New Book: The Soul of UNICEF by Augustine Veliath

Augustine Veliath has published a new book in which he says, "I have harvested the best thoughts of Jim Grant and has published them under the title "The Soul of UNICEF".  We will add this book to our XUNICEF bibliography of works by UNICEF and XUNICEF authors. 

From Augustine

The Birth and Rebirth of “the Soul of UNICEF

James Grant lived before the twitter age. Yet he had this amazing and inspiring one liners. I have 23 pages of what would have been his best tweets in this book. These pages of all time great one-liners alone makes this a collectors’ item.

You know the seven habits of highly successful people. In this book we have a full “chalisa”. It has forty mighty attributes of a UNICEFer or a committed development worker.

This is the third Avtar of this book. Within 48 hours of Jim Grant’s death, a slim version of it was born in the city of Lucknow in India.

The immediate priority was briefing the Chief Secretary. Four religious leaders of Lucknow had agreed to grace a condolence meeting. The State Secretariat hosted the meeting in memory of Jim who had visited the state and the capital. In fact his wife Ethel Grant died in the state.
Those were not google or internet days. I had two sources - what a UNICEF field office held as hard copies and my own "Grant collection".

We distributed the memorial volume at the Lucknow prayer meeting . Later we also lent copies to the larger national condolence meeting in Delhi. Dr Jon Rohde had a much larger collection of Grant’s public statements. He encouraged me compile a larger version. It was published as All For Children, with a foreword by Dr Jon Rohde, as an "internal document" distributed to UNICEF staff.

The current expanded and revised version is called the Soul of UNICEF. It is available on Amazon in India and Flipkart, as well as Notion Press, in Chennai.

From the Publisher

Secrets of Building the World's Most Loved Organization

Amazon Sales Rank: Ranked #5 in Social Welfare & Social Services

The Urgency
We can wait for many things we need. The child cannot. Now is the time his/her bones are being formed, his/her blood is being made, his/her mind is being developed. To him/her we cannot say tomorrow, his/her name is today.

The Visionary
Throughout his long career, Jim Grant has been a towering figure of vision, strength, statesmanship, and leadership, in the endless struggle to improve the survival and development of children around the world. His deep insight, boundless energy, originality of thought, universality of understanding, devotion to duty, tireless spirit, and ceaseless plotting for action will continue to spur us on in the future, as this rare combination of qualities did in the past.

The Harvester
Augustine Veliath is a former UNICEF Communication Strategist. Children paid his salary, and are paying his pension. Therefore, children speak to him and he speaks for them.

The Photographer
Shikha Khanna is a portrait photographer specializing in baby and child photography for the past 20 years. She is incidentally India’s first baby and child photographer. She is now heading a world initiative for bringing out coffee table books for mums across the world.

The New Mission
Profits from the sale of this book will go to projects that add digital power to care leavers. Care leavers are children who are now in care homes, but are just about to take off on their own as adults.