What is Rotary?
 
Rotary is:
  • An organization of business and professional leaders worldwide who provide humanitarian service, encourage high ethical standards in all vocations and help build goodwill and peace in the world.
  • The world's first service club, founded in Chicago, Illinois, USA on 23 February 1905 by an attorney named Paul Harris who decided to found a club where the members might be acquainted with one another, while giving back to the community they lived and worked in.  Meetings used to rotate between members' businesses (hence the name "Rotary").
    • The Rotary Four Way Test
  • 1.2 million service minded men and women belonging to more than 31,000 Rotary clubs in virtually every nation in the world.
  • Internationally involved - as with PolioPlus where Rotary is commited to work with national and international health organizations on the goal of polio eradication by the year 2005, Rotary's 100th Anniversary.

    The Object Of Rotary is to encourage and foster the ideal of service as a basis of worthy enterprise and, in particular, to encourage and foster:

    2006-2007 Rotary International Theme   FIRST.  The development of acquaintance as an opportunity for service;
    SECOND.  High ethical standards in business and professions, the recognition of the worthiness of all useful occupations, and the dignifying of each Rotarian's occupation as an opportunity to serve society;
    THIRD.  The application of the ideal of service in each Rotarian's personal, business, and community life;
    FOURTH.  The advancement of international understanding, goodwill, and peace through a world fellowship of business and professional persons united in the ideal of service.

    The Declaration of Rotarians in Businesses and Professions was adopted by the Rotary International Council on Legislation in 1989 to provide more specific guidelines for the high ethical standards called for in the Object of Rotary:
    As a Rotarian engaged in a business or profession, I am expected to:
    • Consider my vocation to be another opportunity to serve;
    • Be faithful to the letter and to the spirit of the ethical codes of my vocation, to the laws of my country, and to the moral standards of my community;
    • Do all in my power to dignify my vocation and to promote the highest ethical standards in my chosen vocation;
    • Be fair to my employer, employees, associates, competitors, customers, the public, and all those with whom I have a business or professional relationship;
    • Recognize the honor and respect due to all occupations which are useful to society;
    • Offer my vocational talents: to provide opportunities for young people, to work for the relief of the special needs of others, and to improve the quality of life in my community;
    • Adhere to honesty in my advertising and in all representations to the public concerning my business or profession;
    • Neither seek from nor grant to a fellow Rotarian a privilege or advantage not normally accorded others in a business or professional relationship.
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