How to tell friends about the Passport Club + our 2022-23 Club President World’s Greatest Meal to End Polio PEP – Our Environmental Project

Do you need a make-up? missed meetings? To learn about other Rotary clubs?

The Passport Club members are encouraged to join local (and other) clubs to learn more about Rotary, get to know other Rotarians, gain a new perspective and appreciation for Rotary and Rotarians. Here is a list of online clubs where you can earn a make-up along with learning a whole lot more about Rotary! Why not visit them all?

• Rotary E-Club of Canada One – Rotary On Demand, Where you want, When you want! • Rotary Club of One World • Rotary E-Club of World Peace

Click here to attend this week’s posted meeting of E-Club of Canada One. These meetings are posted online and available 24/7!

Welcome our new Club President for 2022-23 – Sue Storie

Stay tuned, engaged, and plan to participate!

Links – Donate Tell us about your success

When Susanne Rea became polio chair of Rotary District 9550 in Queensland, Australia, she was living a quiet retirement of reading books and gardening. But as she brainstormed ways to engage her fellow Rotarians in the campaign to end polio, she had an idea, and her life changed completely.

At left - Susanne Rea, Rotary Club of Cairns Sunrise, Australia, has raised more than $7 million to fight polio.

In 2014, Rea founded World’s Greatest Meal, a program in which Rotarians host meals, anything from two people having lunch to elaborate gourmet dinners, and ask for donations.

WGM started small but has grown enormously, and, with matching funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, WGM has raised over $7 million to date. To keep the momentum alive, Rea reverse-mortgaged her house and embarked on a world tour, speaking, vaccinating, and motivating across 32 countries.

She pays her own way, and local Rotary members host her whenever possible. “We raise awareness as well as funds,” she says. “I spend a lot of time explaining what goes on in Pakistan with the training of the polio workers.”

Rea is a childhood polio survivor herself, but she doesn’t focus on that. Instead, her motivation is to make an impact during her retirement. Some meals bring in a lot of money, but Rea says the number of participants is more important.

“A big donation is wonderful,” she says. “But my idea is that it’s giving back polio eradication to the ordinary Rotarian, or grassroots Rotarian as I like to call them, because no Rotarian is ordinary.”

– Jacob Meschke

By Dave King Published Date: March 5, 2020

She is a 77-year-old Australian grandmother with the energy and dynamism of a woman a third of her age, and Susanne Rea shows no signs of stopping.

A survivor of polio as a child, Susanne is a restless soul with a drive to do just as it says on the tin – End Polio Now!

Susanne has flown over to London for the month to spend time with her family here, while husband Nauman is back home in Cairns. She plans to fly to Pakistan next month.

She was last there in December 2017, when Susanne and Nauman travelled to a small rural school close to the capital Islamabad as part of a polio immunisation visit.

“We were guests of Past President Nosherwan Khalil Khan and the Rotary Club of Rawalpindi, and we met at the corner of the GT Road at Rawat,” she recalled.

“The countryside is rural and peaceful with the occasional dwelling and mosque, until we came to a sprawling complex entered through a metal gate which revealed a school for 200 students.

“This was the former home of the head teacher, which now contains a collection of classrooms. It was midwinter, and the children were sitting on the floor. Even some of the classes were held in the open air, with the children and teachers rugged up against the elements. One rather basic washroom services the complex.”

Click here to read more.

WORKING HARD AT OUR CLUB’S ENVIRONMENTAL PROJECT

In upcoming months, members will be available to speak with your club about this project.

The Passport club members will collect these items and we will use our community contacts to repurpose them. One of our community contacts is London, Ontario - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. As we gain more contacts, we will expand our project. Would your club like to partner with us?

Contact Lynn Coates lynn.coates.1@outlook.com

or Sue Storie sastorie.rotary@gmail.com for more information.

Onward and upward!

UPDATE - With the St Mary’s bags that Lynn did this week plus the updated count from their August bags our bag total is now 15,915 bags! Sue has more in her basement to do as well.