One of the best decisions I have made in the last 8 years was to join Rotary. This organization amplifies the good you can do in your community and around the world. Rotary International is a service organization whose stated purpose is to bring together business and professional leaders in order to provide humanitarian services, encourage high ethical standards in all vocations, and to advance goodwill and peace around the world. “It is the duty of all Rotarians,” states the Manual of Procedure “outside their clubs, to be active as individuals in as many legally constituted groups and organizations as possible to promote, not only in words but through exemplary dedication, awareness of the dignity of all people and the respect of the consequent human rights of the individual.” The Rotarian motto is “Service Above Self.”
Rotarians pledge the 4-way test at each meeting. This is a great reminder of how to live life, serve your community, and simply how to be better.
Our club, Rotary Club of Rockingham County meets each Tuesday of the week (except holiday weeks) at Golden Pony in Harrisonburg for breakfast at 7am. We organize a soapbox derby in Harrisonburg and a car raffle to benefit Generations Crossing and First Step. We partner with other clubs (Harrisonburg Rotary, Bridgewater Rotary) to organize the Harrisonburg Strawberry Festival to benefit parks in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County. The Ronald McDonald benefit golf tournament done jointly with Waynesboro East Augusta is always a great event. We donate books to the Massanutten Regional Library, have a grant to help supply food backpacks at county schools, and work to end polio partnering with Harrisonburg-Massanutten Rotary with their Polio Tailgate party. Our weekly meetings raise money for the Collins Center and we have donated books to the Broadway-Timberville Rotary Little Free Library. It is a great group of people dedicated to “service above self.” If you want to visit to see if this club is a good fit for you – let me know. If a 7am breakfast meeting each week is not right for you, let me introduce you to members of one of the lunch clubs. There is work to be done and we need you to be a Rotarian to get it done.
