District Governor Craig Loughery visit September 22, 2015
Posted by Robert T. Chambers
on Sep 22, 2015
Members had the opportunity to meet District Governor Craig Loughery and his wife Diane during his luncheon visit to the club at the Hughes Shelter September 22, 2015. Craig is a member of the Ely, Minnesota club who has served our District 5580 for a number of years in a variety of capacities and then three years ago was nominated to be the District Governor for 2015-16. He is one of 535 District Governors for Rotary International encompassing most of the world; over two hundred countries and territories. District 5580 is geographically one of the largest districts in the world incorporating all of North Dakota, northern Minnesota, northwestern Wisconsin and part of northern Ontario with sixty-six clubs and over thirty three hundred members.
DG Loughery addresses club with wife Diane and President Jordan Ottoson looking on.
During the morning DG Loughery sat down with the Board of Directors of the Wahpeton Rotary club to review operations. In part that is for him to look for ways the District can assist the club and in part it is for him to learn things that the local club is doing that might assist other clubs. When he addressed the members over the lunch hour he said that he was very pleased with local operations.
At the luncheon he presented the “Wahpeton Rotarian of the Year” award to Past President Norma Nosek (see additional story).
During his address to the club he focused on four areas. The first was membership. Her he emphasized how it is important to keep seeking new members and the ways in which Rotary has changed the rules to make membership more flexible and easier to achieve. His second area of emphasis was The Rotary Foundation and the need to contribute to the Annual Fund of the Foundation so that the financial engine of Rotary has resources for the mission. He emphasized that fifty percent of the contributions from the district are returned to the district for local projects. He has set a district goal of having one hundred new first time Paul Harris awards in the district; to date this fiscal year there are thirty. His third emphasis was the District Conference scheduled for May 12 to 14 in Bismarck, ND. Explaining the process of choice of venue he emphasized the lower cost of the Bismarck option over other venues. The Bismarck Visitor bureau is contributing five thousand dollars to have the convention there. The forth area of emphasis was this year’s theme of “Be a Gift to the World” as enunciated by the 2015-16 Rotary International President R. K. Ravindran.
