Rotary is an opportunity to build lifelong friendships and experience the personal fulfilment of providing volunteer service.
An organisation of business and professional leaders, Rotary provides humanitarian service, encourages high ethical standards in all vocations, and builds goodwill and peace in the world.
The world's first service club, Rotary, began with the formation of the Rotary Club of Chicago, Illinois, USA on February 23, 1905.
A young lawyer, Paul P. Harris, and three of his friends started the club. They wished to recapture the friendly spirit they had felt among business people in the small towns in which they had lived.
Their weekly meetings rotated among their offices, providing the new service club with its name.
Today Rotary flourishes with some 27,000 clubs and 1.2 million men and women as club members, providing community service in virtually every nation in the world.
The Object of Rotary is to encourage and foster the ideal of service as a basis of worthy enterprise, and, in particular, to encourage and foster:
First: The development of acquaintance as an opportunity for service.
Second: High ethical standards in businesses and professions, the recognition of the worthiness of all useful occupations and the dignifying of each Rotarian's occupation as an opportunity to serve society.
Third: The application of the ideal of service in each Rotarian's personal, business and community life;
Fourth: The advancement of International understanding, goodwill and peace through a world fellowship of business and professional persons united in the ideal of service.
The 4-Way Test is a simple but profound statement of things we think, say or do:
1. Is it the TRUTH?
2. Is it FAIR to all concerned?
3. Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
4. Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?
1. Club service - providing service to the Rotary club to enable it to run efficiently in the spirit of fellowship.
2. Vocational service - putting high standards of conduct into practice in the business and professional lives of Rotarians
3 Community service - identifying needs in the Rotary club's community and addressing these needs with service projects.
4. International service - working for international understanding and peace by promoting goodwill between all people.
Rotary International is the association of Rotary clubs around the world. Rotary clubs select their own service projects on local needs and requirements.
Clubs work on projects relating to health, hunger, environmental concerns, literacy and vocational assistance, drug abuse, and assisting senior citizens and young people.
Club members support projects internationally through their own contacts with Rotarians in other countries, and through participation in the programs of the Rotary Foundation.
Membership in a Rotary club is by invitation only and is on the basis of one representative of each business and profession. This classification system ensures a wide cross section of community representation.
Clubs meet weekly for fellowship and interesting and informative programmes dealing with topics of local and global importance.
The real work of Rotary takes place before and after the meetings, when Rotarians plan and carry out a remarkable variety of humanitarian and educational service projects that touch peoples' lives in their local communities and in our world community.
A chance to provide direct service to your community
A chance to meet other Rotarians who may one day require the business you provide
A chance to make new friends throughout the community
A chance to learn more about social service organisations, fitness and health, consumer affairs, other businesses and hobbies through the nearly 52 programmes presented at meetings each year.
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