Meeting Weekly on a Monday at 7:00pm

The White Hart Hotel, St John Street, Salisbury

Wilton Rotary Club has been serving the local, national and international communities for over 40 years.

The club promotes and supports a range of local activities and events including cycle rides, the Wilton Wake-Up, which is a clasic car meet held at Wilton House, a “Walk for Wards” fundraising event in support of Wilton’s Hospitals, and an annual Mammoth Car Boot event.

The club also operates a local business partner scheme with the aim of fostering relations with local businesses that are willing to be publicly associated with the charitable community service activities supported by the club.

The annual Mammoth Car Boot Sale, established in 1983, has for many years been one of the largest of its kind in Southern England. The event is held on August Bank Holiday Monday by kind permission of the Earl of Pembroke in the beautiful grounds of the Wilton House Estate.

The 2022 Sale attracted over 4,500 buyers and the Sellers Area covered over 300 pitches.

Meeting Weekly on a Wednesday at 18:00

Cashmere Club, 50 Colombo Street, Christchurch

We have just seen the Artemis capsule return from its voyage to the dark side of the moon, and we know that the Voyager spacecraft launched in the 1970s is now quite a long way from Earth. I thought it would be nice to send greetings to the furthest place that I could visit that wasn’t on another planet. I looked near and far, we,, mostly far, and I settled on Christchurch in New Zealand, which is about 11,773 miles from somewhere in Hertfordshire.

So, greetings this week go to the Rotary Club of Christchurch South, or is it the Christchurch South Rotary Club, which is one of 31 Rotary Clubs in the upper South Island of New Zealand.

The club, as you might expect, is involved in a variety of activities, some are fund raising, some are based around the community and some are social. 

Earlier this year, the members all came together to carry out some maintenance work on the John Taylor Walkway. 

The John Taylor Walkway was originally constructed in 2005 across the Halswell Quarry Park and is the only project in the club’s 65 year history to be named after one of its members. 

Along with three Park Rangers and some heavy-duty gardening tools, they managed to clear the are and cut down the overgrowth. Much was accomplished during the exercise and and the work ended with a barbeque … and a biography of John Taylor’s life.

On a different note, though still loosly linked to horticulture, the club has recently completed its Annual Chicken Manure Fund Raise, where forward thinking club members raise cash through the sale of the stuff that chickens leave behind.

Sadly, it was all sold out by the 27^th of August, but if anyone is interested, there is always next year.  

Meeting Weekly on a Thursday at 14:00

Hotel Madeira Centro, Calle Esperanto, Benidorm

Rotary Clubs are relatively new to Spain as General Franco considered the organisation to be enemies of the regime, along with Freemasonry and Communism.  He died in 1975, marking the end of one of Europe’s longest dictatorships, and the beginning of Rotary in Spain.  The Rotary Club of Benidorm was established in 1994 and currently has a membership of 44, although it would appear that they are all men.

They did, however, publish a Facebook post on the 8^th March in support of International Women’s Day.

As you might expect, the club has been supporting the global End Polio Now campaign.

Closer to home, the club works hard on behalf of the local community, and last year donated 10,000€ to provide 400 sets of supplies to schools in and around Benidorm.

Support for Covid saw collaborations with the Red Cross to deliver food, and the provision of protective masks to Social Associations and the Benidorm Police.

Recently, the club has been providing essential supplies for shipment to Ukraine, collecting and shipping 7,000 nappies and 1,000 jars of baby food.   

In 2021, the Rotary Club of Benidorm received a Rotary Citation for the work that the members had done throughout the year.  

Rotary Club of Benidorm