PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

If every won one, won one

July is membership month on the Rotary calendar so I thought I would focus this bulletin article on membership.  

At our turnover meeting in June, we welcomed our new membership committee chair Laird Coghill to our club leadership team and I am excited to have him on board.  He has already started thinking about some of the main membership issues we face, like recruitment, retention, and engagement and he is going to be reaching out to club members for their input on how we can address them.  I am confident that his leadership will result in increased growth and stability as the months unfold, but I am also aware that the responsibility for membership must be shared by every member of the club.

When I was a child, after every supper meal my parents would conduct a brief time of family time. We had a small box filled with small cards with quotes and sayings written on them.  We would pass the box around the table and each of us would pick a card and read it.  After many years we got to know the cards well and each of us had our personal favorite.

My favorite was a card with a small tongue twister on it.  It read ‘’ If every one, won one, and every won one won one. How many ones would be won if every won one, won one? ’’   It was fun to say, but It is also really profound and I think it’s also the best way for a Rotary club to build its membership strategy.

Membership starts with us.  Every one of us at some point in our history was won over to the Rotary cause. We knew a Rotarian, who invited us to a meeting, or to participate in an exciting Rotary project, and eventually that one Rotarian won us over to Rotary and is the reason why we find ourselves in the Passport club today.

As we look to the upcoming Rotary year, developing a strategy for membership attraction, recruitment, and retention has to be one of our priorities, but let’s never forget that the most effective strategy will always be a personal invitation from an active (won) Rotarian.

I am hoping that during my year as president, we see 3 new members join our club.  This is certainly achievable, and I will be thrilled if we do it, but I can’t help thinking about how our club would grow if every member won one.

This month, as the focus of Rotary turns toward membership, give some thought to the people you know who might be interested in becoming members of our club.  I would challenge every member to identify one person and give them a call to extend an invitation to attend a meeting. Who knows, maybe a few of our won ones will win one and we will have the satisfaction of seeing our club grow in numbers and strength.

                        David Carey

 

 

 

When I was young tornado's happened far away in Kansas, 1939, in The Wizard of Oz.  When I was 28 yrs old the movie "Twister" was a box office smash, showing 'rare' weather events in Oklahoma and the people chasing them.   Not once was it something real to me, something Canadian, or something to be feared.  It was Hollywood. 

 

Last week a Tornado whipped through my very own suburb in Ottawa, destroying/damaging over 125 homes - but not mine.  One year ago in the same month a twister touched down in other parts of the city ripping out trees with surprising ease like a giant hand from above.    So like my father used to say -- "It got me to wondering" -- what has changed in the last 50 or so years?

 

Al Gore famously rang the bell 17 years ago with the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth".  He talked about climate problems and, very helpfully, how we have all the tools to fix them.  Watching this 17 years later it's alarming that most of the problems still exist and most of the solutions are still applicable.   The problem is we havent done a darn thing about it.   We seem to be too lazy, too uninterested, or too busy looking at our smartphones.

 

Sometimes, I think, we just need to be told what to do.   With tornado's ripping through Ottawa I'm beginning to wonder - perhaps wish - that somebody would just tell us what to do.   When Henry Ford was once challenged about the need for vehicles, he said "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said they wanted a faster horse".  Instead, he told them what they wanted, and he revolutionised transportation.

 

I'm waiting for the environmental revolution to happen.  We need a solution.  We need an environmental version of Henry Ford to replace our slow horse.  Oh, and we need it quick.

 

Yours in Service,

 

 

               Christopher Thompson