Jim Dunny
(If you have any comments or questions, please contact the editor)
Program for Tuesday, August 19, 2014
The speaker for August 19, 2014 will be Carl Nettleton. Mr. Nettleton will speaking to us about "Drought and the Nation"
Meeting Assignments
Date
Who Am I
Cheering for Rotary
August 19, 2014
Bill Mortimer
Alison Farrin
August 26, 2014
Trudy Armstrong
Wayne Hamburger
The assignment for the Who Am I includes providing the positive thought at the beginning of the meeting and introducing guests and visiting Rotarians during the meeting.
Cheering for Rotary assignment includes selling opportunity drawing tickets.
I was new to Rancho Bernardo when I started my own Farmers Insurance Agency in February 2011. I joined a networking group in order to build my business. It was in this networking group that I met Steve Redd. Steve was in the automobile sales business.
I had a few people invite me to join their Rotary club. I went to a few different meetings and realized their crowd wasn't "my type." The clubs I visited didn't seem at all interested in me and the members didn't look like they were interested in someone my age.
A friend of mine mentioned to me that his daughter needed a car for college. Because I knew Steve was in the automobile business, I referred this friend to Steve. Within days, my friend's daughter had a great car for college. Steve called me to thank me for the referral and suggested that we meet for a beer. I accepted his offer.
When Steve and I met shortly thereafter, he discussed the wonderful opportunity of becoming a Rotarian. I was quick to dismiss his invitation as I assumed he was a member of one of the clubs I had already visited. Steve didn't take no for an answer. When he pressed me about the clubs I had visited, he quickly assured me that his club was different . He encouraged me to come to one meeting and check out his club.
I came to that one meeting back in October 2012 and have been a member ever since. Joining Rotary has been a great decision. I can now give back to the community that has given so much to me already.
Steve unfortunately passed away a few months ago. I will always be grateful to him for his persistence in persuading me to just check out the Rancho Bernardo Sunrise Rotary Club. I am now co-treasurer of RB Sunrise Rotary and have been involved with the club's projects that make a difference in the local community and in the world.
If you want to be involved with great people who are working to make the world a better place, come to a meeting like I did. RB Sunrise Rotary meets at the Country Club of Rancho Bernardo every Tuesday at 7:00 am.
The most recent story on the district website is: "Who's Your Tommy?" The story is by a man who became a banker and returned to his home town early in his career. Soon after his return, an older man who whose paper he once had delivered, asked him to come to a Rotary meeting. The man's name was Tommy. The story is about the difference Tommy's invitation made in the life of this young banker over the years.
The story ends with the question - Who's Your Tommy?
Without knowing it, one of our own members answered that question very recently. Marc Nimetz spoke at the Celebration of Life for Steve Redd about the fact that Steve would not take no for an answer when he invited Marc to a meeting of our club. Marc had already visited other clubs and decided that they were not a good fit for him. Steve's insistence that our club was different led to Marc visiting and quickly becoming a member and better still an involved Rotarian. For Marc, Steve was his "Tommy"
Each of us has a story to tell about who cared enough about us to invite us to a meeting. That first meeting was the introduction to having an ongoing association with community leaders who became our friends and extended family. We experienced that is our clubs support for Doreen Redd and Inan Lintion when they lost their spouses. We have seen it in the past when several of our members lost their homes in the wildfires of 2007.
Our club has also bonded in doing service projects like building a house in a day for a family in Tijuana or doing a fantastic job of helping Ronald McDonald House with refurbishment projects to help the environment that the families of children undergoing treatment at Rady Children's Hospital have available.
Our club helped to launch POVA - the Poway Valley Therapeutic Riding Center. I could go on, but these are just a sampling of the projects of the last several years that has given each of us a reason to be proud to be "a Rotarian"
August is Membership month. When I traveled to the RI Convention in Sydney, I learned that Rotary has a membership problem. Despite a growing population, Rotary, like most organizations has remained static or has experienced loss of members. The recent push by Rotary International to look at this problem was the subject of the breakout sessions I attended.
What I learned is that the next generation of potential Rotarians, as we have seen in our club, are eager to make a difference in the world. What we are doing in our club by welcoming younger members and allowing them to become leaders is showing them that Rotary is the vehicle for making a difference in the world.
Your own story is a powerful recruiting tool. Rotary is an idea or attitude, not a product or service. For that reason, citing facts and statistics are far less effective than telling your Rotary Story. Our story is the good news that we join tegether as community leaders to exchange ideas about how and what to do to change the world around us. The next generation needs to know that that is what Rotary is all about.
