Acknowledgements

There were some amazing strokes of “luck” that enabled this web site to come together on a moment’s notice. For this, some grateful acknowledgements are in order.

Ruder Finn, an internationally renowned Public Relations firm. Their San Francisco office, which lives and breathes in the technology, biotechnology and consumer communities in the Bay Area, has been an ongoing help to us. True to form, they stepped in on a moment’s notice to help us get the word out on this web site.

PeaceJam, one of our favorite non-profit partners, works with many of the Nobel Laureates on a regular basis, producing conferences where teenagers have the rare chance to sit at the feet of the Laureates and learn from them. They also have been ongoing friends of archive.The Community, and once again jumped in right from the start, helping to get the statements in hand.

Earthlink, Inc., for their ongoing support in many forms to archive.The Community and its projects. Earthlink hosts archive.The Community. When things started to break with this site and we realized that we were getting much more traffic than we were prepared to handle, they stepped up and sponsored the additional bandwidth required to get this message out. Senior personnel on their web team have been monitoring the site as our load increased, moving things around on their end to keep things running smoothly, and catching problems before we even find out about them.

Armando Gutierrez of All in Spanish, a translations firm in Portland, Oregon, pulled off a small miracle for us, translating vital pages for the site within a span of 48 hours. By doing this he made the site available to a large population who would not otherwise have had access to the words of the Laureatse.

With each of these organizations, I have had the real pleasure of working with people who saw what was here, and honestly and personally wanted these messages to get out to their fellow man. When you work on the Internet, you live for those times, when cooperative effort starts to take hold, and as a group you see something like this happen.

Coincidentally (if you believe in coincidences), I had been introduced to Michael Collopy some three weeks before this all happened, by a mutual friend. We had become friends quickly. When it came time to start gathering these statements, and putting this site together, I had no question where I would get the photos. When you see a beautiful black and white of a Laureate, that seems to reveal something new to you about that person, look for the Michael Collopy credit.

I have shamelessly plugged his book on the site, without his asking, because before ever meeting him, I had gotten a copy of one of his earlier books, about Mother Theresa — Works of Love Are Works of Peace. I gave it to my mother for her birthday, and it is now one of our family treasures. Now I have Architects of Peace on my coffee table. It has more of the photos, and writings by some of the Laureates you see here, as well as Carlos Santana, Robert Redford, Walter Cronkite, César Chavez and others. It’s an important counter-balance to CNN on the television, and couldn’t be more appropriate to our times.

And certainly not last or least, Dr. José Ramos-Horta is, in the middle of everything else, the Cabinet Member for Foreign Affairs in East Timor. After recently completing their first democratic elections, they are in the intense process of forming their new government, a consuming job, of which he is an integral part. When September 11 happened, he was in Jakarta for meeting with other Timorese leaders and the new President of Indonesia. In his hotel room between meetings, he took the time to read and answer my e-mails. I don’t remember who came up with the idea to collect the statements. He sent out the initial request to each of the Laureates. He has never failed to answer an e-mail or take a phone call to help get this site up, or to give me the phone number of a friend somewhere who could help me get through to someone. Throughout, he has lent his guidance, his experience and advice, and I can tell you, this site would not be here without him.

Thank you for being here, and please feel free to get the word out on the site yourself, on whatever available channels you have. The messages here are intended to help.

With Our Best Wishes,
Mary Wald
President, archive.The Community