Lowell Rotary Club Getting Ready for Next Water Filter Project

If there is one thing everyone deserves, it’s access to clean water. At least, that’s the philosophy of the Lowell Rotary Club.

When the group isn’t handing out dictionaries to local students or spearheading fundraising efforts for the new Showboat, they are busy installing water filters around the globe. Along with its youth chapters, the Lowell Rotary Club has already sent filters to Haiti, and it is a major sponsor of a Lowell Middle School initiative to dig a well in South Sudan.

Up next is a water filter project in central Honduras which will provide 250 families with filters for clean water.

Lack of Indoor Plumbing Means Need is Great

While we can turn on the tap in our houses and watch the water flow, people elsewhere in the world have a markedly different experience.

“They generally don’t have any type of bathroom facilities,” says Wendell Christoff, a Lowell Rotary member, when asked about the challenges facing families in less developed countries. People might have to travel long distances to simply acquire water and then it could be filled with bacteria or toxins.

Christoff says the Lowell and Grand Haven Rotary Clubs are working together with a mission organization in central Honduras to identify 250 families in need of water filters. The bio-sand filters use a gravity system to pull water through three layers of aggregate. Made in Grand Rapids, the filters are the Rotary Club’s go-to system for providing clean water.

“These filters have been in use for more than ten years,” Christoff notes. Their durability and sustainability are prime reasons the Lowell Rotary Club uses them. They don’t want to install a filter that may stop working shortly after the project is complete.

What’s more, they are affordable. Christoff estimates when it’s all said and done, the filters cost less than 3 cents a day to provide up to 50 gallons of clean water. That’s an investment that’s hard to beat when you consider how dramatically access to clean water can change a family’s life.

Projects Pulls Funding from Multiple Sources

Thanks to a unique funding system offered by Rotary International, the Lowell and Grand Haven clubs didn’t have to come up with the full $45,000 project cost on their own. Lowell pitched in $9,000 while Grand Haven raised $4,000. The Rotary District then matched that $13,000, and a request has been made to Rotary International for the final $19,000.

Rotary’s method of matching funds and pooling money from both local clubs and the international organization allow groups to tackle bigger projects. It means money raised in Lowell can be multiplied several times over to complete work that would otherwise be a stretch for the local club alone.

Christoff stresses the Honduras project is just one of many that are initiated by Rotary Clubs across the world each year. “There’s thousands and thousands of projects going on,” he says. The local district alone has upwards of 20 in the works that will help people in countries from India to Brazil.

For local Rotarians, charity begins in Lowell with its community projects and ends halfway across the world by giving someone the life-changing gift of clean water. The group’s work is one more reason why so many are proud to call Lowell home.

To learn more about the Lowell Rotary Club, visit their website or Facebook page.

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