Foundation Speaker - Chris Barnett

The club’s guest speaker on 1st August was Chris Barnett who is Chair of our District (1120) Foundation Committee. We were also pleased to welcome past DG Ray Dixon with his wife Jenny – good to see you both.

Chris spoke about Foundation, Rotary’s own charity, to which Senlac Rotary has contributed $38,380 since the club was chartered in 1985. Chris spoke briefly on each of the six main areas of focus:-

Peace and Conflict Prevention/Resolution, Disease Prevention and Treatment, Water and Sanitation, Maternal and Childcare, Basic Education and Literacy, and finally, Economic and Community Development.

Rotary now has assets approaching $1bllion and has spent a massive $3billion on “Doing good in the world” since 1917. Additionally $1.4billion has been spent on Polio eradication. Chris pointed out that every penny raised is spent; administration costs are paid for by the interest on the Endowment Fund. The World and Polio Funds are only used for those purposes. Within the funding are six programmes:-

Polio Eradication, Global Grants, District Grants, Scholars,Peace Programmes and Vocation Training Teams.

Chris went on to discuss how Global and District grants worked and the type of projects they could be used for. He finished with an update on the Polio programme and the success so far in reducing the number of case from 65,000 30years ago to just 13 so far this year. Chris quoted Melinda Gates, “And we’re inspired by the infinite persistence of Rotary International. They were leading this fight long before we joined it, and they’ve just kept moving forward. They know that going from 350,000 cases is amazing, but success is zero.”

And finally, Chris quoted Mother St Theresa, “Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love..”

Senlac President, Dave Miles, thanked Chris for such and interesting and enlighten talk. He had open our eyes to the world of Foundation.