World Community Service

Rotary provides an extraordinary opportunity to meet humanitarian needs around the world. The Rotary Foundation has established a system of humanitarian matching grants which allows our local Rotary Clubs to meet the needs of the poor in foreign lands. Rotary International also provides a network of Rotary Clubs in over 170 countries, which can oversee grants received by beneficiaries in their own countries.

The Global Grant program provides that each dollar raised by a local club, such as our own, will be matched with a dollar by our District 6900 in Georgia. Those two dollars will be matched with two more by the Rotary Foundation, producing a grant four times the amount of funds raised locally. These grants are non-competitive up to $50,000, so virtually any grant initiated by a local club, for truly humanitarian purposes, will be approved by the Foundation.

Recent examples of grants sponsored by the Thomasville Rotary Club providing school furniture and kitchen equipment for a new boarding school offering free education for native Indian children from remote mountain regions of Mexico.

Another grant provided school busses for orphan children in Tula, Russia. Their new orphanage had only one four-passenger car for almost 300 children. The busses were needed to take children to school, athletic events and field trips. The children were very excited about receiving the busses.

Other grants provided wheat combines for a particularly impoverished region of Moldova in Eastern Europe which had only one combine. In their first year, two wheat combines provided by the Thomasville and Bainbridge clubs provided 170,000 metric tons of wheat.

Another recent grant included sending mattresses, blankets, pillows and cloths for 640 orphan children in five orphanages in Tinali, India. The orphans were largely tsunami victims but included Gypsies, children rescued from work in mines, girls rescued from prostitution and true orphans.

A past grants involved providing a maternity clinic for a woman's prison in Russia, which will help reduce the exceptionally high infant mortality rate in Russian prisons. The grant will provide all medical equipment and supplies necessary for this new maternity clinic in the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia. This grant will be overseen in Russia by the nearby Ekaterinberg Rotary Club, since all grants must be hosted by a Rotary Club in the receiving country which will then distribute the funds to ensure that they are spent exactly according to the grant budget.

The Thomasville Rotary Club has also co-sponsored a clean water grant, with the Moultrie Rotary Club serving as the primary International Sponsor. In the country of El Salvador, water is not in shortage, so instead of providing water wells, it is necessary to provide water-sealed latrines to avoid contamination of the drinking water springs and streams where the villagers bathe. This grant to provide 30 latrines in strategic locations, will markedly improve the water quality for the village of El Balsamar, El Salvador. Again, one of the Rotary clubs in the capital city, the San Salvador Sur club, is the host club and will be approving the installation of latrines by the villages Environmental Planning Committee and a team of construction workers.

This project was brought to us by a young Peace Corps volunteer from Georgia who will be living in that village for the next two years and who helped to organize this Environmental Planning Committee which ultimately decided that the latrines were the best solution to their clean water problem.

The grant for the woman's prison was brought to us by a prison ministry that travels to dozens of prisons across Russia each summer during the warm summer months to meet the humanitarian, spiritual and emotional needs of the inmates, who otherwise have little hope. The prison ministry was asked by Russian prison officials in Moscow to provide medical equipment for this particular women's prison which was among their priority needs.

The main international project for this year is the Global Grant request which is being staffed. The proposed Global Grant (WCS) will be to provide computers and computer skill training for orphan children in Belgrade, Serbia in order to give them job skills necessary to become self-supporting once they leave the orphanages. In addition we hope to help with furniture and minor repairs at two different orphanages in the same area. We have participated in the former Matching Grant program every year, and Walter Gilbert from our club has been a resource to help many clubs with their grant requests. We look forward to the approval of the Global Grant request and executing the program with our Serbian counterparts.

The coming year offers another opportunity to reach out to the poorest of the poor in the rest of the world. We thank Rotary and thank God for the opportunity to be a part of this vital work of Rotary International.