If you didn’t make it to our last Rotary Club of Forest Grove meeting, here’s what you missed…

Mobility Assistance: If you have mobility issues and would like assistance on the Pacific University campus to get to and from parking areas to our meeting location, please contact Amy Tracewell at 541-844-9467 or amy.tracewell@pacificu.edu at least one day before our scheduled meeting. She will work to make sure you can make it to the University Center. Please give one day’s notice for assistance.

Road Cleanup: Our next road cleanup service project is scheduled for this Saturday, Oct. 15, at 8:30 a.m. As usual, we will meet at the Oregon Department of Forestry offices, 801 Gales Creek Road. Many hands make for quick work, so make plans to join us for our semi-annual cleanups of Gales Creek Road between Thatcher Road and Forest Gale Drive and Thatcher Road between Gales Creek Road and David Hill Road.

All volunteers who take part in the cleanup will receive a general admission ticket to that afternoon’s Pacific University football game against Linfield.

For more information on the road cleanup or to confirm your participation, please contact Andrea Stewart or Paul Waterstreet.

Youth Exchange Updates – Host Families Still Needed: For the first time since 2020, our involvement in Youth Exchange is back! Our outbound exchange student, Blue Barbour-Weiss, will leave for Ecuador on Aug. 25. We wish her all of the best on her journey this year!

Our inbound exchange student, Juan, arrived from Ecuador on Aug. 20. For the first four months of his exchange, Juan will stay with the Barbour-Weiss family.

Host families are still needed that can host Juan during the winter (December through March) and the spring (March through June). If your family is interested, and for information on the requirements for hosting, please contact Youth Exchange Committee chair Melinda Fischer, dancorntopper@aol.com.

Additionally, our outbound student for the 2022-23 Rotary year has been selected! We will have information on our new outbound in a future issue.

Paul Harris Fellow Award: It was the goal of our late friend and Rotarian, Jerry Hoerber, to present a Paul Harris Fellow to each of his children and their spouses. At Wednesday’s meeting, we were able to make a special Paul Harris Fellow presentation to John Waglarz. John is the husband of Jerry’s daughter, Lynn, to make this dream a reality.

Accepting the Paul Harris Fellow on behalf of John was Lynn, who was present with her mother and Jerry’s wife, Margaret. We are grateful that we all were able to see this part of Jerry’s Rotary dreams become reality.

Steaks Still Available: We still have packs of steaks available for purchase left over from June’s Steak Feed. The packs of two raw choice steaks from Columbia Empire Farms are available for $20 per pack. If you are interested, please contact President Janet.

New Concours Chairs: We have new chairs in place for the Concours d’Elegance and it will be a team effort. Geoff & Alisa Johnston, Tom Raabe and Allen Stephens will all share in leading our team for the 2023 show. Thanks to the four of them for their longtime dedication to the show and for stepping up in leadership roles. The 2023 Concours d’Elegance will take place on Sunday, July 16. Mark your calendars now!

Wreath Sales Coming Soon: Be watching in the next week as we ramp up our annual wreath sales to benefit our Hope for the Holidays service program. We will have 20-inch wreaths available for $30 and 28-inch wreaths available for $40. The wreaths will be produced locally by Fischer Greens, owned and operated by Rotarian Melinda Fischer. Orders will be due Nov. 4 with wreaths delivered over Thanksgiving weekend.

New Member Orientations: Our club held the first of four scheduled new member orientation sessions on Wednesday, September 7, ahead of the club’s potluck social. The other orientations are scheduled for December 7, March 1 and June 1. Watch the Rototeller for times and locations. All Rotarians are welcome to take part. If you know of someone who you believe might be interested in joining us, this is a perfect opportunity to introduce them to our club.

Past Programs: Did you miss a meeting or want to go back and check out a program again? Most of our programs since May 2020 are archived on our club’s YouTube page. Visit https://bit.ly/fgrotaryprograms.

Service Opportunities For Club Members
Holiday In The Grove: The City Club of Forest Grove has approached our club asking if we might be willing to conduct an activity as part of the annual Holiday in the Grove celebration on Saturday, Dec. 3. If you are interested in leading this for the club, please let President Janet know.

There are also volunteer opportunities that will be available both during the daytime event and the Holiday Light Parade that evening. Information on volunteering is available from the City Club of Forest Grove.

Additionally, President Janet is gauging if there is interest in the club putting a float in this year’s Holiday Light Parade. If you are interested in spearheading this for the club, please let her know.

FGHS Community Food Pantry: Our club’s support for the Forest Grove High School Food Pantry continues.  Thanks to its partnership with the Oregon Food Bank, food donations are still welcome but are of less need at this time. Of need, however, are toiletries and hygiene products as well as household cleaning materials.

The Food Pantry is open on Mondays from 4-6 p.m. The pantry is now open in its new site in the building along Nichols Lane between the football field and the Basinski Center.

For information on the Food Pantry, please contact Brian Burke, bburke@fgsd.k12.or.us. If you wish to make a cash donation to the pantry, Click Here.

Additionally, Rotarian Gwen Hullinger has put together an Amazon wish list of items that can be purchased and donated. Click Here To View That List.

Around District 5100
Imagine Rotary Raffle To End Polio: In January, Rotary International President Jennifer Jones sent a package to each district governor-elect with some important Rotary information and a little Rotary swag. Also included was a signed print of an original painting by her brother, Darren Jones, an accomplished artist in the Chicago area. With the print came a request to use the print to help raise funds to help Rotary finish the fight to end polio.

District 5100 has decided to have a raffle for the print. Tickets are $21.55 each ($20 per ticket plus a $1.55 handling charge. We are limited by the state of Oregon to sell only 464 tickets. When all are sold, the district will be able to donate $9,280 towards Rotary’s flight to End Polio.

The raffle drawing will be held on Oct. 27 at 12:50 p.m., during the week of World Polio Day. Anyone who purchases a ticket will receive a Zoom link to witness the drawing. The district will continue to sell tickets until all are sold out or on Oct. 27 at 12:45 p.m., whichever comes first.

For details and to purchase your raffle tickets, visit https://myevent.com/imaginerotaryraffle.

District 5100 Newsletter: Click Here To View The Monthly District 5100 Newsletter

Around Rotary International
Re-emergence Of Polio Underscores The Need For Eradication (by Arnold R. Grahl): The detection of poliovirus, and even cases of polio, in places where it hasn’t been found for years has demonstrated once again that eradicating a human disease isn’t easy, especially in the final stages.

In recent months, an unvaccinated man in the United States was paralyzed. In the UK, poliovirus was detected in sewage. In Malawi, a child contracted polio. And Mozambique announced its first polio outbreak in 30 years.

But rather than be discouraged, Rotary and its partners in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) remain confident that they are making progress and can achieve their goal of a polio-free world. There are several reasons for this optimism.

A new oral vaccine, which has a substantially lower risk of causing vaccine-derived variant polio, is now available. This makes it less likely that the weakened strain of poliovirus that is used in the vaccine will mutate and spur outbreaks in communities where immunization levels are low, which has occurred in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Moreover, the number of cases of the disease caused by the wild virus has been at historically low levels in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the two countries where poliovirus transmission has never been stopped. This presents an opportunity to seize the moment and stop the wild virus forever.

Rotary’s perseverance has played an enormous role in bringing the world to this point. It’s that commitment, coupled with the determination of the other GPEI partners, that is needed to complete the job.

“This year has shown us why we must stay the course on polio eradication,” said Mike McGovern, chair of Rotary’s PolioPlus Committee. “We have an opportunity to make history and need Rotarians to redouble their commitment by raising funds and awareness.”

Rotary members have been at the center of the worldwide effort to eradicate polio for more than three decades. Rotary launched PolioPlus in 1985 and helped found the GPEI in 1988, with the goal of eradicating a human disease for only the second time in history. (The World Health Organization declared the world free of smallpox in 1980.) When the GPEI was founded, wild poliovirus paralyzed hundreds of children every day, with an estimated 350,000 polio cases across more than 125 countries in one year. Since then, cases have plummeted more than 99.9%, sparing more than 20 million people from paralysis.

Through a funding partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Rotary commits US$150 million to fighting polio every year. Rotary members have contributed more than US$2.6 billion and countless volunteer hours to this effort. With the GPEI partners, members engage with communities everywhere to encourage high vaccination rates and help immunize more than 400 million children annually.

As the world gets closer to having zero polio cases that are caused by the wild virus, public health experts say it is more important to track all forms of the virus, wherever they may appear, including in polio-free regions.

They also say that the re-emergence of polio in these places highlights the importance of vaccination as the only form of protection against polio and many other diseases. It draws attention to the work needed to encourage people to get vaccinated at a time when vaccination rates are dropping in some communities. And it reinforces the fact that polio anywhere is a threat everywhere, which underscores the importance of the End Polio Now campaign.

As World Polio Day on 24 October approaches, Rotary urges its members to tell their communities about the importance of vaccination. Global donors and national governments are also expected to announce new pledges to fund the GPEI’s 2022-26 polio eradication strategy. This strategy focuses on greater accountability from national governments about their work to eradicate wild polio and end outbreaks of polio caused by variant poliovirus.

With these kinds of sustained political and financial commitments, the world is still on the path toward an incredible accomplishment: making sure no person is paralyzed by polio ever again.

Last Week’s Program: Blake Timm, World Athletics Championships

Click Here To Watch The Full Program

At last week’s meeting, Rotarian Blake Timm presented to the club about his experience working as a media relations volunteer at the World Athletics Championships, which took place in July in Eugene.

The World Athletics Championships is the primary international championship for the sport of track and field. It marked the first time that the meet had ever been held in the United State and just the second time it had been held in the Americas. The meet was held at the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field, which is the home for many high-caliber track and field meets. The venue was rebuilt between 2018 and 2020 with the specific purpose of hosting the World Championships.

The meet involved a large volunteer effort with 1,583 people from all over the world logging volunteer hours. Just in media operations, where Blake was involved, there were 184 total volunteers that worked over 900 shifts and over 4,500 hours during the course of the 10 days of the meet.

While volunteers covered the vast majority of areas at the meet, Blake’s specific expertise working in college athletics communications allowed him to work as part of the media operations staff. For his four days of shifts, Blake was assigned to the main press tribune (seating area) inside the stadium. There he worked as part of a team to make sure that the international media had all they needed to cover the event.

Blake went over the massive media operations for the event, including the main media operations center, photographer locations inside the stadium and the mixed zone, where media interacted with athletes just after participating in their events.

In addition to the volunteer duties, Blake was able to cover three athletes from Simon Fraser University that competed for Team Canada. Simon Fraser is a member school of the Great Northwest Athletic Conference, for which Blake is the assistant commissioner for communications.

Blake described some of perks of volunteering at the event, which included meals, an extensive volunteer uniform and the opportunity to participate in the media race on Hayward Field’s world-class track.

Club Calendar
Wed., Oct. 12: Weekly Meeting, Noon
Boxer Pause Room, University Center, Pacific University
Program: Emily Bakitah, Rise To Shine Education

Thurs., Oct. 13: Executive Board Meeting, 7 p.m.
Via Zoom

Wed., Oct. 19: Weekly Meeting, Noon
Boxer Pause Room, University Center, Pacific University
Program TBA

Thurs., Oct. 20: Board Meeting, 7 a.m.
Via Zoom

Wed., Oct. 26: Weekly Meeting, Noon
Boxer Pause Room, University Center, Pacific University
Program TBA