Fulfilling Rotary’s Core Purpose Through Local Community Service
Each year, the incoming Rotary international president selects a theme. Rotary International President-Elect Ian H.S. Riseley recently announced his theme – “Rotary: making a difference”. For the most part, annual Rotary themes are variations on the Rotary motto: Service Above Self. Whether you want to “be a gift to the world” or “engage Rotary and change lives”, you are expressing Rotary’s core purpose.
An important thing to note is that Service Above Self is not done by Rotary International or local Rotary clubs. They cannot deliver service above self. The one thing they can do is enable the members to be the best that they can be in delivering Rotary’s core purpose.
As Rotarians, you will find numerous opportunities offered by Rotary to enable you to deliver that Service Above Self. Over the past two weeks and continuing over the next two months, we will be outlining not only the available opportunities for you to engage in service but also how you can help guide the club as a whole in making choices.
Take a look at the table of local community service projects. These are all projects that our Rotary club has supported in the past year. Those in blue are projects focusing on youth and young adults. Those in red reflect programs to help the homeless and needy. Those with one asterisk (*) reflect new programs initiated or to be initiated this year. Those with two asterisks (**) are projects that are new within the last two years. Of the 17 programs listed, over half are programs started in the last two years. Each of these projects came about because someone in our club had an idea, presented it to the community service committee, and convinced our club that the project should be funded and supported.
Interact Clubs at Washington and Lowell High Schools
Rotaract at USF*
Scholarships for Interact students*
Rotary Youth Leadership Awards: lead sponsor
Boy Scouts: inner-city youth support and financial literacy*
Dictionary Project
Bike Build
Larkin Street Homeless Youth Project*
Homeless Prenatal Project*
Salvation Army
Thanksgiving at the ARC
Food Bank
Heroes' Voices National Veterans Poetry Contest**
Cable Car Caroling**
Emergency Service Day
Alzheimer's Walk *
Glaucoma Research Foundation*
Some of these projects may seem unfamiliar to you. If so, learn a little bit about them and discover how you can help to make it successful. Some projects, like the Interact scholarships, only take a few members to manage. Others, like Thanksgiving at the ARC, the Bike uild, Emergency Services Day, or supporting the Alzheimer’s Walk, have a variety of jobs that require many hands to make it successful.
Each of us has different levels of interest and ability. However, whatever that level is for you, there are opportunities for you to enable Rotary to achieve its core purpose. It’s up to you to enable Rotary to serve humanity.
Musical theme for January: In honor of those we lost in 2016, our song master Rick Harrell (Veterans Outreach; Heroes' Voices) sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”.
Thank you, Rotarians:President David recognized Lisa Stark (Video Production; Arizona Residence) as the Rotarian of the Month for December. A successful club needs the active support of its members to accomplish its goals. This support often involves activities that are not seen by many members. While most members of the club do not see Lisa’s efforts to secure guest speakers for every weekly meeting, all who attend those meetings see the results of her efforts! For her management of the club’s speaker committee and her diligent work in identifying and selecting guest speakers, we honor Lisa Stark as the December 2016’s Rotarian of the month! President David also recognized several other Rotarians for significant recent contributions to the success of club programs:
Eric Schmautz (Banking - Business; Wells Fargo Bank): cooking at Thanksgiving and managing arrangements with the Saint Francis for the holiday party
Luncheon Programs: The first meeting of 2017 featured our annual financial prognosticators program. Alan Herzog (Stocks and Bonds; Wells Fargo Advisors) moderated a panel including Brent Cunningham, Kevin Waldeck (Financial Services - Investment; Morgan Stanley Investment Management), and Benjamin Lam (International Private Banking; UBS Financial Services). The panelists painted a rather optimistic financial picture for 2017.
Frances Dinkelspiel, author of Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California described the details of the loss of over 4 million bottles of premium wine worth more than a quarter billion dollars due to the destruction of a wine warehouse. Her story also describes the behind-the-scenes dealings of the wine industry and how its roots reach back to the origins of California.
Lynn Luckow, founder of the crowdfunding site LikeMinded, outlined how crowdfunding websites have mushroomed in the last few years and how they have succeeded in creating a new method of fundraising for businesses and nonprofit organizations.
Dictionary Plating: Rotary club members and friends gathered to prep over 800 dictionaries. These dictionaries will be delivered to third-graders in 18 elementary schools in the San Francisco Unified School District.
Rotary Recognitions:Lillian Tsi-Stielstra donated $100 in recognition of the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women day. She encouraged everyone to wear red on Friday, February 3 to help raise awareness of heart disease. Her story is available here.
New and prospective member orientation:Lynn Luckow hosted the January, 2017 new member orientation. Fifteen new or prospective members and ten longer-term members enjoyed refreshments and snacks as they learned about opportunities in the Rotary Club of San Francisco. Thank you Lynn!
Super Bowl Pool: Our 2017 Super Bowl Pool was a great success, collecting $20,000 in donations to The Rotary Foundation of Rotary International. Watch for more information in next month's issue of Grindings.
Dan Joraanstad, Membership Chair for the Rotary Club of San Francisco, recently retired after a successful business career and thought, “I can’t retire to a life of emptiness after being a very busy person.” The answer was to become more involved in Rotary. “Rotary has become the replacement for work,” he says. “A Rotaplast trip to Peru was my first act of retirement.”
Dan was born in a small town in North Dakota and moved to the “big city of Minot” at 14. He majored in political science and English, with a minor in piano performance, at the University of North Dakota, then did graduate work at the University of Minnesota.
A job counselor suggested he would be a good fit for the publishing business, so Dan took a job with Prentice Hall as a college textbook traveler in northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. After 18 months, he was promoted to the Michigan State territory in East Lansing, moved to San Francisco in 1982 to take over the “prestige territory” of Berkeley and Stanford and eventually left the college textbook industry to sell engineering and computer science trade books on the Peninsula.
From 1986-91, Dan worked on the East Coast editing chemistry college textbooks and, at 26, became responsible for a multi-million-dollar list of textbooks, “but the best thing about the East Coast was I met Bob Hermann,” his now-husband. The couple moved to San Francisco in 1996 and now lives in Westwood Park with their dog, Skippy.
Dan became managing editor of science, engineering and computer science at Benjamin Cummings, a textbook publisher in Menlo Park. Meanwhile, he was spending a lot of time talking to his stockbroker, and, with the encouragement of friends and a lot of support from Bob, he took a job with Prudential Securities, which became Wachovia, then Wells Fargo Advisors, retiring as a managing director.
It was his Wells Fargo Advisors colleague Allan Herzog who encouraged him to check out Rotary and eventually sponsored him into the Club in 2008. “He twisted my arm and said, ‘You have to do some good sometimes.’ I liked it, but I was terribly busy and had limited time to be involved. Cecile Chiquette called me ‘a check-writing Rotarian,’ and I thought, ‘I’ll show her.’”
As Membership Chair, Dan plans “growth, but in structured ways, measured growth, 5% by June 30.” Along the way, the Club is measuring members’ satisfaction with such things as the weekly lunch meetings, service opportunities and social events. Members Connect reaches out to members monthly, and each new member is assigned a mentor to help them get involved and adjust to the Club. Dan also is planning ways to get local clubs together for social events and service projects. “We’re stronger together,” he says.
“The sense of being useful and helping others, I love that,” he says. “My business is connecting people to causes. That’s what I like about Rotary. I’ve really had a big drink of the Kool Aid.”
Celebrate the Year of the Rooster with an evening of fun! Complimentary hors d'oeuvres, wine, soft drinks - and raffle drawings for gifts - throughout the evening.
Please volunteer to help with the silent and live auctions at the Glaucoma Research Foundation's annual gala. The Glaucoma Research Foundation is dedicated to improving the lives of glaucoma patients and funding innovative research to find a cure - our own Tom Brunner is president and CEO.
Enjoy watching the Super Bowl while sharing a pot luck dinner at the home of Lilian Tsi-Stielstra and her husband Scott Stielstra. Winners of the club Super Bowl Pool will be celebrated at the end of each quarter.
The founder and executive director of the non-profit Center for Ecosystem Management and Restoration in Oakland, Dr. Gunther will review the basic physical principles and observations that have led every scientific academy in the world to conclude that human emissions of greenhouse gasses are altering the climate. He will discuss what the expected significant climatic changes mean for the country in general and the Bay Area in particular.
This is the day when we honor outstanding representatives of the public safety departments we depend on every day: Police, Fire, Sheriff, and Coast Guard. Meet the honorees and their loved ones, and hear their amazing stories of heroism and dedication told by the top brass of each department. Since this is one of the most popular meeting of the year, it is especially important to RSVP.
This presentation by the Consul General of Mexico is bound to be especially interesting given the context of current political events. Consul González López, an author and frequent speaker who holds several advanced degrees, has also served his country as General Director of Government relations and, Chief of Staff of the Secretary of Communications and Transportation, as well as Deputy Attorney General for the federal Environmental Protection agency.
Join us at the service opportunity where club members and guests will stuff diaper bags with the supplies new moms need to help care for their babies. The bags will be distributed to pregnant women involved in Prenatal Classes at the Homeless Prenatal Project. Afterwards, we'll walk down the block to Mars Bar and Restaurant for food, fellowship, and fun.
Thank you, Rotarians: President David recognized Lisa Stark (Video Production; Arizona Residence) as the Rotarian of the Month for December. A successful club needs the active support of its members to accomplish its goals. This support often involves activities that are not seen by many members. While most members of the club do not see Lisa’s efforts to secure guest speakers for every weekly meeting, all who attend those meetings see the results of her efforts! For her management of the club’s speaker committee and her diligent work in identifying and selecting guest speakers, we honor Lisa Stark as the December 2016’s Rotarian of the month! President David also recognized several other Rotarians for significant recent contributions to the success of club programs:
Paul Harris Fellowship: We are delighted to honor these club members for their growing contributions to The Rotary Foundation of Rotary International:
Luncheon Programs: The first meeting of 2017 featured our annual financial prognosticators program. Alan Herzog (Stocks and Bonds; Wells Fargo Advisors) moderated a panel including Brent Cunningham, Kevin Waldeck (Financial Services - Investment; Morgan Stanley Investment Management), and Benjamin Lam (International Private Banking; UBS Financial Services). The panelists painted a rather optimistic financial picture for 2017. 
Dictionary Plating: Rotary club members and friends gathered to prep over 800 dictionaries. These dictionaries will be delivered to third-graders in 18 elementary schools in the San Francisco Unified School District. 
New and prospective member orientation: Lynn Luckow hosted the January, 2017 new member orientation. Fifteen new or prospective members and ten longer-term members enjoyed refreshments and snacks as they learned about opportunities in the Rotary Club of San Francisco. Thank you Lynn!
The founder and executive director of the non-profit Center for Ecosystem Management and Restoration in Oakland, Dr. Gunther will review the basic physical principles and observations that have led every scientific academy in the world to conclude that human emissions of greenhouse gasses are altering the climate. He will discuss what the expected significant climatic changes mean for the country in general and the Bay Area in particular.
