From the July 2016 issue of The Rotarian When Brad Rubini was reading a bedtime story to his seven-year-old daughter, Claire, she asked him why he was reading the words wrong. “I’m dyslexic, so I thought I was reading the words right,” recalls Rubini, a past president of the Rotary Club of Toledo, Ohio. After he explained his problem, she began to read to him on most nights instead. “She was a voracious reader and storyteller. She was always telling stories, even when she was a toddler,” he says. Three years later, while Claire was away at summer camp, she died unexpectedly as a result of a...

From the July 2016 issue of The Rotarian In the seven days from 7 through 13 March, I took precisely 84,250 steps. This amounted to 39.85 miles. I also climbed 288 floors and burned 22,055 calories. I’m fairly certain that you, gentle readers, could not care less about those statistics. Unless, of course, you’re one of the millions of gentle readers who have joined America’s fitness self-surveillance movement by strapping a tracking device to your wrist. In which case, you are probably pretty darned impressed by my stats. I should therefore add a few crucial caveats. Caveat No. 1: That week...

From the July 2016 issue of The Rotarian Just before John Germ dropped by, Rick Youngblood took a deep breath. “You want to match his energy,” he says, “but he makes it hard to keep up.” Youngblood is the president and CEO of Blood Assurance, a regional blood bank in Chattanooga, Tenn., that Germ helped found in 1972. After his visit with Youngblood, Germ strode between mountains of empty bottles and cans at Chattanooga’s John F. Germ Recycling Center at Orange Grove, which he designed, before he drove to a construction site and popped a cork to dedicate a Miracle League field where special...

From the July 2016 issue of The Rotarian The way Cynthia Salim sees it, the fashion industry doesn't have much to offer a young, socially conscious woman like her when it comes to work clothes. "The fashion industry often does 'sexy' or 'fun' or 'hip,' and things that encourage frequent purchases," the 29-year-old says. "It's very rare that the design community will design something that will make a young woman look credible and influential as well as timeless." Add "and is ethically made" to that list, and it becomes a tall order that Salim became increasingly frustrated trying to fill when...

From the July 2016 issue of The Rotarian Susan Davis has devoted the past three decades to using social entrepreneurship and microfinance to address extreme poverty, particularly in Bangladesh. A Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholarship in the early 1980s allowed her to study international relations at the University of Oxford. A decade ago, she co-founded BRAC USA (previously the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee) to help the world’s poor through self-empowerment. She is co-author, with journalist David Bornstein, of the book Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to...