Reality Tells Me What To Do

Ten days ago, Gretchen and I attended the Chesapeake Regional President Elect Training for all of the Rotary clubs in what we call the DMV (District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware) region—CPETS for those in the know.

Although I hadn’t planned to write about the event, I changed my mind a few minutes after we got there because the weekend deepened my understanding of the potential that service clubs like Rotary have, why they aren’t quite realizing it, and what could be done to ramp up their game.

You will have to read to the end to have the title make sense, however

It might help to put why we were there in context.

No, we are not becoming presidents of our E-club of Global Peacebuilders.

Rather, the present, past, and incoming District Governors for Northern Virginia thought that we should be there to talk about peacebuilding in the US and make people aware of my new book (which you can order by clicking the link at the end of this post).

More importantly, they also understand that our country’s divisions are particularly visible in our region that, of course, includes Washington, DC. And, since Rotary is one of the few organizations left that still attracts people of all political stripes, they wanted us to help convince our fellow Rotarians to engage.

Together, People Create Change

That they were right became clear with the first keynote speaker, Marty Peak Hellman, whom we had met at an earlier event a couple of years ago and liked her a lot. She serves on the Rotary Foundation board of trustees and was the driving force in the fund raising effort for the organization’s new Peace Center in Turkey. She is also one of two people we know named Marty Hellman who are first class peacebuilders. The other is a retired engineering professor at Stanford and male. They have never met. I’ll leave that story for another time.

This Marty Hellman began her talk with the four words in this section’s title which are drawn from this longer sentence from Rotary’s vision statement.

Together, we see a world where people unite and take action to create lasting change—across the globe, in our communities, and in ourselves.

I have no idea how many times I had read or heard that statement, but it didn’t really click until she reduced it to those four words.

Together, people create change.

To be honest, I would have wanted her to have kept a fifth word, lasting.

But these will do.

Yes, Rotary is a service organization

And yes, we saw plenty of Rotarians focus on what my activist self might think of as do-gooder projects that would help the people it serves but that’s about it.

Then, look at Marty’s version, which other senior Rotarians often use. Don’t forget together and create. Or my hoped-for addition of lasting.

In other words, by the time Marty had finished, I was psyched. And saw why the DGs wanted us there.

They (like Gretchen and me) wanted to take Rotary to the next level and truly become a social change promoter.

And a lasting one at that.

Bob Putnam’s Shadow and Service Organizations

Marty’s words also helped me add some focus to the hundred or so discussions about my book and the Peacebuilding Starts at Home initiative which AfP is helping lead.

Almost all of them got to Robert Putnam’s research on civil society and his book, Bowling Alone, for which he is best known.

After Rotary, Putnam is the star of my book.

In fact, it begins with a statement we heard him make at a discussion of the documentary based on this work and life, Join or Die. His last words to the group of Georgetown students in the audience that night were, “The future of our country is in your hands.”

I ended up focusing on Bob’s work in part because Gretchen and I have known Putnam since we took one of his courses as grad students at the University of Michigan in the early 1970s. More importantly, two parts of the strategy for social change that I (and he) have come to espouse since then are at the heart of my book.

· Unlike what many of us thought in the 1960s, you can build lasting social change from the insider of society out.
· Any successful movement has to focus on forging dramatic shifts in the ways that Americans think about their society and about each other. If the Chinese Communist Party hadn’t given the term a bad name, I might call it a cultural revolution.

And who might be better at pulling off than Rotary? Or the other service organizations?

t least if Rotarians and their colleagues who call themselves Moose or Lions or Elks or Odd Fellows or Kiwanians realize that they have to take Marty’s and Bob’s words seriously?

That won’t happen quickly or easily.

But we can get there is we tackle the next thing I learned last weekend.

How We Deal With DEI and the Culture Wars

In an earlier post after an earlier Rotary event, I argued that politics doesn’t have to be a four-letter word.

Even if most Americans think it is rapidly becoming one.

Here, another keynote talk at the lunch before the presidents-to-be went into their final breakout session did the trick.

I had never heard of Brian Rusch before we registered for the conference which is somewhat surprising given his connections to folks who have influenced my thinking including Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, and Pope Francis.

But then, Rusch is a former fashion designer turned video producer which have not been central parts of my life—to say the least. To get a sense of what I was missing, here is a key passage from his Linkedin page in describing his work for his main gig, Out for Equality.

I deliver keynote addresses and speak on panels about peace, human rights, LGBTQIA+ issues and DEI. I share my own experiences having worked with and on behalf of some of the world’s greatest peace leaders in the world, as well as creating peace building programs for people of all ages. Below are a sample of places I have presented. I regularly deliver keynote addresses in English, Portuguese and Spanish. United Nations Headquarters, Rotary International Assembly, UNESCO/MiSK Foundation NGO Forum, Stanford University, Rotary International Convention, UNESCO Achieving Global Citizenship NGO Forum, Global Sustainability Network, Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, QS World Merit Global Launch, The Better Man Conference, Beyond Borders International Festival, University of San Diego, World Merit Council Summit, Global Peace Film Festival, Forward: The Rotaract Canada Symposium, University of Southern California, Rollins College, A Taste of Liberia with Leymah Gbowee (co-host), Negus-Worldwide Party (co-host), American University, various Rotary District Conferences.

He had been asked to talk to a changing Rotary about what its international leadership now calls the Enhanced Participant Engagement Committee which had been DEI until last year. As his Linkedin profile goes on to say:

Despite the name change, the work remains the same–to create a more diverse, equitable and inclusive organization at Rotary International.

The reactions of my table mates said a lot. Two engineers of about my age found his ideas and his style perplexing, but I watched them warm to what Brian had to say. The two middle aged Black women were enthusiastic from the moment he started as was the young, hip couple at the table next to ours.

But they were all drawn to what Brian had to say because he took on controversial issues (at least for many Americans) in a non-controversial way. He showed how even the most conventional Rotarian could see the benefits of a more diverse (and younger) organization and that we could only get there if we took enhanced participant engagement (DEI is a more descriptive term, sorry) seriously as something that could benefit us all.

Like the two engineers sitting to my left.

Politics doesn’t have to be a four-letter word.

DEI doesn’t have to be a threat.

As the words of Rotary’s own Four-Way Test puts it, “beneficial to all.”

And can actually be fun.

Rotary, the Book, Oberlin, and PBSH

That brings me (at last) to this post’s title, whose origin story has nothing to do with Rotary. It comes from this poster that Oberlin College’s admissions office used to entice potential students twenty years or so ago. In case you can’t read the words on your phone or laptop,

Think You Can Change the World? So Do We. Oberlin.

I spent the second half of the 1960s, there, as I put it, majoring in ending the war in Vietnam, a time that set me off on the political and professional journey which came together in Peacebuilding Starts at Home—the book and the movement. You can buy the book by clicking this link and the movement by visiting its web site.

Oberlin has almost always worn those values on its organizational sleeve starting with its very foundation as the first college to admit women and Blacks. It has had to adapt them over the years, often in ways that earlier generations of activist alums did not always adapt to easily.

Marty Hellman, Brian Rusch, and the other Rotarians in the room last weekend didn’t go to Oberlin, but they would all embrace the poster’s sentiment.

Rotary has also always worn its values on its sleeve, values that stress about putting “service over self.” It, too, has had to change any number of times. Going international. Admitting people of color. Women. Reaching beyond the professional/business community.

Now, as the world is changing in unprecedent ways and at an unprecedented rate of speed, it, like Oberlin, has to change again and make its efforts more focused on that word I would have had Marty include—lasting.

The problems we face need more than what I called do-gooder projects a few paragraphs ago. It still needs to support food drives and to respond to emergencies.

But it also needs to do more so that it can do its part in addressing the deeply embedded problems that seem to be stymieing our leaders of all political stripes.