Hello all. I recently spent the summer in Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island. In my last couple of weeks here I decided to get in touch with the local Rotarians in order to learn a thing or two about what Rotary is and does (Side note: ‘I decided’ and ‘Timmy voluntold me’ are the same thing, right?).
If you are not much of a reader I will summarize what I learned, RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW. The jist is that there is a graduated system of clubs. Interact at the high school level, Rotaract at the post-secondary level, and Rotary at the grown-up level. All three of these clubs are devoted to community involvement and doing things for the greater good. What I gathered is that they host fundraisers, seek sponsors, raise money etc, and then they use the funds they’ve raised to improve their community or other communities all over the world.
Ok, non-readers, you can leave now. I see you, you engineers, slackers, ADHD folks and the like. Bye bye now.
Now for the rest of you, I shall elaborate.
First I contacted the Rotary Club of Nanaimo North. I spoke to the club president, who was recently elected. He is a lawyer in his thirty-somethings and a very nice guy overall. He invited me to be a guest at one of their weekly meetings. They meet every Tuesday evening and have dinner. The dinners occur at a multitude of places: restaurants, event halls, people’s backyards, the bottom of the ocean, inside volcanoes and the like. This week is was at a local event hall and we had a sort of buffet dinner at nicely set tables, reminiscent of a Conrad Grebel community supper. The proceedings can be briefly summarized as follows:
-Sign in and mingle
-A bell was rang to call to attention, followed by our national anthem, then we said grace, then a recitation of some sort of Rotary motto or something (clearly I am a noob)
-Suppertime! Yum:)
-Announcements: a recap of recently held events, notes and details about upcoming events, location of next week’s meeting, financial components, recognitions of recent noteworthy contributions, zombie quarantine protocol, emergency volcano evacuation drill, the usual
-Guest speaker. This is a feature each week, this week it was a woman with a cause I am very interested in supporting and will talk more about at the next meeting I attend.
-Happy buck/sad buck: An interesting custom. One person goes around with a donation bucket, the objective is that you share some personal news from the previous week, at a rate of $1.00 per news item. Proceeds go to the club. For example, I donate $2: “My happy buck is that the beautiful weather last weekend gave me opportunity to hang out at the river. My sad buck is that I’m leaving BC on Friday and I’m going to miss this place.”
-50/50 draw - tickets were sold at the beginning of the meeting
-La fin
The meeting proceedings are very formal, however the atmosphere is casual and welcoming. Club members were mostly retired folks, however Nanaimo is mostly retired folks so this does not come as a surprise to me. One thing that stood out to me was that they are in touch with Rotary clubs in Africa and are providing good and services to underdeveloped countries through Rotary.
I was invited to volunteer at a monthly breakfast they do one Saturday a month at the local soup kitchen. Saturday morning my younger sister and I got up nice and early, put one some aprons and waited tables for the homeless and poor and so on and such forth. It was a very tiresome but very rewarding experience. The locals were very grateful for our contribution and the kitchen staff have a lot of fun. Additionally, I met someone working for the City of Nanaimo, which is the owner of the building I’m working on. We had a lovely chat about water treatment for Vancouver Island in the future.
My sister got chatting with one of the volunteers who was eagerly encouraging her to join rotaract clubs whenever possible. He was so enthused about having young minds engaged in helping the community, he told her a heartwarming story from his own experience to win her over. This man joined a rotary club a few years back and met an individual who opened his eyes. This individual had made a trip to Zimbabwe and experienced first hand the poverty, specifically in their educating facilities. He encountered two young girls and presented them each with a ballpoint pen and a ruler. They treated these items like gold and ran back to their schoolyard beaming. The man returned the next day with pens for the whole school, including the faculty. Moved by how they cherished this small gift, he made it his mission to help this small community in any way he could. Long story short- he brought this tale to his rotary club and the community threw themselves into the project. A great deal of fundraising and a series of trips to Zimbabwe made it possible for them to stock the school with basic supplies, repaint the entire facility, open a new community well, and pay for their electricity to run the water. The experience was life altering and the gratitude and friendship they received is incomparable. The moral being- rotaract can lead you to all sorts of unexpected adventures and opportunities, in addition to being self-fulfilling.
At the Rotary meeting I met the local Rotaract Club president, who was very friendly and welcoming. He invited me to the Rotaract meeting which I went to earlier this evening. It was much less formal. We hung out in a Vancouver Island University (VIU) student’s apartment and they chatted about conduct for the fall. Some noteworthy things were choosing a meeting time and place for Fall, planning a conference trip to San Fransisco, planning events for the Fall, breaking into maximum security prisons, bussing tables for Oprah Winfrey and the like. In the month of August, while most of the members (VIU students) were away for the summer, they raised $1400.00. Which I think is pretty darned good. The club president is super friendly and I told him I’d stay in touch going forward because I think there’s a lot we could learn from the Islanders!
~ Katy R.
If you are not much of a reader I will summarize what I learned, RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW. The jist is that there is a graduated system of clubs. Interact at the high school level, Rotaract at the post-secondary level, and Rotary at the grown-up level. All three of these clubs are devoted to community involvement and doing things for the greater good. What I gathered is that they host fundraisers, seek sponsors, raise money etc, and then they use the funds they’ve raised to improve their community or other communities all over the world.
Ok, non-readers, you can leave now. I see you, you engineers, slackers, ADHD folks and the like. Bye bye now.
Now for the rest of you, I shall elaborate.
First I contacted the Rotary Club of Nanaimo North. I spoke to the club president, who was recently elected. He is a lawyer in his thirty-somethings and a very nice guy overall. He invited me to be a guest at one of their weekly meetings. They meet every Tuesday evening and have dinner. The dinners occur at a multitude of places: restaurants, event halls, people’s backyards, the bottom of the ocean, inside volcanoes and the like. This week is was at a local event hall and we had a sort of buffet dinner at nicely set tables, reminiscent of a Conrad Grebel community supper. The proceedings can be briefly summarized as follows:
-Sign in and mingle
-A bell was rang to call to attention, followed by our national anthem, then we said grace, then a recitation of some sort of Rotary motto or something (clearly I am a noob)
-Suppertime! Yum:)
-Announcements: a recap of recently held events, notes and details about upcoming events, location of next week’s meeting, financial components, recognitions of recent noteworthy contributions, zombie quarantine protocol, emergency volcano evacuation drill, the usual
-Guest speaker. This is a feature each week, this week it was a woman with a cause I am very interested in supporting and will talk more about at the next meeting I attend.
-Happy buck/sad buck: An interesting custom. One person goes around with a donation bucket, the objective is that you share some personal news from the previous week, at a rate of $1.00 per news item. Proceeds go to the club. For example, I donate $2: “My happy buck is that the beautiful weather last weekend gave me opportunity to hang out at the river. My sad buck is that I’m leaving BC on Friday and I’m going to miss this place.”
-50/50 draw - tickets were sold at the beginning of the meeting
-La fin
The meeting proceedings are very formal, however the atmosphere is casual and welcoming. Club members were mostly retired folks, however Nanaimo is mostly retired folks so this does not come as a surprise to me. One thing that stood out to me was that they are in touch with Rotary clubs in Africa and are providing good and services to underdeveloped countries through Rotary.
I was invited to volunteer at a monthly breakfast they do one Saturday a month at the local soup kitchen. Saturday morning my younger sister and I got up nice and early, put one some aprons and waited tables for the homeless and poor and so on and such forth. It was a very tiresome but very rewarding experience. The locals were very grateful for our contribution and the kitchen staff have a lot of fun. Additionally, I met someone working for the City of Nanaimo, which is the owner of the building I’m working on. We had a lovely chat about water treatment for Vancouver Island in the future.
My sister got chatting with one of the volunteers who was eagerly encouraging her to join rotaract clubs whenever possible. He was so enthused about having young minds engaged in helping the community, he told her a heartwarming story from his own experience to win her over. This man joined a rotary club a few years back and met an individual who opened his eyes. This individual had made a trip to Zimbabwe and experienced first hand the poverty, specifically in their educating facilities. He encountered two young girls and presented them each with a ballpoint pen and a ruler. They treated these items like gold and ran back to their schoolyard beaming. The man returned the next day with pens for the whole school, including the faculty. Moved by how they cherished this small gift, he made it his mission to help this small community in any way he could. Long story short- he brought this tale to his rotary club and the community threw themselves into the project. A great deal of fundraising and a series of trips to Zimbabwe made it possible for them to stock the school with basic supplies, repaint the entire facility, open a new community well, and pay for their electricity to run the water. The experience was life altering and the gratitude and friendship they received is incomparable. The moral being- rotaract can lead you to all sorts of unexpected adventures and opportunities, in addition to being self-fulfilling.
At the Rotary meeting I met the local Rotaract Club president, who was very friendly and welcoming. He invited me to the Rotaract meeting which I went to earlier this evening. It was much less formal. We hung out in a Vancouver Island University (VIU) student’s apartment and they chatted about conduct for the fall. Some noteworthy things were choosing a meeting time and place for Fall, planning a conference trip to San Fransisco, planning events for the Fall, breaking into maximum security prisons, bussing tables for Oprah Winfrey and the like. In the month of August, while most of the members (VIU students) were away for the summer, they raised $1400.00. Which I think is pretty darned good. The club president is super friendly and I told him I’d stay in touch going forward because I think there’s a lot we could learn from the Islanders!
~ Katy R.