Born in London, David Sunderland always dreamed of being active with nature.  Introverted in school, he studied geography, physics and chemistry.  Being aware that life is more than sitting on a bench, he worked in a shop after his A-levels and then traveled through 16 African countries.  With that experience, he studied Geography in Cambridge and became president of the Oxfam group at the university.

Understanding that life has put him in a privileged position, he volunteered in a home for physically disabled people and then volunteered with a rural development NGO in Andhra Pradesh in southeast India.  Living with the Hindu community, he also read the Bible intensively for the first time - which subsequently led him to find Quakers, a religious society which promotes peace.

Back in England, he learnt Hindi and worked with an NGO which advised civil society organizations how to use their funds more effectively.  He set up a twinning project between Brighton and the Ghanese city of Accra.  He then worked with two more NGOs in the UK, as assistant to the Director, while deepening his admiration for French culture.  Having learnt French, he participated in the European Social Forum in Paris; on the way to an event on sustainable agriculture, he met a Brazilian woman, Liza, and they married twenty months later, spurring him to learn Portuguese then Spanish.

For some 20 years, he lived in Cairo, Geneva, New York and Paris working for six of the twelve organizations comprising the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).  He obtained French nationality in 2019 and in 2022 studied irregular migration in small boats from France to the UK.  The US decision to stop most of their international non-military funding stopped his UN activities; the divorce from Liza, who meanwhile had become a renowned lawyer in Geneva, added to this existential challenge.

At the Pendle Hill Quaker centre in Pennsylvania he drafted a book about death and loss, which will be published later this year.   Versions in French, Portuguese and Spanish are planned.  He has also written a novel, Angeland, and various poetry collections.

Starting from the premise that most people neglect end-of-life planning, and observing related unnecessary suffering, he created the information platform Plenna to promote death literacy.

He is discovering that Brussels is an open-minded melting pot, having moved to the city in January 2026, and is grappling with Dutch.

With thanks to Frank Schwalba-Hoth who drafted much of this for my presentation to his soirée internationale on 20 May 2026.