The International Rotary Educators Fellowship is one of Rotary International’s newest. It is a Fellowship that tends to appeal not only to professional educators, but also to Rotarians who are not teachers, but who possess a passion for education or a keen interest in education’s considerable benefits.
Worldwide there are more than 775 million people over the age of 15 who are illiterate. This is approximately 17% of the world’s adult population.
An important focus of this Rotary Fellowship is to strengthen the capacity of communities to support basic education and literacy, to reduce gender disparity in education, to increase adult literacy and to promote quality education (both public and private.) Other types of training promoted by the Fellowship include continuing education and adult lifelong learning.
An excellent program that this Fellowship sponsors is an online FREE Reading program for Kids. This is an English speaking interactive literacy program for children starting at kindergarten level through to grade 6 at school. It’s free for use by Rotary clubs and other groups and it can be accessed by signing up via the International Rotary Educators Fellowship website: www.rotarianeducators.org. The program improves English reading comprehension, grammar, vocabulary and much more, and students can start at any level at which they feel comfortable. The program is designed in such a way that a lot of children think the activities they are doing are games, but all the while they are mastering learning language. Currently there are more than 60,000 students using the program.
In 2014, several Australian Rotary clubs joined other countries, including the US, UK, Ireland and Canada to establish the Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. These clubs provide children from birth up to the age of 5 years with a free new book each week, chosen for its suitability for the child’s age. The children who receive these books are mostly from low income families or families suffering hardship and the program has proved very successful for the children.
The International Rotary Educators Fellowship is a group of Rotarians from different parts of the world who enjoy friendship, share their enthusiasm for the value of education and endeavour to further literacy worldwide.