President's Message
Bakersfield East Rotary Club was chartered on December 23, 1952 and held its’ inaugural Charter Night on January 30th, 1953, making this our 70th year of “Service above Self”. Known within District 5240 as a “Black Belt Club”, we are very active in Community Service & Youth Service. We are fortunate to have four affiliated Foundations that provide funding for academic & vocational scholarships, to meet emergency spending requirements for families in need & for our Rotary Avenues of Service as well as support for local hospice, the fight against cancer and medical research. They are the Bakersfield East Rotary Foundation, The Plank Foundation, Valley Fever Americas Foundation & the Joe Alexander Foundation.
Locally our club was instrumental in establishing the Houchin mobile blood bank, providing a coffee truck to Covenant Coffee, as well as creating & maintaining the scenic area along the Panorama bluffs known as Rotary Park. Annually we make available tens of thousands of dollars in scholarships to local high school students & we sponsor the Kern Community Rotaract (for young adults) and four Interact Clubs (the high school version of Rotary). Our club has established KERN Yes! (Youth Empowerment Symposium) as a vital opportunity for Kern County Youth to learn leadership skills, and we sponsor a large number of top-notch students annually to attend RYLA (Rotary Youth Leadership Awards).
We partner with many local organizations, such as The Mission at Kern County, the Boys and Girls Club, CASA, Jamison Center, Ronald McDonald House, Links for Life, and Lamont Chamber of Commerce (to name a few). This year we will be partnering with The Mission at Kern County to help complete an upgrade of their overnight accommodations for the homeless of Kern County. We are a Peacebuilder Club & a Rose Parade Ambassadorial club. Some of our Global projects include providing water filtration systems to remote village so they can have safe, clean drinking water, and supplying medical equipment and wheelchairs where they are badly needed.
The Rotary International Theme this year is “Create Hope in the World”. Through the hard-working members of our club & friends of our club we will do our best this year to create hope in our community as well. Our District theme is “Let’s Have Fun.” We invite you to attend one of our meetings at the Bakersfield Museum of Art to see how we have fun while we create new friendships & work on a vast array of projects to benefit our community & the world. Our club is most welcoming to visitors & prospective members.
We meet most Fridays at noon at the Bakersfield Museum of Art.
Frank Colatruglio
2023-2024 President
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Every year before school starts, Bakersfield East Rotary Club provides backpacks for students of several organizations such as The Boys and Girls Club, Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), Bakersfield Homeless Shelter, and several of our sponsored elementary schools including College Heights Elementary. Inside each backpack are pencils, erasers, notebooks and notebook papers to help the children in these programs get a good start to their school year.
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Bakersfield East Rotary Club has had a long relationship with The Boy's and Girl's Club of Kern County. With their original site in East Bakersfield, it was a natural fit. We have provided backpacks, vans, Thanksgiving Dinner to the area citizens, scholarships, Christmas and Halloween parties and goodies, and support any time a need arises. This organization has successful programs during the summer and after school programs during the school year. It is a safe place for these area children after school. We also provide "sweat equity" when the need arises, providing graffiti removal when the building or vans get "tagged."
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