More than 700 Rotarians from throughout North and Central Florida gathered Monday at the Hyatt Downtown to help the Rotary Club of Jacksonville celebrate its 100 anniversary.
When the club was founded at the Windsor Hotel at Hemming Plaza on Feb. 13, 1912, it became just the fourth Rotary Club in the world and the first in Florida.
The club invited other clubs in Rotary District 6970 to participate in the centennial project, raising more than $500,000 for the purchase and operation of a mobile clinic that Rotary donated to St. Vincent’s HealthCare’s Mobile Health Outreach Ministry.
The rolling clinic was parked Monday along Newnan Street at the hotel. The fully equipped vehicle, dubbed “Heals on Wheels” by the Rotarians, will provide medical care to underserved citizens in North Florida.
Special guest and keynote speaker at the meeting was Rotary International President Kalyan Banerjee.
He said that since Paul Harris founded the first Rotary Club in 1905 in Chicago, the club’s members all over the world have made incalculable contributions to the lives of people and communities through the club’s philosophy, “service above self.”
Banerjee said through the philanthropy and volunteerism of more than 34,000 Rotary Clubs in more than 200 countries, polio virtually has been eradicated from the planet.
The international organization also is focusing on eradicating malaria in Africa, building schools for girls in Afghanistan and supporting programs to promote housing for low-income people worldwide, he said.
“There are now 7 billion people on the Earth. One billion of them are hungry. One billion of them have no clean or safe water. Of the more than 2.2 billion children in the world today, more than half live in poverty,” said Banerjee.
“We cannot shoulder them all, but we cannot look away, either,” he said.
In celebration of the first century of the Rotary Club of Jacksonville, Banerjee said it’s always the first 100 years that are the most difficult.
“Yours and Rotary’s best days are still to come. The rest will be easy,” he said.
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