 The Rotary Club of Portland was established in 1915. Their goal is to encourage and foster the ideal of service to promote peace and understanding throughout the world. Leslie McVane talked with Jack Carr, the president of the Portland Rotary, about the many ways they contribute to our community. Jack, Rotary Club of Portland has been around for quite a number of years, and I think a lot of people don't really understand what it's all about. Can you enlighten us? That's actually exactly why I'm here. You ask the average person on the street what a Rotarian is, and they'll probably describe a retired old guy with a tie on, like me. But in reality, it's a wide range of people that meet almost all the demographic nuances across the community. We've been around for a long time. The Rotary Club is probably one of the largest organizations in the world that does services. We have 34,000 clubs across the country. We're in more countries, frankly, than the United Nations. We have more power in terms of influence on those countries than many government leaders as well as the United Nations. We have over 1.2 million people, yet nobody knows who we are. They mistake us with people that wear funny hats and wear dress-up and clothes, different clothes. But Rotarians, if you go to a local meeting, they look just like the people walking on Congress Street. They wear short sleeves. They don't have ties. Sometimes they do, but they're a cross of the entire demographics of the city. And what primarily is your function? What do you do as a club here in Portland, in the Portland area? We are a service organization. What a service organization means is that we're looking for things that need to be done in the community that would help not only the local community but internationally sometimes. In the local community, we provide a lot of donations in terms of both money but also volunteers. Volunteers is extremely important for Rotarians to get out in the streets, meet people, and get involved with the community. This year, as president, my theme was youth and endangered youth in the community. And so we focused on youth at risk. So we've spent a lot of time mentoring at the Long Creek Institution. We do a lot of mentoring at the schools. I'm involved very heavily with the Portland High School in mentoring and various types of programs. And I have a mentee that I meet with every week and help him with his homework and do whatever he wants. I've been doing that for years, but many other Rotarians are doing the same thing. And it's so crucial to a healthy community to have well-mentored kids, no matter where they are backgrounded. Especially with the change of demographics. I mean, three years ago, I was working with a young kid that survived the genocide in Congo and got him a full scholarship to Colby. And now I'm working with a young man in Portland High School from Afghanistan who survived all that. And he's back here with his family. So there's different kinds of people that need help out there. So we do that. Scholarships are important. Within the last month, we've given scholarships to every major high school in the area. We've given money also to the PATHS program for, we call it a tool ship, where we could actually give money that they can buy tools to go out in the world and work, go to vocational schools or on a job and get a job. So education for our youth is very important, keeping kids at risk. But we also support the community in different ways. When the canine dog died recently, the Portland Police Department, just last month, we bought a new dog for them. It's called Roto, by the way. Roto. I like that. So you can say hi to Roto when you see him walking down the street. So we do a lot of things. We have a lot of people who are in the community. There are recent days care program they opened up. We funded that. Now do you search for these people or organizations in need? Or do people come to you and say, look, I've just found out about this group and they're struggling. Can Rotary help them? Well, absolutely. It comes in different ways. Sometimes we'll know it because we have some 120, 130 some odd Rotarians and they're involved in the community and they hear things. Sometimes we have a theme, like I mentioned, youth at risk and we go out and look for it. We call the local schools, the guidance offices and find out what they need. Rather than telling them what we're going to do for them, ask them what they need. We get surprising answers. We talk to the local medical people when Haiti had their problems and Conte Santé needed support after the earthquake. We loaded up containers of medical goods and shipped it out. It was very strange. We're going to have to wrap it in a minute but I know you do work internationally through Rotary eradicating polio, trying to. Internationally, some of our biggest programs are involved with polio. We are the major leader of the world eradicating polo. We're this close. We'll probably have it done in a very short period of time. We'll get you back and maybe talk more about that because there's too much to talk about in this short segment. We'll talk more about it. The best way to do it is check out our website. Just go to PortlandRotary.com or you can email us at PortlandRotary at main.err.com We'll be happy to talk to you. We want everybody that can come to one of our meetings to come. They're great speakers. We're at the Holiday Inn by the Bay. It's a nice place to come. Thank you, Jack. Appreciate it very much. Thank you.