Rotary Club of Surfers Sunrise

Chartered in January 1987, Surfers Sunrise Rotary was the first ‘Breakfast Club’ on the Gold Coast. Our club participates in the traditional Rotary programs of Vocational, Community, Youth and International Service. We are emphatic in supporting local youth, via several Rotary-developed youth programs. These camps are targeted at teenagers who transition to adulthood (RYPEN), RYTS, the Rotary Youth Leadership Award (RYLA) for 18 - 29 year olds, as well as International Youth Exchange students. We support qualifying candidates for the National Youth Science Forum, and we sponsor the annual ‘Lutzy Award’, in the form of a surf ski for an emerging teenage leadership personality in the Surfers Paradise Surf Life Saving Club. Further, we are running a program 'Rotary Support for School Kids', established to support disadvantaged children from local schools. Our club is financing the purchase of essential goods, such as school uniforms, laptops etc. The recipients are selected by the Principals and our involvement is anonymous; there is no direct personal involvement with the children.

• Repurposing discarded bicycles to make low-cost “Rough Terrain” wheelchairs, destined for developing countries throughout the world, particularly in the Pacific, South-East Asia, Sri Lanka and many African countries. For just AU$123, we make a wheelchair suitable for unpaved, often muddy territory. By June 2026, over 12,000 (yes, twelve thousand) had been despatched, giving people, mostly children, the gift of mobility.
• Building schools and community buildings for underprivileged communities. The major projects were a school for Phuket, Thailand (after the tsunami of December 2004), two schools for Samoa (the tsunami of 2009), a ‘House of Hope’, together with a school for abandoned and abused children in Apia (Samoa) in 2014 and 2018.
• The most recent project, which was completed in 2024, is an X-Ray and Blood Analysis unit for Mauna Health Centre on the island of Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu.  This was a joint project with the Rotar Clubs of Surfers Paradise and Broadbeach.