Local Club Marks 100 Years of Community Service

By Misty Cryer

Carlsbad Rotary Club has made numerous contributions to the community through service projects over the last 100 years, along with assisting with the organization’s international projects. Membership of the local club has increased steadily this year. Upcoming on February 8 is Carlsbad Rotary Pancake Day.

Pancake Day will be at Carlsbad High School’s cafeteria from 6 a.m. to noon. The tickets are $5 per person. Children aged five and under accompanied by an adult eat free.

For the last couple of years, a blood drive has been combined with Pancake Day, according to Benjamin Freston, President of the Carlsbad Rotary Club. “Those who donate blood will get a free ticket for the Pancake Day,” he said.

“We took it over from the Kiwanis Club in 2018,” said Freston about Pancake Day. “Prior to that, they ran it for several years, but due to membership, they had to close their club,” he said.

“We’ve had a number of new members who joined this year, and prior to that, we were about 75. We have a good group of people,” he said.

Freston shared information about the history of the organization and the local club.

“Back in 1905, it was started by a man by the name of Paul Harris in Chicago. He was an attorney there. The point of starting the organization was to just get some like-minded men to kind of find ways to help give back to the community—to serve in different ways,” he said. He said members were a bunch of entrepreneurs, and at that point, it was just for men; now, membership is open to everybody.

“Twenty years after that, in 1925, is when the Carlsbad club opened up,” said Freston. “This year, we are celebrating 100 years for our club,” he said.

“Here, locally, we do a lot of scholarships for our local students to go on to continue with education, advanced degrees, and stuff like that to help encourage them to continue to shape their minds and be the help in the future for the community that they serve in later in life,” said Freston.

“Pancake Day does a lot of that,” he said, explaining that the proceeds go to scholarship funds as well as funding other projects the club does in the community.

“Recently, we just did a service project for Packs for Hunger,” said Freston. “They were in need of some new shelving. They had gotten some donated shelves from Albertsons—they used that for a number of years, but recently, some of them had broken and almost hurt some people. We went over and replaced them with a bunch of new, sturdier shelving and helped to make donations for more food for the kids,” he said.

There are a lot of other projects that Rotarians have been involved in locally over the last 100 years. Examples provided by Freston include revitalizing a park in Loving, lighting of the Flume, new lighting and padding on the gym walls at the Boys and Girls Club, construction of a playground center at the Battered Family Shelter, and building playgrounds and handicap-accessible parks, including Playground on the Pecos and Friendship Park. He said some of the projects involve Rotary partnering with other organizations.

“We have two mottos for Rotary. One of them is ‘service above self.’ The other one is ‘one profits most who serves best,’” Freston said. “Where we see a need, we try to fill those needs through service; that service will come in a variety of different ways,” he said.

“Every year when we get a new President, they may have a different focus or a different theme; everyone has a project,” said Freston.

Rotary International is now around the world, said Freston. “It serves communities throughout the world,” he said.

“The efforts of it are basically to serve the communities around us and to find ways in which we can provide services to those who are underserved, even providing the basic necessities for life,” said Freston.

“A lot of service projects that we will be involved in are water projects for some of these countries that don’t have access to clean water,” Freston said, adding that the projects include bringing water to those areas through things like pumps and pipes and helping to teach the people of that community to do the work, but also to maintain the water systems. Other projects on a global basis mentioned by Freston include providing medical equipment and health education.

For more information about Carlsbad Rotary Club and its activities in the community, follow their Facebook page.