About Our Club

The Rotary Club of West Olympia (also known as the West Olympia Rotary Club) is a service club of around 80 members representing a wide range of professions drawn from the business, government, education, and nonprofit sectors in the Olympia area. We get together every Tuesday at noon for a little socializing, lunch, a brief meeting, and an interesting program in the Viewpoint Room at West Bay Marina, 2100 West Bay Drive, Olympia, Washington. 

Club History and Organization

Our club was chartered by Rotary International (RI) in 1975 (see "Club History" and "Charter Officers and Members"), and like RI, our motto is "Service Above Self", and our focus is on the five "Avenues of Service" recognized by RI, which include Club Service, Vocational Service, Community Service, International Service, and Youth Service.  This emphasis on service is reflected in our Club Constitution and Bylaws (as adopted in 2011), where we established a Board of Directors with Director positions and Committees for each of the Avenues of Service.  (Please see our Club Organization Chart and our Committees webpage.) 

Charities Fund Board

As shown on the Organization Chart, we also have a Charities Fund Board that manages the assets in a Charities Fund that our club has established to house all of the funds raised through our various fundraising activities (including those in a Scholarship Endowment Fund that our members contribute to), all in accordance with a set of bylaws and in support of the club's West Olympia Rotary Statement of Values.  In doing so, the Board reviews funding requests from the club and other local community organizations seeking funding for their activities, and it decides whether to approve such requests.  If you are a community agency interested in a West Olympia Rotary Club Charities Board grant, please check out our Charities Request Guidelines to learn more about the process, and then use our Funding Request Form to download an application form.

Service and Social Activities

As shown in the links on our Committees webpage, our members have spent many hours of their time engaged in activities that support all of the five Avenues of Service recognized by RI.  These include many Community Service project activities in the local community, like cleaning up community parks, building garden beds for low income families, putting on a joint high school spaghetti feed to raise money for scholarships, bell ringing for the Salvation Army, and providing "sweat equity" for Habitat for Humanity, but we also support many Youth Service activities, including participating in Rotary's Youth Exchange Program, supporting an Interact Club at Capital High School, and providing college and vocational-technical school scholarships to graduating high school students.

Although we primarily focus our service activities in the West Olympia area, we also raise and spend thousands of dollars annually on service projects and other activities that address needs in the broader local community and around the world.  Some of our International Service project activities include providing books to a small library in Santo Tomas, Nicaragua, training Health Promoters in rural Bolivia, and supporting numerous water and sanitation projects in Africa, Central and South America, and Papua New Guinea, and all of these activities have proven to be both rewarding and fun.

But please be assured that we are not an organization that is all work and no play. Fellowship is a core value for our club, and we look for any excuse to have fun. Committee meetings are also social events, and we schedule a number of family and club-oriented gatherings (like wine tastings, picnics, etc.) that help renew and energize us as an organization.  To see some of the activities that we've been engaged in over the years, please see our Photo Albums.

Check Us Out

Please take a few minutes to check us out through this website. Like our club, the website is a work in progress. If you are interested in learning more about us, or if you want to ask about membership, we encourage you to Contact Us or check out the "Interested in Joining?" tab on the horizontal menu bar above. We are always looking for new members who share our interest in serving our local community and the broader world community. We hope you are such a person.