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For 39 years, a quiet but powerful partnership has been changing lives on the SIUE campus: one scholarship, one garden bench, one handshake at a time. 

Musonda Kapatamoyo, PhD, current District Governor for Rotary District 6460 and past president of the Edwardsville Rotary Club, sat down recently to reflect on nearly four decades of collaboration between the club and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. This service has grown into one of the University's most enduring community investments. 

"The most important unit in Rotary is the individual member," Musonda explained. "Members belong to clubs, and clubs belong to a district. Our district, 6460, covers 50 clubs across Illinois." But it's at the local level, Edwardsville's own club, where the SIUE story has unfolded. 

Each year, the club presents an $8,000 scholarship to SIUE's School of Business, split between two incoming students from Edwardsville High School. The amount has held steady at $8,000 for the years Musonda has been a member, funding students who, in many cases, stay rooted in the community long after graduation. He points to one recipient, a local realtor named Connor Gramke, as a case in point--proof, he says, that investing in local youth pays the community back twice over. 

"Receiving a Rotary scholarship while attending SIUE meant a lot to me because it showed that my community was willing to invest in my future. SIUE gave me a strong foundation to build a career in Real Estate and Construction. I'm incredibly grateful for the support and the role the Rotary played in getting me to where I am today," Gramke said. 

 The scholarship is only one thread in a much larger tapestry. Rotarians helped shape SIUE from its earliest days in the 1950s, when the club was already a quarter-century old. Their fingerprints are everywhere on campus, literally. Stroll through the university's arboretum and gardens, and you'll find benches and plaques bearing Rotarian names, memorials to members who funded the grounds simply because, as Kapatamoyo put it, "they wanted SIUE to be beautiful." 

That civic thread runs deep and wide: Rotarians serve on university committees, sit on the athletics department's advisory circles, and even hold seats as SIUE professors. The local credit union CEO, a Rotarian, helped install an ATM in the university's Morris University Center. A club member played a role in athletics fundraising that led to a facility being named in her honor. "I see their imprint everywhere,"  Kapatamoyo said. "We're all over the place intertwined." 

The Club’s fundraising engine, golf tournaments, its signature "criterion" event and other community drives, bring in close to $100,000 annually, all funneled back into local causes: scholarships, food pantries, parks, and music programs. 

Asked what he'd like to see in the next decade, Musonda did not hesitate: growth.  

"Everything's becoming more expensive," he said. "If we can increase the money, that would be nice. I'd like to help more kids." 

His message to other civic groups considering similar partnerships was simple: "You don't need a certain background to be a Rotarian. We just want people with a passion for community service to join us." 

Four decades in, the partnership between Edwardsville Rotary and SIUE shows no sign of slowing down.