A child in Eagle County will carry a bright red bag of books home to read with her family.

A family escaping domestic violence in Pueblo will walk into a freshly cleaned and furnished place to stay.

On a bitter winter night in Durango, someone without shelter will have a ride from the transit center to a warm, safe place to sleep.

Students in Fruita will help raise endangered fish and eventually release them into the Colorado River.

And in Pagosa Springs, Rotarians, Interactors and community volunteers will stand shoulder to shoulder packing 20,000 meals for their neighbors.

Different communities. Different needs. Different projects.

But every one of them shares something important:

Rotarians made them possible long before the first meal was packed, the first book was opened or the first hammer was lifted.

They gave to The Rotary Foundation.

The gift you made three years ago is at work today

For the 2026-27 Rotary year, District 5470 received $110,386.37 based on contributions Rotarians made to The Rotary Foundation Annual Fund during the 2023-24 Rotary year, plus $7,120.81 from available endowment fund share earnings.

Together with funds carried forward from previous years, District 5470 has $150,299.33 in District Designated Funds available this year.

Now $58,528 of those funds is going directly back to clubs through District Grants, helping Rotarians turn local ideas into service.

The remaining funds will help support Global Grants, where District 5470 dollars join Rotary partnerships tackling larger needs around the world.

It is one of the most powerful features of The Rotary Foundation funding model.

We give. The Foundation invests. The money returns. And Rotarians put it to work.

Sometimes it looks like a bag of books

At the Vail Eagle Valley Rotary Club, District Grant funding will support Raising A Reader, placing bags of high-quality books into the homes of 450 children. Each week, children take home a red bag filled with books to share with the adults in their lives, while families receive support for building reading habits that can continue long after the program ends. 

In Montrose, the focus is third-graders. The Rotary Club of Montrose plans to provide flashcards to local students to strengthen multiplication, division, addition and subtraction skills, with materials available in English and Spanish. 

Cañon City Rotarians are helping take learning outdoors. Their grant will help provide picnic tables and benches for the new outdoor classroom and pavilion at Mountain View Core Knowledge School. Rotarians are also invited to help install the seating. 

And the Broadmoor Rotary Club will help Colorado Springs School District 2 provide school supplies and transportation assistance so students can participate in educational field trips and enrichment opportunities that might otherwise be out of reach. 

Sometimes it swims

At Fruita Monument High School, students are preparing to build and manage something decidedly unusual for a school classroom: an endangered fish hatchery.

Students are expected to raise approximately 300 threatened or endangered fish each year while learning about biology, water chemistry, conservation and other subjects. Eventually, students and community supporters will gather for annual releases into the Colorado River. Approximately 1,100 students attend the school, creating possibilities for learning that extend far beyond the students directly involved in the hatchery. 

The project is being developed with expertise from fisheries professionals, and three fish tanks have already been donated. Fruita Rotary is helping the school take some of the first financial steps toward a hatchery estimated to cost roughly $30,000 or more. 

Farther south, the Wet Mountain Valley Rotary Club is helping preserve a different kind of water resource: the community swimming pool at Altitude Community Fitness.

The approximately 22-year-old pool needs resurfacing to remain safe and functional. The facility has grown from about 250 members in 2018 to more than 680 today, serves roughly 50 to 80 swimmers a day and offers programs ranging from rehabilitation and senior fitness to school activities. Its annual Teach Custer to Swim program provided eight weeks of free instruction to 85 local children in 2026. The resurfacing project is estimated at more than $94,000, demonstrating how a relatively modest Rotary match can become one piece of a much larger community investment. 

Sometimes it is dinner

In Archuleta County, the Rotary Club of Pagosa Springs will use its grant to help address food insecurity in an especially hands-on way.

Working with Meals of Hope, Rotarians plan to assemble and distribute 20,000 fortified meals for local residents. Pagosa Mountain Rotary Club and Pagosa Springs High School Interact members have also been invited to participate, turning the project into a collaboration across generations and Rotary clubs. 

The finished meals will go to local organizations serving children, families, seniors and homebound residents. The project does more than provide food. It puts Rotarians around the same tables, working together to create it. 

In Durango, another grant strengthens the regional food system behind the scenes. The Good Food Collective operates a warehouse used around the clock by farmers, ranchers and food distributors. Rotary support will help provide more secure coded access to the facility and replace an aging laptop used to manage the organization and coordinate its partners. 

Sometimes it is a safe place to sleep

Few projects make the connection between dollars and dignity more clearly than the Pueblo West Rotary Club's work with Posada.

Posada provides temporary housing and support for families experiencing homelessness. Pueblo West Rotarians have committed to maintaining two units designated for women and children escaping domestic violence.

Rotarians will clean, paint, make repairs and purchase bedding, towels, cookware, dishes and basic food supplies so that when a family arrives in crisis, the room waiting for them feels less like an empty unit and more like a place where they can begin again.

With the anticipated turnover of the two rooms, the club estimates the project could help approximately 32 people during the year. 

Broadmoor Rotary is addressing housing instability from another angle, helping A Place Like Home provide bunk beds and essential furnishings for families and children who may not have adequate sleeping arrangements. Rotarians plan to help assemble and build the beds themselves. 

And in Durango, Neighbors in Need Alliance opens an Emergency Warming Center when temperatures fall below 15 degrees. There is one problem: the center is not on a public transportation route. Rotary funding will help provide transportation from the Durango Transit Center to the shelter, addressing a deceptively simple barrier that can become a matter of life and death on a Colorado winter night. 

Sometimes it makes music, theater and stories possible

The Rotary Club of Durango will help repair donated musical instruments so children from low-income families can borrow or receive instruments they otherwise could not afford. Durango Friends of the Arts also connects young musicians with discounted lessons, scholarships and volunteer instruction. 

In Carbondale, the Sage VOICES Project will bring together storytellers age 75 and older with young performers ages 11 to 15. Four seniors and four young people will create an original theatrical production inspired by their experiences, culminating in three public performances expected to reach about 300 people. 

And in Salida, Rotary funding will contribute to installing air conditioning in “A Church,” a nonprofit community gathering and performance space. It sounds wonderfully practical because it is: without cooling, the resident Salida Theater Company is limited during the warmest months. The improvement will allow performances to continue through late spring, summer and early fall as part of a $20,000 project. 

Sometimes it is simply a place to sit

Florence/Eastern Fremont County Rotarians will install five community benches at the John C. Fremont Library, Florence City Hall, Florence Senior Center, Penrose Park and Penrose Public Library. Club members will be involved from planning and design through anchoring the benches into place. 

In Delta, Rotarians are returning to a project their club began more than two decades ago. A gazebo originally created beside the Carnegie Library was moved when the library relocated. It is still being used for children's reading and learning programs, but its new location sits on concrete with little protection from summer heat. The club will help add a shade structure, with the City of Delta contributing installation labor and Rotarians helping prepare and clean the site. 

A bench. A patch of shade.

Small things, perhaps, until you are the person who needs somewhere to rest or the child trying to listen to a story beneath a blazing summer sun.

And sometimes a District Grant becomes the first step toward something larger

Durango Daybreak Rotary is supporting a rabies-control effort on Ukerewe Island in Tanzania, where vaccinations of domestic dogs are intended to reduce the threat of rabies to people while training local veterinary and healthcare professionals.

The project has another ambition as well: use this work to develop partnerships and community assessments that could eventually lead to a Rotary Global Grant and a larger, sustainable vaccination effort. 

That journey, from a District Grant to the possibility of a Global Grant, brings the story full circle.

This is what an Annual Fund contribution becomes

The Rotary Foundation can sometimes feel distant from the weekly life of a club.

These grants make it tangible.

It becomes a repaired trumpet in the hands of a child.

A red bag of books going home with a preschooler.

A warm ride to a shelter.

A bed for a family in crisis.

An outdoor classroom.

A fish released into the Colorado River.

Twenty thousand meals packed by neighbors for neighbors.

And none of those projects begins when the District Grant check arrives.

They begin years earlier, when a Rotarian decides to give.

The Annual Fund contribution made today helps determine how much District 5470 will have available for service three years from now.

That is why giving to The Rotary Foundation is not separate from the work our clubs do.

It is how some of that work becomes possible.

The $58,528 being invested in District 5470 projects this year is the evidence.

Those dollars once looked like donations.

Now they look like Rotary.