Who Are We?

The Story of the Rotary Club of North Port Central

The Rotary Club of North Port Central was born to fulfill a need for a lunchtime club to complement the existing North Port Rotary breakfast meetings. With the ”morning club” sponsoring us on January 4th, 2002, Rotary International President Richard King presented us with our Charter making us one of the 32,0000 Rotary Clubs worldwide. With a fun and active group, we began supporting the Rotary mission on local, statewide, and international levels.

In our community, we have supported numerous causes, including Little League team sponsorship, the Back to School Resource Fair, the City of North Port 50th Anniversary Program, and the North Port Community Scholarship Fund. Every year, we give dictionaries to all local third-grade students for the distribution of over 750 dictionaries to 6 elementary schools. We annually provide scholarship money to selected North Port High School graduates. Additionally, we sponsor the Interact Club at North Port High School and send deserving members to the Rotary Leadership Programs. We also provide many local individual and family gifts to cover needs caused by medical emergencies, Holiday hardships, and individual student exchange programs. We offer funds and service to the Charlotte County Homeless Coalition, and water safety education through the Josh the Otter project for our kindergarten children.

At the Statewide level, we support The Rotary Camp Florida, both with financial contributions and member involvement. We have supported the Haley House at Bay Pines Veteran’s Hospital as well. This beautiful facility provides temporary living arrangements for the families of our wounded warriors undergoing treatment.

Our international involvement included “Heartbeat International,” which provided pacemakers and medical support globally. We have enjoyed sponsoring local professionals going overseas in The Group Study Exchange program to Australia, Japan, and the Caribbean. The international disaster relief program and Shelter Box has regularly received our enthusiastic support. We contribute substantially to the Rotary International “Polio Plus” program for the total eradication of Polio worldwide and is now down to two countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan. We also have participated and will continue to participate in the “clean water” projects.

All of these worthy causes are supported by fundraisers, which include our Charity Challenge, Quarter Frenzy, Car Shows, and our major signature event in March, Vegas Casino Gaming Night.

By supporting these various causes, the Rotary Club of North Port Central is both promoting the Rotary goal of local, state and international friendship and having a good time doing it.