Why Join Your Local Rotary Club?

1. Professional Networking: A founding principle of Rotary was to provide a forum for professional and business leaders. Members are leaders in business, industry, the professions, the arts, government, sports, the military, and religion. They make decisions and influence policy. Rotary is the oldest, most prestigious service-club organization in the world.

2. The Opportunity to Serve: Rotarians provide service at both the community and international levels. Service programs address health care needs, hunger and poverty, illiteracy, disaster relief, and environmental cleanups, to name a few. Members experience the fulfillment that comes from giving back to the community.

3. Personal Growth and Development: Membership in Rotary ensures continuing personal and professional development. Leadership, public speaking and communication, organization and planning, team-building, fundraising, and teaching are just a sampling of the skills that can be exercised and enhanced through Rotary.

4. Friendship: Fellowship was a primary reason Rotary was started in 1905, and it remains a major attraction. Today, with more than 30,000 Rotary clubs in over 160 countries, Rotarians have friends wherever they go. Rotary helps to build community as well as enduring friendships.

5. Cultural Diversity: Rotary International is an association of local clubs in many countries. Clubs are open to members of every ethnic group, political persuasion, language, and religious belief. Rotary clubs contain a cross-section of the world's leaders. They practice and promote tolerance.

6. Good Citizenship: Membership in Rotary makes one a better citizen. Weekly Rotary club programs keep members informed about what is taking place in the community, nation, and world. Rotary's expansive network of clubs and programs provides extensive opportunities for service and interchange.

7. World Understanding: Rotary members gain an understanding of humanitarian issues and have a significant impact on them through international service projects and exchange programs of RI and its Foundation. The promotion of peace is one of Rotary's highest objectives.

8. Entertainment: Every Rotary club and district hosts parties and activities that offer diversion from one’s personal and business life. Conferences, conventions, assemblies, and social events provide entertainment as well as Rotary information, education, and service.

9. Family Foundations: Rotary sponsors some of the world’s largest youth exchange and educational exchange and scholarship programs. Rotary clubs provide innovative training opportunities and mentoring for future leaders. They involve family members in a wide range of social and service activities.

10. Ethical Environment: Rotarians practice a 4-Way Test that measures words and actions by their truthfulness, fairness, goodwill, and benefit to all. Encouraging high ethical standards in one's profession and respect for all worthy vocations has been a hallmark of Rotary from its earliest days.

Message from Outgoing President Rotary International

June 2009

In the late 1990s, I traveled on business to an African country I had never visited before. While there, I met a Rotarian who offered to take me on a driving tour of the province, and I was happy to accept. An hour or so outside the capital, we stopped in a small village of mud-brick huts, with straw roofs and dirt floors. As I walked past one hut, I heard a sound that made me stop – the weak sound of a crying baby.

Squinting into the darkness, I could make out a shape on the floor. As my eyes adjusted, I realized that I was looking at a woman, lying on a mat with an infant. Her child was trying to nurse, but the woman was exhausted and ill and had no milk. It was obvious that both were starving.

My first instinct was to reach into my pockets, to give them money, to find food, to help in any way I could. How could I walk away and leave that mother and that child to die, alone together in the darkness? And in that instant I realized that this horror was by no means unique. All over Africa, all over the developing countries of the world, children were dying – of hunger, of disease, of poverty.

When I returned home, I began to read more about the issue of child mortality. It became clear to me that this was an area in which Rotarians could make a major impact. This is why, when I became president of Rotary International, I chose Make Dreams Real as the RI theme and asked Rotarians to work through our emphases of water, health and hunger, and literacy to reduce child mortality in our world.

As I end my year as RI president, I am inexpressibly proud of the work I have seen Rotarians do. When I first learned about the problem of child mortality, 30,000 children were estimated to die of preventable causes every day. Now, UNICEF reports that figure at about 25,000 – still far too large a number, but a significant decrease. There is no question in my mind that Rotary’s service has played a role in this change – and that we must continue our work until not one child dies of hunger and poverty. And so I ask you all to continue to Make Dreams Real in the new Rotary year. The Future of Rotary Is in Your Hands – and the future of the world’s children is as well.

Dong Kurn (D.K.) Lee
President, Rotary International

The Beginnings

Paul Harris worked as a newspaper reporter, a business teacher, stock company actor, cowboy, and travelled extensively in the USA and Europe selling marble and granite. In 1896, he went to Chicago to practice law. On the evening of 23 February 1905, Harris invited three friends to a meeting. Silvester Schiele, a coal dealer, Hiram Shorey, a merchant tailor, and Gustavus Loehr, a mining engineer, gathered with Harris in Loehr's business office in Room 711 of the Unity Building in downtown Chicago. They discussed Harris' idea that business leaders should meet periodically to enjoy camaraderie and to enlarge their circle of business and professional acquaintances.

The club met weekly; membership was limited to one representative from each business and profession. Though the men didn't use the term Rotary that night, that gathering is commonly regarded as the first Rotary club meeting.

As they continued to convene, members began rotating their meetings among their places of business, hence the name Rotary. After enlisting a fifth member, printer Harry Ruggles, the group was formally organized as the Rotary Club of Chicago. The original club emblem, a wagon wheel design, was the precursor of the familiar cogwheel emblem now used by Rotarians worldwide.

By the end of 1905, the club's roster showed a membership of 30 with Schiele as president and Ruggles as treasurer. Paul Harris declined office in the new club and didn't become its president until two years later. Club membership grew, making it difficult to gather in offices, so the members shifted their meetings to hotels and restaurants, where many Rotary club meetings are held today.

These early "Rotarians" realized that fellowship and mutual self-interest were not enough to keep a club of busy professionals meeting each week. Reaching out to improve the lives of the less fortunate proved to be an even more powerful motivation. The Rotary commitment to service began in 1907, when the Rotary Club of Chicago donated a horse to a preacher. The man's own horse had died, and because he was too poor to buy another one, he was unable to make the rounds of his churches and parishioners. A few weeks later, the club constructed Chicago's first public lavatory. With these inaugural projects, Rotary became the world's first service-club.

Rotarians frequently ask me, “When you founded Rotary, did you think it would come to anything like this?” No, I did not in 1905 foresee a worldwide movement of 6,000 clubs and 300,000 men. When a man plants an unpromising sapling in the early Springtime, can he be sure that someday here will grow a mighty tree?

Does he not have to reckon on rain and sun—and the smile of Providence? Once he sees the first bud—ah, then he can begin to dream of shade.

The Rotarian February 1947

^{Membership Services}

^{Becoming A Rotarian}

An association of some 30,000 autonomous clubs in more than 160 countries, Rotary International is one of the world's largest service organizations. The goal for a club's membership is an up-to-date and progressive representation of the community's business, vocational, and professional interests.  An important distinction between Rotary and other organizations is that membership in Rotary is by invitation. Rotary clubs invite individuals to join and become members.  

Membership is vital to a Rotary club's operations and community service activities. A primary goal of the club is to continually expand with committed members who have the interest and ability to get involved in service and humanitarian projects. Prospective members must:

The Rotary Club of Henley-on-Thames 

meets each Tuesday 12.15pm for 12.45pm at