The Future of Rotary Is In Your Hands

Last week at the International Assembly where all the District Governors for the 2009-10 Rotary year are trained, our RI President for 2009-10 John Kenny (Scotland) presented his RI theme for the year.
"The Future of Rotary is in Your Hands."
The world is changing, and if we are to keep Rotary alive and well, we must also change. The future of Rotary looks very exciting. Our Rotary leaders are working hard to provide direction that will encourage us to grow as an organization. Both in membership and in the service that we can provide to others. The Future Vision plan will be difficult to embrace, but only because it is change and change is hard. The end result of this new direction for our Foundation has been cussed and discussed at many levels and many times. It has been changed and changed again. And it may still change more.
Lets take this new theme and run with it as individual Rotarians, because Rotary is not RI in Evanston, its not the District, but it is individual Rotarians like you and me, working in our clubs on projects that put Service Above Self.
Click on the link for this blog to be directed to the RI website and learn more about the theme and the International Assembly.

What A Guy !!

You may get frustrated at his personal computer operating system software (windows), but you gotta love his understanding of the polio eradication effort around the world and his commitment to help Rotary elimate this disease from our world.

Last week at the new District Governor training event in San Diego, The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation made another monetary commitment to the fight against Polio. Another $255 million. That brings their total contribution to $355 million. If you read more about this, you will learn that Bill and Melinda Gates traveled to India for a NID (National Immunization Day) and first hand experienced the work being done by Rotary and its volunteers. They saw our commitment, strong management of the funds and determined this was a cause to join.

The original $100 million was a matching grant where us Rotarians matched the contribution. We are working on that now. The latest report is that we have $73 million on the books with outright contributions and solid commitments. With the latest contribution by the Gates Foundation, our matching portion has been increased by $100 million to a total of $200 million.

We can do it!

Along with the Gates Foundation new grant, the United Kingdom signed on for $150 million and also Germany for $130 million. With this flurry of recent events, it brings the total to $835 million for the fight to eliminate polio. LETS FIGHT!

Click on the title of this blog to be directed to the Rotary International website on this subject where you can get more details and view video's.