Rotarian making a difference
Rotarian Ted Krisanda is a retired Boy Scouts of America executive who continues to try to bring better health, understanding and peace to the world.
By Paul Bonasera
Special to Morristown This Week
With a long volunteer career as a Rotarian, retired Boy Scouts of America executive Ted Krisanda continues to try to bring better health, understanding and peace to the world.
"The world is not a safe place today because of the problems that exist between cultures," Krisanda, 67, says. "The more people of the world get to know one another and mingle their cultures, the better their relations will become."
And the Rotary and the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are helping accomplish this, he says.
Krisanda has been a Rotarian for 40 years, having joined the Rotary of the Rockaways in 1970. Since then, he has lived in Virginia, New York and New Jersey, moving from place to place with his Boy Scout management positions. He has joined local Rotary Clubs in the places he worked. He has been a member of the Morris Plains Rotary for the past 16 years. He and his wife Mary have lived in Morris Township since 1994. They have a son, David, of Morris Township; a daughter, Carol Jardines, of Washington Township in Warren County, and a grandson.
Krisanda has served as a trustee with Rotary's Gift of Life Program, helping to make life-saving heart operations available to children and young people around the world. He was governor in 2003-2004 of Rotary District 7470 — composed of Morris, Warren, Sussex and Essex counties, and a small part of Somerset County. He is currently executive vice president of the district's annual Student Exchange Program, which allows more than a half dozen high school students to learn abroad and an equal number to visit here in exchange for a school year. Other students take part in an abbreviated exchange program during the summer.
"They not only learn a foreign language and about another culture, but also play a role in improving foreign relations," Krisanda said. "Boy Scout and Girl Scout international jamborees are also good at accomplishing friendly relations with the people of other lands."
Krisanda is District 7470's parliamentarian, making sure that parliamentary procedures and Rotary bylaws are followed at every Rotary meeting. At the end of April, he will represent the district in Chicago at the Rotary International Council on Legislation, which writes the bylaws. One representative from each of Rotary's 431 districts around the world will be there. There are 1.2 million Rotarians in the world.
Krisanda will serve for the fifth consecutive time as registrar at the annual New York City Rotary United Nations Day on Nov. 6. This year an estimated 1,400 Rotarians and their guests from around the world are expected at the conference. Before the day itself, Krisanda handles reservations for the event via mail, email, Pay Pal and fax. Rotary International and the Red Cross were the first two nongovernment representatives to the U.N., which was founded in 1945, he noted.
A project Rotary and the U.N. are working on together is the eradication of the pockets of polio that remain in the world. These areas are located in Nigeria, Northern India, Afganistan, and Pakistan. Rotary has raised $100 million, matching $100 million donated by Bill Gates to fight the crippling disease, and is now raising another $100 million to match $255 million promised by the American billionaire for the cause, Krisanda said.
Krisanda is also on the committee of the Rotary's Help The Children Hear Program, the brainchild of a Rotary exchange student who is now a high school Spanish teacher. She asked whether there was any way to help third world children whose parents drop them off at orphanages because they can't hear, Krisanda said.
"In the third world, some people didn't know that all these children needed was a hearing aid," Krisanda said. Two Rotary Clubs, Blairstown and Caldwell, came up with the idea of sending a doctor there and fitting the children with hearing aids. Rotary provided the hearing aids, and the program has been a success ever since, he said.