Tony Blair

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The Tony Blair Faith Foundation aims to promote respect and understanding about the world's major religions and show how faith is a powerful force for good in the modern world.

Faith is vitally important to hundreds of millions of people. It underpins systems of thought and of behaviour. It underpins many of the world's great movements for change or reform, including many charities. And the values of respect, justice and compassion that our great religions share have never been more relevant or important to bring people together to build a better world. But religious faith can also be used to divide. We have seen throughout history and today we still see how it can be distorted to fan the flames of hatred and extremism. The Tony Blair Faith Foundation is a response to these opportunities and challenges. We will use the full power of modern communications to support and step up efforts at every level to educate, inform and develop understanding about the different faiths and between them. .

There are 4 billion people of faith in the world.
Nearly 1 million people die from malaria each year.
Let Faiths Act together.

Faiths Act is a global movement of grassroots action: mobilising ordinary people of faith across the globe to raise awareness and funds to help eliminate deaths from malaria. The movement is spearheaded by our Faiths Act Fellows: thirty young leaders of faith from the UK, USA and Canada who are spending 10 months as ambassadors for the Millennium Development Goals. The movement is being spread even further by our global network of Faiths Act Volunteers. www.faithsact.org

Faith communities in Africa are already playing a significant role in health care and malaria prevention, reaching parts of society currently inaccessible to governments. The Tony Blair Faith Foundation is working to facilitate this in a number of ways which include the dissemination and scaling up of best practice in primary health care training and bed-net distribution, communications and health education, encouaging North-South transfers of resources and learning between and within faith communities, the creation of networks of religious leaders committed to eradication of malaria deaths and, with partner organisations, brokering greater integration into national anti-malaria plans and participation in planning at an early stage. The Foundation is partnering with the Centre for Interfaith Action on Global Poverty (CIFA) in Washington to support the creation of an Inter-Religious Coordinating Mechanism against Malaria in Nigeria. The Foundation is also supporting Project Muso in Bamako, a multi-faith primary health care project in Mali with a focus on malaria prevention, a pioneering exemplar of the methodology and vision that TBFF is trying to promote.

The Tony Blair Faith Foundation, working in partnership with the Interfaith Youth Core and the Belinda Stronach Foundation, have announced their choice of 30 exceptional young people selected out of 100s of applications from around the world to become Faiths Act Fellows. These young leaders will be ambassadors of the Faiths Act campaign to bring people of different faiths together to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, and in particular to eliminate the scourge of malaria. The newly selected Faiths Act Fellows are representative of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu faiths and hail from across the US, Canada and UK. From Saskatoon to Michigan to Belfast they will work in interfaith pairs, reaching up to tens of thousands of people of faith, informing them about the devastating impact of malaria and the opportunities open to faith communities to work together to save millions of lives.

• tonyblairfaithfoundation.org
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What role will faith play in a globalised world? How can faith help to shape our solutions to the global financial crisis? When many predicted faith would decline in the era of modernity why is the current debate about a ‘religious resurgence’? How do faiths contribute to conflict and what are the possibilities for preventing this?

National University of Singapore

These are some of the big questions facing world leaders and faith leaders alike as they grapple with an increasingly globalised and interconnected world where different ideas, values and world views are more and more forced to confront each other. Faith motivates billions of believers around the world in their thoughts, words and actions and is a core component of this process. We at the Tony Blair Faith Foundation are trying to build up a global conversation between some of the world’s top universities to generate new thinking, new solutions and a new purpose for all of us trying to make sense of this fast changing world. Tony Blair speaking on faith and globalisation in March stressed the values which underpin religion can help to transform and humanise the impersonal forces of globalisation. The initiative was launched at Yale University in September 2008 with a thirteen week course on faith and globalisation, which Yale will adapt and repeat this year and next. We are now developing the initiative more widely. The National University of Singapore and Durham University in the UK are now each developing their own versions of the course. We are in conversations with a number of other universities, with more to follow. You can join the debate by checking out some of the Yale course materials here.

The Tony Blair Faith Foundation has just launched Face to Faith, a new global education programme

A new global education programme from the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, Face to Faith, is designed to increase knowledge about the different faiths and breakdown prejudice and tension. Developed by an international group of educational experts and piloted in more than 10 countries on three continents, Face to Faith uses video conferencing, an online community and a course syllabus to support exchange between young people of different faiths. Face to Faith also contributes to the project component of the 'Global Perspectives' IGSCE from Cambridge Assessment as well as to a range of national RE, Humanities, Social Sciences and Citizenship qualifications and curricula. The programme has already been taken up by schools in India, Singapore, Pakistan, Palestinian Territories, Thailand, Indonesia, Lebanon, the US, UK and Canada. Phil Hart, Head teacher of St Westhoughton Technology College, has been an early pioneer of the programme, and his pupils have responded superbly. He said, “Our students have welcomed the opportunity to discuss important global issues with people of different faiths in an engaging manner that challenges many of the negative views that are regularly portrayed across the media." If you want to find out more, click here

Business Day, The Voice of business, Monday 11 May 2009

Global action against malaria and the Interfaith perspective

Ray Chambers, Special Envoy of Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations Secretary-General for Malaria, recently hosted religious and political leaders from different parts of the world in Washington, where the delegates launched an Africa-wide campaign to engage faith-based institutions, working in partnership with governments and the private sector to cover every African with a bed net by 2010 Read more...

Tony Blair, The Jewish Chronicle, April 2 2009

Charity must not end at home

We all have a responsibility to help end deprivation, disease and hunger around the world. Last week, the first major collaboration between the Tony Blair Faith Foundation (TBFF) and World Jewish Relief (WJR), one of UK Jewry’s leading international agencies, took place. The event, Faith in Our World, aimed to highlight the importance of different faiths working together — a principal goal of TBFF. The two organisations focused on areas of mutual concern in Africa Read more...

Tony Blair, On Faith, March 23 2009

Our World, God’s neighbourhood

In all my time in public life, one fact has struck me with increasing force: that failure to understand the power of religion means failure to understand the modern world. People of different faiths are being brought closer and closer together." Read more...

Rowan Williams, The Guardian, Monday 9th March 2009

Deeper than simple greed

A profound imbalance is at the root of this crisis. We have ignored scarcity and injustice for too long.Read more...

NPR.org, December 8, 2008

Finding A Connection To Judaism During the Eid

He reminds me of my son. That was my first thought when I saw the picture of Moshe Holtzberg — 2 years old, dark eyes, full lips — wearing a green shirt, clutching an orange ball and wailing "Dada."Read more...

09_Music

08_Tech

05_EnviroAfrica

11_MySpace

10_RollingStones

07_Sports

06_China

04_HowHelp

03_Malaria

01_Tea

Tony Blair speech at the launch of the Faith Foundation

Tony Blair speech at the launch of the Faith Foundation

The Story of a Bednet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx4A_Dortms