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Grant submitted by Rotaract Club at the United Nations
The Global Need for Prosthetic Equipment:
Currently over 90% of the world's 65+ million amputees do not have access to prosthetic care. In this grant, we propose to use funds from both our club and District 7230 to help support a local organization dedicated to addressing this problem. Penta Medical Recycling (Penta) is a New York-based organization which repurposes high-quality, used prosthetic equipment to support underserved communities in low and middle-income countries. In the United States, each year over 300,000 used, yet entirely functional prostheses are discarded as US law prevents their re-use. Penta collects and inventories these devices by working with a variety of different doners, ranging from individual families to large biotech companies and hospitals. PENTA then works with local prosthetists in over 29 countries and allows them to order, at no cost, equipment from their inventory. This ensures that PENTA only sends equipment which matches the exact needs of these local prosthetist's patients. By doing so PENTA has already help empower over 1000 amputees with physical, economic, and social mobility in these chronically underserved areas.
PENTA's ongoing partnerships with Rotary:
Since its incorporation, Penta Medical Recycling has had ongoing partnerships with Rotary and Rotaract Clubs across the globe. Penta has worked the Rotary Club of Choluteca in Honduras to provide local prosthetists with the equipment needed to serve their community, partnered with the Rotary Club of Portland Maine to coordinate a prosthetics mission trip to the Dominican Republic, and most recently partner with our club, the Rotaract Club of New York (at the United Nations). We were first contacted by Penta in the 2022-2023 Rotary Year after a talk at our sponsor club, the Rotary Club of New York. Here Penta discussed the mission of their organization and invited us to volunteer at their storage facility. Since then, our club has repeatedly visited Penta Medical Recycling, assisting them in the disassembly and inventorying of donated equipment. It is through this partnership that we were able to see the dedication and determination of the Penta team to helping serve underprivileged communities in need of this life changing equipment. Seeing firsthand that the goals, actions and people of this wonderful organization personified the values of The Four Way-test, our club decided to donate the proceeds of our annual gala change-over event to Penta, totaling around $1000 USD.
Enabling Penta to serve more people:
In this grant, we are requesting district 7230 to match our raised funds to help enable Penta Medical Recycling to provide more life changing equipment to amputees in need. Until recently, Penta was operating out of a storage facility in NYC, the size of which severely limited the numbers of volunteers who could work there at any given time, significantly slowing the rate at which Penta could collect, process and then ship orders for specific prosthetic equipment. For this reason, Penta recently relocated to a much larger facility in Westchester County. When discussing how our club may assist their organization, Anna Szczepanek, Penta's Executive Director and Jeffrey Woolverton, Penta's Director of Development, detailed how Penta would be greatly assisted by our support in helping to outfit their new facility with the various equipment needed to collect, inventory and store the donated prosthetic equipment. This new equipment would allow them to have more volunteers (including from our club) working at the same time, increasing the flow of this life-changing equipment to those in need. They also detailed how this equipment would help facilitate more educational opportunities, by allowing Penta to teach both school-aged and university students about prosthetic equipment and the needs of amputees across the globe. This additional equipment will also allow more of our members to attend our semi-monthly volunteering opportunities with PENTA.
Below we give a detailed breakdown of the needed equipment and associated costs. Following approval of this grant application, this equipment will be purchased and delivered to PENTA at our semi-monthly volunteering event in November 2024. We hope that by combining both our resources and that of district 7230, we will be able to assist Penta Medical Recycling in its mission of providing more amputees around the world with the life-changing equipment they so desperately need.
Item Price Purpose
Desk x2 $660 Provide work area for up to 6 volunteers to help disassemble prosthetic limbs and inventory components
Chairs (x2) $160
Printer $190 Print orders received by local prosthetists to enable volunteers to find and collect components
Computer $600 To enable volunteers to look up and find items in inventory when processing orders
Scale $33 To weigh various orders prior to shipping
Cart $120 To move various storage containers and equipment around the facility
Storage bins (x25) $250 Used for storage of the components
Total $2,013
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