Rotary Central Melbourne Face-to-Face meeting at the RACV Club on Tuesday, 4 February 2025
Chair: Neville John
Reporter: Rob Hines
Photographer: Roger Thornton
The chair of the day Neville John opened the meeting with a recognition of Rotary International.
President Rhys Wiliams welcomed members and guests, which included:
- Guest speaker, Charlie Allen APM: Peacebuilding
- DG Michael Lapina
- Alex Lapina – Rotary Activate
- Asher Reichman – Guest of Michael Lapina
Neville then introduced our Guest Speaker
Charlie Allen APM: Peacebuilding
Charlie Allen APM is well respected within policing for his community-centred approach.
Charlie is currently the Immediate Past President of the Rotary Club of Sydney, Australia. He is a peace and conflict prevention technical cadre member, and active in peace building within Rotary.
Charlie is a facilitation, resilience, leadership, and peacebuilding professional with over 30 years’ experience. His early experience is grounded in the security sector with 35 years with Victoria Police. Over the past decade he has expanded his peacebuilding experience working in south, southeast, and eastern Asia, western and eastern Africa, MENA region and Oceania. His areas of specialty include, peacebuilding, process facilitation, training design and delivery, resilience practice, leadership development, organisational and community systems change.
His education includes Masters in Leadership and Organisational Change, and post graduate studies in Peace and Conflict Prevention, Good Governance and Human Rights. In his recent experience as the Director of Partnerships with Institute for Economics and Peace, IEP, he facilitated Positive Peace workshop with a wide range of partners globally, using the empirically derived IEP Positive Peace framework. He now heads up Space Melbourne shifting focus back to resilience.
His talk covered:
- His goal as a Peace fellow is to bring people together to work towards a common outcome via a respectable dialogue.
- He did a word association exercise with members asked to nominate words associated with Peace. The responses were varied but a general theme of love and reconciliation emerged.
- The Institute of Economics and Peace (IEP) ranks 173 countries across 23 indicators in regards to Peace
- The general trend over the last 15 years is negative
- Iceland is the most peaceful country
- Yemen is the least peaceful country
- Australia ranks 15th
- He also discussed the economic impact of violence and both the GDP and individual cost
This Week’s Member Milestones (February 2 - 8):
Spouse/Partner Birthdays:
- Athina Driver (Spouse of Allan)
- Charity Chen (Spouse of Luke Allen)
Anniversaries:
- Herb and Leonie Greenwood (58 years)
- Bruce and Nasima Heron (42 years)
- Neville and Suzette Taylor (33 years)
Rotary Join Date Anniversaries:
- Roy Garrett, 19 years on 7th Feb
- Grace Davidson, 2 years on 7th Feb
Chair Neville invited Member Announcements:
- Peter Duras advised that Caprice have offered, and Peter has collected, six cartons of footwear.
- Roger Thornton reminded members of the Peninsula BBQ on March 2nd. Please advise Roger of your intention re attendance.
- Roger also Mentioned the multi-district conference in Adelaide on May 16 to 18. The early bird discount has been extended to Feb 28.
- DG Michael reinforced the fact that February is the Rotary Peace & Conflict Resolution month
- He also mentioned possibility of sponsoring an Interact club at Melbourne High.
- He mentioned that he intends to start a Rotaract club exclusively for singers
- He introduced Asher Reichman and announced that Asher is the successful NGSE applicant and will be travelling to Germany, sponsored by District 9800.
President Rhys then summarised the meeting
He closed the meeting with thanks to members, visiting Rotarians, guests and friends of Rotarians.
Next meeting will be an online meeting on Tuesday 11th February. The Zoom room will be open at 7.30am, with the meeting commencing at 7:40am.
Continuing on the theme of Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution month, our speaker is Steph Hunt who will share her insights in international dispute settlement, drawing from her experience in private and public international law.
Rotary theme - “The Magic of Rotary” – Celebrating the magic of Rotary. Members create that magic with every project completed, every dollar donated, and every new member of Rotary.
