EMIN KECECI

Emin Kececi has spent his career proving a simple idea: education can change the direction of a life, and connection is what makes that change last. He started as a teacher of English in Amsterdam and quickly set his sights on something bigger than the subject he taught. He wanted to teach belief. In 2015, two years after being shortlisted for a national teaching talent award, he was named Teacher of the Year.

Kececi splits his time between the classroom and the boardroom. He teaches English at Calandlyceum in Amsterdam Nieuw-West, one of the most diverse parts of the Netherlands, while running marketing, communications, recruitment, and external relations for the entire school foundation from its board office, covering both Calandlyceum and Lumion. Alongside that, he runs his own consultancy, BlueprintX, delivering leadership training and advisory work on connective leadership, team development, organizational culture, and change management for non profit and government clients.

He never stopped at his own classroom door. He co-founded Meesters met Dromen, Masters with Dreams, a national teachers' movement that grew into an education manifesto and later into a bestselling book, Het Geheim van de Leraar, ''The Teacher's Secret'', now in its sixth print run. He also co-founded Teachers for Climate, and every year he co-organizes and co-hosts the election for Sustainable Teacher of the Year, putting a national stage under educators pushing sustainability into Dutch classrooms. He has carried his story to the TEDx stage, to researchED and to the national jury that decides the Netherlands' Education Book of the Year. Announcing the 2025 winner, he distilled everything he believes about education into three words, the same three he hopes to one day teach his own daughter: ''Desire it. Develop it. Pay it forward.''

That last part, he says, is the hardest to live by, and the one that changes everything once you do.

It is the same instinct that made him a Rotarian for life. As club president of RC Hilversum-West, he turned that motto into real projects: a container city for earthquake survivors, education programs in Nepal, and chances for young people who needed someone to bet on them. He now trains future leaders across District 1570 through the Rotary Learning Institute, and was recently asked to help grow Rotary membership across the Netherlands and Flanders as Assistant Membership Coordinator.

To Belong is not just the theme of this summit for Emin Kececi. It is the job he has always done. Every classroom he has taught, every stage he has hosted, every teacher he has put in the spotlight has been the same belief in motion: people do their best work, and become their best selves, the moment they know they belong. As Co-host in Rotterdam, he brings that conviction to a room full of Rotarians from across Europe, making sure that whoever walks in, whatever language they speak, whatever corner of Rotary they call home, walks out knowing they belong to something larger than themselves.

At home in Leimuiden, just outside Amsterdam, Kececi is first and foremost a father, raising his daughter Leyya with his partner Betül. Every stage he stands on and every room he leads is, in the end, a rehearsal for the only audience that really matters: her. He wants her to grow up knowing three things. ''Desire it. Develop it. Pay it forward.''