By LAWRENCE SPRINGBORG
JUNE and July are busy times in our community, not just for people finalising their end of year financials, or kids starting or finishing their school holidays. But, no more so than the myriad of wonderful service clubs that have their annual changeover events.
New presidents and boards are inducted, reports of last year’s achievements given and plans for next year devised and implemented.
These wonderful service clubs enrich our community in so many ways. The local Apex/ Lions Park, the Rotary Club cooking at a local event. Disadvantaged people assisted, charities supported. The contributions are critical.
Our home of the Southern Downs, boasts dozens of these clubs, including, Zonta, Scope, Apex, Lions, Rotary and Rotaract.
Zonta, has raised and donated millions of dollars to humanitarian programs around the world and Quota has a special focus on supporting the hearing impaired.
As a former health minister, I saw daily, the value of childhood vaccination in saving lives and preventing lifelong disability. The scourge of polio has been purged from our shores. Until the advent of vaccination in the 1940s and 1950s, thousands of Australian children died or were left permanently disabled. Many still live with the scars today.
In the mid eighties, Rotary International set itself the ambitious goal of ridding the world of polio. When they started, there was almost half a million of cases worldwide annually, the numbers now are in the hundreds.
Through this initiative, billions of children have been immunised and Rotary members have donated almost two billion dollars to the cause. Rotary International, through its respect and standing has cut across socio political boundaries and united governments behind this cause, even in some of the most unstable and war torn parts of the world.
Lions International, similarly, through its Sight First Program, has raised almost half a billion dollars and saved the sight of hundreds of thousands of children worldwide, through its program aimed at treating preventable blindness.
When you see your local service club members out and about, with their meat raffles or chocolate wheels raising money, or helping in the community, just think for a moment, they are not only doing great work locally, they are literally changing the world for the better.
