Ray Klinginsmith of the Rotary Club of Kirksville, Missouri, USA is the President nominee of Rotary International for the year 2010-11.

Klinginsmith earned degrees in business and law at the University of Missouri and completed graduate studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, as a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholar. He was general counsel and professor of business at Northeast Missouri State University in Kirksville (now Truman State University) from 1973 until his retirement in 1995, and held the post of dean of administration for five years.

Klinginsmith operates a law office. He served as an elected county commissioner from 2001 to 2004. He has been a director of the Macon Atlanta State Bank since 1971 and president of the Chariton Valley Association for Handicapped Citizens since 1982.

A Rotarian since 1961, Klinginsmith has served Rotary as District Governor and as chair of the 1998 Council of Legislation in New Delhi and the 2008 Los Angeles Convention Committee. He was a member of the RI Board of Directors for 1985-87 and chaired its executive committee in 1986-87. Klinginsmith joined The Rotary Foundation Trustees in 2002, serving as vice chair in 2005-06, and was a member of the Future Vision Committee from 2005 to 2008. He is a major Donor and a recipient of the Foundations Citation for Meritorious Service and Distinguished Service Award.

In addition, Klinginsmith has earned many honours in his community including the Parent/Caretaker Award from the Missouri Planning Council for Developmental Disabilities; theThomas D Cochran Award for Community Service, an annual state wide award by the young Lawyers Section of the Missouri Bar; and the Silver Beaver Award from the Great Rivers Council of the Boy Scouts of America, of which he is a former member of the executive board.

Klinginsmith and his wife, Judie, have two children and three grandchildren.

Klinginsmith believes that Rotary's best days are still ahead. "The reputation and ability of Rotarians to impact the world positively is better than ever, and the future of Rotary is bright: he says, "The RI strategic Plan and the Rotary Foundation Future Vision Plan are good road maps to the future. However, the decisions about the selection of strategic partners, the recruitment of younger members, and the facilitation of district change to enable younger leader to serve as district governors will continue to require leaders of uncommon vision and wisdom".

MESSAGE FROM OUR R I PRESIDENT
Ray Klinginsmith
RI President

What is Rotary? What does a Rotary club do? These questions are often asked of Rotarians by prospective member and other interested people, and they are difficult to answer effectively in a few short minutes.

Although our primary motto Service above Self highlights our altruistic nature, it I fails to answer the two questions. Therefore, I decided to search for a briefly stated them that would fulfill two objectives: The first to explain the purpose of Rotary to non Rotarians and the second to confirm and validate the importance of our principles to Rotarians.

In my search for the right words, I reviewed the four Avenues of Service and noted that Club Service and Vocational Service both help us to enjoy life and to be good citizens. Community Service and Vocational Service combine to make our local communities better places for us to live and work. And International Service permits us to partner with clubs in other countries and on different continents to make the world a better place to live with an improved opportunity for world understanding, goodwill, and peace.

It is important to remember that Rotary is a "spirit of service" as well as an organization of Rotary clubs, and we need to share our core values of service, fellowship, diversity, integrity, and leadership with other people and organizations. I considered many words and phrases to capture the essence of Rotary, and the words I finally selected to describe Rotary's current mission and to highlight our achievements are what we do best:

Building Communities - Bridging Continents

I hope you agree that these four words aptly reflect who we are, and what we do, as Rotarians. We are a unique and a premier organization - certainly one of the best in the world. We build the spirit and resources of our local communities in an important way, and we are the best in the world at linking people of goodwill around the globe and then gaining their cooperation and support to make the world a much better place to live and work. In the words of Ed Cadman, "Rotary is unity without uniformity". We are indeed fortunate to be Rotarians!

I applied the same philosophy in developing the Presidential Citation for 2010-11. I consider each of the four Avenues of Service to be equally important, and we have created a new citation program in the form of a questionnaire to help clubs test their effectiveness in all four avenues. We also have produced a higher-level "Presidential Citation with Distinction" to challenge those clubs that routinely earn the annual presidential citations.