Club President Loida Lumanlan with Jose Ferreira
This week we had three short informal talks from one member and two regular guests covering a wide range of topics.
Stephan Jansen van Vuuren gave a short update on the roll out of the new Primary Care Networks that Family Physicians in Alberta will belong to and how they will be organized.
Jacob Bodnaruk, our Rotary liaison with Inclusion Alberta, which endeavors to find meaningful work for adults with disabilities, gave us an update on their recent very successful conference.
Jose Ferreira, our yearly visitor from the Rotary Club of Valongo, Portugal told us about the Rotary Senior’s University in Spain that his club founded and administers. This is a program that has been in place for seventeen years now. These are Community programs that various Rotary clubs in two districts in Portugal run in their local areas.
Classes are offered from 9-5 every weekday and cover many different areas of interest from music (choir, instrumental) to dancing to languages to yoga, economics and history. They also host pot luck lunches for attendees on special celebrations. The programs offered differ from one Rotary club to another.
His Rotary club of eighteen members administers a Senior’s University that has twenty two volunteer instructors and had just over eighty-five seniors who took part this past year. They hold their classes in an unused school building that was refurbished by the Rotary Club.
It is run as a non-profit organization by a volunteer board made up of Rotary Club members. Any senior in the community may attend at a yearly cost of about one hundred fifty Canadian dollars per year plus a yearly administration fee of about forty Canadian dollars. The fee covers the cost of utilities for the building in which classes are held. They also apply for and have received grants from local government which help to cover their costs.
We would like to thank Jose for telling us about this very interesting Rotary Community program.