Our club's PolioPlus initial campaign raised $115,000 in 1987. And since then, we've held the Minnesota/Iowa Football fundraiser annually. The year's game is September 21 and the rivalry is on! The funds we raise will be sent to Rotary International and matched 2:1 by the Gates Foundation to generate up to $150 million.
As a founding partner of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, Rotary International has helped reduced cases by 99.9% since the first project to vaccinate children in the Philippines in 1979. Rotary members have contributed $2.1 billion and countless volunteer hours to protect nearly 3 billion children in 122 countries from this paralyzing disease. It's crucial to continue to keep working on eradication because if the work stopped today, within 10 years, polio could paralyze as many as 200,000 children each year.
