Happy fall everyone! Time is running short to register for the Club Experience Summit that we are holding at 10 AM (doors open at 9:30) October 19. If you want to learn how to grow and retain membership in your club from those who have done so - Paradigm at Mentor High School at 10 AM on October 19 is the place to be! Clubs in our district will share great ideas to make our meetings more engaging and how they grew dramatically in a single year while retaining members! Brand new members will tell us what they want from Rotary. Be there or be square! Register Now
October is Community Economic Development month in Rotary. Economic development provides the foundation for peace by providing jobs and the ability to support one's family. While that is a very important topic, I want to take the remainder of my monthly letter to address a question I received recently. The question was "why doesn't Rotary pick something new to work on? Polio is like, so 1910." My answer follows:
Forty five years ago we made a promise to the world's children that we would eradicate the scourge of polio from the planet. Getting out now would not only break that promise, but models show that, if we were to stop, 200,000 children would be paralyzed due to polio within ten years. The goal is in sight - there has been an uptick this year, but the wild polio virus remains endemic to a border area in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We can and will keep the promise. We have the support of the governments of both countries. The health workers on the ground performing the vaccinations are building the relationships of tribal leaders and educating them to increase support at that level to get all children vaccinated.
COVID taught us how a virus can rapidly spread from a small group to the entire world in a very short time. If we were to stop our work, the virus would break out and spread across the world, paralyzing thousands of children. Rotarians cannot allow that! In 1985, polio paralyzed 360,000 children per year. There are 120 million people living and walking today who would have otherwise been paralyzed without our vaccination work. We have had 40 cases of wild polio virus this year. That is an uptick from the twelve total cases last year, but the end remains near!
Dale Smith
District Governor 2024/2025
Rotary International District 6630
Past-President
Rotary Club of Mentor
The Magic of Rotary
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