September 10, 2008

Dear Friends,

Thank you very much for responding positively to the invitation to meet this month with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) just recently sent this invitation to you and others of our colleagues from a range of organizations in the peace and justice community. We have been very grateful to receive a very strong response. Given the short timeline, we had initially expected 80-100 people would attend the meeting, and a room was reserved for that size group. However, the large number of acceptances indicated this was a miscalculation - plus we have received requests to include others whose attendance will help inform President Ahmadinejad of the breadth and diversity of our community of U.S. peace and anti-war activists.

Because of the large response, it has been necessary to obtain a larger room for the meeting. Unfortunately, the impact of the many events in Midtown Manhattan surrounding the opening of this year's U.N. General Assembly has prevented us from identifying a secure space for that same time slot. Instead, the date and time of the meeting have been changed.

The meeting is now scheduled for Wednesday, September 24 from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., two weeks from today.

Working with others, FOR is also hoping to take this opportunity to organize a strategic organizing meeting for our community of peace leaders. We hope to hold this during the original time period - the morning of Thursday, September 25th (possibly a little later than the original 8 a.m. meeting time) - in another location, for those able to stay through that morning. We believe that could be an invaluable opportunity for our community to come together and organize to prevent military action by our government against Iran. Many of you are doing that work already, in local, regional, and national settings, and such a strategic organizing meeting would help us better network those efforts to support one another during the coming months. So if you are able to stay overnight in New York City to participate in both gatherings, please do so.

We hope this will work for everyone, especially those of you traveling to New York from distant points. Please let us know if we can provide any assistance in rescheduling your trip, if you had already made plans based on the prior date.

We will be in touch with you again in the coming days with further information about the plans for the meeting.

Peace,

Leila Zand

iran@forusa.org