“Positively changing lives through service…across the street and across the world.”
By Gail Pelto and Lori Smith, Rotary Members
The Rotary Club of Destin is celebrating its 40th birthday! And through the years, the Destin club has been instrumental in helping people and organizations in our community, nationally and abroad.
Rotary is a service club which believes in “Service Above Self.” Rotary International has been around since 1905 and today, the club has more than 1.2 million members throughout the world. The Rotary Club of Destin was established in 1979 with more than 50 active members representing a diverse group of professional men and women united locally and worldwide.
Each year, Rotary members invest more than $200 million and 16 million volunteer hours to promote peace, fight disease and hunger, provide clean water, save mothers and children, support education, encourage high ethical standards in all vocations, enhance health, stability and prosperity and help grow local economies. The Destin chapter is comprised of some of the most influential entrepreneurs and business leaders in our community who want to give back. Serving in the club and community enables us to work alongside other members who hail from a range of professional backgrounds, leveraging our members’ expertise to improve lives in Destin, surrounding communities and even throughout the world!
For 2018-2019, we logged thousands of volunteer hours, which included Smoke on the Coast, United Way Day of Caring, Eggs on the Beach, Harvest House, our Boston Butt fundraisers where we cooked and sold 150 Boston Butts to raise money for our charities, Food for Thought, Mattie Kelly Arts Foundation programs, and helped fund a STEM Educational Program for the Boys & Girls Club of the Emerald Coast. Hurricane Michael Relief efforts included “Operation BBQ” meals, delivering turkeys for Thanksgiving, $10,000 in donations for Operation Blessings to purchase and donate supplies, performing tree/debris removal and roof tarping, and cooking/donating 190 Boston Butts which supplied approximately 5,000 meals to hurricane victims. We also partnered with the Interact Club at Destin’s Fall Festival, volunteered with Crop Drop Destin, teamed up with the Sonder Project where we received a $7,500 Hurricane Relief Grant from the District 6940 Foundation to help rebuild a house for a single mother and her three children in Panama City, hosted the annual Cajun Crawfish Bash fundraiser at Seascape Resort which raised over $16,000, and teamed up with the Area 3 clubs and the Choctawhatchee Basin Alliance to help build oyster reefs along the shores at Lincoln Park.
In total, we helped raise over $65,000, conducted 2,317.5 volunteer hours and moved and placed over ten tons of rocks! And that was just this past year!
In addition to our $10,000 per year university scholarships (two, 4-year scholarships), we have an endowed scholarship at NWFSC which provides $4,500 per year for students to attend. To date, that endowment has provided over $45,000 in local scholarships. We also sponsor the Interact Club at Destin Middle School.
Happy Birthday Destin Rotary—impacting our community and the world!
Polio Eradication is a major goal: When Rotary and its partners launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative more than three decades ago, polio paralyzed 1,000 children every day. Through great progress, Polio cases have dropped by 99.9 percent, from 350,000 cases in 1988 in 125 countries to 33 cases of wild poliovirus in 2018 in just two countries: Afghanistan and Pakistan. Rotary has contributed more than $1.7 billion and countless volunteer hours to immunize more than 2.5 billion children in 122 countries. When you’re invited to speak at Destin Rotary weekly breakfast, your speaker gift is bestowed in the form of immunizations for three people—that’s 12 per month!
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