Rotary Club is first for Utah Hispanics

Dr. Cesar Diaz dreams of opening medical clinics for indigenous people in his homeland of Ecuador.

The family physician and homeopathic healer is hoping to fulfill that, and other service dreams, through his new role as president of Utah's first Hispanic/Latino Rotary Club.

"Rotarians are a group of businessmen who get together and do some community service," he said. "We don't get paid, we try to put our resources to help people."

Diaz is one of 21 members so far of the fledgling club geared at getting native Spanish-speaking business leaders involved in community service locally and overseas. Unlike other area clubs, the meetings will be conducted in Spanish.

The first public meeting is tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Utah Business Development Alliance, 1747 S. 900 West.

"The needs are very different," he said. "You have a culture, you have a language barrier. . . . It's a whole different environment."

Dr. Gerald Summerhay, a member of the Murray Rotary Club, which is sponsoring the Hispanic/Latino club, is helping the new club organize.

Summerhays said the Utah district's 43 clubs have had difficulty recruiting Hispanic members. So club representatives went to both the Utah Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the Latin American Chamber of Commerce to get feedback on recruitment ideas.

"Their suggestion was, let us form a Rotary club," he said. Summerhays said he was somewhat concerned about the idea at first. However, he said, the Hispanic/Latino club will be integrating by participating in activities such as helping to plan the Rotary International Convention, coming to Salt Lake in 2007, and will be involved in district training activities.

"The purpose is to invite Hispanic or Latino people to join," he said. "They will integrate over the years wonderfully."

There are other foreign-language Rotary clubs in the United States, including a Spanish-speaking club in Colorado, he said, but this is the first in Utah. There are 30,000 clubs globally with 1.2 million members.

Ingrid Quiroz, owner of La Prensa Times newspaper, is a member of the Hispanic/Latino Rotary Club.

"This is an opportunity," she said. "They are waiting for this, people are accepting this idea.

"We are serving our own communities here and our communities overseas."

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E-mail: dbulkeley@desnews.com