Tonight we heard an address by Bill Boyd, Magazine Distribution, well known as father of our President Cathy Bryant, former rugby referee and playmate of Jan Alford at primary school. Bill is also known as former President of Rotary International 2006/7, Queens Service Order for Community Service and Companion of New Zealand Order of Merit. The list of Rotary positions Bill has held is too long to list here, but notably after retiring from many senior positions in the administration, Bill has dedicated his time to the Rotary Peace Programme, setting up Rotary Peace Centres around the world. This was his subject tonight.
In the 1990s several senior rotarians were interested in setting up an International Peace University but this idea faded to working with existing university peace studies. In 2002 Rotary International set up and funded eight Peace Centres at seven universities including those in Asia, USA, Africa and Australia. Bill is still a member of the three person team that performs three year reviews of these centres. The reviews were serious: one university centre was dropped as most of its members were qualified in law and accounting rather than peace studies and another potential one was dropped as it did not have a peace programme and relied too much on visiting fellows. The programme also involves funding ten RI Scholars for the two years of study in a Peace Programme and leads to a Masters Degree. Later three month Certificate courses were developed at universities, including Bangkok, which generally attract younger scholars. These certificate courses are three month residential courses and are followed by mentoring and monitoring. There is an emphasis on regionalisation, notably Sub-Saharan Africa, South America and the Middle East. An American foundation has donated $US15 million to set up a centre in the Middle East and the three committee members agonised over where to base it, given the existing antagonisms there. From eleven potential candidate countries the decision was made to choose Turkey.
The programme is continuing and in addition to expanding, the Peace Foundation endeavours to keep in touch with all its graduates. We congratulate Bill on what he is doing to encourage peace in the world: the more work the Foundation does, the more difference it makes, the greater our chances of surviving and thriving.