Senior Fellow and Member of our Committee of Recommendation Anna Timmerman on Optimism and Compassion

Senior Fellow and Member of our Committee of Recommendation Anna Timmerman speaks in the news. Anna talks about her persistent optimism and the importance of explicitly expressing compassion when it comes to the suffering of people in conflict zones on the ‘NOS Radio 1 News’. Anna says that especially during her time at Humanity in Action she learned from our co-founder Ed van Thijn that there is always hope and that, no matter how difficult it is, you can always take action.

Anna Timmerman: “we sometimes have a tendency in the Netherlands to think that emphasising deep sympathy is not important, while if something very bad happens to me, then I want people to see that I am in pain. And this naturally applies to people all over the world; we for example see that our partners in Idlib [Syria] were very grateful when we did a major campaign in December “Stop Bombing Idlib”; so that they could see that it is not that ‘nobody is looking, it is not that everyone is just looking away, they actually see what is being done to us’.”

You can listen to the entire interview with Anna Timmerman here.