About the Point of View Process

The Point of View (POV) Process is a collaboration between the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution and the War Prevention Initiative of the Jubitz Family Foundation, focusing on the role, capacities, and future trajectories of Rotary International’s organizational and individual Rotarians conflict prevention and resolution work globally, and the work to be undertaken by the Carter School during its next period of development.

The POV process is formed by a series of 2-day meetings that are taking place at the Carter School’s International Retreat and Research Center (POV), a facility set on 120 acres of pristine wooded land in Lorton, Virginia. The POV is dedicated to peacebuilding practice, teaching, and research.

The first meeting took place in November 2022, the second meeting will take place March 6 and 7, 2023, and the third meeting in July 2023. In each forum, 12-16 participants from Rotary, Carter School, the broader peacemaking/peacebuilding community, with peace actors previously considered nontraditional such as the business sector and building on the inclusion of civil society actors like trade unions and places of worship, are invited for in-depth discussions, pathway-changing explorations, and transformational decisions. While we intend to add new participants based on the direction and priorities determined throughout the process, we aim to keep the core group from the first meeting largely intact.

The first POV Process meeting in November of 2022 had the goal of setting a collective agenda for setting the overall direction of how the process will be run with well-thought-out deadlines and milestones for each stage. Therefore, the meeting had two main sections: the exploration of contemporary conflict prevention & resolution frameworks and how recent global peace and security trends have made them less effective. Hence, how varied emerging dynamics, such as subtle and overt militarism, the diffusion of non-state armed groups in conflict settings, shifting geopolitics, pressures of militarized security, and climate change, will be considered an overall framework for discussions. Considering these trends, the second section of the meeting focused on how Rotary and Rotarians are responding to such conflict prevention & resolution trends. Therefore, the second session covered primary Rotary initiatives, programs, and funding schemes in peace work.

The POV Process pays particular attention to how different civil society actors, including businesses, labor organizations, churches, and other community organizations, could become active agents of conflict prevention & resolution. This initiative considers the absence of business in most such efforts as a tremendously important missed opportunity. The process aims to build on such approaches as a ‘peace economy’, ‘profit-making and peacebuilding hand-in-hand’, ‘business that cares for peace’, and ‘peace for more business and business for more peace’. Diversity, equity, inclusion, justice are core to the process and intellectual framework.

The end goals for the POV Process are (1) to develop an action plan that could assist Rotary in forming an International Peace Constituency and (2) to help the Carter School fulfill its mission to transform peace work globally.