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We love connecting with people, other organizations, and their ideas! If you have a project, initiative, or speaker idea you want us to consider, please share with us.

We are offering online Club meetings 4 times a month – 2 midday meetings and 2 early evening meetings with new engaging meeting formats that give our members increased opportunity for friendship and meeting times that are convenient for younger Rotarians who work, female Rotarians with family commitments, as well as current and prospective members.

Covid-19: A Closer Look

We are so close!

Based on the advice of health officials, most Rotarians will be getting their flu shot to help minimize the impact on our health system as we move into the second wave of COVID19. As we work towards a vaccine for COVID today, we are nearing the end of another battle that Rotary International has been waging for decades, and the largest global health initiative ever - the eradication of polio. We are SO CLOSE to eradicating this terrible disease which now only exists in two countries. The below video demonstrates the work that has been done and why a zero count matters. We are very lucky to have access to vaccines and the health care that we have - so we would challenge all of our friends, family, and fellow Rotarians - if you are going to get your flu shot this season, make a donation of $20.20 towards helping make this vaccine available to everyone who needs it, and give 2020 new meaning. The added benefit?? Every donation made is generously matched 2 to 1 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, tripling your contribution!

Donating is simple: https://www.endpolio.org/donate

To find out more about why zero matters, check out this video!

Go Local!

The Rotary Club of Ottawa is interested in finding out about local businesses that are owned by Rotarians, or the families and friends of Rotarians, who are offering products and services that would interest our members - especially coming up to the holiday season.

Please use our form to tell us about the business. This information will be shared with our Club members and beyond.

Infant Incubators for Zimbabwe

Thrive Project Zimbabwe is a Toronto-based non-profit initiative committed to reducing infant and maternal mortality in Zimbabwe. This landlocked country in southern Africa is experiencing a multifaceted crisis, including hyperinflation, more than 90% unemployment and a failing health infrastructure.

In addition, food insecurity results in most infants being born prematurely. Compounding the problem was the loss of all the country’s infant incubators in a fire at a Harare hospital.

Two of the founders of Thrive Project Zimbabwe, Kerry Grier and Munesu Munyaka, arranged for the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre to donate 32 surplus incubators valued at more than $300,000. They worked with local volunteers such as the Toronto firefighters, who built crates and packed the incubators, but could not source enough funds to ship the containers to Zimbabwe. The Canadian Ambassador to Zimbabwe contacted John Lark and together with Mrs. Ché Weist, both members of the Ottawa Rotary club, they obtained sufficient funding to ship three containers to Zimbabwe.

Fun and games!

Howdy Y'All!

It’s no small task to fully reinvent life itself from your home, but with any luck and a little creativity, the new ways of spending time together that people are discovering are succeeding in making this period of isolation a little less isolating. This is why it was so wonderful to receive an invitation from the Rotary Club of San Antonio, Texas for a virtual happy hour!

Other than getting to know a small group of extraordinary Rotarians from the San Antonio Club, we were entertained by a fun video and enjoyed a lively cultural exchange. We were also able to replicate the best part of any social gathering - smaller, more intimate gatherings with two small chat groups.

We can’t in good faith suggest that hanging out remotely is an adequate replacement for time spent physically together, even if and when we develop better virtual social skills. We all still undoubtedly long for the human touch of actual face time. But in this moment, it’s worth remembering that the options we have can be inspiring, too—and even satisfying, if we get creative enough. Events like this give us the opportunity to widen our Rotary networks to across the world; so we will likely be doing more events like this in the future.

In fact, we had such a wonderful time that we will be doing it again -- we have invited the San Antonio Rotary Club to a Holiday Cheer virtual happy hour on December 7!

We meet In Person & Online

Mondays at 12:00 PM

Online via Zoom
Ottawa, ON
Canada

Phone:

(613) 860-1521

Email:

admin@rotaryottawa.com

Mondays at 12:00 NOON, alternating Mondays at 7:00 PM

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History: A Home for Headquarters

The idea that Rotary should own its headquarters dates back at least to the 1920 convention, when RI President Albert Adams said that he hoped to someday see the headquarters in a beautiful building of Rotary’s own.

Hunger hits home: The pandemic reminds us that food insecurity isn’t just ‘over there’