
More and more people are donating to causes and Rotarians can do the same.
At the height of the 2020 Australian bushfires comedian Celeste Barber set up a crowd funding appeal for $30,000 to supply fire equipment for NSW Rural Fire Services (NSWRFS). She was blown away by the response and so was everybody else with more than $51 million being donated.
What a great outcome - or so it seemed. It turned out much of the money was donated with the expectation that it would go to a range of charitable purposes to support bushfire victims and the matter ended up in the NSW Supreme Court, which ruled that indeed the money could only be given to the NSWRFS.
With The Rotary Foundation, donors can be assured that their gift is going where they want it to go. Many Rotarians are happy for their donations to go to the Annual Fund knowing that it will be used to support Rotary’s causes – our seven Areas of Focus.
A growing number of Rotarians also want to support particular projects and are accordingly directing their donations more specifically. A good example is the signature project launched in the Centenary Year of Rotary in Australia and New Zealand. Rotary Give Every Child a Future has an ambitious goal to raise US $3.9 million to vaccinate 100,000 children in 9 Pacific Island Countries. These countries fall through a funding gap and would not otherwise be able to afford pneumococcal, rotavirus and human papillomavirus vaccines.