As we begin the New Year, we look back to what has been accomplished thus far. I am thankful to all the members that make my job as Rotary President so much easier.
Internationally, we gave a global grant to bring clean safe drinking water to a school in Tijuana. We gave $35K for a cervical cancer detection unit to a medical clinic in Tijuana. We are also providing equipment for a farm school in a poor village in Cambodia to teach about aquaponics. The international committee has grown in size to 11 members.
Locally, we gave $811 towards the Pasadena Rotary Club Bike Project giving 200 children ages 3- 11 their first bike in time for Christmas. We fed over 100 families a meal and organized a Christmas party with Santa and gifts that included toys and pajamas to the families at La Casa de San Gabriel.
We’ve sponsored 2 Global Scholars, Jennifer Binley in Cape Town and Gaelen Stanford-Moore at Cambridge who send us glorious updates about their experiences abroad.
We reinvigorated the Interact Club at SMHS with the help of Courtney Rushing and Scott Kwong. The Vocational Services Committee has started a visit from a business person at SMHS in an effort to inspire students for future careers. We also brought back recognizing our Rotary Students of the Month – every other month we recognize our high school students from SMHS or Southwestern.
The Teen Leadership Camp participants this year did a phenomenal job leading our club, all the finishing touches with the cards and sharing their personal experiences was well practiced and professional.
We voted on sponsoring Troop 358 at our last meeting – connecting us to Boy Scouts, to which many members have an allegiance to.
Our club embarked on a 5 year vision plan to evaluate what we do well and find areas we should improve – we have already begun work on the membership action plan to increase our membership to 119 by 2020. We upgraded our website and are now using a more user friendly wordpress system. We are in the process of updating our brochures. We have asked each committee member to report their role and job description – this should help with the legacy planning as we bring in new members to new roles. We are working with the Pasadena Rotary club on their R2R networking meetings so that our members can inter-mingle with other clubs and expand their business. We started our own meet ups with Russ Osmonson at the helm – look out for details on our next Meet up – these are opportunities for fellowship and to invite new potential members.
Thus far, we have welcomed new members: Cindy Collins, Laura Trombley, Richard Lord and Jesse Hong. We welcomed back James Nash. We have also lost a few members and hope we can remain in touch with them, they are Jack Hamilton, Boz Lee, Jim Thompson and John Schaefer.
We had our first in a long time gathering during the holidays and made it a community gathering opportunity to welcome back and honor local hero, Army Sgt. Oliver Campbell.
Finally, we got recognized by the world and our neighboring community at the Rotary International’s float of a dragon at the 128th Rose Parade on January 2, 2017 as our club was the first in line to greet and wave at the crowds lining the streets of Pasadena.
I look forward to the next six months and what we will accomplish together. If I did not recognize any projects, accept my apology up front.
Yours in Rotary Service,
Gilda Moshir
