Programme of the President for 2010/11

The rotary theme for next year is

 Building Communities and Bridging Continents

When I first came into rotary nearly 5 years ago, I began to realise what a great organisation I had joined, and what a great club. Most clubs have there problems and ours is no different from many others.

As membership in RIBI has an overall aging membership, with 50% of membership over 70 years of age, we need to look at our own club profile.  Fortunately the average age has come down considerably since Kay and Paula joined.

We as a club must ask ourselves questions, what are we doing wrong, why are we not attracting new members, and keeping them.  At the district assembly there was a strong message coming across, if we are not increasing our membership and retaining them, then perhaps we need to change so that we do.

We shall be looking at implementing the club leadership plan, discussing at council and with club members.  This will enable the club to improve communication between members, thus enabling greater involvement of all club members in developing future goals and achieving these.  It will also allow more time to focus on service and fellowship, and finally enable an easier transition from one rotary year to the next.

As previously discussed a few months ago by Ivan, our meeting times perhaps are not conducive for a lot of people these days.  We did at council and club discuss implementing one twilight meeting a month to encourage and hopefully draw in new members.  With this in mind from July we shall introduce one twilight evening a month (first Tuesday in the month) 6pm for 6.30pm for a period of one year, and then to be reviewed, (already ratified by council and discussed with the club several months ago).  I sincerely hope that every club member will support this, and have the clubs best interest at heart, to increase our membership.  We are a small club, we do so much, but we must look to increasing the membership or the club will die.

We must also look at our meeting; the committee meetings once a month, introduced by Richard will be re-introduced.  The club leadership plan will give more time and opportunity to discuss rotary business at meetings; and fellowship must be more innovative, dare we say fun.   More guest speakers perhaps, and perhaps something different, which will involve every club member.

Finally we need to have more balance between our service projects, (which for a small club we do extremely effectively) with fellowship.

Group members:

Philip Hills Committee Chairman