Redmond Rotary Joins “This Close” Campaign to End Polio

Rotary Club of Redmond, a long-time supporter of Rotary International’s efforts to eradicate polio worldwide, is now a supporter of the new “This Close” campaign.

The club has donated more than $46,000 dollars in the past decade to support Rotary International’s efforts to end polio. The current and next club Presidents, Michael Nichols and Will Miller, have now posed for the “This Close” Campaign in the same fashion as have public figures such as Bill Gates and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

To encourage public support for its effort to eradicate polio, Rotary International welcomed a select group of celebrities and other major public figures into a new public awareness campaign called "This Close.”

The campaign promotes Rotary’s End Polio Now campaign and its $200 Million Challenge (to match a $355 million polio eradication grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).

These public service announcements emphasize that Rotary is 99 percent toward its goal to eradicate this crippling childhood disease. The PSAs encourage the public to support the effort to finish off the final 1 percent.

The campaign’s tagline is: "We’re this close to ending polio." The centerpiece of the campaign is a print advertisement built around the tagline and a portrait photograph of each participant doing the signature “This Close” gesture with their thumb and forefinger, with display type providing the context.

Visit http://thisclose.endpolio.org/en to learn more about the campaign or the club’s Facebook page, www.facebook.org/redmondrotary, and website, www.redmondrotary.org, for more information on Rotary Club of Redmond.