Rotary in New Malden's Community

The members of New Malden Rotary engage with our local community in many different ways, both as fund raisers and volunteers.  We undertake a variety of activities ranging from supporting local charities to sponsoring the hanging baskets in the High Street in the summer and the Christmas lights at year end.

Current Activity – 2022-24

As with many organisations our recent community activity was heavily shaped by the Covid pandemic and is only slowly returning to a degree of ‘normality’.  We look forward to 2024 being much similar to the pre Covid years.

Over the last two years, despite restrictions,  we were able to increase our funding to support Kingston Hospital Charity specifically to build an important end of life room to support terminal patients and their families.  We anticipate that project support of this kind will continue into 2024 alongside our more traditional areas of funding such as Christmas lunches through the churches and other charity organisations and donations to local charities. 

In terms of raising funds the December Christmas Appeal is always one of our major events in any year.  Covid and the lockdown forced Santa and Rudolph off the New Malden streets for two years but 2022 saw the return of both, to be greeted by some of the largest crowds we have ever seen. Fund raising also reached new levels thanks to the generosity of our town’s residents and this will now benefit a variety of charitable organisations.

A newer area of involvement for our Community Service Team - both as donors and volunteers - is the environment, and we see this growing over the next few years.  For work on this, and on other wider initiatives in our town, we will often look to partner with like-minded voluntary organisations in our area. As part of this engagement Rotary volunteers are active members of the New Malden Town Centre Partnership, an organisation set up just over a year ago to work with Kingston Council specifically to improve the ‘look and feel’ of our town and which brings together local voluntary organisations and interested individuals. 

In recent years New Malden has developed as the home of many different cultures, the largest of which is the Korean community. New Malden Rotary reflects this not only in our membership but also in the work which we do.  We supported the Kingston Korean Festival when it moved to New Malden in 2022.  Through our links with KBCE (Korean Brritish Cultural Exchange) we also supported the initial Kimjang festival which took place in New Malden in 2021 and is now an exciting annual borough-wide event.   As New Malden continues to develop we anticipate that our work with all local communities will also grow.  

At one of our regular meetings in April 2024 we were pleased to welcome Kelsey Lechner, an American former Rotary Scholar who now works for "Connect North Korea", a charity based in our own New Malden community, helping people who have escaped from their homeland to live in relative freedom here.  She explained the difficulties such people face when trying to integrate into a totally different environment, learning the lamguage and all the complications of everyday living which we take for gratnted.  For more on Kelsey's visit see the subpage headed An Important Visitor or for the charity click on the link Connect North Korea