It’s hard to imagine Madison without its many nonprofit organizations, and perhaps no nonprofit has contributed more to the community than the Rotary Club of Madison, which will observe its 100th birthday this spring.
The service organization, which is part of Rotary International, was founded on June 2, 1913. As it prepares to celebrate its 100th anniversary, the names of its founders – McKenna, Law, and Jackson, et al. – have been replaced with names like Ramey and Waldbillig and Woit, but its driving motivation of “Service Above Self” carries on.
On June 8, the club will celebrate its centennial with the Greater Madison community during its inaugural SummerPalooza at the Madison Children’s Museum. The event will feature live entertainment, free museum admission, kid-friendly activities, and a parade around the Capitol Square.
“This has been a hidden craving for some time, and it’s part of our centennial gift to Madison,” said Linda Baldwin, associate publisher of the Isthmus and co-chair of the Centennial Celebration Committee. “We’re inviting the entire community.”
Legacy of Service
The club will be celebrating both its legacy and its future. The global Rotary organization, founded in Chicago in 1905, has 1.2 million business and professional leaders who belong to more than 34,000 Rotary Clubs, with at least one club in most nations around the world. Like Madison Rotarians, they meet weekly for fellowship and programs on topics of local and global importance, but do they also form groups for motorcycle fellowship or Scotch (whisky) fellowship?
Madison Rotarians do, but such camaraderie serves the purpose of collaborative service. One hundred years ago, the club’s primary rationale was business networking, but it wasn’t long before that was taken over by a commitment to community service. At some point, noted 2012-13 Club President Wesley Sparkman, Rotary International realized the importance of developing a service club.
“I think that still stands out today,” Sparkman said. “We have a lot of giving hearts here among members of the club, and that’s really an important factor. We have a special day where we highlight an individual in the community and give an award to someone who exemplifies service above self. That has been a mainstay of the club.”
Through an annual fund drive, club members contribute to the Madison Rotary Foundation, which has more than $8 million in assets. Each year, the “checkbook club,” as some Rotarians call it, taps into its foundation to donate more than $500,000 in college scholarships, youth awards, and community grants. The grants support local and international projects that meet basic needs of literacy, water quality, health, and housing.
Beneficiaries include local nonprofits and deserving, economically disadvantaged high school students who receive college scholarships. Young people are a primary focus of the Rotarians’ philanthropy. Hundreds of high school students attend the Rotary’s annual Ethics Symposium at Monona Terrace, and a few are selected to travel abroad and live with a host family as part of the Rotary Youth Exchange.
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Internationally, Rotary is known for providing $60 million annually for humanitarian, educational, and cultural exchange programs. One of these programs is PolioPlus, a polio eradication program carried out with national and international health organizations. With the help of PolioPlus grants, more than 500 million children in developing nations have been immunized against polio.
Meanwhile, the Rotary Club of Madison hasn’t been shy about its international engagement, as members have supported efforts like CECADE, an educational facility near Cusco, Peru; an orphanage in the Republic of Malawi, in southeast Africa, that helps children whose parents have died of AIDS; Dr. Linnea Smith’s Amazon Medical Clinic in the Amazon Rain Forest; and Dr. Suresh Chandra’s Combat Blindness project in India.
Diversity Dividends
With nearly 500 members who represent a cross section of business and professional leaders, the Rotary Club of Madison is the seventh largest Rotary Club in the world. The presence of state government and the University of Wisconsin have helped Madison achieve this status, but club members also cite more inclusive membership policies – women were finally allowed to join Rotary Clubs in the late 1980s – for that achievement.
Due to lobbying from local clubs and pressure from a lawsuit, the momentum for admitting women had been building long before the 1987 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that women must be admitted to Rotary Clubs. Truth be told, men in the Rotary Club of Madison, which two years earlier had joined AWARE (Accept Women As Rotary Equals) to change Rotary International’s exclusive policy, knew the club needed women members. Pat Jenkins and Angela Bartell were welcomed as the first women members, and after a diversity-inspired growth spurt that doubled membership, the club has maintained membership at about 500 for the past several years.
Incoming President Renee Moe, the first nonwhite woman president, will succeed Sparkman, the second African American president. Moe can’t imagine that an all-male Rotary Club could thrive in Madison in the year 2013, especially in “the robust manner in which we operate today.”
“There is a reason our board selected a young black man [Sparkman] to serve as president in our centennial year and a young Asian woman to serve in our 101st year – obviously, the first in our next 100,” Moe stated. “There isn’t a big statement here on race, but a more subtle statement that demonstrates Downtown Rotary’s commitment to serving our community in the most relevant, effective way into the next 100 years.”
Due to attrition, the club must replace members each year. Membership is by invitation, and executive and community leadership, motivated by service, is the common denominator of each member. According to Moe, membership usually comes about when a current member knows someone who would be a great prospect, or a prospect reaches out to a Rotarian. The prospective member attends the club’s weekly Wednesday luncheon to “get the vibe,” Moe said, and if interested, he or she may also be invited to a fellowship group or Rotary event. (Member criteria and the membership application form can be found on the RCM website.)
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The vibe that Moe alluded to is evident at the Wednesday noon luncheon, a midweek reprieve – members refer to it as adult recess – that’s both entertaining and informative about local, national, and international needs and issues. Over the years, the RCM has hosted political candidates and served as a forum to present both sides of controversial issues. Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, dating back to his days as a firebrand alderman, has been the most frequent luncheon speaker, but certainly not the only distinguished one. On occasion, the weekly program has been broadcast on city cable television.
The tenor of the program is enhanced by music and singing, and members don’t have to sound like classic crooners in order to take part. They must, however, have a strong desire to make a difference. The Wednesday luncheons, along with the club’s strategic planning, serve to maintain Rotary’s relevance, according to Executive Director Pat Jenkins. “We want our members to feel that it’s worth their time to come,” Jenkins explained. “Members feel it’s a worthwhile place to be on Wednesday at noon for that fellowship and that networking.”
History Lesson
The club, which is also hosting the 2013 Rotary District 6250 Conference, is making a video of its history and updating its own book (which currently captures the first 75 years of Rotary history) to chronicle the many changes of the past 25 years. Thanks to the efforts of club members like Stu Levitan, Carol Toussaint, Carol Koby, and Rich Leffler, today’s members have learned a great deal about their club’s role in shaping Madison physically, demographically, and socially.
“We want our own members, many of whom have joined in only the past 10 years, to get a sense of the grounding of this club in the community,” Toussaint said. “We’ll emphasize the theme of how Rotary helped shape this community and how the community shaped the Rotary.”
SummerPalooza
Featuring live entertainment, free Madison Children’s Museum admission, Wisconsin Historical Museum and Wisconsin Veterans Museum exploration, children’s activities, and a parade around the Capitol Square (kids’ bike decorating with help from Dream Bikes).
When: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday, June 8
Where: Madison Children’s Museum, Rotary Centennial Plaza
Sponsors: Rotary Club of Madison, Madison Children’s Museum, BMO Harris Bank, American Family Children’s Hospital, and Madison Gas & Electric.
Scholarly Investments
There is nothing as transformational in the life of an economically disadvantaged kid as educational opportunity and the means to take advantage of it. With that in mind, the Rotary Club of Madison’s scholarship program was launched from an estate gift in 1973, and the students it helps would not otherwise be able to afford college. The Rotary awards roughly $230,000 in new scholarships to about 20 college-bound students each year, supporting roughly 80 students at any one time.
On occasion, the students are not necessarily college-bound when they receive a scholarship. That was the case with Madison Edgewood High School graduate Patrick Thomas Roy, who is now completing his sophomore year at UW-Milwaukee.
Roy grew up in what he called a fractured home, but he graduated from Edgewood in 2011 with a 3.5 grade point average. In high school, he lived with a friend’s family, played soccer his senior year, and played the role of Link Larkin in the school’s production of Hairspray. He wishes his life would have unfolded with less drama, because his plans to enlist in the Marine Corps were nixed when he broke his hip playing soccer.
He was close to his guidance counselor, Laurie Mullen, who died of cancer during his freshman year in college, but not before recommending that Roy and four other Edgewood students apply for a Rotary scholarship. Suffice to say, after all that transpired in his life, winning a four-year, $15,000 scholarship completely changed the way Roy viewed his life prospects. He is enrolled in the Lubar School of Business at UW-Milwaukee, majoring in marketing and leaning toward a double major in finance, and he’s on track to graduate in 2015.
Not bad for a young man who admits he was floundering and unsure what to do before he won the scholarship. “I definitely thought there were limitations on my life, but with the scholarship and especially the mentor that comes along with it, that opens your eyes to the possibilities,” said a grateful Roy.
His Rotary mentor is Moses Altsech, associate professor of marketing and chairman of the marketing department at Edgewood College. He’s there for Roy whenever he needs advice and, after hiring Roy to do some work for his consulting practice, Altsech is impressed with his creativity and attention to detail. “He is absolutely spectacular,” Altsech gushed. “He had a very difficult childhood, a very difficult home situation, but he has triumphed academically.”
Altsech expects Roy to pay it back someday as a mentor himself. That would please Ellie Schatz, who started the Rotary mentoring program 10 years ago while serving on a scholarship selection committee. One scholar hailed from Afghanistan, and Schatz worried that she might not make it through four years of college because of her limited comprehension of English. The scholar needed a mentor, and one decade later, approximately 70 Rotary Club members mentor one to four students at a time.
Mentors are there in the event students encounter difficulties, as many do. “We tell the students and the mentors each year that the goal is more than going to college,” noted Schatz. “It is to graduate.”
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