Peta-Gay Price, right, and Disrict 7200 assistant governor Kerese celebrate with a 5-year-old as she prepares to go home after her procedure at Bustamante Hospital, supported by a global grant.” data-large-file=”https://blog.rotary.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/childrens-hospital-main.jpg?w=600″ />By Peta-Gay A. Pryce, Major Donor and Benefactor of The Rotary Foundation, member of the Rotary Club of New Kingston, Jamaica
There is a kind of love that grows out of gratitude for something that shaped the conditions of your life long before you knew its name. That is the love I carry for The Rotary Foundation.
I am, in the truest sense, a beneficiary of this Foundation in a way I did not earn and could not have asked for. I was born into a Jamaica free of polio, and that is not a small thing. It is the quiet, enduring gift of a generation of Rotary members who decided, decades before I drew my first breath, that a child in Kingston deserved the same protection as a child in Atlanta or in Tokyo. They committed the money, mobilised the volunteers, and walked into communities with vials of vaccine until the work was done. I have walked through my entire life on legs that work, and I owe a measure of that to this Foundation. So when we say “End Polio Now,” I do not hear a slogan. I hear gratitude.
The Foundation came near me again in India. I was there on a study programme when a group of Rotary members invited me, a stranger and a guest in their country, to join them at a health fair they were implementing. It was there, for the first time in my life, that I came face to face with children who had been affected by polio. Their bodies told the story of what happens when a vaccine arrives one season too late. I have not forgotten their faces, and since that day I have never once questioned what this Foundation is for.
My own journey of giving to The Rotary Foundation began in 2015, when I became a Paul Harris Fellow. It was, at the time, a quiet decision, but it set something in motion that I did not fully appreciate then. Today, I am humbled and happy to celebrate being a Major Donor and a Benefactor of the Foundation. I do not share that as a credential. I share it because it is evidence that one small step of generosity, taken in faith, can grow into a habit, and that habit can grow into a life of meaning.
In my professional life, working in social development, I have come to understand that the difference between a community that survives and a community that thrives is almost always the presence, or the absence, of people who refuse to look away. Global grants are how Rotary refuses to look away. The most local example, for me, is the global grant supporting cardiovascular care for the children of the Bustamante Hospital for Children. As a result of that grant, there are children in Jamaica today who will grow up, fall in love, raise families, and build careers and eventually join the Rotary family. They are children who, without it, may not have lived long enough to do any of those things.
It is in that same spirit that I have made two commitments I wish to put on record. I am proud to become a charter member of District 7020’s PolioPlus Society, because the unfinished work of polio eradication is the closest thing our generation has to a sacred trust handed down by those who came before us. Also, I remain committed to the Paul Harris Society, because the Foundation does its best and boldest work when it can count on us, year after year, without having to ask twice.
I also want to honour the Rotary members who came before us. They imagined a world without polio when polio was still a thief in our nurseries. They built the first global grants when the funds were modest and the needs were immense. They sustained this Foundation quietly through the years when no one was watching. They opened the doors of opportunity through which we now walk, and they handed us, in trust, the chance to create lasting change. To them, we owe a debt of gratitude that words alone cannot repay.
To everyone reading this, I extend an invitation. Please consider what your gift could do. Whether through a first contribution, becoming an Annual Fund Sustaining Member, becoming a Paul Harris Fellow, or supporting a global grant brought to life by your club, every gift is a hand reaching back to the next child, the next community, the next generation. The Foundation does not need a few extraordinary donors. It needs many ordinary ones, giving faithfully. Join us.