The Rotary Club of Silver City is planning to hold an online fundraising event to support the world-wide effort to eradicate polio. The event is scheduled for Saturday, November 14 at 6 p.m. and will be held via Zoom.
“Based on the concept of national public radio’s ‘Wait, wait, don’t tell me!’, our Rotary Club’s Fact or Fiction Fundraiser for Polio will be a fun way to solicit pledges for support of the Polio Eradication Effort,” says Kathy Eaton, a member of the event’s organizing committee. She explains the fundraiser will work this way: Members of the local Rotary Club will read three stories, only one of which is true. Participants will then be asked to make bids from zero upwards. If a participant then chooses the correct story, the club will make a donation to PolioPlus in that person’s name. If the participant is incorrect, that person will be expected to contribute the value of their bid to PolioPlus.
“It’s a game where everyone can be a winner,” says Lucy Falley, chairperson of the fundraising event, “either by making a contribution to an extremely worthwhile cause and receiving a tax deduction, or by having a contribution made in his or her behalf.”
The club welcomes participation in this event by members of the public. If a person wishes to participate. he or she should send an email requesting the link to the Zoom event to info@silvercityrotary.org.
“This is an important fundraiser,” says Falley, “because polio, a crippling disease that reached pandemic proportions in the latter half of the 20th Century, has almost been eliminated. Africa was recently declared polio free, leaving only Pakistan and Afghanistan with active cases, but the ongoing civil strife in those countries will make polio eradication there very difficult. In the meantime, continual vigilance must be exercised throughout the world to prevent any new polio outbreaks.
“It has been estimated that, if the polio eradication effort were stopped now, as many as 200,000 children world-wide could be infected with polio in the next 10 years,” says Falley.
In explaining Rotary’s involvement in polio eradication, Bart Roselli, Silver City Rotary Club’s president, notes that Rotary International undertook an effort to eradicate polio in the Phillippines through an intensive vaccination program in 1979. “That then led Rotary, in 1985, to start the PolioPlus program with the aim of inoculating all the world’s children against polio,” says Roselli. The program expanded in 1988, he notes, when the Global Polio Eradication Initiative was launched under the auspices of the World Health Organization under which UNICEF, the Centers for Disease Control, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and most of the world’s governments joined Rotary in the polio eradication effort.