Over 35 team members of Marist entities working in solidarity and development from all continents have gathered in Rome for the first time to exchange ideas on developing a formal network and establishing new lines of collaboration.
Australian Marist Solidarity is one of the seven international development NGOs at the meeting while there are also 24 local NGOs or foundations together with over 40 other Marist solidarity entities with various legal status contacted. AMS is representing a number of these from Oceania, Timor Leste and Cambodia.
The CEO of AMS, Allen Sherry fms, who is present at the meeting noted that “its participants have high energy to formalize statues for an operational network by the end of the week and set out some clear common lines of collaboration in projects and programmes”. Already AMS has established a formal alliance with SED, the Spanish Marists development NGO, which is celebrating its 25th year of operations last year. SED and AMS are currently collaborating on fund searching for a new school and hostel in the tea gardens of Bangladesh.
In an era of the call for more global collaboration this initiative, which will conduct most future meetings through virtual means, is a significant advance across the Marist world.