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Brief History of Rotary
The
world's first service club, the Rotary Club
of Chicago, Illinois, USA, was
formed on 23
February 1905 by
Paul P. Harris, an attorney who
wished to
recapture in a
professional club the same friendly spirit
he had felt in the
small towns of
his youth. The name "Rotary" derived from
the early practice
of rotating
meetings among members' offices.
Rotary's
popularity spread throughout the United
States in the decade that
followed; clubs
were chartered from San Francisco to New
York. By 1921,
Rotary clubs had
been formed on six continents, and the
organization
adopted the name
Rotary International a year later.
As Rotary grew,
its mission expanded beyond serving the
professional and social
interests of club
members. Rotarians began pooling their
resources and contributing
their talents to
help serve communities in need. The
organization's dedication to this
ideal is best
expressed in its principal motto: Service
Above Self. Rotary also later
embraced a code
of ethics, called The 4-Way Test, that has
been translated into
hundreds of
languages.
During and after
World War II, Rotarians became increasingly
involved in promoting
international
understanding. A Rotary conference held in
London in 1942 planted the
seeds for the
development of the United Nations
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization
(UNESCO), and numerous Rotarians have served
as consultants to the
United Nations.
An endowment
fund, set up by Rotarians in 1917 "for doing
good in the world,"
became a
not-for-profit corporation known as The
Rotary Foundation in 1928. Upon
the death of Paul
Harris in 1947, an outpouring of Rotarian
donations made in his
honor, totaling
US$2 million, launched the Foundation's
first program — graduate
fellowships, now
called Ambassadorial Scholarships. Today,
contributions to The
Rotary Foundation
total more than US$80 million annually and
support a wide range
of humanitarian
grants and educational programs that enable
Rotarians to bring
hope and promote
international understanding throughout the
world.
In 1985, Rotary
made a historic commitment to immunize all
of the world's children
against polio.
Working in partnership with nongovernmental
organizations and
national
governments thorough its PolioPlus program,
Rotary is the largest
private-sector
contributor to the global polio eradication
campaign. Rotarians have
mobilized
hundreds of thousands of PolioPlus
volunteers and have immunized more
than one billion
children worldwide. By the 2005 target date
for certification of a
polio-free world,
Rotary will have contributed half a billion
dollars to the cause.
As it approached
the dawn of the 21st century, Rotary worked
to meet the changing
needs of society,
expanding its service effort to address such
pressing issues as
environmental
degradation, illiteracy, world hunger, and
children at risk. The
organization
admitted women for the first time in 1989
and claims more than 90,000
women in its
ranks today. Following the collapse of the
Berlin Wall and the dissolution
of the Soviet
Union, Rotary clubs were formed or
re-established throughout Central
and Eastern
Europe. Today, 1.2 million Rotarians belong
to some 29,000 Rotary clubs
in more than 160
countries.
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