Kim Dixon is an experienced professional in strategy, program development/mgmt and organizational change management for corporations and NGOs. After 25 years in corporate America and Internet startups, she felt honored to serve in the Peace Corps in the country of Georgia (2014-2016) as a community economic development volunteer. She returned to its capital, Tbilisi, to support strategic planning for its first Hospice and other NGOs, including the Eurasia Partnership Foundation.   Returning to the US she joined Midtown Raleigh Rotary club. Kim has served on several Boards including National Association of Women Business Owners, Ronald McDonald House, St. Raphael's Church in Raleigh, NC, and Vail Racquet Club and Mountain Resort. She is currently the President Partnering for Peace: Friends of Peace Corps and Rotary. She enjoys NC, Colorado and Georgia (country of) hiking, swimming, skiing and spending time with her husband and three adult children. 

Fred Cowan, newly elected to the Board and named Vice President, is a retired attorney in Louisville, Kentucky.  After graduating from Dartmouth College, Fred served in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia from 1967-69 as an English teacher in the provincial capital of Dessie. Subsequently, he taught elementary school, worked as a journalist and founded a consumer advocacy group in Little Rock, Arkansas.  He graduated from Harvard Law School and returned to his hometown of Louisville to practice law.  He was elected as a State Representative to the Kentucky General Assembly and subsequently elected Attorney General of Kentucky. As Attorney General and subsequently he has worked on election observation missions in Namibia, Slovenia and Bosnia. Prior to retiring, Fred was a circuit judge in Kentucky for eight years. He has been a member of the Louisville Rotary Club for about 15 years, and is currently the Rotary Peace Fellows subcommittee chair for District 6710. In 2021, he helped initiate a Partnering for Peace project in the District, which has worked closely with the Rotary District and with the Kentucky Peace Corps Association.  Its first effort has been a project to provide winter clothing to Internally Displaced Persons in Ukraine. Fred and his wife, Linda, have three grown daughters and three grandchildren.

RPCV DOMINICAN REPUBLIC (1974 - 1975); ROTARY CLUB OF CASA GRANDE DAYBREAK, AZ

Molly O’Brien is a nonprofit professional with a passion for service. Currently, she works for National Peace Corps Association as the Development & Donor Relations Manager, where she enjoys connecting with RPCVs on a daily basis. Molly graduated from Marquette University with a master’s degree in Public Service/Nonprofit Administration in 2020. She was the recipient of the Trinity Fellowship, a competitive program focused on social and economic justice, and she worked at Milwaukee Habitat for Humanity providing programmatic support for homeowners. Molly was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Trang, Thailand 2016–18 and in Karak, Jordan 2014–15. Prior to her Peace Corps service, she earned a B.A. in history and communications from Loyola University Chicago. She resides in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she enjoys spending as much time outdoors as possible.

Steve Werner is an international development consultant after a 25 year career working with large NGOs, such as CARE, Habitat for Humanity, Water For People, and the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect. His major focus is capacity building, program development and evaluation, fundraising planning, and board development. He served in Peace Corps – Korea as a two-year volunteer from 1976 – 1978 and Peace Corps Response – Georgia from 2016 – 2017. He has served in Rotary, through the Rotary Club of Denver Southeast, since 1989 and still serves at the club, District and International levels as a Water and Sanitation specialist. He has served in Leadership San Antonio, the Kellogg National Leadership Program, and the Salzburg Seminar. He is a past board chair of the National Peace Corps Association. Steve along with other Denver area Rotarians helped to develop the partnership between Peace Corps and Rotary and he is the charter president of Partnering for Peace: Friends of Peace Corps and Rotary. He has three grown children and four grandchildren.

Terrance Stevenson is a peace, social impact, and sustainability professional. He is the Social Impact Partnerships Manager for Givewith, a technology platform that supports social impact organizations through business-to-business activities. He is also the founder of PeaceAtlas, a Seattle-based social impact consultancy that advises leaders and brands on peace-focused social impact solutions.

Terrance has held project management and advisory roles across the federal government, non-profit, and start-up spaces. His career has focused on creating innovative solutions that empower and enable businesses to address better violence, conflict, and other social barriers to peace. Leaning on his research background in sustainable peace practices, he has developed and improved impact and sustainability strategies for several socially-focused organizations around the world.
Terrance was a 2020 Rotary International Peace Fellow in the United Kingdom, where he completed research on the efficacy of conflict-sensitive, private-sector development in conflict-affected contexts. He has a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations, a Master of Arts in International Peace and Conflict Resolution, and a Master of Science in Economics and Finance for Development. As a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Armenia, 2012-14), and a board member of the Seattle International District Rotary Club, he is a lifelong advocate for public service.

Alan Kusunoki was born and raised in Hawai’i. He is a retired architectural/structural engineer. Upon graduation from Columbia University, he joined the Peace Corps and served in Afghanistan, 1971-72, as a building engineer. He partnered with a United Nations engineer and a team of Afghan nationals to help write the first building code for Afghanistan, which was locally published near the end of his Peace Corps service. Returning to Omaha NE, he began a career with an international architecture and engineering firm, Leo A Daly. Within a year, he was transferred to Southeast Asia where he pursued his design and construction engineering career in Singapore and Hong Kong for the next nine years. He returned to the Los Angeles office to help design and monitor the renovation of several airline facilities at LAX for the 1984 Olympics. That led to design/construction work with several high-tech companies in Southern California. In 1991, he left Leo A Daly to join the Smithsonian Institution to manage the construction of a new radio telescope on Maunakea on the Big Island of Hawai’i. Nearly five years of planning finally led to starting construction in 1995. The telescope was finally commissioned in 2003. He remained with the Smithsonian to manage the telescope facilities until he retired in 2016. Since 1992, he has been active with Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs) in Hawai’i. In 1993, he joined the Rotary Club of Hilo. The similarity in Rotary and Peace Corps goals, to “do good in the world”, was undeniable. He has served as the club’s community service, international service, and vocational service director, and club president, 2012-13. He’s also served as District 5000 Asst Governor, 2014-2017, and other District roles involving international service. He currently also serves as vice president of the RPCVs of Hawai’i.

Ellen G. Young – Partnering for Peace – Board Member

Ellen Young’s journey from her Midwestern US roots began with a student trip to France in High School.  She graduated from Smith College with a dual degree in Economics and Political Science. She holds an MBA from the University of Chicago (now Booth) Graduate School of Business. And, Ellenalso received a certificate in Non-Profit Management from North Park University in Chicago.

Ellen, now retired, was a Commercial Banker – working with multinational corporations at several international banks, including Continental Bank, Bank of America, First Chicago and Northern Trust, where she held positions as Vice President. She has held many volunteer leadership positions in local civic and non-profit organizations, including President of the Lake Forest/Lake Bluff Chamber of Commerce, Lake Forest Library Trustee, Vice President and President; The Lake Forest International Club, as President, Treasurer, Philanthropy and Program Chairs; Interim Executive Director of Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Lake County, and other posts.

Ellen joined the Lake Forest/Lake Bluff Noon Rotary Club in 1991, and has held numerous club positions, serving as Treasurer and other positions, including President.  She also served as Treasurer, Foundation Board Member, End Polio Now (EPN) chair and President of the Lincolnshire Rotary Club. After joining the Lake Forest/Lake Bluff Morning Rotary Club, she served on the board and as the Club President.  In 2020, Ellen formed a new Passport Club, serving since its founding as its President.

Ellen’s Rotary leadership extends throughout her District6440, and beyond.  At the District level she was Treasurer, a member of the Finance committee, the EPN Committee, District Foundation Chair and an Assistant Governor for 3 years. She was District 6440’s District Governor in 2014-2015.  Currently, she is the Assistant Regional Rotary Foundation Coordinator for Districts 6420, 6440 and 6450 in Zone 29, all in northern Illinois.

Ellen’s connection with the Peace Corps arose from her daughter Sarah Young’s service during 2007-2008 in the Dominican Republic (DR).  Sarah’s work identified the need to address the lack of reading materials for pre-school age students. Ellen’s Lincolnshire Rotary Club partnered with the Pimentel Rotary Club in the DR to provide books and build a library in a local school through a small International Grant. Eventually, literacy projects were launched throughout the country with the support of the Chicagoland-Korean Rotary Club, with additional funding from a district in Korea.

Ellen is a Multiple Paul Harris Fellow, a member of the Paul Harris Society, the Polio Plus Society, and, with her husband Chris, Level 3 Major Donors to The Rotary Foundation.

Ellen joined Partnering for Peace in November, 2019 to help expand and nurture these types of projects between Rotary International and the Peace Corps.

Ruta served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the country of Georgia from 2010 to 2013 and has been a Rotarian and member of the Rustavi International since 2015. Her Peace Corps assignment was in Borjomi with the Media Center of Samtskhe-Javakheti. Ruta and her director, Marina Kupatadze, organized Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani women to become active politically, have discussions and local talk shows on five small regional television stations. The Media Center received its first grant from NDI to encourage minority women to vote in 2012, with further funding from the British Embassy. The relationship with NDI is ongoing.

Ruta co-founded Together for Real Changes (TRC) with Nana Lomadze in 2013 to serve people with disabilities in the mountainous regions of Georgia. TRC has opened centers throughout the country, including Borjomi, Mestia, Sighnaghi, Ambrolauri, and Tsageri. Several US rotaries have supported this work and Ruta is establishing the Friends of Together for Real Changes in the US to further support this work.

Charlie served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Vanuatu from 2006 – 2008 as a business enterprise volunteer.  He has been active in Returned Peace Corps Volunteers of Colorado as a member of the Welcome Wagon Committee for the past six years.  As a Rotarian he has served as the club president, international service chair and club foundation president for the Denver LoDo Rotary club.  Charlie's club has started a satellite group whose members all served as Peace Corps Volunteers.  The group has doubled the size of the club and brought new energy.  Within Rotary he has worked with other RPCV Rotarian to promote the signing of the partnership agreement between Peace Corps and Rotary International.  Within that project he currently serves on multiple committees to help develop new leadership.  In his neighborhood, Charlie serves on three committees being a co-lead on the Golden Triangle Creative District Improvement committee.  Charlie retired from the Downtown Denver Partnership in 2018 where he worked in operations for the Downtown Denver Business Improvement District and the 14^th St. General Improvement.  In that role he was the subject matter expert for growing trees in a downtown urban setting and called the “wizard of watts” in working with 16^th St. Mall vendors to ensure that their electrical needs could be met.  And for fun Charlie plays guitar almost daily developing his fingerstyle guitar chops.

Chantelle's background is in public policy, community relations, and project management. Chantelle is a return US Peace Corps Volunteer (Paraguay), and a Rotary International Peace Fellow (University of Queensland, Australia). She has previously been involved with Mediators Beyond Borders International as chair of the Los Angeles Chapter; and as a graduate student, spent time with the United Nations Development Program in the South Pacific as part of her research. Chantelle is currently the co-chair of International Service for the Rotary e-Club of World Peace (District 5330).

SUMMARY

After serving in the Peace Corps (almost) right out of college, Erica joined Rotary just a few years later and is now the Rotary-Peace Corps Partnership Liaison for District 7610. She embraces projects that spread peace and has started a District 7610 Rotary-Peace Corps Partnership Alliance Committee, still in its very early stages of development, to engage other groups in the quest for peace. With 12 years of experience in the community and international development fields as a volunteer (including Peace Corps service and several community-based organizations, including Rotary), Erica is excited to further advance her knowledge and experience to serve the global Partnering for Peace community.

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Erica has a MA in Global Affairs (concentration: Global Culture & Society) from George Mason University and a BA in Political Science (concentration: International Relations) from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her field experience in Armenia (2007-2009) while she served in the Peace Corps opened her eyes to environmental and gender challenges in Armenia, located within the Caucasus Region of Eastern Europe. Upon her return to the United States, she was inspired to help those in need at home. Erica began volunteering with local 501(c)(3) nonprofits that perform human services, namely HandsOn Greater Richmond (now called HandsOn RVA), Carpenter’s Shelter, and PRS, Inc. She’s been recognized for these humanitarian efforts in the following ways: she was awarded the 2012 Fairfax County Human Rights Commission’s Human Rights Award and was nominated as a Finalist for the March of Dimes’ 2017 Heroines of Washington Award.  

To continue serving the global community, she joined Rotary in 2012. Joining Rotary was an educational moment for her, as she felt that she was joining Peace Corps all over again, the similarities are many. This was affirmed in 2014, when then-PC Director Carrie Hessler-Radelet and then-Rotary President Ron Burton signed a Memorandum of Understanding joining Peace Corps and Rotary into partnership on service projects, both global and within the United States. She brings leadership experience and dedication within Rotary with her service as President of Falls Church Rotary for two years, July 2016-June 2018. She has served in other roles on Falls Church Rotary’s Board of Directors, namely as the Future Vision Chair, Youth Service Director, and Community Service Director. Her leadership continues today within the Northern Virginia Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, an affiliate group of the National Peace Corps Association, where she has served on the Board as Community Service Director for the last nine years, from September 2012-present.

Global service is where her passion lies. Leveraging her network within the extended Peace Corps community and global network of Rotarians, she has taken full advantage of opportunities for global service projects, or “mini Peace Corps projects,” as she likes to call them. These experiences have led to further global connections that have developed into real partnerships abroad. Below is a descriptive list of select global projects and her roles within.

• Caribbean Partnership Program in Trinidad & Tobago: This is a global forum, convening project leaders together from hundreds of Rotary clubs in the Caribbean and Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States. With a service cadre representing Falls Church Rotary, Erica attended as the Future Vision Chair. She identified projects in the Caribbean that her club could partner with. She made some lasting connections from this meeting. 

• “We Care to Share” Free Clinic in Chantal, Haiti: This clinic is free to patients for one week in January and many underserved Haitians waited until this week to visit the clinic. The volunteer physicians from Rotary and other organizations saw more than 1,000 patients that week. Erica assisted the clinic in the pharmacy as volunteer pharmacists dispensed the medicine to patients.

• Camp Sizanani (part of Global Camps Africa) in South Africa: This camp, started by a fellow Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, brings youth together in a camp setting. The youth are at great risk of contracting HIV/AIDS and who have often been abused. Local and international camp counselors lead sessions, including life skills, nutrition, arts and crafts, swimming, and theatre. Erica served as an International Camp Counselor and facilitated sessions on nutrition. She was also a Cabin Co-Leader for girls aged 12 and 13. This experience was rewarding on many levels. She has been invited to serve again at the Camp. 

• Power Classes for Women in Zimbabwe: This is a woman-led organization that provides leadership classes for women interested in starting their own community-based organizations and social enterprises. Classes include effective civic leadership, marketing, designing advocacy campaigns, fundraising, and resource mobilization. Erica has consulted on best practices for organizational grant writing and fundraising. She has been invited to review a draft strategic plan for the organization. She has also been invited to visit the training center in Zimbabwe and plans to do so in the near future.

• Refugee Camp in Lesvos, Greece: This initiative brings members of the Peace Corps Community and others interested in assisting refugees to work with nongovernmental organizations on the ground at major refugee hubs in Greece. Erica served at the Moira Refugee Camp on the Greek island of Lesvos. Project durations range from 10 days to three months. She applied with a Norwegian NGO, A Drop in the Ocean, and upon acceptance, traveled to Lesvos, Greece, for this fieldwork. From January 6-16, 2020, she worked with refugees from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Somalia, West Africa, and other countries. Specifically, Erica helped the mental wellbeing of unaccompanied minors by playing games and puzzles with them at Moria Camp’s Safe Zone for younger children and both Sections A and B for older children. She also interacted with adult refugees outside the Camp in the Drop Center in Moria Village, which is about a 30-minute walk from the Camp. There, Erica assisted with activities and classes, such as painting and English classes, as well as social activities for both women and men. The women, especially, needed a safe place to spend time away from the Camp at a time of day when they could walk between the Camp and the Village during the day. They could bring their children or they could ask volunteers to keep an eye on their children while they relaxed in a comfortable space. For the men, it was a safe place away from violence and long lines for food and donations in the Camp. For both groups, there were sewing machines available for tailors to repair their clothing and other materials.

Ed Pettitt is a Ph.D. student in the Urban Planning and Environmental Policy program at Texas Southern University. His areas of research are: parks and greenspace equity, urban heat island effect, tactical urbanism, and global health and development planning. He received his B.S. degree in Human Biology, Health, and Society from Cornell University in 2006 and his M.P.H. degree in Healthcare Management with a concentration in Global Health from The University of Texas School of Public Health in 2016. Mr. Pettitt served as a Community Capacity Builder with the U.S. Peace Corps in Botswana and worked as a Senior Project Coordinator with Baylor College of Medicine Pediatric AIDS Initiative at Texas Children's Hospital. He has also worked as a consultant for the World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), United States Agency for International Development (USAID), John Snow International (JSI), and Family Health International (FHI). Locally, Mr. Pettitt has served as a technical advisor for The Trust for Public Lands’ Park-Smart Precinct 1 program, through which he helped develop a decision support tool on parks and social determinants of health; the City of Houston’s Complete Communities initiative, through which he chairs a work group on Parks and Neighborhood Character; the Health Equity Collective, through which he helped to develop a Community Voice strategy for community engagement; and Nature and Eclectic Outdoors’ Healthy Outdoor Communities project, through which he is currently helping to implement a grant from the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health to promote equitable access to urban greenspace as an intervention to mitigate health disparities. Mr. Pettitt is actively involved with the Third Ward neighborhood, a frontline environmental and climate justice community, where he has successfully spearheaded initiatives to build a tactical urbanism chess park, convert a city-owned illegal dumpsite into a pocket park, and install safety and wayfinding signage along a rails-to-trails conversion called the Columbia Tap Hike and Bike Trail. Mr. Pettitt serves on the U.S. Department of State IREX Community Solutions Program (CSP) Partner Advisory Board (PAB) and is a member of the Equity in a Clean Energy Economy (ECEE) Collaborative, Emancipation Economic Development Council (EEDC), Project Row Houses (PRH), and Third Ward is Home Civic Club. Mr. Pettitt is a member and director of the Rotary Club of Houston Skyline, Rotaract Chair for Rotary District 5890, and member of the Environmental Sustainability Rotary Action Group (ESRAG), RPCVs for Environmental Action, and Partnering for Peace. He has been recognized as a Rotary International Paul Harris Fellow and an Albert Schweitzer Fellowship Fellow for Life.

Cal Mann is a Volunteer Leader for Peace Corps North Macedonia, a Rotarian, an industrial designer and a former Apple Creative.  His Peace Corps assignment is focused on developing effective relationships between Peace Corps North Macedonia and select partners including the Association of Rotary Clubs. In his 15 years with Rotary, he worked with high school youth on community service projects and youth leadership development.