About Mercy Corps: Our Leadership:

Landrum Bolling, Director at Large

Photo: Joni Kabana for Mercy Corps

Dr. Landrum Bolling has served as a senior advisor to Mercy Corps for most of the organization's history. He was for more than three years Mercy Corps' senior representative in the Balkans, stationed in Sarajevo. Dr. Bolling now works out of the agency's Washington, DC office as a senior advisor on matters of policy and program development. He also serves as President of Pax World Service, an affiliate of Mercy Corps that promotes citizen diplomacy.

Over his long life, Dr. Bolling has had exceptional international experiences in conflict resolution and in facilitating dialogue between members of different religions, cultures and ethnicities. In working with local and national government officials, religious leaders and non-governmental organizations in Bosnia he developed initiatives for inter-ethnic and inter-religious cooperation and recognition.

Dr. Bolling was for many years a senior advisor and Board Member of Conflict Management Group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a nonprofit agency that originated from the Harvard University Program on Negotiation and is now a division of Mercy Corps. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington.

A journalist at the beginning of his career, he was a foreign correspondent with assignments in Rome, Vienna and Berlin and served as a war correspondent with Tito's Partisans in World War II, covering the liberation of Sarajevo from Hitler's occupation army. Dr. Bolling has written or co-authored several books, including Search for Peace in the Middle East, This is Germany, Private Foreign Aid, Reporters Under Fire, and Conflict Resolution: Track Two Diplomacy.

Trained as a political scientist at the University of Tennessee and the University of Chicago, Dr. Bolling served on the faculties of Beloit College, Brown University and Earlham College, where he was President for 15 years. He was also a research professor at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy of Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. For four years he was President and rector of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute, located near Bethlehem, where he was deeply involved in interfaith dialogue between Muslims, Jews and Christians.

Dr. Bolling also served as President of the Lilly Endowment, one of the largest grant-making foundations in the world, and as Chief Executive Officer of the Council on Foundations.

Over the past 35 years, Dr. Bolling has been drawn repeatedly into the study of the Arab-Israeli conflict and became personally acquainted with a number of the leading political figures on both sides. Beginning in the administration of President Jimmy Carter, when direct official communication between Washington and the PLO was forbidden, he was one of the informal, "nonofficial" links entrusted with delivering messages between the White House and the State Department and top Palestinian leaders.

Dr. Bolling has received more than 30 honorary doctorates from U.S. and foreign universities. In June of 2000 he was honored, along with Senator George Mitchell, with a "Peacemaker/Peace Builder" award by the National Peace Foundation. The University of Tennessee at Knoxville awarded Bolling, a 1933 graduate, with its prestigious Founders Medal in 1998. Similar recognition has been accorded him by Earlham College, where the Landrum Bolling Center for the Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies was opened in 2003. He was chosen for the 2005 CASE award for his life service to education.