RIPN Jennifer Jones

RIPN Jennifer Jones, a Canadian and the first woman president of Rotary International (2022) was our guest speaker this week.
 
 
Jennifer emphasized the role of Rotary and the significance of the organization in the healing process when disaster happens. She recognized the Global impact of Rotary and its ability to connect and adapt to support the world initiatives on service to society. Major opening statement, and special comments; “In order to live in the kind of society you want to have you have to help to build it” and this was the message and mode of the meeting and a worthy theme.
 
Polio Eradication  
The impact that Rotary has had in the past 30 year, that adaption of the Polio team in helping with contact tracing and the role that the Polio infrastructure will play in assisting with the COVID vaccine challenge.
 
Recognition was given of the progress of the Polio program and the great success of getting Africa off the endemic list. Mention was made of the Nigerian program and the work of Dr Funsho who was recognized as Time Magazine 100 most Influential People.
 
The derivative effect of the recognition of the good work of Polio program and other Rotary initiatives causes are points of pride that enables and fosters growth and pride in membership.
Special mention of COVID Response:- $29m through the Rotary Foundation to support global pandemic needs. Recognition was given to the work and contributions of Rotarians around the world in support of the Rotary needs. In addition, all the current efforts a task force is currently in place collaborating with the relevant organization to demonstrate how we can be of assistance with the support of efforts to deal with the Pandemic issues.
 
Upcoming Events:
In the next coming weeks President- elect of RI will be talking about membership and service. The Environment will launch as the 7th major area of service on July 1. and special interest will be given to how we can contribute to the improvements in the environment by local efforts. 
 
Diversity Equity and inclusion is the other area of focus and this is another area of focus. A special statement was released by RI and Jennifer mentions that there were some challenging dialogue that needed to had to ensure that we are a proper representation of our communities so that we are able to bring our diverse perspectives to the solution of problems in our communities Jennifer ends with looking forward to the days when we can return to in person meeting where we can commune before opening the floor for questions.
 
Questions
  1. How is Rotary dealing with diversity- Task force has been assembled and they now have the difficult task of figuring out the conversation and action steps needed to tackle the issue. What’s great about the construct of Rotary is our beliefs, mission and diverse make up, these qualities make it possible for our clubs to host these types of conversation
  2. Rotary’s role in assisting governments in dealing with COVID 19- Rotary will likely take positive action steps in assisting with the vaccination efforts because of the Polio infrastructure
  3. How can Rotary International Global grants be processed for (Liberia) Jennifer identified that establishing partnership is the best approach and asked members of the call to support the brother from Liberia by posting the Global grants process
  4. Will the International Convention happen this year in Taiwan – not sure, looking into it
  5. Rotary’s collaboration with the Institute for Peace and Economics – Mention was made of Steve from Australia and his development of a metric tool to measure the impact of peace initiative
  6. Any areas of improvements:  Stabilizing Membership, we need to be more intentional about how we treat our membership. We need to ask why people join and deliver on the promise of why they joined. Why people leave is a bit late, why the join is probable more significant. Support people in their initiatives and support them to success, be vested in their success and we will never have to worry about people leaving
  7. Norm Binder our organizer – asked a question about the membership potential for mainland China- China, Vietnam, Cuba, Saudi Arabia ; are all countries that have leadership assigned to getting extension into those countries, The response was a reiteration that new membership is great but we need to retain our current membership, mention was made that Roteractors are a pipeline that need to be fostered into membership, we need to look at extension but more importantly we need to work on keeping our membership
  8. Attract more younger people. This is best served by being relevant!
  9. Is there a disaster relief fund? – Yes, and we were able to rapidly deploy $2m less than a week to the district level to assist with relief at the beginning of the pandemic.
  10. Question what improvements would you most like to see?  Improvement of gender and age balance in membership and leadership.
  11. Rotary in expanding more in Africa and Asia what’s being done differently – Other areas are asking we just need to ask to actively solicit the number that working side by side with us in our volunteer efforts.
President Dittie thanked our speaker and in her thank you speech she mentioned the positive of the Pandemics and the extension of our meetings to Rotarian in other parts of the word. President Dittie emphasized our pride in Jennifer being a Canadian and extended our support of Jennifer’s position.