NAF History

History

What became the Nicholas Albery Foundation originated on the 6th of January 1981 as the Fourth World Educational and Research Association Trust. The original trustees were Lord Beaumont, Edward Goldsmith, Leopold Kohr and John Seymour: all were (and are) renowned for their work and research in the areas of environmental and human-scale thinking. The Trust was set up to allow Nicholas Albery to pursue areas of interest and research, to fund these endeavours with associated publications, and to further the aims of the Fourth World movement:

"The Fourth World embraces small nations of under twelve million inhabitants, groups working for their autonomy and independence at all levels from the neighborhood to the nation, minority groups whether ethnic, linguistic, cultural or religious, and those in the fields of peace action, ecology, economics, energy resources, women's liberation, and the whole spectrum of the alternative movement, who are struggling against the giantism of the institutions of today's mass societies and for a human scale and a non-centralized, multi-cellular, power-dispersed world order."

This led to the Trust, under Nicholas Albery's direction, being involved in such publications as 'How to Save the World: A Fourth World Guide to the Politics of Scale' (Turnstone Press, 1984), and in supporting educational forums such as the Academic Inn. The latter was done in close alliance with John Papworth, a leading light of the Fourth World movement, who founded the magazine Resurgence and presently runs the Fourth World Review. It was during these years in the early 1980s that Leopold Kohr was superseded as a trustee by Sir Richard Body, another stalwart of the Fourth World movement, and an authority on Englishness and agriculture.

In 1985, Nicholas Albery founded the Institute for Social Inventions formally, distributing journals of ideas to subscribers, reporting new research, and building up a Who's Who of social inventors in the UK and beyond. Much of this work had been going on under the auspices of the Trust, but the concept of 'social innovation', non-technological innovation to improve society, now came to the fore. It was Nicholas Albery's belief that imagination and creativity could provide innovative solutions to problems on every scale, and that these solutions were more effective when devised and put into practice by the people who were affected by those problems originally: the public. This ethos remains at the heart of the Foundation's work, and the Institute is, in many ways, the core project of the charity's work.

The Institute was also intended to be an idea generator itself, to create projects that the Trust could run, and the first one of these to really take hold was the Natural Death Centre. Founded in 1991 by three psychotherapists, Nicholas Albery, Josefine Speyer and Christianne Heal, the Centre's aim is to 'improve the quality of dying'. It was originally intended to be analogous to the natural birth movement, but has since expanded to offer advice and information on funeral alternatives, particularly woodland burials and private land burial. It continues to run workshops on death education, grieving and bereavement, and continues to go from strength to strength. One part of the Centre's work on death education became the Befriending Network, a project in which volunteers visit and befriend people suffering from a terminal illness. The network expanded and grew, and became independent in 1998. It continues its work in London and Oxford today.

Further projects followed in the mid-1990s, including the ApprenticeMaster Alliance, modelled on a San Francisco scheme, the Global Ideas Bank (which was originally suggested by a reader of the Institute journals), and the Poetry Challenge. All three flourish to this day, with hundreds of successful apprenticeships having taken place through the Alliance's directory, with the Global Ideas Bank attracting nearly 4 million hits a year from around the world, and with many UK and US schools running poetry challenges to raise money for charity. As with the Natural Death Centre, both are a testament to the idea and project generation at the heart of the Foundation's work. The publications also continued to flow thick and fast, with an annual compendium of ideas, a poetry anthology, the Natural Death Handbook, the Time Out Book of Country Walks (by now Nicholas had also started a walking club for Londoners) and a travel guide to the island of Gomera.

In 1999, Nicholas Albery started work on his most ambitious project to date, a website aimed at retribalising the cities of the world and creating real-world communities through the power of the internet. After a huge programming effort by Phil Wilson and Nicholas' son Merlyn, www.DoBe.org was launched the following year and is already functioning ata successful level in London. The use of imagination and innovation to combat a problem (urban isolation) again comes to the fore, with the added ingredient of Nicholas' belief in community as a crucial factor in society.

On June 3rd 2001, whilst returning from one of the walking club's Saturday walks, Nicholas Albery was tragically killed in a car accident. The three staff who had been working with him, Retta Bowen, Nick Temple and Stephanie Wienrich, decided to continue the Trust's work and to rename it the Nicholas Albery Foundation. A fundraising campaign was launched to secure the charity's future, and a new board of trustees assembled. This having been achieved, the present staff are looking to take the projects onwards and upwards, and to generate new ideas and projects in the best traditions of the charity, all with innovation and problem-solving at their heart.

The Nicholas Albery Foundation

12a Blackstock Mews

Blackstock Road

London N4 2BT

tel (int. 44) [0]20 7359 8391

fax (int. 44) [0]20 7354 3831