As a teenager in southern Italy in 2005, Maria Vittoria “Mavi” Gargiulo was “kind of forced” to join an Interact club that her father’s Rotary club was trying to reestablish. The students wore suits (or at least coats and ties), and the atmosphere was very formal. “Everybody was pretending to be adult while I just wanted to be 15,” she recalls.
She quit as soon as her father was off his club’s board, but she reconnected with Rotary while attending the University of Salerno when she found a “more chill and relaxed” Rotaract club.
There, her Rotaract career took off. In 2022, she decided to also join a Rotary club at the urging of her closest friend, whose father was serving as president. It was what she calls a “legacy club,” focused on lunch meetings and weekly speakers. The dues of 1,400 euros amounted to her entire salary as a post-doctoral student. “They were a good club, and a lot of district governors come from it,” Gargiulo says. “Some people really look forward to that kind of social gathering every Thursday, which is fair — that’s the experience they want. That’s just not the experience I like.”
So she created the club she wanted to belong to instead. The result was the Rotary Club of Global ROOTS – District 2101, which chartered in April and has become a space for Rotaract members and others who had expressed interest in Rotary but hadn’t found a club where they fit in.