A Good Year for Giving

We are a small Rotary club but we do what we can to raise money to support charitable causes, so it is pleasing to report that we have managed to raise over £25,000 in Rotary Year 2023-24 (July-June) YTD. This has enabled charities and good causes we support to receive well over £23,000 so far this year, and with a surplus of just under £2,000 which can be carried forward to next year.

End Polio Priority

Our most significant donation was to End Polio Now and Rotary’s continuing campaign to eliminate Polio.  
We directly raised over £3,950 including a GlobalGiving Bonus (for donations on November 28, 2023) of just under £1,080, plus Gift Aid of £745 yielding a total raised of just over £4,700.

Every donation to End Polio Now gains a double bonus from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, another £9,400, so that the value of the donation to End Polio Now as a result of the quiz is a grand total of £14,110 at the prevailing exchange rate.

This is enough to buy up to approximately 178,000 Polio vaccinations depending on this year’s purchase price.

We continue to be affected by the plight of Ukrainians in the face of Russian aggression so our next major donation was to support Ukrainians living in Moldova.  (Moldova has the highest proportion of Ukrainians per head of population of any country in Europe).

Working with our daughter Rotary Club of Billericay Mayflower, and with a grant from the Rotary Foundation Disaster Relief Fund for Ukraine, we funded water, food and supplies for children for two villages in Moldova.  All these supplies were taken in a convoy to Moldova by the charity TEECH, and two members of the Mayflower and Billericay Town clubs were on-site to see the supplies distributed to those in need.

100% Participation

Almost as much was given by all members of of the club to The Rotary Foundation, Rotary’s only highly-rated charity where every member is both a sustaining member (donating $100) and also a member of the Every Member Every Year (EREY) Club, by donating this sum every year.

Slightly smaller amounts were given to two local Hospices - St. Luke’s and Little Havens, as the result of our highly successful Antiques Night Fundraiser.

We supported our twinned club, the Rotary Club of Alba, by donating Euro 1,000 to their “Help the Children” project to build a multimedia classroom in a school in Madagascar.

Finally, we gave over £500, with support from a District Grant, to our own project for this year’s sponsorship of two children in Kenya to attend senior school.