This Week - A Business Meeting

 There's not much to say about a Business Meeting as we won't be sure what is involved until the agenda is complete.

Jim and Zen Rankin attended the Annual BirdLife South Africa Owl Awards ceremony last Wednesday.

Owl Awards are given to individuals and organisations in recognition of their valuable contributions to the conservation of South Africa’s birds and their habitats.

At the ceremony, Jim received an Owl Award in recognition of his leadership in raising R100,000, together with the Rotary Club of Knights Pendragon and his company Agfacts, towards the eradication of introduced mice on Marion Island.

In reading the citation, BirdLife South Africa CEO, Mark Anderson, expressed his gratitude to the Rotary Club of Knights Pendragon and Agfacts for their valuable contributions to this important conservation project.

Here is Jim receiving the award from Yvonne Pennington, Chairperson of BirdLife South Africa.

Last Week

Charles Hopkins, winemaker at De Grendel, gave us a very interesting talk which ranged from the history of wine farming in South Africa to De Grendel itself and ended up with him waving a grape vine stokkie at the camera and chatting about grafting.  

This box is full of grafted root stock with the graft protected by green wax.

Next Week

Martin Kobald, Honorary Past President of the SA Chefs Association, Vice President of the World Association of Chefs Societies will be talking to us.  He owns Chef MLK School of Cooking in Kempton Park.  This could be an opportunity for the Club in a number of ways.

International 

Global partnership a dream come true for clean water advocate

• Lis Bernhardt
• Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, 2000-01
• Master’s in international affairs, Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland, 2002
• BA, Henley Business School, England, 2012

Few people could have been more thrilled than Lis Bernhardt, a former Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, when Rotary and the UN Environment Programme announced a joint initiative this year to empower Rotary members to protect, restore, and sustain local bodies of water with technical guidance from UNEP experts.

A programme officer for UNEP, Bernhardt spent five years moving the idea for Community Action for Fresh Water forward through leadership changes at both organisations. After the agreement was revealed during Rotary’s International Assembly in January, she posted on her LinkedIn page: “A professional dream has come true.”

“Rotary has been a huge part of my working for the United Nations,” she later explained. “To be able to give back to Rotary, close that loop, and connect in a global partnership is super exciting.”

Bernhardt has held multiple positions in international development since her Rotary-supported studies at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland in 2000-02. Her work has often focused on the overlap between development and the environment. As a program officer for UN-Water in New York in 2015, she essentially “held the pen” for the UN’s sustainable development goal 6, which is to ensure the availability and management of clean water and sanitation systems. Many of her roles have had one thing in common: water.

That may have something to do with a chance encounter midway through her Rotary scholarship that altered her career trajectory.

Bernhardt arrived in Geneva sponsored by the Rotary Club of Valparaiso, Indiana, in her hometown. With her undergraduate degree in international studies from Northwestern University near Chicago, she intended to focus on conflict resolution and the rights of minorities.

As an intern with UN Volunteers during the summer between her first and second year, she was part of a programme where nongovernmental organisations and other civil society groups in developing countries could apply for online volunteer assistance for projects like building a website, translating documents, or writing a funding proposal. Her job was to vet applications, including one from the Navajo Nation in the United States.

“Their request met all of our qualifications,” she recalls. “They clearly needed access to education. They had issues with drinking water and sanitation. They were a disadvantaged group and a minority. They met all the criteria, except that they were in the U.S.,” which disqualified the group.

Though the group’s application was rejected, its plight stuck with her. She remained in contact and visited the Navajo Nation. The example became the basis for her master’s thesis that explored the disconnect between the environmental and socioeconomic tracks of development.

“In the end, all of their issues were environmental. I saw how conditions in the environment underpin all other development issues,” she says. “That’s where I shifted my thinking. Every job I have had since has been in the environmental sphere.”

After short stints with Amnesty International and as a consultant for UN Volunteers, Bernhardt joined the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change in Bonn, Germany, serving as a program officer and head of external relations. In 2009, she took a job with a UN-Water program in Bonn and later moved to UN-Water’s office in New York where she contributed to writing the sustainable development goals on water and sanitation.

As influential as that work was, she began to get an itch for the implementation side “to help make these sustainable goals a reality.” Moving to Kenya in 2016, she joined the Freshwater Ecosystems Unit at UNEP. It was there in 2018 that she was part of the reception for a Rotary International delegation, including incoming President Barry Rassin, that was exploring a partnership. Wheels were already in motion for the environment to become one of Rotary’s areas of focus.

“A couple of us, including Dan Cooney, our head of communications who was a Rotary Peace Fellow, were largely responsible for driving the idea of a partnership on our end forward,” Bernhardt recalls. “We had both been involved with Rotary and knew what a relationship could look like.”