Perhaps, Mr. Chair, I could say that Rotary is made up of more than 34,000 Rotary clubs. They're all independent. They're all doing their own thing; they're all doing their work in the community. In addition to that, they're encouraged to give money to The Rotary Foundation to do bigger and better projects worldwide. To that extent they cover a wide variety of areas of focus.
The Rotary Foundation, which we're representing here, concluded that they could use this new vaccine that had come out to immunize children against polio. The local Rotarians in the Philippines carried out a project to immunize children. This was back in the early 1980s. It was so successful that the World Health Organization came to Rotary and said, “You know, if you can raise $150 million, we can do this for the whole world. We can do it in five years”. That was nearly 30 years ago. It's how the program took off. There were 125 countries where polio was endemic at that time. Now we're down to the three, possibly just two. It's taken a lot longer and a lot more money than we thought. We now have $1.3 billion in this program, and we're going to see it through. That's how it works.
Rotary is working at all levels in the community. The money for polio comes from the members through The Rotary Foundation as an extra to their community service, or their educational service, or the other services they carry out in the community.