About
The Rotary Club of Toowong Inc. was originally chartered on August 6 1965. The Club meets weekly on Wednesday evenings at 6pm for a 6:30pm start at the Toowong Bowls Club located on the Corner of Gailey Rd and Heroes Ave, Toowong. Guests and visiting Rotarians are more than welcome at our meetings: we request that you contact us to let us know that you would like to attend.
Currently, the Club has over 40 members who contribute as much as their personal circumstances allow to the Club’s to the Club’s local, regional and international community service projects. Our Club members are community-minded people from diverse professional backgrounds who enjoy networking and creating long-term friendships. Our Members are people who live, study or work in Brisbane’s western suburbs.
History of Toowong Rotary
For over 50 years Toowong Rotary has proudly supported local and international projects including:
- $500 000+ donated to Drug Arm – Street Outreach
- Rotary Youth Leadership Awards
- Achievement Awards at Indooroopilly and Kenmore State High Schools
- Interact Clubs at Brisbane Boys College and Indooroopilly State High School
- Rotary Youth Exchange Programme
- Australian Rotary Health Research Fund
- Funded scholarships for PhDs in cancer research
- International House – Residential College at The University of Queensland
- McIntyre Centre Riding for the Disabled
- Huntington’s Disease Association
- Kids Helpline
- Schools and hospitals in Papua New Guinea
- Literacy training in Queensland, Thailand and the Solomon Islands
- Funded research on SIDS and Alzheimer’s
- Tree planting in the local community
- Blue Nursing Service at Ashgrove
- Cerebral Palsy Association
- Built a Senior Citizen’s Centre
- The Smith Family children’s bursaries
- Water projects in Bangladesh and Papua New Guinea
- Brisbane West Rotaract Club
- Brisbane West, Ithaca and Toowong Probus Clubs
The First Rotary Club
The first Rotary Club was organised in Chicago in the United States in 1905. By 1921, Rotary clubs had been formed on six continents and the name Rotary International was adopted. The 30,000th club was chartered 80 years later in 2001.
Rotary International offers a broad range of humanitarian, intercultural and educational programs and activities designed to improve the human condition, and to advance the organisation’s ultimate goals of international understanding and world peace.
Around the world today there are…
1,214,062 Rotarians
32,180 Clubs
529 Districts
In Australia and Papua New Guinea there are…
35,455 Rotarians
1,195 Clubs
23 Districts
The Rotary Foundation
Central to Rotary activities around the world is The Rotary Foundation (TRF) which is one of the world’s largest private foundations supporting humanitarian and educational programs. In recent years, the Foundation’s general annual donations have totalled over US$100m. When combined with the Polio Plus Fund, total overall contributions exceed US$250m. By investing these funds for three years in order to earn income to support the organisation, one hundred percent of donations are returned to TRF programs, and thus available to apply to beneficiaries. TRF also provides funding for Global and Districts Grants which are used to match funds raised by the Club.
Rotary and Polio
In 1985 Rotary International began the PolioPlus programme – the first initiative to tackle the eradication of polio through mass vaccination of children. More than 2.5 billion children have been vaccinated in 122 countries.
Today there are only three countries that have not yet stopped transmission of wild poliovirus: Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. In 2017, there were 22 cases of confirmed polio worldwide compared to the over 350 000 cases in 1985.
Polio eradication under the Polio Plus program is a major project driven by Rotary and supported by many governments and non-government organisations, including the World Health Organisation and UNICEF.
We are ‘this close’ to eradicating polio worldwide.