President's Report and Update
Pat Waite’s Talk
It was awesome having Pat Waite’s input on Tuesday night from the District Governor Elect Training held in San Diego. Pat shared with us the latest ideas, challenges and messages from Rotary International for the 2019 – 2020 year.
Mark Maloney, incoming World President’s key messages are “focus on innovation” and “diversity in our clubs.” Pat told us that Rotary in its present state is unlikely to survive unless it embraces change. Clubs must reflect what members want and all club leaders must reflect servant leadership.
Pat asked over 400 participants about their clubs. More than 75% of clubs worldwide are now meeting fortnightly with a need to change their focus to better reflect what members and community wanted.
Members’ Poll
Pat gave a shout out and thank you to the Members’ Representative on the Board, Lyn Calman. She achieved 100%-member engagement in the recent phone poll of members that she conducted at my request.
In the poll, Lyn welcomed the members back in 2019 and asked members the same questions: How do you feel about the meetings? What time suits? What days suit? Do you prefer weekly or fortnightly meetings? Lyn also noted comments from the members.
Pat enjoyed his phone call and opportunity to talk to Lyn and was impressed by her friendly manner.
The result of the poll was 25 members wanted fortnightly meetings, 7 either/or and 6 wanted weekly meetings.
The decision to hold an independent poll, conducted away from the board and carried out by your Members’ Representative with no bias, has given insight to the board that change is needed to meet members' wishes. If anyone would like to talk further to Lyn Calman or myself about the poll or any concerns, we would be happy to meet you for coffee. Many thanks Lyn for your wonderful support.
Moving to Fortnightly Meetings
The members have spoken and a change to fortnightly meetings will occur as soon as possible.
At this stage we have reduced to three meetings per month (see Meeting Schedule in the Bulletin below for dates), but there is no expectation that you attend all three meetings.
Prior to moving to fortnightly meetings, a plan must be put in place to ensure the club continues to run smoothly. We need to make sure members are more engaged and the meetings are meaningful and focused, and that we also adopt a more community engaged, approach. Laura Sommer was keen to look at an action group to lead community driven change in Rotary meeting 4 -6 weekly with a team of members - who would like to help?
As well as creating a plan, we need to sort out logistics. From here, we need to discuss with Judith, as Club Services Director, to see if we can reschedule some speakers for later in 2019. A big thank you to Judith for her hard work in engaging speakers and ensuring the smooth running of our meetings.
When we do move to fortnightly meetings, this will more than likely be on the 1st and 3rd Tuesdays of the month (caterer’s preference).
We will keep you updated about the Planning for our club and the impact of moving to fortnightly meetings.
Changes are here.
Pat’s challenges above, should remain in our minds as we go through this transition. Members input, ideas and help is invaluable. How do you want your club to be -with only 2 meetings a month? – what does it look like? What are the most important thing members want from the meetings?
Laura Sommer has already raised a great suggestion to me (she is my mentor) of having a Tawa Rotary Action Group for community projects and members engagement and would like to ask who would be interested in joining her to ensure we move forward collectively and collaboratively, by being more engaged and remembering that we are all volunteers who want to serve the community and have fun.
New Project
We launched the start of Judith Havill’s and Bruce Phillips combined International Project on Feb 5th, 2019
Dress the Solomon Islands ‘Children in Need’ Project.
We are writing up project plan(s) now and will be needing most members and the community to help in a variety of ways with this project very shortly. Updates will be coming.
Kind regards to you all - Denise
P.S. I will email an update of the board meeting and other projects like the book fair etc in the next week or two.
Click Read More for further notes and photos of last week's meeting >>>>
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