Rotary Club of Armidale member, Peter Lloyd has been awarded a Paul Harris Fellowship, one of Rotary's highest honours, for his substantial contribution to Rotary's humanitarian and educational programs.
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"This award is recognised Internationally and we are very proud of Peter," Rotary Club of Armidale president, Bernie Perkins said.
Peter has been a member of the Armidale club for 30 years, after originally joining the Rotary Club of Albury in 1983. He has filled many roles during his time in service to Rotary, and is a past president of both the Armidale and Albury clubs.
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In the decades of his membership with Rotary, Peter has been involved in many projects, including a long partnership with Backtrack Youth Works, and a drought appeal which raised around $120,000 for food and fodder relief for drought-affected farmers.
"We're pretty proud of how successful that was," Peter said.
The project occupying his time for the past two years, though, is the biggest he has worked on to date.
His focus is on helping local Ezidi families with the development of the Armidale club's Ezidi Agricultural and Horticultural Program - teaching farming skills to Ezidi refugees to enable them to get jobs, start their own business or grow food for their own consumption.
Peter has been working tirelessly on getting the program up and running, chasing funding and liaising with government departments and refugee settlement non-government organisations, and it has been a hard slog.
Despite the lack of funding, the project is now up and running, with the first group of students having passed a Certificate II at TAFE, and plots of land donated by two fellow Rotarians now planted.
"Peter Lloyd has driven this program and has persisted in the face of 'red tap' and continued to see the need to help the refugees," Bernie Perkins said.
"Peter has driven the program to the point of such success, that it may end up a national and global model for settling people driven from their homelands."
Peter was humble about having received the honour of a Paul Harris Fellowship.
"There are lot of people here in other clubs who have been awarded Paul Harris Fellowships for doing incredible stuff. I'm not unique by any means. And there are a lot of people in the Armidale region who more than ever deserve to get that award as well," he said.
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