ROTARY Part 1
Steve - All right.
This evening I'm sitting with some members of a local Rotary club, I guess it would be, or chapter, club. And I'm going to try to find out a little bit more about the Rotary. And I gather that you are one of the senior members of this club. So maybe you could tell us about your motivation for getting involved and what the major features of a Rotary club are.
Neil - Well, again my name is Neil and I'm a charter member of our club, going back to 1980 when our club was first formed there were 24 of us in the group originally and we still have a few of our original members. And the Rotary club is something that I was quite interested in becoming a member of because it was explained to me at the time as a Rotarian you serve your community locally and abroad in a variety of ways.
Steve - Can I ask you what your profession is?
Neil - At the time I was say, senior secondary school principal and my interest was in youth at the time and I spent 35 years in that profession.
Steve - Thank you. Now you, I think have a different background and perhaps different motivation or the same for getting involved Bob?
Bob - Yeah, I'm a relative new comer to Rotary compared to most. I've only been a member of the club for 5 years. And it was primarily because of my vocation that I wasn't able to join because I spent much of my time traveling. I was previously an investment banker. Now I've changed careers and I'm involved in the health care and home care industry. But my reason for joining was I've always been involved in the community. I was a Scout Leader for many years so very much involved in the community and when you become a Rotarian it's very much like Scouting because you're giving back to the community. Scouting for, I shouldn't say for more mature people, but for adults.
Steve - I gather there is not general agreement that everybody here is very mature.
Bob - Well one of the hallmarks of being part of a Rotary club is that not only do we serve the community and both locally and internationally but we do have a lot of fun. There's a lot of fellowship and caring within our clubs and that is certainly the case with our group.
Steve - Now let me ask Theresa, again the same question. What is your professional background and what motivated you to get involved with Rotary.
Theresa - Thanks Steve. When it comes to what my occupation is, that's a difficult question because I think I'm on my 5th or 6th occupation now in my career. I'm currently a tour bus, Tour Company, yeah. Tour Company. I have, but accounting is my original background. I first joined Rotary about 10 years ago now, 10 or 11 years ago and as a female at the time I joined, it was only, I believe, about 4 years at that time that the first female Rotarian came in, into Rotary. And, my motivation wasn't so much as a female it was just networking with other business people and doing some service in the community. I was in Rotary for about a year that I found out, well, it's really not a networking club per say although that comes out of building relationships anyway in a normal course of relationships. But it was a fellowship and the service in the community on a very equal level of in your own, being local and also globally. A lot of people say well take care of people at home first before we go out and give money to other companies. Well, I believe there needs to be a good balance and I believe Rotary does that.
Steve - I guess some people probably who aren't in Rotary might think that it's sort of a place for business people to hob knob and have lunch together and make business contacts. But that's not the message that I'm hearing this evening and of course, it wouldn't be your motivation Neil, because as a business principle or at least as a school principal you weren't running businesses on the side so I think maybe you could go, delve a little further into this whole idea of how much of it is "business networking" and how much of it is this sense of contribution to the community.
Neil - Well I'm gonna take just a little different slant on that Steve and one of the things that I've found as a school teacher and a school principal it is very easy to become somewhat isolated from what's going on in the community and after joining Rotary I discovered that I got my head out of the sand and I started to find out what was going on in real life and the kind of problems that other people in business whatever their walk of life, the kind of problems that they were having. So I found that it was a, not only the camaraderie that you would have within the group but it was sort of the way of trying to relate how other people in the community were, how they were surviving, how their businesses were going and taking that back in to the school system where we sometimes are somewhat isolated.
Steve - and you mentioned in your opening remarks that you were particularly interested in youth. So were you able to get involved in activities with the Rotary that were helpful to youth?
Neil - Well I think in the sense that Rotary supports a number of activities in the community, and one of the things that Rotary does for youth is provide scholarships in the school systems and representing educational side of things. I could present that to our club and as happens in other clubs too and so school students benefit somewhat from that. And another side was to bring the interests of education into the Rotary club where sometimes we would visit schools and, or meet in a school setting or with students and find out more about what's going on in their lives.
Steve - Now there's quite a variety of, sort of work or professional backgrounds here, investment banker, health care, travel, accounting, what is the range of backgrounds of people? What are some, could you kind of run through sort of a, it wouldn't be an exhaustive list but sort of a bit of a list of the kinds of people you have?
Bob - Well another one of the foundations of Rotary was built on vocational skills and that was when Paul Harris founded Rotary back in 1905. His premise was that you, by bringing together people with different vocational skills they could bring together their abilities to assist their community, bring their connections together as a means to find ways and use those connections to help the community. Within our club there are the full range of classifications as we call them. There is, there are lawyers, there's doctors, there's accountants, there's publishers, realtors, you name the profession and they are represented within our club. There's elevator, right from elevator repairman to financial planners, financial analyst, to bankers to those who work for credit unions. There's a full range. I don't think I've, I'm sure there's lots more that I've forgotten but really we represent just about every profession that walks and talks within our community and that speaks to all of Rotary.
Steve - And so people contribute what, their ideas, they contribute their professional experience, they, you get involved I guess, in fund raising, what are some of the activities?
Bob - Within our club it, there's any number of activities that are taking place at any point in time. Right now we have a project underway that Neil is spearheading where we're helping to construct a pottery wheel, a pottery house for an art center. So we're committed to providing not only funding but also the labor to help with the construction of this pottery house. And in the past we have built playgrounds for children at, whether it's public playgrounds or at schools, we've built a lawn bowling club at a senior's center, we have assisted with the construction of a skate board park, we've helped with the development of a, the reconstruction work at a Boy's and Girl's club, we've also provided funding at an international project in Mexico where we put in a park, and we've paid for the drilling of wells so it goes on and on.
