This Week's Rotary Chips, September 9, 2013
I would like to apologize up front for sending this out so late this time. Hope you all had a nice week and I’ll see most of you at lunch.
Guests/Attendance not available
Brags/Fines
George was fined by David for his puns.
Nick bragged that George only reminded him four times that his beloved Yankees were beaten by the Red Sox.
Traci bragged that the United Way Campaign is off to a good start due to the help of several Rotarians in this room.
Wendy’s son successfully moved up to Fairbanks, AK recently. She’s assuming that Alaska will be her next travel destination unless she decides to visit her parish priest when he moves back to Tanzania.
Reed mentioned that there will be a block party on Oct. 5th from 10-2 for Project Vision., with aims to make our neighborhoods safer by getting to know your neighbors. He was hoping we could have a booth there possibly.
Rotary Minute: Brian read an article regarding children and malnutrition from a recent issue of The Rotarian.
Announcements:
Board mtg (last) Thursday at noon at the Hampton Inn.
Sept 30th Manchester Golf Tournament
Nov. 14th Foundation Dinner
Leadership Institute
All of these are on the District Website. Please check it out for more details.
Raffle:
Chris won the weekly raffle but not the big pot.
Foundation:
Bob gave us a Foundation update. Polio is almost eradicated worldwide and our club has been helping keep malaria cases down in Togo (Africa). Rotarians who are generous in service and donations can become Paul Harris Fellows (after $1000 donation to the foundation). We all celebrated Cale’s recent achievement of attaining this special honor. His father and brother are both Paul Harris fellows. He’s honored and happy to receive this award.
New Member Induction:
Jason and Dick welcomed Amanda Beraldi into the club today. She’s a Rutland native and works at GMP as the director of customer programs. She has an MBA from College of St. Joe’s, a bachelor’s from UVM and a hubby and two small children at home. Reminder: Sign those forms and introduce yourselves to our newest members!!
Speaker: District Governor David Hoopes
He likes how well this meeting was scripted from the Paul Harris Fellow to the induction of a new member to our visiting foreign exchange student.
The theme of RI this year is: Engage Rotary, Change Lives. Our RI President, Ron Burton (from OK), would love to see the last case of polio. He would also like to increase membership, be less formal and more down-to-earth to be more inclusive. Attendance will be a less stringent requirement as long as hours are put in elsewhere.
Work on attracting new members by being an attraction. Engage our new members and make meetings and projects fun and worthwhile.
What is 7870 doing to be more helpful to all of us? If there is something we need from RI, seek help through the District staff. They exist to help and serve us. If we need training in any area, let them know. They can help. There will be membership seminars in Brattleboro and NH over the next six months. Size of the club does not matter. It’s the heart that counts.
Communication is important to him. He sends emails every Monday letting every club in the district know what’s going on. Next week he’ll be training in Philadelphia with about 50 other DGs from the Northeast. The monthly newsletter would be even better if we can give him a little bit of info on what we’re doing recently.
Crisis management is another priority of the District. Two years ago, they put together the largest district grant to help with fallout from Irene. Due to liability issues, there is still a good amount of money from the grant that has not been disbursed. They learned from this when it came to Sandy. With a Rotarian network, we were able to get tons of supplies from our district clubs to other clubs in hard-hit NJ where the items were put where they were needed most.
District grants allows them to take money from RI and figure out where and how to distribute it. Almost all of the money has been spoken for this year for special projects, like Sandi’s clubs project in Uganda.
Cale led the Four-Way Test. See you later today!