(upbeat music) - Founded in 1911, the Salt Lake City Rotary Club is part of a global network committed to service and ethical leadership.

President Heidi Ruster is here to tell us more.

Hi, Heidi.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- I'm so glad you're here.

This is the first time we've had the Rotary Club on the show since I can remember, and I think there's a lot of people out there who don't know what the Rotary Club is.

I'd love for them to learn more.

- Yeah, so Rotary Club is a service organization, been around for many years, started in Illinois of all places, and the whole idea was a rotary.

So each business had an opportunity to host each other during their meetings.

That was the idea initially.

But also to bring people of like interest together and have fellowship.

And that interest is mostly service back to the community.

Seeing where the needs are and how this group of individuals who are very diverse in what they do, both community leaders, business leaders, and really see where the needs are greatest.

We meet weekly, and we often find out in our program what's going on through the city, through sports teams, through the different schools that we work with.

Really get a good sense of that and figure out where do we wanna do our service.

So each club does a little bit different service, but much of it is surrounded around youth and youth empowerment, but also environment and internationally, polio or the end of polio is still a focus.

That's much of what we focused on in the beginning of Rotary, but there's still many people still with polio in two or three countries in the world.

- So who can join the Rotary Club?

- So anybody is open to apply, and we would love for people to consider to join us that have a real interest in engaging the community, getting to know other business and community leaders, and join us to really engage and have deep fellowship with a lot of social opportunities.

And so it's just a wonderful place to, to recognize the ability to give back service above self and to do it with great integrity.

- Oh, sounds wonderful and a great way to network and learn leadership.

- That's right.

- Well, thank you so much for telling us more about it.

And if you would like to learn more about the Salt Lake City Rotary Club, simple, go to SLCRotary.org.

That's SLCRotary.org.

I'm Laura Durham.

Thanks for watching "Contact."

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