by Diana Schoberg

In December 2017, on his first night as a Peace Corps volunteer in the ancient North Macedonian city of Štip, Cal Mann was welcomed with a raucous party at a rustic cabin far outside of town. There was an abundance of food and drinks, and a boom box blared local music. As the party raged well past midnight, Mann watched, beer in hand. “I’m like, I can’t do this for two years, that’s for sure,” he recalls.

So you can understand his trepidation the next day when he found out a barbecue was in the works. Being a good sport and new to the city, he opted to go — a pivotal decision, it turns out. At the barbecue he struck up a conversation with a man named Zoran Kolev, who spoke English. As talk came around to Mann’s work as a Peace Corps volunteer, Kolev mentioned that there was a new service club in the city: the Rotary Club of Štip.

“He told me they had just started the club a few months before,” Mann says. “They didn’t really know what Rotary was, but someone had told them it was a good thing to do.” This was great news to Mann, who had been a Rotary member since 2004 (and who currently belongs to the Rotary E-Club of Silicon Valley).

“I was thrilled to have met someone involved in Rotary so I could tap into my experience there. And they were happy to have someone who knew what Rotary was.”

Mann’s primary assignment with the Peace Corps was to work with a legal clinic for Roma residents, but volunteers are encouraged to take on a side project. Rotary became his. “I had just linked up with a club of people with big networks in the community, and most spoke English,” Mann says. “I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid. I figured that’s a pretty good opportunity. I better jump on it.”

Mann connected the club with a youth group and worked on small projects such as litter cleanups. When two Peace Corps volunteers in Štip who were teaching English needed more books, Mann talked to the club about finding a local distributor and also reached out to his friends at the Rotary Club of La Jolla, California, where he’d been a member previously, to connect them with the Štip club so that they could work together on the project.

Mann’s supervisor at the Peace Corps took notice. By the end of 2019, Peace Corps Northern Macedonia had placed four Peace Corps volunteers with Rotary clubs in the country. “The clubs loved it because they got volunteers who were really knowledgeable in the area of community development and who had a lot of ideas, energy, time, and skills,” Mann says. “The volunteers loved it because Rotary clubs immediately gave them a good connection to their community and a natural circle of friends.”

It was a match made in heaven. Rotary and the Peace Corps seemed meant for one another — as subsequent developments would demonstrate.

It was an impromptu speech by John F. Kennedy, just weeks before the 1960 presidential election, that catapulted the idea of a volunteer corps of Americans into public consciousness. Speaking from the steps of the student union at the University of Michigan, he challenged students, who had been waiting until well after midnight for his arrival, to contribute part of their life to service. The idea took hold, and hundreds of students signed petitions pledging to volunteer. In March 1961, President Kennedy signed an executive order creating the Peace Corps. “‘Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country’ was very real for me,” says Ted Bendelow, a member of the Rotary Club of Mead, Colorado, who joined the Peace Corps six months after Kennedy’s assassination and served in Liberia from 1964 to 1966.

In the 60 years since its creation, more than 240,000 Americans have served in the Peace Corps. Chances are there might be a returned Peace Corps volunteer (known as an RPCV) in your club or district. “They pop up in Rotary more than you might think,” says Charlie Hunt, a member of the Rotary Club of Denver Lodo, who served in Vanuatu from 2006 to 2008. Hunt recalls attending a Rotary club meeting while traveling to another part of the United States and hearing an opinionated academic speaking about Iran. “A Rotarian took her to task,” Hunt says. “He said he had spent two years in Iran. He had been a Peace Corps volunteer.”

The relationship between Rotary International and the Peace Corps, made official with a 2014 partnership agreement, has its foundation in the organizations’ shared values. The mission of the Peace Corps — “to promote world peace and friendship” — is one Rotary has embraced for more than 100 years. And the Peace Corps’ chief areas of focus — agriculture, community economic development, education, environment, health, and youth in development — have much in common with Rotary’s.

The Peace Corps has three goals: providing training for men and women in interested host countries; helping people in those countries to better understand Americans; and helping Americans to better understand other peoples. Service, therefore, is meant to continue once volunteers return home. “The third goal is not necessarily just about telling stories about your Peace Corps experience,” Hunt says. “It’s about being active in your community and how you can best take the things you’ve done in the Peace Corps and apply them when you come back.”

Steve Werner, a member of the Rotary Club of Denver Southeast and a Peace Corps volunteer in Korea from 1976 to 1978, recalls a meeting in the early 1990s with JFK’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, who had served as the first director of the Peace Corps. Then the board chair for the National Peace Corps Association, Werner stopped by Shriver’s office to have him sign some fundraising letters, a task he thought would take only 15 minutes. But Shriver was in the mood to talk. “He told me that the vision was that once a Peace Corps volunteer, we would always be a Peace Corps volunteer,” Werner says. “We would continue to serve after we got home to be examples to our fellow Americans. It was a big part of my motivation for becoming a Rotarian.”

Werner served another tour as a Peace Corps volunteer in the country of Georgia in 2016, this time with Peace Corps Response. While similar in approach to the two-year traditional program, Peace Corps Response assignments are shorter (generally 9-12 months) and involve higher impact projects geared to volunteers with more technical expertise in a particular program area.

Elsewhere in 2016, Andy Lenec was listening to NPR with his son when he heard an interview with the oldest active Peace Corps volunteer at the time: 87-year-old Alice Carter, who had just finished her first year in Morocco. “I’d been a Rotarian for over 25 years and service is second nature to me,” Lenec says. “I looked at my son, and he said, ‘Go for it, Dad.’ The next thing I know, I’m filling out the Peace Corps application form online.”

Lenec was assigned to Truskavets, a small city in western Ukraine near the Polish border where a Rotary club had applied for a Peace Corps volunteer in partnership with the city government and library. The club was small but committed. “Because of economic struggles, Rotary in Ukraine can cost as much as one month’s salary for annual dues,” Lenec says. “Many just cannot afford it. So a club of what used to be 20 was down to maybe 4.”

Once in Truskavets, Lenec decided that he wanted his side project for the Peace Corps to involve young people. He proposed an international youth conference to the Rotarians, and they jumped at the idea, as did the city’s mayor. As Lenec traveled to other Rotary clubs to encourage them to support the conference, a Rotarian asked if the conference could be turned into a Rotary Youth Leadership Awards event, which was defunct in the country. Lenec had been involved in RYLA for years and had seen the impact it makes on youth. Now he had a new goal: “We were going to revive RYLA in Ukraine,” he says.

Unfortunately, Lenec became ill while planning the event and had to return to Colorado, where he is now a member of the Rotary Club of Denver Lodo. But another Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine, Shannon Carter, stepped in and worked with Rotarians to keep the momentum going. During the summer of 2019, the RYLA took place; 17 young people from Ukraine, Japan, and Armenia participated. “It cemented faith in the program,” Carter says. Carter then helped organize a virtual RYLA in 2020 with more than 700 registered participants.

Unlike Lenec with his decades of Rotary experience, Carter had none. But she soon discovered how valuable the Rotary network would be, both with RYLA and her future projects. Following up on work Lenec had done to raise awareness of the RYLA project with clubs in North America, Carter was introduced to Gordon Crann, a member of the Rotary Club of Hamilton After Five, Ontario. Crann, who has an extensive global network as past chair of both the Rotary Action Group for Peace and the Rotary Action Group for Community and Economic Development, offered to help Carter promote RYLA. Then he went one step further: He suggested she also apply for a Rotary Peace Fellowship.

“I was very impressed by Shannon and her organizational ability,” Crann says. “She was the key person in bringing everything together, and this was an interna-tional effort. Peace Corps volunteers have shown they have a commitment to Service Above Self by taking time off [for public service], when they could be making a lot more money in jobs in the United States.”

Carter applied, and today she is a Rotary Peace Fellow at the University of Bradford, England, and a member of the Rotaract Club of Lviv International, Ukraine. “I went into RYLA anticipating personal growth, but I didn’t foresee the international network I would gain that would provide future opportunities like the Rotary Peace Fellowship,” Carter says. “My experience as a Peace Corps volunteer cemented my confidence in myself and made me realize we are fully able to do what we want in life.”

One of the driving forces behind the Rotary-Peace Corps partnership at the international level is a group of returned Peace Corps volunteers from Colorado who named themselves the “Tiger Team,” after a dog owned by one of its members. The group began meeting in November 2009 at the instigation of Sue Fox, a past president of the Rotary Club of Denver and a returned Peace Corps volunteer who served in Liberia from 1968 to 1970. Fox recognized the potential for the two groups; as she told a local business magazine at the time, “RPCVs and Rotarians are kindred spirits, seeking the same goals embodied in Rotary’s motto, Service Above Self.”

Students register for the regional English-language spelling bee in Štip. Nationwide, more than 3,000 students participate in this highly competitive contest, which is facilitated by volunteers from the Peace Corps and Rotary.

The Tiger Team expanded to include other Rotarians as well as returned Peace Corps volunteers who were not affiliated with Rotary. Their group, which became the organization Partnering for Peace, proposed to Rotary International and the Peace Corps administration that a formal alliance be established between the two organizations. That step was taken in May 2014, and the partnership was recently renewed for another three years.

by Aidan O’Leary                Illustration by Viktor Miller Gausa

“There’s something about the whole idea of eradicating polio that grabs the imagination,” says Aidan O’Leary. “Most people talk about making steps toward achievements, and it’s almost always into the never-never. Eradication is a zero-sum game; anything short of zero is failure. You keep getting closer and closer, but ultimately the only number that actually matters is zero.”

Although O’Leary, the polio eradication director for the World Health Organization, is speaking from his home in Galway, against the verdant backdrop of western Ireland, his focus is on war-torn Afghanistan and the parched and dusty plains of Pakistan — the last two places on the planet where wild polio still thrives.

Even during a pandemic, even as grim realities confront him, O’Leary conveys a sense of optimism about the possibility of finally eradicating polio. “Particularly in the days of COVID-19, there is something that really resonates about snuffing out a highly communicable infectious disease,” he says. “As COVID has taken off, it has also led a lot of people to better understand why now is the time to finish this job with polio.”

Yet O’Leary’s optimism is shaded with a sense of urgency and pragmatism. “There is absolutely no case for complacency here,” he says. “What is really important is that we double down on reaching the persistently missed children who are a top priority for our program.”

O’Leary, who began his tenure as WHO’s polio chief in January, came into the job knowing the terrain well. He formerly led UNICEF’s polio eradication efforts in Pakistan and was the head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, organizing the UN’s emergency response during crises.

O’Leary says he understands the difference Rotary can make — both in a community and in the global fight against polio. In Galway, a local tradition involves kicking the limestone wall at the end of a 2-mile stroll on the Salthill Promenade along Galway Bay (the reason for doing so has been lost in the mists of time). In 2012, O’Leary explains, the Rotary Club of Galway-Salthill installed on that wall a box that bears the slogan “Small Change, Big Impact” and encourages walkers to leave a small donation, with all money collected going to local charities and institutions.

In July, weeks before the dramatic turn of events in Afghanistan, O’Leary joined Rotary magazine senior staff writer Diana Schoberg and Dave King, editor of Rotary magazine for Rotary International in Great Britain and Ireland, on a Zoom call to discuss the new strategy of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) and the new polio vaccine, and how they will be used to eradicate polio — once and for all.

What is the latest update on wild poliovirus?

The numbers are extremely encouraging. We’ve gone over a very bumpy road during the last two years. We had a fivefold increase in cases between 2018 and 2019, when we saw 176 cases, and we had 140 cases in 2020. But we’ve recorded just two cases this year [as of 27 July] — one each in Afghanistan and Pakistan. [Both cases were in January.]

The particularly encouraging part right now is that the program has a very elaborate network of environmental testing sites for sewage — almost 100 sites in Afghanistan and Pakistan that cover all of the major population centers. In 2020, almost 60 percent of the monthly test samples came back positive for poliovirus. This year to date, that percentage is probably around 15 per-cent. We have been unable to detect any wild poliovirus in Afghanistan since 23 February, and we’ve seen just five isolates in Pakistan since 12 April.

Why do you think that is? Given that some polio immunization campaigns had to be suspended last year, you’d think the numbers would have gone in the other direction. Is it because so many elements of society were shut down due to the pandemic?

While conditions in 2020 were certainly adverse both for surveillance and for the campaign operations, there are two areas that are helping us this year. One is reduced mobility — both within Afghanistan and Pakistan, and across the borders. When you look particularly at the experience in India, with the explosion of COVID cases in the first and second quarters of 2021 — and what were some very shocking images of funeral pyres — I believe that the drop in mobility has had an impact. There has also been a change in social norms, very simple things like social distancing and hand washing. Maybe that has made some impact, as well. But those are short-term changes.

With the conflict in Afghanistan, we don’t believe that the benefits we’re seeing from reduced mobility will continue indefinitely. We need to continue to prepare for the possibility of large-scale displacements across borders. We need to grab the opportunity that we have.

Now we’re coming into the high season for polio transmission, so we’ll continue to wait and see. There’s certainly no complacency from our program.

"The single most important relationship that the program has is between a frontline vaccinator and the caregiver who answers the knock at the door."

Vaccines are on everyone’s mind because of COVID. Has that affected acceptance of the polio vaccine?

For me, the more fundamental issues in Afghanistan and Pakistan center around household and community confidence and trust. If you get the basics of that right, you are 80 to 90 percent there. The challenge has always been reaching the other 10 to 20 percent.

The key issue is broader — the marginalization of communities. That’s not something that can be addressed just at the household and community level. It requires a systemic engagement to try to make sure that we properly understand the community’s actual needs and then that we connect those dots in a more reliable way.

The single most important relationship that the program has is between a frontline vaccinator and the caregiver who answers the knock at the door. That caregiver is usually the mother, and what’s really important for our success is that the frontline vaccinator is a local woman who is well-trained and motivated to do what she’s doing. If that relationship of confidence and trust is developed, then you’re able to vaccinate all of the children inside the house.

Because of the suspension of house-to-house vaccination campaigns in 2018 in areas of Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban, more than 3 million children routinely miss vaccinations. Do you think that polio eradication is possible while the security situation in Afghanistan is so unpredictable?

We continue to speak with all parties. Our priority is the protection of children, and that requires engaging with all stakeholders. We have an agreement with the Taliban to conduct mosque-to-mosque campaigns, which we hope we’ll be able to initiate in the coming months. In some cases, we’ll be reaching children for the first time in several years. We’d like to build on those opportunities toward resuming house-to-house vaccination campaigns.

We don’t have an all-or-nothing situation. Let’s seize the opportunity to reach 40 to 50 percent coverage before we start talking about 100 percent. Will the campaigns in July and August be perfect? No. They’re taking place against the backdrop of a growing full-scale conflict, so we have to make sure that we find appropriate ways of making that work.

There will be risks. Eight frontline workers were killed in eastern Afghanistan earlier this year in various targeted killings. In these contested areas, the de facto authorities on the ground shift. We need to make sure that we navigate these areas as sensitively as we possibly can.

We are also working on financing essential immunization coverage [universal access to all relevant vaccines], particularly in the provinces of the southern region of Afghanistan. We recognize that it’s not just a polio gap. There’s a much broader gap.

The other point that I would highlight is the importance of the surveillance system. Although we have not been able to reach all children with vaccinations, our surveillance system is continuing to pick up all the acute flaccid paralysis cases. There is a basic system in place that allows us to properly understand what’s going on. We want to build incrementally and in a sustainable way to make sure that we have access in all of these areas for the purposes of our immunization programs.

What about in Pakistan, where 81 percent of the cases are among the Pashto-speaking population, who make up 15 percent of the overall population. Why are the cases so concentrated within that group, and what is the program planning to do to address it?

It’s often presented as a vaccine acceptance issue, but I think it’s much broader than that. Because of economic migration, among other reasons, you have this massive influx of Pashto-speaking people from across Afghanistan and Pakistan into Karachi. You’re seeing this huge explosion of settlements — formal, informal, and everything in between. These settlements tend to be highly underserved. There can be issues between the state and provincial administrations and these minority communities. There’s a wider issue around community acceptance, confidence, and trust.

The polio eradication program is one of the few programs that reaches these communities, but their needs go way beyond polio vaccines, including clean water and sanitation, nutrition, basic health services, and education. So when you are trying to access these informal settlements, you have this big residue of issues that polio essentially becomes the proxy for.

These issues are not strictly within the control of our program, but we recognize that to build the acceptance and trust of these communities, we’re going to have to make a much more sustained effort than we perhaps may have been doing in the past. The idea on our side is to move from patchy and ad hoc initiatives to something much more comprehensive and systemic.

Zero-dose refers to any child who has never had a vaccine. We want to make sure that they not only get the oral polio vaccines but also as many other essential immunizations as is feasible. It’s not just a question of a fixed, static target of high-risk children in core reservoirs — those areas with persistent wild poliovirus transmission. There is a rolling target that we have to stay on top of. We’re in a race against time with newborns. There are between 7 and 8 million babies born every year in Pakistan. So we need to make sure that within the first months of those babies’ lives, we’re reaching as large a proportion of them as we possibly can.

What’s your best guesstimate of your target?

Every time we do a national immunization campaign in Pakistan, which are house-to-house campaigns, we target more than 40 million children under age 5. When we go to Afghanistan, that number is between 9 million and 10 million. It continues to be very humbling to see what frontline workers are doing during a pandemic.

We’re dealing with two issues here, aren’t we — wild poliovirus and the circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus. What is the difference between the two?

The wild poliovirus is essentially as its name describes. It’s the original of the species. It has evolved over centuries and millennia, and it has continued to evolve.

The oral polio vaccine contains a live but weakened virus, which can circulate among under-immunized or unimmunized populations for a long period of time, usually for years. And eventually, it can revert to a form that causes paralysis. That is circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus [cVDPV].

Viruses require an immunity gap. They need susceptible children. Anywhere there are zero-dose children, you’re going to find these diseases taking off. When we map where these children are, we keep coming back to the same locations again and again. That’s why we really have to double down and make sure that these zero-dose children are our very top priority to get covered by vaccination.

Globally, how widespread is cVDPV?

There have been 1,800 cases since 2016. Between 2018 and 2019, there was a tripling of cases, and then there was a further tripling between 2019 and 2020. The total number of cVDPV cases in 2020 was 1,103. So far in 2021 [as of 27 July], there have been 179 cases. We’ve seen real progress as immunization campaigns have resumed. The number of countries with cases has decreased from 27 last year to just over a dozen.

These cases happen where children miss vaccinations. When children are fully vaccinated, cVDPV is not a problem. These cases are highly concentrated, with Afghanistan and Pakistan making up 40 percent of cases in 2020. If you look at the situation in Afghanistan, which was the country with the greatest number of cVDPV cases last year, more than 90 percent of those were concentrated in the areas that were inaccessible due to the Taliban banning house-to-house polio campaigns.

So again, the challenge for us is to protect through vaccination. You create a risk by not building up the immunity levels as high as they could or should be. As a program, we are trying to get back to a stage where we’re going after the root cause of the problem — which means making sure that we are fully vaccinating all of these zero-dose children.

Here’s how joining a Rotary club helped enhance Ashley Holmer’s work

Ashley Holmer is a member of the Rotary Club of Lewis River (Battle Ground), Washington

Looking for a meaningful year-abroad experience, Ashley Holmer decided to teach in Tanzania. The former college soccer star coached and taught English in a Maasai community in 2005.

But Holmer soon became more deeply involved in education in Tanzania. She co-founded the Indigenous Education Foundation of Tanzania (IEFT), which established a school in the village of Orkeeswa in 2008. In 2011, the leaders of Mungere village asked Holmer to help build its first community high school. That was the beginning of the Red Sweater Project, named for the color of the school uniforms. Since then, the Mungere School — and education — has been a central part of Holmer’s life.

The Red Sweater Project focuses on three main areas: quality education, gender equality, and responsible innovation. In Tanzania, many children — especially girls — leave school around age 12, in part because of costs for uniforms, school supplies, meals, and transportation. To keep students in the classroom, the project makes education affordable by reducing those ancillary costs.

In 2013, Holmer, who still spends about half her time in Tanzania, was invited to a meeting of the Lewis River Rotary club. She was struck by the way her values meshed with those of Rotary but was unable to join at the time because of attendance requirements. In January 2017, with those requirements having become more flexible, she became a member.

The club has embraced Holmer’s work and sponsors scholarships for six students each year to attend the Mungere School. “We have students whose parents are illiterate,” Holmer says. “One of my students just finished her teacher training. It’s coming full circle.”

— NIKKI KALLIO

• This story originally appeared in the March 2021 issue of Rotary magazine.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media contacts: Clinton Bennett, DHSS, 907-269-4996, clinton.bennett@alaska.gov
Public inquiries: State COVID-19 Vaccine Helpline, 907-646-3322

Administration of Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine paused for national safety review; mRNA vaccine administration will continue in Alaska and nationally

April 13, 2021 ANCHORAGE – Out of an abundance of caution, vaccine providers in Alaska have been asked to pause all use of the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) COVID-19 vaccine (Janssen) immediately, in accordance with a joint announcement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration this morning.

All upcoming appointments with the J&J vaccine are being canceled in Alaska. This is because CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is reviewing six cases of a rare and severe type of blood clot in women aged 18-48 years after vaccination with the J&J vaccine. Symptoms in these patients began 6-13 days following vaccination.

ACIP will meet tomorrow, April 14, to review the relevant data. Meanwhile, administration of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines will continue both in Alaska and nationally. The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are considered extremely safe and effective.

Anyone who was scheduled to receive the J&J vaccine in Alaska this week should be aware that their appointment will be canceled or postponed. If you need help rescheduling your appointment to instead receive one of the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer or Moderna), please call the Alaska Vaccine Helpline at 1-907-646-3322 or toll-free 1-833-4-VAXLINE (1-833-482-9546).

“We take every vaccine adverse event seriously. This pause is an important part of the process that ensures the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines,” said Dr. Joe McLaughlin, Alaska’s state epidemiologist. “This is how our safety checks work. DHSS is notifying vaccine providers via email and phone calls this morning and is also providing information to all health care providers. Alaskans should also know this appears to be a very rare event, with six cases out of 6.8 million doses of J&J vaccine administered to date.”

As of April 12, there have been 11,178 Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses administered in Alaska out of 35,500 doses allocated in the state. This vaccine has been delivered to a number of sites in Alaska, including pharmacies, outpatient clinics, federally qualified health centers and local public health authorities.

The six U.S. cases were flagged in the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), a component of national post-licensure vaccine safety monitoring. None of these six cases occurred in Alaska. Anyone who has received the vaccine who develops severe headache, abdominal pain, leg pain, or shortness of breath within three weeks after vaccination should contact their health care provider or seek medical care.

Health care providers are asked to report adverse events to VAERS.

# # #

The Israel-based charity ‘Save A Child’s Heart’ reaches across conventional political boundaries for the welfare of children. Watford Rotarian, David Silverston, a trustee of Save A Child’s Heart UK, describes the amazing work which is taking place.

They will also be recognized at the 2021 Virtual Convention for their outstanding contribution to health.

Rohantha Athukorala

Rotary Club of Colombo Reconnections, Sri Lanka

In April while Sri Lanka was on lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Rohantha used his time in isolation to rally other members across Sri Lanka and create Stop the Spread, a comprehensive effort to reduce new infections through behavior changes. The program brought the country's top athletes together with some 15,000 Rotarians, Rotactors, and Interactors to create awareness of health protocols and behavior change that can slow the spread of the disease. They also created a certification program for businesses that met new health and safety protocols addressing the spread of the virus. More than 300 businesses have been certified including schools, supermarkets, hotels, and tea and apparel industries. Read more about the project.

Julie Dockrill

Rotary Club of Timaru, New Zealand

In 2013, Dockrill and other midwives introduced a Maternal and Infant Health Education program in Mongolia that has been adopted by the Ministry of Health. They created a "train the trainer" curriculum and made numerous trips to the country to help educate healthcare workers, university students, and expectant mothers about safety practices and protocols of childbirth. Since the program was launched in Mongolia, the mortality rate among pregnant mother and newborns has decreased by 60%.

James Ham

Rotary Club of Honolulu Sunset, Hawaii, USA

The Homeless Outreach & Medical Education (H.O.M.E.) Project has provided free medical services through weekly clinics in nine sites across Oahu, Hawaii. Ham, an emergency physician in Honolulu and an assistant clinical professor at the University of Hawaii's school of medicine, began volunteering with the project four years ago. Ham's Rotary club purchased and stocks a mobile clinic that expands the project's reach. To address the COVID-19 pandemic, Ham organized 12 Rotary clubs to provide hot meals and masks and hygiene kits to a quarantine camp for homeless people, as well as PPE to the volunteers who offer frontline care.

Mohan Kumar

Rotary Club of Bangalore Prime, India

Since 2007, Kumar's Reach the Unreached organization, has led efforts to provide prosthetic hands to more than 20,000 people in mostly economically-challenged communities of Africa and South Asia. He credits volunteers with leading him to the people who most needed help: among them, a mother who can now hold her baby, a barber able to resume his profession, and a boy who lost both hands in an electrocution accident. According to Kumar, accidents often lead to amputation among the more than two-thirds of India's 1.3 billion inhabitants who live in low-income rural areas.

Isabel Scarinci

Rotary Club of Birmingham, Alabama, USA

Scarinci, a polio survivor, has been a strong advocate for polio eradication. She is now leading efforts to eliminate another disease: cervical cancer. Funded by a Rotary Foundation global grant, the Rotary clubs of Birmingham and Colombo (Sri Lanka) have joined with the Sri Lankan Ministry of Health and the O'Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, where Scarinci is a behavioral scientist, to vaccinate girls in Sri Lanka against the human papillomavirus and to screen women for the disease at ages 35 and 45.

Scarinci contracted polio as an infant in Brazil in 1963. She recovered, and together with her mother, has become a strong advocate for polio vaccination.

Teguest Yilma

Rotary Club of Addis Ababa Entoto, Ethiopia

On World Polio Day last October, Yilma, chair of Ethiopia's PolioPlus committee, collaborated with the Ministry of Health and the World Health Organization to conduct a high-level panel discussion that addressed the problems COVID-19 created for ongoing polio eradication efforts. The media attention that event received helped people understand the importance of continuing National Immunization Days and spurred the government to continue providing polio and measles immunizations throughout the pandemic.

Rotarians, Rotaractors, and Interactors worked together in a nationwide project that promoted behavior change and initiated safety standards for businesses

by Ryan Hyland

Rohantha Athukorala felt helpless. It was April 2020 when Sri Lanka was on lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, and he wanted to do something immediately to help the country slow the spread of virus.

“The lockdown was so sudden and absolute. It was hard not being in control of what you can and can’t do,” says Athukorala, a member of the Rotary Club of Colombo Reconnections, Sri Lanka. “Especially for us Rotarians who pride ourselves on helping our communities in desperate times.”

But sheltering in place had its advantages, he says, providing the time and opportunity to connect with fellow members online. Their discussions sparked ideas about what they could do to help people understand how to stay safe from the coronavirus.

Promoting safety though social media

Athukorala started by contacting club and district leaders, talking with government officials, and listening to business leaders. In late April, he launched Stop the Spread, a comprehensive effort to reduce new infections through behavior changes.

He asked the more than 5,000 Sri Lankan Interactors to lead the campaign and be community advocates for specific behaviors such as wearing masks, washing hands, and social distancing. Interactors used their social media networks to blast daily messages about staying safe from the virus, and posted relevant communications from the Ministry of Health.

To complement the Interactors’ communication, Athukorala worked with the country’s Ministry of Sports and the National Olympic Committee to get top athletes to become ambassadors for Stop the Spread. More than 280 athletes — including stars in cricket and rugby, as well as Olympians — participated in videos and graphics that were posted on social media.

Stop the Spread also promoted safety protocols through a certification process for businesses. Athukorala and fellow Rotary members created the certification with the Sri Lanka Standards Institution that enabled companies that are compliant with certain safety guidelines to be certified as a COVID-19-controlled environment. Protocols such as mandatory mask wearing, temperature checks, and social distancing had to be in place in order to receive the certification. Nearly 300 businesses, educational institutions, supermarkets, and other retailers have passed the program’s rigorous audits and received certification, allowing customers and students feel safe while supporting these businesses.

When the lockdown order was lifted in early May, Interactors fanned out across their communities to visit businesses, homes, and public transport to give people educational materials and safety guidance. They became leaders in helping schools implement COVID-19 safety protocols, which allowed schools to open in early July.

“Our Interactors have been fantastic and made a real difference in getting crucial information out to the public,” Athukorala says, who was chair of the Sri Lanka Tourism Bureau and served as the chief business development officer for Sri Lanka at the United Nations.  

Tools and technology

To encourage hand washing, local Rotary clubs worked with S-lon, a plastic water pipe company, and PickMe, a transportation organization, to build nearly 2,000 mobile hand washing units that attach to three-wheel bikes. Riders are encouraged to wash their hands before and after using the bikes. The aim is to promote hand washing hygiene in public spaces and increase hand washing rates, which is one of the best protections against COVID-19 infection.

The Rotaract Club of Kelaniya created a mobile app, Track the Spread, that allows Sri Lankans to log symptoms and register positive tests. The app is integrated with local hospitals and health centers so medical professionals can identify hotspots and communicate with people about their symptoms. It also allows people to purchase goods online from grocery stores, pharmacies, retail shops, and even pay utilities with the app, while allowing people to stay home and thus contain the spread. “This is helping commerce continue,” Athukorala says.

The government of Sri Lanka is now testing the app for widespread adoption across its health departments.

The next phase

As vaccinations are increasing in the country, more than 800,000 doses have been administered so far, Rotary clubs have also worked with local health officials to support vaccine sites including logging data. 

Clubs worked with the World Health Organization and Ministry of Health to develop a booklet for parliament representatives and religious and community leaders to facilitate a successful vaccination program. The printable booklet has information on different vaccines, safe practices, and key messages that leaders can use to better inform people about the COVID-19 vaccines.

More than 88,000 cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed as of mid-March, with over 530 deaths.

“We have done a great job at keeping COVID-19 at bay, but our next focus is making sure Sri Lanka can adequately provide vaccinations to its people,” Athukorala says.

22-Mar-2021

How to Protect Yourself and Others

Until we know more about those questions, everyone — even people who’ve had their vaccines — should continue taking basic prevention steps when recommended.

Want to learn more about these recommendations? Read our expanded Interim Public Health Recommendations for Fully Vaccinated People, and corresponding Science Brief, and recommendations for healthcare providers.

March 9, 2021 (Juneau, AK) – Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy today announced effective immediately the COVID-19 vaccine is available for all individuals who live or work in Alaska and are age 16 and older, making Alaska the first state in the nation to remove eligibility requirements.

“This historic step is yet another nationwide first for Alaska, but it should come as no surprise. Since day one, your response to the pandemic has been hands-down the best in the nation,” said Governor Mike Dunleavy. “I couldn’t be prouder of Alaska’s response. From being the first state to offer widespread testing, to maintaining one of the lowest mortality rates in the country, to rolling out vaccinations to every willing Alaskan, we got here by working together.”

“It is a great day for Alaskans wanting to receive the COVID-19 vaccine,” said Adam Crum, Commissioner of the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services. “I want to thank Governor Dunleavy for this opportunity and if Alaskans had any questions about vaccine eligibility and criteria, I hope today’s announcement clears it up for you, simply put, you are eligible to get the vaccine.”

The Pfizer vaccine is available to individuals who are 16 and older, while the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and the Moderna vaccine are available to individuals who are 18 and older. All three authorized vaccines have shown to be very effective at preventing severe illness, hospitalization, and death caused by COVID-19.

Regions including Kodiak Island, the Petersburg Borough, and the Kusilvak Census Area are nearing or exceeding 90% vaccination rates among seniors. In the Nome Census Area, over 60% of residents age 16 and over have received at least one shot, and roughly 291,000 doses have been administered statewide.

“A healthy community means a healthy economy. With widespread vaccinations available to all Alaskans who live or work here, we will no doubt see our economy grow and our businesses thrive,” said Governor Dunleavy.

Visit covidvax.alaska.gov or call 1-907-646-3322 for more information and to sign up for a COVID-19 vaccination.

Moderna first-dose appointments are currently available.

700+ Moderna first-dose appointments are currently available.

Randall Butler is the chair of the peacebuilding committee of a club with more than a century of dedication to fostering peace

by Geoffrey Johnson

“I’ve been in conflict resolution my whole career,” says Randy Butler, the founder and CEO of the Institute for Sustainable Peace. A former trial lawyer, Butler abandoned the courtroom to focus on using mediation to resolve disputes and training others in the use of mediation. “I’d found my passion,” he says.

In 2018, he led a workshop to “build the skills necessary to overcome the polarization we are experiencing in the United States.” When Butler reached out to the peacebuilding committee at the Rotary Club of Boulder, he met Gary Kahn, who asked him: “Why are you not a member of Rotary?”

Attending a meeting of the Boulder club, he says, “it was amazing to look at all these people around the room — the district attorney; medical professionals and successful businesspeople; college professors — and realize that here was a club that had brought all these individuals together and that they make a real difference in what they’re doing.” 

It was Butler’s Rotary epiphany. “I suddenly saw this network forming all over the world: people who knew how to get things done and knew people they could get things done with.”

Today he’s the chair of the peacebuilding committee of the 101-year-old club, which has dedicated its second century to fostering peace. “We remind our club members that all of our projects that help to build Positive Peace involve collaborations at the community level, even across traditional divides,” he says, noting that they look forward to using the vast Rotary network to build even more “bridges of understanding.”

• This story originally appeared in the February 2021 issue of Rotary magazine.

Related content

Promoting Peace: Rotary’s peacebuilding history around the world

Learn more about Rotary’s focus on peace

700+ Moderna first-dose appointments are currently available.  

Make an Appointment For the mass vaccine event on March 12

In a challenging time, Rotary members and partners have shown drive in overcoming challenges

by Diana Schoberg                                      Image credit: Andrew Esiebo

It was May 1997, and Sam Okudzeto, then a member of the African Regional PolioPlus Committee from Ghana, was flying to Sierra Leone for what he anticipated would be a routine annual meeting about polio eradication in Africa. But when his plane touched down and he looked out the window, he saw that soldiers, guns drawn, had flooded the tarmac.

As Okudzeto made his way to passport control, he asked an airport official what was going on. “Listen carefully,” he was told. “You can hear the guns.” There had been a coup that morning.

“All we heard was boom, boom, boom,” Okudzeto recalls. “Then I realized that the aircraft that had brought us had gone.”

With no taxis running, Okudzeto and the other meeting participants who had been on the plane walked to a nearby hotel. “We all went to our rooms and put our luggage down and then went to the restaurant,” he recalls. “I asked for the biggest and juiciest sole fish I had ever had in my life, because it might be my last supper.” (Luckily it wasn’t, and four days later, Okudzeto and the others caught a helicopter out of the country.)

“There is an enemy in life — and it’s fear,” he says now. “For those who are not afraid, it’s amazing what you can do. It’s fantastic to see the result now: Africa is [wild] polio-free.”

In August 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) certified the African region free of wild poliovirus, the culmination of a decades-long effort involving millions of Rotary members, health workers, government officials, traditional and religious leaders, and parents. Since 1996, a year when wild polio paralyzed an estimated 75,000 children across Africa, health workers have given more than 9 billion doses of the oral polio vaccine, preventing 1.8 million wild polio cases.

“Everybody chipped in,” says Gaston Kaba, longtime chair of the Niger PolioPlus Committee (he retired from the position in June 2019). “Volunteers, town criers, many other people were involved. Nobody knows about them. They worked quietly to get the job done.”

The 47 countries that make up WHO’s African region are home to nearly 1,400 Rotary clubs and 32,000 members, many of whom have dedicated time and resources to the effort. Rotary members around the world have contributed nearly $890 million toward eradicating polio in the region, advocated for support from their governments, mobilized communities around National Immunization Days, and held events for World Polio Day to raise public awareness.

The legacy of those efforts is a health care infrastructure that is playing an important role in the COVID-19 pandemic and is poised to respond to future public health emergencies. The laboratory and surveillance networks developed to track the poliovirus are being used to monitor other diseases. Polio workers bolster an array of routine immunizations, deliver deworming medicines and oral rehydration salts, and provide other health services. And they continue to vaccinate children against polio, because until the virus is eradicated from the earth, it remains a threat everywhere. “Being declared free of polio is an amazing success,” says Teguest Yilma, Ethiopia PolioPlus Committee chair. “I am happy — but I’m still not relaxed.”

In a time of extraordinary challenges, we can celebrate the eradication of wild polio in the African region. Here are just a few of the stories of the drive and determination Rotary members and our partners have shown in overcoming challenges and setbacks.

  THE CHALLENGES  

Conflict
Rumors
Hard-to-reach children
Political will
The next phase

In February 2005, as civil war raged through Côte d’Ivoire, Marie-Irène Richmond-Ahoua entered the heart of rebel-held territory. Then the national PolioPlus committee chair, Richmond-Ahoua joined representatives from Rotary’s partners on a United Nations (UN) flight to Bouaké, where the rebels were based. “We met with rebel chiefs to beg them to make immunization days safe,” she recalls, asking for their cooperation in providing soldiers to protect the vaccinators. “They did it. For five days, it was easy to reach children.”

Over the years, security was one of the biggest challenges to the polio eradication effort in Africa. Rotary and its partners worked to negotiate truces and military protection to make sure that health workers could reach every child in conflict areas. In 1994 and 1996, the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army and the Sudanese government agreed to honor “corridors of peace” where vaccinators could travel safely, and two years later, a PolioPlus grant supported the airlifting of vaccines into villages that hadn’t seen a government health worker in 15 years. In 1985 in Uganda, the government and the National Resistance Army agreed to permit UNICEF flights into rebel-held territory after the civil war cut off a third of the population from government serv-ices. And in late 1999, then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan negotiated a nationwide truce in Sierra Leone so that National Immunization Days could be held.

But at times, bloodshed still derailed polio eradication efforts. Nigeria thought it had seen its last case of wild polio in July 2014. But then the militant group Boko Haram kept vaccinators out of its strongholds in Borno state in northeastern Nigeria for several years. “Boko Haram was against immunizations in the first place, so many health facilities were destroyed. Immunization was not even something you could think about,” says Tunji Funsho, who has served as Nigeria PolioPlus Committee chair since 2013. Polio was festering, undiagnosed, in the areas of Borno where children hadn’t received their vaccines, and in 2016 the country recorded four cases.

But the Nigerian government — as well as Rotary, its partners, and health workers and volunteers — never gave up. The Nigerian Army became a key participant in vaccination efforts. At first, it would secure an area, and vaccinators would spend two days or less quickly immunizing children before leaving, a strategy called “hit and run.” Later, armed local militia members would escort vaccinators to unsafe areas. Today, army medical corps members carry the vaccine to settlements that remain unsafe for civilians to enter and vaccinate children themselves. “The military knows how to take care of themselves,” Funsho says.

Funsho recalls visiting the home of the child who had the last case of wild polio in Nigeria, another innocent victim of the insurgency. “The potential for a three-year-old girl in Borno state to achieve the best that is possible for her life is already very low — educationally, socially, in all aspects of human endeavor,” he says. “Add polio paralysis to that, and what is the hope for that child? It is heart-rending.”

In Nigeria, another significant obstacle was the persistent rumors about the safety of the oral polio vaccine that spread in the northern part of the country in the early 2000s, Funsho says. Skeptical political and religious leaders told parents to refuse vaccinations, combining rhetoric of the anti-vaccine movement with conspiracy theories about a Western plot to sterilize Muslims. “This rumor was not homegrown. It came from abroad and found local weapons to energize it,” Funsho says. “It led to vaccination becoming a political thing rather than a means to protect our children against paralysis.”

The situation deteriorated. Several states in northern Nigeria canceled all immunization activities until officials could show proof that the vaccine was safe, and the country went 14 months without a National Immunization Day. The Nigerian government, strongly committed to polio eradication, set up a committee that included key Muslim leaders to verify the vaccine’s safety. They toured vaccine manufacturing sites and produced a report that satisfied all except political and religious leaders in Kano state, the epicenter of the rumors. Officials there sent their own committee of health experts and religious scholars to Indonesia, where they reconfirmed the safety of a vaccine manufactured in a Muslim country.

Meanwhile, Rotary members continued to engage in advocacy and in educating the public. Ado Bayero, the late emir of Kano, was a supporter of the Rotary Club of Kano, and Funsho was his personal physician. One of the country’s most influential Muslim leaders, the emir “was a great friend of Rotary,” Funsho says. “He knew Rotary would not bring anything harmful.” The emir demonstrated his faith in the oral polio vaccine by personally immunizing his grandchildren in his palace. “We used that to a lot of our advantage in the media.”

In neighboring Niger, a country whose population is 99 percent Muslim, then-President Mamadou Tandja pushed back against the persistent rumors in a key speech that launched a 2004 immunization campaign. He gave the speech in Hausa, a language widely spoken in Niger as well as Nigeria, which made his message about the importance of vaccination all the more effective. “Tandja was very strong on the message he delivered,” says Kaba, the former Niger PolioPlus Committee chair. “He referred to the Quran. You don’t joke with the Quran.” A month later, Rotary presented Tandja with a Polio Eradication Champion Award.

Polio cases in Africa had been trending down until the early 2000s. But the rumors and missed immunizations led to the exportation of the virus from Nigeria to almost 20 countries. “As soon as we overcame that, the graph just went gradually down and down until we got to zero,” Funsho says.

Nearly 800,000 refugees live in Ethiopia, most of them from Eritrea, Somalia, and South Sudan. “Our borders are very porous. A lot of people come in and out from neighboring countries,” Yilma says. So the government coordinates cross-border vaccination campaigns with surrounding nations to ensure that the virus isn’t brought in over the border.

The country has some of the most rugged terrain in Africa — from mountainous highlands to vast desert plains that sit hundreds of feet below sea level. There are some places where health workers have to walk hours to reach a single family, and others that are so densely populated that ensuring that every child is vaccinated can be difficult. “Ethiopia didn’t face a situation like in Nigeria where people outright refused to be vaccinated,” Yilma says. “The problems in Ethiopia are that it’s a large population that is mobile and that the topography of Ethiopia makes them very difficult to reach.”

Throughout the African region, millions of health workers have traveled by foot, boat, bicycle, and bus during the decades-long eradication campaign. Grants from The Rotary Foundation have supported them along the way. In 2000, Africa’s first synchronized multicountry

Six elements of sustainability must be addressed in the design of a global grant project: 

• Start with the community
• Encourage local ownership
• Provide training
• Buy local
• Find local funding
• Measure your success

Learn about 20 noteworthy grants

Read tips for strong projects

Anyone who knows Rotarians sees how we give of our time and resources. They know their money is in good hands.

Eric Kimani, regional Rotary Foundation coordinator

Financial structure

The Rotary Foundation is organized as a public charity operated exclusively for charitable purposes and governed by a Board of Trustees. The operations of Rotary International, a member organization, are overseen by its Board of Directors.

The headquarters of Rotary International and The Rotary Foundation are in Evanston, Illinois, USA. We have associate foundations in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

Read highlights from the past year in our annual report

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Your generous contributions to The Rotary Foundation are essential to securing and growing Rotary programs throughout the world.

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Phase 1b criteria

1. High risk medical conditions are limited to the following based on risk-factors for severe COVID-19–associated illness:

• cancer
• chronic kidney disease
• chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
• Down Syndrome
• heart conditions, such as heart failure, coronary artery disease, or cardiomyopathies
• immunocompromised state (weakened immune system) from solid organ transplant
• obesity or severe obesity (body mass index [BMI] greater than 30 kg/m²) (see calculator)
• sickle cell disease
• smoking
• type 1 or type 2 diabetes mellitus
• pregnancy

2. Frontline essential workers are defined as people who are working in sectors essential to the functioning of society and are at substantially higher risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 because their work-related duties must be performed on-site and involve being in close proximity (<6 feet) to the public or to coworkers. For further criteria, see the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) advisory list (PDF). Including, but not limited to:

• Law enforcement, public safety, and other first responders
• Education (including people not covered in Phase 1b Tier 2)
• Food and Agriculture (Food manufacturers, distributors, restaurant workers, seafood workers, grocery store workers)
• Energy (electricity, petroleum, Natural Gas, utility and power workers)
• Water and Wastewater
• Transportation and Logistics (Public transit workers, aviation workers, taxi drivers, port workers, bus drivers, U.S. Postal Service workers and mail carriers, warehouse operators)
• Public Works and Infrastructure Support Service
• Critical Manufacturing
• Communications and Information Technology
• Other Community-or Government-Based Operations and Essential Functions
• Critical Manufacturing
• Hazardous Materials
• Financial Services
• Chemical
• Defense Industrial Base
• Commercial Facilities
• Residential/Shelter Facilities, Housing And Real Estate, and Related Services
• Hygiene Products and Services

3. Working in congregate settings includes people working in the judicial system whose job responsibilities require them to interact with individuals residing in congregate settings.

Phase 1a criteria

1. Long Term Care facilities included Skilled Nursing Facilities, Assisted Living Homes, and Dept of Corrections infirmaries providing care that is similar to an assisted living facility.

^ Back to Who is Eligible Now

2. Particularly those performing the highest risk procedures or who spend extended periods of time bedside and whose absence from work would compromise the ability of the hospital to continue functioning. Personnel in this category include, but are not limited to:

• ICU and COVID unit nurses, LPNs, CNAs and patient care technicians

• ICU and COVID unit physicians

• Inpatient physicians caring for COVID patients, including hospitalists

• Respiratory therapists

• Emergency department personnel

• Personnel working in operating and other procedural rooms in which aerosol generating procedures are conducted.

• Other hospital staff working in COVID units such as PT/OT/ST therapists, phlebotomists, etc.

• Environmental services personnel

• Facility security personnel

3. Particularly those personnel whose absence from work would compromise the ability of these critical medical services to continue. This Tier 

< Continued >

February 10 Update–
 

Looking for a Covid-19 vaccine? Although SPH has none available at this time, we hope to learn from the State soon what our next allocation will be, and the expected date of arrival. We are obligated to offer the vaccines to anyone in the eligible groups (see below), and cannot prioritize within that for the large-scale vaccine events. As vaccines become more available we do plan to offer them by appointment on a regular basis, in addition to the mass events, but have no idea at this time when that might be. Our goal is to vaccinate the most number of people in the quickest and safest amount of time.

The wait list for the Feb. 12 and 13 clinic is full. There are no additional call lists at this time for Covid-19 vaccines from South Peninsula Hospital. Please check back to this page regularly for updates as we receive them. And for those not connected online, there is an informational recording at 435-3188 that will be updated as more information becomes available.

• New Eligibility Group!
  Phase 1b, Tier 2 – This group includes:
  • People 50 years and above with a high-risk medical condition*
  • People 50 years and above working as a frontline essential worker*
  • Pre K–12 and child care education staff*
  • People living or working in congregate settings*
  • Persons aged 65 years and older (Phase 1b)
  • All of Phase 1a*
    Please note: The State of Alaska DHSS has clarified “health care setting” for vaccine eligibility as follows:
    Workers in health care settings can include someone who stays home to care for an elderly family member. Eligible individuals provide daily support related to an individual’s activities of daily living (i.e., bathing, dressing, eating) as well as instrumental activities of daily living (i.e., shopping, laundry, light housework). These may be paid, unpaid, or contracted positions. This may also include teachers or other school staff that provide health care activities for students including tube feedings, suctioning, and other hands-on healthcare.
• If you already got your first dose at the January 15/16 event, you already have your 2^nd dose appointment for Feb 12/13. If you have questions about your appointment on Feb. 12 or 13, click here or call 235-0235.
• Vaccines are not available at Homer Medical Center or South Peninsula Family Care Clinic at this time.

Check back here for regular updates.

See the map of vaccine locations statewide

We don’t need to trade a healthy environment for a thriving economy.

by Jonathan Foley

To some people, the term “environmentalist” seems to be a dirty word. In their minds, it denotes starry-eyed zealots who chain themselves to trees.

Or perhaps they envision out-of-touch elites who care more about spotted owls and humpback whales than people, self-centered activists who want to tell others how to live their lives, run their towns, and operate their businesses.

But that’s a wildly out-of-date assumption. Today, environmentalism has evolved into a much more helpful and engaging field. It’s a diverse community that looks to improve the lives of everyday people, as well as safeguard the natural world and our collective future. In addition, over the past couple of decades, rather than merely harping on the environmental problems facing the world, environmentalists have shifted more of their attention toward practical solutions. And they have done that by keeping the focus on people and their collective well-being.

While it’s important to recognize the challenges facing the environment — and there are many — it is even more important to shine a light on the potential solutions to those challenges, especially those solutions that can benefit society by creating jobs, improving health, and making people more prosperous and resilient. That’s where the future of environmentalism lies. For example, addressing climate change will spur deep investments in energy efficiency, renewable energy, improved transportation systems, smarter buildings, better materials, a healthier food system, and more sustainable forms of agriculture. All of these have the potential to create new jobs, foster new economic opportunities, and generate huge savings and new sources of income.

In the future, as we address our environmental challenges, we can build smarter, more efficient ways of doing everything. We can build more efficient homes that save energy and money for everyone. We can design smarter and more efficient vehicles that emit no pollution; save fuel and money; and are safer, cheaper to run, and more fun to drive. We can reduce food waste, promote healthier diets, and help farmers become more sustainable and more profitable, even as we help to repair our broken food system and curtail its negative impact on the environment.

The idea that we need to trade a healthy environment for a thriving economy is simply wrong. In the future, we can improve the environment and the economy through bold new thinking, innovation, and collaboration. It’s essential that we do that. As Gaylord Nelson, the former senator and governor of Wisconsin who founded Earth Day in 1970, famously said, “The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.”

Nelson was absolutely right. At the most fundamental level, our economic systems are built on the environment. Clean water, breathable air, a stable climate, abundant resources, places free from toxins: These are all requirements for a healthy economy. A world where water and air are polluted, or where storms, fires, and heat waves are frequent, or where basic natural resources — water, food, fiber, and fuel — are running out, is a world headed to economic ruin.

Improving the environment is crucial not only to the well-being of the planet but to the health of the billions of people who inhabit it — another shift, over the past few decades, in the focus of environmentalists. Let’s step away from our focus on solutions for a moment and look at some examples of the tremendous challenges we face as we move into the 2020s. Look at the impact of the recent fires in California and Australia on the health of tens of millions of people, forcing entire families to take shelter inside for weeks as a precaution against dangerous air pollution levels. Or consider the devastating toll that toxic drinking water can take on all the residents of a single town, as we saw — and continue to see — in Flint, Michigan. And look at the effect of severe and prolonged heat waves on our most vulnerable neighbors, particularly the elderly and those with underlying health conditions.

A degraded environment doesn’t just degrade our health; it also undercuts our security. In a world where extreme weather events and natural disasters are more common and more lethal, growing environmental pressures, including those resulting from climate change, may force large numbers of people into extreme poverty or send them fleeing from their homes into other countries as environmental refugees. Such shocks could overwhelm entire nations and cause severe instability in numerous parts of the world.

In short, without a healthy environment, and without a long-term commitment to maintaining that healthy environment, we cannot have a healthy and thriving society. But let’s take a positive approach to this: If we are smart about it, addressing the most critical environmental issues facing us today is an opportunity for us to reinvigorate our economy and our communities. As Rotarians embark on a bold program of new environmental initiatives, it is crucial to keep this in mind. Solving environmental problems is a welcome chance to fix some of our out-of-date and broken systems and replace them with ones that are safer and fairer. In the process, we can create a world that is healthier and more prosperous for us and our children. Can there be any better future than that?

Jonathan Foley is the executive director of Project Drawdown, a leading resource for climate solutions. A climate and environmental scientist, educator, writer, and speaker, he was the 2014 recipient of the prestigious Heinz Award for the Environment.

Read more perspectives about where Rotary may be headed — and what to expect when we get there.

MORE STORIES

• This story originally appeared in the January 2021 issue of Rotary magazine.

The water systems humans have created and rely on will look inadequate in the face of climate change

by Charles Fishman

I was in Charleston, South Carolina, to talk about water, and a university faculty member there explained how dramatically life has changed in the past few years in that beautiful waterfront city.

As recently as the early 2000s, she said, Charleston had experienced a few flooding events a year — eight or 10. Not even one a month.

But in the past few years, Charleston has annually had 40 to 50 intrusive flood events. The flooding is so common and so disruptive, the woman explained, that she and her husband had to plan their lives around it. Their kids went to day care in one part of the city; they worked in another part. When the low-lying streets and intersections filled with seawater — as happens on average three times a month now — they were cut off from their children.

“We have to watch the weather, we have to watch the tides, we have to talk to the people at the day care,” she said. “Because we could easily end up at the end of the day with no way to get the kids.” There have been occasions when they didn’t take the children to day care, because flooding was predicted during the day.

You don’t have to imagine the future of water: It’s here. It’s happening right now, all around us.

That’s the most obvious lesson from the flooding in Charleston, a single problem in a single U.S. city: The flooding is not devastating, but it is sudden, it’s new, it’s relentless, it’s hugely disruptive, and it’s not going away. When it comes to water, we aren’t ready for what’s happening to us right now. So we certainly aren’t ready for the future.

In the past decade, we have made dramatic progress in water. In the 10 years between 2005 and 2015 (the most recent year for which there is U.S. data), the typical American went from using 100 gallons of water per day at home to using 83 gallons. If we were still consuming water at the rate we did in 2005, we would be using 5 billion more gallons of water a day than we are.

We’ve also made dramatic progress across the past 50 years. The United States today uses less water every day, for all purposes, than it did in 1965. We have tripled the size of the U.S. economy in that half-century without using a single new gallon of water. Which is to say, every gallon of water we use today does three times the work it did in 1965.

Farmers today use a little less water than farmers did in 1965 — but they irrigate 45 percent more land and raise twice as much food.

That’s all good news. If climate change weren’t transforming everything about who gets water, and how much, it would be great news — the foundation of a new water ethic. As it is, the progress we’ve made in the United States and around the world will cushion the impact of climate change. But that impact is likely to be so dramatic, we may not notice.

We don’t often connect the dots when we talk about the impact of climate change, but it is almost all about water. Rain that doesn’t fall anymore where we expect it. Rain that falls in fewer events — fewer rainy days and fewer storms — but with much more intensity and volume. Snow that now falls as rain, stealing from a kind of “water savings account” that whole regions rely on, where winter snows pile up in mountain ranges, then melt gradually through the spring and summer to provide a steady flow of water.

Every day we’re seeing the dawn of a kind of brutal intensity to the climate, and to the weather, that feels all new. Fueled by one record-dry summer after another, megafires rage across the American West. Nourished by unusually warm ocean temperatures, slow-moving hurricanes in the Atlantic and supertyphoons in the Pacific explode with power and intensity just before coming ashore, where they release torrential, flooding rains.

We’re used to separating out our experience of water, especially in the developed world. There’s the water we use every day at home, in offices and factories, on farms. And then there’s the water out in the environment — the water that either comes, sometimes in destructive torrents, or doesn’t come, for months that add up to drought.

Climate change is going to erase that convenient distinction. The human water systems we’ve created, and that we all rely on, are going to look brittle and inadequate in the face of what’s coming.

The most important principle for adapting to the new world of water is this: Water does not respond to wishful thinking. Water problems don’t get better on their own. Just the opposite: The longer you wait to tackle a water problem of any kind, from a leak in the ceiling of your living room to a sea-level rise in your city, the harder, and the more expensive, that problem is to solve.

That’s not just true directly. Well-managed water undergirds the entire economy. But we don’t appreciate that very often. A city that floods once a week, a city that has to ration drinking water, a city that has to brace for destruction with every hurricane season or every fire season: Those are not places with stable, appealing economic futures.

We need to adapt to a new world. And we need to appreciate two more key ideas when it comes to water. First, we know how to solve every water problem that exists in the world — in engineering terms. We don’t need a Manhattan Project or a moon shot to tackle water. But the hardest part of most water problems is the people part. It’s getting people to see the water situation in a clear-eyed way — with realism, not optimism. And then getting people to change their behavior.

The second thing to appreciate is that all water problems are local — and that’s where they must be solved. The United States is a perfect example of a rich, smart country with a wild array of water problems. Not only is there no active national strategy for tackling them; in most cases there isn’t even national guidance.

But that can be liberating for cities, for regions, for states. The smartest communities — in the United States and around the world — aren’t waiting to tackle water and climate change. They aren’t waiting for the alarm from Washington, or the guidance, or even the financing.

Especially in the developed world, we’ve had a century-long, highly engineered golden age of water, in which we left the management of it to the experts, and most of us never had to give water a thought. It was invisible in our daily life. We need to see the new age of water turbulence with realism, with urgency, and with a sense that water is something all of us are going to have to grapple with.

The golden age is over. Water isn’t going to be invisible anymore. The future of water is now.

Charles Fishman is a frequent contributor to Rotary. His most recent book is One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon. He is also the author of the bestselling The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water.

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• This story originally appeared in the January 2021 issue of Rotary magazine.