Club President Heather deKok with Chelsea Leach
This week we heard from Chelsea Leach whom our club supported to attend the recent Learning to Lead event held in Toronto from Sep 27 to Oct 01. Chelsea was President (for the past three years) of the Vimy Ridge Interact Club. The attendees came from Rotary International zones 28 and 32, covering Bermuda, Canada, France and the United States. It comprised four days of sessions on many different topics related to leading within Rotary. Attendees could select sessions from a wide variety of topics that were of interest to them personally. They also had many opportunities to meet, talk with and learn from Rotarians with many different points of view.
Chelsea thanked us for supporting this opportunity and gave us a very lively and entertaining talk about the people she met and the many different sessions that she attended. She truly appreciated the wide variety of people she got to talk with and she said that she learned a lot of new ideas on many different aspects of leading a Rotary club.
These included:
Ways to get club members to interact with each other more by having them pull a colored piece of paper as they came in the door to a meeting and then sit at the table to which that color was assigned.
How to bring new people into your club.
New ideas for service projects.
A mentor program for recent college or university grads where they are assigned a Rotarian who has worked in their chosen field for a long time and is willing to give them some advice on the opportunities in that field and some help with job hunting.
Setting realistic goals for your club.
How to start a fund raiser.
How to write grant proposals for projects.
She also learned more about Rotary clubs in other areas. One lady there said that in 2021 she decided to join Rotary and went to several different Rotary clubs in her local area of the eastern US before she found one that would accept women into their club.
In closing she thanked us again and said that it was an amazing experience and being able to go was just phenomenal.