programmes in Asia, Africa, and Eastern and Western Europe with over 30 different teams, primarily of Initiatives of Change. His experience ranges from leadership programmes in Caux, to the reconciliation process and grassroots consultation in South Sudan. Rob has Honours degrees in both Law (LLB) and Arts (International Relations/French) from the Australian National University, as well as a Master’s of Public Policy (MPP) from the University of Oxford.
Patrycja Pociecha (Pati) is a project manager, facilitator and digital education specialist. She holds a degree in Psychology. Since 2010 she has volunteered with national and international organizations: first, as a Project Coordinator for GFPS-Polska, a student organization which promotes Polish-German cooperation, later with the Initiative Mittel- und Osteuropa (InMOE) network. In 2013 she was inspired by IofC's approach, which links personal change to global change.
You never knew who you might meet in the Caux kitchens in the 1960s. The kitchen which prepared dishes for Asian guests was presided over by a small Burmese woman in her 60s. Few would have guessed that she was a former headmistress from Myanmar (then Burma) and a friend of Mahatma Gandhi.
Daw Nyein Tha – or ‘Ma Mi’, as her family and friends called her – became the youngest headmistress in Myanmar in 1921, aged 21. Her style was authoritarian. After 10 years, her staff and pupils finally rebelled when, as the Christian head of a Christian school, she refused to allow the Buddhist girls to observe a religious fast day. The incident caused a national furore.
Now I knew why Christ had put me in the school – not just to be headmistress but to learn to love people.
The issue was finally resolved when she accepted that she disliked the girls and that her pride and conceit made it hard for the teachers to work with her. She apologized publicly. ‘Now I knew why Christ had put me in the school – not just to be headmistress but to learn to love people,’ she said later.
This lesson stayed with her throughout her life, as she moved away from teaching and into work for reconciliation and justice both at home and around the world. She first encountered Moral Re-Armament (now Initiatives of Change) on a visit to Britain in 1932 and embraced its message of inner listening and starting with yourself.
Wherever she was, Daw Nyein Tha remained a teacher – often using her hands to convey her truth. She liked to demonstrate a Burmese proverb: ‘When I point my finger at my neighbour, there are three more pointing back at me.’ The phrase became one of MRA’s best known songs, written by Cecil Broadhurst for the musical Jotham Valley and made famous by the Colwell Brothers. (Listen to the song here)
When she visited Mahatma Gandhi in his ashram in 1941, she used a handkerchief pulled taut between two hands to show the tension between two people who each insist on having their way. When one hand stops pulling, the other also has to yield and they can work together. ‘Yes,’ responded Gandhi mischievously. ‘It works very well with a handkerchief, but does it work with people?’
In Thailand in the early 1950s, she used a hollowed-out seed containing three tiny ivory elephants to make her point. Thailand and Burma had nursed a smouldering enmity ever since the Burmese destroyed Thailand’s ancient capital and stole its prized white elephants 200 years earlier. These memories rankled in Thailand, but had been largely forgotten in Burma. Now the Burmese airforce, chasing Burmese rebels, had bombed Thai border villages and feelings ran high.
At a meeting with the Thai prime minister, Daw Nyein Tha emptied the three ivory elephants into his palm. ‘These little elephants have been away from Thailand for such a long time,’ she said. ‘They were so homesick, they have got very thin.’ The Prime Minister laughed, and the story went out on the radio. Later the Burmese Prime Minister apologized to the people of Thailand on Burma’s behalf and backed this up with financial compensation.
Daw Nyein Tha spent most of the last years of her life in Britain and Switzerland, unable to return to Myanmar, then under military dictatorship.
She taught those who worked with her in the Asian kitchen at Caux some simple principles, as Marjory Procter writes in her biography The World My Country: ‘It was the people for whom you cooked that mattered…. Why you were cooking was more important than what you were cooking.’
Asked by an Italian journalist what someone like her was doing cooking, Daw Nyein Tha replied, ‘I am not cooking. I am obeying God.’
It was the people for whom you cooked that mattered…. Why you were cooking was more important than what you were cooking.
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Some time during this period, my mother helped in the Asian and African kitchen at Caux. She wrote the recipes she learnt, including ‘Daw Nyein Tha’s prawn curry’, in a small notebook. She also jotted down some ‘principles of Asian cooking’ – starting with the sweeping generalization that ‘no one east of Burma likes lamb’ and continuing with the essential components of a curry meal: ‘something hot and something mild; something dry and something wet; something sour and something fried; some sort of bread’. I still have the notebook, stained and blotched from use, as my mother offered a taste of home to foreign students in Oxford, where we lived.
Mary Lean, United Kingdom
You can read more on Daw Nyein Tha here:
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Watch an extract of this film from our archives (1950) showing a Burmese group with Daw Nyein Tha (05'57", first woman on the left, front row)
Watch Daw Nyein Tha speaking to three women in the film Ma Mi from Burma from our archives.
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This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World.
When we launched the 75 Years of Stories series in February 2021 about 75 years of encounters at the Initiatives of Change conference centre in Caux, we had no idea what an adventure we had embarked o...
As our series of 75 stories for 75 years of the Initiatives of Change conference centre in Caux draws to an end, the President of Initiatives of Change Switzerland, Christine Beerli, and its two Co-Di...
In 2020, the Caux Forum went online in response to the pandemic. Its organizers found that this made Caux accessible to people all over the world who could not have taken part in normal circumstances....
During World War II, the Caux Palace (later the Initiatives of Change conference centre in Switerland) provided a refuge for Jews fleeing the Shoah. Over the years, some of them – or their descendants...
When Tunisian economics graduate Wael Boubaker joined the Caux Peace and Leadership Programme (CPLP) in 2018, he expected a conference which would look good on his CV, and some beautiful scenery. Inst...
Tanaka Mhunduru from Zimbabwe is one of the organizers of the Caux Peace and Leadership Programme (CPLP), a one-month programme for young people from around the world. He first took part in 2017....
The Winter Gathering of 2016 was a special experience for Diana Damsa – not just because she experienced Caux in winter, but also because, for the first time in eight years, she had no responsibilitie...
Lisbeth Lasserre came from Winterthur, where her grandparents, Hedy and Arthur Hahnloser, had built up a private collection of art at their home, Villa Flora. Amongst their artist friends were Bonnard...
Catherine Guisan is Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, USA. She has written two books on the ethical foundations of European integration. In 2014 she spoke at Caux’s first se...
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When Merel Rumping from the Netherlands first visited Caux in 2012, she had a goal in mind – ‘to explore how I could contribute to a more just world through my professional activities’....
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Near the coffee bar in the Caux Palace stands a grand piano, the gift of American mezzo-soprano Muriel Smith. She was a familiar face at Caux conferences in the 1960s, filling the meeting hall and theatre with her unforgettable voice.
Muriel grew up in Harlem, New York. She created the role of Carmen Jones on Broadway in the 1940s, a time when few black singers were prominent outside the jazz scene. In the early 1950s she moved from Broadway to the London revue and recital stage and then to Drury Lane, where she starred for five years in South Pacific and The King and I.
In 1957, she was the first black opera singer to take the lead in Carmen at Covent Garden. Her artistry and hard work had brought her to the top of the ladder in the musical world.
That autumn riots broke out in Atlanta, Georgia, and Little Rock, Arkansas, over new integration laws. The news hit Muriel hard. ‘A great sense of helplessness came over me,’ she wrote later. ‘What practical thing could I do? Or where could I put myself in order to be in the path of something that might need to be done?’
What practical thing could I do? Or where could I put myself in order to be in the path of something that might need to be done?
The next year, she turned down Sam Goldwyn’s insistent offer of a role in the film of Porgy and Bess, because she felt it did not enhance the dignity of her people. From then on, she devoted her talents to promoting understanding of the black race and healing racial divisions worldwide.
She found in Moral Re-Armament (now Initiatives of Change) the framework for which she had been looking. For 15 years she travelled widely, using musicals, plays, films, recitals and personal encounters to express her vision of a united humanity.
She and numerous other committed artists created The Crowning Experience, a musical based on the life of pioneering black American educator, Mary McLeod Bethune, and took it to Atlanta. It was the first show in the city where black and white members of the audience were seated equally. Residents maintained that its four-month run contributed to the integration of the city without further violence.
In The New York Times she explained, ‘Born and raised with the race question in America, I have through my life and through my career tried to bring an answer to this problem. I discovered that the answer to that great wound in this nation could begin in my heart and in my life. It meant I had to be honest about my past, clarify motives, and unselfishly to strike out with no thought of personal gain or ambition, with the love for the world that comes when we surrender our wills to be wholly committed to the power of God.’
I discovered that the answer to that great wound in this nation could begin in my heart and in my life.
Both The Crowning Experience and another play written for Muriel, Voice of the Hurricane, were made into feature films and shown all over the world. Muriel often travelled with them, speaking to the audiences after the screenings.
In the early 1970s, Muriel returned to America to care for her aging mother in Richmond, Virginia. After her mother's death she herself contracted cancer, and while under treatment gave recitals and theatre performances. In 1984 she received an award from the National Council of Negro Women for her services to the arts and to the community.
Shortly before her death the next year, she said, ‘I felt that my country needed the healing (and still needs it) that could be found in facing the moral dilemma of judging people of the human family racially rather than on the basis of character. One of the choices I made was to give up my personal career in order to make such a statement.’
On her piano at Caux, there is an invitation: ‘If you play, do so with a full heart and Muriel’s generosity of spirit!’
If you play, do so with a full heart.
Discover a selection of Christmas carols, sung by Muriel Smith
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Watch The Crowning Experience (1960)
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Watch Voice of the Hurricane (1964)
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Discover a film from our archives on the Hollywood premiere of The Crowning Experience
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This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World.
When we launched the 75 Years of Stories series in February 2021 about 75 years of encounters at the Initiatives of Change conference centre in Caux, we had no idea what an adventure we had embarked o...
As our series of 75 stories for 75 years of the Initiatives of Change conference centre in Caux draws to an end, the President of Initiatives of Change Switzerland, Christine Beerli, and its two Co-Di...
In 2020, the Caux Forum went online in response to the pandemic. Its organizers found that this made Caux accessible to people all over the world who could not have taken part in normal circumstances....
During World War II, the Caux Palace (later the Initiatives of Change conference centre in Switerland) provided a refuge for Jews fleeing the Shoah. Over the years, some of them – or their descendants...
When Tunisian economics graduate Wael Boubaker joined the Caux Peace and Leadership Programme (CPLP) in 2018, he expected a conference which would look good on his CV, and some beautiful scenery. Inst...
Tanaka Mhunduru from Zimbabwe is one of the organizers of the Caux Peace and Leadership Programme (CPLP), a one-month programme for young people from around the world. He first took part in 2017....
The Winter Gathering of 2016 was a special experience for Diana Damsa – not just because she experienced Caux in winter, but also because, for the first time in eight years, she had no responsibilitie...
Lisbeth Lasserre came from Winterthur, where her grandparents, Hedy and Arthur Hahnloser, had built up a private collection of art at their home, Villa Flora. Amongst their artist friends were Bonnard...
Catherine Guisan is Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, USA. She has written two books on the ethical foundations of European integration. In 2014 she spoke at Caux’s first se...
2013 saw the first full-length Caux Dialogues on Land and Security (CDLS). These events, which took place at the Caux Conference and Seminar Centre, focus on the links between sustainable land managem...
When Merel Rumping from the Netherlands first visited Caux in 2012, she had a goal in mind – ‘to explore how I could contribute to a more just world through my professional activities’....
For many years, Lucette Schneider from Switzerland organized the team which gathered in the early mornings to wash, peel and chop vegetables for the kitchens of the Caux conference centre. ...
Mohan Bhagwandas is all too aware of his carbon footprint. In the 13 years from 2006 to 2019, he flew 17 times from his home city of Melbourne, Australia, to Switzerland to take part in the Caux confe...
25 distinguished Indians and Pakistanis came to Caux in 2009 with the aim of building bridges between their countries. The man who initiated the gathering was Rajmohan Gandhi, a grandson of Mahatma Ga...
2008 saw the launch of an unusual course on Islam’s approach to peacemaking for young Muslims and non-Muslims, devised by Imam Ajmal Masroor from the UK. The course’s coordinator, Peter Riddell, descr...
Harmen van Dijk worked in The Hague, La Paz (Bolivia) and Berlin before leaving the Dutch diplomatic service to pursue a new dream and become a coach. Passionate about spiritual politics, he wants to contribute to global peace by bringing the personal into the professional.
But why would a diplomat throw in his career and give up a prestigious job to do something completely different?
When Harmen spoke at the online Creative Leadership conference in July 2020, he was amazed at how easily the young participants understood that spirituality and politics go hand in hand. As a diplomat, he used to think that they had nothing to do with each other, but it was clear to the participants in the webinar that to grow as a species, we all need to grow personally. ‘I have felt alone thinking that,’ he says, ‘I was inspired and touched to see that it was so obvious to the group.’
From an early age, Harmen knew that he wanted to work for peace in the world. As a young child, he lived in the Caribbean. When he came back to the Netherlands, aged about 10, he became acutely aware that he was a citizen of the world and that he wanted to bring people together and enhance their understanding of each other. He studied international law and embarked on a career in diplomacy.
I was inspired and touched to see that it was so obvious to the group.
Around the same time, he started a spiritual journey, attending classes on meditation and other spiritual practices with his wife. However, he kept that part of his life completely separate from his job. He was intuitively attracted to spiritual practices, but his rational mind was sceptical on how to integrate mindfulness or deeper spiritual practices into the diplomatic world.
After a mission in Bolivia, he was posted to Germany. His career was right on track, but after 12 years with the Dutch department of foreign affairs, he was longing for something else. Risking his career, he decided to take a sabbatical year, to spend time with his children and get a clearer vision of what he wanted to do next. After taking his daughter to school, he would sit in a café and journal for hours. He slowly started to realize that he did not want to go back to diplomacy. It was a time of deep uncertainty.
Luckily, he had a neighbour who mentored him and taught him the power of saying ‘no’. He had never really gone against people’s expectations and had to learn that it was OK to just say ‘no’, even to what seemed an amazing career opportunity. During the year, he opened the door to creativity, learned to ask for support and slowly forged his new dream. He came to realize that he wanted to train as a coach, with a view to applying these skills in a new job, such as manager.
Just start somewhere!
Much to his own surprise, he loved coaching so much that he started to make a living out of accompanying people. Furthermore, his training had put him in touch with his dream of being close to nature, which was incompatible with an office job. He started to coach people out of doors. As he became more experienced in coaching he started to see that every person is, in essence, a transformational leader.
‘Seeing the eyes of my clients light up when they find their own answer to a pertinent question or longing in their lives, when they experience a breakthrough in deeply engrained patterns, or when they reconnect to their true passion and purpose is a simply amazing experience,’ he says. Witnessing such greatness makes him feel humble and grateful, and determined to continue creating spaces for people to unpack and realize their true potential.
Now, his personal and professional development are aligned. ‘I not only see that they can go hand in hand, but that they have to,’ he says. ‘For humanity to make a quantum leap and to move to the next level, we have no other option than to look within and grow personally.’
Having built up his coaching muscle in the past years, he now feels an urgency to make an impact. He is coming back to his vision of working for world peace, but with a complementary approach. He has already started facilitating conversations on conscious politics, but this is just the beginning, he says.
Don’t forget that even if you lose yourself, there is always a way out. It will emerge. You simply have to trust.
His tip for anyone who wants to bridge the gap between their personal and professional life is ‘just start somewhere’. Your current situation might seem awful to you, but actually it is the perfect place, because it will lead you to the next step, closer to what you want. ‘Don’t forget that even if you lose yourself, there is always a way out,’ he says. ‘It will emerge. You simply have to trust.'
You would like to know more about this year's Creative Leadership conference? The 2021 edition will be a great opportunity to meet young voices from all over the world and to explore how to move from uncertainty to possibility!
Stay tuned for registration from 1 June onwards!
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In 1962, a documentary about a remarkable 62,000-mile journey was premiered in Caux. Two years before, Chief Walking Buffalo of the Nakoda (Stoney) Nation and Chief David Crowchild of the Tsuut’ina (Sarcee) had led a First Nations delegation of eight from Canada on a tour that took them to Europe, Asia, Africa and the Pacific, including Caux. It is estimated that 100 million people saw and heard them through press, radio and television.
Walking Buffalo’s association with Moral Re-Armament (later Initiatives of Change) went back nearly 30 years. In June 1934, in a ceremony in Banff, Canada, he and other leaders of the Nakoda Nation had made Frank Buchman, the founder of MRA, a blood brother, naming him A-Wo-Zan-Zan-Tonga (Great Light out of Darkness). It was the beginning of a lasting friendship which led to the involvement of indigenous people from across the world in Buchman's work and Caux conferences.
Over the years the blood brothers kept in touch and met again in 1958 at an MRA world conference. There Walking Buffalo met people from across the world who had found new purpose in their lives. After three weeks, he decided to renounce bitterness, pride and fear in order to support Buchman in his work. ‘I have had good reasons for hatred but now I know that I can even forgive those who have done me wrong,’ he said. ‘I feel like a new man.’
Now I know that I can even forgive those who have done me wrong. I feel like a new man.
Walking Buffalo saw his role as helping the people and leaders, indigenous and non-indigenous, to respect and protect Mother Earth for the benefit of future generations. With passion, humour, and stories he shared his knowledge and understanding of the traditional values of his people.
The journey, in 1959-60, took the delegation to 18 countries. In Europe Chief Walking Buffalo visited 13 countries in 11 weeks, meeting Chancellor Adenauer in Germany and leaders of the Greek and Turkish communities in Cyprus. In Scandinavia he was welcomed by the Sami people 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
In New Zealand, the Canadian party were honoured guests of the Confederacy of Maori Chiefs. In Australia they were welcomed by the Acting Prime Minister and the Governor of West Australia. Their talks and celebrations with the Aboriginal community lasted three days. ‘They showed us the futility of bitterness and hate, and how to work with white people for a God-led country,’ said one Aboriginal participant. They also visited South Africa, Zimbabwe then known as Southern Rhodesia, the Central African Federation, Uganda, and Kenya.
They showed us the futility of bitterness and hate.
During 1961 – his 90th year – Walking Buffalo also took part in campaigns in Brazil, Japan and the US. Back home in Canada, he shared his thoughts with his grandchildren. ‘Lots of people hardly even feel real soil under their feet, see plants grow except in flower pots, or get far enough beyond the street lights to catch the enchantment of a night sky studded with stars,’ he told them. ‘When people live far from scenes of the Great Spirit’s making, it’s easy for them to forget his laws.’
Walking Buffalo died in 1967. In 1976, his son, Bill McLean, accompanied the cast of the MRA review Song of Asia to several regions of Quebec. He came to Caux in 2001, with three Nakoda chiefs. Walking Buffalo’s great grand-daughter, Alana, was a Caux Intern in 2004 and has since done trustbuilding workshops on the reserve – so the story goes on.
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Watch the colour film, made in 1962, of Chief Walking Buffalo's journey around the world (photographer: Robert Fleming, narrator: Edward Devlin)
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This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World.
When we launched the 75 Years of Stories series in February 2021 about 75 years of encounters at the Initiatives of Change conference centre in Caux, we had no idea what an adventure we had embarked o...
As our series of 75 stories for 75 years of the Initiatives of Change conference centre in Caux draws to an end, the President of Initiatives of Change Switzerland, Christine Beerli, and its two Co-Di...
In 2020, the Caux Forum went online in response to the pandemic. Its organizers found that this made Caux accessible to people all over the world who could not have taken part in normal circumstances....
During World War II, the Caux Palace (later the Initiatives of Change conference centre in Switerland) provided a refuge for Jews fleeing the Shoah. Over the years, some of them – or their descendants...
When Tunisian economics graduate Wael Boubaker joined the Caux Peace and Leadership Programme (CPLP) in 2018, he expected a conference which would look good on his CV, and some beautiful scenery. Inst...
Tanaka Mhunduru from Zimbabwe is one of the organizers of the Caux Peace and Leadership Programme (CPLP), a one-month programme for young people from around the world. He first took part in 2017....
The Winter Gathering of 2016 was a special experience for Diana Damsa – not just because she experienced Caux in winter, but also because, for the first time in eight years, she had no responsibilitie...
Lisbeth Lasserre came from Winterthur, where her grandparents, Hedy and Arthur Hahnloser, had built up a private collection of art at their home, Villa Flora. Amongst their artist friends were Bonnard...
Catherine Guisan is Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, USA. She has written two books on the ethical foundations of European integration. In 2014 she spoke at Caux’s first se...
2013 saw the first full-length Caux Dialogues on Land and Security (CDLS). These events, which took place at the Caux Conference and Seminar Centre, focus on the links between sustainable land managem...
When Merel Rumping from the Netherlands first visited Caux in 2012, she had a goal in mind – ‘to explore how I could contribute to a more just world through my professional activities’....
For many years, Lucette Schneider from Switzerland organized the team which gathered in the early mornings to wash, peel and chop vegetables for the kitchens of the Caux conference centre. ...
Mohan Bhagwandas is all too aware of his carbon footprint. In the 13 years from 2006 to 2019, he flew 17 times from his home city of Melbourne, Australia, to Switzerland to take part in the Caux confe...
25 distinguished Indians and Pakistanis came to Caux in 2009 with the aim of building bridges between their countries. The man who initiated the gathering was Rajmohan Gandhi, a grandson of Mahatma Ga...
2008 saw the launch of an unusual course on Islam’s approach to peacemaking for young Muslims and non-Muslims, devised by Imam Ajmal Masroor from the UK. The course’s coordinator, Peter Riddell, descr...
