The District 5020 Scholarship Committee is pleased to announce that the 2022-23 recipients of the Rotary District 5020 Ambassadorial Scholarships are Marisa Terry sponsored by the Lakewood Rotary Club), Brandon Block (sponsored by the Olympia Rotary Club) and Sylvan Lutz (sponsored (by the Victoria Harbourside Rotary Club).
Each scholarship is worth $15,000 and will be used for tuition and other costs for graduate studies in a country outside the USA and Canada.
Marisa Terry, who is from Lakewood WA, is a senior at Louisiana State University where she majors in international Studies. She is an outstanding student with a cumulative GPA of over 3.8 out of 4. She has been accepted in a MSc program in Leadership for Sustainable Development at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. This program has a strong experiential component with an NGO focusing on sustainable development, giving Marisa some important hands-on experience..
Brandon Block is a reporting fellow at the Olympian newspaper in Olympia WA where he has been addressing the local homelessness issue and its relationship to urban planning and design. Brandon, who grew up in Pennsylvania, is a BA graduate of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in political science. He plans to study the University College, London to do a Master’s degree in Global Urbanism that focuses on design, public policy, history, technology and humanities.

Sylvan Lutz is a native of Victoria BC and a graduate of the University of Ottawa with a Bachelor of Social Science degree double major in Political Science and Economics. He graduated with a GPA of 9.78 out of a possible 10! While in Ottawa, he served in Canada’s parliament as a page for two years as well as a parliamentary assistant for another year. He has also taken courses in Canada at the University of Victoria and Camosun College while in high school, and at a Political Science university in Paris, France on a one-year exchange program.
He is currently completing the first year of a two-year double Master’s degree program from Peking University in Environmental Management for the first year and at the London School of Economics in Environmental Economics and Climate Change for the second year.
In addition to being selected the Rotary District all three are being supported by the D5020 Scholarship Committee in their applications for Global Grant Scholarships. A successful GGS application would bring ftheir unding up to USD 30,000.
Dr, Harry Panjer, Chair of the District 5020 Scholarship Committee, stated “We are thrilled to award these scholarships to such promising young persons. Our district’s investment in them will almost certainly pay big dividends to both Rotary and the world at large.”