President Jean has already told you about the event so I won't repeat it here.
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| President Jean with our Vocational Service Awardees. Dorothy Ann Gould with sponsor Roger Lloyd. And above, Thulani Nkomo & James Delaney with sponsor Liz Short. |
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| Some of the assembled multitudes |
The Vocational Service Awards include a donation by the club to the charity of the awardee's choice...and in this instance it will probably be to their own!  |
| Viv Herbert from the Wits Faculty of Nursing Education and Lester Connock Awardee Basi Baloyi |
The Lester Connock Award is a R25 000 bursary.
And we had some visiting Rotarians from the Rotary Club of Accra Ring Road Central.
Charles Okyere, Edwin Provencal and Fred Kwofie. The small people in front are President Jean and the sergeant for the day, Sybille Essmann.
James Croswell has worked extremely hard to get a container from the Rotary Humanitarian Centre to provide an office etc for the Palliative Care volunteers at Baragwanath Hospital as an add on to our completed Global Grant project.
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| John Hope-Bailie, Jerry Bernardo and Marandi busy with the refurbishment. |
This Week
It's one of those relaxing social meeting followed by a Board Meeting. There will be the inevitable jokes, laughter and maybe a few things to catch up on.....so you never know what will happen.
Upgraded Rotary Peace Fellowship Programmes
This is very important as we have to keep up with trends and at the same time provide fellowships that are of practical use. If you read this article you will see just how this is being done.
(I have changed all the spellings to English ones for my own amusement....see if I missed one!)
With a new peace centre at Makerere University in Uganda, a re-imagined peace fellowship programme, and ambitious plans for the future, Rotary International advances its push for global harmony
Since Rotary inaugurated its peace fellows programme in 2002, 810 students have graduated with master’s degrees from one of five Rotary Peace Centres; an additional 514 have completed the certificate program from the peace centre at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. These fellows have become thought leaders in the world of peace studies, but only a small fraction of them — 148 — are from sub-Saharan Africa.
That’s about to change. In January, Rotary announced a new peace centre at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda — the first peace centre in Africa — and a complete re imagining of the Rotary PeaceCentres professional development certificate programme. “This is a real bonus not just for Africa but for Rotary,” says Bryn Styles, chair of the Rotary Peace Centres Committee. “It will increase our credibility in the area of peace.”
The announcement was greeted enthusiastically in Kampala. “It was important for us to expand our expertise and our engagement in the area of conflict and peace,” says Barnabas Nawangwe, vice chancellor at Makerere University. “Partnering with an international organisation like Rotary allows us to demonstrate on a global scale what we’ve been doing for 20 years in our local environment. What we’ve learned here we can use to confront strife in populations all over the world.”
Rotary was seeking a program that draws from the regional expertise and experiences of those affected by conflict, says Jill Gunter, manager of the Rotary Peace Centres programme. Makerere, which already offered a programme in peace and conflict studies, was ideal because of its focus on local peace-building and conflict transformation. “The programme will attract candidates dedicated to working for peace throughout Africa,” Gunter says. “It helps that Uganda provides lessons in hosting refugees that the whole world can learn from — and Makerere showed a willingness and desire to adapt their programmes to Rotary’s needs and requirements.”
Nawangwe expects local Rotarians to also play a big role in the success of the new centre. “There are many clubs around Africa engaged in the cause of peace, so there is much they can offer,” he says. “Makerere is located in the heart of the Great Lakes region, which has historically experienced the most strife in Africa. We’ve had frequent experience with conflict, which is why we established our peace programe. We have a formidable faculty that understands and can educate others about conflict and peace.” Nawangwe expects that peace fellows will do field studies in areas struggling with the aftermath of conflict, such as South Sudan and Rwanda. “We will talk with the communities there, finding out what happened, what has been done, and what remains to be done,” he says.
Rotarians from the region had been “very keen” to land the new peace centre, says Styles. “The new certificate programme at Makerere will provide peace fellows with the education and hands-on experience that will allow them to go back to their communities with tools to create positive social change,” he says.
When the first peace fellows begin their studies at Makerere in January 2021, they will be introduced to Rotary’s new yearlong certificate programme in peace-building, conflict transformation, and development. The peace centre at Chulalongkorn University, which has offered the three-month version of the certificate program, will also follow the new model.
“It was important to bring the certificate programme into the larger peace-building ecosystem of Rotary,” says Surichai Wun’Gaeo, the director of the Chulalongkorn peace centre. “We also want to be more aligned with Positive Peace efforts and foster a holistic understanding of the relationship between peace and development. In the past, when we talked about peace, it was separate from development. Peace was considered a separate sector. Now we will move to a comprehensive approach to peace-building.”
In the new model, each certificate programme will accept a cohort of up to 20 peace fellows twice a year. The online application for the 2021-22 peace fellowship is available beginning this month. Qualified candidates for the certificate programme will be professionals with a minimum of five years of experience in peace and development. They must be working on or have an idea for an initiative that promotes peace or social change in their workplace or community.
The programme will begin with an online course to provide each of the incoming fellows with baseline knowledge on peace and development studies. It will also offer fellows the opportunity to share ideas about their peace and social change initiatives with one another.
A 10-week session will follow at the peace centre, where fellows will work on their peace initiatives and create plans to bring them to fruition. After a review of the fundamentals of peace-building and conflict resolution, the curriculum will concentrate on human rights, governance, and the role of media in conflict, among other topics; it will also help fellows develop practical skills, such as in mediation and negotiation. To build on Rotary’s strategic partnership with the Institute for Economics and Peace, a one-week workshop will be devoted to the theory and practice of Positive Peace. Fellows will devote two weeks to field studies, an opportunity to engage in hands-on sessions of experiential learning. (At Makerere, for instance, it’s proposed that fellows visit western Uganda and Kigali, Rwanda, to study ethnic strife and incidents of mass atrocities.) All this will occur within a regionally focused context, which could mean an emphasis on refugees, climate-induced conflict, and peace-building in divided societies.
At the end of the 10-week session, fellows will return to their jobs or communities and implement their initiatives over the next nine months. They will be assisted by a mentor chosen from members of the university’s faculty or network of professionals. Fellows will also participate in interactive online learning sessions with other members of their cohort.
As the yearlong programme concludes, fellows will return to the peace centre for a one-week capstone session, where they will network, hear from prominent experts in the field of peace and development, and reflect and report on their initiatives. To foster a long-term affiliation with one another and with Rotary, the cohort returning for its final week will overlap with a new cohort starting its first on-site session. After the programme concludes, graduates will continue to hone their leadership skills and reassemble periodically to provide updates, inspiration, and encouragement to one another, all with an eye toward creating a robust regional hub of peace-builders.
Other changes still lie ahead for the Rotary peace programmes. An enhanced master’s degree programme — one that concentrates more broadly on the link between peace and development and that is aligned with each of Rotary’s six areas of focus — will be introduced in 2022, and two more peace centres offering the certificate programme are expected to launch by 2030, one in Latin America or the Caribbean and a second in the Middle East or North Africa.
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