Tuesday 17 June - Rotary Convention

Today's plenary session opened with a keynote address from Robert Scott who urged us to reconnect with Rotary Alumni which has over 100 000 people who would be excellent as Rotarians. He also talked about contributing to the TRF and also encouraged clubs to give to match the $100million by the Gates Foundation.

Dr Young Woo Kang then spoke about his life where he was blinded in a childhood accident and the adversity and discrimination he faced. His work with the US Government to get recognition given to people with disabilities earned him many awards, distinguished service awards and presidential citations. His work also had a postive effect on his family where his son is now a leading eye surgeon in Washington DC and he was an example that persistance and determination will get you far in this wrld.

It was a historic occasion yesterday where the 4 Directors of the Rotary partnerships were on stage together for the first time. All women and all executives of Unicef, WHO, Global Health Organisation and the CDC.

Dr Margaret Chan Director of the World Health Organisation jokingly said, "this is a historic occasion. It is the first time that all 4 partner organisations are here and it's good to see that we got the gender balance right!"

She announced that polio eradication will be her organisation's top priority over other programs of public health as their reputation is at stake. How can they claim to be the WHO if they quit now - if they can't get to the 80-90% of the population in 4 countries where Type 1 virus is spreading?

From there I went to a breakout session on Developing Club Leaders and you'd be happy to know that our District was mentioned along with Districts 9600 & 9800 as active ones in Australia regarding active leadership development programs. PRLS was mentioned along with a couple of othr Rotary leadership programs but we had a bit of tension during question time when a DGN of a French District got up and adamantly and aggressively stated in front of everyone that he "says NO! to Rotary leadership programs!" He thought them a waste of time and effort and must have had a bad experience. The manner in which it was said got everyone's backs up but let's not forget that it may have come across as aggressive given the limited English so he may not have verbalised his argument more effectively. However, there were strong words, and lots of finger pointing directed to one individual on the panel. I had never seen anything like it but as per normal, he was asked to ask his question or!
come and see the panel on completion to voice his concerns. I was flabbergasted that thi guy was a nominee District Governor and he managed to get all nationalities offside in the room.

For a bit of calmness, I decided to go to the Literacy Resources breakout session where I assumed the proceedings would be more civilised with teachers. It was. More sedate, literacy projects were discussed and ideas for clubs and districts to use to increase the literacy and numeracy of people and communities. They talked about Dolly Parton's Imagination Library [unfortunately she could not attend the convention], and other projects that countries had done. Two examples were Australia's Concentrated Learning Encounter [CLE] ad the Computer Assisted Learning progam [CALS]. I've been speaking to the CALS people and checking out their software programs as this is my line of work and I will attend another breakout session on Wednesday specifically on this project to find out more.

Overall, the plenary sessions and breakouts were informative - in particulary the controversial leadership one but at least our district got a mention for the work we are doing on PRLS.