Mackay Sunrise Rotary is a service club.  We meet on a weekly basis.

Our members are, or have been, from a diverse range of vocations from business owners to nurses, teachers, taxi drivers, electricians and retirees

We enjoy being a part of group of people that uses their talents to help our local community either by raising and donating funds or contributing our labour.

The club was chartered in 1996, raised money each year and essentially donated all that money in the year it was raised.

Some years the projects that we donated to were inspirational and really useful to the community. Other years, the causes were less inspiring, but we felt the need to donate all our funds anyway.  

In 2004 the club founded the Mayor’s Charity Ball and in subsequent years (from 2004 to 2019) raised a lot of money i.e. approximately $600,000 in total.  (The club no longer runs the Mayors Charity Ball having donated it to Mackay Regional Council.)

In 2008 the club decided to think long term, i.e. we asked ourselves, what is the best way of using the money that the club was raising for the most “bang for buck” for our local community?

The club decided that instead of donating all the proceeds of the Ball that we would put aside 50% of the proceeds.

This would mean that we would use the power of compounding the money raised to leverage our total funds. It also meant that we can make sure that the money we donate to the community is targeted towards the causes and projects that will have the most impact in the Mackay region, rather than giving for the sake of giving.

So we created a perpetual fund which will keep on giving back to our Mackay community, significantly more funds than just dispersing all the funds in the years that they are raised.

In fact our perpetual fund is now at about $330,000 and it’s essentially giving back up to $10,000 per annum in dividends each year.

The funds that we are giving away in 2021 are indeed $10,000. We are incredibly proud to be in a position to make such a substantial contribution to the local community in a year where fundraising in traditional ways has been substantially restricted due to COVID.