For five years, the Emmaus Rotary Club, and Rotarians from District 7430 have honored women for their achievements in the field of volunteer humanitarian work.

This year, the Emmaus Rotary Club celebrated two women at its March 10 meeting at Brookside Country Club - Gwenn Carr and Clarice James.

Carr has been a member of the Allentown West Rotary for 17 years. Her bio shows she has served on the membership, fundraising, dictionary, communications, scholarship, public image and Purple Pinkie teams as well as on the Allentown West Rotary Board.

Carr is very involved with Engineers Without Borders - Lehigh Valley Professionals which provides sustainable solutions in Third World countries. Their motto is “Building a Better World One Community at a Time.”

Through her relationships with EWB-LVP and Healy International Relief Foundation, Rotary grants have provided $82,000 to EWB-LVP for their projects in Sierra Leone. The Centennial School in Mattru Jong was completely refurbished and the hospital close to the school has undergone significant modernization.

Carr and her partner Gary Englehardt founded The Pegasus Organization in 2001 and have worked throughout the United States and South Africa providing project management assessments, consulting, education and process development. Their specialty is energy and manufacturing.

According to her bio, James is the founder and executive director of M.I.R.A. Resources, an Allentown based nonprofit focusing on providing support for migrant, immigrant, refugee and asylee families. The goal is to equip these families of different ethnicities and cultures with the equitable resources to succeed upon entering a new community.

Among her many projects, she helped set up a series of community gardens where migrant, immigrant and refugee families plant crops and the produce is later donated to the local homeless. She coordinated the involvement of high school students from Allentown Central Catholic High School in this project. She helps the migrant community with job placement, training and other resources. She assists with training programs, job interviews, wardrobe for interviewing and work and other needs.

M.I.R.A. provides adult English classes and citizenship courses. She works to get children provided with care, head start programs and other similar services.

James will soon host a job fair to assist migrant workers in finding employment as well as a health fair to ensure everyone in need is helped.

She has committed her life to “helping people from all walks of life break through barriers and achieve their goals by helping them gain access to equal opportunities.”

Rotarian Alicia Ruiz-Orbin chaired the International Women’s Day Celebration Committee. Members of the committee included David Dunn, Dee Eng, Rose Galeano-Phillipss and Courtney Kennedy.

Ruiz-Orbin noted of the 1.3 million Rotary members worldwide, about 292,000 or 25 percent are women.

On July 1, Jennifer E. Jones, of the Rotary Club of Windsor-Roseland, Ontario, Canada, will become the first woman president of Rotary International.

Ruiz-Orbin said Yvette Palmer was the first District 7430 Governor and first woman president of the Allentown West Rotary Club.

“Wendy Body, of the Allentown Rotary Club, was the first woman in our district to join Rotary on May 1, 1989,” Ruiz-Orbin noted.

“We Rotary clubs, and Rotarians, need to continue to celebrate International Women’s Day, to identify and recognize women for their humanitarian service and do all we can to truly make a positive difference for women. We also need to continue to bring women into Rotary.”