Yannick is looking for helpers for Bunnings Sausage Sizzle on 11 June.
This is a great result and is a credit to Ross and all the members of the Committee, the riders, sponsors and volunteers.
Ross has some RTB cycling tops which are available for purchase at cost. Perhaps if you make a further donation, cycling legend Andrew Thornton may autograph it for you?
Shelter Box Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
I am honoured to advise you ShelterBox has been nominated for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize, the winner to be announced in October. Whatever the result, this is an amazing nomination and we are truly honoured. The nomination reflects the incredible work done by the ShelterBox staff and volunteers around the world, and to those who have supported us, especially the many Rotary Clubs and Rotarians.
The nomination is also an implicit recognition of the partnership between ShelterBox and Rotary International. Two great organisations combining their efforts to provide disaster aid wherever it may be required across our world. I am reminded that last year we helped 32,000 households, or 160,000 people, who had lost everything through conflict or natural disaster. We responded to world events 24 times in the year and deployed aid to 20 different countries. Rotary groups around the world helped us provide vulnerable people with emergency shelter and aid in almost all of the countries we have worked in affected by natural disaster. In 2017, we also surpassed the highest number of days ever deployed in one year. This includes 84 ShelterBox Response Team volunteers who deployed for a total of 1,530 days. That’s an average volunteer deployment of 18 days each.
I never underestimate the impact of the support of Rotary International, Rotary Clubs and individual Rotarian has to ShelterBox in achieving our goal of no family without shelter.
As we continue to pursue our goal, we thank each and every one of you for the support given and make an impassioned plea for that support to continue into the future. As individual organisations we can make a difference in the world; as a partnership we can do even more.
Thank you.
Rowley
ROWLEY TOMPSETT CRLSS FICDA JP
Chair
Bill Sets The Pace
Bill has been fitted with some top ticker technology. He is the heart...and soul of our Club.
Eddification - Member donations to The Rotary Foundation.
PDG Eddie Loughnan spoke on the District TRF campaign to which we can respond with a donation if we wish in addition to our regular or annual contributions via our well-established system.
Donation Coordinator Eddie is currently distributing individual forms prepared by the Rotary District with a request they be completed and forwarded direct with donations to the District Fund Raising Chairman.
Attached to those forms are details of the way we have been processing individual donations for some years and members may wish to continue using this system.
The attachment shows member amounts we sent to the Foundation last December, plus details of sponsorship individuals made to Ride the Bellarine and whatever totals members have been rounding up with their dinner fees and currently in our bank accounts.
Unfortunately we do not have details of amounts placed in Foundation envelopes at funerals and cannot include them in our calculations.
Eddie and Michael will forward individual donations to The Rotary Foundation during the first week of June to ensure they are credited by the end of the financial year and it is therefore important that those wishing to round up their donations for 2017/18 do so while paying dinner fees by Tuesday 5th June.
Hamburger Happenings
Adrian reported that the Hamburger Stand gave us about $2,500.00 profit over the weekend. Many thanks once again to all who assisted.
Fundraising Committee Report
Michael Carroll indicated that our fundraising income has been down somewhat.
We can only spend what we can raise so we need to look at fundraising activities especially for next year's commitment to the Barwon River Safety Markers project.
From Head Office...via PDG Eddie...
REMEMBERING SABIN AND THE VACCINE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD.
Medicine and public health lost a luminary 25 years ago this week with the death of Dr. Albert Sabin. During his life, Sabin became a household name, famous the world over for his development of the oral polio vaccine. He was also a role model for many clinicians and researchers because he refused to patent the vaccine.
I recall a conversation with Sabin at a medical conference in Miami in the early 1960s. My wife and I had come down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. Sabin, sitting alone having his toast and coffee, motioned us over and invited us to join him. He had something he wanted to talk about that he thought I might find interesting, as we were both involved in work on vaccines. What he described went far beyond interesting.
In those days, children in the United States were immunized much the same way they are now: individually, on a schedule determined by a child’s age. But in Cuba, Sabin told me, they’d done it differently. In a country without reliable refrigeration, it didn’t make sense to try to store perishable vaccine in every hospital and clinic. Instead, the health authorities had decided to vaccinate the entire country in one fell swoop — all of the children in a matter of just a few days. Six months later, they came back and did it again.
The results were as spectacular as they were unexpected. By vaccinating all the children simultaneously, Cuba had not only protected each vaccinated child but deprived the virus of all of its potential carriers. Cuba, he told me, had eliminated polio1.
The words were electrifying. We were only a few years out from the era of unstoppable polio epidemics in the United States and elsewhere. At that time, no disease had ever been eradicated. But there before me was Albert Sabin, sipping his coffee, saying that if it had been done in one country, “we might be able to do it everywhere.”
Over the next 30 years, Sabin pursued this possibility as single-mindedly as he had once pursued the vaccine itself. He traveled the world, conferring with governments and experts, and wrote paper after paper that meticulously explored the mechanisms by which polio might be defeated. Two elements, he said, were the keys to success: the use of the oral vaccine, and the need to administer it to an entire population at once.
The obstacles, however, were enormous. The cost, the logistics, the army of workers needed to vaccinate millions of children at a time — who would ever take it on?
In 1979, the president of Rotary International, a global humanitarian service organization, called me at the National Institutes of Health, where I was then working. He wanted to know what large-scale humanitarian effort might be accomplished by an organization with, at that time, just under a million members in most of the world’s countries. My mind immediately flashed back to that morning in Miami, and I said, “Eradicate polio.”
Rotary committed to doing just that, going on to become a spearheading partner of what is today the Global Polio Eradication Initiative3. With the support of national governments and using the technique of mass immunization, this initiative — now made up of Rotary, the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, UNICEF, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — has reduced the number of children paralyzed by wild poliovirus from 350,000 in 1988 to just 22 cases last year. We have every expectation that the number will soon drop to zero.
Through this extensive partnership, Sabin’s spark of breathtaking ambition flamed into a beacon of cooperation, professionalism, and hope. When its work is done, and the world is free of polio, the achievement will be a testament not only to the vision and determination of one man, but also to the ability of a world united in compassion to determine its own future.
John Sever, M.D., is vice chair of Rotary’s International PolioPlus Committee, and former chief of infectious diseases at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
