The Power of Student Ambassadors in Promoting Global Understanding and Acceptance

By Elizabeth Beck

 There is a theory that the future of peace initiatives is most successful at the person to person level. As an international service organization with 34,000 clubs in over 200 nations, Rotary has practiced this theory for 65 years through their Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship Program. This program sends students to other countries to study, but the real purpose is to engage young people in the value of understanding the lives and views of the “other.”

As a member and chair of my club’s Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar selection committee, I have first-hand knowledge of the power of these cultural opportunities. During my tenure with this committee, my club has sponsored over 15 outgoing scholars and I also served as the club host for an incoming student from Belgium.

The power of these experiences was expressed by a Rotary Scholar who went to Peru.

In an email urging a friend to apply for the Scholarship he said, “If you want to truly help the world, and meet some amazing people that are just as strongly motivated and possess the tools to do so, I suggest applying for this scholarship.”

Although scholars are selected based upon academic ability for their university study abroad, it is equally important for scholars to serve as goodwill ambassadors to the host country. The role of the host Rotary Club is to engage the Rotary Scholar in the life of the local communities. It is this people-to-people interaction and the Rotary motto of “Service Above Self,” that prompts Rotary Scholars to initiate important sustainable projects, leaving the host community or region with a lasting legacy that Rotary was there and cares.

Rotary Scholars’ projects have included: securing funding from home clubs to provide mosquito nets for the purpose of reducing malaria in Uganda; providing supplies to dental clinics in the low-income areas of Hong Kong; building and providing instruction for sustaining a community garden in the tent cities of Lima, Peru; organizing local teams to dig wells to bring water closer to villages in Africa.

Rotary Scholars return home and continue to engage in initiatives and efforts to make their communities better places. The Scholars from my club have gone on to document the global warming process through a National Geographic sponsored trek in the Arctic Circle interviewing Inuit villages; provide on-site administrative support for hurricane victims in Haiti through Doctors without Borders; use social media technologies in the Middle East to promote peaceful exchanges of personal narratives as a way to mitigate cultural and political barriers; and, through the World Food Prize Foundation, implement and coordinate national youth programs in major research universities to study world food problems and solutions.

The Rotary Motto for the current international president is Peace through Service. Hundreds of Rotary Scholars around the world have committed their lives to accomplishing this goal bringing one person and one community at a time into their circle by changing minds and lives.

For 27 years, Elizabeth Beck worked extensively with University Honors students at Iowa State. Since her retirement in 2004, she has worked in nonprofit management with human services and educational agencies. She has worked in Scotland and Italy and traveled to five continents and 15 countries.  Her next scheduled trip is to Mongolia in 2013.