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Our next West Ventura County Rotary meeting on April 7 will focus on the Rotary Foundation. This is how the Foundation Page on the Rotary.org website briefly describes the Foundation:

The Rotary Foundation transforms your gifts into service projects that change lives both close to home and around the world. Since it was founded more than 100 years ago, the Foundation has spent more than $4 billion on life-changing, sustainable projects. Together, we can make an impact in your community and around the world.

Our mission:

The Rotary Foundation helps Rotary members to advance world understanding, goodwill, and peace by improving health, providing quality education, improving the environment, and alleviating poverty.

What impact can one donation have?

$3 is the average cost to fully protect a child against polio.
$50 can maintain water filters to help fight waterborne illness.
$200 to develop work opportunities by replacing livestock for people impacted by disasters.

Each one of you donates $60 per year to the Foundation as part of your dues statement. Several of you donate more either by direct donation or through our “PHD” program. When your donations total $1000 you receive a Paul Harris Fellow Award. I’m proud to say that our Club has achieved the 100% designation, meaning that at one time every member of our Club was a Paul Harris Fellow. (As I’m sure you are aware, Paul Harris is the Founder of Rotary!) Our Club has committed $100 per member per year for the next three years. With about 60 members, our regular payments will get us most of the way there. Our various other fundraising (good news, club dues, events, etc) allow us to supplement the foundation dues income to meet that goal of $5000 this year. About a third of the money can come back to us in grants directly from the Foundation or from the district. Our big Autism program in Cameroon featured a matching grant of $13,000 as I recall.

The Foundation is one of, if not the largest, non-profit foundations in the world. Your donations are kept for three years so the corpus can grow and then the gains are distributed to member clubs and international programs such as Polio Plus. You and your 1.2 million fellow Rotarians have successfully eradicated polio with just a few cases now in the world. Pretty gratifying, Huh?

How can you increase your commitment to the Rotary Foundation:

Join our PHD program. All you need to do is donate an additional $25 or $50 per quarter on your Rotocharge invoice. That’s just $100 or $200 a year or a cup of Starbucks a week! I will have signups available as an attachment on the email and at our next meeting.

Donate directly to the Foundation. They have system on line. Here’s the link https://my.rotary.org/en/donate . You can designate your funds to one of the dedicated funds within the Foundation such Water, disaster Relief, Environmental, etc.

Bequeath – Here’s a simple one. Become a “Benefactor” by designating in your will that $1000 or more be left to the Rotary Foundation. Who will join me leaving a legacy to help continue the great works of Rotary. Our same sign ups will ask you for this commitment.

I will be facilitating a discussion on the Foundation at our April 7 meeting at the Holiday Inn. Please try to be there.

Prez JZ

President’s Message 3/24/26

International Service

Today's message highlights our Club's work in International Service. Our merged clubs have a history of an impressive array of projects covering every continent. Just in the last half century we have executed or participated in projects such as : water projects in Cameroon and the Philippines, bought a van for indigenous mountain people in Peru, bought and delivered washer and dryer to an orphanage in Mexico, collected shoes and sent medical supplies to Ukraine, sent books to Africa, and of course, donated thousands of dollars toward the eradication of Polio through Rotary’s Polio Plus. In our 150 years of history, we have participated in at least as many projects.

This year our Club has participated in three projects. We led the effort for an ongoing autism training program in Bon Wakam’s home country of Cameroon. We funded this through our own Foundation with matching funds from the Rotary International Foundation. (More about the Foundation in an upcoming Prez message.) We are also assisting two other Rotary club’s with their projects. We assisted the West Lake Village club is leading an effort to provide sewing equipment and supplies for school uniforms in Uganda. Diane Moss has partnered us with the Tehachapi Rotary Club on a Kenya water project. The club’s Foundation has approved $1,000 to support this project, estimated to cost $10,000 in total. Just this week, in response to Derek Eidison’s presentation, a Rotoactor and President -elect of the Ventura East Club, you wonderful WVC Rotarians stepped up to the plate and personally donated over $4000 towards the one-day building of a home in Mexico. We are making a difference in the world! If you have a project in mind for next year or thereafter, please let President -elect Cynthia know. Money is available through our Foundation, through district grants, and from the RI Foundation.

Speaking about our Foundation, like our Club, the Rotary South Foundation, under the leadership of Sam Monroe has worked hard to manage your hard earned funds and set the Foundation up for long term growth. This week we will be having elections for next year’s Foundation Board. The nominating committee will recommend a slate of candidates for your election this week. Nominations from the floor will be offered as well and the election will take place. We will have a new President of the Foundation since Sam will be assuming a Club officers position as President Elect for 27-28. The new Board will administer the transition to a newly formed foundation entity as our last merger action item.

We look forward to Tuesday’s meeting when Alexander Nguyen City manager of Oxnard will be informing us of the City’s progress and future. Should be another fun and exciting gathering of WVC Rotarians.