By Dan May
Rotary Club of Orange
Dan May
The president-elect for Rotary International, Stephanie Urchick, met in New Haven with members from Rotary clubs from across New England last month. She discussed initiatives for RI peace-building programs, and joined a speaker’s panel that included a Peace Fellow completing an RI-funded master’s degree at Oxford University as well as Rotary’s current liaison with the United Nations.
Although I have been affiliated with local clubs for nearly two decades, I was not aware how extensive Rotary’s links to the UN extend. In the tumultuous 1930s, Rotary clubs in Tennessee and Texas started to advocate for “institutes of understanding” to promote international awareness and peace. Rotary’s expanding global club structure helped spread these institute ideals worldwide.
When US President Franklin Roosevelt and the UK’s Winston Churchill agreed in the darkness of World War II to convene meetings to establish the UN, Rotary was invited to provide international delegates and chair several of the founding subcommittees. Overall, 49 Rotarians from around the world participated in the 1945 UN charter meetings in San Francisco, and the first draft of the UN charter was written by a Rotarian from South Africa. Thus, the humanitarian goals of RI and the UN are similar. New York City Rotarians also played a key role in negotiating the land deal to establish UN headquarters along the East River.
RI annually hosts a convention for club members from around the world to discuss activities, policies and platforms. The 1940 convention was held in Havana, Cuba, and that meeting’s statement on “respect for human rights” ultimately evolved in 1948 into the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And the 1942 London convention laid out a framework that helped formulate the specialized United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Most media coverage of the UN focusses on politically fraught Security Council votes and/or peace-keeping activities. Rotary is not involved in such actions but does join in humanitarian initiatives in conflict-troubled regions where possible. One UN entity that Rotary regularly works with is UNICEF – the United Nations children’s fund. UNICEF is coordinating aid provisions for women and children in Gaza, south Saharan Africa and elsewhere.
Another UN agency that RI works closely with is UNESCO. UNESCO fosters international collaborations in education, natural sciences, social and human sciences, culture and communication. In particular, RI shares UNESCO literacy and education objectives and collaborates on a range of technical projects, particularly with regard to water supply and rural development.
In recent years, the Orange club has donated funds raised in the local community to support projects in Kenya to expand a multilingual community library, enhance water supply in both rural Kenya and Nepal, and subsidize pediatric heart surgeries in the Dominican Republic. These are collaborative global grant projects where groups of local Rotary clubs in our area band together with clubs in the receiving countries to design, fund and execute humanitarian projects. RI itself provides matching funds, technical and administrative guidance and access to potential support groups, including those that are UN-affiliated.
One of the understated roles of UNESCO (and the UN in general) is that it serves as a clearinghouse and hub for hundreds of international non-governmental organizations. Rotary is one, but so are organizations such as the International Federation of Libraries, International Police Association, World Association of Newspapers or World Federation of Engineering Organizations. These professional guilds share information, volunteer technical expertise and collaborate globally. The collective diffusion of knowledge and skills by these networked NGOs since World War II has been immense.
As an example, each year the UN organizes Conference of Parties meetings focused on climate change or biodiversity. The most famous of these is likely the COP 21 climate change meeting that met in Paris in 2015. It yielded the international treaty seeking to limit average global temperatures below two degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels. COP meeting attendees include official delegates from the nearly 200 member states of the UN, but also representatives from the hundreds of NGOs (including Rotary) and corporations that collaborate to address environmental concerns at all levels.
Treaties are rare, but the networking and sharing of best and emerging practices is the real goal of these COP meetings. The most recent climate change conference met last December in Dubai, and the next biodiversity conference will meet in Columbia this October. Rotary International was and will be there, and will bring back emerging global perspectives for sustainability to inform its own environmental and development initiatives.
Dan May is the president of the Rotary Club of Orange.