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)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)