Dear Earth Charter Community,

With a mixture of pride and sadness, I write to say goodbye to you in my role as Executive Director of Earth Charter International. Pride, because I am very proud of my colleagues, and of our collective accomplishments to rebuild this vehicle we call "Earth Charter International" and to advance the Earth Charter's journey in the world. Sadness, obviously, because I have grown to experience my association with so many people in this Initiative as more like a family kinship than a professional relationship.

But for this reason, this message is really not a goodbye. I am simply changing position, from Executive Director to Earth Charter Endorser and Supporter. I am not leaving the Initiative, just my official job.

As most people reading this know, I took on the position of ECI Executive Director at the request of the former Steering Committee of the Earth Charter Commission, at the end of 2005. Actually, my original title was "International Transition Director," and this is really a better description of my assignment. Working closely with Mirian Vilela and so many others, my mission was to lead a period of rapid change, strategic repositioning, and expansion we called the "Transition."

The Transition is now complete. As of tomorrow, 1 December, I conclude two extraordinarily intensive and fast-paced years of work to implement the strategy designed back in 2005. Mirian Vilela -- now Director of the ECI Center for Education for Sustainable at UPEACE, formerly Director of the Earth Charter Secretariat -- takes on the role of ECI Executive Director. As anyone who has been tracking the Earth Charter Initiative for any length of time will understand, giving this "conductor's baton" back to Mirian is a wonderful feeling.

We set a big vision. I wrote early on, in the first ECI internal "blog", about achieving a "ten-times greater impact" for the Earth Charter as the goal of our work. Thanks to the contributions of so many, many people, I believe we essentially accomplished that goal. There are, for example, more than ten times as many people visiting this website every month -- just since January of this year.

And the Earth Charter has achieved many new milestones, including the development of new or greatly expanded programs in business, youth, and religion; new currency within many aspects of the United Nations system; an entirely new governance structure; new state-of-the-art web-based communications systems; new official partnerships; new Affiliates; new official governmental declarations and agreements ... the list is truly long.

And the Earth Charter is truly taking off.

Please, give your time, support, and resources to support this extraordinarily effective organization. And if you have not yet been a "giver," please become one. (Note: My little firm, while we have been working professionally for ECI, has also been a major contributor to the Initiative, since our first engagement with the initiative as consultants over two and a half years ago. I tell you this in order to inspire others to do the same.)

Never before has the Earth Charter's time felt so right. As issues like climate change keep pushing the "sustainability agenda" higher and higher on the world's list of priorities, the Earth Charter is unique in its ability to provide that essential quality of ethical guidance, legitimized by the great global process of the document's creation, and by the many thousands of organizations and individuals who have endorsed it. (By the way, the number of organizational endorsers is up over 4,000 now. You will soon be able to navigate through this list by map, on this website. Watch for our our new website design, coming on around 15 December.)

So, I say goodbye to you in my role as Executive Director of Earth Charter International ... and hello to you in a new role, as a member of that large, and rapidly growing, process of voluntary engagement and ethical commitment that we call the Earth Charter Initiative.

I'll be seeing you ... and I look forward to collaborating with you.

With fond wishes for a great future for the Earth Charter ... and for the Earth,

- Alan AtKisson