About Rotary | Our Guiding Principle
Service | Rotary Centennial | Rotary History

About Rotary

Rotary is a worldwide organization of business and professional leaders that provides humanitarian service, encourages high ethical standards in all vocations, and helps build goodwill and peace in the world. Approximately 1.2 million Rotarians belong to more than 31,000 Rotary clubs in 166 countries.

The Hutchinson Rotary Club is among these organizations.

Members of a Rotary club are part of a diverse group of professional leaders working to address various community and international service needs and to promote peace and understanding throughout the world.

Click here to see photos of Rotary’s history and today’s service projects.

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Our Guiding Principle

From the earliest days of the organization, Rotarians have been concerned with promoting high ethical standards in their professional lives. One of the world's most widely printed and quoted statements of business ethics is The Four-Way Test, created in 1932 by Rotarian Herbert J. Taylor, who later served as RI president.

Adopted by Rotary in 1943 to serve as a guide for members, The Four-Way Test has been translated into more than a hundred languages and published in thousands of ways. (See margin)

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Service

Our motto is “Service Above Self.” This is how we carry out that promise:

PolioPlus: Rotary, in cooperation with its global partners and national governments, has immunized more than two billion children against polio at a cost of more than $600 million.

Scholarships: Each year Rotary spends more than $20 million on international scholarships, benefiting 1,000 students worldwide.

Humanitarian programs: Rotary has given more than $1.5 billion for various humanitarian programs to promote literacy, alleviate hunger, provide safe drinking water and protect the environment.

 

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Rotary Centennial

Rotarians around the world are being encouraged to focus on three key goals for 2005: eradicating polio, increasing membership to 1.5 million members, and supporting The Rotary Foundation's goal of $100 per member in donations to the Annual Programs Fund. Once achieved, Rotary will be more capable of spreading goodwill far into its next century of service.

Click here to read about Hutchinson Rotary's contribution to our community to commemorate the centennial and our own 90th anniversary.

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Rotary History

The 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.

Mission expanded

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.

Doing good in the world

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 $2 million, launched the Foundation's first program — graduate fellowships, now called Ambassadorial Scholarships.

Today, contributions to The Rotary Foundation total more than $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.

Eradicating Polio

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 through 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.

Responding to changing times

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 145,000 women in its ranks today.

Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Rotary clubs were formed or reestablished throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Today, 1.2 million Rotarians belong to some 31,000 Rotary clubs in 166 countries.

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