Raymond Shonholtz’s Story
I write to recognize Raymond Shonholtz for his lifetime of work in developing fellow citizens with skills in nonviolent dispute settlement, starting at the community level in California and since 1989 as the founder of Partners for Democratic Change, a global leader in civil society capacity building with centers in twenty countries around the world.
I have known Ray as a member of Partners board of directors and have seen his work first hand from the creation of new centers in Mexico, Indonesia and Yemen to the training of a coalition to fight corruption in Mauritania. Ray is a student of the nexus of conflict and society and has shown that real experiences can be shared across borders and cultures. He pioneered the use of citizen networks to build successful and sustainable centers that from the outset are built and run by local nationals with the help of their colleagues from other countries.
Partners got its start in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall when the emerging democracies of central and eastern Europe needed to transition from opposition movements to functional civil societies capable of working with governments to solve social and economic problems. The techniques and capabilities learned from those experiences have in turn been shared with leaders in the creation of centers in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia. These skills are now used to resolve environmental conflicts in Mexico, fight corruption in local governments in Eastern Europe and resolve tribal conflicts in Yemen. Partners' centers have developed leadership talent for their societies, including the leader of their Hungarian center, Kinga Goncz, who went on to serve as foreign minister of Hungary and is now a member of the European Parliament.
Ray has worked tirelessly to build support for Partners and its work through its global network of centers. Financial support has come from foundations, governments and the private sector, most recently from a substantial grant of the GE Foundation in support of Partners' leadership program. Ray's ability to develop programs and match them with resources has allowed him to leverage many times over the contributions to his programs. Ray is now successfully transitioning leadership of Partners to a new generation as he hands over the Presidency of Partners to Julia Roig on October 1. Ray recruited and mentored Julia who came most recently from Serbia where she served as the director of the ABA Rule of Law Initiative.