Announcing our new collaboration with Rotary International

May 10th, 2011 5:26 PM UTC
By Margaret McDonnell

As the manager of ONE’s strategic NGO partnerships, I’m very excited to announce that ONE and Rotary International will be collaborating more closely around issues of global poverty and health. Both ONE and Rotary share similar humanitarian goals and strive for a better world where no child should have to suffer or die from preventable, treatable diseases such as polio, pneumonia and rotavirus. Toward this end, ONE members and Rotarians will work together in communities throughout the US to raise awareness, advocate and increase support for life-saving programs, such as access to life-saving childhood vaccines.

We have joined forces with Rotary several times in the past, but one of my favorite examples is from last November, when three officers from Rotary’s club in West Henrico County, Virginia joined ONE members on a meeting with Representative Cantor — who happens to be a Rotarian — about finding bipartisan solutions to global poverty issues. We hope to expand, deepen and replicate this kind of collaboration around the country, as we know that our voices are stronger and more effective when they unite together on behalf of the world’s poorest people.

For those of you not familiar with Rotary, it is the world’s first service club organization. They have more than 1.2 million members in 33,000 clubs in more than 200 countries. Rotarians are business, professional and community leaders who work to combat hunger, improve health and sanitation, provide education and job training, promote peace, and eradicate polio under the motto Service Above Self. In 1985, Rotary International created PolioPlus — a program to immunize all the world’s children against polio — and has since contributed more than US $1 billion and countless volunteer hours to the protection of more than two billion children in 122 countries. Thanks to Rotary and its partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (WHO, UNICEF and the U.S. CDC), the world has seen polio cases plummet by more than 99 percent, preventing five million instances ofchild paralysis and 250,000 deaths. To learn more about Rotary’s workaround polio, check out End Polio Now.

All this is to say that I’m excited about our collaboration and I know there will be many more good things to come. Stay tuned!

TAGS: From Our Partners, Rotary International