Regeneration should be a part of all our lives. We live and work in a certain way but eventually most things lose their momentum and should be either changed or ended.
At SafeGround, we have faced regeneration many times since our inception in 1992. As I type that date it drives home the huge amount of work that has been done by this small organization over almost 30 years.
Our first face under Sister Patricia Pak Poy was the Aus-tralian Network to Ban Landmines. This title brought us to-gether to achieve the goal of an International Ban on Anti Personnel Landmines in 1997. At that point we could have ceased to exist as our job was done. The organization had a rethink and a reshuffle and we continued on to take on the issue of Cluster Munitions resulting in the treaty banning them in 2008.
Harnessing some of our strengths, we began detailed field research looking into communities at risk from ERW (ex-plosive remnants of war) resulting in a book on the dan-gerous legacy of cluster munitions in the east of Cambodia. This book was entitled ‘In Search of Safe Ground’. As we had achieved our two main goals of a landmine ban and a cluster munition ban we needed to re focus and we became ‘SafeGround’. This strong but more neutral name gave us the banner to branch out a bit and take on a variety of topics that r 4elate to human security and legacy weapons. We worked on the Nuclear Arms Treaty and now are working on a treaty to restrict Lethal Autonomous Weapons, Killer Robots.
The regeneration undertaken by the organization has been essential to stay relevant and attract supporters and members to continue the important work that draws our attention and efforts.
Our key tool to communicate with our supporters has been the Memorandum. This newsletter has been the conduit that informs our supporters of the work underway. We felt it was time for an overhaul and the Memorandum will now be the newsletter ‘MiddleGround’.
We are pleased to announce our MiddleGround team which consists of Isabella Porras, Margot Stewart and Rhett Kleine. These three have taken the reigns and will inject a new level of energy into its pages. We aim to have an overview of international affairs and events that reflect our work and interests and report on the work we do within SafeGround.
SafeGround continues to work hard across a variety of is-sues and has never been more relevant and needed. With our new newsletter MiddleGround we aim to keep our support-ers informed and engaged as we strive to simply make the world a better place.
Thank you all for your ongoing support and we hope you enjoy the content and new format of MiddleGround.
John Rodsted
