A Peace Fellow’s school helps refugees land tech jobs

By Amy Hoak

Being a pacifist in Nazi Germany meant being labeled as a traitor.

That’s why Anne Kjær Bathel’s grandfather and his family uprooted in 1933, rather than submit to the demands of Hitler’s regime. They fled to Denmark, where they found work and a home and could sustain their convictions of nonviolence. “Had they not left, they would have landed in the concentration camps and I wouldn’t be alive, that’s for sure,” she says.

Today, her family history inspires her work to help refugees restart their careers as they settle into a new home.

About a decade ago, Bathel, 43, co-founded the ReDI School of Digital Integration to help refugees land tech jobs. Since then, the school has expanded to multiple locations in Germany, Denmark, and Sweden and has served more than 30,000 people, providing free coding and computer courses as well as career and mentorship opportunities in partnership with over 100 businesses and public entities. In February 2025, Bathel was honored as one of six Rotary People of Action: Champions of Peace.

Rotary programs helped shape Bathel’s worldview starting at age 16, when she traveled from her family’s home in Norway to Australia as a Rotary Youth Exchange student. She remembers meeting other students from around the world through coordinated tours and beginning to understand how people could live in peace despite differing cultures and languages.

At 18, she participated in a Rotary Youth Leadership Awards program at a military base in Norway. Coming from a pacifist family, it was a unique opportunity.

“Even to this day, I remember a very serious conversation about if everybody, especially young males, should serve in the army. I was very much against this, and I was discussing this with a general in the Norwegian army,” she says. “What has stayed with me was, of course we disagreed, but he listened and I could also therefore listen to him.”

Her studies took her to International Christian University in Japan, where she researched open social innovation as a Rotary Peace Fellow. She wrote her master’s thesis in Silicon Valley with OpenIDEO, a platform that aims to build solutions for societal problems.

“My focus has always been on social innovation and social entrepreneurship,” she says. “How do we make sure that we find the really powerful ideas, and when those ideas are being implemented in pilot projects, test if they are good ideas? And how do we track the impact data to understand what ideas to bring forward and to scale up?”

While in Silicon Valley, Bathel met with the Stanford Peace Innovation Lab. They collaborated to open a Peace Innovation Lab in Berlin in 2012, bringing together people from for-profit companies, nonprofit organizations, politics, and academia to discuss local issues.

One topic of discussion: the refugee crisis that started developing in Germany and other parts of Europe in 2015. There was an influx of refugees arriving from Syria at the time, and Bathel began visiting refugee camps to try to understand their needs.

“There I met Mohammed, who was from Iraq, and he had a bachelor’s degree from the university in Baghdad. Since he had a degree in computer science, he wanted to work in the tech sector in Germany,” she says. But he didn’t have a laptop to keep up his programming skills. He’d go to the library but could only use the computer for a set amount of time.

They continued their conversation, bringing two more friends to join the next time they met. Those friends brought more friends. Quickly, the idea for the ReDI School gained traction.

The school stepped up during the COVID-19 pandemic because it could reach students when many traditional schools couldn’t, she says. Afghan students, especially women, enrolled with the school when the Taliban came back to power, and there was another push when Russia invaded Ukraine and refugees fled to Germany. “In a sense, when the world is in crisis, we grow because the need is there,” Bathel says.

Today, 71 percent of former ReDI tech students are working in full-time jobs or have entered universities to further their careers, she adds. To name just two: Her early collaborator, Mohammed, is now a senior developer at Accenture, and another student, an engineer from Syria, is a cybersecurity expert for Cisco.

“It’s super nice to see these changed lives — but also changed companies that have more diversity and therefore, hopefully, can build better products,” she says. “Our part is small, but we can see the impact when refugees are well integrated into society.”

Over the years, ReDI has taken on a variety of initiatives. It worked to increase the number of women in its classes and provided child care to those who needed it while attending school. ReDI then started offering tech classes to the kids in child care, with funding help from a Rotary Foundation global grant. Its most recent push focuses on skills related to artificial intelligence, with the goal of educating 1 million students on AI over the next five years, she says.

Bathel’s biggest wish is for peace in her former students’ homelands and for them to return with fresh skills. “Because that’s a wish of all refugees,” she says. “They don’t leave because they don’t love their home country. They leave because they cannot survive.”

Another, more big-picture wish: that people all over the world regularly make small but powerful steps toward peace. The best way to start? Ask yourself what can be done in the next five minutes, five hours, five days, five months, she says.

“You can go and say something nice to your spouse. Or together with your kids, you can go out and you can pick up garbage. Or you can give money to a homeless person or have a conversation with a homeless person, asking what they really need,” Bathel says.

“I really believe in these small actions that create momentum, that will become a wave and a movement that can change society for the better.”

This story originally appeared in the February 2026 issue of Rotary magazine.