Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, the Rotary Club of Tettenhall together with Rotary clubs throughout Great Britain and Ireland have donated over £6m and given more than 100,000 volunteer hours to support Ukraine and its people.
Rotary’s impact ranges from supplying life-saving medical equipment and rebuilding bombed villages, to welcoming Ukrainian guests to our communities.
We continue to stand with the people of Ukraine and are committed to supporting the ongoing humanitarian crisis.
Friday marks the first anniversary of Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and we'll be joining with the Ukrainian community in Wolverhampton to show our support for their resistance
Everyone is invited to the rally hosted by the City Council outside of the Civic Centre in Wolverhampton starting from 10:00am on the 24th February.
The event will include the raising of the Ukrainian flag at 10:45 followed by speeches from members of the Ukrainian community and the Mayor of Wolverhampton before taking part in the minute of silence which is being held across the country at 11:00am.
Can't make the rally? You can still show your support by wearing blue and yellow on the day, flying a Ukrainian flag and by posting your support on social media.
October is Rotary's Economic & Community Development Month highlighting the work which Rotary members do to promote economic and community development and reduce poverty.
With over 648 million people living on less that the $2.15 a day poverty line – the critical threshold value below which an individual or household is determined to be poor – there’s a lot of work still to be done.
The work of Rotary begins in the community, we recognise that every community has its own unique needs and concerns and that the people in those communities know best how to deal with those. By working with micro finance organisations such as Lend With Care we help empower local entrepreneurs to develop their local economies and reduce poverty in a sustainable way.
Working with other members of District 1210 the Rotary Club of Tettenhall has loaned over £360,000 to help 31,950 entrepreneurs around the world develop their businesses and create 17,636 jobs.
Following the heaviest recorded summer rainfall for over a decade Pakistan has been hit with floods which have affected over 33 million people, over 15% of the country’s population, with at least 1,136 people losing their lives since the monsoon season began in June.
Early estimates from Pakistan’s planning minister, Ahsan Iqbal, put the cost of the damage at £8.5 billion, with remote communities cut off, communication lines damaged and 150 bridges destroyed.
Around 1 million homes in the affected areas have been damaged or destroyed, leaving behind millions in need of urgent shelter.
Tettenhall Rotary Club has made a donation to ShelterBox, Rotary’s global partner in disaster relief, who already have people on the ground.
Shelterbox are focusing their attention on the most affected areas of Sindh, Punjab, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). The charity has a huge amount of experience supporting communities affected by flooding having responded to flooding at least 75 times since 2000, providing emergency aid and support to tens of thousands of families around the globe.
The work of the charity – which was founded in Helston, Cornwall, UK by Rotarian Tom Henderson, OBE, with the support of the Rotary Club of Helston-Lizard – recognises that recovery starts with shelter. Having somewhere dry and warm to sleep, to prepare meals and be with your family is vital in helping people start the long process of rebuilding their lives. Emergency shelter offers privacy and helps to preserve dignity. It offers protection from the elements, animals and disease. It helps keep communities together. It can help to bring back a sense of normality, allowing children to go back to school. Most importantly, it empowers families to start the process of getting back on their feet.
In addition to tents and tarpaulins each Shelterbox contains essential items such as water purification equipment, tools and cooking utensils to help those affected recover and to rebuild their homes.
From Cameroon to Syria, all the way to the Philippines and the Caribbean, Shelterbox have provided shelter to over 2 million people so far. You can help to support their work by donating now at https://shelterbox.org/donate/
Its nearly three years since we started working with Lend With Care - a micro-finance organisation that brings together entrepreneurs in developing countries with people who have the power to help them.
With loans totalling just short of £3,000 to date we've made 53 loans, helped 231 entrepreneurs, 593 of their family members and helped businesses to create 87 new jobs - a little can go a long way
We've been helping people like Mrs Bui Thi Phoung in Vietnam.
Mrs Phoung's family is reliant on the income from their small holding on which they grow vegetables and corn and raise pigs and buffaloes for sale to local merchants
The family lives in impoverished conditions but the loan which we assisted with under the Lend With Care scheme helped Mrs Phuong to invest in seedlings and fertiliser to expand their vegetable plantation and to increase the family's income
The loan to Mrs Phuong has been fully repaid meaning that we can now put that money to work again helping other entrepreneurs.
As part of our work with Lend With Care we're one of the lenders supporting Ángelo Correa a carpenter from the small town of Palanda in Ecuador.
Don Angelo owns a workshop making mostly household furniture such as beds, tables, chairs and cabinets to order which employs two assistants. Having built up the business from very humble beginnings Don Angelo requested a loan in order to further develop the business by purchasing timber in bulk and new tools for himself and his assistants.
Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in the Philippines are now homeless and without clean water or food in the wake of Super Typhoon Haiyan. Their situation is desperate.
With winds of 195mph, the typhoon is the largest storm ever recorded to make landfall and current reports indicate that upwards of 10,000 people may have lost their lives. Further reports are filtering through of 'utter devastation' across the main city of Tacloban and the islands of Samar and Leyte. The need to get shelter and essential aid to those affected is immense.
Rotary's Project Partner ShelterBox has moved quickly to put teams on the ground in the Philippines and they are moving emergency shelter and other vital aid already located in the Philippines and neighbouring countries to the worst affected areas.
The ShelterBox solution in disaster response is as simple as it is effective - they deliver the essentials a family needs to survive in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Each large, green ShelterBox is tailored to a disaster but typically contains a disaster relief tent for an extended family, blankets, groundsheets, water storage and filtration equipment, cooking utensils, a basic tool kit, a children’s activity pack and other vital items.
Rotary clubs throughout the world have been supporting ShelterBox in this vital work and this week President Sammy was pleased to hand Shelter Box Representative Gerry Walsh a donation of £31,270 to help those affected by Super Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.
The scale of the contribution has been made possible by the generosity of a single anonymous donor, who recently gave the Club a donation of £30,000 to help our Disaster Appeal. With the Club's support ShelterBox will be sending 53 additional ShelterBoxes to help people left homeless and destitute by the devastating effects of Typhoon Haiyan last week.
You can see the contents of a Shelter Box for yourself at the Tettenhall Christmas lights switch on event this Saturday, 23rd November at Tettenhall Green from 4 o'clock and we'll be collecting more donations from members of the public to help ShelterBox carry on their vital work.
Thanks to the contacts which Club member and Foundation Chairman Ivan Hill has developed with the Rotary Club of Knysna in South Africa we've recently been able to work with that Club on a project to provide some much needed welfare to vulnerable and needy children in the nearby communities.
Knysna have been involved with the “Gogo” project for some years. “Gogo” is ‘grandmother’ in Xhosa and pronounced ‘gorgor’. The Gogo project is a nationally run welfare scheme which effectively puts trained social workers (Gogo’s) in direct contact with needy and vulnerable black children.
The focus of the Gogo workers is on both education and welfare, with particular emphasis on HIV/AIDS. Each Gogo is allocated up to 20 children who are at risk - childheaded households, single HIV patients deserted by their spouse due to fear of AIDS, or single parents who have had to leave their homes due to alcohol abuse, physical violence etc.
The Matching Grant funding for the project of R.110,000 (£7,500) will fund Knysna’s Gogo activities for a year and will be spent on clothing (mainly warm underwear for the cold summers, May to August, and School Uniforms), food, health and sanitary requirements, with a very small payment to the Gogos to help them with buying shoes, as they have to walk several miles every day.
Currently, there are 6 Gogos involved, looking after 140 children with the support of Rotarians from the Knysna Club whotake turns at purchasing the week’s necessities and delivering the produce to the soup kitchens and the supplies to the Gogos.
Today saw the Club's annual summer BBQ at the Wolverhampton Cricket Club. Oragnised by Doug Evans and his International team the event was held to raise funds for Village Water, a charity which had impressed the Club with the emphasis that it places on the sustainability of its projects.
In the past many schemes which aimed to deliver clean drinking water to communities in Africa have foundered as organisations have simply dumped pumps in communities without providing the infrastructure necessary for their continuing maintenance. Village Water ensures that local people are trained to maintain and repair the pumps which they install so as to ensure that their projects have a meaningful long term impact. Additionally the supply of the water pump is only part of a wider sanitation programme with all the occupiers of the village being required to sign up to and to implement basic sanitation measures in the form of latrines and handwashing facilities before the pump is brought into use. By invloving the comunity in this way Village Water ensures that their projects have a long term impact on the communities which they help reducing ill health and deaths as well as encouraging economic activity.
With Chris Bowyer and Izeham Che Dan on BBQ duty it was wonderful opportunity to enjoy a range of BBQ food generously supplied by the Club's very own butcher John Whitten - the black pudding being especially good. Monies raised from ticket and raffle sales on the day mean that the Club has now met its Village Water fundraising target and another Zambian Village will benefit from the sanitation services and clean water supplies which the charity delivers.
We were joined this evening by Steve Evans a member of the Rotary Club of Ironbridge. Steve has long been involved with the development of Rotary's international programme but had come to talk to the Club about the work of the Village Water charity in advance of World Water Day on the 22nd March.
Billions of people lack access to safe drinking water and proper sanitation. Village Water provides hygiene education and sustainable water for rural villages in western Zambia. The charity installs protected shallow wells with manual water pumps that allow the people to draw uncontaminated water from underground.
Diarrhoea is one of the leading causes of infant mortality in Zambia and a major contributor to malnutrition. Village Water will only install pumps in villages where the community agrees to implement measures to provide for the safe disposal of human waste, and to adopt basic hygiene practices such as hand washing with soap in order to break the cycle of disease transmission for diarrhoea, particularly amongst children under five.
To date, Village Water has succeeded in helping over 75,000 people in 326 villages, each with either a new or rehabilitated well and with around 20 pit latrines for toilets, with hand washing, refuse pits and plate and vegetable racks to keep the food off the ground - and this has had a dramatic impact upon the health of the people. All the sanitation work is undertaken by the people themselves with Village Water providing cement and other materials.
Our thanks to Steve for his work in promoting the work of this very worthwhile charity and rest assured that we shall be supporting its work over the coming year.
Gerry Turner and Doug Evans reported back to the Club on their involvement with the Charity Tent Collection which takes place each year following the V Festival at Weston Park.
Over 250 volunteers helped to collect in over 1000 tents on the first day of the clean up alone. These tents which have been left by visitors to the festival and which otherwise would end up in landfill are distributed by the International Aid Trust Charity to be used in connection with disaster relief.
Working with other Rotary Clubs and with the World Water Works charity the Tettenhall Club has helped to ship 200 Water Survival Boxes to the flood affected areas in Pakistan.
These boxes are filled with new items that people who have lost everything would need to survive - including mugs to drink out of, cooking pots, bowls to eat from, spoons, anti-septic spray, cotton materials and needles and thread, basic tools, tarpaulin and bungee cords to make simple shelters.
The Water Survival Box itself is a rigid, reinforced 54 litre plastic container that becomes a receptacle for water when emptied of these survival items, it includes a filtration pack including chlorine tablets – enough for family of 4 for some 4 months.
Rotary International in Great Britain and Ireland (RIBI) has launched an appeal to help the hundreds of thousands of people affected by the Pakistan floods. Donations will be used to aid the long-term rebuilding of communities in the affected areas. If you'd like to donate to this appeal follow the link here.
