Rotary Tacoma 8
Guests
Original Air Date: 2/4/2010
Rotary Tacoma 8
Tacoma Rotary eight is the eighth oldest Rotary Club in the world. The club is celebrating one hundred years of local and international service. Rotary International is a service club that strives to improve people’s lives both locally and internationally.
Guests
Visit the Rotary Tacoma 8 website here.
Visit the Rotary International website here.
Steve Smith
Steve is a past secretary and past president of Rotary 8. He has been a member of the club since 1997 and is very active in the community projects of the club, including tutoring young people to read.
Jim Henderson
Jim is a past president of Rotary 8. During his time in the club, he joined the Rotary Foundation and became the main contact for receiving applications for the Ambassadorial Scholarship program.
Nita Sell
Nita is a past president of Tacoma 8. She has worked on multiple service projects throughout her time at the club and recently returned from Africa to take part in polio eradication and water projects there.
Stats and Facts
REACH Center
Rotary 8 was seeking a project to represent their 100 years of service to Pierce Country. Their centennial grant would give $100,000 to a cause in the Tacoma area with the aim of improving the community. On June 7th, 2007 the Rotary determined that the grant would go to Tacoma Goodwill for its Youth Career Development Center, the centerpiece of a new building planned to support a tripling of the nonprofit agency’s services in Pierce County over the next five years. Rotary members have also contributed $440,000 to the project through their membership on the board of Goodwill, Goodwill’s senior management team, or as special friends of the organization.
Ambassadorial Scholarship Program
Ambassadorial Scholarships, The Rotary Foundation's oldest and best-known program, was founded in 1947. Since then, nearly 38,000 men and women from about 100 nations have studied abroad under the program. Today it is the world's largest privately funded international scholarships program. Each year, through grants totaling approximately $500 million, recipients from about 70 countries study in more than 70 nations, worldwide.
Rotary Youth Exchange Program
Youth Exchange is one of Rotary International’s structured programs designed to help clubs and districts achieve their service goals in their own communities and in communities abroad, fostering fellowship and goodwill in the process. The long-term Youth Exchange program is an exchange program for secondary school students. Students travel to other countries to learn about the culture and the language as well as act as a cultural ambassador for their own country. Youth Exchange became an official program of Rotary International in 1972.
Ethiopia Water Project500,000 Ethiopian children die each year from diseases caused by contaminated water. Ethiopia tops The Rotary Water Resource Group’s list of countries most in need of accessible clean water. Ethiopian girls and women spend hours each day carrying heavy water jugs many miles - just to provide drinking water for their families. As a result, schooling for girls is inconsistent. As a result, Rotary Districts of western Washington and Canada are sponsoring a project called “Ethiopia Water Project III” or EW3. This project unites US and Ethiopian Rotarians to improve people’s lives in Ethiopia.
Polio Eradication
Although Polio was a long-dead disease to most Americans in the mid-1980’s, it afflicted 350,000 people in 120 countries worldwide. This was the point when Rotary set out to eradicate the disease globally through immunization efforts. The founding of Rotary’s PolioPlus initiative brought a global spotlight to polio, and even spurred the World Health Assembly to pass a resolution to eradicate polio in 1988. The remaining cases of polio were centered in developing countries in Africa and Asia. Today, only four countries are still classified as polio endemic.
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