April, 2006 My Fellow Rotarians - Rotary's Global History Fellowship

District 6440 Histories 2005
1994 - Formed Interact Club at Dundee-Crown High School. Took medical supplies to Yugoslavia.
Contributed $2,000 for Natasha Ageev (a Russian) to study at Judson College. Sent five students to
RYLA. Participated in the Jane Shover Marathon, Fox River Clean-Up, and the Firemen’s Festival.
Granted $26,500 in scholarships to graduating seniors. Extensive work in RI. “Health to the Children
International”.
1995 - 2006 - Our big project is our scholarships for kids coming out of high school. In the last 10 years,
we’ve given away over $300,000 worth of scholarship. This year we’ll probably give $30,000 again in
scholarships. We are able to do that through our own fundraising and some corporate donations. It’s
about two-thirds funded through our club and about a one-third through corporate donations, usually
from a business affiliated with one of our Rotarians.
We fundraise through three major events. Our biggest fundraiser is our Citrus Fruit Sale, where we get a
truck-full of grapefruit and oranges around each December and sell locally. Gross sales for this
fundraiser average about $30,000, and we profit about $21,000. We’ve averaged about $15,000 a year
over the last ten years. So we’ve gotten better and we’ve also partnered with other Rotary clubs.
We also have Bowling Fundraiser, and we make approximately $5,000 to $10,000. Our third fundraiser
is our reverse raffle, where we sell about $10,000 worth of tickets, have a big dinner and split the funds
with the winner. Some local philanthropy includes an annual Shadow Day, where we have high school
youths spend half a day with rotary members, and then take them to our Rotary meeting. We also have a
Halloween Party for disabled kids, where we partner with the Holiday Inn and decorate two floors for
the children to enjoy at no cost to the Rotarians. This year we had about 500 children partake. Then we
also do a Christmas party for Boy and Girls club for needy kids who might not have Christmas, so we
have Santa give them gifts. We usually have a service project, one day we put up drive safely signs
around schools, we helped plant flower around parks, we bought rotary benches for parks and so on and
so forth. We also pretty much every year sponsor a foreign exchange student inbound and outbound.
Youth Exchange:
1983 - Hosted first student, Juan Seba from Columbia, South America.
1985-86 - Jean Christophe Baxas from France.
1986-87 - Ammol Chandan from Bombay, India. Summer short exchange - one to France.
1988 - Summer short exchange - one from Finland and Norway.
1989 - Hilary Kitto from Zimbabwe. Summer exchange - two from Belgium, one from West Germany.
1990- Yvette Eddington from Perth, Australia. Short exchange to Germany and one from Germany.
1991 - Sponsored Outgoing exchange student to South Africa. Sponsored short term exchange student
from Germany and one to France.
1992 - Sponsored Erin English to Zimbabwe; hosted Helene Andrade from France.
1993 - Sponsored Cammie Schultz to Finland; hosted Carla Kaiser from Brazil. Sent Holly Miller as
short term to France.
1994 - Sponsored Amanda Roudebush to Denmark. Hosted three short term from Belgian and three
short term from Germany. Sponsored two short terms to Germany
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Rotary Club of Elgin Chartered May 1, 1922
Awards Day – For more than half a century, Elgin has hosted honor students from Burlington Central
HS, Elgin HS, Elgin Academy, Fox Valley Lutheran Academy, Larkin HS, St. Edwards HS, and
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