Our International Projects for this year
Polio Plus
After 20 years of hard work, Rotary and its partners are on the brink of eradicating this tenacious disease, but a strong push is needed now to root it out once and for all. It is a window of opportunity of historic proportions.
Your contribution will help Rotary raise $200 million to match $355 million in challenge grants received from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The resulting $555 million will directly support immunization campaigns in developing countries, where polio continues to infect and paralyze children, robbing them of their futures and compounding the hardships faced by their families.
As long as polio threatens even one child anywhere in the world, children everywhere remain at risk. The stakes are that high.
The Wheelchair Foundation
The Wheelchair Foundation is a nonprofit organization leading an international effort to create awareness of the needs and abilities of people with physical disabilities, to promote the joy of giving, create global friendship, and to deliver a wheelchair to every child, teen and adult in the world who needs one, but cannot afford one. For these people, the Wheelchair Foundation delivers Hope, Mobility and Freedom.
Over 100 million children, teens and adults worldwide are in need of a wheelchair but cannot afford one.
For each $75 donated, we will combine that with funds provided specifically for that purpose and deliver a wheelchair to a child, teen or adult without mobility, freedom and often hope.
www.wheelchairfoundation.org
AquaBox
Disasters come in many forms - earthquake; cyclone; flood; refugee displacement - but all share a common factor. The most urgent single problem facing the relief agencies is the provision of a supply of safe drinking-water.
In some cases, it may be possible for the relief agencies to supply water from outside the affected area. In others, there is clearly a need for those suffering in the aftermath of a disaster to achieve an early, if temporary, self-sufficiency in the supply of safe drinking-water. The answer is Aquabox.
www.aquabox.org
Shelterbox
The idea of Shelterbox is provide one pre-packed, self contained, easily transported unit that provides shelter, warmth and sleeping facilities for 10 people. In May 2000 The Rotary Club of Helston-Lizard (D1290) adopted an individual member's idea as an ongoing Millennium (2000) project. Shelter Box has Trust status and is a Registered Charity. It is able to not only respond to natural and man-made disasters worldwide it has also diversified and it is aiming to provide shelter over the next four years for one million displaced women and children in Africa who have been rendered homeless as a result of war.
A fully equipped Shelter Box costs £490.00 and contains 185ltr capacity rigid plastic container, one new 10 person tent, ten new sleeping bags and useful ancillary equipment including water-purifying material, water carrying bags, cooking pots, rope, tools etc. The cost of dispatching, delivering and distributing the Shelter Box is included in the £490.00 cost.
The Shelter Box scheme has been taken up by Rotary clubs in the USA, Australia and Canada.
www.shelterbox.org