JOHN MCCARTHY MEMORIAL
As part of World Community Services month here at Rotary, we wanted to tell you about a special grant that the committee is awarding to honor one of our former members and our dear friend, John McCarthy. You all know that John passed away very unexpectedly six months ago. Today we have asked John’s wife, Suzanne, to join us as we honor him with a special award dedicated to him.
John was a very active member of our committee – he participated in many projects over the years, including polio immunization days in Nigeria and India; he traveled to Haiti to distribute water filters with Pure Water for the World; and he made many service trips to Guatemala in support of Safe Passage, which helps the children and the families that are part of the Guatemala City garbage dump community. You’ll hear more about Safe Passage later in this meeting --- and John was a passionate and dedicated advocate for the school and children there. These pictures show him in Guatemala on some of his service trips over the years.
In recognition of his tireless efforts on behalf of World Community Services, the committee is giving a special grant in his honor to Safe Passage to create a memorial classroom to honor his memory. Accepting this grant, Safe Passage said that it “is honored that the Traverse City Rotary has chosen to celebrate the life and commitment of John McCarthy through the purchase of new laptop computers in a classroom named for him for our first-time 6th, 7th and 8th-grade classes. These computers will be used in a mobile unit for our computer, science and math curriculum, and will permanently reside in a new classroom upon its completion. Safe Passage is proud to honor this donation and John McCarthy’s dedication to the children in our programs with a recognition plaque in the John McCarthy Memorial Classroom at the Collegio.
John had a proclivity for and love of science and could explain even the most complicated technological aspects of a project easily, so we believe that providing assistance in the science & tech arena is particularly fitting and would make him very happy indeed.
