Vol. 100 No. 50
Philip Webber, President
Franco Gallo, Secretary
Next meeting: Tuesday July 03, 2018 Transition to the Club's New Leadership Goodbye and Hello
Passing of the torch & plan for 2018-19
President Phil Webber will be saying goodbye to his role and will be passing the torch to the 2018-19 President, Brian Street. DG Darcy Long will be present for the installation of Brian's Board. Brian will present his vision for the 2018-19 Rotary Year.
Renewal of our Twin Club Agreement with the Rotary Club of Kinshasa Kingabwa. There will be a 7-person delegation joining us; please help in making them welcome.
Upcoming meeting: Tuesday July 10, 2018 Robert Spector The Nordstrom Way
Robert Spector is co-founder of the RSi consultancy, bestselling author, international speaker, educator and advisor to organizations. He is also the author of Amazon.com: Get Big Fast and The Mom & Pop Store. Robert’s presentation, The Nordstrom Way, sets the stage for creating, encouraging, and maintaining a superior customer experience built on a non-negotiable set of core cultural values. The underlying philosophy and culture of the Nordstrom Way is disarmingly simple: Use your own initiative to provide customers with exceptional levels of service. You’ll never be criticized for doing too much for a customer, only for doing too little. If you’re ever in doubt, err on the side of doing too much rather than too little. How the company organizes and empowers its employees to use their initiative in practice is impressive. Customers love it, employees thrive on the responsibility and flexibility of their job and sales soar. And paradoxically, the Nordstrom Way illustrates the direct link which many companies fail to realize -- specifically that the more front-line employees are trusted and empowered, the stronger the long-term relationship that can be built between a company and its customers. The Nordstrom Way is the gold standard of customer service.
Upcoming meeting: Tuesday July 17, 2018 John Madden Open Net Pen Salmon Farms in BC - Are They a Problem?
John Madden studied physics at the University of British Columbia, and completed a D. Phil., also in physics, at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. For Rotary Club purposes, John became involved in Tony Allard’s Wild Salmon Forever organization in the unofficial role of chief scribe four years ago. Wild Salmon Forever is attempting to apply some new, lower profile strategies to assist our governments in paying appropriate attention to the recommendations of the Cohen Commission of Inquiry into Fraser River Sockeye insofar as the recommendations pertain to all wild BC salmon, with special focus on the role open net pen salmon farms appear to play in the spread of sea lice and viruses to wild salmon. As most of us are well aware, our salmon face many hazards, real and potential, including overfishing, low water in our rivers and streams, high water temperatures, algal blooms, pollution and predation (particularly while young). Many of these factors are beyond our ability to control. However salmon farmers appear to have options for raising salmon other than in open net pens, and it appears to us (amongst many others) that the net pens can and sometimes do have a substantial negative influence on wild salmon survival.
On June 21st our International Service Committee hosted a dinner at the Marine Drive Golf Club for four visiting members from our Rotary Sister Club Tokyo Setagaya South.
Our Sister Club Agreement was renewed in March when a contingent from our International Service Committee were invited to go to Tokyo for a signing ceremony.
DG Don Evans, along with 19 other DGs received recognition for the tremendous Foundation contributions, resulting in our District being included in the top 20 in the world at the RI Convention in Toronto.
Congratulations and a sincere thank you to all of the members of District 5040, and our Club, who helped make this happen.
Rotary Club of Vancouver member since December 2, 1962
Congratulations
Stephanie Lawton
Grandma of Everley Diana Stewart born Saturday June 23, 2018
8 lbs 1 oz
Mother and baby are doing well
John Hayto has had his hip surgery and is currently convalescing at home. All went well and hopefully he'll be hobbling in to a meeting in the not too distant future.
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Error in last week's Rotor (dated June 22): missed the birthdays and anniversaries for the week. So here's who we missed:
birthdays:Kendall Jessiman Jun22, Barbara Welsh Jun23, David Motion Jun25
member anniversaries:Mackenzie Close 2 years, Joe Lopushinsky 2 years, Jack Zaleski 24 years
wedding anniversaries: Bill & Luise Shulz 51 years Jun24, Paul & Lynne McCrea 57 years Jun24
President Phil Webber chaired the meeting and gave the invocation.
Kayo Otake accompanied us on the piano for the singing of O Canada.
Jim Evans, Sergeant-at-Arms, introduced visitors and guests, this being his last meeting as our Sergeant-at-Arms. The torch will be passed on to Joe Lopushinsky for the 2018-19 year.
Tom Calkin, Past President, visited from Nova Scotia (his children & grandchildren live in Vancouver). Tom is still a member of the Rotary Club of Vancouver, albeit a distant one.
Chair's announcements:
In Memorium of Joel Chodos, who passed away May 17, 2018. Kayo Otake played Abide with Meand Jim Evans read an obituary for Joel which appeared in the Vancouver Sun on June 23, 2018.
Last week there was a dinner, on June 21st, hosted by the ISC with the contingent from our sister club, Tokyo Setagaya South.
Happy Canada Day - Tom Crean will be hosting a Canada Day Pool Party at his home. See above for more details - all are welcome.
Next week we will have delegates visiting us from our twin club, RC Kinshasa Kingabwa. They will be here from July 29th - July 5th.
Nicola Rule Project: Nicola, a student from the University of Oxford is doing her Master's dissertation on food and cultural diversity in Vancouver. The aim of her research is to understand how the availability of diverse foods have changed, and how interactions between people of different cultural backgrounds affects people's food cultures, with the hope of illuminating the impact of this cultural diversity on the health and sustainability of people's diets. Nicola is looking for people who would be willing to chat with her, primarily people who have been living in Vancouver for at least 20 years. If you are interested contact President Phil.
At the RI Convention in Toronto, our DG Don Evansand District 5040 was honoured for being in the TOP 20 for total contributions to the Foundation of RI.
There is less than 2 weeks to go for the bike-a-thon.
Secretary's, Franco Gallo, announcements:
reminders of upcoming events/meetings (see above);
birthdays:Tom Calkin Jun28 (and he came in from Nova Scotia to visit us!)
member anniversaries:Parisa Adrangi 1 year, Kayo Otake 14 years, Stephanie Lawton 21 years, Paul Martin 31 years
wedding anniversaries: Milton Kiang & Emily Geng 2 years Jun26, Angus & Kim Campbell 8 years Jun26, Jason & Carissa Boudreau 8 years Jun30, Bill & Candice Davidson 34 years Jun29, Myron & Karin Kuzych 39 years Jun30, John & Jane Bathurst 48 years Jun26
Special announcements; presentations, and members' moments:
Verona Edelstein provided an update for our visit from the RC of Kinshasa Kingabwa contingent next week. There will be 7 people in their group (4 Rotarians & 3 spouses). We will be renewing our Twin Club Agreement during the meeting. The group arrives on the weekend, will be hosted for a dinner on Saturday evening followed up on Sunday with a fun evening at Tom Crean's Canada Day Pool Party. Please join us -- all are welcome. See info above. There are plenty of activities planned for the group while they are in Vancouver, including a trip to Whistler.
We will be sharing with the membership some highlights from some of the projects we have partnered on. Please do come to the meeting next week to welcome these wonderful Rotarian friends.
Justin Emilio, a new RCoV member, having joined our Club on May 15, 2018, gave his "new member's intro talk". He is a man of many interests and talents. Loves the outdoors -- hiking, camping, boating, riding his motorcycle. He has had a wonderful breadth of business experiences before settling on real estate as a mortgage broker in 2011. He works under the Verico Nova umbrella providing residential and commercial mortgages.
He is a facilitator, educating his clients so that they can make informed decisions versus directed ones. When they are ready, he connects them to the right providers, while working to keep his clients' money out of the banks and in their pockets as much as he possibly can.
Justin joined Rotary, after being introduced by Franco Gallo, with a mind to network with like-minded individuals and also to make meaningful contributions to his community. He's still working on deciding where best to put his efforts. In trying to figure out where he can have a direct personal impact, he is attending as many committee meetings as possible and is learning about/from other Club members. Justin will be starting as a member of the Networking and Vocational Service Committee.
Katherine Copeland attended a yoga event hosted by the U.N on International Yoga Day June 21st. She was with PDG Shasha Varvandkar of RC Raipur Millennium who was in Vancouver for the event and who part of the International Yoga Fellowship in Rotary.
Program:
Jack Zaleski introduced the speaker, Grace Shyng, Acting Executive Director for the Western Institute for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (WIDHH).
Grace became the head of audiology in 1999. She is a Noel Lamb Award recipient and expresses a real enthusiasm for her field of expertise - the human ear. They are her favourite sensory organ.
Sounds get transmitted through 3 tiny bones (all can fit together on a dime) to the inner ear, the cochlea, then on to the brain for interpretation. Our ears work ALL the time, regardless of what the rest of the body is doing. They are most important for communication and for being connected to our surroundings, be it nature or people. When hearing is lost this can lead to feelings of being left out and eventually total isolation. If we cannot hear, we cannot participate.
Currently 20% of the population has hearing issues; this increases to approximately 75% in those over 85 years of age. Given our increasing life span this is a problem. Note of interest: the highest percentage of seniors in Canada are located in Qualicum Beach, BC.
As we age, we have more trouble processing speech with background noise. So even if your hearing is really good normally, it can be problematic in noisy locations to hear accurately.
WIDHH is not just a clinic for hearing aids. It has two areas of focus: (1) social enterprise and (2) Social Services. The first is a for-profit enterprise where they provide testing and sell hearing aids. Another note of interest is that they do not affiliate themselves with only 1 brand or show a preference for particular brands. They will help you decide on what is best for you regardless of brand.
Some of the services they offer:
Employment counselling
Senior outreach
sign language interpreting
drop-in English-American sign language translations
They do have a showroom with helpful household devices for those with hearing issues, e.g., phones, alarms, fire alarms, door bells, etc.
WIDHH helps many, many people from all walks of life and of all ages. Over 85% of their business is generated by word-of-mouth. They have won many awards and accolades including Vancouver's Accessible City Award for helping to make the city more hearing accessible.
WIDHH is very excited to have a new building being built on 4th & Quebec streets, to be ready for move-in fall of 2019. It will allow them to not only continue what they currently do but will also allow them to expand their services.
