Monessen native leads 1.4 million Rotarians as international president for 2024-25

California has produced a pair of presidents.

If the question pops up on Trivia Night, the answer probably is Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

As it applies to Rotary International, two leaders of the worldwide service organization once belonged to the club in Washington County’s California Borough, which had about 5,700 residents when Monessen native Stephanie Urchick attended her first meeting there in 1991.

She found the Rotarians to be friendly, but was unfamiliar with many of the acronyms being mentioned. So she asked a nearby gentleman for translations of the alphabet soup.

“And he was so patient with me,” Urchick said a week after the July 1 start of her term as 2024-25 Rotary International president, overseeing 1.4 million members.

The gentleman turned out to be Charles Keller, her predecessor as president for 1987-88, and they remained close until his death in 2018 at age 94. He and wife Carol, another Rotarian, eventually lived just a few miles from Urchick’s North Strabane home.

“Occasionally I would go over, and Carol would put the tea kettle on. I’d sit with Chuck in the living room, and we would talk about all things Rotary. And it was a really, really special time for me,” Urchick said. “I do miss him.”

With Keller serving as her mentor, she quickly invested herself in the California club — “By the fourth meeting, I was doing the newsletter” — and just seven years after becoming a Rotarian, she served as the first female governor of Rotary District 7330, which extended from Pennsylvania’s southwestern corner to Cambria County.

Today, Urchick is a member of Peters Township’s McMurray Rotary Club, which Keller happened to be instrumental in forming when he served as district governor in the 1960s.

Since beginning her role as president-elect last summer, Urchick has been living near Rotary International headquarters in suburban Chicago, but she frequently is on the move.

Efforts to eradicate polio

A recent trip took her to Pakistan, one of only two countries — neighboring Afghanistan is the other — in which cases of polio still occur regularly. Rotary is a founding partner of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, launched during Keller’s presidency, and has its own PolioPlus program dedicated to ending the crippling disease.

In Pakistan, Urchick met with frontline workers in the country’s eradication efforts, first greeting a group of women to provide reassurance of Rotary’s support and express gratitude for their perseverance in delivering vaccines amid treacherous conditions.

“They’re doing the dangerous and difficult work of climbing those mountains in that region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. They’re getting shot at by the Taliban,” Urchick explained. “They were so appreciative. They said, ‘This is wonderful, knowing that Rotary likes what we’re doing. It will continue. It gives us the motivation to go on.’”

The men with whom she met immunize children by the busload.

“I said to one of the workers, ‘How many of these do you do every day?’ And he said, ‘Three thousand,’” she reported. “So when I left Pakistan, there was no question in my mind that we will eradicate polio. It’s not ‘if.’ It’s ‘when,’ because they were so diligent about the work that they’re doing. And I was grateful that I had a chance to see that.”

Back in Pittsburgh, eradication endeavors will receive a boost with Strike Out Polio night at the Pirates-Cardinals game on July 23 at PNC Park. Rotary District 7305 — which includes Allegheny, Washington and Westmoreland, among numerous other counties — arranged for tickets bought for the event to include a donation to PolioPlus.

Urchick will be in town to throw out the first pitch.

Further service ventures for her include travels to India and Nigeria to administer vaccines during National Immunization Days, to Vietnam for assistance in building a school, and to countries where people are in dire need of clean water.

‘The Magic of Rotary’

A trip to the Dominican Republic inspired Urchick to select “The Magic of Rotary” as the theme for her year as president. She recalled giving one family a demonstration of how to assemble and use a biosand filter to remove particles and pathogens from their water.

“The last thing we would do was test it,” she said. “So we would put dirty water in one side, and it would come out clean on the other. And when we stopped doing the test, one of the little boys ran up to me, and he tugged on my sleeve and said, ‘Lady, lady, show me that magic again!’”

In her view, the filter’s real wonder was the positive effect it had on the family, particularly in eliminating the need to walk long distances for fresh water.

“It dawned on me that every single Rotarian has engaged in something, been a part of something, that has created magic. So I thought it was the perfect phrase to use as an inspiration and rallying call for all that we do in Rotary,” she said about her theme.

For Rotary in general, an overarching theme is working toward harmony.

“If you look at our foundational principles and our constitution, we’re an organization that’s built on world understanding and peace. And so everything that we do is meant to create the optimal conditions in societies that can help peace happen,” Urchick said. “When we’re doing projects that feed people or provide basic education or provide clean water, those are foundational elements that need to be in a society before peace can be there.”

She acknowledged that such efforts have their limits.

“I’ll be clear: Rotary will never stop a war or negotiate the release of hostages,” she said. “But we do have things that we can use to help really get to that kind of climate or that atmosphere.”

Among them is the establishment of global Rotary Peace Centers to train individuals in conflict resolution and related skills. Istanbul, Turkey, is the site of the newest center, which will host a peace symposium Feb. 20-22.

Anyone with an interest in promoting goodwill is invited to attend, Urchick said.

“We want the world to see that this is what Rotary is focused on: building peace.”

For more information, visit rotary.org/en and rotarydistrict7305.org.