In 2000 Mary Wald founded TheCommunity.com, a portal for online collaboration between non profits in the US. The site sponsored the first “high tech” build for Habitat for Humanity in the Bay Area. It raised sponsorships for children in the Dalai Lama’s community.
in India and sponsored underground schools for girls in Afghanistan. In 2000 the site raised six tons of school supplies for East Timor (now Timor-Leste).
In 1999 East Timor a brutal occupation by Indonesia. She and José Ramos-Horta , the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize laureate from East Timor, founded the Fund for East Timor to raise funds for the country’s rebuilding. It was the beginning of a long and productive working relationship.
Twenty three years later, Ramos-Horta is now President of Timor-Leste. Mary is his international public relations representative.
For five years she was the Public Relations partner on the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, founded by Mayor of Rome Walter Veltroni and former President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev. In this capacity she handled all logistics and coordinated international PR for the presentation of the Summit’s peace award by Mayor Veltroni and President Gorbachev.
The artists Mary coordinated the award for included Yusuf Islam, Peter Gabriel, Don Cheadle, and George Clooney. The awards generated the first international media on the Summit. The last press conference she set up for the Summit peace award resulted in more more than 6000 media pick ups around the world within four hours.
TheCommunity.com organized the Nobel laureates into actions on critical causes, including the use of torture by the US, the treatment of the Dalai Lama by China, and the execution of dissidents by the Saudi Arabia government.
23 Nobel laureates participated in actions on TheCommunity.com. Archbishop Desmond Tutu was TheCommunity’s active human rights advisor for 14 years. The site forwarded the laureates’ messages with press, story telling, and video production, and connected known artists to their causes, including Bono, George Clooney, Paul Simon, Harrison Ford, Paul McCartney and others ,
Mary’s work has been covered by the New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, Hong Kong Morning Post, Associated Press, Good Morning America, and more.
Today Mary Wald and José Ramos-Horta are collaborating on the launch of a new site and blog, The Democracy Report. One of the first actions on the site was a letter in support of 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa who was facing legal persecution for her online news site in the Philippines. The letter was signed by her fellow Nobel laureate, Russian journalist Dmitri Muratov, who also taped a video in support, and all of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureates, with the wife of political prisoner Ales Bialiatski signing on his behalf. The letter received front page New York Times coverage.
