Rotary International, the oldest and largest secular service organization in the world, has many thousands of projects underway across the country and around the world. In 208 countries, 1.2 million Rotarians are working on local and international projects. Since the first Rotary service project, a public convenience station on the streets of Chicago in 1905, Rotary clubs have built playgrounds, established reading programs, given scholarships, built schools, libraries, and hospitals, as a few examples.
Rotary District 5690, of which the Boise City Club is a member, has established many water wells in the Philippines, put sun ovens in fuel-deprived Haiti, built dormitories and water systems in Panama, developed rain water collection systems in India, sent bred heifers to former Soviet Bloc countries and Africa, built and equipped a library in Vietnam, sent Shelter Boxes with family size tents and accessories to disaster areas, and sent dehydrated food to Caribbean countries. These and many other international projects are accompanied by many projects within the district. The district’s clubs are helping to rebuild Greensburg, Kansas, and have raised over $200,000 in donations for the effort. Local clubs have projects in all of the 30 towns and cities with clubs in the district.
The flagship project of Rotary International is the Polio Plus program which began as a single club project in 1985. Rotarians have so far spent $700 million to immunize two billion children. Since 1988, Rotary has worked with the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to rid the world of the polio virus. Reported polio cases have dropped 99.8 percent from 350,000 a year in 1988 to fewer than 2,000 cases last year. Polio was eliminated in the western hemisphere by 1994. Today, the only cases of polio are all contained to pockets in four countries, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Nigeria. Rotary hopes to have polio eliminated from the world by 2010.
