This past week we welcomed a visit from our current District Governor, Ingrid Neitsch. Ingrid has been travelling round our large district visiting with each club. Our district has fifty-seven clubs, with over two thousand members and stretches from Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories and Ft. Nelson in northern BC, south to include Jasper, Camrose and east to Battleford, Saskatchewan. So far Ingrid has put forty-two thousand kilometers on her vehicle travelling to visit various clubs.
Her message to our club, and to all of the clubs in our district, follows this year’s Rotary International’s theme of ‘Be the Inspiration’. It also includes a heavy emphasis on taking care of our family of members and growing our membership so that we an continue to make a change both in our community and beyond. We need to remember that the change we bring will endure beyond us and will continue to spread outwards. We are like the members of an orchestra that starts playing one at a time but when all of the members have joined in the message is overwhelming. She also asked us to think of a moment when we were inspired and then asked us what we did in response. Then she reminded us that we can be the vehicle that helps other people’s dreams of a better education, a better life, and many other hopes and dreams come true.
She then talked about how our support of the Rotary Foundation is a key in this goal. She then presented our club Foundation chair, Patrick Gibson, with a banner, as every member of our club made a donation to the Foundation over the past year. She also talked about how our support of Polio Plus has helped to eliminate polio around the world and stressed the need for us to continue our support for this program as the fight is not over yet.
Ingrid has also been working together with other people in our district to create a strategic plan to support our current members and to increase our membership. Their goal is to establish three new clubs and to attain a net increase of fifty members. This would mean that each club would have a goal of retaining their current membership and also adding three new members this year. In order to do this she reminded us that we are the best advertisement to bring in new members for our clubs.
She also spoke about the role that Rotary can play in peace and conflict resolution. This is something we can work with and teach our children about. Rotary supports Peace Scholars through the Peacebuilder District Fund who work in many places around the world to promote peace in many different ways. Our District has not sponsored an applicant for this in several years, but this year we will. Our district would need to raise the equivalent of sixty-one dollars per member each year in order to support this.
Vince Campbell then presented Ingrid with a cheque for thirty-four hundred fifteen dollars, which works out to sixty-one dollars per member towards the Rotary International Peacebuilder District program from our club. Ingrid thanked us and said that we were the first club to make a contribution for each member in this way.
She closed by have everyone stand and hold hands as we repeated the Rotary theme for this year, that we will ‘Be the Inspiration’.
.jpg)