Vegan lifestyle articles that discuss ways of living in peace with humans, animals, and the environment.
Paul Turner, FFLG Food For Life Global
February 2018
Food for Life Global (FFLG) was founded in 1995 and is currently based in Ljubljana, Slovenia to serve as the headquarters and coordinating office for Food for Life projects worldwide. With 211 affiliates in 60 countries serving up to 2 million plant-based meals daily, FFLG is the world’s largest food relief organization.
Today I want to share a summary of my journey with Food for Life Global.
I started my career with Food for Life as a young monk in Sydney. I was 20
years-old when I got started and was one of the early pioneers of the
project in the 80s in Australia. My big contribution back then was to
demonstrate how effectively FFL was as a communications tool to inspire all
kinds of people to participate in this service and assimilate its message of
equality.
In 1993, I left Australia as a monk and started lecturing and training
others to start their own FFL project in Eastern Europe and Asia.
in 1994, I settled in the US to establish the first-ever headquarters for
what was then a grassroots operations in about 10 countries.
Food for Life Global was originally founded in 1994 and registered as a
501c3 in 1995 in Potomac, MD.
One of the first things I did was build a website in 1995, way before most
larger companies had a presence on the web. Sadly, there are no records of
that very early website but there are from as early as 1998 on the Wayback
Machine. Take a look here.
At the end of 2010, I migrated back to Australia and at the end of 2014, we
decided that it would be best to run the global office from Slovenia since
most of our staff were now spread around the world and Slovenia offered the
best opportunity for a virtual headquarters.
During this time, I published my FOOD YOGA book and made food yoga an
integral part of Food for Life Global philosophy and practice.
For most of our history, we've tried to operate mostly online to reduce
costs so that we could maximize every dollar you donate to the charity work.
You may be interested to learn that from 1994 until 2018 I have mostly
performed my service to Food for Life Global as a volunteer and my total
wages during those 24 years would average out to about $200 a month.
A More Holistic Vision
In 2014, I also moved to Colombia, South America to be with my wife and
her animal sanctuary.
An important distinction that sets Food for Life Global apart from other
food relief services is our strong belief that the only way to solve world
hunger is to address the root cause. For other food relief services, this
means trying to be more efficient in distributing meals, or it means
increasing the numbers of meals. However, for FFLG it means teaching through
actions that every human on this planet is spiritually equal, thus we
instituted the tagline: Uniting the World Through Pure Food. Once this
understanding is firmly established, social issues like hunger can disappear
overnight. As it turns out, FFLGs network of 210 affiliates serves more
meals than any other agency in the world, including the World Food
Programme.
In our passion to push this solution, we forgot to give equal importance to
animals. This was solved soon after I met my wife and got involved in her
project. Her mission was to teach equality for all beings and so
JULIANA'S
ANIMAL SANCTUARY became the first sanctuary to be affiliated with FFLG. We
had already included cow protection projects as part of the FFLG family of
affiliates but this was the first time we were including all animals as part
of FFLG's extended mission to promote equality. It was a beautiful and
natural synergy and I am forever grateful to her and count my blessings
every day to be able to serve her rescued cows.
It's also important to note that my wife, Juliana is the regional
coordinator for FFLG and has been directly involved in setting up new
programs in South America, including responding to recent disasters in
Ecuador, Colombia, and Chile.
Regional Offices
At the end of 2017, we came to realize that we needed to establish regional
offices to support our regional representatives.
In pursuit of this new direction, we recently re-established our presence in
the US as Food for Life Global - Americas (FFLGA). This office will focus on
the Americas (Canada, USA, Central and South America) and our Slovenian
office will now focus on the Western European region.
FFLGA is in the process of acquiring its 501c3 status but in the meantime,
any donations to FFLGA will still be tax deductible in 2019.
Our future plans are to open regional offices for Australasia, Eastern
Europe, Russia, China, and Africa - Middle East.
If you're interested in helping us establish these other regional offices to
provide support and guidance to those regions, please contact us now.
Please DONATE!
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