Next Rotary peace centre could be at Pune or Seoul
The next Rotary peace centre could come up either at the Symbiosis University in Pune or in Seoul, TRF Trustee Martha Helman, a member of RC Boothbay Harbor, US, told Rotary News in an interview at the Kochi Institute. She has been instrumental in getting the huge funding of $15 million from the Otto and Fran Walter Foundation, which made possible TRF setting up its latest Rotary Peace Center in Istanbul, Turkey.
Excerpts from the interview
Before we come to the massive investment you and your late husband got for TRF, tell us why, when and how did you join Rotary?
My late husband and I joined Rotary together in 2003. We were new in our small community, had just moved into Bay Harbor, and joined Rotary because we wanted to meet people. It was as simple as that.
Your journey so far?
In the first year I wasn’t sure Rotary was for me. And then I discovered international service, got excited by the grants, became my club president in 2006–07, and right after that, joined the District Foundation Committee (now the Peace Major Gifts Initiative), as the grants coordinator. I became district governor in 2012–13 and IA trainer in 2018–19, and a TRF trustee in 2022.
How did the peace centre funding happen?
My late husband was a lawyer with an international law firm in New York City, the founding partner of which was Otto Walter, who had moved from Germany to US in 1937 to escape the Nazis. He knew four languages, but not English. His law degree from Germany was no good in the US; it was the middle of the Great Depression, with 25 per cent unemployment, animus against Jews and immigrants. But he worked hard, went back to law school here, graduated in the mid-’50s, and started his own law firm with another expat German Jew.
How old was he in 1937?
He was born in 1909; so he was a young man. He had entered the bar in Germany, but he was disbarred because one of the first Nazi hate laws was that Jews could not have a profession, such as doctor, lawyer, or business executive. He was disbarred from the bar for his religion, and then some other nasty things happened, so he left Germany.
Anyway, his law firm in the US did very well. In the early ‘80s, three things happened. First, he had acquired enough personal wealth to start a small family foundation, more or less as a rich man’s philanthropic pocketbook. Second, he apparently could take long lunches on Wednesday and joined the New York City Rotary Club. Third, his law firm hired my husband, a newly-minted law graduate, to join the firm.
This is New York City we’re talking about…
Yes, and between the early ’80s and early ’90s, Otto and my husband Frank’s relationship went from boss to mentor to friend. And in the early ’90s, Otto rewrote his will; they had no children. After taking care of the hairdresser, driver and doorman with small legacies, he left everything else to this family foundation, leaving my husband as executor of the foundation.
In 2003, Otto died in his ’90s; his wife died within six weeks. My husband, and by extension, me, found ourselves responsible for a wealthy man’s philanthropic fortune.
Can you put a figure to that?
Around $18 million; not a Rockefeller, but he had done very well. He started with nothing in his early 30s, and left this. The goal of his life was that the country of his birth, Germany, and the country of his adoption, US, should never ever be at war again. He spent his life working on that, and was honoured by the governments of both nations.
We can’t stop the current wars or declare a ceasefire, but we will have to work for another generation, maybe 100 or 200 years, to solve conflicts in the Middle East.
Meanwhile my husband, who had been in the US Air Force during the Cold War, was stationed in Berlin as his job was to listen in on the Soviet air pilots. Later he had to interview displaced persons who were escaping from the Soviet-held countries in Eastern Europe.
How long did he serve in the military?
Five years in the Air Force, as a sergeant in the Air Force Intelligence. Now I don’t know of any child who says that when he grows up he would like to have a philanthropist leave behind his fortune for him to manage. That’s just not on the list. But this happened to Frank and by extension, me.
First of all, we wrote a cheque for $3 million, and established a chair in Otto’s name at his law school in the US. This left $15 million. We created a board, that laid down guidelines based on what we had seen Otto spend money on in his lifetime. And because he was a Rotarian, and so interested in peace, we started funding the Rotary Peace Centers, creating an endowment in Otto and Fran Walter’s name at the master’s degree level.
This was in the 2013, 14, 15 era. In 2018, the TRF trustees decided to start new peace centres, including in the Middle East, North Africa region. In 2020 when I was on a Zoom meeting at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, I heard RI vice-president Yinka Babalola, who is from Nigeria, talking about the new peace centre which was about to open in Makerere, Uganda (Africa). Yinka said Makerere marked the first time in history that an institution in Africa had been set up to train African peacemakers to come up with African solutions to African problems.
As a person of privilege from a privileged community, I was absolutely stunned by those words — 400 years of the slave trade, 150 years of colonisation, and here is an African saying that this is the first time that the world had asked Africa to look within itself for the means to look for its future. So I talked to my husband and we talked to the board of the Otto and Fran Walter Foundation. The result of that was that in the 2020 fall, I called Evanston and asked the cost of buying the naming rights for a new peace centre in the Middle East… later in 2020, they did decide on Istanbul.
In 2021, the trustees accepted the gift. I should tell you, it’s the first time in the history of Rotary that a project/programme was named after the funder. We have named everything after Paul Harris, Arch Klumph… Rotary pioneers, but not the persons whose money it was. For us, this was a deal breaker; and Rotary had no problem with it.
So you gave away all of the money?
Yes, all of it; the foundation was done. All gone. No bank account. The other unusual thing is that though $15 million is a lot of money, in terms of philanthropy, it’s really a drop in the bucket. And Rotary gets all of its money from our members, from individuals, very, very little from corporations, with the exception of Gates.
So that was in 2021. I was on the team that selected the Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul two years ago. The first batch of students has been selected, and President Stephanie Urchick is holding the peace conference in Istanbul in February. So that’s the story.
How difficult was it for you and your husband to decide on this? Did you have other alternatives in mind?
My husband always felt very strongly that small family foundations should not live forever because at some point the founder, and what was important to him, is forgotten. It’s not that the money is misused, but it just becomes a sort of treadmill… the money goes to the bank officer’s mother-in-law’s charity, something like that. And we did not want that to happen to the Otto and Fran Walter Foundation. We wanted Otto’s name to live forever… we just wanted their names and their portrait to be there at the students’ centre, so that the students will know about them and their life story.
We felt that if Otto could trust us with his legacy, and give no instructions, then we could certainly trust TRF to do the right thing.
It’s sad that your husband, who passed away 30 months ago, did not survive to see this centre.
Yes, it is. He lived to know that the centre would be established, but died before we selected the site. That’s okay. It proves that peace is something that’s larger than anyone’s lifetime. I will tell you that Frank is right here behind this shoulder and Otto is right here behind this shoulder, and every day I’m aware of them and what their wishes would be. This one’s whispering into one ear and the other one’s whispering very similar things into the other ear. They’re always in sync, almost always!
Coming to our trouble-ridden world, establishing peace efforts is so important. Look at the conflicts, violence and aggression that we see. Your thoughts.
We can’t stop the current wars; we can’t declare a ceasefire, but we will have to work for another generation, maybe 100 years, maybe 200 years, to solve conflicts in the Middle East. The current problems didn’t start a year ago; what happened on Oct 11, 2023, was exacerbated by decisions made, not in the Middle East, but in the West, when the British Empire was carved up, and there was a war in 1947 when the Palestinians became homeless people. They’ve been living in refugee camps ever since. So, we have to take peace a step at a time.
And we cannot expect change to happen overnight, but over generations, because the problems we’re in today took generations to develop. What happened on Oct 11 is dreadful, horrifying. But you should not confuse the work of those terrorists with the people of Gaza who have not had any control of their lives for generations. Gaza and the Palestinian question is, of course, the most depressing one in the Middle East, but there are many others too in the region. I’m always impressed by Rotarians because, you can count books when you give them to a school, or polio vaccinations. But you can’t count peace. And yet, despite that, from our almost $2 billion endowment at TRF, almost $250 million — that is one-eighth of that endowment — has been given by Rotarians for the subject of peace.
Rotarians love peace, and Rotarians trust TRF to build that peace. And we just have to recognise that as my husband’s life and death proves, as Otto’s death proves, it won’t happen in anyone’s lifetime.
But it’s not only the Middle East. We see much of the world around us being torn apart by so many violent groups.
Oh yes, we’re living in a period of time right now… in your country, in my country, where right-wing, nationalist leaders are taking over. This is a terrible problem internationally and Rotary can’t do anything about that. What we can do is work on the ground with vulnerable and damaged people. Our Rotary Peace Fellows are not diplomats. They don’t go around in suits. They are working on the ground in NGOs with vulnerable people, changing one life at a time, one situation at a time.
And we have 1,900 graduates now, and with the new peace centres we’ll have more. But it’s always a process. It will never be completed.
Hopefully the next one will come up in India. India has been trying. Trustee Bharat Pandya has been talking about it too.
So the situation is like this. The trustees in 2018 had one graduate certificate programme going at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. They decided to grow the Rotary Peace Centers by growing the graduate certificate programme as opposed to the master’s programme offered by five universities. They have decided to make the graduate certificate programme only regional.
We are now selecting a school for the Asia centre. Asia is a big place and could probably use two or three peace centres, but it takes a lot of funding. We have funding for only one; we started with something like 60 schools in 60 universities in 12 countries. The requirements were it has to be in a place with many Rotarians and where visas were available to all potential students, and it had to be a university that had proven expertise in peacebuilding.
We did site selections, site visits at schools in Pune and Seoul, South Korea. Both are very strong contenders; both India and Korea are very strong Rotary countries; both Indian and Korean Rotarians think their country should have the peace centre. And I can’t disagree with them. But we only have funding for one.
Is the funding ready, and what does it cost?
Yes, it is ready; it costs close to $20 million. The trustees are meeting in February and will decide, so till then we all have to hold our breath. I wish we could select two, but we can’t!
Once the new school is selected, it will open in winter or Jan of 2027. Or whenever the spring semester opens in that school.
Let me add that in the last 25 years we’ve had the Rotary Peace Centers, one quarter of the students from Asia have been from India. India is a very, very strong user of our Peace Centers.
Pictures: Rasheeda Bhagat
