Category: District Governor Newsletters

Let’s try this again😀 happy August this is Susan Haralson your district governor and it’s Rotary‘s membership and new club development month where is the worlds oldest and most important service organization with over 1.2 million members and 34,000 clubs spread throughout 200 countries where we provide clean water to those without it feed the hungry bottles crippling debilitating and disfiguring diseases polio and helps people learn to read and write so that they can compete in the modern workplace.

I hope that your club is working to win the Rotary Presidential Citation. Rotary President Ian Riseley is asking all clubs to strive to achieve it. I have contended that the Rotary Citation is easier to achieve than any citation presented during the past five years. I believe also that it presents a more level playing field for small, medium-size, and large clubs than recent Presidential Citations.

If You Are Not Criticized, You May Not Be Doing Much – What a great line to remember if you are a leader breaking away from the buffalo herd! In the South, there are creatures called Blue Crabs. Let’s say you catch a bunch of Blue Crabs, and you put them in a bucket. You can walk away, leave your bucket, and you don’t have to worry about any of the crabs escaping, because when one of those crabs gets up to the top of the bucket rim, another crab pulls it back in the bucket.

Rotary clubs around the world are experimenting with club flexibility and membership types, but how does a club go about offering an alternative membership type? Before making changes, clubs should ask themselves questions like:

Why do we want to offer this new membership type?
How would our club benefit?
What membership issues do we expect it to address?

If a club wants to engage family members, then offering family memberships may be a strategy to consider.

District 5710 in Kansas has a provisional club almost entirely designed around family memberships. A parent is listed as the active Rotarian, but the annual fees cover participation for the entire family. Meetings are held on Sunday afternoons and children are invited to attend meetings, projects, etc. The club also appoints an unofficial leadership role to one of the children, which rotates between the kids over time, to help them build leadership and responsibility skills. At the start of the year, eight families were participating and interest is growing!