Minutes of January 8, 2018
At 07:15 Club President Bob Guerette called us to order and requested Fred Burgess lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Bob Beaumont then gave the invocation.
Prez. Bob then gave a quick wrap up of all our Rotary activities in the last part of December with thanks to all who contributed. These activities included:
Working on the Build Day for the Habitat house in Bath.
Filling the Backpacks for Mid Coast Hunger Prevention.
Bell Ringing for Salvation Army
Donating money and gifts for Christmas for a needy family coordinated by Pastor Ron.
Attending the purely social event at Flight Deck Brewing.
Under announcements we had the following:
Dues are due. Still the bargain $60.00 semiannually.
Time for Read-A-Loud sign up. Scheduled for March 2. Use the following link to sign up. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/2017ReadAloud
Lots of happy dollars for good times with family and friends over the Christmas Holidays.
Gordon stumped us with his Presidential question- Which President had sheep on the White House lawn? We all thought back to the 1800s but it was Woodrow Wilson as a cost saving measure during WW 1.
The Program was Prez. Bob’s State of the Club presentation touching on a range of topics with open discussion on most.
Membership – Acknowledging this is a District wide concern, and in fact a growing concern of all service and civic organizations as younger generations, while interested and often active in the community, are much less likely to join and participate in regular meetings. Bob said he has asked several past presenters to come back for regular meetings. He also encouraged us to recruit female members as it now has been several years since we had active female members in the Club.
Bob said the District does assign each Club as goal for contributions to the Foundation. Our goal is $1,000 for the year.
Bob reminded us that one of the District goals for the year was to have clubs track volunteer efforts in term of hours. By his figures we were over 50 hours in the first half of the year, not bad for a small club.
Bob brought up the concern that our major fundraising event, Music at the Museum, scheduled this year for Friday, May 4, conflicts with the District Conference at the Mt. Washington Hotel. That prompted a broader discussion all organizations have of trying to schedule major fundraising events that do not conflict with either other events or semi-major holidays such as Mothers Day, Fathers Day, Valentine Day, etc.
Bob said he would like to revisit how the beneficiaries of our Fundraiser are selected and offered the suggestion that perhaps we should open it up to presentations from other non-profits requesting our support. That brought about a bit of discussion regarding the historical major goal of the Club as support for literacy and early childhood development and that our beneficiaries have been related to that goal.
Related to that then was a bit of a discussion that should there not then be an expectation that those organizations support the club though membership in the club? There was acknowledgement that several of our club members are or have been active members of the Boards of those organizations.
Bob suggested that perhaps the Club have some type of Annual meeting in June – July to mark the turnover to a new president with the event possibly being an evening out dinner with spouses / partners. There was general agreement to the suggestion.
In other club business Bob Davis raised the possibility that Bill Gillespie may have failed to file the required 501C paperwork with the IRS the past year or so. Bob agreed to look further into it.
No meeting was scheduled for January 15 due to Martin Lutherr King holiday.