TurningPoints
What is TurningPoints?
TurningPoints is an NGO that aims to alleviate poverty through the creation of companies and the development of security.
What is the most precious in your life?
When asked this question most people answer: ‘my children, my spouse, my parents, my family and friends, that they are healthy, and that they get food from a clean environment in balance.’ So: family, health, food and nature is what we value the most.
Despite these answers we every day - through our work, economy, consumption and waste - support a development that is a threat to our most precious ones. As a consequence, our societies become unstable and prone with conflicts. In this situation we can choose to see each other as enemies and start fighting each other - or we can start thinking up sustainable, self-reliant, just and creative ways of living.
In TurningPoints
- we believe that humanity has reached a turning point in its development. "Turning points are moments pregnant with new life, which rise from what appear to be the barren grounds of destructive violence and relationships." (Lederach, 2005, p. 29)
- we believe that human community has the capacity to generate and sustain the one thing uniquely gifted to our species: our moral imagination. (Lederach, 2005, p. 23)
- we believe that life should be a happy, joyous experience to all human beings where everyone is free to strive for fulfillment.
- we believe that a peaceful world is also a world of curiosity, play, learningand growing to become mature and wise – both as persons as societies as countries and as cultures.
- we believe that in such a world material consumption will become secondary to the process of living and learning, and that these activities will become the primary activities of human lives.
- we believe that these changes can be met in sustainable, self-reliant, creative, joyous and peaceful ways.
How to develop according to TurningPoints?
To change the world into a peaceful world with a self-reliant way of life, humanity needs to develop its basic economical structures to be supportive of the individual and the collective development processes.
To support and set free creative, constructive and self-reliant social and economic processes that do not destroy our nature, and do not escalate economic speed, greed and competition, we need new types of companies, ownership and market behavior.
This process also has to face and abolish violence, suppression and exploitation of human beings. Direct and structural violence in many countries are the two most important obstacles to development. So, these two obstacles must be dealt with – not by confrontation, but simply by building new ways of working with new ways of policing. Both these processes are profoundly in need of each other. This is not unrealistic – on the contrary: to continue the way we do today is unrealistic.
As a part of this development proces, the ancient alienating and confrontational process between capital owners and workers will fade and change into a creative production process based on self-reliant smaller units that co-operate globally. This will also change greed consumption to a need based self-reliant and sustainable form of consumption.
What does TurningPoints offer to support development and peace?
As stated, TurningPoints has been created to meet several inter-related and very complex global problems: violence, poverty, inequality, alienation and the lack of self-reliance.
Violence – both direct and structural – is one of the main reasons why the global poor are poor in the first place and one of the primary reasons they stay poor. Without security for the poor no development will take place.
Consequently, violence and poverty must be seen as two closely related aspects of development work which must be coordinated ininterventions.
TurningPoints has been created to educate, research and coordinate the interventions of its two subdivisions: ‘Pass It On’ which deals with job creation, and ‘Politeia’ which deals with social security and trust.
The Pass It On Concept
The purpose of the ‘Pass It On’ concept is to generate jobs that generate jobs. It does so by creating companies that are self-owned, cannot be sold for profit and by contract are obliged to ‘give birth’ to new companies with the same concept, but producing other services or products. Pass It On serves the UN Article 23 that every personhas therightto have a job. And a job which they can live from.