The International Committee
The International Committee meet on a regular basis to plan how funds can be best directed to help with causes in need overseas.
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Over the last few years these are the projects that have been helped...
Autumn 2025 - End Polio Now​
Supporting Rotary International’s ongoing campaign to End Polio Now, we worked with the local community and Farlingaye High, the Primary schools of St Mary’s, Kyson, Woodbridge, and The Abbey Preparatory, distributing crocus bulbs to be planted and raising around £600 for this worthy cause. They are now beginning to peep through as can be seen in the photograph. To find out more about this campaign visit <rotarygbi.org>.
Autumn 2024 - Ukrainian Christmas Card Project
The following year children from the local schools designed Christmas cards with a simple message. These cards were a wonderful sign of solidarity with children who were still living under constant bombardment. We also sent information and images of of Woodbridge and about its four primary schools – what was taught and what made up their normal primary school day
Autumn 2023 - Ukrainian Children’s ‘Treasure Boxes’
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In the Autumn of 2023, some eighteen months after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the club saw an interview of President Zelensky’s wife with Bel Trew of The Independent. In it she described how with the constant bombing, loss of contact with friends and seeing those suffering with life changing injuries, some children were losing the will to live.
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​​​​​Olena Zelenska ended the interview with these words:
Can we endure this? There is no other way out. We have
no right to be tired. This is about our very survival.
Having made contact with UK Aid, an Essex registered charity that regularly takes essential items overland to Ukraine, the club decided to enlist the help of the four local primary schools to support the project. Assemblies were taken in each school and the children were invited to provide the sort of items that children would enjoy, especially when they were in the darkness of a bomb shelter. Pens, pencils, felt tips, picture puzzles, playing cards and portable games, etc were collected. These were sorted and placed in tough plastic boxes with a secure snap-on lid for ease of carrying in an emergency. Altogether the club was able to fill fifty of these boxes along with a further two crates for distribution in time for Christmas. The Club also received an anonymous donation of £500 for the purchase of more essential items.
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UK-Aid began as a registered charity which aims to help sick and under privileged children in Ukraine, especially those still suffering from the devastating effects of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and now those traumatised in Russia’s war on Ukraine. The convoys travel overland. Donations are stored and sorted /packed in its donated warehouse and its office is based at home – thus keeping expenditure to the minimum
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The items were taken overland via Poland by lorry and delivered to schools in the far north east of Ukraine in a town close to the existing Russian border
We received photos of the children opening the boxes in school along with thanks for our support of the children.
