Stories


Rotaract: 50 years of changing lives 50 years ago, the first Rotaract club was formed to give young adults a place to connect and take action for good. Rotaract members from each decade share what the program was like and how it shaped their lives. The year is 1968. A wall divides East and West Berlin, as the Cold War rages on. The U.S. and the Soviet Union are locked in a space race, and Apollo 8 becomes the first manned spacecraft to orbit the moon, sending back pictures of Earth from deep space. And Rotary members in North Carolina, USA, charter the first Rotaract club, to provide young people opportunities for service. A half-century has passed since those first Rotaract clubs began inspiring young leaders to take action to improve their communities. The world has changed, as has the way Rotaract members connect with one another. But the underlying values of the program, and what attracts people to it, remain remarkably the same.	Rotaract: 50 years of changing lives		2018-02-23 05:00:00Z	0
Movie tells inspirational Polio story 'Breathe' details life of British polio survivor Robin Cavendish, who contracted the disease in Kenya in 1958. As Rotary prepares to celebrate World Polio Day on 24 October, an inspiring new film depicting the devastating impact of polio is hitting theaters. Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy star in the love story “Breathe,” now playing in select U.S. theaters and scheduled for wider release over the next month. The movie tells the story of British polio survivor Robin Cavendish, who contracted the disease in Kenya in 1958. At the age of 28, he was paralyzed from the neck down, confined to a hospital bed with a respirator, and given just months to live. However, with the encouragement and help of his wife, Diana, Robin was able to leave the hospital and spend the rest of his life advocating for people with disabilities and popularizing a new wheelchair with a built-in respirator. People were frightened by polio. People would shout at us in the street complaining about my father being in a wheelchair when he should have been in the hospital.	Movie tells inspirational Polio story		2018-02-12 05:00:00Z	0
Critical Care Linked through sister cities, Rotarians save newborns in Brazil. A mother is in labor, and she’s frightened. Her baby isn’t due for three months. The closest hospital is 30 miles away, and although she makes it there in time, the baby is born weighing barely 2 pounds. And there’s another problem. The hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit has only seven incubators, and all are in use, so the baby must be transferred to another hospital to receive the critical care he needs. If he survives the transfer, his parents will need to find a way to make trips to that hospital for months. Many new mothers were facing similar situations at Dr. Leopoldo Bevilacqua Regional Hospital, a state-run facility in Brazil’s Ribeira Valley. Lack of equipment meant some of the hospital’s most vulnerable newborns had to be transferred, which was a factor in São Paulo state’s high infant mortality rate.	Critical Care		2018-02-04 05:00:00Z	0
Vision Quest Posted by Mickey D When Barry Rassin arrived at Rotary headquarters in Evanston at 4 a.m. for his first full day as president-elect, his security card wouldn’t work in the elevator. Just the day before, in a whirlwind process, he’d been nominated to fill the vacancy of Sam F. Owori, who had died unexpectedly in July. Now Rassin, a member of the Rotary Club of East Nassau, Bahamas, didn’t have the right credentials for all-hours access to the building. “I had to explain the situation to the security guard, who of course didn’t have a clue who I was,” he says. Read more...	Vision Quest	Mickey D	2018-01-27 05:00:00Z	0
Reaching a Polio Free World Posted by Sarah Hughes After 25 years of hard work, Rotary and its partners are on the brink of eradicating this tenacious disease, but a strong push is needed now to root it out once and for all. It is a window of opportunity of historic proportions. Reaching the ultimate goal of a polio-free world presents ongoing challenges, not the least of which is a hundreds of million dollar funding gap. Of course, Rotary alone can't fill this gap, but continued Rotarian advocacy for government support can help enormously. As long as polio threatens even one child anywhere in the world, children everywhere remain at risk. The stakes are that high... Polio	Reaching a Polio Free World	Sarah Hughes	2017-12-28 05:00:00Z	0	Polio

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