ValuesQuest: the next step

	Ian Johnson, Secretary General of the Club of Rome (left) and Martin Palmer, Secretary General of ARC celebrate the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding

The partnership between ARC and the prestigious international think tank The Club of Rome has taken an important step forward with the creation of ValuesQuest, an independent organisation that will take on the work of the ValuesQuest programme.

Begun in March 2013, ValuesQuest arose from a discussion paper of the same name jointly written for the Club of Rome by Martin Palmer, ARC Secretary General, and Karl Wagner, the Club’s Director of External Communications. Subtitled ‘the search for values which will make a world of difference’, the paper’s publication led to a series of events at a major UK festival of ideas and the programme was subsequently asked by the UN to contribute to the creation of its post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals programme.

In this latest development ARC and The Club of Rome have signed a Memorandum of Understanding that will ultimately give ValuesQuest its own organisational basis, independent of either. The first project for this new entity will be meeting a request from the UN to bring into their strategic discussions sectors of civil society seen as key to exploring values, including religions, the arts and the media.

	The discussion paper that started it all

Martin Palmer welcomes this new phase for ValuesQuest, saying: ‘Implicit in all ARC’s work over the last 20 years has been the religious motivation behind the desire to engage with environmental issues. What the ValuesQuest programme has made us realise is that we have always explored the issue of ‘why care?’ as a prerequisite to working out what is to be done. For so many campaigning organisations the motivation has often been fear, anxiety and at times even levels of paranoia. ValuesQuest asks us why we might rather want a world that celebrates beauty, honours commitments and delights in love.’

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