We're off TOMORROW!!! Our two cars are ready to go. Here's hoping that the stickers come off afterwards!

This is Team Pug

and this is Team Herdy

Rotarians are coming together from across the UK to highlight their fight to end the scourge of polio, a fight we started back in 1979. Back then, over a 1,000 children contracted this crippling disease every day but this year there have only been 8 cases throughout the World thanks to almost 40 years of vaccination campaigns led by Rotarians. So, although polio in Britain is a distant memory, we mustn’t forget that we have yet to finish this huge endeavour and eradicate polio for good by continuing to vaccinate every child in those hard-to-reach places such as Afghanistan for at least the next three years. After all, if we were to fail now, the virus is only a short flight away from us.

Across the UK, we’ve been raising over £1M a year. My Club's major event for 2018 is a Banger Rally, the Purple4Polio Grand Tour, around the UK from 21st to 24th May. Why purple? Well to be sure that every child in a city or a village has been vaccinated, we dip their little finger in a harmless purple dye so when see ‘purple pinkies’ everywhere, we know we can move on to the next community with confidence. The cars will be decorated in purple and so will the participants!

My Rotary Club, South Foreland (based in Dover), just one of over 1,000 in Britain, has entered two ‘bangers’ into the tour, a Peugeot 307 and a Vauxhall Zafira with a team of 8 participants. We aim to visit check-points from Dover to Exeter, Brynmawr to Cambridge and Preston to Halifax to give a flavour of the 1,000 miles that we’ll cover in the four days raising awareness about the End Polio Now campaign, collecting donations and engaging the broadcast and social media as we go.

I hope that you will support this great cause because we really are ‘this close’ to eradicating polio throughout the world, forever. All of your donation will go to the End Polio Now campaign as the participants will fund all their own costs. The Rotary Foundation is a UK registered charity and the donations will be accumulated initially in the Rotary Club of South Foreland’s Charity Trust Fund, reg. no. 1068471 from which we can raise a non VAT invoice if that would be helpful.

Great news…all donations will be trebled! For every £1 that Rotary raises for the End Polio Now Campaign, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will donate £2.