For a different sort of program on September 27, Julie Johnson Haffner, Rotary District 5440 Governor Elect, moved away from the podium and interacted with individual attendees by celebrating our successes and our ongoing programs while, at the same time, encouraging us to branch out into other areas and to push some of our own ideas into action.
Ms. Haffner started with a brief summary of her history with Rotary in northern Colorado, commenting that she was only the sixth woman to become a member of the Rotary Club of Fort Collins and the first Rotarian in the district to have a baby. Then she congratulated and welcomed o= our new members. She followed that with a brief discussion of the leadership team for District 5440 and an explanation of the difficulty of scheduling an annual visit to every club in the district given that the district has 53 clubs and extends from Wyoming to northern Colorado.
The remainder of her interaction with the attendees was centered around the Rotary Action Plan, summarized as “Take Action Now to increase our Impact, expand our Reach, enhance participant Engagement, and Adapt to changing situations”.
In the realm of increasing impact, she asked which are or have been our most successful projects. Those mentioned included the VTT grant that recently brought the team from South Africa to our area to improve our ability to help disabled children, the projects at the orphanage in Mexico, the growth of the Legacy Fund as a reliable source of funds for projects, and the success of the recent golf tournament in providing focused funds for the Dolly Parton reading initiative.
Expanding our reach focused on bringing in new members. Efforts mentioned ranged from conversations with individuals, even in relatively awkward situations (e.g., from the dental chair), to participating with other groups in charitable actions (e.g., the Food Bank), to simple actions like wearing your pin or having a sign on your car.
Participant engagement focused on what you get from Rotary. One response addressed the benefits associated with developing lots of new friends with a range of life experiences while being part of something larger.
Adaptation brought out a number of areas where our club might expand our reach. Are there things that we ought to be doing with respect to cost of admission/membership, bringing in spouses or more focus on the trades?
What should the perfect club look like? There were several comments about the high quality of our club, recognizing the quality and range of our projects and the fact that some of our new members are walk-ins attracted by the news of our club. However, there were several ideas from other clubs. One was the periodic granting of a significant fund to the cohort of new members to make a difference in the community. Another was to focus on bringing along kids from Ryla and Young Ryla into projects associated with the parent club.
She concluded with the question: What would you do as you leave today to grow Rotary? And this was followed by plugs for the District Fall Assembly in Cheyenne (October 7th), the District Conference in Steamboat (May 16 – 19, 2024), and the Rotary International Conference in Singapore (May 25 – 29, 2024).
If you have any questions, please contact her:
1 (979) 481-5792 (mobile).