History
The Elders is chaired by Kofi Annan and consists of nine Elders and two honorary Elders. Desmond Tutu served for six years as Chair before stepping down in May 2013, and remains an Honorary Elder.
The group was initiated by Richard Branson and musician and human rights activist Peter Gabriel together with anti-apartheid activist and former South African President Nelson Mandela. Mandela announced the formation of the group on his 89th birthday on 18 July 2007 in Johannesburg, South Africa.
At the launch ceremony, an empty chair was left on stage for Aung San Suu Kyi, the human rights activist who was a political prisoner in Burma/Myanmar at the time. Present at the launch were Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, Graça Machel, Nelson Mandela, Mary Robinson, Desmond Tutu, Muhammad Yunus and Li Zhaoxing. Members who were not present at the launch were Ela Bhatt, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Lakhdar Brahimi and Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
The Elders are funded by a group of donors who are named on the Advisory Council. Over the first three years, US$18 million was raised to fund The Elders' work.
Read more about this topic: The Elders (organization)
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“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)