David Johnston opened our Meeting
Greig Lee-Archer - Tonight, my Toast is a little different from our usual toast to an International Rotary Club.
I would suggest few of us (including me) would have known that today is “World NGO Day” and was born on the 27th February 2010 in London as the brainchild of Marcis Liors Skadmanis a Latvian – British philanthropist.
My toast is not only to Skadmanis but includes all “Non-Government Organisations” around the world. The universal concept of the World NGO Day is Celebrate, Commemorate and Collaborate the various and many NGOs around the world and the people behind them! I think Rotary well deserves to stand tall amongst all NGO’s.
It’s a day for NGOs around the globe to share knowledge and experiences with one another. Plus, the day acts as an ideal opportunity for education, enabling individuals worldwide to understand more clearly what NGOs are doing for society locally, nationally and internationally. Without the humanitarian efforts around the world many countries would be further devastated.
President David Wallis reinforced requirement to submit RFI insurance detail.
Ross Harrison gave us an update on the amazing progress with the School project in the Philipines.
AND Ross won Riki Tiki - themed around St.Valentine's Day!
Greg Lee-Archer gave brief progress report on the Trivia night - if you still haven't registered to come, there's still time - get in touch with Greg.
ROMAC TRIVIAS is Thursday 5th March - so no regular meeting at the Golf Club!
Bruce Radford outlined the history of the Jack Robertson Memorial Fund for newer members who don't know it's origin, Cynthia Morgan so generously donated to the fund in memory of her late husband, Rotarian John - more details below.
Geoff Leddy introduced our guest speaker, our own Membership Officer, Will Waterford who presented a brilliant PP slide show outlining the state of membership in Rotary, across Australia.
Over the past few weeks, Will Waterford has done an awesome job of putting together a survey to establish what direction our Club should take, to not only retain members but to also attract new members. It is a common problem throughout Volunteer organisations. How do we retain our current members, how do we attract new members, how do we attract "younger" members?
Will’s theme being we can do better and if we don’t change we are unlikely to recover from the declining membership.
Having possibly identified a couple of areas that we can improve on, we are considering professional target marketing to attract new, younger members from our community.
Congratulations Will!
Terka Zankova, our Rotary Exchange Student has also been busy, creating some artwork which is entered in a competition - well done, hope you win!
Then to a favourite activity - the Raffles - David Millar picked out his own ticket from the Raffle bucket!
Meeting finished a bit earlier than usual at 7.40 pm.
