About Rotary

Rotary is an organization of business and professional leaders united worldwide who provide humanitarian service, encourage high ethical standards in all vocations, and help build goodwill and peace in the world. Founded in Chicago in 1905 as the world's first volunteer service organization, Rotary quickly expanded around the globe, with about 31,000 clubs in more than 165 countries.

Rotary club membership represents a cross-section of the community's business and professional men and women. The world's Rotary clubs meet weekly for fellowship to discuss local and global topics. Clubs are nonpolitical, nonreligious, and open to all cultures, races, and creeds.

The main objective of Rotary is service — in the community, in the workplace, and throughout the world. Rotarians develop community service projects that address many of today's most critical issues, such as children at risk, poverty and hunger, the environment, illiteracy, and violence. They also support programs for youth, educational opportunities and international exchanges for students, teachers, and other professionals, and vocational and career development. The Rotary motto is Service Above Self.

Rotary clubs support community projects locally and globally, through more than US$95 in Rotary Foundation grants each year, known as the world's largest private provider of international education scholarships.

All Rotarians worldwide are united in a campaign for the global eradication of polio, through PolioPlus, Rotary's flagship program. In the 1980s, Rotarians raised US$240 million to immunize the children of the world; by 2005, Rotary's centenary year and the target date for the certification of a polio-free world, the PolioPlus program had contributed US$600 million to this cause plus countless volunteer hours to help immunize over two billion children.

Information sourced from: The Rotary International About pages.

Object of Rotary

The object of Rotary is to encourage and foster the ideal of service as a basis of worthy enterprise and in particular to encourage and foster:
First: The development of acquaintance as an opportunity for service
Second: High ethical standards in business and professions, the recognition of the worthiness of all useful occupations, and the dignifying of each Rotarian's occupation as an opportunity to serve society
Third: The application of the ideal of service in each Rotarian's personal, business and community life
Fourth: The advancement of international understanding, goodwill, and peace through a world fellowship of business and professional persons, united in the ideal of service.