Since its start in 1969, a small club on the West Side continues its legacy of community-driven efforts.

When Craig Alvarado moved back to Waiʻanae to raise his kids in the same place his family had lived for three generations, he began looking for ways to volunteer and give back to the Waiʻanae community. He was attracted to the Waiʻanae Coast Rotary Club as an active service organization, although he’d never been a Rotary member before. Now, roughly halfway through his one-year term as the current Waiʻanae Coast Rotary Club president, Alvarado is building on Rotary’s legacy of service, which stretches back more than 50 years.

The Waiʻanae Coast Rotary Club, chartered in April 1969, is a small but mighty group of community movers and shakers—currently there are 21 members—whose signature service projects include the Dictionary Distribution Project, which aims to put dictionaries into the hands of every third grader on the Waiʻanae Coast, a popular annual “96792 Pride” photo contest and calendar that is used to fund the project, and the annual Waiʻanae Coast Community Christmas Parade, which triumphantly returned in 2022 after a hiatus during the COVID-19 lockdown. “We wondered what the turnout would be, but it was just amazing,” Alvarado says. “Thousands of people lined the street from Waiʻanae Boat Harbor to Waiʻanae Mall—the community reaction was a validation that the parade is very relevant.”

Then, there’s the Rotary Club’s impactful, merit-based youth scholarships. Awarded each year to high school seniors who reside in the 96792 ZIP code area and who are pursuing a four-year college education, the scholarships are a game-changer for students with limited financial means. This year, the Rotary Club is broadening its range of scholarships to include vocational and community college scholarships as well.

The first Rotary Club meeting was held in Chicago in 1905. Today its satellite organizations comprise a global, nondenominational, non-political network of diverse individuals—over a million members worldwide in more than 200 countries and territories—all sharing a common desire to serve and improve the quality of life in their communities.

The Waiʻanae Coast Rotary Club, chartered in April 1969, is a small but mighty group of community movers and shakers—currently there are 21 members—whose signature service projects include the Dictionary Distribution Project, which aims to put dictionaries into the hands of every third grader on the Waiʻanae Coast, a popular annual “96792 Pride” photo contest and calendar that is used to fund the project, and the annual Waiʻanae Coast Community Christmas Parade, which triumphantly returned in 2022 after a hiatus during the COVID-19 lockdown. “We wondered what the turnout would be, but it was just amazing,” Alvarado says. “Thousands of people lined the street from Waiʻanae Boat Harbor to Waiʻanae Mall—the community reaction was a validation that the parade is very relevant.”

To learn more about the Waiʻanae Coast Rotary Club, visit WaiʻanaeCoastRotary.org.