Like many Rotary members, Mario Costantini is actively involved in his community. He and his wife own a business and support a variety of nonprofit organizations near their home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, including Mad Hot Ballroom and Tap, an educational dance program for children. With so many commitments, Costantini hesitated when he was asked to join the Rotary Club of Milwaukee.

"I finally said yes out of a sense of obligation, but after I joined I realized how glad I was that I did," he says. "The connections I've made through my club have really helped my nonprofit work." At one club meeting, Costantini happened to sit next to club member Gregory Thornton, the superintendent of Milwaukee public schools. As a result of their conversation, the Mad Hot Ballroom and Tap program is offered in 50 public and private schools throughout the area.

"The members of my club are very involved in our city–we have business people, educators, and government officials," Costantini says. "It has been a great way to network with these wonderful people."

Taras Mytkalyk started a Rotaract club as a way to get things done in his hometown of Kyiv, Ukraine. In the past year, his club raised money for an animal shelter, collected clothes for needy children, and visited a nursing home to boost the spirits of elderly residents. Members also gathered for poker nights, cookouts, and holiday parties.

Mytkalyk believes in giving everyone in the club the opportunity to lead. Identifying a community need and finding a solution is empowering to members—and can have a noticeable impact. "Young people in Ukraine are attracted to this movement because they see the results of their work," he says. "There's no need to wait for somebody's approval or to go through bureaucratic procedures—they can just go out and do good, while having fun along the way."

There isn't a place in the world that Richard Huston wouldn't like to see. So when the chance came to visit Taiwan as part of a Rotary Friendship Exchange, he was happy to board the plane with fellow Rotary members from Minnesota. They spent 10 days in Taipei and Yilan, staying with two different host families. It was like nothing he'd ever experienced. "I feel that I now have lifelong friends."

The differences in culture and lifestyle were stark in some ways, says Huston, who is a veterinarian and lives on 150 acres of prairie in a town of 20,000. His new friends live on the 14th floor of an apartment building in a city of 7 million. But they connected on a personal level. "We laugh and we talk about serious things and family and the goals of Rotary," he says.

Since his initial trip to Taiwan, Huston has hosted several of his Taiwanese friends, who visited farms, drove tractors, and watched robots milk cows. They met up again at the Rotary convention in Lisbon and made plans to travel to Africa and Brazil in the next few years. "By traveling the world you get an understanding that other people have the same problems and the same joys that you have."

Path Heang has good reason to work toward peace. His family fled from bombs falling on their village in Cambodia, and he spent part of his childhood toiling in the rice fields of a Khmer Rouge labor camp.

Heang's desire to help his country heal from years of brutality eventually led him to the University of Queensland in Australia, where he studied as a Rotary Peace Fellow. Now, as chief of a UNICEF field office, Heang manages six programs that help improve the lives of millions of women and children in his country's poorest households.

In his studies Heang explored the Khmer Rouge tribunal and security issues in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

"I am in a senior position because of the analytical skills and tools I learned as a peace fellow," Heang says. "Now I can influence national policy for the poor in Cambodia."

Sarita Jarmack is only 25 but her passport is filled with stamps from more than two dozen countries—Honduras, Ireland, Panama, Sri Lanka, China—and the list goes on. But her very first stamp is from Sweden, where she spent a year as a Rotary Youth Exchange student in high school. Youth Exchange fueled her love of meeting new people in new countries. "When I am in certain places for a long enough time I feel like I am part of that place and part of the people," she says. "I learn the languages, I learn the customs, I embrace the love from the mothers, and I play with the little kids."

Jarmack credits Rotary member Michelle Frechette with helping fulfill her quest for adventure, including the chance to earn a master's degree in international relations in Denmark thanks to a Rotary scholarship. "Michelle has led me to opportunities that quite frankly were unimaginable," she says. Frechette sees a similar enthusiasm for learning in all of the students her club has helped sponsor. "I look at the kids we select for Youth Exchange as being able to solve long-term global problems."

The residents of Sumpango in rural Guatemala draw their water from several municipal pools fed by unfiltered mountain water. These public pools are used for everything—children fill water bottles, women do laundry, and farmers bring livestock to drink. Not surprisingly, residents get sick from the water, which is why Rotary members from Guatemala and the U.S. stepped in to provide schoolchildren with clean water.

Six schools in Sumpango were outfitted with ceramic water filters, toilets, septic tanks, and hand washing stations using Rotary grant funding. Improvements to three more schools are in the works. Besides providing the equipment, club members are making sure students learn good hygiene habits.

“We started with water because everything starts with water,” says Rotary member Jorge Aufranc. Providing access to clean water is one of Rotary's primary causes, and it's the first step in improving conditions for people in areas like Sumpango. “We are working with the government to give the same to the community as we did with the schools,” Aufranc says. “Rotary cannot solve all the problems, but step by step, we can change Sumpango in five to 10 years and build a model that could be replicated.”

You won't find fancy cocktails or colorful streamers at these parties. But Rotary members in the Seattle area still have a good time at Rotary First Harvest work parties, where they repackage surplus produce for distribution to the hungry. "The work is rewarding and great fun," says David Schooler, Rotary member and president of Rotary First Harvest. The organization collaborates with farmers, truckers, volunteers, and food banks to move food that might otherwise go to waste to food banks and meal programs for those in need.

Schooler and around 100 Rotary members and friends gather at a warehouse twice a month to break down 1,000-pound bins of food into smaller boxes or serving bags. They also volunteer on farms to gather fresh fruits and vegetables that aren't economically viable for farmers to harvest. In one season, Rotary First Harvest coordinated 1,500 volunteers and provided 3 million family meals.

"Every Rotary project anywhere in the world always started with one person who had an idea," says executive director David Bobanick. "They were able to grow and develop that idea by getting other Rotarians engaged and using that powerful network of Rotary to really change the world."

In rural Kenya, having a nurse or midwife present during childbirth can mean the difference between life and death. But health professionals assist with only 42 percent of deliveries in the country.

To improve maternal health care in East Africa as well as access to it, Rotary has a partnership with Aga Khan University. Thanks to Rotary grants, health educators and nursing and midwifery students on scholarship receive critical training that could one day help save the lives of mothers and newborns.

Teams of experienced nurses travel to Aga Khan's Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda campuses to train their counterparts. Rotary member Jeanne Kearley led a group of U.S. nurses for training at the Nairobi campus. Over two weeks, they simulated medical problems and case studies with faculty in the university's advanced nursing program.

The training provided new tools for the faculty that will help motivate their students and improve their skills, Kearly says. Aga Khan's partnership with Rotary "has the potential to make long-term changes in the development of nursing in East Africa."