A powerful PBS premiere highlights the work of Dr. Judith Richter—2021 Peace Award recipient, bridge-builder, and daughter of a Holocaust hero.
Congratulations to Dr. Judith Richter, recipient of the 2021 King Husein Global Business & Interfaith Peace Award, on the national PBS premiere of The Last Twins on June 15.
The acclaimed documentary tells the remarkable story of Judith’s father, Erno “Zvi” Spiegel, whose courage and compassion helped save dozens of young twins subjected to Josef Mengele’s horrific experiments at Auschwitz. More than a Holocaust story, The Last Twins is a powerful testament to the enduring strength of human dignity and the moral choices that define us even in the darkest times.
Judith’s commitment to advancing human dignity extends far beyond the film. As CEO of Medinol, she founded the NIR School of the Heart, a groundbreaking initiative that brings together Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Druze high school students from Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt and Jordon to learn about cardiovascular medicine while building friendships across cultural, ethnic, and religious divides. Today, the program has graduated more than 800 students, many of whom have gone on to become ambassadors for peace and pursue careers in healthcare. As one graduate reflected, the program “will make the whole Middle East a better place.”
The PBS premiere comes as preparations are underway for the 2026 Dare to Overcome Global Reunion and the King Husein Global Business & Interfaith Peace Awards in London (12–16 October 2026). The gathering will bring together past award recipients and announce a new class of honorees during a week of events at the Palace of Westminster, Mansion House, Lambeth Palace, and other leading institutions under the theme The Economics of Kindness.
We encourage you to watch and share The Last Twins and celebrate the inspiring work of leaders like Judith Richter, whose efforts remind us that peace is built not only through diplomacy, but through everyday acts of courage, compassion, and bridge-building.
Parliamentary Session: AI and Freedom of Religion or Belief
Wednesday, 8 July 2026 | 5:00–6:00 PM BST Committee Room 20, UK Parliament, London Hosted by the APPG for Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB)
As artificial intelligence increasingly shapes how we work, communicate, and participate in society, important questions arise about its impact on fundamental freedoms, human dignity, and social cohesion.
Join us at the UK Parliament for a timely discussion on AI and Freedom of Religion or Belief, exploring both the opportunities and risks presented by rapidly advancing technologies. The session will examine how AI can support human flourishing while ensuring that freedom of religion or belief remains protected in an increasingly digital world.
Featured Speakers
Lord Tarassenko CBE FREng FMedSci President, Reuben College, University of Oxford
Professor Lord (Lionel) Tarassenko is a pioneering engineer, academic, and one of the world’s leading experts in machine learning and healthcare innovation. Internationally recognized for his groundbreaking work in signal processing, artificial intelligence, and patient monitoring, he developed the first FDA-approved machine learning system for critical care, transforming how patient deterioration is detected and managed.
A graduate of Oxford University, where he earned both his BA and DPhil, Lord Tarassenko has held numerous senior leadership positions, including Chair of Electrical Engineering and Head of the Department of Engineering Science. He also founded Oxford’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering, helping bridge engineering, medicine, and public benefit. A prolific researcher, inventor, and entrepreneur, he has authored hundreds of publications, launched multiple technology companies, and was appointed to the House of Lords in 2024 in recognition of his contributions to engineering and healthcare innovation.
Brian J. Grim, Ph.D. President, Religious Freedom & Business Foundation
Dr. Brian Grim is a leading global expert on religion, economics, and human flourishing. Through the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation and the Dare to Overcome movement, he works with business, government, and civil society leaders to advance freedom of religion or belief, workplace inclusion, and social cohesion worldwide.
Why Attend?
This conversation will bring together policymakers, faith leaders, business executives, academics, and technology experts to explore how innovation can serve humanity while safeguarding fundamental freedoms. As AI becomes embedded in everyday life, ensuring that technology respects human dignity and freedom of conscience has never been more important.
What does human dignity look like in the modern workplace?
The Revd Josh Harris, Director of the Joseph Centre for Dignified Work, shares how business, faith, and civic leaders can help ensure every worker flourishes.
About The Joseph Centre for Dignified Work
The Centre works with others to foster discussion and encourage action to make the City of London a place where all – regardless of occupation – can work in conditions of dignity and justice. We do this through research, discussion, and developing partnerships within the City of London and beyond to policymakers in Westminster and elsewhere, remaining rooted in the direct lived experience of London’s workers.
This means we are strong supporters of the London Living Wage for all who work in essential occupations in the City of London. But we want to encourage the City’s employers and businesses to go further, to become national leaders in just working practices so that everyone who works in the City does so under conditions which ensure their human dignity and promotes their flourishing.
Josh Harris is Priest in Charge of the Guild Church for Workers in the City of London, which serves those who work through chaplaincy, practical service, and providing a community of prayer and worship. Alongside this, Josh is Director of the Joseph Centre for Dignified Work. The Centre translates grassroots experience into broader action by connecting it with people across the City’s finance, law and professional services who share the conviction, rooted in our faith, that every worker possesses inherent dignity. Before coming to the City, Josh was a priest in the East End of London, and prior to ordination worked in government.
Why dignity, purpose, and belonging must be at the heart of any serious rethinking of work, wealth, and wellbeing.
By Brian Grim, Ph.D.
Reflections on the new report released by UK Bahá’í Office of Public Affairs, Work, Wealth & Wellbeing: A Collective Reimagining of Social Cohesion, being launched in the UK Parliament on 1st June 2026.
Britain’s social fractures are no longer easy to ignore. Rising inequality, fragile trust in institutions, loneliness, and a growing sense of social distance have left many people wondering what, exactly, is holding society together. The deeper question is not only economic. It is cultural and moral. What kind of society are we building when people are valued mainly for output, income, or status, rather than for their inherent worth and their capacity to contribute?
That is why Work, Wealth & Wellbeing: A Collective Reimagining of Social Cohesion is so timely. The report argues that stronger social cohesion will require more than policy reform alone. It will require a broader understanding of value, one grounded in four interlocking principles: Value, Purpose, Participation, and Collaboration. In that vision, people flourish when they are recognised as intrinsically valuable, trusted with responsibility, and connected to something larger than themselves.
Four organising principles for reimagining work (both paid and unpaid), wealth, and wellbeing emerged from the report:
— Value
— Purpose
— Participation and Contribution
— Collaboration
Two other recent texts reinforce that message from different angles. Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas offers a moral grammar rooted in dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity, and the common good. The Religious Freedom & Business Foundation’s Faith, Belief, and the Future of Corporate Culture adds a workplace lens, showing that trust, integrity, belonging, and purpose are increasingly central to healthy organisations. Taken together, these three perspectives suggest that social cohesion is built not only by systems, but by whether people feel seen, trusted, and able to contribute meaningfully to a shared life.
“Contrary toeconomic theories that portray human beings as primarily selfish, competitive, and motivatedchiefly by personal gain, there is growing recognition that human beings are also deeply motivatedby meaning, contribution, and connection to others.” — Work, Wealth & Wellbeing
Where Belonging Becomes Real
The first issue is where the foundations of social cohesion are actually being formed. In practice, they seem to emerge most clearly in places where people are treated as contributors rather than as passive recipients. The Bahá’í report’s strongest examples come from local community initiatives, youth programmes, and values-based workplaces where people are consulted, encouraged to act, and given a meaningful role in shaping outcomes.
The wider UK picture broadly confirms this. In England, many adults still report a sense of belonging to their immediate neighbourhood, yet trust in neighbours is markedly weaker. That is a revealing difference. Local attachment remains, but the trust that turns proximity into cohesion is much thinner. At the same time, most adults still see their local area as a place where people from different backgrounds get along well together, which suggests there is still a real social base on which to build.
Pope Leo’s encyclical offers a compelling image for this challenge. In contrasting Babel with the rebuilding of Jerusalem, he highlights the difference between a society built through power and uniformity and one rebuilt through shared responsibility, plurality, and cooperation. That is strikingly close to the UK report’s vision. Cohesion grows where people help rebuild the walls together, not where they are simply managed from above.
How Institutions Earn Trust
A second question is what institutions can do to help people feel valued, trusted, and able to contribute. The best answer is that they must provide structure without suffocating participation. The Bahá’í report shows this in practice. In Sheffield, a community-building initiative enabled young people to identify problems and organise responses around health and wellbeing. In London, a youth internship model linked work experience with service and character development. At Apax, a social enterprise in supported housing, staff contribute through regular reflection meetings and shared ownership of the organisation’s development.
This lesson is echoed in recent UK thinking on trust and public engagement. Public trust in political institutions has been declining, and effective public engagement can help restore legitimacy when it is transparent, inclusive, accessible, timely, and linked to actual decision-making. Poor engagement, especially where participation feels tokenistic or disconnected from outcomes, can deepen distrust. Legitimacy depends not only on what is delivered, but on whether people believe their involvement matters.
Pope Leo frames the same issue through subsidiarity. Higher authorities, he argues, should support the initiative of persons, families, associations, and communities rather than replace them. Institutions strengthen cohesion not when they do everything themselves, but when they enable others to act with dignity and responsibility. The Religious Freedom & Business Foundation adds that the same is true inside organisations. Workplaces build trust when people are treated as whole persons, capable of bringing meaning, conviction, and service into their work, not merely as performers of tasks.
Agency, Not Dependency
The policy question, then, is what kinds of approaches cultivate agency rather than dependency. Here, the Bahá’í report is refreshingly clear. It argues for policies that develop capacity, recognise diverse forms of contribution, and invest in the infrastructure of participation. In particular, it calls for public services to support people’s long-term potential and social contribution, not only their speed of return to the labour market. It also insists that unpaid care, volunteering, and relational work should be recognised as part of society’s real wealth.
That matters because participation is not evenly distributed. Volunteering remains lower than it was a decade ago, and participation is significantly lower in more deprived areas than in less deprived ones. Agency, in other words, is not simply a matter of attitude. It depends on whether the conditions of life make contribution possible.
Pope Leo reinforces this through solidarity and subsidiarity together. He argues that systems should create room for people, families, schools, associations, and communities to carry real responsibility. The Religious Freedom & Business Foundation makes a parallel point in corporate life. Institutions are strongest when they recognise people not just as economic resources, but as bearers of ethical agency, meaning, and responsibility.
Why Meaning Still Matters
Another major issue is the place of meaning, contribution, and service in shaping economic and social behaviour. Too often, modern debate treats these as nice extras, morally appealing perhaps, but secondary to productivity or growth. All three reports suggest the opposite. Meaning and service are not marginal to flourishing. They are part of its foundation.
The Bahá’í report repeatedly shows that purpose grows when people experience their efforts as contributing to something larger than themselves. In its case studies, commitment deepens when individuals see their work or service as socially meaningful. Pope Leo says much the same in theological language, describing work as a sphere of human freedom, creativity, and cooperation, not merely a mechanism for earning income. He warns against societies that judge people mainly by what they produce.
The Religious Freedom & Business Foundation brings that insight into the workplace. Its report argues that technology cannot replace the human need for meaning, trust, purpose, dignity, and belonging. It also finds that leading organisations increasingly rely on values such as integrity, collaboration, responsibility, and people focus. In other words, meaning is not a distraction from serious institutional life. It is one of the things that makes serious institutional life possible.
Young People and the Search for Purpose
Perhaps nowhere is this more visible than among younger generations. In the UK, many young people are not only looking for employment. They are also looking for belonging, purpose, and a sense that they can contribute meaningfully. Recent government work with young people in England shows intense concern about money, mental health, safety, work, and housing. It also shows a strong desire for safe and affordable places to gather, trusted adults, practical life skills, meaningful work experience, and a genuine voice in decisions that affect them.
The supporting data underline how urgent that is. Younger adults are more likely than older age groups to report loneliness and lower hope for the future. Questions about work, agency, and belonging are not separate issues for younger people. They are intertwined.
The Bahá’í report suggests that youth purpose is strengthened when work, service, and identity are connected rather than split apart. Pope Leo’s encyclical deepens that by insisting that development must be integral, not merely economic. And the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation shows that workplaces, too, are healthiest when they give people a sense that what they do matters beyond output alone.
From Participation to Shared Responsibility
The final challenge is how collaboration becomes more than a slogan. People move from passive participation to active contribution when they are listened to, trusted with responsibility, and able to see that their voice has consequences. The Bahá’í report is especially strong on this. Its recurring pattern is consultation, action, and reflection. Collaboration becomes cultural when it is structured, repeated, and connected to shared learning.
Pope Leo offers a parallel framework. He links solidarity with active participation in shared decisions and subsidiarity with decision-making as close as possible to those affected. The Religious Freedom & Business Foundation adds that collaboration flourishes where trust, belonging, integrity, and people focus are embedded into the rhythms of organisational life. Across all three, the lesson is remarkably consistent: collaboration becomes real when it is routinised, resourced, and lived out through relationships.
Britain’s question, then, is not simply whether it can restore social cohesion through better policy. It is whether it can recover a fuller understanding of the human person. These reports suggest that repair will come not from seeing people as economic units to be managed, but as persons with dignity, purpose, and a capacity to contribute to the common good. That is a demanding vision, but also a hopeful one. It reminds us that social cohesion is not something we inherit automatically. It is something we build, weaken, or rebuild through the ways we value one another, structure our institutions, and imagine the good of the society we share.
For those who would like to explore these ideas more fully, I invite you to join us at Dare to Overcome: The Economics of Kindness in London, 12–16 October 2026. You can learn more here: Dare to Overcome London 2026.
