The Rotary Club of Madison County was chartered in February, 2004 and welcomed as a member of Rotary International. With 45 active members, we meet every Thursday morning at 7:30 AM at Pittman Hall on the Mars Hill College campus. We enjoy a great breakfast, much good fellowship, an interesting speaker, and discussions of current and future service projects.

We have an array of projects that focus on youth activities, community service, and International service. In the area of youth activities, each year we give a dictionary to every 3rd grade student in the county, we sponsor the Interact Club at Madison High School (a junior Rotary Club), we send students to our Rotary Youth Leadership Assembly each year, we teach Junior Achievement classes in the Madison County School system, recognize the student of the month at Madison High and employee of the month of the school system, and give every third grade student in Madison County a dictionary each October. In addition we provide a four year scholarship to a Madison County High School Senior each year based on need and accomplishments while in High School and provide two scholarships to the winners of an essay contest about Rotary's ethical principles called the Four Way Test.

Some of our community service projects have included river cleanups and road clean ups as well as the funding of many youth related organizations and projects through our "Make a Difference" grants.

On the International front, we fund shelter boxes for use in areas where people are trying to cope with natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis and floods. We donate wheel chairs to the needy in impoverished areas of the world. We also arrange youth exchanges for Madison County youth to various foreign countries as a broadening experience for them. We are currently working on a project to supply vitamins and nutritional supplements to people in Haiti.

Rotary International is the largest and oldest Service organization in the world with over 1,200,000 members in 32,000 Clubs in 166 countries around the world. Our motto is "Service above self-he profits most who serves the best."

If you would like to attend a meeting or are interested in obtaining additional information, please contact O'Neal Shelton at 712-4966 or visit our website at www.rotaryclubofmadisoncounty.org.