Featured Projects
Everything on this site is the work of a small club in Stevenage. These three projects are the ones we would point to first. One restored sight to thousands of people in Asia for the price of a pint each. One is putting a roof back on a classroom in the Niger Delta right now. One involves standing in the cold in December, pushing an illuminated sleigh around your street, and it pays for a great deal of the rest.
Making Blindness History
Between roughly 2007 and 2014, this club funded eight overseas projects in Asia at a cost of around £230,000. Those projects paid for over 7,600 cataract operations.
A cataract operation takes about twenty minutes. The patient arrives blind and leaves seeing. It is one of the most cost-effective interventions in all of medicine, and our projects delivered them for less than the price of a pint of beer each.
The club came to call it ROI, for return on investment, because the arithmetic is almost embarrassing to state. Sight restored means work resumed, families supported, and children back in school instead of caring for a blind parent. The economic uplift to the communities involved was estimated at over £6m each year, against a total outlay of £230,000.
We are a few dozen people in Hertfordshire who raise most of our money by pushing a sleigh around Stevenage in the cold.
Opobo Classrooms
The Rotary Club of Stevenage Grange partnered with Save Opobo Foundation to refurbish a community school in Opobo, Rivers State, Nigeria, improving the learning environment for more than 300 pupils.
The club committed £1,000 towards the project and secured a Rotary District Matching Grant, increasing the impact of its contribution to cover over 40% of the refurbishment costs. The project restored classrooms with improved roofs, floors, and essential facilities, creating a safer and more inspiring place for children to learn.
This initiative reflects Rotary’s commitment to Basic Education and Literacy and demonstrates how collaboration with trusted local partners can deliver lasting benefits. By investing in education today, the project is helping to create opportunities that will positively impact generations of children in the years ahead.
The Christmas Sleigh
Every December, members take an illuminated sleigh around the streets of Stevenage. It is cold, it takes weeks, and it is the reason most of the town knows who we are.
It raised nearly £2,900 last year, which was almost exactly what it raised the year before. There is no clever mechanism behind it. It is people walking slowly through the dark in December while their neighbours come out of their houses with change.
That money, along with the raffles and the tombolas and the stalls, is what pays for everything else on this site. The cataract projects, the classrooms, the local donations. All of it starts with a sleigh.