World Peace and Understanding Day: 118 Years Of Rotary International's Humanitarian Mission

People across the world commemorate World Understanding and Peace Day as the calendar turns to Feb. 23 every year.

World Understanding and Peace Day came about as a way to mark the anniversary of the first meeting of Rotary International, which describes itself as "a global network of 1.4 million neighbors, friends, leaders, and problem-solvers who see a world where people unite and take action to create lasting change."

Rotary was the brainchild of Paul Harris, a Chicago attorney who wanted to create a group of people that meet to exchange ideas whilst also building long-lasting friendships.

Harris and three others, Gustavus Loehr, Silvestor Schiele, and Hiram Shorey, met on Feb. 23, 1905, in a downtown office building in Chicago for the first meeting. They decided to call their club Rotary because the locations for their meeting would "Rotate."

The founding Rotary club grew from its humble beginnings as more people joined for the humanitarian values that the club became known for.

From meeting at each other's offices, the club started finding larger spaces as the number of members increased. Rotary clubs then began springing up in other cities and eventually crossed the borders to other countries.

By 1922, there were Rotary clubs across six continents, and this was also the year in which they officially adopted the name Rotary International.

"Whatever Rotary may mean to us, to the world it will be known by the results it achieves," Harris once said.

Over the years, Rotary became a global movement that unites people for community service and works with the humanitarian mission of promoting goodwill and peace.

There are over 46,000 Rotary clubs today that work to promote peace, support education, provide clean water, fight diseases, protect the environment, and promote the development of local communities.

One of Rotary International's most well-known efforts is working to eradicate polio. As a founding partner of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, Rotary International helped in reducing polio cases by 99.9 percent.

The project, seen as one of its most famous humanitarian efforts, started with administering polio vaccinations to children in the Philippines in 1979 and has since vaccinated 2.5 billion children.

Rotary International continues to be a global network that works for its humanitarian mission and has several projects and programs that members can be a part of. Hence, World Understanding and Peace Day serves as a day to remember how one meeting with four men in 1905 grew to become one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the world.

"Membership of Rotary is thrown open to representatives of all walks of life. To representatives of all countries and all forms of religion," Harris said at the 24th annual Rotary Convention in 1933. "Herein lays the genius of Rotary and the glory of Rotary. The formula of procedure is simple. While Rotarians differ in many respects, intuitively, they are in perfect accord."