Rotary Club of Whitehorse Rendezvous meets on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of the month at 6:30pm at Ricky’s Restaurant at the Quality Inn Hotel in Whitehorse, Yukon. Box 31105
Whitehorse, YT Y1A 5P7
Rendezvous Rotary club was formed 30 years ago in 1992. The Rendezvous Rotary club raises funds for local and international initiatives that support Rotary International’s areas of focus: literacy and education; economic and community development; maternal and child health; water and sanitation; and disease prevention and treatment, and Environmental protection. Rendezvous Rotary club's first locally sponsored project was to support expectant mothers from rural communities who had come into Whitehorse for their babies’ births. We sponsored two hotel rooms with kitchenettes, providing mothers with a comfortable place to stay at no cost during the final weeks before delivery. A major activity of our club is fundraising and ‘hands on’ support for local Yukon projects. The Rendezvous club led the fundraising drive for the Rotary Centennial Bridge, the pedestrian bridge that crosses the Yukon River below the Whitehorse dam. We have also raised funds for local projects such as providing dictionaries to all Grade 3 classrooms in Yukon, and the Yukon Imagination Library which provides free books to all Yukon children up to the age of five through an initiative started by Dolly Parton. Club members also donate their time to ‘hands on’ projects. These have included repairing fencing at the Yukon Wildlife Preserve, stocking shelves at the Whitehorse Food Bank, trail clearing and signage at Bert Law Park and the Millennium Trail, building a playground at the Copperbelt Railway and Mining Museum and many others. Rendezvous Rotary club members also run one of the Yukon River Trail Marathon water stations every summer. We also provide scholarships to Yukon students to study in the territory or overseas. Other local projects we support financially include the Whitehorse Food Bank, the library at the Child Development Centre, donations of telephone/gift cards to Kaushee’s Place, and support for a Syrian refugee student at Yukon College. The club also supports international projects such as ShelterBox Canada (http://www.shelterboxcanada.org/about.php?page=16), which provides emergency shelters to displaced people all over the world. Recently, through ShelterBox, the Rendezvous Rotary Club purchased shelters for people who lost their homes to the 2016 typhoon in Cameroon and the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal. We have also supported long-running projects in India alongside Rotary clubs in that country, such as polio immunization programs, catchment dams in Rajasthan to improve life expectancy for that area’s poorest people, and a project to get children of migrants living in slums into the educational system.
