Why I Joined Rotary—and Why You Should Too

In 2014 the Damariscotta-Newcastle Rotary Club set a 10-year goal of becoming a significant player in helping to eliminate hunger in Lincoln County. On Sunday June 5, a dedicated team of fifty volunteers, led by a core group of Rotarians, boxed 30,000 meals for food banks in Lincoln County. At the same time, the club was able to host four Rotarian psychologists on a cultural/professional exchange trip from Argentina. They found it meaningful and gratifying to spend a few hours helping us pack meals.

This was the second time in the past year that Rotary has restocked food pantries with vitamin-fortified meals. Having won a competitive Rotary grant, we also funded tuitions for the FARMS program, which helps elementary school students learn how to cook tasty and nourishing vegetarian food.

Rotary recognizes that employment is part of the fabric that holds families and communities together, and we work to support employment through academic and vocational scholarships. We support high school seniors looking to attend college, and have a particular interest in helping people pursue a career in the trades and in health care. Our local Rotary has an active program, called Interact, at Lincoln Academy, where high school students can participate in their own community projects and learn to put “service above self” in their formative years.

The effectiveness of service projects undertaken by local Rotary clubs (and happily, Rotary is only one of a number of service clubs in our area), demonstrates that what works locally can be scaled up even to the global level. There are six areas where Rotary presses forward both locally and internationally: promoting peace, preventing diseases, providing access to clean water and sanitation (one of our members personally financed and oversaw the building of a number of such projects in Africa), enhancing maternal and child health, improving basic education and literacy (Rotary supports the Ready to Read Program at the Skidompha Library), and helping communities develop.

Rotary International, an organization with global reach, takes on great big, hairy, audacious goals—and succeeds. Perhaps the most striking one is its Polio Plus campaign, begun in earnest in 1985, to help completely rid the world of the scourge of polio. To date 2.5 billion children have been vaccinated. Polio is still extant only in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

When I retired to Maine, I knew nothing about Rotary, except I thought I did. I imagined a bunch of mostly male working stiffs who practically slept in their three-piece suits and assembled to network with each other in a slightly forced spirit of conviviality.

At Rotary’s outset in 1905, its primary purpose was indeed self-interested business networking. But the founder, Paul Harris, had the vision to change Rotary’s central purpose into something much larger—community improvement.  This sparked a century of growth, evolutionary change, and greater inclusiveness that have resulted in a powerful organization that links local and international service efforts.

In the course of volunteering as a peace activist, I had the privilege of working with Al Jubitz, a prominent Rotarian from Oregon. Al has given his life to two ideas. The first made him a millionaire many times over, and the second just might save the world. His extended family owned a truck stop, and Al developed a computer program that allowed truckers to unload their cargo at a destination but then find a fresh load rather than returning empty—in effect, the complete obsolescence of “dead-heading,” the period during which a for-hire vehicle is not generating revenue.

Al prospered to the extent that he was able to turn his philanthropic attention to the challenges of the world, and for him challenge number one was war. Al sees the potential of Rotary, with well over a million members in clubs in 161 countries, to help our small, fraught planet grow beyond its tragic fixation with violence as the first resort for humans in conflict. Rotary’s strong network of international relationships and its vibrant conflict-resolution programs reinforce trends toward the peaceful settling of disputes.

Inspired by Al’s example, when I retired to Maine, I asked if I could speak to the local Rotary club on the need for greater international efforts to abolish nuclear weapons. While I understood that everyone in the audience might not agree with my views, the respectful hearing I received impressed me, and I decided to join the club.

So far I haven’t come across anyone who sleeps in a three-piece suit. What I did find was an accomplished, generous, and friendly group of judges, dentists, bankers, clergy, engineers, lawyers, artists, teachers and entrepreneurs, all of whom are willing to submerge their egos or need for approval in larger cooperative tasks, people who would give you the shirt off their backs if they saw the need—including larger-than-life characters like Boyce Martin, who, sadly, has just passed away. Boyce, a summer member based in Kentucky, was a retired Federal Appeals Court Justice who wrote significant opinions on complex issues like affirmative action and capital punishment. Everyone looked forward to the annual talks Boyce delivered that plumbed the thinking of the Supreme Court.

The conviviality in weekly Rotary meetings is hardly forced; it is as authentic as it gets. We genuinely enjoy each other in all our diversity, male and female, younger and older, still actively employed and retired, Republican and Democrat. Part of being a real community-within-the-community is our support and care for one another. Someone who falls ill will at the very least receive a card or a visit. We share our joys as well, the births of grandchildren, the athletic or scholastic accomplishments of our children, our personal or professional successes small or large.

Is Rotary a conservative or a liberal organization? The answer is both—and neither. In a sometimes contentious political climate, Rotary is a space where people of good will come together in fellowship and service irrespective of their motivation or political orientation. If a primary conservative value is creative, self-reliant grit and a primary liberal value is compassion, Rotary has both in abundant supply.

In a time when economic, political and environmental change is accelerating, the mere existence of a powerful local/global institution like Rotary is consoling.  In the battle between the light of creative cooperation on the one hand, and the darkness of alienation, chaos and sectarian violence on the other, Rotary is one of those organizations that would have to be invented if it did not exist.

Join Rotary, and you will inevitably be changed. You will be stretched by doing things you were only able to do because colleagues were supporting you. You will learn about how people with diverse ideas and opinions, instead of polarizing with each other, submerge their differences for the sake of doing good together. You will experience community close-up and personal, and at the same time have the opportunity to connect and contribute to visionary initiatives of global scope. You will laugh often. And you will make lifelong friends.