Spirit in Action

Tilting the UN Toward Peace & Justice - QUNO

Andrew Tomlinson has been the director of QUNO (Quaker United Nations Office) in New York since 2008. QUNO staff in New York & Geneva advocate for and work behind the scenes on issues like Peacebuilding, the Prevention of Violent Conflict, Climate Change, Food & Sustainability, and Human Rights & Refugees. Raised in the UK but a long-time resident of the USA, Andrew's background anthropology and finance give him the long-range and in-depth perspective needed to nudge the UN toward world-healing and peace.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 15 Feb 2015
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Today for Spirit in Action, we're going to focus on one of the ways in which efforts are made on the international level to make this a better world. In this case, in efforts to leverage possibilities for good through the United Nations. We'll be speaking with Andrew Tomlinson, who is Director of the Quaker United Nations Office, also known as QNO, QUNO, in New York. Although there are thousands of groups trying to influence and guide the UN, QNO is one of the oldest, which means that it both has a broad perspective and a fair amount of accumulated experience and influence. So we'll talk about issues like peace, climate change, and human rights at the level of the UN. I got connected up with Andrew Tomlinson because of an interview with him. I've read in Western Friend, a publication by Quakers on the western side of the United States. That article was entitled "Facing the Limits of Reconciliation" and I want to read to you a couple of passages from that interview, which will be complementary to this interview. To find the interview, either Google Western Friend and Andrew Tomlinson or follow the link from northernspiritradio.org. When Western Friend editor Mary Klein asked Andrew about one of the tools of peace and reconciliation, that is national dialogues, here's what he responded. The first steps of a traditional peace agreement coming out of a conflict are largely about bringing together the main combatants, the guys with the guns, and trying to stop active violence. But these are not the people that you need to be involving in order to build sustainable peace in the country. For that, you need to have a much broader consultation to get some kind of a dispensation for the country that is actually going to have some chance of surviving over time. It's about getting people's buy-in to actually need their input. You need an agreement that reflects the priorities and needs of as broad a range of the population as possible beyond the elites and the capital. Again, that's just a taste of that article. There's a link at northernspiritradio.org so you can read the entire interview with Andrew on Western Friend. But right now, let's get to Andrew Tomlinson, Director of Quaker United Nations Office in New York. Andrew, thank you so much for joining me today for Spirit in Action. Thank you for having me. I'm just very pleased to be able to talk to you for this time. As I just told our listeners, it was your interview in Western Friend that connected me to you. I don't want to revisit the entire content of the article, but I still suppose I need to have you recap, at least in part, the history of CUNO. We have to go back in time a little bit to 1945 when the UN charter was signed in San Francisco and there were Quakers present there. And then in 1947, Quakers in the U.K. and in the U.S. got the Nobel Peace Prize for their work on relief and humanitarian action and two world wars. So at the end of that year, end of 1947, the Quaker UN Office was formed in New York. There had already been a presence in Geneva for a while from League of Nations days. You can imagine at that point in time, this before all the buildings went up that we now know so well, the sort of a big tall one, the Secretary at Building and then the General Assembly Building. And officials from around the world and diplomats were just coming together to try to work out how this extraordinary new multilateral institution was going to work and how really it was going to try and achieve this lofty aspiration of saving, succeeding generations from the scourge of war. So we've been around since that point in time, which actually means we've been at the UN for longer than the majority of the member states of the UN. And over that time, we've worked on a variety of peace and justice issues. And these days we work particularly around peace building and prevention of violent conflict, and that's in New York and Geneva. They were like on a variety of other issues, everything from climate change to human rights to peace and disarmament and food security. And when Cuba first started at the UN, there were very few non-governmental organizations or NGOs as they're called working directly at the UN. We were one of the first wave of them in 1948 to get official accreditation with the UN. But now there are thousands, literally, and one of the keys for us has also always been to try to find ways of making sure that we're still relevant, so we're not just doing what everybody else is doing, and we're trying to find the best way we can with the limited resources we have to be effective and helpful and to move discussions forward. And we spend a lot of time thinking about ways that we can do that. And one of the things is the way in which we work, which is that we have a space almost partly between facilitation on the one hand and advocacy on the other. But we don't do loud advocacy. The UN is a tricky place. We have many governments represented here who, in their own countries, don't really talk to civil society to different sorts of human rights groups or anything else in their own context. So they're not necessarily used to doing that in a context in New York either. So what we do is we build relationships first, and then we start to find ways of trying to have meaningful conversations on topic of interest. It's a long-term strategy. We've been here for a while. We plan to be here for a while, building our contacts with people. And once you've been here for a little while, then the ambassador of CountryX then introduces you to his successor and so on. And you start to have a certain place within this sorry complex community. Give me a little picture of what it's like. You said there's thousands now of organizations that are present trying to give their point of view, advocating for their point of view at the United Nations, either in New York or in Geneva. Could you characterize this span of who's there trying to get the ear of these governmental officials? It's almost everybody that you can think of, but it's a smaller group of the people who have sort of real access and who get listened to. So among the folks that we work with quite a lot here are all the multi-mandate agencies from the Oxfam's and the World Vision's Human Rights Organization. So I am the human rights watch. You have refugee organizations. You have people like Save the Children. And then also faith-based organizations are here so that the World Council of Churches and some of the Catholic relief organizations and a number of the Christian denominations are all here. In fact, our office is in something called the Church Center, which is on 44th and 1st right across from the UN itself. And that's about half the organizations in there are actually faith-based organizations. Are there also organizations there? I mean, do Pepsi and Coke have offices there? And I'm just wondering if it's every corporation as well as every government that is trying to tug on the ears of the people in the UN? It's interesting. The private sector side, they may get involved in and around particular UN processes or even sometimes on a country-by-country sort of a basis. So it depends when there is a topic which they are particularly interested in. We do see it right now, obviously, there are a set of different negotiations going on on issues like climate change or the new gender and development and sustainability. And we'll see the private sector engaging with those areas. Just yesterday, we were having a session with a number of member states on the peace issues within the agenda of what will be replacing the Millennium Development Goals. And there was somebody there from what is called the UN Global Compact, which is one of the mechanisms by which the UN works in partnership with private corporations. And they were actually saying that they were happy to be back in Quaker House because 16 years ago, some of the meetings which went towards the founding of that group in the first place had actually happened in Quaker House at that point in time. So they are there, but many of them anyway will have the logical operations, at least will have their own offices in New York. They tend a lot to have a separate sort of presence at the UN in the way that the NGOs do. I mean, the NGOs also have almost like a semi-formal kind of process by which you have one or more sort of representatives to the UN as it were from that particular NGO. And can you rate the relative influence that organizations can have? I mean, when you're one among thousands, it's hard to tell how much of a snowflakes weight you have. Do the NGOs or particular NGO or coalition of NGOs have equal weight to perhaps other organizations and outside who are coming in trying to influence sustainability efforts, et cetera? They can do, yes, because so much of this is about personal relationships. And remember, in many ways, there's also no real right of access. If you're doing advocacy in Washington or even in Brussels and you're from one of the sort of constituencies, then to some degree, at least some of the folks in Congress or otherwise will feel that they kind of have to listen to you. There is no such right of access to the UN. Your credibility is as good as your last phone call or your last meeting. There's absolutely no reason why anyone has to take that phone call or to meet with you unless they see that it is actually something that is helpful for them. Now, some NGOs, of course, are significant partners on the ground for the UN and things like food distribution or different types of humanitarian relief. So they have an operating relationship, which is a little bit different. But on the policy side, a lot of it has to do with just being able to interact in a variety of different ways and to have credibility as you're doing it. Certainly for us, as partly we've been here for a while, we have a reasonably significant presence as to the office here of six or seven people. It sounds small, but for a number of NGOs, it's actually larger than they may have. And we have evaluations done on a regular basis, and that's certainly our last evaluation, which was pretty extensive at the end of 2013. Certainly put forward that we have very significant access and significant influence on those issues where we care to engage. And a lot of this is sort of a little bit, it's hard to quantify, but also very recently the quicker UN officers were named as being among the top organizations globally in armed violence prevention. And that's not from doing it on the ground, it's from trying to make sure that we're raising issues and pushing them forward and getting changes in broad-scale policies and procedures and so on that make a difference on the ground. I saw that article on the CUNO website mentioning this rating of CUNO as one of the top most influential actors in armed violence reduction. Who was it that made that kind of determination or rating? Well, this actually came out of a particular organization from the UK who work extensively on armed violence reduction, it's called Action on Armed Violence. And they felt it was important to under various categories to identify everyone from, of course, the celebrities, Angelida Jolaine, George Clooney, to some of the officials and others, to some of the people's even from victims groups, but included those working on policy work. And I think because what has happened both in New York, and I should mention very much Geneva here, where a lot of the very specific work on disarmament has taken place over recent decades, it's been a consistent presence. And that's something that I know in terms of different ways we do things. One of the things is trying to make sure that we can track and accompany certain issues over long periods of time, because these are topics which will be with us for many, many years. In many cases, the world has not found wonderful solutions to issues like arms proliferation or even poverty or how to prevent war. So these are going to be very long-term conversations and we're accompanying them over that time and trying to facilitate and act even as a catalyst, which is also something we very much try to do. We'll have a kind of a cumulative impact, which enables us in many ways to sometimes seem like a larger or better funded organization than they actually are. Well, let's talk about the organization. I was looking through your staff on your website, and I noticed you have people designated to categories like peace and disarmament or climate change or food and sustainability, human rights and refugees. So do people actually have those individual areas that they work on or are they working collaboratively with others? I assume part of what you want to do is this person has access to this country, these representatives from this country, you want to access that. So who builds the personal connections and who works on the issues and how do those two interleave or interface with each other? So we have in those New York and Geneva, there are a number of, if you like, the senior staff representatives, quicker UN representatives. And each of them has a fairly clearly defined area that is the core of their activities. But within that then, and between those things, we also try to make sure that there is collaborative work and that indeed that the sum is greater than the parts. You know, that is something that ebbs and flows a little bit over time as do the topics. The topics themselves come out from a number of different places. Firstly, of course, are all the things that the Quakers around the world are interested in. And we are, as it were, a quicker presence after UN, and we are a representative office in that kind of a way. So we have some formal mechanisms in the background by which the insights and concerns and interests of friends around the world are then reflected in what we do. Not to the extent that we chop and change what we do every year, because that would be somewhat self-defeating, but over time. So that, for example, the work on climate change, which our colleagues in Geneva have picked up relatively recently, has come out of that kind of discernment process out of the global community of friends. So we have these now, what's three in New York and four in Geneva are of these representative positions. And also, we're doing them partly where the UN is focusing on this issue. So the human rights work is done out of Geneva, where the Human Rights Council is. And so that they have a position where they can be formally making submissions to the Council and then interacting informally with delegates in New York with our work on peace building, the prevention of violent conflict. Then we have someone working a great deal on peace building, and so they're interacting with the Peace Building Commission and the relevant parts of the UN, bureaucracy, UN officials working on these things, as well as those connected to what's going on on the ground. In some ways, some of those definitions and some of those areas are defined a little bit in terms of how the UN itself organizes itself, so that we're interacting with those bits of the machinery directly. And sometimes that gets a little artificial. So when we talk about the prevention of violent conflict and peace building, in our minds, that's all the same thing. Really, it's all about finding ways of accompanying societies as they become more sustainable, more resilient to be able to be more inclusive in the way they make decisions both politically at a national and regional community level and so on. And yet the discussion on peace building in the UN basis is quite different from those mostly who talk about things like prevention or even on response to conflict. So we try to organize ourselves in such a way that we can most efficiently be interacting with the appropriate bits of this very complicated UN system within which we work. I want to remind our listeners that I'm speaking with Andrew Tomlinson. He's the director of the Quaker United Nations office in New York. There's a separate organization or maybe a parallel organization at the UN offices in Geneva, Switzerland as well. I first encountered Andrew through an interview with him in the January, February 2015 issue of Western friend on facing the limits of reconciliation. Go to westernfriend.org to find that article or simply follow the link from nordenspiritradio.org. Again, again, that interview nicely supplements the talk that Andrew and I are having today, so it's well worth checking out. One of the things I need to understand in order to better appreciate the effort you're putting in Andrew, we talked about the positions on your staff, things like peace and disarmament, climate change, food and sustainability. And as you said, there are many, many, many more faith-based organizations working with the UN. Would their staffs be working on the same or similar or overlapping, maybe even opposing issues? I mean, the Catholics, the Methodists, the Mormons, whoever has staff there, how does your work compare to or relate to the work being accomplished by these other faith-based organizations? I think what you'll tend to find is that the most successful of the faith-based organizations, as indeed perhaps for any of the organizations here, are one who have been able to select a small number of issues where they can then develop expertise and develop relationships. Because that's the way you can start to have impact over time. It gets very difficult, particularly in a smaller office, if you only have one or two people and that's very often the case, then to be able to cover everything from peace and security to development to humanitarian action to women's issues to climate change. Those who do sort of have to do that as part of their mandate end up just going to meetings, taking notes and sort of reporting back to whoever they're reporting to. They're not actually necessarily doing things and trying to actually create change. To do that requires a different level of resourcing and commitment and focus. But we do see that and I think what people also try to do, and we certainly spend a lot of time thinking about this, is working out where the skills, the knowledge, the networks, the constituencies that they have can enable them to make something of a unique contribution. So we've spent quite a lot of time thinking about almost where are the less well-accompanied spaces where we can make a difference. Because if we're simply the sort of the 200th organization working on a particular issue, then it's going to be hard for anyone to make much of a difference there. But if we find that there aren't that many people in the room and yet it's a really important issue, then that starts to feel like we're probably in a place where we can have a meaningful impact. Well, let's talk about the impacts that Kunal has had on the UN, on decisions of the UN. I've been very interested over the years as I've watched the decade of women declared by UN or for children or nonviolence. Could you talk about what effect you think that you've been able to leverage? Again, we're one of the probably the smallest religious groups in the world. I think if we estimate 300,000 Quakers in the world, I think we may even be generous at that. So compare that with a billion Catholics in the world. Have we had our effect through the Quaker United Nations office? We have. And in some ways for a, as you say, a very small religious group compared to many others, somewhere like the UN is actually ideal for a small group that is interested in having an impact on sort of international affairs because of the leverage factor. At the UN, we're at a place where standards are set, where policies are made, but also some of this is pretty normative in such a way that then has a ripple effect around the world. On peace building, we're at a stage still in the development of it, if you like, as a discipline or as an art, where people still are in the process of debating what are the core issues. What is the central can not of something like peace building? We happen to think it's in the area of things like reconciliation and restoring the social fabric. So as those ideas get set and then established in different sorts of documents, and that can be both normative law and sexual general's reports, they can be particular mandates, they can be treaties, they can be standards. But these are things where ideas are set in place, which are then picked up by someone writing a constitution on the other side of the world, or somewhere else setting some kind of a national development policy or whatever it is, or trying to find ways to organize their domestic institutions to address ethnic divisions or religious divisions in their country. They're going to look to what's been established at the UN as a source for these sorts of ideas. So the leverage potential is extraordinary. And so the way that we've had, and see that we've had impact, now some of the things we do or have done over the years are unfortunately, as it were, off the record and always will be. But some of it, if we look back a few years, both of the offices together from New York and Geneva were a very large part of putting the issue of child soldiers on the map. That was something that no one had really focused on, and there was some significant pieces of research done by friends and their partners. And now it's very much an ongoing concern, and it's part of the UN's interaction and set of concerns from many humanitarians in conflict zones. And on other things, I mentioned a little earlier on this notion of pursuing issues over very long periods of time. So Cuba, Geneva has had a very long-term piece of work around conscientious objection. Now this is something that in many countries of Western Europe, but not all set of procedures that were gradually established over time through the 1900s. But in many countries of the world, we're talking about a set of rights which are simply still not well enshrined in law. So they have been working consistently within the multilateral system of trying gradually to expand the context and the types of places where these sorts of ideas, the right to conscientious objection to military service, are recognized and supported. And that's really its long-term work. It's not work. This is necessarily supported by every member state in the world, as you might imagine, and so takes time of building partnerships and coefficients and step-by-step moving it forward. But with some quite considerable successes in terms of different regional organizations, and there's been a lot of progress within the EU around this issue, for example. And you can really point to a whole set of step-wise but important still with a momentum in the right direction on issues like that over time. And those are just a couple of the things that you've been involved in. I'm sure there's many more. You've only been there since 2008, so you haven't had your finger in every pie. Did the Quaker United Nations Office have any connection with law of the sea work that was done? I know that there were some Quakers that they had of trying to bring international consensus together on that. Was that connected with the United Nations? It was indeed. That was the place where the issues first came up. In fact, as I understand it, and this is a while ago now, the very idea that there should be such a thing as a body of law which applied to the world's oceans came up in a discussion with diplomats at Quaker House. The topic itself was then taken up, again, as I understand it, by Quaker couple who were not working directly for the Quaker United officers but worked very much with them and supported by them in their efforts. And, you know, became a rather extraordinary example of cooperation between member states. That's your topic that's being sort of rapidly revisited as climate changes, the face of what the oceans actually are and what they look like. And it opens up so many waters that used to be just ice. So it's suddenly become a very hot topic again. And I think it's one of the things, I think, that the Quakers and many fears, not just that the UN have, for one reason or another, been good at, is sort of being early to the table on particular issues. And I think this was certainly one of them. It was something that was very far cited at the time. And so we see ourselves now a couple of decades later finding ourselves very much in need of having that framework. And it's really important that that was put in place when it was, because it's given us something then to start the build on. If we were trying to build it afresh at this point in time, I think it could be really quite tricky. For Spirit in Action today, we're speaking with Andrew Tomlinson. He is Director of the Quaker United Nations Office in New York. And he's joining us today for Spirit in Action, which is a Northern Spirit radio production. We're on the web at NorthernSpiritRadio.org. On that site, you'll find almost 10 years of our program. You'll find information and links to our guests. You'll find a place where you can see other people's comments, and please add your own when you visit. We love two-way communication. There's a place where you can support with donations, the work of Northern Spirit Radio. It is how we fund this good work, and so please help us help other people by supporting this media effort. Even more than supporting Northern Spirit Radio, remember to support your local community radio stations, kind of stations that carry this program nationwide, about 20 stations so far. So please start out with your hands, with your wallet, support their work. Again, we're with Andrew Tomlinson of the Quaker United Nations Office. Speaking with us today, he had an article in Western Friends. You can find it on the web at WesternFriend.org. His article was facing the limits of reconciliation, and this was an interview with Mary Klein, the editor of Western Friend. There's quite a few more things I want to talk to you about, Andrew. One of them is, you work in New York. I understand Pennsylvania is where you hung out for a number of years, Philadelphia and so on. And yet, your accent does not seem to be typical of a Philadelphia. Does having your English accent help you at the UN? Oh, what an interesting question. I don't know. I'm not sure that it necessarily does. Of course, at the UN, it is actually a very richly accented working environment, if you like. So the English accent, I'm not sure, is necessarily a particular benefit. The association, as it were, with one particular country that the accent sort of suggests is not always necessarily a good one. Not that there's anything particularly wrong that the Brits do at the UN, broadly painted, but I think the identification with any one country is not necessarily a good or a bad thing. And I think that in the end, I don't think particularly people here would see me as being necessary. I identified nationally in that kind of a way. And some of the others I did grow up in the U.K. and I was there through college. And then I actually came to the United States on a graduate exchange scholarship. And I ended up at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia doing my master's degree there. And that's where I became a Quaker. And shortly thereafter, became married just over 30 years ago. I've never really been in the United States ever since. So I'm also even at this point, kind of halfway between two countries rather than necessarily coming from one or the other. The reason I was asking about your accent, I don't know if it's true, but I have this supposition, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that maybe the United States pushes its weight around a lot. And so that having someone who's accent isn't from the U.S. might ease some of the reactivity that one would get from the big one on the block, or maybe it would take away from the strength of that your opinion might carry because you don't have a U.S. accent. I don't know that either of those is true, but I'm just wondering if you actually run into that kind of attitude. Yes, I think all of these things, to some degree, they're a perception. So I would say, you know, our office, I'm trying to think now, let's see, I'll go through. We have somebody born in Sweden, somebody born in Zimbabwe, someone born in the U.K., one American, another from the U.K., another from China, and another from Canada. So we're actually already a very sort of multinational group, even in the office itself, then we sort of carry that outside. So I think that there are certainly broader issues about the way in which the U.S. is perceived at the U.N., and thinking about that a little bit. I mean, that relationship, the United Nations would never have been formed without the enthusiastic support and engagement of the United States. When you think of the early years, when you think of some of the sort of the great and much loved figures in U.S. history who were involved like Eleanor Roosevelt. I mean, her achievement in many ways of what we have now in terms of a universal charter of human rights was actually extraordinary, and there were many folks working on it. But she, I think, was probably very key, not only to making it happen at all, but then also getting U.S. ratification on it. The U.N. works best and our adventure to say that perhaps the U.S. works best when the relationship between the two is good. Because if what is still in many ways and many spheres, the most powerful country in the world, certainly in terms of dollars and of military strength, is connected in some ways with the needs and hopes and aspirations of the rest of the planet. Then we have the ability for there to be partnership on a global scale among between the peoples of the world. When the U.S. goes through one of its phases of deciding that it's really most important that all its efforts are focused simply on furthering the needs and aspirations of its own government or some portion of the people there are or whatever it is, then the world doesn't work as well. And I think it's certainly been a great sadness to me and I think to many how to see in particularly recent decades there has been almost a field sometimes like a deliberate focus in the U.S. on denigrating the United Nations, which after all is simply a place where countries come together to try to make decisions together for the common good of the planet. The amazing thing is that the United Nations ever gets anything done at all given that it has no enforcement powers. Actually, there are many ways in which being a Quaker and having a long experience of things like Quaker business meetings is actually very useful and relevant experience for how the UN makes decisions. Nobody really has any power, but budgets that the UN works with are absolutely tiny compared to the budget for the U.S. military for example. So the amount of money that is spent in the world on peace is a tiny, tiny fraction of the amount that is spent on war. And the UN is one of those places where those try to work for peace to find themselves trying to spend some time but are just hugely outmatched by the energy and the dollars that are pushing war. You've got this wonderful assortment of your kind of program directors, people, the senior staff there. Is there a place for someone who isn't a full-time, a lifetime dedicated worker for the United Nations or in this area? Yes, we have these two positions in New York and a dozen, two or three in Geneva of program assistance. And these are young people who come to us some cases a year or two after college and some cases with graduate degrees, who come and work with us for a year and sometimes they're Quakers, sometimes they're not. And in a way get this, what's really a rather sort of extraordinary introduction to the, as it were, the real practice of international relations and building peace around the world. They come to us and it's a steep learning curve. So they'll be coming with us and our meetings with diplomats. They'll see how this stuff actually gets done. They see how negotiations take place and they see how civil society can influence those. And very often then they'll go on to careers in related industries and related areas, everything from being academics to working for NGOs around the world. And sometimes indeed they find their way back again to CUNO as representatives and senior officers. And we welcome applications for those positions. Normally it's early February when the applications are due. It's pretty competitive, I will say. But it's extraordinary, both I think, what the opportunity is for them but also what they bring to us. That enthusiasm, the curiosity keeps us fresh and keeps us energized. And again I assume if people want to check that out they just go via your website quno.org. Indeed. I'd like you to describe a little bit more of what the actual physical being of the Quaker United Nations office in New York. And again, there's also one over in Geneva in their autonomous organizations and maybe you can explain a little bit of what that's about. But I'm talking to you right now, you're at what's called Quaker House there. What is Quaker House like? Where's all the staff hanging out at this kind of rainbow coalition that is the staff of CUNO? Where do they all hang out and do you have a really nice parlour to have someone from the UN come and visit a Quaker House? Do you have to have proper China or how does this work? Well, so Quaker House is a brownstone on 48th Street to start of 2nd Avenue and is actually very much almost in the heart of sort of diplomatic land in the east side of New York. So I look literally out of my window right now across the street, across 48th Street. I'm seeing a building in which are many of the member state missions and the mission is what would be called an embassy anywhere else in Washington for example. So you have the US mission to the UN or the UK mission. So in the building I'm looking at it. The UK mission is there, the French are there. There's a whole number of people, both the missions or other related organizations in that building. So as they step out on the street, I can see them at different times. There have been stories of sort of what I'm best, sort of dropping by sort of a quick cup of coffee in the morning. So we've been here. This House has been sort of the heart of the operation of the Quaker UN office since the early 1950s. And sort of a far-sighted set of donors who gave money for the purchase of the building at that time. And we gave the money to AFSC so the building is owned by the American Friends Service Committee for Quaker work at the UN. And we have the main space, it's like a floor through parlour floor with like a living room and sofas of one end of it and a dining room at the other. But you can see from one end to the other. And outside in the back it looks onto the Turtle Bay Gardens, which is a rather extraordinary sort of set of, you know, right time of year, lovely green gardens where there's sort of a common walkway down the middle with fountains. And the whole thing is set up to be a completely different space than where most diplomats and UN officials actually spend their days. So you can have people coming in here who may be coming from the media stakeout outside the UN Security Council, very formal TV cameras and microphones. And from the formal debating chambers in the UN and then it'll come here and it'll sit down on the sofa and it'll have a cup of tea or coffee and it'll relax. And part of the whole idea and the core of what we do is trying to create a different space. A space that is best is a transformative one where you can bring small groups together to interact in kind of a different way. We try very hard to reach out and work with people as individual human beings than to reach out people on all kinds of political spectrums and whatever it is. We will and we try to make sure that we do talk to anybody. And so a lot of it is bringing people together in these groups in these different sort of environments where they can interact in different ways than the way they normally do. And very often actually we have to make sure we are relatively careful about the meetings we do here, that there are meetings. It's not a space that we rent out or have other people use in that kind of a way because we want to keep it in this characteristic way. Most of the meetings, probably all the meetings we have in Greg House, for example, are off the record. Which in the UN context mostly means non-attribution which is to say you may be able to report some of what was said but you can't say who said it. Which is the most important thing usually. And the groups we are talking about can be anything from even three or four people to a dozen people. We've had some meetings there, we can probably go up and people sitting down about sort of 30 or so but that's about it. So it always has a certain intimate sense of a space where there is some potential for something different to happen. It sounds charming, I'll have to drop by and visit sometime. I do have a son who lives in Brooklyn so I could swing by. That far off my track. I'd like to ask a little bit more about you. Again, Andrew Tomlinson, you grew up in the UK, came to Philadelphia, somehow got sucked in with the Quakers. How did you grow up religiously and why are you working in the religious spiritual domain? I noticed your background, I mean you had your BA in archeology and anthropology from Cambridge, your masters in oriental studies. How did you end up in this work and I'm particularly interested in the spiritual religious core of your motivation? Well, it was typical looking back on the sort of life and it's very easy to sort of try to explain it as a wonderful linear direction, a fulfilled purpose. I really can't look back on my life like that. I think there are a lot of twists and turns in some ways. I mean when I had finished my graduate work, which also was still on sort of archeology and anthropology at the Middle East and India, what that did give me that I can look back and see it contributed towards even the work I do now. That was the first time I'd spent any extensive periods in parts of the world where people were living in abject poverty. But as you've seen that and seen what that meant in terms of a real sort of lived reality, not of just some picture or statistic. But it also gave me ways of thinking about the ways in which societies organized themselves about cultural and ethnic and religious identity, which is actually all obviously very important things when you think about violent conflict. I then went into the world of finance for a while, for a while, 25 years. There were many parts of that that I enjoyed. It was an intellectual challenge. I enjoyed meeting people and working with people, but it was never a real fit for my personality. And so I ended up doing some social responsible investing and then this position came along again very much serendipitously. I saw the advertisement for this position the day before resumes were due to be sent in. And I hadn't really been looking for anything quite like this, but I sort of looked at the description of what the job was about. And I thought, you know, in a very strange way, this looks right, it feels right. Let's give it a go. And in the end, it all happened. But part of that was a continuing search, if you like, from a sort of a personal, spiritual perspective. I grew up in the Church of England, in the UK, from Anglican. I sang in choirs through most of my growing up years, including in college. I mean, the religion was around. I had one uncle who was a Church of England vicar and another who was too an evangelical missionary. My own immediate family was religious, but not how to say it. I think was in a spiritual and the social way, perhaps. And I know that that was the other, both my parents, been something that has always been very important in their lives, but also not prescriptive. So, when I came to Philadelphia and graduate school, I was, I think, very much looking for something new that, in my own personal experience, for example, prayer was something that was meaningful. I couldn't have told you necessarily what I was praying to or with or what that meant. But what I found from friends was the ability to be able to, as it were, explore that spiritual relationship with something, with a divine, if you like, without having to define it too much. Because for me, then, remember, as I had a training as an archaeologist, I excavated the graves of folks who died many years before the time of Christ. And those people, their societies, did not seem so much to me to be different from our own in many ways. So, to have the flexibility to be able to explore things, spiritual and what that meant for me and the people around me in a context where I was not immediately forced to take a whole set of boxes about what I did or didn't believe was hugely important for me. And I think that enabled me to then be able to focus on a real core set, not so much of belief as experiences. And I think the whole George Fox approach of knowing things experientially is hugely important. And I know from my experience with friends, I was cluck in my meeting in New Jersey for a while, that the idea, that the truths we know, we know because we experienced them, that the notion of not what are in the scriptures, what is everything else, but what can't thou say, has always been crucially important to me. And I think even then in doing this sort of work, and I think doing work around sort of social action or humanitarian work, development work, you see many people who burn out. I think for friends and for some of the people I see, and it may not be for friends as many, many others who at least are able to find ways to periodically refresh for themselves why they are doing what they're doing. What are the roots, what are the impulses, what are the connections that brought them to be doing this kind of work. And I think if you can find ways of linking to that, to those impulses, to those convictions on a regular basis, then that is something that is refreshing. That you can really find a way then of taking the burden off of renewing your enthusiasm, your hope, and continue to move on forward. And so I think for me, and for not everybody in our office is a Quaker, we certainly make no stipulation that has to be the case. My job as sort of the director of the Quaker representative office, I have to be a Quaker, but no one else in the office necessarily does. The majority of us are, it so happens, but it's not a requirement. But I think everybody there has a deep sense. Even if they don't necessarily describe it as spiritual themselves, or link to something else and a need to be trying to work in that kind of a way. That's so well said, Andrew. I so appreciate you going into the depths that you did, both personally and in terms of the work done by CUNO. And really, I know that this is absolutely crucial work for the world, and I'm so happy that you found your pathway to it. I think I really have some inkling of the twists and turns getting there because I worked in computer programming consulting for some 25 years. Before I found this work as Norton Spirit Radio, which I consider to be my true vocation, I hear in your experience a similar questioning about living your work from the core of what you're called to do. So I'm thankful that you went through that search and self-examination to get to this world-changing, world-healing work with CUNO. Again, thanks for that work, and thanks so much for joining me today for Spirit in Action. Thank you so much. I'm going to encourage you listeners also to come and see us at our website, which is www.cuno.org, Q-U-N-O. And we look forward to hearing from people by email or whatever way they'd like to communicate with us. So thank you very much for your time. One last reminder, go to westernfriend.org to read the interview that Mary Klein did with Andrew Tomlinson, entitled "Facing the Limits of Reconciliation." Almost all of what you'll read there is supplementary to what we've talked about here today. Thank you so much, Andrew, and we're going to finish off today's Spirit in Action with a World Uniting Song. It's by a tremendous singer/songwriter that lives only 90 minutes from my home here in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. His name is Peter Mayer, and you can find a couple interviews I've done with Peter via the NortonSpiritRadio.org website. In the meantime, glue your ears to the radio as Peter Mayer shares his song "All the World Is One." And we'll see you next week for Spirit in Action. You can say that you stand apart, put a fence around your yard. You can build a tall, round part, guard it with a gun. You can dig yourself a moat, burn the bridge and burn the boat. It won't matter that much, you know, 'cause all the world is one, all the world is one. ♪ You can march in a big parade, every independence day. You can raise up your own flag, sing your own anthem. It'll ring out in the air, with the other anthem's there. To the winds of the earth declare, "All the world is one, all the world is one." Go and ask the Buddha when he's sitting under the tree. Go ask Walt Whitman when he's looking out at the sea. Ask Alan Shepard when he's standing up on the road, staring at that pearl of blue. Askin' that I'm in the breath you take. Ask the Wanna Mother River by hand. Ask a strand of DNA, it's written in your blood. One life running in your veins, one life from one big bang. You can try and separate it. All the world is one, all the world is one. ♪ Go and ask the Buddha when he's sitting under the tree. Askin' he delivered when she's up on take good grief. Ask Alan Shepard when he's standing up on the road, staring at that pearl of blue. ♪ You can take an outbound train, try to make it get away. You can ride off like John Wade to the setting sun. The earthlings don't leave town, they just go around and around. Until they figure out all the world is one, all the world is one, all the world is one. ♪ ♪ The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)