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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.
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.
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