For District's First Peace Fellow, Journey Began With an "Aha! Moment"

Amelia remembers exactly how and when she first became committed to a career in international development.

 

As a fifteen-year-old high school student in Western Massachusetts, she chanced upon a book by a former Peace Corps member who had developed agricultural programs in sub-Saharan Africa.  “The author’s passion inspired me,” Amelia says.  “At the time, I was focusing on sustainable agriculture in my own studies at Northfield Mount Hermon.  I already knew I wanted to work for the greater good.  But seeing how this guy managed to establish these practices in sub-Saharan Africa – it really showed me just what was possible.  It inspired me to think globally.  It was one of those ‘aha! moments,’ where I realized that I needed to work internationally, possibly in issues relating to land.”

 

Amelia attended college in Boulder, Colorado, where her coursework focused on civil rights.  After graduation, her passion for global change brought her first to French West Africa as an English teacher, and then to Sudan and Uganda, where she spent the last six years working for a leading Sudanese NGO on development projects.  Her experiences managing the agency’s Uganda field office deepened her appreciation for the power people have to improve the world and, more practically, made her into a seasoned and effective development worker.

 

Enter Rotary.  “In Uganda,” says Amelia, “I had the incredible good fortune of becoming friends with a woman – she works for the World Bank now – who had completed something called a Peace Fellowship a few years earlier.  She kept urging me to apply for the program.”

 

Amelia learned that The Rotary Foundation annually funds some of the world’s most dedicated and brightest professionals to study at RI's five international Peace Centers.  What these Peace Fellows have in common is a commitment to the real-world advancement of peace.  Many go on to serve as leaders in national governments, leading NGOs, international organizations such as the United Nations and World Bank, and even militaries.

 

Eventually, Amelia reached out from Uganda to our District.  That lead to a Skype interview with Jeff Tager and other members of the Bloomfield (CT) Rotary Club; after that, things moved quickly.  Although our District had never before sponsored a Peace Fellow, Jeff immersed himself in the program’s requirements and helped guide Amelia through the formal application process.

 

The effort paid off with Amelia’s acceptance to the 2014/2015 Master’s degree program at Rotary’s Bradford University Peace Center.  This summer she relocated to England and found accommodations.  Classes began last Monday.

 

For the next fifteen months, Amelia and ten other Rotary Peace Fellows at Bradford University will be completing extensive course work in peace and conflict resolution/prevention.  The Center’s interdisciplinary approach integrates multiple fields of scholarship related to mitigating armed conflict and violence, within a framework of international development and human rights law.  Amelia notes that a solid grounding in peace and conflict resolution studies, of precisely the sort available through the Peace Centers, is a potentially crucial asset for anyone seeking to carry out meaningful development work in today’s world, with its extensive war-torn regions.

 

In addition to her classroom studies, Amelia will also need to complete a practical internship known as an Applied Field Experience, or “AFE”, and submit a written dissertation.  Those are tough requirements, but fortunately, she won’t have the added burden of finding a way to cover her expenses!  A full Rotary fellowship is covering Amelia’s travel to and from the program, tuition, living expenses, study materials and other incidentals.  Peace Fellows also receive a modest stipend for attending conferences.

 

“I’m so grateful to Rotary for this amazing opportunity,” says Amelia.  “It’s especially exciting to be here at Bradford with a Rotary program, instead of as a regular graduate student.  The network Rotarians and the Peace Fellows have built is just incredible – and the work they do is truly helping to make the world a better and hopefully kinder place.”