Beasley's Bits
Posted by President - Brad Beasley
March always reminds me of two things; that corporate tax returns are due on March 15th, and St. Patrick's Day. Given that my father's family hailed from County Cork in Ireland, I certainly prefer the latter. I mean, who does not enjoy a day devoted to wearing green, pretending to be Irish, drinking green beer, and chasing Leprechauns (that occurs after the beer).
As our Rotary calendar turns to March, our service projects continue to roll on, and we continue to have great attendance at our meetings. I would like to commend Richard Haas, our membership chairman, and the club on the multitude of new members we have brought in. With our latest induction, we have 9 new members this year. The sad thing is that we have lost 4 members during the year. I sat down and was thinking about the club when I joined and the turnover of members I have seen since then. I know that roughly half the club has changed since I became a member nearly 10 years ago. While the majority of the people that have left the club have done so for financial reasons, I cannot help but ask "could I have done something to keep the member in the club?". I came to the conclusion that us as individual Rotarians have an obligation to make Rotary a "Fun" place to be, so that members will not feel obligated to participate in Rotary, but enjoy the Rotary journey. My hat's off to Chris May and her team that is putting together a wonderful set of speakers for each meeting, and to the Rotarians shepherding the High School Students to the meetings.
We are the fun club, and it is the duty of every member to make it fun for everyone. I had one member tell me, "Brad it is good to have fun, but we need to be serious when we are doing the projects". I would disagree in that, we should have fun in all we do. It is fun to deliver dictionaries to 3rd graders. IT is fun to dress 500 children at dress the child. It is fun to see the community come out for our yard sale, it should be fun to go with Rotarians and pick furniture (note just because we exert energy to pick up thing does not mean it can't be fun). If doing this projects become "not fun" then we need to really reassess whether these are projects our membership can get behind.
I will be filling out our "club accomplishments" to send to the District and it is really amazing what we have done. I will highlight the accomplishments at our newest event, our year end extravaganza on June 21.
Until then, keep it fun.