Thanks for visiting our site! The first ClubRunner site in District 5370
"The Friendly Club"
Tuesdays at 12:15 PM
Woodvale Facility and Golf Clubhouse
4540 - 50 Street NW
Edmonton, AB T6L 6B6 Canada
Our Club meets every week with a twist. The first three weeks of each month on Tuesday at the Woodvale Club and the last week for a meeting and social at a location, date and time to be determined. Members will be notified by email of the details.
Rotary President Elect Loida Lumanlan with Tammy Wiebe
This week we welcomed Tammy Wiebe to tell us a few things about herself. Tammy is the Executive Director of the Valley Zoo Fund Development Society. Her rotary classification is Fund Development. Tammy told us that she came to Rotary through Dennis and Donna Hutton as Dennis has served on the Valley Zoo Fund Development board. She came to know Donna when she approached her about our club sponsoring the zebras. Tammy said she has been a member of our club for one year now.
Tammy told us that she was raised in Red Deer by a single mum in a family of five children and is herself a single mum with three grown children and three grandchildren. She said that she worked for many years in marketing for various large law firms around Alberta. More recently, once her children were grown and gone, she became interested in giving back to the community and volunteered for the Valley Zoo board. She soon realized that she really enjoyed the work there and found that her business background was a valuable addition to their board. Gradually she became President of the board, where she served for two years and started hiring people with more professional backgrounds for the Zoo. A few years later she decided to take a pay cut, leave marketing and become the Executive Director for the Valley Zoo Fund Development Society. She found that it was a steep learning curve working for a charity board but she truly enjoys her work and has not looked back since. She has been at the zoo for twelve years now and said that doing something you are truly passionate about makes all the difference.
Her latest endeavor at the Zoo has been fundraising and building a new wolf habitat that will open later this year. Another one of her projects has been ‘Pay it Forward for the Planet’, where the zoo subsidizes the cost for classrooms of children from poor areas to visit the Zoo when they make a commitment to take on a conservancy project. The Zoo has now sponsored over eight hundred students under this program.
We would like to thank Tammy for telling us a few things about herself and look forward to getting to know her better in future.
We are desperately in need of more donations for our Wheel of Fortune. Please bring your donations to the meeting with you and give them to either Ken or Eric Germain. Small, new items such as wine, small gadgets, candy, books and any other small non-perishable items are welcome, in particular something you yourself would be happy to win!
Mark Climie-Elliot with club member Vince Campbell
This week we heard from Mark Climie-Elliot from Operation Smile Canada. Mark told us that Operation Smile was founded in 1982 by Bill and Kathy Magee with international headquarters currently located in Virginia, USA. Bill is a world recognized plastic surgeon and his wife a nurse and social worker. Mark told us that world-wide one in seven hundred children are born with this condition and that more people die each year from this condition due to lack of surgical care than die from Tuberculosis, Malaria and HIV combined. Cleft lip and palate can cause severe feeding problems in newborns and young children and many simply starve to death without care.
He said that Operation Smile has a worldwide network of teams of medical personnel who work to train local people and build operating rooms and equip hospitals to provide wrap around care for children with cleft lip and palate. They currently operate in thirty-six countries with one hundred and eighty facilities. Many of the hospitals that they use are Rotary sponsored. Their teams consist of about forty-five percent local personnel with the remainder coming from all over the world. These people provide their time and skill free of charge with Operation Smile covering their travel and living expenses. This care covers everything from providing pre-surgical nutrition to surgical care, which may include multiple surgeries over several years, orthodontic work, physical therapy, speech therapy, psychosocial care, family counselling and much more. This care can be ongoing up to the age of eighteen for some. Many of these children and their families also suffer from the social stigma of local superstition as this common deformity is considered to be a curse in many third world countries. This surgery can be life-changing for both the children and their families.
Mark told us that there are currently about five million people with untreated cleft palate with no access to safe surgery in their local area. He said that just over two million of these are in countries where Operation Smile serves. Operation Smile currently has a ten-year plan to help one million of these. Our donations mean the world to these children and their families. He hopes that our club will consider supporting them. We can also make individual donations through their website at operationsmilecanada.ca.
We were pleased to welcome Bienaventurado Dela Cruz to our meeting to tell us about his time in Winnipeg last summer at the week-long Rotary Adventures in Human Rights conference for high school students. Ben told us that Rotary was new to him and he would like to thank us for sponsoring him for this opportunity to meet and get to know other young people with similar interests in Human Rights and activism. He said that each day there was a different field trip or learning experience on various topics. One day they visited the Immigrant and Refugee canter in Winnipeg to learn about the experiences and difficulties faced by newcomers to our country. Another day they visited Human Rights Museum where they learned about the holocaust, the Japanese immigrant experience in Canada and the experiences of indigenous people. He said that many of these resonated with him as he tries to find his own identity in Canada. They also helped out at a free barbecue for three hundred local people by cooking and serving food and talking to the people who came. He said that he learned to do a pretty good job of barbecuing hot dogs. The last day concentrated on learning about how to foster positive peace in the community.
Ben gave us his sincere gratitude and thanks for sponsoring him to attend and said that he learned many new things about the world, met and made many new friends, gained more confidence in himself and learned how he can help to make change happen around him.
One week ago Thursday we met at Telus World of Science to have some fun checking out their Puzzles, Mazes and Games display and have a few drinks as well. Some of them were easy but others were quite challenging. Some people even got lost in one of the mazes for a while. The best part of the evening for some was having to show ID to prove we were over eighteen!
One of the requirements of Rotary International was for clubs to have good printed matter- notices, minutes of meetings and newsletters and a practice of preserving these.
All types of newsletters were published by our club since it’s inception in 1974. From simple typed, hand formatted single page mimeographed letters and later photocopied multipage newsletters which were snail mailed to each member, to present day sophisticated electronically formatted bulletins that are e-mailed to each member.
Our editors and publishers are the heroes of these publications. They gathered information (club news, new member write ups, speaker write ups, jokes, logos, pictures), typed it up, did the page layouts (what would we have done without scotch tape!), had it copied, folded, stapled, stuffed into envelopes, addressed, licked stamps and put it in the mailbox for delivery. All of this was no small task, especially prior to e-mail.
Our first newsletter was titled The Tele-Rotary. The name then transitioned to The Rota-Teller and finally the Strathconian, which became the e-Strathconian in 2007. Hans Granholm has been instrumental in seeing that nearly every newsletter got distributed to our members, was instrumental in our shift to electronic formatting and mailing and still has a hand in as the administrator of our ClubRunner website.
Some of the editors over the years were Neil Weir (our first editor), John Barnes, Hans Granholm, Jim Ashton, Len Gierach, Peter deNooy, Ken Germain and since 2016, Vi Hughes. Many other people contributed over the years as well.
We definitely owe a big debt of thanks to all of the dedicated people who made our newsletter possible over the years.
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