About Rotary - What Is Rotary?

print this page

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, approximately 1.2 million Rotarians belong to over 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 began the campaign by raising US$240 million to immunize the children of the world and will continue the process until certification of a polio-free world is achieved.  After more than 20 years of hard work, Rotary and its partners are on the brink of eradicating this tenacious disease, but a strong push is underway to root it out once and for all.  It is a window of opportunity of historic proportions.  Added by $355 million in challenge grants by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rotary is raising an additional $200 million.  The resulting $555 million will directly support immunization campaigns in developing countries, where polio continues to infect and paralyze children, robbing them of their futures and compounding the hardships faced by their families.  In addition, Rotary has provided an army of volunteers to promote and assist at national immunization days in polio-endemic countries around the world, where over 2 billion of the world's children have been immunized against polio.

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