Martin chose to forego his career to pursue a passion for peace fulltime after being awarded the Rotary Peace Fellowship (RPF). Now, as the Global Partnerships Manager for RI Service Partners, Mediators Beyond Borders Int’l (MBBI), Martin uses his diverse background to design effective peacebuilding programs.
Martin from Mediators Beyond Borders International came to our club on the request of Siham to discuss the work of MBBI and the opportunity for Rotary to become a leading peacebuilding organization through a presentation he called “Two Drops for Peace.” Martin is a Rotary Peace Fellow and he shared about his journey as a landscape architect, social entrepreneur and community led him to apply for the peace scholar program and his acceptance into the program at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. He even shared some of the lessons that inform the current work, including to look at the role of identity in conflict and how it can be a greater motivator to violence than other needs like food, shelter and clothing.

We practiced a listening exercise and experienced how we can be connected to each other in just a few minutes if we practice listening without problem-solving or distraction. He shared a little about the ARCoM projects and how the graduates could help our club host mini dialogues internally and with the local community. He left us with the vision of what would be possible if all 40,000+ clubs globally could engage with each other and be seen as hubs for peace in their respective communities.