No One Gave Us a Handbook: Interviews with Eve Pope and Betsy Stang
December 18th, 2007
North American representatives to the Interim Global Council 1999-2002
by Susanna McIlwaine
URI is officially only seven years old, but our early development goes back to the mid-nineties. Some of our North American CC members were present at or near the beginning, but most of us are newbies. We thought it would be helpful to reflect upon some of our history, especially that of the Global Council during the Trustee Selection process. This article looks back at the Charter-writing and Interim Global Council period, from 1996-2002. In future newsletters, we will look at the first two terms of the Global Council, and ahead to changes and hopes for the future.
Before the Global Council there was an Interim Global Council (IGC), which guided URI through its launch and first Global Assembly. The IGC was born out of URI’s Charter-writing gatherings at Stanford University, involving hundreds of people over several years (1996-1999). It was a highly fluid, creative time that attracted luminous innovators with religious, spiritual, and organizational wisdom. Many came to only one meeting; a few came back to form a core, of which Betsy Stang (NY) and Eve Pope (VA) became integral parts.
Betsy Stang (NY) became aware of URI through her work at the United Nations (UN), where she represented concerns of indigenous elders. People kept telling her about some “interesting interfaith thing,” so she went to hear Charles Gibbs give a talk. She remembers being very direct with him afterward, demanding, “What is your objective here? Do you really want to do something new?” Charles assured her it was new and that indigenous participation was sincerely wanted. That was enough to get Betsy to a meeting at Stanford to look at the Charter from an interfaith and indigenous perspective. She stayed on with the Charter process for four years.
Eve Pope became aware of URI through Mary and Sanford Garner. They were part of the first meeting called by Bishop Swing at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco in 1996, where people of many faiths gathered together. Among the roughly sixty people at the meeting was Robert Muller, former Assistant Secretary General of the UN, who helped birth the URI vision. The Garners invited Eve to join them at the next meeting, which would be a Global Summit at Stanford in June of 1997.
“It was an incredibly diverse group of people from all over the world,” Eve recalls, “including lay people and people from many different religions. Clerical collars mixed with Buddhist robes, colorful saris, nuns’ habits, and indigenous dress, gave a distinctively global look. That year, we struggled with how we were to be organized. Should we have a charter like the UN? Gradually the idea of a grassroots non-hierarchal organization emerged.”
“We would first need to define our purpose in a single sentence. This was a challenge! Defining our preamble and principles was also a daunting and lengthy process. All these people from different backgrounds, cultures, and religions put something into the pot. We wrote all these things out and put them on the wall. Then we walked around the room putting dots everywhere. In the end, everything was decided by consensus. We used Appreciative Inquiry throughout all these meetings. It was new to everyone, and helped us connect heart to heart and jump over our differences.”
“When the participants were asked to gather by region and choose delegates to the IGC, Eve and Betsy were elected. Did they have a clear idea about what the IGC was going to do? “No one gave us a little handbook with our responsibilities. Everything was in such a formative stage—this was before the Charter was signed.”
Betsy remembers it as “quite a process.”
“One of the processes I liked the most about the IGC meetings,” she recalls, “was the development of trust and support for one another—we were able to tackle deep, difficult issues. Particularly in the early days, there were a lot of difficult issues. People got to express things about their tradition, their lack of participation, and their old hurts. We moved forward as family and started becoming co-conspirators in the vision of URI. That was the most amazing thing.”
What was the purpose of the IGC?
“A lot! How do you take this new form of a Cooperation Circle, with all of the cutting-edge thinking, creative vision, circular dynamic—all pretty amazing. How do you make it work? We had this amazing conceptual charter that had never been done before. What did it mean? The work of the IGC is implemented in the structure of URI. People should read the minutes of the IGC meetings. We tackled financial systems, organizational structure.…It was a pretty hairy time. The best thing I remember was one of the international conference calls of the IGC. Despite technical glitches— we had been communicating by email, talking in subcommittees— it was amazing, and easy to do. We had really come to respect quite deeply each other’s traditions.”
“How did we walk without stepping on each other’s religious toes? We all live in our assumptions; we all come out of a field of ‘this is what it is.’ There were a lot of ‘wait a minutes.’ The idea of the Charter was to level the playing field, trying to find a ground of reconciliation— to create a field where reconciliation could happen.”
“Some of the issues back then are ones URI still struggles with: How do you fit the corporate, non-profit structure into the Global Council structure? How do you give people latitude to do what they want to do, and still support them? How do you balance the relative roles of trustees and staff? How do you decentralize? How do you share information?”
“Because of the Charter,” Betsy says, “URI has pulled in some really strong people of vision. This has such deep integrity and other people may not know that if they have not been as deeply involved. It is our job to spread the word.”
For more information on the birth of URI:
Birth of a Global Community by Charles Gibbs and Sally Mahe. 2004. Lakeshore Communications.
The Coming United Religions by William E. Swing. 1998. United Religions Initiative, CoNexus Press
We would love other stories, reminiscences, photographs, or documents about the birth of URI to share in the newsletter and an online archive. Send material to bailey.barnard@gmail.com.