About Rotary - What Is Rotary?

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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. In more than 200 countries worldwide, over 1.2 million Rotarians belong to more than 33,000 Rotary clubs.

Rotary club membership represents a cross-section of the community's business and professional men and women. The world's Rotary clubs meet weekly and 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.

Although Rotary clubs develop autonomous service programs, all Rotarians worldwide are united in a campaign for the global eradication of polio. In the 1980s, Rotarians raised $240 million to immunize the children of the world.  As of September 2008, the PolioPlus program will have contributed more than $730 million to this cause and inoculated over 2 billion children worldwide.

In addition, Rotary has provided an army of volunteers to promote and assist at national immunization days in polio-endemic countries around the world.  To date more than two billion children have received the oral polio vaccine from these efforts, and 210 countries, territories, and areas around the world are now polio-free.

Find out more about Rotary by visiting the Rotary International web site.

Information on this page came from:

The About Rotary and the RI Programs pages on the Rotary International web site