President’s Prologue
I spent the last week at cottage on the north shore of Lake Huron, a fabulous week. Last night, I got a call from my daughter in Whitehorse, calling to congratulate me for beginning our new Rotary year. She joined Rotary in Whitehorse. We discussed the new theme for the Rotary year—Rotary Opens Opportunities. She sees the impact of COVID on Rotary as an opportunity to redo how we do meetings and to rethink how we do our fellowship. I am finding meeting through Zoom more interesting than our breakfast meetings. We seem to all be able to talk with one another, not just with the same people at the same table. Her club is old, and we’re also an older club. If we rely on new media, we have an opportunity to invite people and make it an attractive meeting place.
President’s Address
The theme for this year is Rotary Opens Opportunities. The impact of Zoom and new technologies has been beneficial for our club. I first want to talk about how successful our year was last year. Fifteen months ago, I challenged us to embrace a big project building on our international connections, to build connections with Pathways. It has now been approved by the Foundation and is well underway. We now have an opportunity to deliver that project to the community. Already, because of this project, we are building a whole panel of Rotarians who want to act as mentors. There are many more graduates than mentors, so I hope that many more Rotarians will want to become mentors to the Pathways graduates. I expect that the mentorship role will develop. I expect that other Rotarians and other people in the community will volunteer to act as mentors. It becomes a way to build connections not simply with Pathways but to draw other members of the community into what Rotary is doing in Kingston. It is a way to introduce ourselves to the community as a whole and to bring people into our club, without relying on the old personal-connections model.
Because we’re now involved with Pathways, we have the opportunity to do other things besides mentorship with the Pathways project—the Rotary FAR (Facilitator of Alumni Relations) Project. For instance, we just helped Pathways celebrate the graduation of their high school students. That will bring other opportunities to build and deepen the relationship with Pathways. Our focus in the Rotary FAR program is on getting students into post-secondary education and into the workplace and to help graduates find employment. One of the key partners is KEYS Job Centre, an organization in Kingston that is focusing on helping youth find employment in the Kingston area. It will be a key participant in making the FAR program a success. It’s an opportunity for us to build a relationship with KEYS, to assist them in helping graduates from the Pathways program to find employment.
Lots of things will happen for our club this year as we work on delivering the FAR Project. We will have to build relationships that will help to build the brand of Rotary in the community and bring people into our club.
Other things happened last year in addition to embracing Pathways and doing something that’s really ambitious. At the end of the year there were three big projects that involved a lot of “sweat equity”, as Murray (Cotton) likes to say. Through our National Committee, we have the development of a relationship with the community of Loughborough and the Loughborough Public School. We’re now talking about building a greenhouse, assisting that school to integrate with its community in a way it hasn’t done before, through the re-establishment of a home economics course at that school. We’re going to be able to build on that throughout the year. We’ve put a lot of our funds into making that happen. We’re going to assist the community and the school to work out how that’s going to work. It’s an opportunity for us to facilitate and integrate the efforts of the community in that part of Kingston. It will also be a way to build awareness of Rotary, to build personal connections with that community, and to draw members of that community into Rotary.
That’s the product of the work of our National Committee over the last year or two. We’re now starting to see real accomplishments and the possibility for big impacts because of the efforts of that committee. Finally, the COVID-19 food hamper project, a co-operative effort of all of the clubs in Kingston, is a real opportunity for sweat equity. Many of us are delivering or packing food hampers. That’s a way to build relationships among our clubs. This COVID-19 project has really facilitated individuals from the various clubs to get together and to talk to one another again in a way they haven’t done in many years simply because our clubs become silos. We talk among ourselves but we haven’t really had a lot to say with the other clubs because we’re not going to their meetings. Participating in a joint effort like the food hamper project leads to meeting Rotarians across clubs regularly. We build links that are very helpful for building the Rotary brand in Kingston. Rotarians start to think of themselves simply as Rotarians, rather than as members of particular clubs. Those are all good developments that provide opportunities for building our brand, delivering meaningful service to our community, and attracting new members.
I remember when I was first thinking about how I would go to the club and talk people into a big project that was going to last for a few years, with total cost over $100,000US. I thought that most people in our club would shirk that because it seemed overly ambitious. It was a much larger project financially than we had ever bitten off. It turned out that finding the money wasn’t the most difficult thing at all. We found the money because we were able to build on our international network, but we were also able to get the support of other clubs in Kingston. We should never forget that the Rotary Club of Kingston put in $6,300 US into that project. That’s almost $10,000 Canadian. That’s a big contribution. We wouldn’t have been able to do the project without that or it would have been that much more difficult to accomplish. But because we were able to raise that money, building on our existing relationships, we got that project going. Now the challenge is to actually deliver the project.
We have many opportunities for personal service—as mentors to the students in the FAR Project, as managers of the COVID-19 food hamper project, or as facilitators or community organizers at the Loughborough Public School and the greenhouse project there, or packing or delivering food hampers. We have real opportunities as Rotarians and members of the club to actually physically deliver service to the community.
In each case, with all of these projects, we start with the money to get things going. Money is important to us because we’re a service organization, but it’s just the key that allows us to help facilitate the planning and delivery. It’s what we bring to the table initially, but what we also bring is our own talent and time to devote to these projects. We have time and talent to contribute, not only to those three projects that we have going. As we begin to think more ambitiously about what we might do, all of us have contacts in the community as a whole. As people become aware of the potential that Rotary presents, our members are going to be able to come back to us with suggestions for what else we might do. But in each case, I think we’re going to find that the first ask from members of the community is going to be our money, but the second ask is our time and talent. Actually, I think our time and talent is the bigger, better contribution, one that we’re going to be able to deliver. The real opportunity for us, going forward, is to be able to develop other projects that our members think are important. We’ll be able to support one another in doing these things.
I want to end with this. Our first contribution to most of these projects in Kingston is the delivery of money, but, I think, not the most important and certainly not the last. Contributing funds enables us, if we wish, to become involved in the planning and delivery of the projects that are undertaken. We become facilitators. This is different from what we used to do a few years ago, when we raised money and gave it to other people (organizations) and they went off and did their stuff. Often we never heard from them again with respect to whether their projects were successful. We should be levering our money to get into planning and delivery of projects. That’s an opportunity that Rotary provides to us. The funding of our projects, whether internationally or locally, has enabled us to develop a whole network of contacts. We’re going to be able to go back to those people, the people that we’ve worked with in the past, and to new people who become attracted to us, to develop projects.
As a service club, we need to raise and spend money. How do we contribute meaningfully to our club’s major fund-raiser this year, our Internet auction? It has been on hold for a while. The people who have been planning it feel that we should go ahead this year. I want to emphasize how important it is for us as a club to raise those funds. I thought about issuing a challenge that we should aim to raise so many thousands of dollars per member. Maybe that’s better left for a later discussion among our members. We ought to be establishing a target, I think, bearing in mind that the money we raise allows us to finance serious projects, but more importantly, our financial contribution really is the way that we get to the table to be engaged in planning and delivery, the sweat equity that Murray has talked about on many occasions. There’s no point in simply raising money to give to other people. If we raise the money to have a role in deciding how it’s spent, that’s much more fun.
That leads me to the final point—remembering how Ana finished her talk at the beginning of the year—let’s not forget that we have fun. And we did. We had more fun last year than we have in a long time. I hope that we’ll have as much fun this year as we did last year because we all pitched in and got enthused about Rotary.
Comments
Ana: I like what you said a lot and I plan to support you every step of the way!
John Farrow: I noticed with interest that our new RI president did not rise through the ranks of Rotary in the traditional way; he came through very active involvement in student exchange and he is dedicated to getting more young people involved in Rotary.
Doug Hicks: Thanks to John Gale. Based on observation from experience in several cities, and membership in two Rotary Clubs and Kiwanis, he knows we need a stable platform from which to do our work. We have that, a template for other Rotary clubs. More important is our vision for the future. He thanked the club for the opportunity to be part of it.
