Gail Scott, Talked To Rotary Club of Ann Arbor North About Rotary Foundation On July 11th.

On July 11, 2013, Gail Scott, talked to at the RCAAN Luncheon about The Rotary Foundation. Helped by Past President Laura.

Gail Scott, our new Rotary Foundation chair, gave a very informative presentation about the workings of the Rotary International Foundation (TRF) and promised to keep educating us about the foundation throughout this Rotary year.

Gail explained that TRF is the charitable arm of Rotary International, just like the RCAAN Foundation is the charitable arm of our club.  Our club’s foundation supports local projects and requests from other Rotary clubs for their projects.  The Rotary Foundation (TRF) supports worldwide humanitarian efforts. Contributions to TRF also earn points toward Paul Harris Fellowships. Rotarians worldwide are asked to give EREY (Every Rotarian Every Year) whatever amount they can to support TRF. A gift of $100 per Rotarian is suggested, but not required. (That’s only 27 cents a day.)  We are asked to give $25 per quarter to TRF and $10 per quarter to the RCAAN Foundation. In our case, our club makes up the difference to TRF by giving $100 per club member if our membership does not give the suggested amount.

Income from the investments of the Rotary World Fund goes to the administration of TRF. After three years, the money is spent on service projects, so that the principal has to be raised again.

Half of the money that we give to TRF is credited to our Rotary District (6380). Local Rotary Clubs can initiate service projects and ask other clubs to help fund them. Then the district can authorize District Designated Funds. Previously, DDF monies had to go to far-off projects; now those funds can be put to work locally. Global Grants are given for projects that are initiated in one country and carried out in another county, like our own Project Dignity, spearheaded by Manish Mehta.  Through the power of matching grants, a small seed investment can be leveraged four or five times to produce a significant amount of money to do good works.

Our own contributions to TRF can be designated to various funds within the foundation. (For example, we could designate our donation to the Rotary Peace Scholars program, which was created by our own Virginia Nordby.  So far, the program has graduated more than 700 scholars who are working for peace and global understanding.)

We can write in our designation on our dues invoice.

TRF now has six focus areas for grants:

1.    Clean Water and Sanitation

2.    Women’s and Children’s Health

3.    Literacy

4.    Peace and Conflict Resolution

5.    Disease Prevention

6.    Economic Development.