What is Rotary?

Rotary at a Glance

Rotary International is a service organization that joins leaders from all continents, cultures and occupations to exchange ideas and take action for communities around the world. Through fellowship and global understanding, we build life-long relationships. We honor our commitments with ethics and integrity. Through diversity, we connect different perspectives. And through vocational expertise, service and leadership, we solve social issues.

 

Rotarians are people of action. We volunteer our time and talents, provide funds, develop partnerships, and invest in the next generation of leaders. Each individual club has the opportunity to discuss the greatest challenges and needs of its own community and communities throughout the world, and works to develop ideas on how to solve these issues.

Membership Snapshot

Who:

Rotary International brings together the kind of people who step forward to take on important issues for communities worldwide. Rotary members hail from a wide range of professional backgrounds: doctors, artists, executives, small business owners and stay-at-home parents all call themselves Rotarians. Rotary connects these unique perspectives, and helps leverage its members’ expertise to improve lives everywhere.

 

What:

Rotarians contribute their time, energy and passion to sustainable, long-term projects in local communities across the globe. Projects focus on important issues like peace and conflict resolution, disease prevention and treatment, water and sanitation, maternal and child health, basic education and literacy and economic and community development.

 

Where:

From Haiti and Greenland to Nigeria and Singapore, Rotary unites a truly diverse set of leaders from across the world. Currently, the largest number of clubs comes from the United States, India, Japan and Brazil. The fastest growing Rotary regions include Southeast Asia and Africa.

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Polio Eradication

Rotary has been working to eradicate polio for more than 45 years. Our goal of ridding the world of this disease is closer than ever.

Rotary's first polio project was to vaccinate children in the Philippines in 1979. Inspired by that successful vaccination campaign, Rotary went on to become a founding partner of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in 1988, which has reduced polio cases around the world by 99.9 percent.

Thanks to the generosity and commitment of our members, Rotary has contributed more than US$2.9 billion in PolioPlus grants and countless volunteer hours to protect more than 3 billion children in 122 countries from this disease. Rotary’s advocacy efforts have played a role in decisions by governments to contribute more than $11 billion to the effort.

Today, polio remains endemic only in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But it’s crucial to continue working to keep other countries polio-free. If all eradication efforts stopped today, within 10 years, polio could paralyze as many as 200,000 children each year.