A strategic alliance between Rotary District 4690 Bolivia and United4Change Center means greater impact for communities across the country.
This past July, United4Change Center signed a two year alliance with Rotary Bolivia District 4690. On paper it is a framework agreement: it says the two organizations will keep working together in Bolivian communities within Rotary’s seven areas of focus, that we will look for ways to bring in technology and support women, and that we will try to bring more partners and more resources to Bolivia. In real life it means something simpler. The people we have been working with for more than ten years want to keep working with us, and they put it in writing.
That matters to us more than I can easily explain. Bolivia is where U4C started. Having a formal agreement with the Bolivian Rotary District gives us something steady to build on for the next two years. It also says clearly what we have always believed: that we are and have been good partners. We decide together what to do, we design it together, and we carry it out together.
How we got here
U4C has been working in Bolivia since 2015, and Rotary has been part of it almost from the first day. Since then we have been the cooperating organization on close to seven Rotary Global Grants, and between them they have touched nearly every one of Rotary’s areas of focus. We have helped bring clean water to Aymara families in the Altiplano. We have worked with women starting and growing small businesses. We have supported mothers and babies, taught peace education to the youth, and helped when a community needed help right away. None of those projects was ours alone, and none was Rotary’s alone. Bolivian and American Rotarians and our team visited the same villages, sat with the same families, wrote the proposals together, and then shared the work of getting them done.
A lot of this would not have happened without the Rotary Clubs of Hobbs and Lovington in New Mexico and their District 5520. They believed in communities they had never seen, and they kept believing, grant after grant. But the other half of the story is the District in Bolivia. Without the support of District 4690 and its leaders, none of it would have been possible. They are the ones who believed in us, who sat through the long meetings, and who helped us understand what each community actually needed.
The people behind it
Rotary Bolivia District 4690 brings together every Rotary club in the country. The first club in Bolivia was founded in 1927, so this is a network that has been serving Bolivian communities for almost a hundred years. The agreement was signed by Mario Yaffar, the District Governor for 2026 to 2027, and by Nicolas Zalles, who will be Governor in 2027 to 2028. What we keep coming back to, after all these years, is how these leaders carry themselves. They have big ideas about what Bolivia can be, and they are also the first ones to listen, to give the credit to someone else, and to get in a truck and drive four hours to a community meeting.
Thank you
To Governor Mario Yaffar, to Governor Elect Nicolas Zalles, and to every Rotarian in Bolivia who has walked these roads with us, Bob Reid, Livio Zozzoli, Mauricio Steverlinck, Victor H. Garcia-Meza, David Sadler, Harvey Branin, and many more active Rotarians: thank you!. To our friends in Hobbs, Lovington, and across New Mexico who made so many of these projects real: thank you. We are going to keep going, and we are going to do it the same way we always have, together! Stay tuned for more!
