Dispatch from New Orleans: Connecting Rotarians with ONE

May 24th, 2011 6:30 PM UTC
By Sara Donaldson

This week, I joined more than 19,000 Rotary club members from more than 160 countries in New Orleans for the humanitarian service organization’s annual convention. I’ve spent the last three days camped out in the exhibitor’s hall, which is a room at least the size of a football field, filled with booths featuring Rotary clubs and projects and global networking groups.

For anyone who is not familiar with Rotary’s mission, I can best sum it with five words: Doing good in the world. Those five words run through my mind during every conversation I have had with a Rotarian since arriving at the conference. If you’d like to know more, I encourage you to check out Rotary’s website so you can learn how Rotarians work to advance world understanding, goodwill and peace through the improvement of health, the support of education and the alleviation of poverty.

While I am chatting up Rotarians, I am working hard to engage attendees in ONE’s vaccines campaign. Given Rotary’s history with polio eradication, you can understand the strong support here for childhood vaccines as a way to save lives and prevent disease for a lifetime.

All-in-all, everyone here is excited about ONE and Rotary’s new collaboration and many attendees are looking forward to hearing from ONE members when they return to their hometowns. Stay tuned for more updates from the convention. I’m especially excited for Tuesday’s agenda, when we will hear from the key note speaker, Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a staunch supporter of Rotary’s work to eradicate polio.

TAGS: From ONE Members, ONE, Rotary International, vaccines