It is with sadness to inform our club members that our friend Jim passed away last night peacefully. Jim suffered a severe stroke and unfortunately did not recover from it. During this difficult time, our thoughts and prayers are with Varee and family and we will offer any support to the family. Jim will be remembered as the one who, with his quiet manner and smile, participated in all events and functions and got on well with everyone. He will be sorely missed.
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Despite a week of sad news for our club that weighed heavily on all of us and its members, we were delighted to have a wonderful and inspiring talk from Stephanie Davy, our sponsored Rylarian last night. Stephanie is in her last year of a combined Engineering and Arts degree majoring in Materials Engineering and English Literature. She is indicative of the youth of today who are passionate about her studies, her friends and how she can make her mark in the world through community service. She told us about her experiences on RYLA in July this year and saw it as an opportunity to learn about herself and how to communicate and work with teams. She had a wonderful time learning skills and techniques to make her a better person and make some new friends in the process. She is now looking to join Rotaract Monash and we hope to see her again soon at our club.
Thanks also to the people who helped out Yvonne at the Spellathon last week. I know that sometimes it is difficult to attend and represent the many functions and events that occur but your presence undoubtedly would have made a good impact with our community partners.
Our Membership and Marketing Committee also had a meeting last night to cover off on a couple of items. The first one is to identify a President for the 2011/2012 year. I would strongly encourage those who haven't tried Presidency to give it a go as we would provide all the necessary support to ensure that it is not only a fruitful year for you but also an enjoyable one for you and the club. Alternatively, those who have been President before and would like to savour the experience once again, please let me know.
Secondly, we went through some event co-ordination for the Rotary Business Month and we can foresee that when it comes around, we'll be asking members to be gracious 'meet and greeters' of the non-Rotarians and visiting Rotarians who will be coming to all the events. The evenings will be slightly modified in format to enable the guest speakers, visitors and Rotarians to network with each other as well as learning about Rotary and how vocational service has inspired them in their personal, professional and business development. The consistent message we'd like to get across is that Rotary is an opportunity for all vocations to be able to give something back to the community as well as establish new friendships.
There will be heavy promotion of this event across various media but I would strongly urge every one of us to bring along a friend (non Rotarian) on the night. Think about people who you know who are in small business, industry, trades or professions. This may be someone you know, a friend, a colleague, a neighbour.
Already I have advertised these events across our Cluster and invited a couple of representatives from each of our cluster group to attend the evenings to be able to participate. Who knows, they may even get interest for their clubs. Also, this morning I have sent an email out to the President and the Membership Member for RC Braeside to approach partnering in these events with us. The events have also been uploaded into the City of Kingston webpage (Under Calendar of Events) and closer to the date, we will advertise in local press and radio.
I hope that each of you are as inspired as I am to promote Rotary and to connect with businesses in our local area so that we can achieve our community service ideals and in the process, make new friends.
Have a glorious week and see you next week.
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