2015 Feb 26 Bulletin.
Starting on a personal note as one who went to sunnier climes for a while, my mistake was that I didn’t leave for long enough. It is still wretchedly cold in the east, even as February departs. And my wife, Ruth, who is usually among the most uncomplaining and phlegmatic about miseries of any kind, has been heard to hope that things might warm up a little bit and soon.
Juliette reported on going skiing and wants everyone to know that Sunday March 1st is, (or was) the day on which our latest crop of outbound students finds out where they’re going. It’s high-energy, high anxiety event and if this gets to you in time you might want to sit on the sidelines and watch it. It’s at the Burlington art gallery and starts at 1.30 ish (tomorrow –as I write).
Also, if you know of a young person in the 19 to 24 age bracket who would benefit from a week’s leadership development, consider RYLA. Follow this link for more (even though it’s a year out of date, the program is much the same.)
http://ryla7080.ca/
Barb Hislop and Deanne Mayall are scheduled for induction into the club on March 12th. But formal notice will follow in a bulletin from President Brady any day now.
Our speaker today was Oakville Rotarian Rolf Soeder, who I think has been a fervent promoter and organizer of Camp Enterprise for perhaps all of its nineteen years.
Ralf told us how in Camp Enterprise’s early days, it was tough to recruit kids from area schools because authorities were skeptical of the camp’s usefulness; today they’re all over it. The proven worth of Camp Enterprise has mirrored the surge in entrepreneurism that has accompanied the decline of Big Auto, Big Steel and the Big Martini Lunch.
Perhaps a generation or two ago, the average high-schooler understood that the preferred way to chart a course in life was to find a good job: a niche in the bosom of a mother corporation, education, or government: work hard, pay your dues and retire on a pension at the end of the day. Indeed, it has worked out that way for some of us. But as we’ve seen in the last decade or so, that’s not the way the world works anymore.
There’s probably an academic study around somewhere on this, but I bet if you were to compare the opinions and aspirations of today’s high-schooler against those of 40 years ago (Recall, that just the 1970’s) you’d find a much higher percentage of today’s kids who see starting their own business as a serious option. What with crowd-sourcing, on-line everything and almost daily stories along the theme of “Look-at-the-innovation-empire-these-kids-have-built” well, business as an option has been seriously re-booted.
So with the foregoing ruminations in mind, I wonder how Rotary’s Camp Enterprise has borne witness to the changes. Ralf gave us an overview of how the two-and-a-half-day Camp Enterprise works. Most of us were at the meeting (generally save and except most of the superannuated) so I’ll skip a laborious repetition of Ralf’s talk. You can read and see everything you need to know about it by clicking on this link. Camp Enterprises But please note, if you’d like to volunteer or just go and watch, you will be welcome. The 2015 edition of Camp Enterprise takes place April 16-19 at Crief Hills Community Centre.
P.Scribe
