Rotary is an organisation for community-minded people of different professional backgrounds, genders, ages, religions and ethnicities, who carry out humanitarian work and strive to promote understanding, goodwill and peace in the world.
History
“I came to hang up my sign,” said Paul Harris. The year was 1896 and he had come to Chicago to start his law firm. The depression had the city in its grip and dishonesty and corruption were everyday occurrences. Running a business under such circumstances was not easy, so one evening he invited three friends to his office.
There they decided to start a club to better withstand the hard life in Chicago and to support one another’s professional work. The first members were the coal merchant Silvester Schiele, the tailor Hiram Shorey and the mining engineer Gustavus E. Loehr. It was 23 February 1905, and the club was named Rotary after the rotating meetings. They also decided to have only one representative from each profession. As the club grew, they took a new step: they would serve not only one another but also the community they lived in, and adopted two mottos – “Service above self” and “He profits most who serves the best”. By the start of the Second World War there were over 200,000 members in 77 countries.
Today there are 1.2 million members in around 34,000 clubs in 212 countries – a development even Paul Harris could hardly have dreamed of. Rotary’s work is divided into five avenues of service: club service, vocational service, community service, international service and youth service. Rotary International’s constitution encourages service by:
- getting to know people
- applying high ethical standards in working life
- applying the ideal of service in one’s daily life and in society
- promoting international understanding and peace through worldwide fellowship
Charity
At present, the Rotary Foundation and Rotary donate the equivalent of more than SEK 1.7 billion to various projects around the world.
The purpose of the Rotary Foundation is to create understanding across borders and achieve peace in the world through international programs for humanitarian aid and education. The foundation was laid in 1917, and in 1983 the foundation was registered in Illinois, USA, as a non-profit organisation. The contributions are entirely voluntary, from Rotarians and clubs around the world.
End Polio Now! is the Rotary Foundation's largest program. Since it started in 1985, over a billion children have been vaccinated.
The Rotary Doctor Bank
The Rotary Doctor Bank is a Nordic project in the form of a foundation that started in 1988. In Sweden the project receives funding from Sida and from individual members and clubs. Over 500 doctors from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and now also the Netherlands take part, of whom about 120 are sent out each year to work in developing countries – mainly in East Africa, where the shortage of doctors is unimaginable by our standards.
Read more about the Doctor Bank's work
The doctors, who receive free travel and board but no salary, are out for periods of at least six weeks. Most work in so-called relays at the hospitals, which means 6–9 doctors take over from one another over a year in the same post. The cost ends up being only about a fifth of an equivalent post in Sweden. More recently, jeep-doctor relays have also been added, replacing doctors at the mission hospitals when the regular ones are absent.
Through the jeep lines' work, 35,143 patients received medical care during 2012. 45 doctors worked as volunteers each for a six-week period – on average each doctor treated 780 patients, a total of 26 patients per day. This is possible because the work is done in teams with Kenyan staff: a nurse, an HIV/AIDS counsellor and volunteers from the village where the clinic is located.
During 2012, about 300–400 children per month were treated at the Doctor Bank's two dental clinics in Kenya, and many more were checked at the schools. Tooth extraction is the most common treatment – on average a dentist extracts 340 teeth, does 44 fillings and 181 other treatments during their six weeks in Kenya.
The U-fonden fund
The U-fonden (Developing Countries Fund) was established in 1968 on the initiative of Carl-Herman Hjortsjö. Its work focuses on educating young men and women in developing countries. Contributions go to individual clubs that cooperate with Rotary clubs in developing countries, Sida and/or serious and well-established organisations with branches in the country concerned.