Outlasting the pandemic
COVID relief interventions by the Rotary-USAID partnership have found a second life after the emergency
Diana Petronela Rufat is certain she would have lost a year of school.
When the COVID-19 pandemic erupted in Italy in February 2020, when schools closed, when the world shut down, she was stuck at home without a computer. Her dad was the only one working, and the work he had dried up. Her mom didn’t speak much Italian; the family is from Romania and immigrated when Rufat was 13. Money for a computer was the least of their concerns. They had rent to pay.
When classes went virtual, she did the best she could and used her phone. She held it up to her ear — “like I was speaking to a friend” — and tried to participate in her lessons, including a French language class. “I didn’t understand a single thing,” Rufat, 19, recounts this spring while sitting in an orange chair in her school library. “It was really hard to keep up.”
Diana Petronela Rufat was falling behind in her classes until she received a tablet through the Rotary-USAID partnership.
With waist-length mahogany hair and eyes that sparkle like her gem-studded shoes, she speaks animatedly about her and her family’s ordeal. Her school is in Tor Bella Monaca, an impoverished district in southeast Rome. The neighborhood, long neglected, is home to one of the largest drug markets in Europe. But the school is a beacon, creating a community for its 2,000 students, and this library serves as a cultural center for residents.
In fall 2020, when students in Italy returned to school part time, Rufat realized she was completely lost. “I was in class, shocked,” she says. She wasn’t alone; 70 percent of students had difficulties following classes remotely, according to a 2021 survey by the Italian National Institute of Statistics. At the start of the pandemic, the institute reported that 57 percent of children ages 6 to 17 had to share a computer or tablet with their family, while 12 percent didn’t have one at home at all.
A teacher realized that Rufat was struggling and offered help — in the form of a tablet computer and data connection donated through a Rotary-USAID partnership.
“It helped me to understand things because I could see the teacher more clearly. It helped me a lot, and it still helps,” she says. Without the computer, “I think I would have lost that year. For sure I would have lost that year.”
Sometimes it’s hard to remember those early days of the pandemic. It was three years and a lifetime ago. Italy reported its first case on 31 January 2020. Within weeks it had the biggest COVID-19 death toll in the world. In one city, “the number of corpses was so huge that they needed the army to carry them outside of the town and to the crematorium,” recalls Giulio Koch, a member of the Rotary Club of Milano Linate and governor of District 2041.
Rotary members began meeting on video calls, which led to one of the early positive outcomes to emerge from the crisis: a nationwide Rotary project, a rarity in Italy. Typically, Rotary districts in Italy prefer to work on their own, Koch says. But the pandemic was “an emergency that convinced the districts to work together.”
Rotary members (from left) Claudia Conversi, Anna Maria Bonomo, Gabriele Andria, and Maria Rossella Ricciardi helped lead District 2080’s efforts.
By mid-April, the Italian Rotarians, in partnership with Rotary members in Minnesota and elsewhere, had submitted four global grant applications to outfit 28 hospitals nationwide with equipment such as thermal scanners at hospital access gates to instantly detect fevers, tools for COVID-19 triage units, and covered biocontainment stretchers.
Meanwhile, with Italy at the epicenter of the pandemic in spring 2020, the U.S. government wanted to support the Italian people. It approved $60 million in aid, to be disbursed primarily through USAID, the government agency that provides international development assistance and disaster relief.
Rotary and USAID have been partners for more than a decade, first on water and sanitation projects in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Rotary brought its access and reach; USAID and its partners had the technical expertise. More recently, the two organizations have partnered through Hearts of Europe, a four-year jointly funded program aimed at fostering collaboration and friendship among Rotary in select Eastern European countries and the United States by providing low-cost, high-impact, locally led community activities.
USAID doesn’t typically distribute aid in Italy, focusing instead on countries most in need of development assistance through partnerships and investments that save lives, reduce poverty, strengthen democratic governance, and help people emerge from humanitarian crises and progress beyond assistance. So when it came to the pandemic relief efforts, the agency looked to trusted partners already working in Italy — including Rotary.
Rotary in Italy covers the entire country, from north to south, from metropolises like Rome to tiny villages dotting mountainous landscapes. “Rotary is a unique power in Italy,” Koch says. “Rotary members know the communities. They know the way the community thinks and acts. They know the mayor, the doctor, the pharmacist, the butcher — everyone who counts.”
USAID saw Rotary as the perfect gateway into the communities it was trying to reach. The $5 million grant received through USAID was eventually divided among the 14 Rotary districts. Each district proposed to USAID how to spend the money.
Rotary members used the $5 million grant from USAID to reach:
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956 schools
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41 hospitals
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620 nursing homes
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16,000+ workers
Data as of 27 April
Rotary members in Italy saw the grant as a chance to build on their nationwide project. They decided to focus on three areas: health care, education, and community and economic development. In total, the 14 districts implemented 53 projects throughout the country. “We had a win-win situation,” says Koch, the zone’s regional Rotary Foundation coordinator at the time.
“It was a natural thing to do,” says Robert Camilleri, a deputy director at USAID. “When you want to reach communities, Rotary is a partner that comes to mind as one that’s having an impact and that we can help support.”
Small and medium businesses are the Italian economy’s lifeblood. They employ nearly 80 percent of workers and generate about two-thirds of the economic value of businesses outside of the financial sector, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In a report by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., 80 percent of businesses surveyed in Italy in August 2020 felt the pandemic had somewhat or greatly reduced their bottom line.
At the headquarters of Unindustria, a business association in Rome, Davide Lucchetti and Alberto Formichetti demonstrate an app developed to help small businesses make sense of the web of relief available to them. The app works like a search engine, providing hyperlocal information about available benefits. Unindustria has 2,800 member companies employing 220,000 people across the Lazio region. Eighty-five percent are small and medium businesses. In the pandemic’s early days, Lucchetti recalls working 20-hour days trying to help companies through the crisis.
Claudia Conversi, a member of the Rotary Club of Guidonia-Montecelio and District 2080’s Rotary Foundation chair in 2018-21, has a family business that mines Roman travertine, a stone used as building material that can be seen in landmarks throughout the city (imagine the Colosseum). She’s associated with Unindustria through the company, as are many Rotary members who are entrepreneurs.
Rotary members meet with school administrators to talk about possible future collaborations.
When thinking about the plight of Italy’s businesses and how the USAID funding could help, Unindustria came to mind. “I asked myself: How can we help a bigger number of companies with a small amount of money?” she recalls. “We have to find a partner.”
Unindustria had already been thinking about the app, and the injection of funding from the Rotary-USAID partnership helped make it a reality. It launched in the spring of 2022, and within a year it had 16,000 users and 40,000 views. “The Rotary and USAID assistance was essential,” says Cristiana Campanella of Unindustria. “We had allies with us to get out of the crisis. It was a great opportunity to collaborate.”
And Lucchetti sees great possibilities for the app’s future. There was the emergency of the pandemic, but also an energy crisis and a commodity crisis. The group could evolve the platform to deal with multiple business problems or use it to invest in shrinking the gender gap by helping women start businesses.
Medical projects, too, have found a second life after the pandemic’s crisis period. After Constantino Astarita, 2021-22 governor of District 2101 in the Campania region including Naples, learned that Italy was behind in processing positive COVID-19 tests to detect virus variants, the district decided to help. Rotary members used USAID funding to purchase lab equipment for TIGEM, an institute in Pozzuoli that researches genetic diseases. During the pandemic, the facility was the leading COVID-19 sequencing site in Italy. The donated machines reduced the time needed to prepare samples by 90 percent, helping further researchers’ understanding of how the virus mutates and spreads. Today, researchers use the machines to study rare genetic diseases and cancers.
The district used another grant for a monitoring system that allowed pregnant or postpartum people with COVID-19 to remain in close audiovisual contact with staff 24 hours a day at a hospital in Naples. Today, the system is used for all hospitalized patients in the maternity ward, with or without COVID.
Children flock to Sara De Lorenzis like she’s the Pied Piper, following her under a wisteria-covered arbor and through the dappled shade of chestnut trees when visitors to her school appear. De Lorenzis is a support teacher for students with special needs at a culinary and hospitality school in a leafy neighborhood near the Roman Appian Way, the ancient cobblestone road that ran from Rome to present-day Brindisi in the heel of Italy.
Among the school buildings are three former villas, including one that was once home to actress Ingrid Bergman and her filmmaker husband, Roberto Rossellini.
The school received tablets through the Rotary-USAID project that it initially used to support pandemic-era hybrid learning, but with students back at school full time, De Lorenzis has been using them to build lessons. “Sometimes it is hard for the students to follow all the lessons in a standard way,” she says. “I can make it very interactive and accessible. It is playful for them.”
Teacher Sara de Lorenzis (right) poses with her student, Zoe. De Lorenzis uses the tablets donated by Rotary and USAID to build lessons for her students.
Sabrina Torino has seen her 14-year-old son, Marco, blossom. “He is the protagonist of the lesson thanks to the use of the device,” she says. “It is much better than a simple book.”
In District 2090, which encompasses four central Italian regions, Rotary members realized that COVID-19 would “forever change our habits, both in society and in the education field,” says 2020-21 District Governor Rossella Piccirilli, a member of the Rotary Club of Lanciano, near the Adriatic Sea. After distributing 513 tablets to 49 schools with its first round of USAID funding, the district decided to enhance the 397 tablets given in its second funding round by pairing them with wireless keyboards. “This way, students could use the device as both a study tool and a complete workstation,” Piccirilli says. When the immediate need for tablets during pandemic-era schooling was over, students in the city of Teramo repurposed the equipment to increase their STEM skills by programming robots that they took to national robotics competitions.
The initiatives funded through the Rotary-USAID partnership were disaster response projects, but Rotary members built in an impressive amount of sustainability. The projects continue to pay dividends, not just through the equipment that people are using in new ways, but also by continuing relationships with partners that are developing into future projects. In Sicily, for example, those partnerships have evolved into mentoring and other opportunities for Rotary members to work with students. In Rome, Rotary members used their connections in schools to pitch Rotary Youth Exchange to parents, students, and school administrators. Other clubs have found new members as their communities gained a greater understanding of what Rotary is and what Rotary does.
“It was a big opportunity for us to work with the community, to reach a large number of people who did not know about Rotary,” says Conversi, who oversaw the partnership activities for District 2080, encompassing the regions of Sardinia and Lazio, which includes Rome.
And the project kept Rotary members engaged too. Districts typically worked with most, if not all, of their clubs to implement the projects. “During that period, clubs were disoriented and unable to meet in person. Older members were isolated due to their limited familiarity with technology,” Piccirilli of District 2090 says. “However the project was enthusiastically embraced by the clubs, who, thanks to USAID, could offer tangible assistance to their communities and convey the message that Rotary is ready to take action.”
Roman Chaika fled with his family to Rome from Ukraine. He used one of the donated tablets to teach himself Italian and earn top marks at his new school in Monterotondo, Italy.
Student Roman Chaika stands on the dais in the auditorium of his school in Monterotondo, a town about a half-hour drive from central Rome. Mayor Riccardo Varone congratulates the lanky teenager on receiving a scholarship of about $1,000 from the Rotary Club of Monterotondo-Mentana. Chaika poses for a photo with friends.
He and his family moved to the Rome area from Ukraine, fleeing by car in July 2022. When Chaika started school that fall, he barely spoke a lick of Italian. But using a tablet supplied through the Rotary-USAID partnership, he translated the words he didn’t know, watched educational videos, and went on to score top marks in all his subjects at this science-based high school. “I use the tablet almost every day,” he says in a quiet, measured voice. “It’s very useful for me.”
The school orchestra plays. Its director, the school’s physics teacher (also a musician and composer), has taught them the Rotary anthem. The notes waft through the open door and outside into the sunlight, a celebration of what’s to come.
This story originally appeared in the September 2023 issue of Rotary magazine.