Global partnership a dream come true for clean water advocate
“I was always impressed with the passion Rotarians have,” Lis Bernhardt says.
Image credit: Sarah Waiswa
Few people could have been more thrilled than Lis Bernhardt, a former Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, when Rotary and the UN Environment Programme announced a joint initiative this year to empower Rotary members to protect, restore, and sustain local bodies of water with technical guidance from UNEP experts.
A program officer for UNEP, Bernhardt spent five years moving the idea for Community Action for Fresh Water forward through leadership changes at both organizations. After the agreement was revealed during Rotary’s International Assembly in January, she posted on her LinkedIn page: “A professional dream has come true.” (Read about Bernhardt’s experience in her own words on Rotary’s blog.)
“Rotary has been a huge part of my working for the United Nations,” she later explained. “To be able to give back to Rotary, close that loop, and connect in a global partnership is super exciting.”
Bernhardt has held multiple positions in international development since her Rotary-supported studies at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland in 2000-02. Her work has often focused on the overlap between development and the environment. As a program officer for UN-Water in New York in 2015, she essentially “held the pen” for the UN’s sustainable development goal 6, which is to ensure the availability and management of clean water and sanitation systems. Many of her roles have had one thing in common: water.
That may have something to do with a chance encounter midway through her Rotary scholarship that altered her career trajectory.
Bernhardt arrived in Geneva sponsored by the Rotary Club of Valparaiso, Indiana, in her hometown. With her undergraduate degree in international studies from Northwestern University near Chicago, she intended to focus on conflict resolution and the rights of minorities.
As an intern with UN Volunteers during the summer between her first and second year, she was part of a program where nongovernmental organizations and other civil society groups in developing countries could apply for online volunteer assistance for projects like building a website, translating documents, or writing a funding proposal. Her job was to vet applications, including one from the Navajo Nation in the United States.
“Their request met all of our qualifications,” she recalls. “They clearly needed access to education. They had issues with drinking water and sanitation. They were a disadvantaged group and a minority. They met all the criteria, except that they were in the U.S.,” which disqualified the group.
Lis Bernhardt
- Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, 2000-01
- Master’s in international affairs, Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland, 2002
- MBA, Henley Business School, England, 2012
Though the group’s application was rejected, its plight stuck with her. She remained in contact and visited the Navajo Nation. The example became the basis for her master’s thesis that explored the disconnect between the environmental and socioeconomic tracks of development.
“In the end, all of their issues were environmental. I saw how conditions in the environment underpin all other development issues,” she says. “That’s where I shifted my thinking. Every job I have had since has been in the environmental sphere.”
After short stints with Amnesty International and as a consultant for UN Volunteers, Bernhardt joined the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change in Bonn, Germany, serving as a program officer and head of external relations. In 2009, she took a job with a UN-Water program in Bonn and later moved to UN-Water’s office in New York where she contributed to writing the sustainable development goals on water and sanitation.
As influential as that work was, she began to get an itch for the implementation side “to help make these sustainable goals a reality.” Moving to Kenya in 2016, she joined the Freshwater Ecosystems Unit at UNEP. It was there in 2018 that she was part of the reception for a Rotary International delegation, including incoming President Barry Rassin, that was exploring a partnership. Wheels were already in motion for the environment to become one of Rotary’s areas of focus.
“A couple of us, including Dan Cooney, our head of communications who was a Rotary Peace Fellow, were largely responsible for driving the idea of a partnership on our end forward,” Bernhardt recalls. “We had both been involved with Rotary and knew what a relationship could look like.”
up: Lis Bernhardt at Lake Geneva, Switzerland. down: Bernhardt and a colleague crossing the Congo River from Brazzaville to Kinshasa for a project to preserve the carbon stores in basin peatlands. Courtesy of Lis Bernhardt
After many conversations, Bernhardt’s bosses at UNEP wanted to collect data before ironing out an agreement. Bernhardt got together with Joe Otin, then Rotary’s representative to UNEP, and together they launched a pilot project, called Adopt a River for Sustainable Development, in District 9212 covering Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Sudan. Bernhardt and her colleagues worked with Rotary members in 20 clubs as they “adopted” nine rivers to collect garbage, catalog pollution information, hold community engagement events, and meet with responsible parties to discuss solutions. They performed a type of research known as citizen science, driving the creation of a long-range plan for each river.
Looking back, Bernhardt credits her scholarship year with her desire to work with Rotary members. “That year, I met with Rotarians in a lot of clubs, and it was just like talking with the club back in Valparaiso. I was always impressed with the passion Rotarians have, the fact that they are all over the world and that they want to do good for their communities.”
She remains enthusiastic about the partnership’s potential.
“Water is so valuable to everything we do,” she says. “Not a day goes by that we don’t use fresh water in some way. We drink it to live. It is embedded in the food we grow. It makes our industry go. It is essential for every kind of energy we use. Water is so present and so essential in all these processes.”
This story originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.
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