Mission Statement

The World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) promotes communication for social change. It believes that communication is a basic human right that defines people's common humanity, strengthens cultures, enables participation, creates community, and challenges tyranny and oppression. WACC's key concerns are media diversity, equal and affordable access to communication and knowledge, media and gender justice, and the relationship between communication and power. It tackles these through advocacy, education, training, and the creation and sharing of knowledge.

WACC's worldwide membership works with faith-based and secular partners at grassroots, regional and global levels, giving preference to the needs of the poor, marginalised and dispossessed. Being WACC means 'taking sides'.

Background

WACC is an international ecumenical professional organisation that promotes communication rights for social change. Its global office is in London where it is a registered charity.

The origins of WACC date back to 1950 when Christian communicators from Europe and North America began seeking guidelines for the future of religious broadcasting. Several organisations, including the World Council of Churches, shared the same concerns and they eventually joined forces to establish the 'old' WACC in 1968. Rapid developments in mass media worldwide and a concern to integrate the work of the Agency for Christian Literature Development of the World Council of Churches led to a merger in 1975 that created the present WACC.

Originally established as a trust with a small number of trustees, in the 1980s WACC became a membership association with a governance structure based on representation from its global members organised into eight regional associations. WACC currently has about 1,000 personal and corporate members in 100 countries.

WACC believes that:

• communication creates community
• communication is participatory
• communication liberates
• communication supports and develops cultures
• communication is prophetic.

Based on this belief, WACC's general aims are:

• to promote democratic forms of communication which encourage dialogue and debate, enhance people's creativity and solidarity, and respond to people's needs.
• to contribute towards building a communications environment that is open to all and founded on respect for human dignity.
• to support processes that lead to the democratisation of the mass media including advocacy, reflection, policy development, and networking.
• to implement communication programmes and to support projects that lead to the empowerment of people, especially the dispossessed and marginalised, indigenous peoples, refugees, migrants, women, children and people with disabilities.

For more information, go to www.waccglobal.org

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