This past Tuesday was new members day and as part of our initiative to try to bring younger members into Rotary, Ellen Weber facilitated a special brainstorming session on leading Rotary with the brain in mind. The workshop was designed to help us come up with some suggestions for new Rotary projects that would inspire others and help ignite change. As Ellen said, we often assume that millennials and boomers do not have anything in common. Rotary has a reputation for tackling serious problems and maybe it is time to talk together about some of the newer problems now facing the world.
The group divided into six tables of about eight participants each. Each table had some older Rotarians and some younger guests. Each table was then given some time to come up with suggestions for a problem to approach. Then each table discussed various ways that Rotary could approach their particular problem. Finally, each table was asked to use a quiz devised to help each of us discover our areas of interest and strength, based on the eight intelligences of verbal-linguistic, visual-spatial, logical-mathematical, musical, intrapersonal, bodily-kinaesthetic, interpersonal, and naturalistic. We were then to decide how each of us could use our individual strengths to support our project.
Each table then presented their project to the group as a whole. The suggested projects were wide ranging, from helping young people dealing with mental illness, to improving accessibility of our rotary meetings for younger students or working people, to addressing isolation and loneliness in seniors, to empowering women to be able to make their own decisions by working for abolition of the dower act, to finding ways to improve retirement incomes for the elderly, and finally to encourage interest in science, technology, engineering and math in aboriginal youth. As part of this whole project we all learned that millennials and boomers do have a lot in common, in their desire to make the world a better place. Through this workshop, we came up with a lot of ideas for projects which can now be used as a basis for further discussion and translation into action.