TRF New Year’s Resolutions
For Club Presidents and TRF Chairs
I will encourage Club members to fulfill donation
commitments by January 31st.
I will report regularly to my Club on our progress toward this
year’s TRF goal.
I will strive to make my Club 100% Every Rotarian, by
personally contacting every last member to make a
contribution in even a small amount.
I will make interesting presentations to my Club regarding the
projects of The Rotary Foundation.
I will regularly review my Club’s TRF record through RI
Member Access to assure its accuracy.
I will begin planning a smooth transition to the 2013-14 Club
Leadership in all aspects of our TRF programs.
I will make sure to give appropriate recognition to each
Double Sustainer, Super Sustainer, Paul Harris Fellow and
Paul Harris Society member in my Club.
A Great Place to Be at Mid-Year!
The D-5170 TRF contribution totals just keep on growing as fast as
we can check RI’s online records (see next page). Sometimes there is a
bit of a lag between sending the checks and having them reflected in the
RI data, but be patient and keep on checking. If there is still a “no-show”
in the published totals for your Club, do not hesitate to check with your
Club Foundation Chair, who can call the TRF “Helpline” at (866) 9768279 to see if a contribution has “gone missing” Please review the
current totals carefully and assess how your Annual Giving contributions
to date match up with the goal set by your Club for the year. Now is the
time to review your Pledge Cards, to see who has promised but not yet
paid. And don’t forget: January 31st is an important deadline not only
for your Club’s “SHARE” (see below), but also for points in the Squaw
Creek Vacation contest (see page 4). Now is the time to make this year’s
Annual Giving Campaign a huge success for your club!
Be Sure Your Club Gets its SHARE!
The SHARE Program can be quite confusing and difficult to explain
to Club members, especially with regard to the importance of making
TRF contributions (not just pledges, but actual payment) by January 31st
each year. But let’s give it a try: The SHARE program is how The Rotary
Foundation and your District return a large portion of your Annual
Giving donations as grant funds for your Club’s domestic and international projects. The total amount of DDF funds made available to each
Club is based on the total Annual Giving contributions made during the
31-month period ending on the prior January 31st. Funds contributed
after that date will not come back to the Club until one year later. So…if
your member contributes $200 on January 31, 2013, part of it will come
back to your Club for the 2013-14 Rotary year. If you make the same
$200 donation on February 1, 2013 (one day later), your Club will not
see it until the 2014-15 Rotary year, a full year longer wait. Sooner is
better, so get the word out to encourage donations over the next two
weeks before the deadline passes!
D-5170 Annual Giving Report as of January 10, 2013
OPP CT = Number of Club members who have NOT yet contributed to Annual Giving!
The Good News and The Not As Good News!
By PDG Roger Hassler, Foundation Fundraising Chair
In the December report we reported that “Rotarian Generosity is in the Air”.
Well, that generosity has continued unabated. Over the past 20 days, D-5170
Rotarians have donated an additional $122,000 to The Rotary Foundation.
Outstanding! Twenty-three clubs have achieved their goal for the entire year, and two
clubs, San Lorenzo Valley and Tri-Valley, have achieved 100% EREY. When it comes to
per capita giving we have some truly remarkable numbers to report:
Los Altos Sunset $498.57
Tri-Valley
$341.67
Sunnyvale
$339.66
Freedom
$333.85
Oakland Sunrise $281.67
Cupertino
$274.76
Plus, we have eleven additional clubs over the $200 PP mark, and twenty-four
clubs over $100 per capita. WOW!
Certainly the above numbers are worthy of our praise and gratitude....
BUT, the one thing that is not so good is the number of Rotarians who have not
made a contribution to The Rotary Foundation. To date we have not heard from 2140
of our 3797 members. In other words the great numbers from above are coming from
only 44.2% of our members. So now is the time to remind all Rotarians that the good
work that we will do in three years is dependent on their generosity today. Although
we would love to see each Rotarian become a Double Sustainer or above, a check for
$10.00 would be gratefully received. Every Rotarian pulling together to generate
Goodwill, Peace, and Understanding is a worthy goal Each and Every Year!
There are Hazards and Obstacles to
Polio Eradication That Were Never
Anticipated… But the Will and
Persistance of Rotarians Will
Overcome Them All!
(Courtesy of Time Magazine)
There’s no one place a virus goes to die — but that
doesn’t make its demise any less a public health
victory. Throughout human history, viral diseases
have had their way with us, and for just as long, we
have hunted them down and done our best to wipe
them out. In the developed world, vaccines have
made once-common scourges such as measles,
rubella, mumps and whooping cough rare to the
point of near-extinction. Only once, however, has
any virus been flushed from its last redoubts in both
the body and the wild and effectively vaccinated out
of existence. That virus was smallpox, which ceased
to exist outside high-security labs in 1977. Since
that day, humanity has been free to put the vaccines
against the disease — and the terror its periodic outbreaks would cause — on the shelf forever.
Now we are tantalizingly close to another such epic moment. This time the disease in the medical
cross hairs is polio, and there’s no minimizing the progress made against it. Just 25 years ago,
polio was endemic to 125 countries and would paralyze or kill up to 350,000 people — the
overwhelming majority of them children — each year. Now the disease has been run to ground
in just three countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria, and in 2012, it struck only 215 people
worldwide. Thanks to aggressive global vaccination programs led by Rotary International,
UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and, most recently,
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the year just beginning could be the disease’s last.
But polio still has strong-armed friends. On January 1, as the rest of the world celebrated the
New Year, gunmen in Pakistan shot and killed seven medical aid workers — six of them women
or girls — who had been part of the anti-polio drive. Those killings followed nine others in
December, as well as the shooting of a Ghanaian doctor, also conducting polio-vaccination work
in Pakistan, in July. The month before that, the Pakistani Taliban blocked the planned vaccination
of 161,000 children until U.S. drone strikes in the country were halted.
Polio is a notoriously slippery disease, one that relies on — indeed its very survival depends on
— just the kind of holes such sabotage efforts open in the vaccine safety net. In 2003, polio was
similarly near its end when clerics in Northern Nigeria halted inoculations — claiming that the
vaccine contained HIV and was designed to sterilize children. Within two years, cases of polio
linked to the Nigerian strain were raging across 16 countries. And since once case of paralysis
can result for every 200 cases of polio infection, that means there may be 199 other carriers
silently and unknowingly spreading the virus.
Using children as viral suicide bombers this way is a new — and grotesque — form of
bioterrorism, and the world, for now at least, is not standing idly by. After the December killings,
Pakistani officials pledged to continue with the country’s plans to deploy 250,ooo health care
workers to vaccinate 35 million children this year. The governments of Nigeria and Afghanistan
have similarly vowed to see the eradication drive through to its end, as have the U.N. and the
other institutions involved in the battle. The Islamic Development Bank has put fresh money
behind the push, donating $227 million to the vaccine program in Pakistan in particular. This is
on top of the billions already provided by Rotary and the Gates Foundation alone.
Here’s Another Angle for Your “PolioPlus” Fundraising
Campaign: OPM (“Other People’s Money”)….
The clubs are doing a great job in fulfilling their Foundation goals for this year, and let’s
hope that our members’ generosity will continue. But as is our tradition we reserve the
Spring for generating monies to continue our effort to eradicate polio from the face of
the earth. District Polio Chair Jim Mealy will be providing information to help the clubs
design their PolioPlus campaign, but we would like to discuss just one aspect of the
funding effort.
Rotary’s effort to win the fight against this terrible disease has received a lot of public
attention through the media. The recent Time magazine article is a case in point. So
let’s capitalize on this publicity and encourage the general public to support our effort.
In short we should work hard to obtain Other People’s Money to buy the vaccine that
we need to protect the world’s children. Here are a few ideas for the clubs to
consider:
 A PolioPlus dinner with a verbal or silent auction of donated gifts.
 A movie night: A Picture, Popcorn, and Pop to Prevent Polio.
 A bowl-a-thon.
 A PolioPlus walk.
These are simple ways to get the public involved. We would like to ask clubs to share
their ideas for fundraising events so that we can publish those ideas in The TRF
NewsToday.
“We Are This Close”, let’s finish the job.
ATTENTION FUTURE VISION REPRESENTATIVES!
Be sure to reserve either February 12th or February 27th for your
next Future Vision Seminar (exact time and location to be
announced), as each FV Club Representative is required to attend
one of these sessions. And remember: all of the Rotary world will
be joining you in July as “Future Vision” becomes “Rotary’s Vision”!
TRF Quarterly Time Line:
It is important to stay on course with your Foundation time line to prepare for your
upcoming year (for Presidents-Elect), or to keep your committees’ activities moving
forward for your club’s successful year (for current Presidents). The below time tables
are certainly not mandated, nor should they be considered all inclusive. They are
merely suggested outlines that can be tailored to your committees’ needs. Please note
these suggestions are based upon the normal club timeline.
January through March for Presidents-Elect and Next-Year Foundation Chair:
 Establish Committee Membership.
 Review Past Five Years Records.
 Establish Next Year’s Goal.
 Solicit the Club President’s support for planning next year’s TRF programs.
January through March for Club Presidents and Foundation Chairs :
 Remember that January is a critical month to complete payments to the TRF. This
is due to the fact that the proration of funds from the District Designated Funds is
based on monies received from each club over the past 31 months, e.g., the past
two years plus the first seven months of the current year.
 Continue personal contact with those who have not participated.
 Begin announcements as to the success of the End Polio Now Campaign. Podium
announcements and club newsletter articles are welcomed.
 If appropriate in your club publish the names, by category, of the members who
have completed their pledges. Categories would include Paul Harris Society, Super
Sustainers’, Double Sustainers’, and Sustainers’.
 Complete the Global Grant Form, due in February.
 Although the remainder of the year will emphasize donations to complete your
commitment to PolioPlus, it is still important to complete the work on Annual
Giving.
 Distribute Polio Plus Marketing Materials.
Polio Case Count - 2009-2012
Year
Total
Cases
Date of
Most Recent
Case
2009
2010
2011
2012*
1,604
1,352
650
222
Nov. 19, 2009
Nov. 16, 2010
Dec. 20, 2011
Dec. 20, 2012
* This is not the final count for 2012