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Twenty-five years ago this month, America stood still. On the morning of September 11, 2001, the country watched an attack unfold that took nearly 3,000 lives and changed how we saw ourselves and our place in the world. What came next surprised even the people living through it. Strangers helped strangers. Neighbors who had never spoken introduced themselves. Blood banks ran out of supply because so many people showed up to give. Firefighters, police officers, and ordinary ci

Ken Green opening the latest Library Box built by the Rotary Club of Annapolis. Ken Green spent dozens of hours building two library boxes, then installed them in 95-degree heat. Once the concrete dried and the paint set, he came back to open them with the kids. He has been doing this kind of work since his Peace Corps years in the 1970s. The boxes went up on 10 July at an affordable housing complex in Annapolis, the club's 26th installation. Fifty years in, he still showed u

Rajendra Dawadi was running a school day like any other when a colleague told him the water was coming. A parent had just arrived to pull her child out. He did not wait for a second opinion. He stopped school on the spot and sent every student and staff member uphill. The school was Tribhuvan Trishuli Secondary in Bidur, in Nepal's Nuwakot district. It had 1,643 students. A glacial collapse high in the Himalayas had sent a wall of water down the Trishuli Valley in late August

There were not enough dentists in the barangays of Malolos to give every child an annual check-up. So the Rotary Club of Malolos, Bulacan built a clinic that drives to the children instead of waiting for the children to reach a clinic. The fully equipped mobile dental unit was funded through a global grant from The Rotary Foundation and international partner clubs, then handed over to the local Schools Division Office along with the supplies to start seeing patients right awa

The Rotary Club of Tokyo International started in the summer of 2025 with a simple idea: build a club around the people who actually wanted to join, not the format clubs have always used. Instead of an hour-long lunch meeting every week, members meet for 90 minutes over breakfast twice a month. English is the working language. Fourteen regular members and three alumni from five countries make up the club, including professionals with little or no Japanese. Attendance runs aro

Mariama Keita-Thiero lost her job the day USAID was dismantled in February 2025, one of more than 10,000 people let go as the agency folded into the State Department. She found her way back to purpose through the Rotary Club of Washington, D.C., where she co-chairs the Embassy International Relations Committee. In May, her committee hosted an ambassadorial reception at the residence of Colombia's ambassador, drawing more than 70 guests from multiple countries. The event raise

Rita-Stella Nwojiji was a young widow in Ebonyi State, Nigeria, raising three children under six on a teacher's salary when a colleague invited her to a Rotary fellowship. That same week, she joined a club project serving meals to inmates at Abakaliki Correctional Centre, and something in her shifted. By 2011, she was club president, leading projects that built toilets and clean water access for a school for the blind and renovated homes for orphaned babies. The work caught t

Two earthquakes hit Venezuela on June 24, tearing through Caracas and the hardest-hit state of La Guaira. Rotary and Rotaract clubs moved in alongside rescue teams, setting up temporary camps and delivering medical care while families searched for somewhere to live. Miguel Dos Santos, a Rotaract member in Caracas, helped ShelterBox map the damage on the ground. He said the situation asked more of everyone than they thought they had to give, and that the only real response was

Bharat Pandya, a member of the Rotary Club of Borivli in Mumbai, has been selected by Rotary's nominating committee to serve as Rotary International president for 2028-29. He becomes president-nominee on September 15 if no one challenges the nomination. Pandya spent 38 years as a general and laparoscopic surgeon before turning his full attention to Rotary leadership. He served on the India PolioPlus Committee from 2011 to 2015, the years India was certified polio-free, and ha

In Topeka, Kansas, a program called Intersection to Care helps women rebuild their lives during incarceration and after release, offering mentorship, housing support, and education. Jennifer Montgomery, a Rotary Peace Fellow, volunteers with the program and helped bring an art exhibit called Healing in Color: Stories of Strength and Hope to life, featuring work made by the women themselves. The Rotary Club of Community Action Against Human Trafficking backs the program, which

For more than ten years, Rotary members in the Netherlands have turned a beloved national symbol into a fundraiser, selling tulip bulbs each season to support polio eradication. It is a small, steady kind of giving. No single sale ends polio on its own, but a decade of them adds up, flower by flower, to real support for a disease Rotary has spent decades trying to end for good. Sometimes the simplest idea is the one that lasts the longest. Source: Rotary International on X, x

Rotary.org is now available in more languages, including Swahili, Urdu, and Arabic, part of a broader redesign that also brought faster performance, improved search, and easier navigation. It is a small technical update that carries a bigger point: a website is only useful to the people who can actually read it. Adding languages spoken by millions of Rotary members and the communities they serve is what makes the resources on that site usable in the first place. The stories,

When Selamawit Tezera Chaka became president of the Rotary Club of Addis Ababa in Enderasse, Ethiopia, she started by asking members one question: what would you actually change? Their answers shaped almost everything that followed. Under her term, the club chartered two Interact clubs in all-girls schools, signed a twin club agreement with the Rotary Club of Jabali in Kenya, and brought in four new members, its highest intake in recent memory. Not every project survived the

In 2003, sixteen-year-old Angela Lopez left home on a Rotary Youth Exchange to Denmark, a trip her family had never really done before. She filled seven journals that year and came back, in her own words, a completely different person. She didn't join Rotary as a member until 2017, at 30, but when she did, she became one of only five women to serve as president of the Rotary Club of Phoenix in its 108-year history. Her club now counts three former exchange students among its

A Medevac in Vietnam. Two o'clock in the morning, a few days before Christmas 1969. The request reached our Air Support Radar Team at An Hoa, Vietnam. A Marine unit was pinned beneath triple-canopy jungle. Three men wounded. Darkness and weather ruled out a visual approach. Even if a helicopter found the unit, the crew couldn't see the ground through the canopy. I was a young Marine officer, second in command of the ASRT and, at 23, the second-oldest in the unit. Most of the

My grandson Emmett is eleven. He doesn’t really know what Rotary actually is. I've been a member for twenty-five years, and my father was a member when I was just a kid. I realized most of my answers would bore him to sleep. Committees. Districts. Grants. Membership. Process. blah, blah, blah. So I re-thought how to explain it. Here's what I’d say. Buddy, a long time ago — 1905 — a man named Paul Harris lived in Chicago. The city was enormous and getting bigger every day. Nob

RotaryStories just passed 100,000 impressions and 60,000 views on YouTube. That number isn't the point. You are. Every view means someone stopped scrolling long enough to watch a Rotarian show up for their community. Every share means you trusted these stories enough to pass them on. That trust is the whole reason this project exists. Rotary has been telling its own story for over a century. Our job is just to make sure people are still listening. Thank you for making that po

Rotary Moments is a series about the moment a person discovers meaning. Every Rotary member carries a story they can’t explain away. The one that turned a normal Rotary meeting into something they’d defend with their name. This is a series of brief, heartfelt moments built entirely from those stories — just voices describing the exact second when a service project stopped being a line on a resume and became something that wouldn’t let go. Something with true meaning. The Mome

SJC Rotarians are using a Rotary International Global Grant to supplement local funds. The Kenya Water Global Grant is in the planning stages. We've got most of the funds raised from San Juan Capistrano Rotary sponsors and member plus additional funds from Fullerton, Los Alamitos/Seal Beach/Cypress, and Coeur d' Alene, ID Rotary clubs. This $58k project will feature a borehole well with a solar powered pump filling water tanks. Water will be disbursed via a kiosk system and t

Hello, I wanted to personally introduce myself and express my sincere thanks for your continued support and participation in our annual Rotary charity golf tournament. You're cordially invited to join us for the 17th Annual Rotary Charity Golf Tournament on Friday, June 26, 2026, at the beautiful San Juan Hills Golf Club in San Juan Capistrano. This is always a fun day on the course, filled with great golf, friendly competition, and the opportunity to make a meaningful impact