Moffat names New President

The Rotary Club of Portage la Prairie has a new president as Shannon Moffat took over the duty from outgoing president Craig Bennet at the club's meeting on June 30.

Moffat joined the club three years ago after taking almost a year to decide is she wanted to sign on.

“I did a lot of research and came to a lot of meetings and spoke to a lot of the people and just looked into what they did internationally, what they did in the community, what they stood for, and I wanted to make sure that that fit with what I believed in,” Moffat said. “I didn't want to join a club just to say I was part of a club.”

She said Rotary is an amazing group of individuals and Moffat has enjoyed her time in the club and on the executive, of which she's been on almost the entire time she's been part of the club.

“I've learned a lot and there's still a lot of learning and growing and I'm really confident that this group of people, the executive, will help me to lead them and lead our club into a great year.”

With new leadership comes new ideas, and Moffat has several ideas she wants to put into motion.

“Rotary does a lot on the community, and it's not going to change. This year what I would like to do is really focus on the club as a whole,” she said.

She wants to not only focus on increasing their membership, but also the diversity of the membership.

“Different age categories, different job categories, there's a perception that you have to be in the business world in order to be a part of Rotary and we want to change that, because that's not true,” Moffat said. “That perception is not a fact – anyone can be a part of Rotary.”

That ties in with another focus of Moffat's, which is to bring the club more into the community.

“Rotary is here and we are a club, we're made up of a lot of really unique individuals that are going towards the same goal, but my goal is to bring all of that forward to the community, let people know who the people are behind the Rotary symbol, so to speak,” she said.

While Rotary has been fantastic over the past few years at fundraising for different projects, Moffat would like to see more hands-on work as well.

“We want to get more hands-on, not that we haven't been, but we've done a lot of fundraising, we've done a lot in the community as far as helping to fund projects. One of the goals we want to look at this year is to actually get out there more and to help with the hands-on type of thing.”