Rotary Peace Fellowships
In 2005, Dr. Ellen J. Kennedy spent two weeks in Rwanda. She met a young Rwandan woman, Alice Musabende. Alice was orphaned at age 14 during the Rwandan genocide, losing her grandparents, parents, 12-year-old sister, and 9-year-old and 2-year-old brothers. Alice’s experience affected Dr. Kennedy deeply, particularly because Alice is the same age as her own daughter. Dr. Kennedy shared her experience of visiting post-genocide Rwanda with one of her classes. Upon learning that in 1994 nearly a million people were slaughtered in a hundred days, one of Kennedy’s students asked, “What are we going to do about this?”
Using the model of the Genocide Intervention Network, founded by Mark Hanis, Kennedy began World Without Genocide with a dedicated and gifted group of students. Over the past eleven years the organization has focused on education through many different opportunities – classes, workshops, films, exhibits, conferences – and have advocated successfully for city and state legislation. They address conflicts in the past, those occurring today, and the challenging problems of child soldiers, human trafficking, gender-based violence, weapons trafficking, and resource scarcity or abundance as causes of conflict.