Rotary Club of Pickering & District - Welcome

Pickering’s Rotarians pride themselves on being doers. It’s true they meet together regularly to enjoy a meal and each other’s company but that’s just cover for an enterprise that seeks to help people both in the locality and further afield.

They help largely through raising money - sometimes by holding buckets in market places and town centres in the hope that members of the public might put in anything from a few pence to a fiver. We don’t make the headlines but, recently, our Sweet Charity project led to TV, radio and local press coverage. All the thousands of pounds that were raised went to Marie Curie Cancer Care and Rotary charities.

            So what else have we done and are going to do? You know that Pickering has sometimes suffered from flooding but not on the scale that occurred in York at the tail end of 2015. Hundreds of people had to be rescued. Inland water inflatables were at a premium. We were successful in finding the money to buy the latest state of the art inflatable rescue boat which we recently presented to the Scarborough and Ryedale Mountain Rescue Team.

You know the disabled and disadvantaged sometimes have difficulty in experiencing what for us are regarded as treats: a day at Flamingo Land, a trip on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. Well, we make it possible for children and young people to go to Flamingo Land to enjoy the rides and watch the animals; we make it possible for people with disabilities to spend a day on the railway and we have created an opportunity for young people to compete in our public speaking competition.

            What is Rotary? - a worldwide network of men and women of all ages and backgrounds – 1.2  million strong - who use their friendships, imaginations and skills to improve the lives of others.

Pickering’s Rotarians number over thirty but they are every bit as engaged as their local colleagues in Malton & Scarborough, together with clubs situated in over two hundred countries throughout the world. It’s not a new organisation. Rotarians have been making a difference for over a hundred years.