Palo Alto Rotary Club Annual Charities, Inc. is a publicly-supported charitable affiliate of the Rotary Club of Palo Alto. This Rotary Club was chartered in 1922. Annually, our club raises money for the direct support of non-profit or educational organizations whose activities benefit our local and international communities. Our fundraiser provides more than three quarters of the income used for these purposes, with additional funds coming from the Palo Alto Rotary Endowment Fund and President’s Club contributions. In total over $150,000 is budgeted in 2022 for all of our charitable activities.
- Palo Alto Rotary Club allocated $25,000 in 2021, for vocational scholarships for students at local community colleges
- Palo Alto Rotary Club sponsors a wide variety of youth programs including the Interact Service Club at Gunn High School, camperships to the annual Rotary Youth Leadership Awards training camp for young people, a Boy Scout troop and a Cub Scout pack, and Palo Alto Girl Scouts.
- Palo Alto Rotary Club undertakes numerous "hands on" community projects and decorates University Ave. with flags on national holidays.
- Palo Alto Rotary Club annually provides funding, usually in partnership with other Rotary Clubs and Rotary International, for a variety of carefully selected service projects in the global community. In addition, we sometimes have an international “hands on” project where members travel to a country to assist in a charitable project that we support.
- The largest single component of our charitable budget is for grants to local non-profit and educational organizations, selected on the basis of their grant applications. The total amount granted in any year will depend on the success of our annual fundraising event the prior year. In 2020, more than $80,000 was raised through event sponsorships and auction items. Our current process solicits grants from a variety of non profit organizations in the community from April through January of the following year. In February, these requests are carefully evaluated by a committee of Rotarians, who choose four or five of the most worthy requests. The grants are then awarded to the winning applicants at the annual fund raiser in the mid March timeframe.
- In 2018 Palo Alto Rotary made a $100,00 gift towards the renovation of the Palo Alto Junior Musem and Zoo to kick off our centennial celebration.
Palo Alto Rotary Club Annual Charities is a 501(c)3 non-profit
organization Federal Tax I.D.# 77 0552981