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History of
Rotary |
The world's first service
club, the Rotary Club of Chicago, Illinois,
USA, was formed on 23 February 1905 by Paul
P. Harris, an attorney who wished to
recapture in a professional club the same
friendly spirit he had felt in the small
towns of his youth. The name "Rotary"
derived from the early practice of rotating
meetings among members' offices.
Rotary's popularity spread throughout the
United States in the decade that followed;
clubs were chartered from San Francisco to
New York. By 1921, Rotary clubs had been
formed on six continents, and the
organization adopted the name Rotary
International a year later.
As Rotary grew, its mission
expanded beyond serving the professional and
social interests of club members. Rotarians
began pooling their resources and
contributing their talents to help serve
communities in need. The organization's
dedication to this ideal is best expressed
in its principal motto: Service Above Self.
Rotary also later embraced a code of ethics,
called The 4-Way Test, that has been
translated into hundreds of languages. |
Paul Harris
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During and after World War II, Rotarians
became increasingly involved in promoting
international understanding. In 1945, 49
Rotary members served in 29 delegations to
the United Nations Charter Conference.
Rotary still actively participates in UN
conferences by sending observers to major
meetings and promoting the United Nations in
Rotary publications. Rotary International's
relationship with the United Nations
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) dates back to a 1943
London Rotary conference that promoted
international cultural and educational
exchanges. Attended by ministers of
education and observers from around the
world, and chaired by a past president of
RI, the conference was an impetus to the
establishment of UNESCO in 1946.
An endowment fund, set up by Rotarians in
1917 "for doing good in the world," became a
not-for-profit corporation known as The
Rotary Foundation in 1928. Upon the death of
Paul Harris in 1947, an outpouring of
Rotarian donations made in his honor,
totaling US$2 million, launched the
Foundation's first program — graduate
fellowships, now called Ambassadorial
Scholarships. Today, contributions to The
Rotary Foundation total more than US$80
million annually and support a wide range of
humanitarian grants and educational programs
that enable Rotarians to bring hope and
promote international understanding
throughout the world.
In 1985, Rotary made a historic commitment
to immunize all of the world's children
against polio. Working in partnership with
nongovernmental organizations and national
governments thorough its PolioPlus program,
Rotary is the largest private-sector
contributor to the global polio eradication
campaign. Rotarians have mobilized hundreds
of thousands of PolioPlus volunteers and
have immunized more than one billion
children worldwide. By the 2005 target date
for certification of a polio-free world,
Rotary will have contributed half a billion
dollars to the cause.
As it approached the dawn of the 21st
century, Rotary worked to meet the changing
needs of society, expanding its service
effort to address such pressing issues as
environmental degradation, illiteracy, world
hunger, and children at risk. The
organization admitted women for the first
time (worldwide) in 1989 and claims more
than 90,000 women in its ranks today.
Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall
and the dissolution of the Soviet Union,
Rotary clubs were formed or re-established
throughout Central and Eastern Europe.
Today, 1.2 million Rotarians belong to some
31,000 Rotary clubs in 166 countries.
http://www.rotary.org/aboutrotary/history/index.html |
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