Tearfund Director to head up Friends of the Earth

Andy Atkins - Background
Andy Atkins, who was one of a small group of charity campaigners to conceive what became the high profile Make Poverty History campaign in 2005, has spent the past seven years as Policy & Campaigns Director at relief & development agency Tearfund.

Andy, (47), has been a leading advocate of the need for the development sector to understand the critical importance of environmental issues. Under his leadership Tearfund became the first major UK development NGO to campaign on climate change.

Having previously worked on human rights issues, including Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship,and in other Latin American countries, Andy’s first campaign at Tearfund involved working with Honduran communities to successfully halt plans for a hydroelectric dam which threatened the livelihoods of thousands of indigenous people and vast areas of rainforest.

Since going to Tearfund as the organisation's first Public Policy Adviser, Andy Atkins has pioneered its policy and campaigns work, with the result that Tearfund is now regarded as a major advocacy player among the big UK development NGOs.

Andy is married to Sarah, a solicitor, and they have three children.  He is a keen amateur painter.

Education
Andy studied Economic Geography and then Latin American Development at University College London University, and is fluent in Spanish.   He subsequently studied NGO management with the Open University. In 2006 he participated in the Cambridge University Business Programme course on Sustainable Development.   

Work history
After his degree at UCL, Andy worked in Argentina for 9 months as a volunteer community development worker, in the aftermath of the Falklands War. The experience convinced Andy of the need to address the injustices of Western countries’ economic and political relationships with developing countries, which had been supporting despotic regimes and fuelling mounting international debt.  

1985-1988: General Secretary, Chile Committee for Human Rights

Andy campaigned for human rights and a return to democracy in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, working with the small but effective Chile Committee for Human Rights, first as local campaign groups coordinator and then as the general secretary. 

1988-1990: Working in Partnership Programme Coordinator, CAFOD

His work with Catholic Development agency CAFOD involved successfully developing a combined development awareness and fundraising programme. It was one of the first such programmes by a development agency to feature explicitly ‘environmental’ projects.
   

1990-1997: Latin American Desk Officer, CIIR (Progressio)

Keen to return to front-line lobbying, Andy took up a post as Latin American Desk Officer with the radical think-tank and development agency, Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR), now Progressio.  Here he worked on peace negotiation in Central America at the time of the counter insurgency war, before setting up a programme of work on human rights in Colombia, which brought the brutal conflict in that country to much greater public attention. He went on to lead a ground-breaking programme on the developmental and environmental implications of the illegal drugs trade with Latin America. He was instrumental in establishing a European NGO network on drugs and development which successfully campaigned for a more enlightened EU approach to the drugs trade.

1997- present: Policy and Campaigns Director (also known as Advocacy Director), Tearfund

Andy was recruited by Christian relief and development agency Tearfund, to develop the organisation’s first public policy strategy. This rapidly developed into a comprehensive strategy for research, policy work, campaigns and also capacity-building of Tearfund’s overseas partners to lobby their own governments.

Andy was appointed Tearfund’s first Advocacy Director in 2000 and Tearfund is now considered a major advocacy player among UK development NGOs. He has particularly championed work on the links between environment and poverty and Tearfund was the first major development agency to identify climate change as a ‘poverty’ issue and begin campaigning to address the impact of climate change on developing countries. He instigated and championed Tearfund’s advocacy work on reducing the vulnerability of poor people to natural disasters and climate change. Through his position at Tearfund, he is on the Board of the Stop Climate Chaos coalition of charities and is a founder member and on the Board of the growing international Micah Challenge campaign which is promoting churches’ engagement in lobbying governments to deliver the Millennium Development Goals. Andy also served on the Coordination Team of Make Poverty History campaign in 2005.

He has worked closely with senior UK church figures and scientists to encourage US church leaders to speak out more publicly on US government climate change policy.

Climate change is hitting the world's poorest communities hardest. Find out more about what Tearfund is doing to respond here.