For nearly 40 years, IDOC North America has addressed issues of public policy and the promotion of the values of free, democratic societies. IDOC/NA deals with contemporary and recent historical issues that relate, on a perspective from the individual to the global, to the concerns of opinion-makers and public policy-making groups in the United States, and, where possible, abroad.

In furthering its core focus and velues, IDOC shall foster means, in this new information age, for young people to gain access to and instruction from the latest information technologies. These technologies are instrumental in shaping the world today and tomorrow. For young people, they open doors into the worlds of science and human values earlier accessible only to the more fortunate.

IDOC/NA was founded in 1969 as part of a cooperative network of groups and individual experts in more than 40 countries who, for more than 30 years, have been exchanging and sharing documentation, surveys, photo and film documentaries and in-depth studies on human and spiritual renewal. Under the leadership of Jon Regier, Betty Thompson, John E. Biersdorf, Robert Lecky and David Ramage (all of whom held executive positions in the National Council of Churches), IDOC/NA launched an ambitious print communications program funded initially by NCC member churches and several private foundations.

Its one-time flagship publication, IDOC/Monthly, a scholarly dossier of documentation and analysis, had more than 4,000 paid subscribers by the mid-1970s. IDOC/NA editors Jack Becker, Pat Gaughan and Paul Hallock also supervised the co-publishing of some ten books by authors such as Dennis Goulet, Martin Marty, Earl D.C. Brewer and Erich Weingartner.

Throughout the 1970s, IDOC/NA also sponsored and co-sponsored a series of conferences with United Nations NGOs on Third World Development, Technology Transfer and Women's Political Rights, with funding from the New World, Ford and Lilly Foundations.

IDOC/NA assisted in the production of MERTON: A Film Biography for national broadcast on PBS television stations in 1984. The one-hour film on the life and thought of the Trappist monk and philosopher-poet Thomas Merton received awards of excellence and was re-telecast on the ABC network during the autumn of 1992.

IDOC/NA co-produced the PBS documentary A Quiet Revolution, a one-hour film that explores the impact of Latin American grassroots communities on the traditional and, more often than not, oppressive structures of Latin societies. A Quiet Revolution was awarded the 1989 Blue Ribbon of the American Film and Video Association, sharing honors with the Bill Moyers/Joan Konner film, Masks of Eternity, featuring Joseph Campbell.

Currently, IDOC/NA is promoting, as sponsor or co-sponsor, The Yellow Star Project and The Abraham Film Project.