The International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR) is a non-governmental organization founded in 1914 in response to the horrors of war in Europe. Today IFOR counts 71 branches, groups and affiliates in 48 countries on all continents. IFOR members promote nonviolence, human rights and reconciliation through public education efforts, training programs and campaigns. The IFOR International Secretariat in Utrecht, Netherlands facilitates communication among IFOR members, links branches to capacity building resources, provides training in gender-sensitive nonviolence through the Women Peacemakers Program, and helps coordinate international campaigns, delegations and urgent actions. IFOR has ECOSOC status at the United Nations. History Origins in wartime The first body to use the name "Fellowship of Reconciliation" was formed as a result of a pact made in August 1914 at the outbreak of the First World War by two Christians, Henry Hodgkin (an English Quaker) and Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze (a German Lutheran), who were participating in a Christian pacifist conference in Konstanz, southern Germany (near Switzerland), where the World Alliance for the promotion international Friendship through the Churches (World Alliance, WA) was formed. According to the mythotology of the IFOR, on the platform of the railway station at Cologne, they pledged to each other that, "We are one in Christ and can never be at war". After coming into his home country, Hodgkins invited his Quaker - and often socialist - friends, such as Kees Boeke, to organize a conference in Cambridge in 1915, in which the "Fellowship of Reconciliation" (FOR England)was established. The German branch, Versöhnungsbund, was founded later. It held its first conference in 1932, but in 1933, when Hitler came to power, it dissolved. Schultze was arrested twenty-seven times during World War I and was forced to live in exile during the Nazi period. FOR Germany was officially reestablished just in 1956 with Dr Siegmund Schultze as President. Shortly after the Cambridge conference, in the autumn of 1915, Henry Hodgkin went over to America and, 11 and 12 November, the American Fellowship was founded during a Conference at Garden City, Long Island. More than a thousand members enrolled in the American Fellowship before and during the war, which, for the US, begun on 6 April 1917. Also, Cornelius Boeke made a trip to Europe, where he established international social networks for the work of FOR. Because of this and the peace work of Boeke, he was deported to his home country Holland by the