ROTARY PROFESSIONAL EXCELLENCE AWARD

Each year, Rotary eClub One recognises an individual who has made a significant contribution in his or her professional life, that has benefited the wellbeing of others.

Two years ago, Rotary eClub One presented its inaugural Professional Excellence Award to Roxanne Spillett, the CEO of Boys and Girls Clubs of America.

Last year, we presented the Professional Excellence Award to an inspirational American, former Olympian, Jimmie Heuga who used his personal experience with MS to change attitudes to MS and to establish the Heuga Centre for MS in Colorado.

This year our Award recipient is another inspirational American. He is a successful businessman, investor, and philanthropist. He is included in the Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, and he cares deeply for those people of the world who are weak and vulnerable.

His name is Kenneth E. Behring.

Growing up poor in Wisconsin (before the Great Depression), Ken first earned money by delivering newspapers, cutting lawns, caddying, and as a teenager, working in lumberyard and in a retail store. 

After high school, he sold used cars and eventually opened his own used and new car dealerships. 

A millionaire at age 27, he moved to Florida and launched a second career as a real estate developer.  He founded and built Tamarac, Florida, and later moved to California, where he developed Blackhawk, one of the most successful prestige real estate communities in the United States.   

Blackhawk, near the town of Danville, an hour southeast of San Francisco, is a magnificent example of Ken’s vision and energy. It consists of 2,400 home sites blended into parks, golf courses, sports fields and natural hillside.

Ken was also majority owner of the Seattle Seahawks, Professional Football Team, from 1988 to 1997.   

After his success in business, Ken turned to philanthropic ventures. 

He was involved in founding the Blackhawk Museum (originally the Blackhawk Automotive Museum) in 1988.

Ken pledged $20 million to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in 1997, endowing the museum's new Kenneth E. Behring Family Hall of Mammals.

He pledged another $80 million to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in 2000; the museum renamed its main facility the "Behring Center" in his honor. MuseumNews called it "the largest cash donation ever to be given to a U.S. museum by a living person," and Ken was given the Smithsonian's James Smithson Award for his contributions.

In 2000, Ken donated $7.5 million to expand the University of California, Berkeley’s Principal Leadership Institute; the newly established Kenneth E. Behring Center for Educational Improvement focused on training programs for public school principals. The University of California Berkeley awarded him a Chancellor's Citation in 2001.

Ken founded the Wheelchair Foundation in 2000, to provide free wheelchairs for needy people with physical disabilities in developing nations.

The foundation provides wheelchairs to people who need them but can not afford them. The Wheelchair Foundation had provided 600,000 wheelchairs to people in 145 nations.

The Wheelchair Foundation partners with various service organizations, including Rotary Clubs, to raise the funds for the wheelchairs and to manage wheelchair distributions.

Over the years, Ken has journeyed from poor hospitals in Africa and Eastern Europe to the battlefields of Afghanistan.  He has visited China, Romania, Vietnam, Algeria, Egypt, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Tanzania, Angola, Zambia, Namibia, South Africa learning first-hand of the needs of vulnerable people in these countries.

On his travels, he has seen how the gift of a simple wheelchair can transform the life of a recipient.

In 2005, Ken founded the WaterLeaders Foundation, a nonprofit working to support safe drinking water around the world.

Ken created WaterLeaders with the following core principles in mind:

• WaterLeaders will apply the most appropriate technology and sound public health principles in cooperation with existing health and development frameworks and towards advancing global initiatives

• WaterLeaders will collaborate with and strengthen existing international partnerships to reduce deaths in children and other vulnerable populations through the provision of improved water sources, basic sanitation and hygiene education.

• WaterLeaders will act as a much-needed catalyst for the international community to decrease by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015 as per the United Nations Millennium Development Goal).

According to Ken, "Life without hope is a life without meaning."

We congratulate Ken on his achievements and salute him as a visionary and a man of action for a better world.

Ken Behring is a most appropriate leading citizen to receive our Rotary Professional Excellence Award for 2007.

He received special recognition including a significant cash donation to the Wheelchair Foundation, and an inscribed plaque, at the Annual Dinner of Rotary eClub One, during the 2007 Rotary International Convention in Salt Lake City, Utah.