Rotary Club, a community service organization, is utilizing its worldwide network of some 1.4 million members to provide humanitarian assistance to Ukrainians in-country and those who have fled.
The group announced that its fundraising drive of nearly two months ending on April 30 raised $13.1 million from “donors around the world.”
In turn, the group said the money has been used to “provide people with essential items such as water, food, shelter, medicine and clothing.”
The Rotary Foundation is using the raised funds to provide grants to individual clubs and has so far distributed 74 “disaster response” grants worth $2.1 million.
The endeavor is part of an effort by countless non-profit organizations who are coming to the assistance of Ukrainian civilians who are suffering from Russia’s ongoing war against neighboring Ukraine.
Kremlin despot Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of the country on Feb. 24, displacing about a quarter of its population while invading Russian forces have razed whole cities and towns to the ground. The United Nations says more than 5.6 million have fled the country, most to neighboring Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Moldova.
Two of the group’s six pillars of outreach include promoting “peace” and “maternal and child health.”
According to the most recent data available, there were 46 Rotary clubs registered in Ukraine boasting approximately 850 members as of July 1, 2014. Rotary clubs had existed in Western Ukraine before the start of World War II.
The group was founded in 1905 in the United States in the Illinois state township of Evanston, a northern suburb of Chicago. It has grown into a worldwide network whose members are professionals from a variety of fields.
Its most famous accomplishment and so-called success story was to almost eradicate the spread of polio through its international reach of clubs. As a testament to its international corps of membership clubs, Rotary International’s current president is Indian.
