About

About Us / Meeting Info

The Thorndale-Downingtown Rotary Club was founded in 1995 by Jay Edge to service the Thorndale, Downingtown, and Coatesville Communities.  Guided by the Rotary District 7450 leadership and Rotary International we aim to help the local and international community in many ways.  We provide food for needy families during the holidays, we distribute dictionaries to third graders, we support international projects in Africa, and more!

Check out our calendar to see where you can find us next.

About Rotary International

Rotary is an organization of business and professional leaders united worldwide who provide humanitarian service, encourage high ethical standards in all vocations, and help build goodwill and peace in the world. In over 200 countries worldwide, approximately 1.4 million Rotarians belong to more than 46,000 Rotary clubs. Every club is autonomous, with its members setting the goals for their club.

Rotary club membership represents a cross-section of the community’s business and professional men and women. The world’s Rotary clubs usually meet weekly and are nonpolitical, nonreligious, and open to all cultures, races, and creeds. The main objective of Rotary is service — in the community, in the workplace, and throughout the world. Rotarians develop community service projects that address many of today’s most critical issues, such as children at risk, poverty and hunger, the environment, illiteracy, and violence. They also support programs for youth, educational opportunities and international exchanges for students, teachers, and other professionals, and vocational and career development. The Rotary motto is Service Above Self.

Rotary members believe that we have a shared responsibility to take action on our world’s most persistent issues.

• Promote peace
• Fight disease
• Provide clean water, sanitation, and hygiene
• Save mothers and children
• Support education
• Grow local economies
• Protect the environment

Rotary History

Rotary was born on February 23, 1905 by Paul P. Harris, an attorney who wished to recapture in a professional club the same friendly spirit he had felt in the small towns of his youth. The Rotary Club of Chicago, Illinois became the first service club in the world. The name “Rotary” derived from the early practice of rotating meetings among members’ offices. Rotary’s popularity spread throughout the United States in the decade that followed; clubs were chartered from San Francisco to New York. By 1921, Rotary clubs had been formed on six continents, and the organization adopted the name Rotary International a year later.

As Rotary grew, its mission expanded beyond serving the professional and social interests of club members. Rotarians began pooling their resources and contributing their talents to help serve communities in need. The organization’s dedication to this ideal is best expressed in its principal motto: Service Above Self. Rotary also later embraced a code of ethics, called The 4-Way Test, that has been translated into hundreds of languages.

An endowment fund, set up by Rotarians in 1917 “for doing good in the world,” became a not-for-profit corporation known as The Rotary Foundation in 1928. Upon the death of Paul Harris in 1947, an outpouring of Rotarian donations made in his honor, totaling US$2 million, launched the Foundation’s first program — graduate fellowships, now called Ambassadorial Scholarships. Today, contributions to The Rotary Foundation total more than US$80 million annually and support a wide range of humanitarian grants and educational programs that enable Rotarians to bring hope and promote international understanding throughout the world.

In 1985, Rotary made a historic commitment to immunize all of the world’s children against polio. Working in partnership with nongovernmental organizations and national governments thorough its PolioPlus program, Rotary is the largest private-sector contributor to the global polio eradication campaign. Rotarians have mobilized hundreds of thousands of PolioPlus volunteers and have immunized more than one billion children worldwide. By the 2005 target date for certification of a polio-free world, Rotary will have contributed half a billion dollars to the cause.

Rotary works to meet the changing needs of society, expanding its service effort to address such pressing issues as environmental degradation, illiteracy, world hunger, and children at risk. The organization admitted women for the first time (worldwide) in 1989 and claims more than 90,000 women in its ranks today. Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Rotary clubs were formed or re-established throughout Central and Eastern Europe.