In November 2014, All Together in Dignity will organize a seminar on its governance. Five workshops are being organized during 2014 to help determine the content of this seminar. Each workshop brings together 15 to 20 people, including people who face poverty on a daily basis. Participants will be reflecting critically on ATD’s governance practices from 1988 to 2012.
The whole process will be based on the experience and practice of former Head of ATD’s International Leadership Team, Eugen Brand, who was member of the General Secretariat from 1988 to 1993 and Director General from 1999 to 2012.
The goal is to draw lessons from this experience in order to nourish ATD’s internal discussion of governance and to bring out elements for long-term conversation within ATD.
Since its founding in France in 1956, All Together in Dignity has built its action and its mode of governance on a constant engagement with the following questions: How do the experiences and knowledge of people living in extreme poverty change our ways of living alongside one another and acting together? What kind of thinking and what kind of history do they generate and drive forward?
Wresinski, ATD’s Founder, wrote in 1982: “One of the worst dangers threatening the
Movement is that of “management”. Management reassures people, trivializes issues, and simplifies problems and their solutions. The liberation of people is complex and does not follow a linear progression.”
Today, on every continent, ATD Fourth World continues to look for global, coherent, and forward-looking answers to these questions.
In this process, different forms of knowledge, different practices, and different forms of power merge together, minds and hearts unite in a commitment to collective responsibility, which fosters a specific kind of ethics of governance — one that is based on recognition of the human person and on steadfast concern for the most forgotten members of our societies.
Dowload the document including a more detailed presentation of the workshops and the final seminar.
