Dick Ruffin, a native of Virginia, USA, was educated at Yale and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He was an officer in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War and afterwards worked as a systems analyst on the staff of the Secretary of Defense.
Prompted by the chaos of Watergate and America’s deepening racial divisions, he left government service and set out with others to help try to heal America’s divisions. “Only an America at peace with itself can serve the world,” he said. A first step was to re-vitalize the Moral Re-Armament movement with its distinctive focus on personal change and reconciliation. In 1980 he became the movement’s Executive Director in the United States and served in that capacity for 23 years. In the late 1980s, he facilitated consultations within the global movement that led to a new name and to the founding of Initiatives of Change International, of which he was Executive Vice President for 8 years.
He retired in 2010 and now lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he is active in community affairs. Believing that an accurate knowledge of history is a pre-requisite for forging a better future, he works as a guide at the home of Thomas Jefferson, author of the American Declaration of Independence.
