Rob presented the following at last week's meeting:  "As you know, Rotary Melbourne, through and with the District 9800 Foundation Committee, has maintained an unbroken record of mentoring successful Peace Fellows from the start of the program in 2001, firstly under the guidance of Bob Fels and more recently by myself.

We believe we are the most successful District in the world in this Internationally competitive process. The number of endorsed candidates from D9800 selected for Peace Fellowships now stands at 40. Next year we will be adding another interested community organisation to our network who assist us in identifying possible candidates, The SES in Victoria. This adds to the group consisting, in particular, RedR, Victoria Police and past Fellows. Rotary Melbourne members are also asked to continue their support.

This year we had a record four successful candidates from 6 endorsed by the D9800 committee in June of this year, 4% of the world total!  The four successful candidates this year were:

• Essan Dileri. He was nominated by past Peace Fellow Jessica Trjisberg. Essan was a refugee from Afghanistan with a price on his head, now an Australian citizen working in Local Government at Melton. He will enter the Certificate course at Chulalongkorn in June 2020
• Jenelle Fuller was nominated by Victoria Police and maintains their record in the program with now 9 out of 9 applicants being successful in gaining admission to the Certificate program. She will join with Essan in the June 2020 intake at Chula.
• Eva Mackinley was nominated by PDG July Mason from Wyndham Rotary Club through to Rotary Melbourne. Eva is well known to Bob Fels as she was selected on the team of young adults which attended the RI President’s Peace Conference in Hiroshima six years ago led by him and Tania Militec; our first Peace Fellow. Eva undertook a late entry degree at Deakin University. Eva will be going to Bradford University to undertake a master’s degree starting in the Northern summer of 2020.
• Natascha Hryckow, a Latrobe University graduate, came to us through RedR. Her career has been unusual, even for RedR.  Natascha, educated at LaTrobe University, lives in Paris and undertakes consultative work for the WHO, UN, EU and NATO in regional crisis and conflict situations. However, In the past few days Natascha has been offered a position as co-ordinator for the Somali Sanctions Committee of the UN and is now unlikely to be in a position to take up the fellowship.

You will recall that one of our Peace Fellows, Lucienne Heyworth, who spoke briefly at our meeting a few months ago, was honoured by RI as a Rotary person of action at an award ceremony in New York earlier this month. Lucienne, a graduate teacher from the University of Melbourne, came to us as a consequence of interest provoked by her UN employer in a Jordanian refugee camp, and was quickly mentored jointly by the Rotary Club of Fitzroy and Melbourne Rotary. Since graduation from Uppsala University in Sweden in 2017 she has been employed in the middle east by UNESCO and Caritas in education program design and implementation for refugees in Jordan, Syria Yemen and Lebanon. A tough environment in which to work for peace!

A number of our Peace Fellows and Rotarians are currently engaged in developing the program for a Peace Symposium entitled “The future of Peace Leadership” to be held as part of the celebrations surrounding the Centenary of Rotary in Australasia in 2021.

We aim to enhance collaboration between Rotarians, Peace Fellows and the community through this initiative. I ask you to take a copy of the “Save the Date” Peace_Symposium_Flyer_Final 11.19_1.pdf we have provided for April 21 and 22, 2021 and join with us at that time to celebrate and, simultaneously, learn how peace programs and projects will develop through the 21st Century in our region.

The program is not fully set in concrete and I would particularly like to ask for help in respect of any contacts you may be able to enable with the indigenous community to facilitate the proposed session on Indigenous reconciliation. The organising committee will accelerate funding, publicity and logistic activities early next year and I would like to hear from anyone interested in joining the committee in these roles as soon as possible."

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