St. Vincent de Paul Thanksgiving Dinner for Homeless - Since 1987, in collaboration with Sysco, Rotarians prepares and serves 200 Thanksgiving dinners with all the trimmings at St. Vincent de Paul Soup Kitchen.

Rotary partners with the Locker Project, to fill take-home backpacks with healthy food supplies for low-income, food-insecure students and families in the greater Portland area.

Rotary volunteers work with Cultivating Community to help maintain community gardens which are a resource for local food security in Portland’s diverse neighborhoods.

Each year, we partner with Portland Recovery Community Center and fill backpacks with personal care items.

Working with Maine Works, we help eliminate the barriers to workforce reentry by providing rides to work for those in recovery.

In May 2023, to raise awareness about the fentanyl crisis in Maine, the Rotary Club of Portland and the City of Portland Public Health Division sponsored a concert and resource fair in Deering Oaks Park. Public health partners and opioid support organizations were on site to provide education and tools, including fentanyl test strips and Narcan.

In September 2024, the Club was once again instrumental in organizing the annual Rotary District 7780 Recover Conference. As in previous years, our goal was to bring community organizations and Rotary Clubs together to respond to the challenge of the collision of mental health and substance use.

In April 2024, Portland Rotary made a $25,000 donation to Milestone Recovery to help complete the expansion of its detox program. The funds were used to purchase 14 new platform beds and mattresses.

Rotary made a significant contribution of $4,789 to Project Heat in 2022 and continues to regularly support this program that provides much needed assistance to families who need help in paying for their heating bills.

In 2023, the Club gave the City of Portland a check for $3,325 to help with homelessness. The funds will be used to create a safe storage space for the homeless.

Each year, our Rotarian “bell ringers” support the Salvation Army’s Red Kettle campaign on weekdays throughout most of December. Through our efforts, this year a total of $6,141 was donated to help those in need in our community.

For several years, Portland Rotary held Veterans Day luncheons for veterans but this needed to be stopped due to covid and many veterans having medical conditions. With the opening of the new Veterans Medical Center on Congress Street, Portland Rotarians help veterans feel more comfortable by supplying a wide range of snacks in the waiting area.

Our signature tree-planting initiative began twenty years with our partnership with the City of Portland, a project that began with the creation of Rotary Grove on the Eastern Prom Trail and continues with the ‘greening’ of the Bayside Trail. We have only 30 trees left to reach our goal of planting 90 trees along the Bayside Trail, with our goal to complete this milestone by spring 2025.

In addition, each year Rotarians organize coastal cleanups along Casco Bay and Eastern Prom Trail.

Childhood literacy: As part of Portland Rotary’s long-standing commitment to childhood education, we promote literacy by reading to elementary school students in Portland, both during the school year and summer. Since 2015, Rotary Readers have visited K-2 classrooms at Lyseth Elementary School. In 2023 alone, we have been reading to 16 classrooms reaching 320 students over a four-month period. During the summer, a team of Rotarians reads to children, ages five to ten, at the North Deering Gardens Housing in Portland.  Every student in these programs goes home with a copy of the book that is read to them in the classroom. Last year, a total of 1,256 books were distributed to students to read and keep.

Youth Leadership and Service: Rotary annually funds eight Youth Service Award scholarships ($1,000/each) for students from each of Portland’s high schools and for a student attending the University of Southern Maine who is a part of USM’s New Mainer Community. These scholarship recipients demonstrate leadership in Rotary’s value of service to other both inside and outside of their school community.

In addition, the club provides for “toolships” for three vocational students at Portland Arts and Technology High School ($500/each).

Every year, we fund up to ten scholarships to Rotary Youth Leadership Award (RYLA) - a four-day Experiential Leadership Training for rising sophomores at Camp Hines. For many, their time at camp can become a life changing experience that helps individuals increase their self-confidence, enhance leadership capabilities, and provides tools of communication.  The result is an increase in self-efficacy, and the ability to enhance the communities they are involved in.

Through Rotary’s Youth Exchange Program, this year a Deering High School student has the unique opportunity to study in Japan, and the club will host a student from Valencia, Spain, all with the aim of promoting goodwill, international understanding, and friendship.

Additional Projects: In partnership with Lamey Wellehan, our Boots for Kids drive provides 150 pairs

of new warm winter boots new Mainers and homeless children, many of whom are experiencing a Maine winter for the first time.

In the summer, we provide school supplies backpack and sneakers to children from the Boys and Girls Club.

Throughout the year, we provide a monthly support and mentoring program at Long Creek Youth Development Center.

Our latest project was painting a large US Map (20 ft by 30 ft) on the playground at Amanda Rowe Elementary School. The kids and teachers love it!

In 2023, with the second rebuild of Andrews Square, Portland Rotary, in partnership with the Andrews Square Improvement Project, purchased new benches and planters for the square.

The Andrews Square Memorial was originally dedicated in 1921 and was a gift from Portland Rotary in memory of Harold T. Andrews, the first soldier from Maine to die during WWI. In 2015, Portland Rotary was involved in the restoration of the memorial which included the restoration of the bronze plaque and granite base.

This most recent donation follows in Rotary’s rich history of support and collaboration with the City of Portland, which includes Rotary Grove on the Eastern Prom Trail, “The Armillary” statue on the waterfront, the Rotary Clock in Monument Square, the elevator in Merrill Auditorium, and the Kotzchmar Organ Restoration.

The Portland Rotary’s signature international project is 3H – Hearing, Hands, and H2O in the Dominican Republic. Since 1999, the project has been providing hearing aids, prosthetic hands, and water filters and solar lights to the poorest of the poor in the La Romana area of the Dominican Republic.

Hearing: Through the leadership of doctors Roger Fagan and Elizabeth Fagan, Portland Rotary has provided audiological services in the Dominican Republic since 2005. Since we started this work, 4,500 hearing aids have been donated and fitted with rechargeable batteries and solar chargers for sustainability. At a retail cost of $1,000 for each hearing aid (in the DR), that equates to some $4.5 million worth of benefit to the hearing impaired on the island.

Portland Rotary is currently raising funds to build the Rotary Hearing Center at the Good Samaritan Hospital in La Romana in the DR. Phase 1 of the project includes the installation of a large sound booth, equipped with a clinical audiometer.  

The cost of Phase 1 is $38,000.  We have raised $32,800 and look forward to raising the remaining $5,200 to move ahead with this project.

The Rotary Hearing Clinic at Good Samaritan Hospital: The Portland Rotary Club has an opportunity to leverage the 25 years of work by Drs. Roger and Liz Fagan and establish a permanent Rotary Hearing Clinic at Good Samaritan Hospital in La Romana, Dominican Republic. The hospital has agreed to dedicate space for a hearing center, provided The Portland Rotary Club can supply the equipment, including a soundproof booth – which will allow for better diagnostics and extend the range of care to infants.

This space and the equipment will encourage professional groups and universities to send practitioners, volunteer audiologists, students in training and technicians to the Dominican Republic to support and expand our work.

Hands: Since 2010, Portland Rotary has been supplying prosthetic hands to amputees in the Dominican Republic.  The LN4 model was the first one used.  Portland Rotary, teaming up with University of Southern Maine students made design changes to create the 3D printable version, which can be fitted very accurately using castings from the patient.  The USM students have continued to make improvements over the following five years.  With the expansion to providing both hand and leg prosthesis, and funding support beyond Rotary, a self-supporting nonprofit organization took over this project in 2024.

H2O: For over a decade, Rotarians have purchased, distributed, and installed water filters in villages in the Bateyes in the Dominica Republic - which have no running water or electricity. We recently added the installation of solar lanterns in each dwelling. The team trains the residents on the use and maintenance of both the water filters and lights. Thousands of Dominicans now have access to clean, potable drinking water and safe lighting.

Additional international projects

Africa: Portland Rotary collaborates with Crutches 4 Africa to collect and distribute mobility devices -

crutches, wheelchairs, walkers, canes, braces which are delivered to into the hands of mobility challenged people, all without cost to the recipient, in 15 countries in Africa.

Guatemala: Portland Rotary’s Education & Children’s Issues Satellite Club received two consecutive year grants from District 7780 to promote literacy in Guatemala City with the creation of a mobile lending library. Phase One of the project began as a response to the public schools closing indefinitely due to COVID-19. The lending library provided books to children and their families living in the neighborhood of the Guatemala City Dump and the indigenous children living in the surrounding areas. The second year, they expanded their outreach and doubled the number of books provided.

More than 1,500 children and their families benefitted from the program.

India: In recent years, we’ve partnered with the Rotary Club of Coimbatore Texcity in southern India on three grants. Project Eye Serve 1.0 and 2.0, provided equipment for eye care screenings and eye surgeries for the underserved in the region. A total of 200,000 people were screened and 4,000 free cataract surgeries were performed. The third grant, Breathing Life project, provided the ESI Hospital in Coimbatore with an oxygen generating plant and 200 more beds for the treatment of COVID-19 patients.

Republic of Kosovo: The Club provided a speech therapy clinic in Pristine, Kosovo with a one-year subscription to online Certification Trainings for 15 speech therapists to increase their assessment, diagnosis and treatment for all people who need a speech-language therapy.

Ukraine: We donated $3,200 in humanitarian aid through World Central Kitchen to feed those in need in Ukraine.