About this guide¶
Why I wrote this book¶
Rotary counts more than 46,000 clubs in over 200 countries and geographical areas, and more than 1.2 million Rotarians. And yet, when disaster hits, most clubs improvise. Not for lack of willingness — for lack of a framework.
I have seen it from the inside. When a cyclone, an earthquake or a flood strikes a territory, the Rotary club is very often the first organized actor able to act — before the institutional machine fully kicks in, before the international NGOs deploy their logistics. The members know the neighborhoods, the vulnerable families, the local resources. They are familiar faces, not strangers stepping out of a logo-branded 4×4. An organized club can act in under an hour. That advantage is real — and most of the time it is wasted, because nobody wrote down what to do with it.
This book is the framework I wished every club already had. Not a management lesson: you already run budgets, teams and professional crises. What was missing was the specific operational doctrine for the moment disaster strikes your own territory and your club has to act now, with what it has.
The whole guide turns on one word: autonomy. Autonomy does not mean isolation. It means act with what you have — and you have a great deal — then activate the Rotary network upward: the district, the Foundation, the Rotary Action Groups, the funding mechanisms. A prepared club is not a group of improvising volunteers. It is a local cell of knowledge, trust, coordination and mobilization.
I wrote it because I have lived it — in Lebanon, in Uganda, in the Ukraine mobilization of 2022 — and because the clubs that will face the next disaster deserve better than to start from a blank page at 3 a.m. with the power down.
A living document
This book is still being written, and its content evolves from one edition to the next. Your field experience, corrections and suggestions feed the next version. Write to me: g.bourgogne.rtn@gmail.com
About the author¶
Guillaume Bourgogne is an entrepreneur, trainer, and Rotarian. He started in Rotary at Rotaract in 2005, joining the Rotaract Club of Lyon — three years that durably shaped his rotarian culture of service, friendship, and fellowship. He joined Rotary as a senior member in 2017 at the Rotary Club of Vesoul (District 1680, France), where he became RYLA chair in 2018 and started his first international humanitarian projects — Uganda, Lebanon.
In November 2021, he transferred his membership to the Rotary Club Beirut Cedars (District 2452, which spans nine countries across three continents: Armenia, Bahrain, Cyprus, Georgia, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan, United Arab Emirates). The club awarded him a Certificate of Appreciation in May 2022, and named him a Paul Harris Fellow in recognition of his humanitarian engagement. Dr Hector Hajjar, a former minister of Lebanon, formally recommended his humanitarian work in the country as early as June 2021.
Internationally, he has held a series of Rotary leadership roles. Global Programs Director of RAGCED — the Rotary Action Group for Community Economic Development — for three years (2021-2024), then a member of both the Partnerships and Education committees. He has been a Director of DNA-RAG — the Disaster Network of Assistance Rotary Action Group — since August 2023 for a three-year term, and is a candidate for re-election 2026-2029, on the proposal of DNA-RAG's Vice-Chair. He is a founding member of the Rotarian Action Group for Peace France (RAGFP France) since 2021, and a member of RAGAS, the Rotary Action Group Against Slavery.
In the field, his humanitarian work first took him to East Africa. In October 2019, he joined the humanitarian climb of Kilimanjaro organized by DG Xavier Sentamu (District 9211, Uganda and Tanzania), followed by visits to local Rotary projects. In February 2020, he travelled to Uganda to study an agricultural microcredit project. In March 2020, during the first COVID-19 lockdown, he designed and ran a relief platform that helped 3,000 people in France within three months. In 2021, he climbed the Rwenzori range in Uganda as a fundraising expedition to help rebuild a regional maternity hospital that had been destroyed by fire.
His most sustained engagement has been Lebanon, where he has worked without interruption since 2020. Seven years of continuous personal financial commitment — close to EUR 30,000 cumulated — to support the response to the August 2020 Beirut port explosion, the post-2021 humanitarian crisis, the energy crisis, the funding of a civil defence centre in response to the wave of fires, food and elderly assistance during the 2024 war, and through to the winter 2026 donation rounds.
Probably the episode that shaped his practice most was the Ukraine mobilization of March 2022. In the days following the Russian invasion, relaying the urgency message from the Rotary Club of Lviv, he registered and deployed the next day a bilingual English-Ukrainian SaaS site that he maintained at his own expense for over 12 months. The platform was distributed worldwide through RAGCED's 2,500-member mailing list.
In terms of academic background, he has completed master's-level coursework in Innovation Management and Complex Project Management and in Economic Intelligence (Intelligence Économique), two disciplines that shape the way this book treats risk, decision-making under uncertainty, and information chains. In terms of operational training, he completed in 2021-2022 the Community Development — Economic Disaster Resilience and Recovery Course. He also completed the Positive Peace training of the Institute for Economics & Peace (October 2021, ICC USA-France program in Rennes), and was admitted as an IEP Ambassador in April 2023.
A passionate mountaineer, he survived a high-altitude cerebral edema on Lenin Peak in Kyrgyzstan — a brush with death that, far from making him give up the mountains, sharpened his discipline of risk management. He returned to climbing, and now climbs with his son: at the age of eight, together they attempted Mount Ararat in winter conditions and were turned back from the final summit by a snowstorm — a decision that taught risk management in the field, not in a manual. Risk, in their practice, is not denied — it is studied, prepared, and respected.
He lives between France, Lebanon, Uganda, and Japan.
This book is the distilled outcome of what he has seen, understood, and built on the front lines of disaster response: an operational framework for Rotary clubs that want to act fast, act right, and act on their own.