Rotary International
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| Motto | Service Above Self |
|---|---|
| Formation | 1905 |
| Type | Service club |
| Headquarters | Evanston, Illinois, United States |
| Location |
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Membership
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1.22 million |
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Official language
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English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish |
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President
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John F. Germ (2016–17) |
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Key people
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Paul P. Harris (Founder) |
| Website | www |
Rotary International is an international 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 a secular organization open to all people regardless of race, color, creed, religion, gender, or political preference. There are 34,282 member clubs worldwide. 1.2 million individuals called Rotarians have joined these clubs.
Rotarians usually gather weekly for breakfast, lunch, or dinner to fulfill their first guiding principle to develop friendships as an opportunity for service. "It is the duty of all Rotarians," states their 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's primary motto is "Service Above Self"; its secondary motto is "One profits most who serves best."
The object of Rotary is to encourage and foster the ideal of service as a basis of worthy enterprise and, in particular, to encourage and foster:
This objective is set against the "Rotary 4-Way Test," used to see if a planned action is compatible with the Rotarian spirit. The test was developed by Rotarian and entrepreneur Herbert J. Taylor during the Great Depression as a set of guidelines for restoring faltering businesses and was adopted as the standard of ethics by Rotary in 1942. It is still seen as a standard for ethics in business management. The 4-Way Test considers the following questions in respect to thinking, saying or doing:
The first Rotary Club was formed when attorney Paul P. Harris called together a meeting of three business acquaintances in downtown Chicago, United States, at Harris's friend Gustave Loehr's office in the Unity Building on Dearborn Street on February 23, 1905. In addition to Harris and Loehr (a mining engineer and freemason), Silvester Schiele (a coal merchant), and Hiram E. Shorey (a tailor) were the other two who attended this first meeting. The members chose the name Rotary because initially they rotated subsequent weekly club meetings to each other's offices, although within a year, the Chicago club became so large it became necessary to adopt the now-common practice of a regular meeting place.
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Wikipedia