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Our club belongs to District 7030.
This district consists of the following countries:
Antigua, Barbados, Dominica, French-Guyana, Grenada,
Guadeloupe, Guyana, Martinique, St.Kitts, St.Lucia,
St.Vincent & the Grenadines, Suriname and Trinidad &
Tobago.
The total Caribbean region consists
of clubs in Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, Aruba,
Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands,
Cayman Islands, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada,
Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, Netherland Antilles, St.
Kitts-Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines,
Trinidad & Tobago, Turks & Caicos Islands, Virgin
Islands
DATE OF ADMISSION : 10TH AUG.
1957
MAJOR RECENT PROJECT:
Disability awareness campaign
This has lead to national policy improvements and
vocational assistance programs.
The Rotary clubs involved
conducted a study to gauge the problem and
discovered that 95 percent of all area disabled were
unemployed. To address the problem, the Rotary clubs
of Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, and
Coral Gables, Florida, USA, used a Health, Hunger
and Humanities (3-H) Grant (US$268,800) from The
Rotary Foundation to open a pioneering center for
people with disabilities, providing both
telemedicine and distance-learning services.
The goal is to assist persons
with disabilities to achieve economic and social
independence with "self-help" skills, to promote
public awareness and training through advocacy, to
create an on-line resource bank and a
community-based consortium of groups working with
the disabled, to implement a conference, to
establish a resource and training center, and to
provide vocational education to the disabled and
training to rehabilitation professionals.
The joint project has
revolutionized vocational and clinical
rehabilitation and encouraged changes in government
policy. The Minister of Works and Transportation set
a new national policy requiring
wheelchair-accessible curbs at all new public and
private construction sites after Rotary members
obtained a second Rotary Foundation grant of
US$30,000 to create 400 sidewalk ramps in Trinidad
and Tobago.
Subsequently, the country's
Minister of Health created a task force, including
members from both Rotary clubs, to create a national
plan for medical and rehabilitation services.
Long-held stereotypes about physical disability are
beginning to disappear as a result of these new
programs.
CHARITON ' 02 is currently
focused on providing an Exclusive Bus Service for
Wheelchair users in Port of Spain.
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