Pandemic Response

The big story in Thailand, as in much of the world, continues to be the Covid-19 pandemic, and the disastrous impact it has had on practically every segment of the economy and every-day life. We recently learned that many of the restrictions on travel will continue through the month of June and there is no talk of the resumption of international flights into Thailand until after July 1. The lockdown has been effective in controlling the spread of the disease in Thailand and especially here in Chiang Mai where there has not been new Covid-19 cases in weeks. BUT tourism, a huge component of the economy, here in Chiang Mai is completely shut down. The numbers of people now unemployed is in the tens of thousands and most of these people were low paid and living day-to-day. Many hardworking families are now faced with poverty and hunger through no fault of their own.

I am proud to say that our Chiang Mai International Rotary Club members and our local partners and friends have been working hard to help meet the critical needs of the poor and hungry here in our Northern Thailand community. We began in March by raising money for our food initiative; over 300,000 baht has been raised so far and another 100,000 baht has been pledged by Rtn Kim White’s Road to a Better Life Foundation. Our members and our friends have been very generous in this time of need!

We then sought out our trusted community partners, beginning with our Children’s Water Safety and Drowning Prevention Program partners at Bronco Kids Sport Club-Kru Payu Swim. Their pools were closed for the lockdown and their swim instructors and club staff had created a food distribution program for about 500 poor unemployed people each day. The lines were so long that they had to request help from the municipality to ensure social distancing was maintained. Each person in line received a lunch, 2 kilo bags of rice, fresh fruit, noodles, water, and juice, plus other items such as canned fish, cooking oil, etc. funded by our CMIRC cash donations and direct donations of food and money from many other kind-hearted people. We estimate the cost of purchased items at 50 Baht/person/day. We used 140,000 baht from our donors’ gifts for this program. So, we helped provide 2,800 food packages and meals at the Bronco Kids-Kru Payu-CMIRC program over a period of 3 weeks. The pools and gyms at Bronco Kids are opening up again on June 1, so our amazingly generous and hardworking swim teachers and Bronco Kids staff will not be free to volunteer any longer, so this program is now closed.

Next, we sought out Philanthropy Connections our long-time partner in providing winter clothing and school supplies in the poor mountainous areas surrounding Chiang Mai. Their director, Sallo Polak, helped us identify Shan refugee villages in Chiang Mai Province. Thus far we have donated 100,000 baht through the Philanthropy Connections Foundation and the Shan Women’s Action Network providing meals for the poor and unemployed families who were forced to return home to their villages in Fang and Wiang Hang Districts. In the villages, food packages including rice, cooking oil, canned fish, and fruit were distributed. We are currently allocating an additional 50,000 Baht for school lunches at the Koung Jor Nursery School just outside the Shan refugee camp in Wiang Hang District.

CMIRC also reached out through our members to identify other food initiatives. At Why Not Restaurant; where they fed between 120 and 150 people every day, we were able to sponsor over 700 meals (below, left). Other members knew the Sunday meal program at Kitchen-7 Restaurant, which serves over 125 meals every Sunday to the poor. CMIRC sponsored 4 of their Sunday meal programs or about 500 meals (below, right).

Then we then learned that President Dave McComas and his wife Ella of the Chiang Expats Club were providing Pantry Packs of staples to poor families at Wat Pa Phaeng. These are substantial packages with around two weeks of basic supplies. CMIRC sponsored fifty Pantry Packs and we also helped distribute them.

Finally, we asked our municipal school partners who help us with our survival swim program for 4th graders, if they could identify a school where families were very poor and would need food packages of staples. They identified a nursery/elementary school, Wat Gate Karam School, and we have allocated 50,000 baht of the money pledged by the Road to a Better Life Foundation.

So, we at CMIRC are working hard and doing what we can to help our community in these difficult times with the help of our community partners, and our generous donors.

WE NEED TO CONTINUE SUPPORTING THESE PROGRAMS! The lockdown and resulting unemployment, poverty, and hunger will continue until the end of June at least. Do you want to help? Please contact our CMIRC Treasurer, Nancy Lindley to arrange to make a donation. NLLindley@msn.com or simply "Reply" to this email Bulletin.

Welcome to CMIRC

Using Zoom, we were able to welcome a new member to CMIRC at a virtual meeting. Her name is Shirley (Chili) Humphrey and she is a very experienced educator, just arriving in Chiang Mai after 10 years of teaching English at a Chinese university. This was the first new member induction that CMIRC has done at a virtual Zoom meeting. We were honored to have Rotary District Governor Kamolsak and Assistant District Governor Saran also there on-line to welcome Chili to CMIRC and Rotary. Later Charter President Roger, President-Elect Clarence and I were able to give her a Rotary pin and business cards in person when we met for lunch.

Get involved:

Dear Bulletin readers, if you are excited about supporting meaningful service in a part of the world and at a time when children still have many unmet basic needs, contact me and I will tell you how you can join us and/or support us in our efforts to improve Child Safety, Health and Education in Northern Thailand: johnkschorr@gmail.com .

Chiang Mai International Rotary Club (CMIRC)-Kru Payu  Children’s Water Safety and Drowning Prevention Program (CWSDPP) 

The Thai government has announced a target date of July 1 for the reopening of schools nationnwide. All of our programs rely heavily on full cooperation from the municipal schools for scheduling and transportation to our pools. So, we will soon be working with school officials to schedule our programs for fourth graders at the eleven municipal school in Chiang Mai, two municipal schools in Phrao, and the Ban Ya Migrant Learning Centre in Phuket, and in Phetchabun Province. This year we are also considering conducting a program at the Child Development Migrant Learning Centre in Mae Sot, Tak Province.

We are busily planning getting back into the water and have developed a new budget for the coming 2020-2021 CMIRC Fiscal Year. We anticipate a budget of 540,000 Baht for the coming year, which will be used to provide 15 hours of survival swimming and water safety instruction to around 800 4th-grade children in several locations in Thailand. That computes to around 675 Baht/Child, around US$20/child. Because of our generous donors, only 71,000 Baht is being requested from CMIRC 2020-2021 funds.

Once again this month we would like to recognize the people and organizations behind the success of our survival swim projects over the past 5 years. The logos you see below are the organizations that have recently supported our programs at the Chiang Mai Municipal Schools, municipal schools in Phrao, municipal schools in Phetchabun Province, the BanYa Migrant Learning Center in Phucket, and in partnership with the Warm Heart Foundation in Phrao.

We are also supported by the Thai Thaim Foundation of Park Rapids, Minnesota, USA and Rotarian Bob Ashley and of course all the generous donors to the Chiang Mai International Rotary Club.

We started this program in 2015 and we are still going strong and serving more children every year thanks to our wonderful sponsors and CMIRC volunteers!

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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/people-mailed-dimes-truck-load-fdrs-white-house-cure-polio-180961594/

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the first U.S. president with a visible disability, caused by polio.

What can ten cents buy you? Today, virtually nothing. In 1938, though, it could buy about what $1.71 would today. It could also help cure polio.

The story of polio and the March of Dimes Foundation, which was officially incorporated on this day in 1938, is really about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the United States’ most popular presidents and the thirty-second man to hold that office.

Polio isn’t really a threat now, thanks to regular vaccinations and years of work, but in the early twentieth century it was a regular horror. “Polio wreaked havoc among American children every summer,” according to History.com. “The virus, which affects the central nervous system, flourished in contaminated food and water and was easily transmitted.” Nobody was safe, not even future President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was diagnosed with the disease at the unusually advanced age of 39. Thankfully, though, Roosevelt had the power—and popularity—to do something about it. Roosevelt’s diagnosis came eleven years before his presidential campaign, writes Christopher Clausen for The Wilson Quarterly. He was elected governor of New York with his disability, and then president. Although there is a modern myth that people didn’t know Roosevelt used a wheelchair, he writes, they did know—he just didn’t advertise it, strategically presenting himself and restricting photo opportunities.

But the fact people knew may have contributed to their warm response to his polio fundraising efforts, first at annual “birthday balls” and then when he announced the creation of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (what polio used to be called) in late 1937, which became the March of Dimes the next year.

“Over the past few days bags of mail have been coming, literally by the truck load, to the White House,” he said in a speech published in The President’s Birthday Magazine on January 30, 1938—his birthday. “In all the envelopes are dimes and quarters and even dollar bills—gifts from grown-ups and children—mostly from children who want to help other children get well.” It was too much for the White House to handle, he said, which is why the new foundation was created.

The press immediately responded to the President’s new foundation, Clausen writes. Time’s story began with the lead, “Franklin Roosevelt is not only the nation’s No. 1 citizen but its No. 1 victim of infantile paralysis.”

Those truckloads of mail continued, funding the Foundation, which directly funded and administrated Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin’s vaccines for the virus. Dimes were always the focus of fundraising efforts, and the "March of Dimes" slogan was used in fundraising radio broadcasts that first year.

Why dimes? Most people could spare one, foundation administrator Eddie Cantor explained at the time, and they add up. “The March of Dimes will enable all persons, even the children, to show our President that they are with him in this battle against this disease,” he said.

That first year, FDR received $268,000, or more than two and a half million dimes. Eventually, it all added up to a cure. Soon after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, legislation was introduced by Virginia Congressman Ralph H. Daughton that called for the replacement of the Mercury dime with one bearing Roosevelt's image. The dime was chosen to honor Roosevelt partly due to his efforts in the founding of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (later renamed the March of Dimes), which originally raised money for polio research and to aid victims of the disease and their families.

June is designated as “Rotary Fellowships Month” by the RI Board to recognize the importance of international fellowship and good will among Rotarians with similar recreational interests, vocations, and health and medical issue-oriented interests, to promote increased participation in fellowships and increase understanding of this program.

The RI Board encourages fellowships groups to highlight activities through projects, activities, and events in celebration of “Rotary Fellowships Month” in June.

“Fellowship is wonderful; it illuminates life’s pathway, spreads good cheer, and is worth a high price.” -Rotary Founder Paul Harris

Rotary Fellowships began informally in 1928 when Rotarians with a shared interest in the language Esperanto joined together. In 1947, a group of Rotarian boating enthusiasts began flying the Rotary flag from their crafts, calling themselves the International Yachting Fellowship of Rotarians; this fellowship now boasts the longest continuous existence. The scope of Rotary Fellowships has changed much over the years, but today their purpose is still to unite Rotarians in friendship and provide venues for enjoying their favorite recreational or professional activities.

Rotary Fellowships are autonomous, international groups of Rotarians, Rotarian spouses, and Rotaractors who join together to:

• Share a common interest in worthwhile recreational activities (sports, hobbies, etc.)
• Further their vocational development through acquaintance with others of the same profession
• Make new friends around the world
• Explore new opportunities for service
• Have fun and enhance their Rotary experience

More about Rotary Fellowships can be found at: https://www.rotary.org/en/our-programs/more-fellowships

Note: When reading, it might be beneficial to substitute “volunteer service organization” for “non-profit” and “volunteers who pay for membership” for “staff”

Now now, before you get all up in arms, we’re not saying that non-profits should never act like a business. We did see Dan Pallotta’s Ted Talk – The way we think about charity is dead wrong – and we talked about it in this previous post. The point here is that non-profits cannot always act like a business because of some key distinctions between the two.

What is a non-profit business? Logically, you’d think, it’s a business like any other, with the exception that its mission is not to make money but to do some form of public good. In order to fulfill its mission, profits from the non-profit go, not into the hands of its owners or stock holders, but back into the organization itself.

If that’s the definition of a non-profit then, logically, business principles should be used to structure, manage, and finance a non-profit.

Because they think logically, many boards follow this line of reasoning – and hire business people to manage the non-profits for which they are responsible. Additionally, they make a point of including business people on the board, whose job will be to ensure that the organization follows typical business practices.

Every now and then, this approach works well. More often, however, it doesn’t.

Why not?

The reality is that the vast majority of non-profits – even many of the larger ones – bear very little resemblance to a typical business. Here are a few reasons for those differences.

1. The Staff Have Different Motivations and Values

The staff at most non-profits choose to work at the non-profit not because they are able to make the most money in the least amount of time, but because they care deeply about the mission of the organization. In fact, many staff members could make more money working elsewhere. They choose to forgo higher pay and shorter hours for the pleasure and/or personal satisfaction of being part of the non-profit.

Because of their dedication and sacrifice, staff at many non-profits feel a very personal interest in the processes and outcomes of their organization. They are more likely to connect emotionally to the activities in which they engage, the people they serve, and the processes used to achieve organizational goals. For some, this emotional connection started in childhood – and their work is the culmination of a lifetime of dedication.

While non-profit managers may have a strong ego investment in their position (much as corporate managers do), they are also very sincere in their concerns about the content of what they are doing. In other words, a manager at an art museum is likely to feel very passionate about art, its impact on the world, and the importance of proper art conservation. A manager at an insurance corporation is likely to feel far less personal investment in or passion about insurance.

Lower pay and higher personal investment means that staff are often motivated less by higher pay cheques and more by opportunities to make their mark on the organization or its outcomes.

Imagine Joe, who runs the office of a local animal shelter. He could make more working for a corporation, but he cares deeply about animal welfare. What motivates Joe to work his hardest and stay loyal to the organization? Sure, a little more money would be great – but more importantly, he wants the opportunity to help design and implement better living quarters for the animals in the shelter. That’s because, for Joe, it’s the involvement with animals that brought him to the shelter – not the opportunity to make as much money as possible as an office manager.

What happens if you bring typical business management tools to the non-profit setting? All too often, people like Joe are told to keep out of the day to day work of animal care and focus on office management, thus utterly undermining his reason for being at the shelter. Offer him money instead of a chance to make his mark, and he may decide he’d be better off at a corporation.

2. Non-Profits Succeed Because of Volunteers

Imagine the Acme Furniture Company asking volunteers to come in, week after week, for no pay, to stuff envelopes. Sound likely? Of course, the answer is no. Most non-profits depend upon volunteers for all sorts of necessary work, ranging from serving soup at a homeless shelter to stuffing envelopes for the senior center to ushering at the community theatre.

Volunteers are not staff, and can’t be treated like staff. Not only are they working for something other than cash compensation, they must also, in many cases, be handled with kid gloves.

What kind of compensation are volunteers seeking? Top of the list of reasons for volunteering are social connections, a sense that they are needed, a good feeling about giving back, and, of course, appreciation. That means that non-profit managers must ensure that their unpaid “employees” have social time, are given work that really matters to the organization, see the outcomes of their labor, and receive both informal and formal thanks and appreciation. Most successful non-profits also offer perks to volunteers that range from discounts on events or products to volunteer luncheons or galas.

Why treat volunteers with extra respect and appreciation, even if they’re not doing a stellar job of work? Volunteers are the heart and soul of the non-profit world – and they may have the capacity to give back in significant ways. Even if Mrs. Jones is the most annoying individual in town, non-profit managers must find a way to endure her company while finding work for her to do and thanking her profusely for her time. After all, Mrs. Jones is working for nothing – and there is a good chance that, in addition to donating time, she will dig deep into her pockets.

Volunteers can also be an integral part of an organization’s mission. In some settings, such as hospitals, volunteers serve in roles such as concierge, counsellor, aide, and receptionist. At arts organizations they may staff the front desk, act as docents or ushers, take or sell tickets. These are all important functions which, in a business setting, would be handled by paid employees in a hierarchical office structure.

3. Non-Profits Thrive on Financial Hopes and Dreams

Businesses should plan their budgets based on solid market research, and a good understanding of their product’s value to the public. Their income comes directly from sales, and while sales goals are imprecise, they are usually based on a good knowledge of the market, the competition, economic trends, and so forth.

While non-profits have many of the same concerns as businesses, their income stream is very different. Few non-profits actually balance their budgets on income: the cost of running a theatre, a homeless shelter, or a senior center is not covered by ticket sales, government subsidies, or low membership fees. Instead of basing their budgets on hard sales figures, therefore, non-profits build their budgets on “soft numbers” – funds they hope to raise through a combination of grants, annual giving, sponsorships, bequests, and other philanthropic donations.

Fundraising has a lot in common with sales, but it’s not the same thing. So much is based, not on reasonable expectations of making a deal, but on a volunteer’s ability to capture the heart and imagination of a potential donor.

How do you make smart budget plans on the basis of a foundation or individual falling in love with your mission? It isn’t easy. Yet that kind of pie-in-sky, what-if thinking is just what’s needed in the fundraising function. A fundraiser who doesn’t believe in the story she’s telling will never be able to complete a campaign.

Of course, even non-profits need to run in the black. But the process of making that happen is not as simple as balancing the books.

The Non-Profit Difference

What do all these differences mean? For non-profit managers and board members, understanding those differences is critical to managerial success. The manager or board member who sees no difference between a non-profit and a for-profit corporation is missing the whole point of non-profit work. Yes, the bottom-line matters. Yes, budgeting is important. But for the staff, volunteers, and clients or members of the non-profit, it’s all about the work itself. After all, why work for less, or nothing, unless the work is reward enough in itself?

https://www.sumac.com/blog/nonprofit-management-and-hr/3-reasons-why-nonprofits-cannot-operate-like-businesses/

The needed protection measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has caused the cancellation of many events. Others are being conducted online and others have been postponed. Below is a list of events and their status, as we currently understand them. Please remember the situation is extremely fluid and things change daily. Some of our scheduled speakers may be willing to participate in online meetings. The latest news for CMIRC events is at: https://cmirotary.org/events/calendar

Here are just a few of the important dates for members of Chiang Mai International Rotary Club (CMIRC). These are opportunities to meet some of us and to meet other Rotarians from around the world!

Every Sunday visits by club members to Burma Children Medical Fund's  (BCMF) B. K. Kee Patient House are temporarily on hold. Interested for the future? Contact Rotarian Bill Pierce.

All planned tours of Mae Tao Clinic are temporarily on hold.  

2 June 2020 CMIRC Regular Club meeting will be conducted online via Zoom, 7 - 9  pm.  Program: Shayne Rochfort, "Some Thoughts on Road Fatality Stastics in Thailand"

5 June 2020  District Training Assembly at Royal Peninsula Hotel, 1:00 - 3:30 pm.  Contact Roger Lindley

16 June 2020 CMIRC Regular Club meeting, 7 - 9 pm. May be conducted via Zoom or at Royal Peninsula Hotel.  Dr Lorel Mayberry, "Education Scholarships for Hill-tribe Young People".

20 - 26 June 2020 - Rotary International Virtual Convention  Free!   https://www.riconvention.org/en

23 June 2020 CMIRC Board at Royal Peninsula Hotel, 1:00 - 3:00 pm  Contact P. John Schorr.

27 June 2020 - District Governor's Salute, Chiang Rai. (not known at this time if this will occur)

 

12 – 16 June 2021 - Rotary International Convention, Taipei, Taiwan.

 

4 – 8 June 2022 - Rotary International Convention, Houston, Texas, USA

 

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