Dedication

‘VOCATIONAL service is something that no one else – no leader, speaker or committee – can do for you. It expresses the prime function of your club as proclaimed in The Object of Rotary.

“To encourage and foster the ideal of service as the basis of all worthy enterprise…”

That means in particular your “enterprise” – your daily work – the business or profession described in the classification you represent in your Rotary club. The privilege of holding this classification entails the obligation—”to put Rotary to work where you work” – to make service rather than self the basis of every principle, policy and procedure in your job.

It is a large order.

Many find it difficult. Some avoid its personal application by lip service to generalities. Others are frustrated by not knowing where to start.

Service is My Business is an attempt to surmount these obstacles by conveying the meaning of vocational service in terms of actual experiences. Reading about them, you should become more keenly aware of the opportunities that lie close to hand.

To those Rotarians whose efforts have provided the substance in these pages, .this little book is respectfully dedicated, and if the situations described do not always reflect your particular problems you are urged to bring your own flame to these fagots, to seek in your own enterprise or calling the specific challenges to make service your business.

NOTE: As a member of the Aims and Objects Committee for 1946 – 47, Past President Percy Hodgson saw the need of making vocational service more realistic for the individual Rotarian.

This idea was seconded warmly by the late James Watchurst who was on the committee the following year. The enthusiasm of these two business men resulted in the first publication of Service Is My Business.