Business of the week

Looking to help make a difference? Your local Rotary Club is always happy to see fresh faces and ideas. The Rotary Club of Clinton Arkansas has been serving our community for the past 13 years founded in 2009 with the Rotary Club’s mission to enrich the lives of our children.

While our local Rotary Club has been making a difference for over a decade; the origins of this group goes back much further and can be traced back to 1905 in Chicago when attorney Paul Harris called together their first meeting. The first meeting of the Rotary was attended by six local business men and they came about the name rotary because initially they rotated subsequent weekly club meetings to each other’s offices. This practice of rotating meetings would be short lived due to within the club becoming so large that a central meeting place would be necessary but through this change the name would stay and their newly formed club would be known from here on out as Rotary.

The object of Rotary is to encourage and foster the ideal of service as a basis of worthy enterprise and, in particular, to encourage and foster the development of acquaintance as an opportunity for service, high ethical standards in business and professions, the recognition of the worthiness of all useful occupations, and the dignifying of each Rotarian’s occupation as an opportunity to serve society, the application of the ideal of service in each Rotarian’s personal, business, and community life, and the advancement of international understanding, goodwill, and peace through a world fellowship of business and professional persons united in the ideal of service.

The Rotarian objective is set against the Rotary 4-Way Test developed by entrepreneur Herbert Taylor during the great depression as guidelines for restoring struggling business and was later adopted as the standard of ethics in 1942. The 4-way test asks: is it the truth, is it fair to all concerned, will it build goodwill and better friendships, and will it be beneficial to all concerned?

The Rotary Club on an international level has many accomplishments with some of the most notable being their work to help establish the United Nations where upwards of fifty Rotarians served as delegates, advisors, and consultants, their Polio Plus to help eradicate polio worldwide, the Rotary Youth Exchange and student exchange program for students in secondary education, Rotary Scholarships, Rotary Peace Centers, and Literacy Programs.

Our local chapter is proud to be part of national and world wide accomplishments and they are working hard to improve our community at the local level through many programs and events. Their next event Bluffton Cross Country & Mountain Bike Poker Run is April 1. This event is being held on the beautiful Bluffton Nature Preserve beginning at 8:30 a.m. for runners and 10:30 a.m. for mountain bikers. The $20 entry fee per person includes free bandana, food and cold beverages. Meeting location for this event is at the Stoneroller Trail Head off of Watergate Road on The Bluffton Nature Preserve. For more information please contact clintonarea rotary@gmail.com. We encourage you to attend one of their events or their weekly meeting where they work to educate our local members with engaging speakers Wednesdays at the Western Sizzler at noon.