ABOUT OUR CLUB
We meet In Person & Online
Tuesdays at 12:15 PM
First Congregational Church of Royal Oak
1314 Northwood Blvd.
Royal Oak, MI 48073-3123
United States of America
Currently meeting every 2 weeks
OUR STORIES
ATTENTION: Graduating seniors of RO High School, Shrine and Bishop Foley.
The Rotary Club of Royal Oak is pleased to announce that applications for our Academic Scholarship and Scholarship Renewals are open for 2022.
The online applications are due by April 22, 2022. Use the following links to apply.
If you are a FIRST TIME applicant (senior in High School):
If you are RENEWING a scholarship from the Rotary Club of Royal Oak:

The Seven Centers of Peace

Situated in different parts of the world, the Rotary Peace Centers offer tailor-made curricula to train individuals devoted to peacebuilding and conflict resolution — no matter where they land.

by Jeff Ruby Illustrations by Jason Schneider

Rita Lopidia vividly recalls her experiences as a Rotary Peace Fellow at the University of Bradford in England. “The classes in African politics and UN peacekeeping were my favorite,” she says. “The politics course challenged me to dig deeper into research to understand the history of the continent, and the peacekeeping class aided my understanding of global politics. As a practitioner, that was an eye-opener to have a global view of events happening around the world.”

Lopidia's time at the Rotary Peace Center profoundly affected her. "After graduation, I traveled back to Africa and settled in Uganda due to the ongoing conflict in South Sudan," she explains. "There I established the EVE Organization for Women Development and started engaging the South Sudanese refugees in Uganda and their host communities. Through my organization, we were able to mobilize South Sudanese women to participate in the South Sudan peace process promoted by eastern Africa's Intergovernmental Authority for Development — and that led to the signing of the Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan in 2018."

Lopidia is just one of the 1,500-plus peace fellows from more than 115 countries who have graduated from a Rotary Peace Center since the program was created in 1999; the first peace centers began classes three years later. Currently, Rotary has seven peace centers in various locations around the world; the newest, at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda — the first in Africa — welcomed its inaugural cohort of peace fellows in 2021. Next, Rotary plans to establish a peace center in the Middle East or North Africa, perhaps as soon as 2024, and has set its sights on opening one in Latin America by 2030.