By Rotary International

Alexandria Ritchie (seated under banner), with the Rotaract Club of John Tyler Community College.

By Alexandria Ritchie, a member of the Rotaract Club of Virginia Commonwealth University and the Rotary Club of James River, Richmond, Virginia, USA

Recently, two Rotary friends shared with me the decision taken by the Council on Legislation to allow Rotaractors to also join Rotary. (The Council is where Rotary members gather every three years to discuss changes to the policies governing our organization.)

So I thought I’d give it a try. I am 21, and now also a member of the Rotary Club of James River. Let me tell you a little bit about my experience in Rotary and its young leaders programs from the perspective of a brand new young Rotarian.

My path to Rotary
I joined Rotaract after being a member of my high school’s Interact club. I founded a Rotaract chapter on my campus at John Tyler Community College and have been a loyal member of Rotaract ever since. It’s changed my life. I now represent my entire district as a district Rotaract representative.

How did I make the decision to join a Rotary club? The answer is simple. My …read more

Source:: Rotary International Blog

By Rotary International

Ann Lee Hussey and children in Nigeria

By Ann Lee Hussey, a member of the Rotary Club of Portland Sunrise, Maine, USA

Polio can affect children anywhere. The poliovirus doesn’t discriminate based on geography, skin color, or religion. If we don’t eradicate polio now, the world could see cases rebound to 200,000 new cases every year, within 10 years.

I’ve participated in 27 immunization campaigns, leading 23, throughout Africa and Asia, not because I’m a polio survivor, but because I believe polio eradication will be one of our greatest gifts to future generations.

People sometimes talk about how much money we can save if we eradicate polio. It’s reported that we could save $40 billion to $50 billion over the next 20 years if we eradicate the disease soon, and the economic impact on families and communities that are affected by polio is staggering.

Uma’s story
During my first trip to Nigeria in 2008, I immunized children in very rural areas. We walked through millet fields, down dirt roads, and across fields with grazing cows to reach clusters of homes. During a visit to one village, I met Uma, who was 11 at the time. Uma had never been to school. As a polio victim, she …read more

Source:: Rotary International Blog

By Rotary International

Children display their drawings about the environment.

By Shiv Agrawal, past president of the Rotary Club of Bokora Midtown Couples, Jharkhand, India

Protecting our environment is probably one of the most important issue of our day. My club wanted to tap the creativity of children, and see what they were thinking about the environment. So we organized a drawing competition to let children unleash their imagination and build an awareness of the issue.

We were surprised to see the ideas the children portrayed on their papers and the slogans they came up with. They were definitely advanced beyond their age.

This was a general and small project, and it could be done by many different organizations throughout the year. It is a topic of importance for us in India, where people tend to be rather casual about the environment despite all the knowledge we have about how we are impacting our planet, not always in good ways.

We have decided to repeat the project and involve even more of our city in days to come.

…read more

Source:: Rotary International Blog

By Rotary International

Tiffany Ervin with participants in a special needs baseball league her club sponsors.

By Tiffany Ervin, past president of the Rotary Club of Four Seasons – Hendersonville, North Carolina, USA

In the days of the American wild west, if you wanted to travel a great distance, you had to go by stagecoach and it was a very long trip. There were three different classes of passengers – first, second, and third class. The seats were all the same, but the prices were different. Here’s why…

First class meant you remained seated during the entire trip, no matter what happened or what conditions might be faced.
Second class meant you remained seated until there was a problem along the way, when you had to exit the stagecoach and walk alongside.
But third class passengers not only exited when there was a problem, they were also the ones who had to fix a broken wheel or even push the stagecoach along, through the mud, up the hills, no matter what came along.

So I began thinking about this when it comes to our involvement in Rotary. Let me ask you – what class ticket do you hold?

Pampered, or detached?
Too many of us hold first class tickets – we …read more

Source:: Rotary International Blog

By Rotary International

Rotaractors and guests clean up and create kitchen gardens in the village of Kinyinya, Rwanda.

By Peter King Oloo

Nearly 140 Rotaractors and guests from across the East African countries of Tanzania, Burundi, Kenya and Uganda gathered in Rwanda on 26 March to participate in the monthly cleaning exercise in Rwanda called Umuganda.

The Rotaractors, through their award-winning annual project called REACT (Rotaract East Africa Impact), had organized a project to construct kitchen gardens and raise funds for medical insurance. Both these activities were geared toward helping the community of the 1994 Rwanda genocide survivors who were resettled in Kinyinya village in Kigali.

These survivors were resettled under the Peace and Hope Initiative. We sought to carry out a project with some guests that would be sustainable and enable the people at this community to feed themselves for longer term.

The community was trained with practice to construct kitchen gardens in tight spaces and to balance their diet. By the end of the project, 50 kitchen gardens had been constructed.

Miss Rwanda 2016, Miss Jolly Mutesi, joined us and implored the young girls at the center to be hard workers and make wise choices. She told stories of girls who had listened to the promises of …read more

Source:: Rotary International Blog

By Rotary International

Students respond to a question during the two-day workshop.

By Rajesh Kumar Modi, Rotary Club of Mumbai Borivali East, India

Children are the future of any country. We as members of Rotary have an opportunity to mold them in such a way that they can emerge as efficient and valuable resources for our country. All it takes is changing the way we approach our club activities. Not every project has to be a huge project. Sometimes, size isn’t the only indicator of success.

Big results
In June, my club, the Rotary Club of Mumbai Borivali East, partnered with the Rotary Club of Borivali in District 3140 to organize two day-long workshops on the subject of “How to conduct social activities.” Three dozen students in six grade levels (standard 6 to 12) took part. The outcome was amazing. It was a great experience and made me proud to be chairman of the project.

Our first day started with a motivational speech, followed by discussions of eye and organ donations, skin donation, and garbage management. We passed out pledge forms for anyone who wanted to agree to be skin or eye donors. We also charged them with distributing and collecting additional pledge forms among their friends.

The …read more

Source:: Rotary International Blog

By Rotary International

By Evan Burrell

There seems to be a social media crisis or PR nightmare almost every other week nowadays, and even your Rotary club isn’t immune to a potential crisis that can blow out of all proportion.

Crisis planning is essential and an effective crisis plan is based first and foremost on truth, transparency, and sincerity. Every Rotary club should have a strategy for how it will deal with a public relations disaster, either online or offline. If your club does not have a plan in place, I recommend your club devise one as a matter of urgency.

As part of your crisis plan, make sure you or the club leadership can confidently answer these following questions:

Who will handle your social media accounts in case of a crisis?
What will that person be authorized to write on social media about the crises?
Will they need approval for every post?
What will the messaging be across all the different platforms i.e. social media, traditional media, other Rotary clubs etc.?
Will you have more than one person responding to online posts or offline discussion?
What social media posts will you proactively put out there to manage it?

Managing the Crisis
There is no one answer to managing a crisis, you need to …read more

Source:: Rotary International Blog

By Rotary International

Jon Kaufman with children in Nepal during an installation of a water filtration system.

By Jon Kaufman, a member of the Rotary Club of Peninsula Sunrise, California, USA

The installation of two water plants in rural villages in Nepal now produce more than 20,000 liters of safe drinking water every day, using solar wind as their power source. We helped install the SunSpring ultra-filtration systems the week of 1 July through 7 July as part of the ongoing H2OpenDoors project sponsored by my Rotary club and partnering clubs.

I was able to raise the $50,000 for these units at two different golf tournaments in 2015, thanks to hundreds of generous donors. The tournaments were held in Half Moon Bay, California, and Itasca, Illinois.

The Rotary project worked with Helping Hands, a Nepal non-government organization headed by Narayan Shrestha. Narayan, a Boulder, Colorado, businessman with deep roots in Nepal, has built hospitals and schools in that country and is widely respected among the Himalayan communities. In the small town of Khandabar, Helping Hands has built a school for 700 students. While they do get mountain spring water through the property, the quality is not safe to drink. The SunSpring system now purifies the …read more

Source:: Rotary International Blog