What is the Tualatin Rotary Club?
If you google us, you will find that we are an organization of business and professional people who provide humanitarian service throughout our local community and the world.
Rumors fly about secret handshakes and clandestine meetings. Nothing could be further from the truth! Your Tualatin Rotary meets every Wednesday at the Country Club. Our lunchtime gatherings are filled with great food, friendship and speakers who inform us about the needs of the people who live here and around the globe. Our members are just like you. We live or work in or near Tualatin and we strive to contribute to the health and happiness of this community.
If Rotary has a secret, it is the fact that we have been shy about broadcasting our charitable work. We are consistently raising funds that blossom in the lives of others. Our Tualatin Club has been laser-focused on the needs of underserved youth. We reach out to Tualatin High School to provide support to students, especially those who will be the first in their family to attend college.
Our unique scholarship program has the attention of the broader community. Many organizations offer scholarships for students who have been accepted to college. Rotary does more. We select a student in their junior year of high school and mentor this scholar for five years. A Tualatin Rotary Club Member works with each scholar to secure a pathway for success in their remaining high school career and their future life. The mentor assists with college applications and attempts to gain additional scholarships. Each Rotary scholar receives $4500.00 a year from our club! There are currently four students in college and two who have graduated. If you do the math, your Tualatin Rotary is donating $18,000 every year to this scholarship plan.
There is more! The Tualatin Rotary has partnered with the InterCambio class at the high school. Students mentor struggling eighth-graders at Hazelbrook and Twality Middle Schools. With a Rotary grant of $5000.00, the high schoolers make weekly visits to the middle schools and provide social and academic activities for their mentees. Many students who were once counted as at-risk eighth-graders are now high school mentors themselves. Success of the program is visible! The work is benefitting our community and the lives of each student in the program.
Your Tualatin Rotary has many other projects. We donate funds to the TuHS counseling office to provide access for students who may have barriers to joining a club or a sport. We financially support the Crimsonaires and the FBLA. We are working with a middle school teacher to bring virtual reality equipment to her social studies class. Students will travel the world without leaving their classrooms. We sponsor foreign exchange students and currently have a French student attending the high school and a Tualatin student spending an academic year in Argentina.
More secrets!! Your Tualatin Rotary Club gets its hands dirty! We pull weeds and tackle berry bushes as we assist the bird refuge on Highway 99. We rebuild a house each year for a deserving homeowner. We have a portion of Tualatin Sherwood Road that we beautify twice a year.
We donate $6000.00 each year to provide free dental care at the Tualatin Food Pantry. We support families who are facing homelessness. We visit community parks each summer and give books to kids and families. These books are gifts and become part of a child’s in-home library. We helped build a track at Bridgeport Elementary, and we are always looking for great projects that will benefit our community.
Our biggest secret??? Fundraising is not easy. For several years we have supported our goodwill efforts with an auction. The cost of holding this event has become huge. We are trying something new. We are asking the community to join us by donating directly to our fundraising campaign. You can TRUST Rotary to put every dollar to work right here, right now. Please visit our website tualatinrotary.org or contact any member, and we will joyfully welcome your contribution. Let’s do good together!
