NEW LONDON - The Rotary Club of New London was recognized for its exemplary service with two awards given at the Rotary District 7980 conference in late May.

The club was awarded the Charles W. Pettengill Award and an Outstanding Opus for Peace Service Award. The Pettengill Award recognizes the outstanding large club of the year for “exceptional achievement across all areas of Rotary, while advancing peace, strengthening membership engagement, elevating public image and supporting the Rotary Foundation.” It also recognizes excellence in one or more of Rotary’s four avenues of service over the past three Rotary years and long-time support for programs like Polio Plus to combat disease and poverty. The four avenues of Rotary service are club service, vocational service, community service and international service. The award is named for the 54th president of Rotary International, who was from Greenwich, Connecticut. 

The Outstanding Opus for Peace Service Award recognizes clubs that provided “exceptional leadership in advancing peace, conflict resolution and community impact through peacebuilding and Opus for Peace” related to District 7980’s Opus for Peace initiative for the current year. New London was one of three clubs to receive the award.

“We are very honored to have been chosen to receive these prestigious awards,” Club President for 2024-2025 Mel Foti said. “We had an outstanding peace committee that oversaw numerous worthy events and projects and a history of being honored with the Pettengill Award.”

It is the fifth time the New London club has won the Pettengill Award. It won previously in the Rotary years of 1991-1992, 1997-1998, 1999-2000 and 2007-2008. 

New London Rotary has provided tens of thousands of dollars in financial support to a wide variety of worthy community organizations such as the New London Community Meal Center, the Homeless Hospitality Center, the Haitian Health Foundation, the Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship Fund and Waterford Country School. Some of its other projects include the promotion of literacy in the community with its many Little Free Libraries and its long-standing support of youth through programs such as Camp Rotary.

As part of the district’s Opus for Peace initiative that urged clubs to foster peace and understanding on local, state, national and international levels, the New London club sponsored numerous events and fundraisers. Among the projects was an initiative to collect and send lightly used musical instruments to at-risk students in Ecuador, sponsoring Rotary Peace Fellow Diego Carneiro from Brazil to appear at the Garde Arts Center on the same evening as an Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra concert and also to play at an Arbor Day peace and tree planting event at Lighthouse Inn, sponsoring a regional luncheon featuring German consul general Dr. Sonja Kreibich as keynote speaker, participating in lectures focused on peace, hosting an evening celebrating Haitian food, music, dance and culture at Favorites Bistro in downtown New London, sponsoring a juried art show and erection of a peace pole at the Hygienic Art Gallery in downtown New London and providing other peace poles to be located at various spots in the city.

The club’s peace initiative committee was led by past president Valerie West and also included district governor-elect Julie Kushigian-Secor and 2025-2026 club president-elect Gail MacDonald.

The Rotary Club of New London is part of Rotary District 7980, a district with some 55 clubs and nearly 2,000 Rotarians throughout southern Connecticut.