Club Meeting: 12/13/2023

About Martha Peak Helman

Martha Peak Helman serves as Rotary Foundation Trustee (2022-26).

Marty served as International Training Leader at the 2018 and 2019 International Assemblies and as Training Leader Support at the virtual 2021 Assembly. She was Trainer for Zones 28/32 in 2020 and 2021. She has facilitated at the Rotary Leadership Institute since 2009 and Northeast PETS since 2013; she has presented in breakouts at the Atlanta, Toronto and Hamburg International Conventions as well as at the virtual 2021 Convention. She has been tapped multiple times as President’s Representative, and she speaks frequently on the Rotary Peace Centers, The Rotary Foundation, and growth topics.

Marty served on The Rotary Foundation’s Peace-Major Gifts Initiative and its predecessor committees for six years, culminating in the chairmanship (2020-21). Earlier, Marty conceived of and chaired the Sakuji Tanaka Endowed Rotary World Peace Fellowship Committee, which raised $1 million for the Rotary Peace Centers, the largest sum ever raised by a Rotary Presidential fund.

Marty and her late husband Frank joined the Boothbay Harbor Rotary Club in 2003, and in 2012-13 she served as Governor of District 7780 (southern Maine and coastal New Hampshire, USA). That year, Annual Giving in the District rose 25 percent, and it increased another 33 percent while she was District Foundation Chair (2015-18). In 2017, Marty wrote and implemented the first online Grants Management Seminar in the Rotary world to be made available via RI’s Learning Center.

Marty has organized and supported Global Grants and, previously, Major Grants to provide humanitarian support around the world, including Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina. She has taken part in service projects and NIDs in Cambodia, Chad, Guatemala, India, Mali, Nigeria, Thailand and Uganda, and in 2008 she led a Group Study Exchange to the Philippines.

Marty is an Arch Klumph Society member, a member of the Paul Harris and Polio Plus societies, and she and Frank were charter members of the Legacy Society of the Rotary Foundation.

Marty serves as president of the Otto and Fran Walter Foundation, a small humanitarian non-profit that made history in 2021 when it inked a gift to The Rotary Foundation to fund a new Rotary Peace Center in the Middle East/North Africa region. Total value of the gift is over $15 million, and the new Peace Center, which will be located at Bachesehir University in Istanbul, is slated to be operational in 2025.