The Santa Rosa Metro Chamber has announced that its Board of Directors has chosen Peter Rumble as President and CEO, effective February 7, 2018.

“I believe that Peter's going to be an exceptional leader for the Chamber,” says Mike Purvis, Chamber Board Chair and CEO of Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital & Novato Community Hospital. “His vision around what the Chamber can be and his ability to engage in collaborative relationships will be an effective complement to the work that the Chamber does. I was impressed with his strong vision on topics including downtown and community development and look forward to his positive influence.”

Rumble comes to the Chamber from the County of Sonoma where he held the role of Deputy County Administrator, responsible for a $1.5 billion budget and 4,000+ full time employees. His extensive background in government with the County of Sonoma, San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and U.S. Government Accountability Office will inform many of the programs and advocacy initiatives the Chamber undertakes. Additionally, his time as CEO of California Clean Power enables Rumble to effectively lead the Chamber into new opportunities benefiting the business economy and local community.

The Santa Rosa Metro Chamber CEO represents the membership, advocates on behalf of business interests, interfaces with stakeholders, builds business partnerships, maintains government relations, and advances collaborative endeavors with associations and other Chambers. With more than 900 member organizations and 18 full- and part-time employees, the CEO oversees the Chamber’s budget of over $3 million.

On a regular basis, our resident photo pros Warren Smith and Jack Strange submit pictures of what is going on at the weekly meetings. You can always find the most recent pictures at the websites photo journal called "Meeting Sighting" Please note that all the meeting photos for the entire Rotary year are at this location with the most recent on the last page.

Thanks for all the great pictures Warren and Ross! Link to Meeting Sightings. The most recent are on the last page!

Sarah Gibbard Cook loves a good mystery: The protagonist of her novel-in-progress, set during the siege of Rhodes in 1480, is a young Englishwoman intent on uncovering a traitor’s identity. For the time being, Rotarians can discover Cook’s aptitude for writing a detective story through her two-part Rotary and the Gift of a Polio-Free World, which – especially in its first volume, Making the Promise – has some of the characteristics of a tense thriller.

Rotary and the Gift of a Polio-Free World: Making the Promise and Almost Every Child are available at shop.rotary.org (search “polio books”) for $15 each.

Photo by Jean-Marc Giboux

With a Ph.D. in history from Harvard, Cook arrived at Rotary in 1981 to serve as assistant manager of the 3-H (Health, Hunger, and Humanity) Program, the predecessor to global grants. She left Rotary in 1992 to work as a freelance writer; in 1994, when Rotary commissioned a book to document its fight against polio, Cook got the assignment.

After Rotary abandoned its plan to publish the book in time for the 1996 Calgary convention, the endeavor, says Cook, “became an ongoing, ever-growing project.” Finally, in 2013, the first volume appeared; the second, Almost Every Child, followed in 2015.

After documenting Rotary’s early devotion to helping children with disabilities and tracking the quest for a polio vaccine, Cook follows the internecine conflict over focusing some of the organization’s resources on solving a single global problem (rather than allowing each club to decide which projects it preferred to undertake). She also describes the resistance Rotary encountered from international health agencies that worried, as Cook writes, “that an emphasis on polio eradication might impede the development of broader primary health-care systems.”

Ken Solow, left, executive producer of Dare to Dream, with Rafe Henderson, the first director of the Expanded Program on Immunization for the World Health Organization.

Photo by Ilana Bittner, Pixel Workshop

While the outcome of these struggles is well-known – Rotary’s work to end polio continues today – to Cook’s credit, the books, like a good mystery encountered for the second time, are still compelling. That’s a result, in part, of their strong cast of characters, which includes past RI presidents such as James Bomar, Jack Davis, Carlos Canseco, Cliff Dochterman, Herb Pigman, and Clem Renouf; a mélange of medical marvels, especially Rotary’s own John Sever; some heroic figures, such as Côte d’Ivoire’s Marie-Irène Richmond Ahoua; and a number of pivotal players from outside Rotary.

“I view them as giants,” says Ken Solow, executive producer of Dare to Dream: How Rotary Became the Heart and Soul of Polio Eradication. (A member of the Rotary Club of Columbia-Patuxent in Maryland, Solow is a past governor of District 7620.) The most valuable aspect of the documentary, which is based on Cook’s first volume, is the interviews with the Rotarians and others (including past and current International PolioPlus Committee Chairs Robert S. Scott and Michael K. McGovern, and many of the names above) who lived through the early years of the polio fight, helped direct its progress, and share the credit for its successes.

The third volume of Cook’s trilogy, Fulfilling the Promise, is slated to appear once the battle against polio is finally won. Cook has already written about two-thirds of that book – and she’s confident she will one day write its conclusion. The plot thickens  

– Geoff Johnson

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