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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. |
