The month of August brought us our annual Taste of Hops & Vines fundraising event and boy did it not disappoint! Each and every one of you should be incredibly proud of your efforts. Even with a lighter slate of vendors and lower than expected ticket sales, your efforts saw us to our most successful monetary event to date. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
We heard from the Sheriff's department and the owner of Dependable Solutions on the topic of fraud and scams this past month. There was lots of great information and ways to best protect ourselves from bad actors trying to access our information and take what they can. Reflecting on the information presented, I can't help but think how great it is organizations like Rotary exist. It's so, so easy to get caught up in all the 'bad' we hear on a daily basis, but it sure is nice to belong to a group of people doing good.
If you know of someone who you think would bring good information to the club, be a dynamic and thought-provoking speaker or have an interesting topic to share, there is room on the speaker list. Please just let me know if you do fill a speaking slot.
We have many events coming up and it looks like the weather will cooperate after such an odd winter. I am in Florida but I somehow have twin cities local programming here and I was blown away by the weather back home. Some days our Florida weather was only a few degrees different from Minnesota.
I attend the rotary here all winter. Visiting other Rotaries is a real benefit of membership that we don’t promote enough. I was on a river cruise once and on our stop in Bulgaria a hotel had a notice that the Rotary was meeting the next afternoon. How interesting that would have been if we were there the following day and if someone in the group spoke English.Always check to see when the Rotary meets if you are traveling. The Rotarians are always helpful with restaurant suggestions, etc and you might even get an idea of something they do that we can use back home.
Coming up is a tour of Northern Soda on Wednesday April 3 and the new ( for us) is Taste of Shoreview on April 23. Please send me suggestions of places you would like to tour or a business that can come to our meeting for a ‘Business Minute’ talk.
Our club will be hosting a membership drive on May 2, 2024 from 5:00-7:00 PM at Flaherty's Arden Bowl. We are hoping to host one person for every Rotarian in the club. Please do your part to think of one (or more) friends, family, or acquaintances that you think might make good Rotarians--THEN ACTUALLY CALL AND INVITE THEM!!!!
We also now have a Community Partners group, so if time and money become a factor, they are welcome to join this adjunct group. This group will be advised in advance of all of our projects and will be able to sign up to help out. We hope to become involved in more projects, so we'll need extra hands to share the fun! Don't forget, our goal for the year is 5 new members.
This will be the only formal membership event this year, so please hop on board to make it successful. There will be food, a free drink ticket, and trivia!!
PS. This is a recruiting event. Members and potential Rotarians or Community Partners are invited.
On May 7, our district grants committee held a Shark Tank Event. Clubs that have not had a grant in the past 3 years were invited to submit grant proposals to the “Sharks” in hopes of receiving funding for their proposal. Don Martin participated as a Shark for our club, which provided an amount of $200 to the event. The grant applications were circulated ahead of the event and reviewed by the Sharks. At the Zoom event, each club presented their proposal and answered questions from the Sharks. The Sharks then gathered in a ‘break-out room’ and discussed the proposals.
The big winner with $2,950 was the Greater Rochester Club who plans to work with a club in Uganda, Africa, to build 13 learning centers across 6 sites within 3 refugee camps for educating 330 primary school students. All of the funds from our club were committed to this project. All this sounds astounding, but even more astounding is the total budget for the project is just over $16,000. There is a lot of parents in a refugee camp willing to contribute their labor so that their children can have an education and a lot of dirt to be converted into mud bricks to construct the buildings!
Next was Barron County Sunrise with $2,250 to assemble and distribute “Joy Jars” for children undergoing cancer treatments. The budget for their project is $16,000.
The final entry was Waseca Rotary Club with $1,750 to develop a Rotary Wellness Walk/park on a ½ acre plot that is part of the FarmAmerica MN Agricultural Interpretive Center near Waseca. The budget for their project is $35,000.
Below is a chart that shows the Shark Clubs and the funds they provided; the participating clubs and how the money was distributed.
The district grant team did a great job of organizing and executing the event. The event even had ‘celebrity appeal’ with Ed Boeve, the current District Governor and our own Glenn Bowers, the incoming District Governor, in attendance. Frank Mabley from our club also participated as an observer. I learned that if we are going to participate in the future, we should have the ability to commit at least $1,000 to the participating clubs. As you can see from the table above, other clubs provided $750, $1,000, $2,000 and $3,000 each, compared to our $200.
I think the event was successful in reaching the goal of encouraging clubs that have not applied for a grant in the past 3 years to “jump in” and give it a try. In addition, when a bunch of Rotarians get together, there is helpful information shared, and a good time is had by all.
Our speakers today were Emily Rousseau and Kate Olsen representing the City of Arden Hills. Emily is a City Council member and Kate is a volunteer member of their Parks and Recreation Committee. They reviewed the various parks within the City and the efforts being made to increase community events, improve trails, rain gardens and other natural habitat. They noted that it is somewhat challenging to do everything they would like to do, given the relatively small city population of about 9,000. They expressed appreciation for the projects our club has taken on in the past, such as painting hockey boards at one of the parks, and noted they would love to partner with us in other ways in the future.
Our program also included updates from the Avenue of Service directors within our club, noting progress that has been made toward previously established strategic goals in each area.
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