Our Rotary Club’s International Service
While much of our club’s efforts remain focused on supporting and improving the Boulder City community, we support a number of International Service projects, as well.
From our ongoing commitment to the End Polio Project to the annual Super Build Project, we are doing our part to help improve both the communities and the lives of people we’ll likely never meet…something we believe is at the heart of every true Rotarian.
This year, we are pleased to provide our support of the following International Service Projects…
Wheelchair Project
With the help of the Wheelchair Foundation and other Rotary Clubs within Rotary District 5300, we have been able to deliver more than 800,000 wheelchairs worldwide.
The World Health Organization estimates that tens of millions of people in the world are in need of a wheelchair and cannot afford one. Our goal is to deliver wheelchairs to children, teens and adults that lack mobility due to disease, accident, war or advanced age. These people and their families will have their lives instantly changed, being able to go to school, work, worship, or just outside for the first time in years, or ever. A wheelchair means Hope, Mobility and Freedom.
Here is how it works: The Wheelchair Foundation has been gifted a specific amount of funds to combine with each new $75 donation to wheelchairs, until these gifted funds have been exhausted.
A container of 280 wheelchairs costs $42,000 to deliver by a 40-foot sea container to the country of destination, or $150 per wheelchair. As part of Rotary District 5300′s Wheelchair Project, local clubs have raised enough money to allow the Wheelchair Foundation to use its matching funds for the delivery of hundreds of wheelchairs to a developing country.
Rotarians then organize, at their own expense, a hands-on Rotary experience to participate in the wheelchair distribution, thus experiencing the changing a person’s life with the gift of a wheelchair!
The Rotary Club of Boulder City donated enough funds to purchase 28 wheelchairs, so with the matching funds provided by the Wheelchair Foundation, a total of 56 chairs will be delivered to those who need them in May, 2012.
Together, Rotary and the Wheelchair Foundation have changed hundreds of thousands of lives with the gift of mobility.
Super Build
180-200 Rotarians and friends build up to FOUR homes in ONE day on a site in Mexico.
Rotarians partner with Corazon to ensure safety, site prep, etc. so that four Mexican families now have homes with doors that lock and concrete floor. Eight Mexican children will get a high school education (2 students per home site) and although 180-200 Rotarians are tired…they are proud and humbled by the experience.
It was once said that Rotarians “write checks”…Super Build is just one of many service projects that certainly dispel that myth!
Larry Smith, a longtime Rotarian in our club, will be attending Super Build 2012 and we hear rumors that he’s recruited several other club members to join him on this amazing adventure to Tecate, Mexico on Saturday, May 19th, 2012!
End Polio Immunization Project
Ending polio has been Rotary’s top priority since 1988 with the launch of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, in collaboration with the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Polio is a crippling and potentially fatal disease that still strikes children mainly under the age of five in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Due to the combined efforts of Rotary, along with many other humanitarian organizations, the number of polio cases has been reduced by more than 99 percent, five million cases of childhood paralysis and 250,000 deaths have been averted.
