Rebecca Tobias

Rebecca Gonzalez-Tobiasis a Global Council Trustee of the United Religions Initiative and the Program Director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Ethics which designs and facilitates interfaith and intercultural programming that serves to foster a culture of peace.  Through her work she has coordinated capacity-building projects with civic, faith, and social justice advocacy organizations locally, nationally and internationally. As a past Fellow with the Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights for the Working Groups for Indigenous Populations, Rebecca has assisted in the drafting of resolutions presented at the Human Rights Sub-Commission and has served as an NGO delegate for several assemblies, including the inaugural meeting of the Tripartite Forum on Interfaith Cooperation for Peace.  Most recently she took part in the UNCSD conference at Rio+20, where she prepared a panel presentation on the Ethics and Spirituality of Water.

As a fellow at the Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva she assisted Special Rappateur Miguel Alfonso Martinez in the drafting of resolutions for the Working Group for Indigenous Populations for the Human Rights Sub-Commission meeting held in August 2005. Rebecca serves as a delegate to the UN's Tripartite Forum on Interfaith Cooperation for Peace and the Committee of Religious NGOs. She resides on the board of the LA-PSR's Non-nuclear Proliferation Committee, Levantine Cultural Center, the Immortal Chaplains Foundation, LA 's planning and coordinating council for the Parliament of the World's Religions, and is a US representative of the Interfaith Encounter Association of Israel/Palestine.

She has been invited as guest lecturer and presenter on issues of ethics and inter-cultural cooperation at the Palaise de Nations in Geneva, the Global Assembly of the United Religions Initiative in Mayapur India, the IHRC/CIDH UCLA Brain Trust, California State University Northridge, Arlington West and others. Her work has been a concerted effort to build coalitions and to empower citizen advocacy in an effort to improve the lives of all stake holders on the planet.

Rebecca attended the University of London in 1984, graduating from Florida International University in 1989 with a degree in Political Science and Comparative Religion. In 1996 she went on to study ethics, culture and mysticism of early Christianity and Islam throughout Turkey with the Catholic Sisters of Notre Dame College. In 2003 she attended the Elijah Interfaith Academy of Jerusalem studying sacred tests of the Abrahamic faiths with Rabbi Alon Goshen-Gottstein who is a founding member of the World Congress of Imams and Rabbis