Some Facts about
Green Front of Iran (GFI)
Syamak Moattari
May 2000
Green Front of Iran (GFI) was established in 1989 by four medical students in Tehran. After initial establishment, GFI members started negotiation with many scholars, university professors and distinguished individuals in order to use their experiences to lighten the way for future. This led to the point where GFI considered public awareness on environmental issues as its first and primary goal and started several programs in that way. Cleanup campaigns could attract public attention to environmental problems and occasional declarations could utilize mass media as a means of objecting to those plans that will have destructive effects on the environment and especially on biodiversity. Other programs pursued by GFI include family tours to nature, gatherings of Child and Nature , scientific seminars and round tables, programs on international occasions like The Day of Earth or The Week of Environment and also tree plantation programs.
GFI works as an intermediate institute to reflect the public objections on environmental problems to related state organizations like Municipal Corporation, Department of Environment or The Organization of Forest and Ranch. GFI also attempts to reflect the viewpoints of non-government sector in state plans for development as this was well done during the design of The 3 rd Development Plan of Islamic Republic of Iran .
GFI tries to observe the general criteria for non-government organizations. It has an open system of membership. Every interested Iranian may become a member of GFI. It also answers to all its members. Its financial balance, income and expenses are all monthly reported in the internal bulletin of GFI. The accounting ledgers are open to everybody.
Planning is done in planning workshops attended by old as well as new members. Group management is achieved by an established System of Suggestions . GFI believes in youth and has demonstrated a real active and innovative organization by letting the youngsters take part in planning and making decisions. The youngest member of GFI is a 40-day infant and the oldest a 94-year-old man. GFI accepts members from all over the country and currently has around 6000 members. Most members of GFI are female university students and then male students and in general they are mostly educated persons. At least 300 members of GFI have a master degree or Ph.D. Members are %53 female and %47 male.
Major financial resources of GFI are the membership fees and occasional aids of its members. Musical concerts, theatre performances and green markets also help finance our activities. GFI also obtains part of its budget by performing educational and research projects in cooperation with state institutions. GFI has not yet performed any international project and has not had any foreign financial resource. The financial balance is negative and expenses are always more than income. To now this has been made up for by personal assets of the founders.
In addition to financial problems the lack and shortcomings of national laws for NGOs cause new problems. NGOs being new phenomena has caused them to have to answer to several state organizations with each treating them in a different way. Addressing these problems, environmental NGOs hold numerous meetings to set up the definitions and reflect necessary laws to government authorities and legislative bodies. Government on its own part has always tried to solve the problems but such efforts are always insufficient.
The main policy of GFI is public awareness and for this year (Iranian 1379) has planned for four major programs:
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• · Raising social concern on biodiversity.
• · Trying to change the social consumption habits.
• · Public awareness against pollution in cities.
• · Warnings on destruction of natural ecosystems.
Each program consists of the following parts.
1) Secretariat
2) News groups
3) Symbolic program
4) Gathering
5) Educational workshop
6) Publication
7) Exhibition
8) Competition. Human resources to perform these programs are all selected from interested volunteer members.
GFI submits a declaration on the average every other week. Every 1.5 months publishes an internal bulletin for members. It also monthly publishes a newsletter called the Reflex of Press in which the extracted articles and news about the environment and the cases against the National Constitution are collected from print media. A quarterly called Green Peace is also published every season.
News and articles related to the environment and environmental problems are gathered daily from the Internet and translated for members and researchers. Internet is always available in the office of GFI and many members coordinate their works using daily emails. A group of software programmers are developing the web site of GFI. We hope it will be available before the end of September 2000 for global use.
Green Front of Iran endeavors to save our planet in peaceful ways and is active as a non-political, non-for-profit and non-government organization. We wish a green, peaceful and friendly future for all the residents of our Earth . We also hope to no longer observe the extinction of species of animals and plants.
We believe that we have not inherited the Earth from our parents, but borrowed it from our children.
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Hope you be always green.
