Over the weekend, my wife and I attended our first Rotary district conference at a hotel around the corner from the Alliance for Peacebuilding’s (AfP) office at Dupont Circle here in Washington DC. We initially had not planned on going, but since AfP decided to sponsor the event and someone needed to take our popup banner, we decided to go.
And we’re glad we did.
As you are about to see, it reinforced my sense that organizations like Rotary could play a vital role in sparking vital social change not just in the United States but around the world.
District Conferences
Rotary is an amazingly decentralized organizations whose center of gravity are its 1.4 million members who form more than 46,000 local clubs around the world. Each club pretty much decides what it wants to do as long as its activities fall within one of Rotary International’s seven areas of focus (including peacebuilding) and conforms to its Four-Way Test that emphasizes friendship and relationship building.
Each club is part of a district. Thus, our club that exists fully on line is part of the district that covers the DC suburbs in northern Virginia and other parts of the state almost to Richmond. This year, our leadership decided to hold its district conference with our neighboring district to the north which includes Washington DC and its Maryland suburbs.
Typically, a Rotary district conference is shaped by its volunteer leaders and in some ways reflects the goal chosen by that year’s international president which, this year, is the Magic of Rotary. That’s a loose enough tag line for the district teams to take the conference in any number of directions.
What We Learned
This wasn’t like any conference I had ever been to before, including the Rotary Peace Conferences I had helped organize.
I tend to go to professional meetings that are pretty much all business. Including the social time. Thus, in the previous month, I had been at AfP’s PeaceCon and the Mercatus Center’s Pluralism Summit, both of which I wrote about in recent posts.
This one was different.
It was a social as well as a social change gathering.
That reflects what Rotary is.
Most people join Rotary and clubs like it because they want to give something back to their communities. That’s true for us. We would not have joined Rotary if it did not have peacebuilding as one of its areas of focus.
Many also join and stay in organizations like Rotary because they become a central part of their social life. Thus, lots of Rotary clubs add a fifth criterion to its Four-Way Test—Is it fun?
That was definitely in evidence at the conference. A vocal MC. Dancing. Cheering. Instead of the traditional “Rotary chicken” dinners, the organizers arranged for participants to eat dinner with Rotarians they didn’t know in area restaurants. We did that the first night with members of our club whom we had never met in person when we all met at KramerBooks and Afterwards which is my home away from home in DC. The second night we went to a lovely Turkish restaurant with people I had only met in passing before.
But there was a serious side, too. The Mayor of Washington, Muriel Bowser, gave the keynote. We also had talks on child trafficking and potentially constructive ways of using AI. We all contributed to a service project that made sense given the fact that we were in DC for a day—providing toiletries and other supplies for the unhoused.
Given my reasons for being in Rotary I went to both breakout sessions on Rotary’s partnership with the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University which I have helped support. The two sessions were quite different. The first primarily drew people who were already involved in the partnership and thus focused on things it could do. The second audience was bigger, and few of those attendees knew much about Rotary’s work in peacebuilding in general. It was frankly more interesting.
A New Model for Social Change
That’s the case because the conference reinforced a conclusion I’ve been lurking toward for a few years. Maybe—just maybe—lasting social change can begin in mainstream American society rather than on the fringes. Rotarians—and I assume members of other service clubs—tend to be successful. There were doctors and lawyers and \retired military officers and social workers and realtors and diplomats and librarians and teachers and more. Not many captains of industry or poor people. This was the American middle class.
And it was more demographically diverse than I expected. I didn’t count, but at least twenty percent of the attendees were people of color. As is the case with Rotary in general, it wasn’t a young crowd, but the organizers were in their forties, not their seventies like me. There even was a smattering of people whose hair color wasn’t challenged yet.
The conference also reflected one of the problems with an “inside-out” theory of change. While it is true that few of the people who were at Westin last weekend were satisfied with the status quo, most were also as interested in having fun as they were in dedicating their lives to social change. Even the Rotary mantra of service above self has to fit into the flow of Rotarians’ daily lives that does not often include the kind of obsession with social change you tend to get among professional peacebuilders like myself.
Still, I came away intrigued by the fact that Rotarians could and should play a vital role in Peacebuilding Starts at Home and more.
But It May Also Be Our Last District Conference
At the same time, I’m not convinced that I’ll go to many more large-scale Rortary gatherings, including next year’s international conference in Calgary. To begin with, I’m not a fan of large gatherings of any kind. Add to that the fact that I like to be intellectually and politically challenged when I do go to large gatherings. Finally, I ask myself whether the money I spend to attend such an event could be of more use elsewhere.
My commitment to Rotary and to social change from the inside out remains intact.
But, I wasn’t tempted to buy any of the Rotary shirts or other merch on offer.
WHAT’S NEXT—Build IRL
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.
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