Rotary International

Rotary International staff write thank you cards to some of Rotary’s new members – an annual tradition. By Lee Ann Searight, Membership Resources Specialist In August, we celebrate our members during Membership Month and recognize their contributions while engaging with prospective members.

Something was wrong with Myron Thompson. In 1949, as polio was sweeping the American South, the tiny toddler — just 2 years old — spiked a high fever and struggled to move. Terrified, his mother rushed him to the nearby hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama — a magnificent, red-brick building where a portico with four columns welcomed patients like a grand hotel. There, doctors and nurses who specialized in treating children with polio welcomed the child with open arms and began helping him immediately.

Loading component... Loading component... Loading component... Photography by Monika Lozinska Olayinka H. Babalola makes his way to the front row. This is it. It’s showtime, the moment that Yinka, as he’s called — the 2026-27 Rotary International president, the second from Nigeria, the second from all of Africa for that matter — will make his debut to the Rotary world.

There are two main ways to reach the community of Natuashish in Labrador. Travellers can go by plane or, in the summer months, take a boat up the coast. No reliable roads connect the subarctic Innu community of about 1,000 residents with more populated towns to its south. Frequent transportation delays and high prices for plane tickets also are strains on those trying to make the journey.

Rotary member and astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti shares her journey to space and how she inspires others by bringing cosmic wonder back to Earth

Loading component... Loading component... Loading component... The English poet and printmaker William Blake saw angels in the treetops, spoke with his fellow poet John Milton — who died 83 years before Blake was born — and received insightful tips about engraving from his brother Robert, also dead. As evidenced by his luminous poetry and prints, Blake was a visionary, someone with an eye for the miraculous, even when mired in the mundane.

Rotary makes high-quality health care available to vulnerable mothers and children so they can live longer and grow stronger. We expand access to quality care, so mothers and children everywhere can have the same opportunities for a healthy future. In 2020, an estimated 5 million children under the age of 5 years died, mostly from preventable and treatable causes. Approximately half of those deaths, 2.4 million, occurred among newborns (in the first 28 days of life).

At first it just seemed like a bad flu. The illness struck Danielle Stanisic while she was in New York for a research gig, her first time living away from home in Australia. It was her lab mates, though, who grew alarmed and insisted she get tested. It turned out Stanisic, who had traveled to Papua New Guinea six months earlier, had malaria. The next week in the hospital was a blur of suffering, but looking back 20 years later, Stanisic’s overriding feeling about the ordeal is how lucky she was.

Members of the Rotary satellite club of Heritage Todd Creek during a recent demonstration at Brighton Care Center. By Vern Hansen, 2026-27 president Rotary Club of Northglenn-Thornton, Colorado, USA, and member of the Rotary satellite club of Heritage Todd Creek I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how this idea of starting a Rotary satellite club at Heritage Todd Creek, an active retirement community in Thornton, Colorado, actually began.

Vansh Saini leads a weekend school for children of construction workers. By Vansh Saini, a 2026 People of Action: Champion of Tomorrow In 2022, I was 16 and president of my Interact club at Hansraj Model School. There, I noticed something I couldn’t ignore — children of construction workers in my neighbourhood with no real access to consistent education; a girl carrying bricks after school; a boy who couldn’t read at 12.