The Outgoing President’s Report
Let’s cast our minds back a year. We came out of Lockdown 4 on June 10, 2021. This gave us just enough time to have a joint, face-to-face Board meeting on June 24 and a real Changeover here on Friday, July 2. Lockdown 5 lasted from July 16 until July 27, then another brief reprieve before Lockdown 6 closed us from August 4 until October 22. The lockdowns which had played havoc with Jama’s year looked set to do the same to mine.
At the June 24 Board meeting, I was a bit like the rabbit caught in car headlights. The task for an incoming president looked daunting because of minimal income due to lack of projects coupled with minimal distribution from the Community trust due to share market crashes. The singular success of the Horn of Africa project, in which we sent three containers of goods to Berbera for onward distribution, was largely due to innovative crowd-funding.
For a few months, Rotary consisted only of small regular meetings and monthly Board meetings on Zoom. These were supplemented by DG Dale Hoy’s Saturday morning teas, also on Zoom. Alas, our charity Golf Day kept being postponed as lockdown 6 refused to come to an end.
Nevertheless, there were some house-keeping things which I could do in the background. Our club constitution and bylaws which had gone AWOL who knows when, were refreshed and ratified. We composed a Strategic Plan which was also ratified by our bemused members who had never seen such a thing, and we plagiarised a planning procedural form for our projects. The novel idea of pre-planning was not taken up with alacrity.
Came November and we started to meet again in real life at The Plough Hotel. The venue encouraged chat and repartee and soon we were humming like the old days. My one innovation of asking members to bring a memory-invoking souvenir and talk about it for two minutes further led to lively exchanges. In fact, you became a downright unruly lot.
The mirage-like Golf-Day finally happened on Friday, March 25 this year and the prospects for a bigger fund raiser for next year look good. The Royal and Ancient Sanctuary Lakes was, and will be, a popular venue.
Our Youth, Vocational and Community committees did splendidly in their shortened time frame. RYPEN graduates reported back after their camp and reminded us of the energy that young people possess; we resumed the Evan Phillips Award and awarded it to an Apprentice with Brimbank Council; we made awards to a trainee and a trainer with Mambourin disability services.
Our new committee of Environment and Sustainability found great projects but these, of necessity, have a time frame longer than a year. Happily, we have two secret weapons to help us through the arcane world of bureaucracies. Fred Maddern has the knack of knowing who’s who in the zoo and of getting doors open; Nada Stojkovski has the enthusiasm of an adolescent and the knowledge of an adult when it comes to planning horticultural projects. Between them we are poised to get environment projects in action very soon even though lines of responsibility at Gaskin Towers have yet to be finalised.
Finally, the share market rebound has given us a bumper distribution for our Community Trust which has just occurred and to put icing on the cake, a former club member, Chris McGregor, has made a magnificent donation of 50k dollars to that trust fund to help future beneficiaries.
I’d like to thank all our club members for their support, their attendances and for putting up with me and in particular I’d like to acknowledge the organisational skills of our secretary, Rodney Johnstone, and the accounting skills of Treasurer Elia Andriotis for keeping us out of jail, and finally my wife Suong for her stoicism and her solace.
Jamie Robertson
