Welcome to all tonight after yet another busy Rotary week. Apologies for this week’s meeting from Sharon Kenny, Kelly Curran, Judy Ross, Ann Donaldson, Rachel Furnell, Graeme Ward, David Brown.
Welcome to Lola and Andrew Ross.
Welcome also to all our visitors from 25th Biennial Conference of the Pacific History Association (PHA) being held at Deakin from October 31 to November 4, 2023.
Two of these visitors have been sponsored to attend the conference by our Club. Visitors from the conference include Sonia, Cathy, Aerealla, Paninna,and Kmello, (I feel I may not have spelt these names correctly so apologies if there are any errors.)
There were 3 comments from me tonight.
The first is a thank you to all members who helped at the show. As Tony mentioned there were some negatives with the weather and again equipment and technology but our club together with members from Daybreak undertook our role successfully. The Board will review our involvement and we are in the process of determining the feasibility of taking on more responsibility (for a greater return) in the future.
The second is that the voting on regionalisation will be finalized from our club this week.
Thank you all who undertook this survey and even those who didn’t thank you for your faith in me to submit based on the results of those who did.
Thirdly our Club donated $500 to the bowling night helping to raise much needed funds for the “Say no to domestic violence” campaign which is supported by RI. Thankyou to Terry and Rache for representing our club on the night. We received a thankyou email from the president of the Conden Club.
The Garden Show is on this weekend and Anne updated us on the preparations. A big thankyou to Leon’s colleague from Southwest Health Care Graeme Broderick who went around all gardens on Monday with me to assess the health and safety risk. Graeme and Leon then prepared a risk report which has been very useful for preparing for the Garden show. We appreciate the time and effort Graeme and Leon put into this assessment. Not only do we need to do this these days for insurance purposes it actually increases the likelihood that we will have a safe day and decreases the risk to us, and the attendees so is well worth the effort.
The main event for the evening was a presentation from the Deakin conference representatives who were actually going to present at the conference over the next few days. They gave us a brief outline of what they were going to present at the conference.
Whilst some of their topics definitely went over my head I was really interested to hear about their amazing topics and impressed by their energy and enthusiasm and obvious ability. Those that were sponsored by our club were very thankful for the opportunity our sponsorship provided them.
That’s all for my report. I look forward to a busy weekend for the garden show. Anne and Tony and many others have put a lot of effort info getting this ready for the weekend and I’m sure it will be another successful event. We will be having an evening where we all get together with the DG and the garden owners and thank everyone for their wonderful input.
Have a great week and hope to see you at the Garden Show
“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it's unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there's no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope.”
— Noam Chomsky
Janet Blackley
