Plenary Speacker Rob Raylman, CEO Gift of Life International since 2008

Good morning, everyone. I hope everybody had a wonderful night last night, even though it was a little late. But we did have a wonderful time, and what a wonderful conference we've had. I have a little story to tell you. In 2018, while attending the district conference in the Dominican Republic, I received the gift of an unexpected orderly minute. As a group of veterinarians, we traveled to a local hospital, donned on scrubs, and were escorted into the operating room. There on the operating table was a four-year-old girl. We saw her chest open and her little heart beating. She was receiving the miracle of heart surgery to repair her heart by the gift of life medical team. Not only was the team performing the needed surgery, they were empowering the local doctors and nurses with the training and support they needed to perform. This life-saving surgery in the child's home country will make the difference in this child's life and will ensure a bright future for her. I was in awe to witness this miracle. Our next speaker is Rob Brownlee. Rob has been the Chief Executive Officer of Gift of Life International since 2008. And he is a member of the Riverview Club of Manhattan and was club president in 2021. Before coming to Gift of Life, Rob was the Vice President of Brownlee Ferris Industries. And then he started his own consulting business specializing in legislation and regulatory affairs. As a Gift of Life CEO, Rob travels the world saving little hearts by focusing on the development of sustainable pediatric cardiac surgery programs in emerging countries. By joining the like-minded partners, Gift of Life International has been able to maximize the impact that it has on the program. Currently, the program is in 80 countries across five continents. We are honored to be in Hizad, the Rotarian and CEO of Gift of Life International here to talk to us. My friend, Rob. Judge. I'm Rob, you look really underdressed. I have a present for you, Rob. Thank you, Lydia. Is my mic on? Okay. Well, good morning. And I chose that song for a reason. That's Bruce Springsteen's Teen Angst Anthem of 1975. Believe it or not, that album was released 50 years ago this year. And I think back to 50 years ago and what I was like 50 years ago. And so, 13 year old, in my bedroom in Manhasset Hills, Long Island, listening to Bruce Springsteen and thinking about running and going places and dreaming of the future. And I'll get to this a little bit later, but I never dreamed this would be my future. And I also think about what was going on in 1975. Many of you in this room, I can look around, some of you look like you made big with me in 1975. Some of you, some of you not. But in 1975, the world was really different. Gas, a gallon of gas was 57 cents. A dozen eggs were 61 cents. There was a Great World Series that year when the Cincinnati Reds beat the Boston Red Sox in seven games. I don't know if any of you remember that, the amazing home run that Colton Fisk hit and made it seven games. Gerald Ford was the President of the United States. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was the best movie that year. And in a little diner in Manhasset, New York, the 27-year-old Rotarian raised his hand at a Rotary meeting and asked how a girl from Uganda could be helped. And that Rotarian is our own Robbie Downey. Stand up. Thank you. And that one moment speaks so many volumes about rotary. And the truth of the matter is, as a Rotarian, at a breakfast table, lunch table, a dinner table, or now on a Zoom meeting, we can do more for this world than just about anybody else who's a member of any other organization. And that is not to put others down, that is to raise us up. And I think there are times when Rotarians are a little too modest about not allowing themselves to be raised up. Look at the amazing things we do as Rotarians. Last night's presentation on the shelter box, tremendous. We watch about what we're doing with the leadership in polio and how we're helping to eradicate that around the world. And maybe a little bit more of a secret is gift of life. Now please raise your hand, number one, if you know what gift of life is. Very nice. Number two, have you ever heard me speak before? Okay, good, so I'm not going to tell one story. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that moment of Robbie, and when he stood up at the Rotary meeting in Hassett. And at that time, he read an article in the Rotarian magazine about a girl in Uganda that had been mauled by a hyena. And they talked about the need of this girl to get surgery, so Robbie raises his hand, can we help this little girl? And then Hassett Rotary Club writes a letter to the hyena. You wrote letters at that time, you didn't send texts or get on the email or even call on the phone. And they wrote a letter, and they got a letter back a couple months later, that that little girl, Margaret Rose, had been taken to Australia already, and the Rotarians had already helped her, and she was getting surgery since she was taken care of. But that they had another child in the community, a little girl named Grace, five years old, who had a heart ailment. And that heart ailment was not able to be treated in Uganda at that time. So they asked help from Hassett Rotary Club. And as Rotarians do, they sat at their lunch table and said, how do we help this girl? Well, Robbie and his Rotarians, one of them, a newly employed Rotarian at St. Francis Hospital that had just started their cardiac program, said, why don't we bring that child here to Long Island, in Hassett, Roslyn, operate on the child at St. Francis Hospital, and then be able to help the hospital, and help this little girl. A one-off. That happens, Grace comes, and gets operated on, and you'll hear Robbie tell the story how, at that moment, it changes his life. But I will argue, at that moment, it changed the trajectory of many things. It changed the trajectory of how people around this world dealt with congenital heart disease. Because as many of you may or may not know, 1.3 million children are born every year with congenital heart defect. 92% of them, 93% of them, are born in a country that will not be able to care for them. So let's think about that for a moment as you sit here on a Saturday morning in New Jersey, as a mom, a dad, a grandparent, and uncle. If you were in one of those countries, and your child was born with a congenital heart defect, you would watch that child perish in front of your eyes. That's the fact of life. That's what there is out there. There is a global crisis today, as there was in 1975, of being able to treat children who have a congenital heart defect. It's called a crisis. And I'm proud to tell you that standing up here today, 50 years after Robbie raised his hand to help that one child, and grace came, that over those 50 years, over 60,000 children from 80 different countries have been provided care through Rotary and the Gift of Life program. We have now moved to a different level in Gift of Life, and it's only through Rotary you can do things like this. And I will contest that two of the reasons why you can do it through Rotary is, number one, as a Rotarian, you're sitting here, you're all Rotarians, you joined Rotary for many reasons, but one of them is, within your heart, you're a humanitarian. You care about others, you want to help others, and we see that in all the programs. And I'm not up here to say that Gift of Life is any better than any other program, but it sure as heck is as good as every program. And I will tell you that the way that we succeed is because the heart of Rotarian, and the global network of Rotary that allows us to go to every country that we go to, I've been to 56 countries on behalf of Gift of Life, and every country, the first person that is greeting me off of a plane is Rotarian. And that Rotarian, and that word we call, will introduce me to the Minister of Health, will introduce me to the hospital, the hospital director, the doctors, anybody we need to meet, that Rotarian knows. The organization we are part of is amazing. The ability to deliver care to people is tremendous. And what makes it even more impactful is the second reason, the Rotary Foundation. This Rotary Foundation, and I must tell you, last night was one of the most creative fundraisers I've ever seen. I'm very happy I wasn't part of it. But I will tell you that in donating to our foundation, you can do more good than any of the value you may spend. And I'll tell you why I say that. He said, Gift of Life, since 2013, when Rotary Gold Brands were introduced to the Rotary world, we have accessed over 16 million dollars in Rotary Foundation funding through Rotary clubs and districts, and Gift of Life programs, and other very generous individuals. 16 million dollars. Now that's a tool and a resource that is not available to many, many others in other organizations, but it's available to us. And again, there are other very worthy causes that access that care. Second, polio plus, we get more money from the Rotary Foundation than any other Rotarian-based program. I think it's very valid. It's very needed. You talk about a global crisis that for all intents and purposes, no one is focusing on. But we are. And I do have faith that someday, our leadership, through Gift of Life International, through Gift of Life programs, and there are amazing programs that are represented in this room, from 7230 to 7255 to 7475 to 7490, that are represented here, that have been tremendous work around this world. And the global grants have allowed us to go in and develop sustainability in certain countries that allow them to care for their own children. That's a big word in the Rotary world, and I'm not saying who will appreciate the fact that when you write a Rotary goal grant, you need to prove that you're doing something towards sustaining, that you're going to be empowering the local doctors and nurses, in our case, to be able to care for their own children, sustain the program with their skills, and ultimately involve and inspire the governments to back those programs. And we've done that. The 16 million dollars for those global grants have gone towards developing programs in countries as diverse as El Salvador and Uganda, Central America, and Eastern Africa. I have been to both countries, both continents, and there is not more diversity than those two. However, through the Rotary world, we brought them together. And I heard that word used last night about together. That is what changed our ability to help children in this world, is we work together. And it's one of the great lessons of life that I think is beautiful about Rotary, is that they encourage this collaboration, not just with Rotarians and fellow Rotarians, but with others outside. Because in no way can we address all the problems in this world, and the significant ones especially, without working together. And so when the Rotary clubs, and the Rotary districts, and the Rotary Gift of Life programs all came together in 2008, we were able to go to Uganda in 2009, and for the first time ever, be able to develop a program that allowed them to care for their own children who have heart disease. That's a country of over 40 million people, and in 2009 they didn't have a program to take care of a child with a congenital heart defect. Today, 2025, they're operating on over 250 children at the Uganda Heart Institute. They are doing this on their own, and able to take care of children who have the needs that Grace had in 1975, because they were not able to be cared for. So they are sustaining their own program. On top of that, something you're hopefully going to hear a lot from in the future, is our work on rheumatic heart disease, which is different than congenital. Congenital, you're born with it. It's something inherent, and it's not preventable. But rheumatic heart disease is preventable. It comes from strep throat, and most of this world, when a child gets a strep throat, the parent doesn't know how to treat that child, doesn't know what it is, and what happens is that rheumatic heart disease is developed from the strep throat, the bacteria goes into the heart valves, and destroys the heart, and the children make many times perishing before they're 15. And we have a major program in Uganda, that through Rotary's program of scale, we're going to be introducing and requesting to compete for that grant this year, to be able to, for the first time ever in this world, look at a global solution to rheumatic heart disease, where 5.5 million children every year are affected by that. So through Rotary, we can do so much, and again, we can address so many of these global crises. I look at El Salvador, the next place that I'd like to highlight for you, in 2010, when we first visited there, they were operating on 65 kids a year. Surgeons could do the surgeries, but the aftercare did not take care of the children, and one out of every four of those children was perishing from a, after they were operated on, was perishing in the ICU. Through Rotary Global Grants, over 2.5 billion dollars of Rotary Global Grants, supporting 50 training visits to El Salvador, supporting us by that essential ability to upgrade their intensive care unit, they're operating in their cath lab, we now are operating on over 250 kids in El Salvador, and they're doing that with a mortality rate of less than three percent. That's better and more than most hospitals in the United States do. Now, why do they do that? Why were they able to do that? It's relevant, because people such as yourselves, working together, coming together for the needs of others that we will never, never meet. You will never meet any of these people that were helping in El Salvador, most likely you won't, but the fact of the matter is your fingerprints are on them. The children they got operated on that hospital, the doctors and nurses that are in power now, and to see a doctor and nurse now in El Salvador taking care of their own kids, the pride that they have is truly remarkable. It really is something that as Rotarians we need to be proud of, because I think we do this every day. Every day we give others the opportunity to shine and to do what they really wanted to do all their lives, take care of their own children. And as we talk about the impact that we make, I talked about 60,000 kids over a period of 50 years, we are now taking care of over 5,000 children. We are the largest organization in this world to be able to take care of children with heart disease in the emerging world. Now, that is only done through the network of Rotary, that is only done because you're able to take care of these kids, whether it be in Sri Lanka, or the Philippines, or in Zambia, or anywhere else in this world, through this network that we have that is incredible. You know, I hope the next time you sit down at your breakfast table, your lunch table, your dinner table, and you have your meeting, you remember what you can do just sitting at that meeting. Because that moment that Robbie raised his hand in Manassas in 1975 is resonating around the world now 50 years later. And I would hazard to guess there may not be many Rotary-based programs that started 50 years ago that are still as vital and vitally growing as we are. Every year we're helping more and more kids. This year we're going to help our child every 99 minutes. So the time that, you know, you can go watch a movie, or whatever you may download on Netflix, or whatever it may be, a child's life will be saved through the Gift of Life network, through the Rotary network. And it's something that Rotary should be really proud about. And as we talk about numbers, and we talk about all these great things that we're doing, and how much it costs to do it, it's always important to remember the individual, the individual child. And so I have many, many stories, and in fact, as some of you have heard me speak before, I'm going to not talk about my little girl Sarah in Uganda, but I'm going to talk about two kids in El Salvador, Jocelyn and Brian. I met both of them in 2010, introduced them as we started what we call our Hearts Are In program. We put all the hearts of Gift of Life in countries, and then we focused on that country to make sure that they were able to be empowered to take care of their own kids. We really gave them everything we had. So in El Salvador, we started with our Hearts Are In in July, and we've got a major screening of hundreds of children. And we came up with a list of 100 children that we would ultimately send all over the world for care. And why did we do that? We did that so that we would get the attention of the needs of the children in El Salvador. We would get that so we could get them to get invested, you take care of your own child, you send them back to El Salvador, and then you say, okay, I want to help more. What's the way to do that? Let's invest in that country and help more kids. And it worked. It was really amazing. And it's what led to those statistics that I said to you earlier. We're working together helping the children. And during that conference, there were two children we met, Jocelyn and Brian. Jocelyn 10 years old, Brian 8 months old. Both of them very, very sick. Jocelyn goes to California, and she has her open heart surgery. Brian goes to Amman, Jordan, and he has his open heart surgery. I'll fast forward to the fact that Jocelyn, Jocelyn was very sick. She went to the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, had two surgeries, chest was open for two weeks. Her mother originally traveled with her, but she was so sick that they didn't choose to make it. So her father, we flew her father in from El Salvador. And at the bedside with Jocelyn's mom and dad, I'm sitting there, Jocelyn's mother never gave up on Jocelyn. And every day she would talk to Jocelyn at the bedside and say, Jocelyn, when you get better, we're going to have the biggest fiesta in the world for your next birthday. We're going to celebrate your birthday with your whole family. And she would say this in Spanish to her every single day. It was a mantra. And I would go to the doctor, and I'd say, do we have a chance of that birthday? And he said, we really, it's not going to be 50-50, it's going to be 20-80. Jocelyn was 5. Jocelyn made it back to El Salvador, and we were sure as heck going to give her that fiesta. And the most beautiful, if anyone's been to Central America, there are special days they have when the sun is just shining, the sky is blue, there's not a cloud there. And in this little park in San Salvador, we had Jocelyn's birthday party. And everybody from her family was around. Her mom, her dad, her grandparents, her nieces. And in El Salvador, you got a big family, and everybody was there. And Jocelyn, nothing more than she wanted than to have a spongebob birthday party. So we had a spongebob birthday party, had this big huge cake, and this amazing picture of Jocelyn with cake on her face. She was just taking the cake and putting it everywhere. She just couldn't believe that this party was being thrown for her. And the biggest smile in the world was on Jocelyn's face. And as I sat there, I just soaked it in and remember the days that her mom was sitting at the bed praying for her to have this birthday. I'm like, it's here, it's happening. And then my thought went to Brian. So Brian went to Oman, Jordan. Again, a gift to my program is all over the world. These are world-class hospitals we work with, top-notch doctors and nurses. Every child had the best chance of survival. Bariatric surgery did not go well. We didn't get to Brian fast enough. And that eight-month-old boy perished in Oman, Jordan. And the Rotarians there were absolutely amazing. We arranged for Brian to be flown back home to El Salvador, and in the little village in El Salvador where his mom lived, an 18-year-old mom whose father was no longer around, we went to the house and they prepared Brian to be brought to the cemetery. And Brian was brought to the cemetery in a little white coffin on the back of a truck. And as we walked down the streets, the rain started coming down, and the family just kept on growing. As we walked down, people kept on getting behind the truck and going to the cemetery. And we get to the cemetery, and we go, and the priest is at the grave, and Brian's final, you know, burial. And I looked around that grave at that time, and I saw the mom, and the grandparents, and the aunts and the uncles, and the whole community there. And why I thought about that when I saw Jocelyn was I realized how fine this line is that we're dealing with between a birthday party and a funeral. And at the essence of the work that we do, I talk about all these beautiful things. At the essence of that, at the end of the day, all we want to do is give these kids one more birthday, one more chance to live a life that they have the right to live. And in many countries, as I said before, 93% of this world, they're not getting that right. And so when we go out and we do what we do, I think these stories are important for us to realize the possibilities of Rotary. You know, I think about all the themes that we've had, starting with DKB, who's my first president when I was a young girl, and it was about making dreams come real. And then we talk about Gary Wong, who was, I think, was a knight of hope, giving hope around the world. We talk about the magic of Rotary. How much more magic can you think of that when you go to a country like Haiti, which we've done up until the riots and the revolution, go to a country like Haiti and operate up 300 Haitian kids in a hospital there with less than one percent mortality. That's magic. You can't get any better than that. And uniting for good. That's what we do. That's what has made Gift of Life special. That's what made that moment that Robbie raises his hand when one Rotarian at a table can make the difference and start a movement around the world that 50 years later is stronger than it ever was. It's because people unite and they get together for good. And this is the magic of the world and because we dream. You know, it has that 13-year-old kid in that room listening to Bruce Springsteen on the drum. If you think about what does that mean, it means getting up and doing something. Getting up and making your dreams real, but also making the dreams of others real. And I would contest to you as Rotarians, as we do every day, when we get up and we go to a Rotary meeting, when we get up and we go to a project, we get up and we wear our Rotary shirts and we're proud of who we are. We're standing up for those who can't stand up for themselves. And that is amazing. And so I'm just honored to be able to speak to you because I have lived and breathed Gift of Life for 17-18 years. Robbie's lived and breathed it for 50 years. And I hope we can do this for another 50 years. But at the end of the day, the only reason we can do this is because it's a Rotary. Thank you.