End Polio Now

We Can Do it !!!

OK....lets just say you had been working to eradicate polio in the world since 1983. You had been working with the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. You were down to the last 1%....the hardest and most expensive part of the effort....

Now this new guy comes along and says, I believe in you. I believe in you so much that if in 3 years you and the other 1.2 million Rotarians in the world can come up with $100,000,000 that I will give you a matching $100,000,000 to finish your dream. And he believes in us so much that he has already given us his $100,000,000 !!!

Well, this guy (and his wife) is Bill and Melinda Gates and their Foundation.

Now all we have to do is have each Rotary Club (all 33,000 of us) donate $3,000 to our Rotary Foundation under the name of Polio in the next 3 years! Piece of cake !!! Now we know that there are some very small clubs around that could never make the $3,000. But we also know that there are some very large clubs that can make a lot, lot more than $3,000. So it will all even out. The main thing is that we do what we can, and do it as quickly as we can.

Many of you may remember donating to Polio eradication in the past. Some of us, 2 times. So this time, lets get everyone involved. And I don't mean just Rotarians, but the members of your community. Use the resources that Rotary has provided and educate our communities about Rotary's effort to eradicate polio. Set up fund raising events so they can participate and feel good about being part of the solution.

click on the title of this blog to get to the Rotary website, specifically the Polio section.

In 1988, 1,000 children a day were diagnosed with Polio.

In 2007, worldwide 1,315 cases were diagnosed the entire year!

That's progress!!

Think where we will be after this last push. Lets get out there and get this done !

More website links for Polio eradication:

http://www.rotary.org/en/EndPolio

http://www.polioeradication.org/

District 5710 Foundation Banquet

Rotary is an International organization.

Sure, we do a lot of local projects that help out our communities, but in the big picture, we are all about helping people all over the world.

The reason we are able to fund all these projects is our own Rotary Foundation.

By giving to our Foundation we are able to financially support our mission of world understand and peace. In the meantime, we work to eradicate Polio from the WORLD; provide scholarships to those who would dedicate their lives to conflict resolution; help young business men and women live in another part of the world for a month and see how their profession differs from their country with Group Study Exchange; more scholarships for Ambassadorial Scholars to study for a year in a university of a foreign country; in developing nations, provide clean water, provide eye surgery, prosthetics so people can walk again; oh yeah, the matching grants we use to fund our local projects....and the list just goes on and on !!!

All this is made possible by our Foundation, we need and must support it financially. How many other foundations dedicate 100% of the donations to projects?

Now, here is an enjoyable way to help, attend our District Foundation Banquet!

Block of the date, November 8, 2008.
It will be held at the Overland Park Sheraton, 6:00pm

Go to the District 5710 website http://www.rotary5710.org/ for more information and a registration form. There are many options available, buy a table for your club and give a Paul Harris Fellow recognition, have your company sponsor a table and get your business promoted or just come and enjoy with your spouse.

From the main page of the website, click on events at the top, then go to November on the calendar, there it is on the 8th. (November is Rotary Foundation month)

Hope to see you there !!

District Foundation, Membership & Leadership Seminar

Our District Foundation, Membership and Leadership Seminar (FML) was a great success. For the first time we used our new website functions for registration and 97% of our attendees registered via the website!!! Thanks, its working!!

Pictured from left to right are PDG Rick Tinucci, our Rotary Zone membership advisor, DG 5710 Vickie Randel and Todd Lindley, our Rotary Zone Foundation advisor. Rick and Todd are from our neighboring District 6060 that includes the St. Louis area. Rick and Todd were gracious enough to make the drive to Topeka and provide our District Rotarians with some great information, thanks! We also had many of our own District Rotarians providing breakout sessions on many different subjects regarding Foundation and Membership.

Another part of the seminar is the Leadership session. We had 3 excellent topics covered: the Leadership Model 1 & 2, leading volunteers and meeting management. The comments received about these sessions were outstanding!

Some of the handouts are available on the District website, http://www.rotary5710.org/ under the Training link in the left column of the homepage, then the Foundation, Membership and Leadership Seminar link in the left column of the Training page. More will be added as we can put them out there.

Mark next year's date in your calendar for this event: August 8th, 2009