Rotary International is launching a new peace center at Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul, Turkey.

 

Rotary International is launching a new peace center at Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul, Turkey.

By Etelka Lehoczky

Bahçeşehir University

Next month, Rotary International and administrators at Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul, Turkey, will begin recruiting fellowship candidates for a new peace center opening at the university. The Otto and Fran Walter Rotary Peace Center will offer experienced peacebuilders based in the Middle East and North Africa the opportunity to complete a one-year professional development certificate program, earning postgraduate diplomas in peace and development studies.

“The center will bring together peacemakers from across the Middle East and North Africa — people with different backgrounds and viewpoints, but who share common goals — and provide them with the resources and experiences needed to work together to promote peace within the region,” says Martha Peak Helman, a trustee of The Rotary Foundation and president of the Otto and Fran Walter Foundation. The Walter Foundation donated US$15.5 million to fund the center’s operations and fellowships for up to 40 students per year in perpetuity.

Rotary International offers emerging leaders in peace and development from around the world the opportunity to learn and grow at its peace centers. The centers are located at universities with well-established programs in peace studies, conflict resolution, and international development.

The curriculum of the newest Rotary Peace Center will address issues that are particularly relevant in the Middle East and North Africa: land disputes, climate change, food insecurity, refugee integration, and economic and community development. Fellows will also attend seminars and workshops offered by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research through CIFAL Istanbul, the UN’s international training center for local leaders and organizations, located at the university. The fellows will then implement a nine-month social change project in the region and present their work at a capstone seminar.

“The university’s unique partnership with the UN Institute for Training and Research, and its focus on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, will offer Rotary Peace Fellows from the region an opportunity to receive high-level training that is aligned with Rotary’s mission,” says Rotary Peace Centers Manager Laura Descher. “Their fellowship teaches them to use innovative policy and advocacy tools to address issues that drive conflict, and to adapt what they learn to their local contexts.”

The center’s academic director, Esra Albayrakoğlu, says its regional focus will be one of the keys to its success. “As the discipline of conflict management has given way to conflict transformation, bottom-up approaches based on finding local solutions to local problems more effectively address the root causes of conflicts,” she adds.

Bahçeşehir University, also known as BAU, is a private university with a global presence. One of the leading higher education institutions in Turkey, it has nearly 30,000 students from more than 125 countries. The peace center will be located on the university’s Future Campus , recently built in the suburbs of Istanbul. The peace fellows will live at the campus during the 10-week residential portion of the program and will have access to a spacious library, a study room, medical and fitness facilities, and other services.

“Fellows will have the opportunity to learn about various refugee communities, participate in sustainable development practices, visit areas affected by disasters, interact with nongovernmental organizations, and attend events reflecting the region’s cultural mosaic,” Albayrakoğlu says. “Bahçeşehir University represents the multiculturalism and spirit of hospitality that is so prevalent in Turkey. The university stands out as a microcosm of the Middle East and North Africa, hosting many students from this region and its environs.”

In February 2021, The Rotary Foundation Trustees gratefully accepted a record-breaking US$15.5 million pledge from the Otto and Fran Walter Foundation to establish a new peace center in the Middle East and North Africa region. This gift is allowing the Foundation to make progress toward its longtime goal of expanding the Rotary Peace Centers program to cover key geographic regions. In January 2023, the Trustees approved Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul, Turkey, to host the peace center and authorized the Foundation to proceed with a partnership agreement.

Applications for Rotary Peace Fellowships at all centers, including at BAU, will be accepted 1 February through 15 May. The fellows will be selected in November and begin their studies in early 2025. To be eligible for the fellowship at BAU, candidates must either be from the Middle East or North Africa, have worked in the region, work elsewhere with communities or initiatives connected to the region, or demonstrate strong interest in learning about peacebuilding approaches in the region. The fellowships will pay for tuition and fees, room and board, round-trip transportation to the university, and internship and field study expenses.

Rotary members in the region will play a crucial role in supporting the new center by encouraging peacebuilders from their communities to apply for the fellowship. Rotary members in Turkey will welcome peace fellows to the campus and help them become oriented to the Istanbul area.

“With clubs working together around the world to support community projects locally and globally, Rotary’s heart is in creating peace, goodwill, and friendship,” says John F. Germ, a past president of Rotary International and a member of the Rotary Peace Center Search Committee. “Our peace fellows learn to support community development programs that create environments for peace. Rotary’s partnership with Bahçeşehir University will enhance these efforts not only in the Middle East and North Africa but around the world.”

Based at premier universities, Rotary’s peace centers, which now total seven, offer fully funded master’s degree or professional development certificate programs. They have graduated more than 1,700 fellows, who now work in more than 140 countries. Many program alumni serve as leaders in governments, nongovernmental organizations, educational institutions, and international organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank. Each year, The Rotary Foundation awards up to 50 fellowships for master’s degrees and up to 80 for certificate studies.

“This new peace center builds on Rotary’s long history of working for peace,” says Bill Boyd, a past president of Rotary International and the chair of the Rotary Peace Center Search Committee. “We will not solve every problem, but we will make a difference through the many peace fellows who will become catalysts for peace across the region.”

Visit :-

https://www.rotary.org/en/new-rotary-peace-center-open-turkey

Global citizens: Club centers on peacebuilding

 

Global citizens: Club centers on peacebuilding

By Arnold R. Grahl

Illustration by Serge Seidlitz

What do you get when you put close to 20 Rotary Peace Fellow alumni in a (Zoom) room twice a month to discuss some of the world’s most challenging issues?

Something like Global Partners in Peace, a 2-year-old Rotary club whose international membership meets online and specializes in developing thought leadership on issues ranging from refugee advocacy and human rights to youth empowerment and anti-poverty initiatives. “We have really meaningful conversations,” says Linda Low, a 2016-18 peace fellow at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Guests often say, ‘You have the kinds of conversations that I have never seen in any other Rotary club.’”

The club, chartered in January 2022, has 18 members living in about a dozen countries. They include peace fellow alumni, global development professionals, and others with an interest in peacebuilding. Given its global membership, the club has also become a natural forum for advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion — within Rotary and within members’ communities.

Low, a communications and advocacy professional living in Seattle, had initially joined a Rotary club in North Carolina after her peace fellowship there. But with a full-time job, she found it hard to meet attendance and participation requirements. When she left, members in her district encouraged her to form a club that could better meet her needs.

At the beginning of the pandemic, she began meeting online with other peace fellows from her class. “We all were looking for a way to connect,” she recalls. Inviting colleagues they knew from the global development field, they continued meeting, and soon peace fellows from other classes found them. After a year, they decided to form the partners in peace club. “We realized this still fills a void” even after pandemic shutdowns, Low says. “We knew we had a model that worked.”

That model is open and flexible. Members take turns chairing the discussions held two Saturdays a month. They don’t take attendance, but members are encouraged to log in at least once a month. Meetings are informal with some people dialing in while walking their dogs or late at night, depending on their time zone.

How to lead a DEI discussion

The dialogue model developed by Rotary Peace Fellow Linda Low emphasizes building connections, understanding needs and interests, and listening. She has this advice:

Reframe the conversation. “I try to frame questions in a way that invites people to reflect on their own experience of an issue and hear someone else’s experience with the same issue,” Low says.

Find shared values. Another activity involves forming circles of people, with a facilitator asking participants to write key values on paper plates. Participants drop the plates in the middle of the circle, reading the words aloud and pledging to uphold each value in the discussion.

Pass the mic. A moderator asks a question to get discussion going, then passes around a talking stick. To encourage listening, only the person holding the stick is allowed to speak.

Meetings begin with a warmup question to get discussion going. It can be as whimsical as, “What is your favorite breakfast drink?” After that, members share updates on what is going on in their communities. “In 30 minutes, you have scanned the world,” says Patrick Bwire, a member from Uganda and peace fellow from the 2016-18 class at Duke-UNC. “We get to hear what issues need to be addressed and how our colleagues are addressing them.”

Members choose guest speakers from their networks, careful to select diverse voices and perspectives. Topics have included rural poverty in Pakistan, human trafficking in Chile, and transformative peace initiatives in Somalia. The impact of those discussions hinges on skilled moderation. Low and her co-facilitators employ a dialogue model that focuses on sharing and listening to peers’ experiences to highlight their common humanity.

Members bring a wealth of experience and perspectives to the table. “If you ask a question about the definition of a concept, it’s possible that you will not come out with a single answer,” says club member Kevin Fonseca, a professor at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia who focuses on peacebuilding, historical memory, and human rights. “Members elaborate with their answers so that it’s a collective action.”

Fonseca notes that the club’s current all-female leadership team demonstrates its commitment to equity and breaking traditional molds. And while Rotary is nonpolitical, these members aren’t afraid to discuss politics. “We talk about policies and governments, what’s happening in the States, and how it affects other countries,” says Low. “It doesn’t go there [get confrontational] because we’ve gotten to know each other so well.”

Sajjad Hussain says being part of the club allows him to see beyond his own focus on peacebuilding in Afghanistan and his native Pakistan. “It also gives me a sense of responsibility, belonging, and fulfillment as a global citizen,” he says.

Members are reaching out to other clubs to share their expertise, with a focus on DEI. Low says this grew out of work she and her classmates did at Duke to bridge divides on campus following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Low created a “leadership dialogue” model that she and classmates used to hold workshops with students from different colleges. “People walked away saying it had been a transformational weekend,” Low says. “We kept getting requests to do more and more.”

After the club chartered, she trained other members in the techniques and began fielding requests to talk about DEI from other Rotary clubs including ones in California, North Carolina, and Washington.

Bwire says the club approaches DEI differently because members have already experienced it in the peace program. “My class had students from 21 different countries,” he says. “That already gave me a hands-on experience in how to interact, relate to, and communicate with other people, and how to understand others, appreciate differences in culture, skin color, and people from other regions.”

Low agrees. “The whole point of the peace program is to bring different points of view and different lived experiences together to come up with something that is even better at the end,” she says. And reaching something better, together, is what the partners in peace club is all about.

This story originally appeared in the February 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.

Visit :-

https://www.rotary.org/en/global-citizens-club-centers-peacebuilding

Songs in the key of change

 

Musician and Rotary Peace Fellow David LaMotte wants us to listen more closely to the stories we’re telling. He will perform at the 2025 Rotary Convention.

By Geoffrey Johnson

In 2009, David LaMotte stepped away from a successful career as a musician, singer, and songwriter to accept a Rotary Peace Fellowship at Australia’s University of Queensland.

Image credit: Juan Diego Reyes

David LaMotte understands the power of a good story. Need proof? Look no further than the opening chapter of his book, You Are Changing the World: Whether You Like It or Not. There you will find the gripping account of a sudden illness that, in 2001, seemed like a stroke and left the 32-year-old LaMotte incapable of speaking and feeling sensation in his extremities. The things taken from him, as he explains in the book, were his words and his hands, a catastrophic loss for a man who made his living, and found spiritual sustenance, as a guitarist, singer, and songwriter.

Spoiler alert: LaMotte survived the ordeal, though that should be evident given that, 23 years later, he’s still around to discuss what happened. “As a professional musician, it’s easy to get self-absorbed,” the Rotary Peace Fellow says today. “What happened to me in 2001 made me reevaluate where I was putting my energy. I resolved to turn my focus outward.”

But if LaMotte understands the power of a good story, he also recognizes the importance of closely examining the stories we tell, what we hope to accomplish with them, and the truths they contain or perhaps, unintentionally, conceal. To ensure that people make good decisions, he says, it’s important to be cognizant of the stories we’re telling and the stories we’re hearing.

David LaMotte

• Rotary Peace Fellow, University of Queensland, Australia, 2009-10
• You Are Changing the World: Whether You Like It or Not, 2023 (2nd edition)
• “Why Heroes Don’t Change the World,” TEDx Talk, 2024

• Divergent passions

  But before delving into all that, here’s a quick look at LaMotte’s own story. The youngest of four children, he grew up in Sarasota, Florida. “We lived in the manse across the street from the church where my father was the Presbyterian minister. I was introduced to lots of different kinds of people at dinner.” Those meals, he says, imbued him with a “desire for connection across the lines that divide us.”

  LaMotte, who will speak and perform at the 2025 Rotary Convention in Calgary, also grew up listening to the music his older siblings liked, especially the singer-songwriters Neil Young, Jackson Browne, and Carole King. He began playing guitar in his teens, confining his playing to his bedroom. Finally, in college at James Madison University in Virginia, he began appearing at open mic nights. “I moved from performing covers to playing songs that I had made up,” he recalls. “It meant a lot to me that people were touched by my songs.”

  He graduated from college with two deep but divergent passions: music and mediation, an effective method of conflict resolution. Torn between the two, LaMotte gave himself two years to make it as a musician, which, against all odds (to hear him tell it), he succeeded in doing. Today he has 13 albums to his credit and has performed more than 3,500 concerts around the world, some with the trio Abraham Jam, a musical collaboration between a Jew (Billy Jonas), a Muslim (Dawud Wharnsby), and a Christian (LaMotte). Today he identifies as a “Quakertyrian.” “I’m a passionate amateur theologian, and my spirituality is pretty broad,” he says. “I have a foot planted in both religious traditions”: the Presbyterian teachings of his youth and the Quaker precepts that have informed his adulthood.

  And then, having succeeded as a musician, LaMotte set his career aside to study at Australia’s University of Queensland as a Rotary Peace Fellow. Accompanied by his wife, Deanna LaMotte, and their infant son, Mason, he spent a year and a half earning a master’s in international studies with a focus on peace and conflict resolution. “I was keenly aware of the privilege that the fellowship was,” says LaMotte, who praises the Rotary members of District 7670 (North Carolina) for making his fellowship possible and the members of his Queensland cohort for enriching the experience. “They were all extraordinary people, in midcareer and with a track record. They already had a lot to contribute, and I learned much from them.”

  Puncturing the hero myth

  Today, LaMotte continues to work with Senderos Guatemala (which translates to Guatemala Pathways), the arts, education, and mentoring program that he and Deanna founded after honeymooning in Guatemala. He also devotes time to public speaking engagements, including a recent TEDx Talk in Asheville, North Carolina (near his home in Black Mountain), that has accumulated more than 50,000 views online.

In his recent TEDx Talk, David LaMotte contends that movements, not individual heroes acting on their own, solve large-scale challenges.

Courtesy of David LaMotte

Called “Why Heroes Don’t Change the World,” the 18-minute speech, in addition to confirming LaMotte’s mesmerizing storytelling skills, allows him to challenge a predominant storyline that he fears undercuts our ability to accomplish effective change. (LaMotte considers the same topic in his book, which has been used in some college courses.) Too often, he says, we rely on the hero narrative, where “somebody really special” comes forward to “do something dramatic in a moment of crisis and then the problem is fixed.” Not only does that type of narrative absolve the rest of us from having to do anything other than wait, watch, and applaud, it doesn’t accurately reflect the way things really work. “I have yet to find one single example of this actually happening in the whole history of the world, not one where some extraordinary person ... effectively addressed a large-scale problem by themselves,” he says. “It has simply never happened.”

Returning to the story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, nearly 70 years ago, LaMotte recounts lesser-known details about the network of support behind the boycott, unfolding a more complex tale that relies on what he calls the movement narrative. The upshot is that the boycott succeeded because of ongoing efforts by a group of well-prepared and well-organized people. “They did not wait until the fire broke out to build the fire station,” he says, speaking metaphorically. “They had been doing the work for years. They were ready to go.”

LaMotte finishes by offering some words of wisdom and posing a question. “The truth is it’s not naive to think you can change the world,” he says. “It’s naive to think you can possibly be in the world and not change it. Everything you do changes the world whether you like it or not. We need you. So which changes will you make?”

This story originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.

Visit :-

https://www.rotary.org/en/songs-key-change

RI President Stephanie A. Urchick hosts members, scholars, and other peacebuilders to outline strategies

 

RI President Stephanie A. Urchick hosts members, scholars, and other peacebuilders to outline strategies

Rotary International President Stephanie Urchick addresses a general session at the 2025 Rotary Presidential Peace Conference in Istanbul, 20-22 February 2025.

Photo by Faid Elgziry

By Etelka Lehoczky

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Building peace requires thoughtful, sustained efforts and meaningful partnerships, Rotary International President Stephanie A. Urchick told attendees at a peace conference in Istanbul. The presidential conference, held 20-22 February, focused on “Healing in a Divided World.”

In her opening address, Urchick described the dedication required for true healing to take place.

“Our time together here is a testament to our shared belief in the power of peacebuilding,” she said. “But let’s acknowledge something essential: The act of ‘Healing in a Divided World’ is not something we can achieve quickly or easily. It takes an intentional commitment over time.”

Participants from various backgrounds outlined how that commitment could take shape.

At a session focused on technology and media, speakers discussed how technology can reinforce both peace and conflict. They highlighted the impact of artificial intelligence, the ways technology can bolster peacebuilding efforts, and the expansive threat of misinformation.

Sheldon Himelfarb, an award-winning filmmaker and the founder of PeaceTech Lab, called for peacebuilders to forge a global response to misinformation. The danger it poses, he argued, is comparable to that of war, pandemics, and climate change.

“Misinformation [is] a problem so serious, and so far-reaching, that I believe it is rapidly becoming (if it’s not there already) an existential threat to the planet,” he said. “Fortunately, each day there are more and more people working on this new existential threat, developing tools for fact checking, content labeling, media literacy, AI for peacebuilding, and more.”

Healing the environment and humanity

Other sessions focused on environmental issues in peacebuilding. Nada El Agizy, president of the Rotary E-Club of Egy-International and director of sustainable development and international cooperation at the League of Arab States, emphasized a particular threat in the Middle East.

“Climate change poses one of the most significant challenges the Arab States region has ever faced,” she said. “The region is considered one of the world’s foremost climate-change hotspots, and it is highly vulnerable to the negative impacts of global warming.”

Attendees take a photo at the 2025 Rotary Presidential Peace Conference in Istanbul, 20-22 February 2025.

Photo by Faid Elgziry

Rotary Peace Fellow Nahla ElShall speaks at the 2025 Rotary Presidential Peace Conference in Istanbul, 20-22 February 2025.

Photo by Faid Elgziry

Yana Abu Taleb, the Jordan director for EcoPeace Middle East, said it will be impossible to forge a sustainable peace in the region without doing more to fight climate change. Taleb’s organization brings together environmentalists from Jordan, Palestine, and Israel to promote sustainable development and advance peace efforts in the region.

“Peace will come, but we have to work for it,” Taleb said. “We have to understand that there will be no lasting peace between countries throughout the Middle East if the protection of our shared environment is not put at the center of conflict resolution.”

In the final session, attendees heard from a survivor of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Freddy Mutanguha was 18 when his parents, four sisters, and nearly 80 members of his extended family were murdered. After this unimaginable loss, he dedicated his life to preventing such atrocities and building a more peaceful world. Mutanguha, a member of the Rotary Club of Kigali-Mont Jali, Kigali, Rwanda, is now director of the Kigali Genocide Memorial and CEO of the Aegis Trust. He said the Kigali Genocide Memorial represents a decision to heal.

“We made a choice that in Rwanda, remembering should also mean healing,” he said. “Our generation needs to break the cycle of hate and build foundations for peace and prosperity. Peace is not a theory for us. It is real, urgent, and requires resolve.”

A new Rotary Peace Center welcomes scholars

Attendees at the conference included the first 13 Rotary Peace Fellows at the Otto and Fran Walter Rotary Peace Center at Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul. The newest of Rotary’s seven global peace centers, it offers peacebuilders based in the Middle East and North Africa the opportunity to earn professional development certificates in peace and development studies.

“Through its Peace Fellowship program, the center will equip a new generation of leaders with the knowledge, skills, and networks they need to address the root causes of conflict and to build sustainable peace in their communities and beyond,” Urchick said.

The Rotary Peace Fellows come from countries including Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen. During their fellowships, they will pursue projects such as aiding migrant single mothers, creating peacebuilding content for social media, strengthening grassroots organizations, and educating youth through sports programs.

Several of the fellows’ projects aim to empower refugees.

“Climate change and unsustainable agricultural policies contribute to the number of people involuntarily displaced,” said fellow Havva Şeyda Bodur in her biographical statement. “Humanity must find comprehensive solutions immediately. Otherwise, one day, everyone from all walks of life has the risk of being a refugee.”

In concluding the conference, Urchick called on the participants to forge partnerships to work for peace and said the new peace center reflected the essence of Rotary.

It “is more than just a physical space. It is a symbol of what we can achieve when we work together,” Urchick said. “Rotary’s success has always been rooted in partnerships, whether it’s between clubs, with local communities, or with global institutions. The challenges we face today demand nothing less than the combined efforts of governments, nongovernmental organizations, academia, and grassroots organizations. By fostering collaboration and sharing resources, we can amplify our impact and drive real progress .”

Learn more about Rotary’s commitment to promoting peace.

— February 2025

Visit :-

https://www.rotary.org/en/rotary-peace-conference-seeks-to-heal-in-a-divided-world

Champions of Peace

 

Rotary honors six People of Action: Champions of Peace

The honorees’ projects empower farmers and refugees, heal postwar trauma, and establish dialogue among diverse groups

By Etelka Lehoczky

Anne Kjær Bathel

Germany
Rotary Peace Fellow
Area of action: Preparing refugee children for the digital world

Anne Kjær Bathel is a Rotary Peace Fellow, former Rotary Youth Exchange student, social entrepreneur, mentor, and founder of the ReDI School of Digital Integration.

Bathel helped develop and execute the concept for ReDI Digital Kids, which offers technical education to refugee children in Germany. The program fosters children’s curiosity and creativity and encourages them to communicate and interact in group settings. It also builds digital literacy, empowering participants to navigate the online world safely and confidently.

The initial stage of the project involved 296 children and 78 teachers. Continued engagement with the community has been a key aspect of the program’s sustainability. Thanks to funding from corporate and government partners, it has now worked with more than 4,000 refugee and migrant children across Germany.

Bathel built strong partnerships with Rotary clubs in the community and abroad and secured critical long-term funding. Her background in peacebuilding and innovation allowed her and her team to create a program that has long-term social and economic benefits for the participants and their families.

María Cristina Cifuentes

Colombia
Rotary Peace Fellow
Area of action: Integrating peacebuilding into Colombia’s Nationally Determined Contributions

María Cristina Cifuentes, a Rotary Peace Fellow, member of the Rotary Action Group for Peace, and global climate justice ambassador, leads a pioneering project to integrate a peacebuilding approach into Colombia’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC). The NDC is a climate action plan submitted to the United Nations. This marks the first time Colombia’s NDC has incorporated peace as a critical element for sustainability and resilience against climate change.

The project establishes five pillars for Colombia’s NDC: governance and transparency, social empowerment and human rights, sustainable development and Positive Peace, human security and climate resilience, and innovation and capacity building. It focuses on communities that are vulnerable and have historically been excluded from decision-making processes, including children, Indigenous peoples, and rural populations.

While studying for a master’s degree as a Rotary Peace Fellow, Cifuentes designed a framework to foster peace in fragile contexts. She proposed this methodology to Colombia’s Ministry of Environment, aligning it with climate goals. The framework was integrated into the NDC 3.0 update for 2025-2030. It incorporates ethical transition principles and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals as well as a commitment to human rights, gender policies, and child-sensitive indicators. This innovative approach highlights the role of peace and social justice in driving transformative climate action.

Domino S. Frank

Chad
Rotary Peace Fellow
Area of action: Preparing women for work

Domino S. Frank is a Rotary Peace Fellow with more than 20 years of experience in humanitarian development and peacebuilding. He is a strategic advocate and project coordinator for the Corridors of Peace program in Guéréda, Chad. He focuses on helping displaced women and young people in conflict zones, offering vital services such as vocational training, education, and health care.

In a region destabilized by conflict and displacement, many women and young girls lack educational and economic opportunities. As a result, they may get trapped in cycles of poverty and dependency. The lack of opportunity fuels deeper social and economic divides, exacerbating tensions within the community and contributing to instability.

Corridors of Peace offers training in literacy as well as sewing, agriculture, soapmaking, and other skills that are both marketable and sustainable. By learning these trades, women and girls can generate income, improve their living conditions, and achieve financial independence. The program builds peace by addressing the root causes of conflict: poverty, inequality, and disenfranchisement.

Swati Herkal

India
Rotary Club of Wai in Maharashtra
Area of action: Supporting farmers through regenerative agricultural practices

Swati Herkal is a past district governor and past chair of the Governor’s Council of Rotary News Trust. She is also a member of The Rotary Foundation Cadre of Technical Advisers. An active philanthropist, she has served other organizations in various capacities.

Herkal initiated a project to address economic instability and social challenges in rural farming communities. These communities face increasing poverty, unemployment, migration, and poor soil conditions. All of those challenges taken together contribute to social unrest and exacerbate inequality. Herkal’s initiative encourages farmers to use composting and other sustainable agricultural practices to increase productivity.

In the project’s first phase, 70 participating farmers reported reduced costs, increased crop yields, and improved soil fertility. They also joined a Rotary Community Corps and served as mentors for more than 1,200 other farmers who were eager to adopt innovative methods. Women in these communities produced and sold compost, gaining a degree of financial independence. By demonstrating the success of regenerative farming, the project also offered a more promising career path for young people who might otherwise have left agriculture. The initiative is now being expanded to 50 additional villages.

Linda Low

USA
Rotary Peace Fellow, Rotary Club of Global Partners in Peace, North Carolina
Area of action: Starting dialogues on challenging issues

Linda Low is a Rotary Peace Fellow and the founder and charter president of the Rotary Club of Global Partners in Peace, which has members all over the world. Based in Seattle, Washington, USA, Low developed a process to facilitate dialogue among diverse groups to reduce divisiveness and polarization. The program, called Leadership Dialogues, was conceived in 2016 and is now used in communities across the United States and around the world.

Leadership Dialogues brings people together to discuss difficult issues and leaves participants with a clearer understanding of others’ points of view. By emphasizing shared values, thoughtful listening, and empathy, Leadership Dialogues encourages people to engage in productive discussion and appreciate different opinions and experiences. As a result, communities become stronger and more collaborative. Low has personally facilitated dialogues with at least 2,000 people, around half of them Rotary members. She has also helped many Rotarians in the United States learn to facilitate dialogues, and some Rotary districts have integrated Leadership Dialogues into their awareness campaigns and community engagement initiatives. Most participants surveyed have said the experience changed how they engage in dialogue.

Sanela Music

Bosnia-Herzegovina
Rotary E-Club of Global Impact District 1990
Area of action: Building resilience, trust, and connection

As a child, Sanela Music was a refugee who fled the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Today, she’s an international human resources consultant, a Rotary representative to the United Nations in Geneva, and a dedicated peacebuilder working with The Rotary Foundation and the SANCHILD Foundation.

Music leads the Harmony Project, which addresses postwar trauma by equipping communities to hold dialogues that promote healing and build lasting peace. Launched in 2021, it has carried out 47 initiatives that have benefited more than a thousand individuals and indirectly impacted nearly 50,000 people in 34 cities.

The Harmony Project in Schools empowers teachers and students to manage their emotions and build resilience and trust. Approved by two ministries of education in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the project reduces conflicts, stigmas, and cultural divides. It also enhances inter-ethnic connections. Participants report experiencing transformative changes in their relationships and an overall improvement in their well-being.

Inspired by the project’s outcomes, Music is working with peace education experts and Rotary partners to expand it across the Balkans and beyond.

Visit :-

https://www.rotary.org/en/rotary-honors-six-people-of-action-champions-of-peace

Email this PageRotary recognized six members and alumni as People of Action: Champions of Peace in January. This honor celebrates the recipients’ work to build peace around the world. Their ambitious and wide-ranging efforts include teaching technical skills to refugee children and promoting sustainable agriculture. The honorees exemplify Rotary’s values and the dedication it takes to make a lasting impact.