The Democracy Center Turns 15 -- and the On-Line Version of our New Magazine from Bolivia!

Dear Readers:

The Democracy Center is now fifteen years old!

This new year, 2007, marks our anniversary and in honor of that occasion we just published a newsletter to our subscribers that takes a look back at how we began, where we've been, and acknowledges some of the many great organizations that have worked by our side – from California to Bolivia and beyond. Below is the lead and a link to the full issue.

To celebrate we also unveil the on-line version of our new Democracy Center magazine -- "Jallalla!" You can read it in full (for free) here.

Many, many thanks to all of you who have been with us these fifteen years. I think we're ready for at least fifteen more!

Jim Shultz

THE DEMOCRACY CENTER TURNS 15!

It began with an unexpected letter from Washington. My wife and I were living in Bolivia, taking a year off from political work in California to be volunteers in an orphanage in Cochabamba. Friends at the Advocacy Institute wrote and asked if I would put together an advocacy training program for health activists in South Africa, then still governed under white apartheid rule. That February (1992) I arrived in Johannesburg and, without my really knowing it, The Democracy Center was born.

Read the full newsletter here.