Tony Blair

About me:

The Tony Blair Faith Foundation is a registered charity that 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. As part of this drive the Foundation is working with faith groups to fight global poverty and conflict through pursuit of the Millennium Development Goals. The challenges that we face today are increasingly global and our response must also be global. The Foundation is working to build a movement that supports people from different faith and nations in overcoming the barriers that separate them to work together for a common purpose. This is a movement that belongs to its audience so pleasesend us your ideas and help us reach out to new people.

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

Eight years ago, the world's governments set eight goals to tackle the scandal of global poverty before 2015. One of these includes the target of eliminating deaths from malaria. But neither this, nor any of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), can be achieved without the momentum of a global movement behind it. Faith groups are already playing a major role in delivering progress on the ground. But if faith communities work together, they can both increase pressure on Governments in the developed world to meet their commitments and, in turn, use their un-paralleled reach in the developing world to ensure increased funding delivers real improvements in people's lives. Faith communities can do so much more together than they can achieve apart. World Malaria Day (25 April 2009) brought malaria to the world's attention and on to the Global agenda. We must keep up this momentum. We want you to act now to raise the awareness and funds needed to prevent a million unnecessary deaths each year. Join Faiths Act Together volunteers already active in 31 different countries accross 6 continentes - most of whom are taking part in multi-faith activities for the first time. It’s very easy for you to get involved and you can find all the ideas, support and help you need by visiting our website www.faithsacttogether.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
• tonyblairoffice.org

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? Does faith provide a vital grounding and motivation for Human Rights or does faith hinder and oppose the full implementation of such rights?

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 grapple with some of these huge questions. This is an open debate and we are hoping that the discussions we are starting will 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.

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