Philadelphian Awarded a Rotary Peace Fellow

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Article written by Joy Charlton, Chair, Peace Fellowships Subcommittee, Rotary District 7450, Southeastern PA.

Esmeralda Hajdinaj from Philadelphia has been awarded a Rotary Peace Fellowship to study for the next two years at the Rotary Peace Center affiliated with the University of Bradford in England, one of seven Rotary Peace Centers located around the world. Our District is fortunate to now have three Rotary Peace Fellows actively engaged in earning Master’s degrees oriented to peace studies through the program.

Esmeralda Hajdinaj immigrated to Philadelphia as a child with her family from Albania. While a student at Temple University, she took a gap year to serve as a “City Year” volunteer with the city of Philadelphia, funded by AmeriCorps. This experience re-directed her college pursuits, after which she applied for and received a Fulbright grant to spend a year in Kosovo.

Esmeralda Hajdinaj awarded a Rotary Peace Fellow.

While serving as a teaching assistant at the University of Mitrovica, she also prioritized ways to connect with community groups of diverse sets of people. Her goal was to help build bridges across the deep differences that remain in the Balkans. Esmeralda’s family has retained ties to relatives in Albania so she was experientially as well as intellectually familiar with the complex history of conflict in the region. She was particularly drawn to working with youth, helping them to, at a still-malleable age, come to see their commonalities as well as their differences.

Back in Philadelphia, Esmeralda returned to work with the city, focused on helping multiple and different community groups combine their efforts to support the public places of their local areas for the good of all. She came to understand this as a form of peacebuilding: her work was to bring volunteer groups with disparate priorities and agendas into conversation with each other in pursuit of a productive outcome.

With this growing experience, she found herself increasingly interested in “mediation” – mediation as a set of skills, as a field of practice, as a scholarly focus of investigation, and as a contribution to more peaceful co-existence at many levels, from the small group to international relations. She looks forward to the extraordinary opportunity of a two-year Rotary Peace Fellowship as she begins her studies this September.

If you know of potential applicants who have a demonstrated commitment to peacebuilding, are eager to pursue their professional development in the field, and want to join the network of over 1,400 Rotary Peace Fellow alumni, please encourage them to find more information on our District website as well as on the website of Rotary International, and to contact me for further answers and advice.