Song – Barry, Derek, and Donna led us all in a slightly-modified version of the Beatles’ Hit – “With a Little Help From My Friends”
Rotary Guests: Name: Guest of:
Geoff Alexander – Today’s Speaker ● Ken
Pat Straehley ● Terry
Announcements:
President Ken – D.G. John Weiss was diagnosed with a tumor and is taking 3 weeks off from his Club visits . Ours is now scheduled for 11-15-17
Donna Eyman – Free lunch tickets for prospective members
Jim Lisi – lunch networking meeting tomorrow at Casa on Camarillo
Ken Oplinger- Updated lists were circulated for the pledge-invocation-scribe assignments and Monthly Program Chairs
Mike Bergquist chaired the annual membership meeting for the Club’s Foundation – RCSBNCF, presenting information on the Foundation’s history, board, investments (now over $480K in corpus) and grants. Election of three directors for the 2017-2019 cycle was held (four candidates).
Pat Straehley gave a passionate presentation with her observations from a trip to Kenya 2 years ago about the challenges facing women in Africa in securing and transporting clean water for basic living needs. The Foundation is faced with a large grant request of $13,125 to support the Club’s Global Grant water project in Kenya and the Foundation chair asked all Club members to give generously to support the Club’s efforts in that project.
Donations:
Name: Event: Donation:
Pat Straehley Support of Kenya Water Project Global Grant $1,000.00
Mike Bergquist Support of Pat’s Recognition of Women’s Strength
and in recognition of Jennifer’s recent Birthday -- $100 to RCSBNCF
Donna Eyman Support of Pat Straehley’s Comments about Women 1 MB
Santa Barbara County Film Commission by Geoff Alexander
Geoff has been with the Film Commission for ten years and now serves as its Commissioner. He gave us a lengthy and thorough presentation beginning with some history of the film industry here in Santa Barbara and a short silent film from 1910 entitled “Method in His Madness.”
The Commission’s office is under the Visit Santa Barbara umbrella. Its mission is to organize destination marketing for the Santa Barbara area and promote SB in a positive light via outreach to the film/print/social media outlets.
The economic benefits of the positive PR generated, especially via social media, are huge to the SB area. Geoff showed several photos of locations used in film and print media – wineries, Montecito estates, the SB Harbor, the Coastal scenes, etc. Whiles still photography and commercials account for the vast majority of local activity, feature films and reality TV are big and will get bigger as a result of fairly-recent legislative financial support for the film industry. Examples of productions shot her in SB include films like Seabiscuit, Sideways and a Mike Mills film starring Annette Benning, and reality TV shows like Bachelorette and Top Chef, as well as numerous car commercials. The latter provide the biggest daily economic bang for the buck.
Geoff himself has shot over 25,000 images of local sites and posted them to the Commission’s website. He attends trade shows and conferences to promote SB. He organizes tours for producers, scouts, and directors in order for them to appreciate exactly what the area has to over. He is also the legislative liaison to the film industry in its effort (via 42 commission offices throughout the state) to promote California’s new financial incentives and lure back production that have moved to lower-cost locales, including Northern Ireland.
