In a splendid ceremony in Newcastle upon Tyne’s Civic Centre on 23 May, Cllr David Down, a former full-time volunteer with Initiatives of Change, was elected as the Lord Mayor of the city for 2018-19. His fellow councillors added good-humoured banter during formal speeches in support of him. His wife, Barbara, who is IofC UK's head of personnel and IofC's webmaster, becomes the Lady Mayoress.

Join us for our tastiest fundraising challenge yet! During June, we are asking you to join us in our bake-athon, to raise money, meet people, and make connections.

We are looking for friendly volunteers to help us create an unforgettable day for people who will come to celebrate Frank Buchman’s life at the London Premiere of 'The Man Who Built Peace' documentary film on 7 June. Your role will be varied, you may find yourself welcoming VIPs and showing them to their seats, perhaps helping our musicians to settle, or registering people at the front desk.

The Third Transnational Meeting and Multiplier Event of the Project took place in Stockholm, Sweden 19-23 March 2018, hosted by the Swedish partner, Kista Folkhögskola, represented by Åke Larsson (Assistant Director), Rishab Khanna, Per Hörberg and Tatiana Sokolova (Researchers). The meeting was attended by Catalina Quiroz Nino (Project Manager & Partnership Coordinator), representing the United Kingdom, and Dr Emel Topcu (Hasan Kalyoncu Üniversitesi), representing Turkey.

A new competence self-assessment framework with various tools has been launched for adult educators to assess their effectiveness in enhancing the inclusion of migrants and refugees in communities across Europe.

Genevieve Boast, founder of Beyond Human Stories, launched her new book 'Tough Bliss: restorying life' in the London centre of Initiatives of Change on 7 March. Boast and Euan Smith, husband and wife team, delivered a thought provoking, interactive and entertaining presentation on some of the book’s nuggets of wisdom. The evening offered an enlightening snapshot of the book's core conundrum of learning from life’s tough tests.

‘We want to help 25,000 people with disabilities by 2021’, said Merel Rumping, who spoke to a captivated audience on Tuesday 20 February, at the London centre of Initiatives of Change. The focus of her talk was about founding LegBank, a social enterprise providing life-saving prosthetics to land mine victims in Colombia.

A biography was launched at London’s Initiatives of Change centre last month. When the event concluded, an Eritrean got up from the audience and pulled himself onto the speaking platform, hindered by his artificial leg. A casualty of Eritrea’s fierce war of independence from Ethiopia, he was determined to pay tribute to the subject of the biography. ‘Dr Teame came to us in the war zone,’ he said. ‘He inspired me to train in education, and it is thanks to him that I persisted until I succeeded.’ His sentiment was echoed by many participants.

Michael Smith, business author from the UK, addressed 70 MBA students and 70 computer engineering students, at the Chandigarh Group of Colleges (CGC), India, on 10 February. He was the guest in Chandigarh of Dr Ramandeep Saini, Head of International Relations and Associated Professor at the CGC Landran campus of 13,000 students, which was founded in 2001.

A ‘Pioneers of Change’ workshop for refugees took place in Derby on 9th December 2017. It was one of a series of workshops on the themes of ‘Dialogue Facilitation, Trust-Building and Reconciliation.'