Club Assembly is when the club presents to itself it’s goals and ambitions for the forthcoming year.

Sounds easy. Probably is if you’ve done it before – I on the other hand had only recently joined Rotary and still hadn’t quite organised to my satisfaction the plans for the next month let alone the next year!

Initially, I said to Jarle that I’d need at least 15 minutes to present the parts from Service Projects. That was a gross underestimate on my part – in the end it needed 27 minutes. So what did we do and why?

I’m an objective driven person. I really need to know what the aims are in order to work towards them. Rotary has aims, I copied them on this blog earlier, but they are not exactly easy to digest or summarise. When you read them closely, you realise that every word has it’s reason for being there. Still, I’ve found them awful tough to learn and integrate in my mind. I decided that before I could present my committee’s objectives, I needed to present the object of rotary in a way that everyone would instantly know and understand. Only then could I go onto to how in the first year we can achieve that. I worked out that I could put across the Object of Rotary in just 3 words. Sure, they wouldn’t carry the minute detail of how Rotary can achieve things, but it would be enough that every new Rotarian around the table could use, remember, and apply. Here it is, my Object of Rotary in 3 words:

Do Good Things

Having an aim is one thing, but we need to follow it up with actions. There were already two causes others in the club had begun work on. I needed to find out very quickly what those causes were beyond just their name so that I could stand and present them as a worthy “Good Thing”. The first was Pilgrims Hospice, the second was Playing for Success. I went to visit them both, and if you want to find out what I found then you can read on once more.

Less than 2 weeks later, the day of the fun day had arrived.

The fun day was a large event organised by District. We got (if we wanted it, and we did) a free pitch to have whatever type of stand we wanted to. The event was open to the public and had a few large attractions, including a parachute display, a Spitfire flypast and a fun fair.

Our stand had 2 Nintendo Wii machines with WiiFit Boards. Steve Charman works for KCC in Education and was able to borrow them from a youth club for the day. We charged a pound a go with two iPod prizes donated by Apple specialist ServiceWeb for the highest score in two different games (hula hoops and a ski slalom).

I wrote that Lucy and I set two aims for the event. Firstly that we should involve as many of our club members on the day as possible. Over half the members took part which I consider a fantastic response. Many changed their plans to turn up at some point through the day. Our second goal was to raise money for our chosen charity, we raised 163.30 for Odyssey. All in all a good day.

One other surprise was when my family arrived in the afternoon. My daughter ran across to Steve Charman’s wife, shouted her name and gave her a hug! Why? Steve’s wife Rosie is a guide leader at my daughters guide pack in Faversham. None of us knew of the connection until then.

The fun day was a great success, but looking forward, it was now just a few days until “Club Assembly”, whatever that was. Read on, if you’re still with me!

I can come clean, I’m really not very good with names. I’ve found it very hard to get to know everyone at Rotary – at the time of writing this I’m still finding it hard to get to know everyone.

I’d spoken to Lucy in one of the earlier meetings but still knew very little about her. I’d only been to 12 meetings at this point and still felt very much the new boy. I gather many new Rotarians felt the same way. I thought Lucy had been there for a lot longer but in fact had only started going regularly in March too. New or not, we’d taken on a challenge to run the committee and had a pressing engagement – a Fun Day to organise. In the initial organisation chart I had been put in the Public Relations committee so I had no idea what had been going on in Service Projects. Lucy was within the Service Projects committee under the “International” section. That was a job she’s kept in addition to her new Deputy role. Our club had already set the goal of twinning with a Rotary club in Amiens, that meets at Amiens Cathedral. Lucy’s perfect English accent effectively conceals the fact she’s French, grew up in France and speaks the language fluently. Rather handy member for setting up twinning with a French club then!

In an effort to get to know her more and figure out what the aims of our committee were we met at her local pub. What could have taken an hour ended up taking all night until closing time – the functional bit an hour or so, the rest a lot of interesting conversation. Initially she filled me in on what had happened within the Service Projects committee up until that point. Only one meeting, some initial ideas on what to do at the fun day. I think it was then I discovered that we weren’t organising a whole fun day – but running a stand at a Rotary organised fun day – Phew! Lucy already had the Risk Assessments under control, another couple of members had suggested some activities for our stand to generate some revenue.

We set our objectives as

1. Get as many club members involved in the Fun Day as possible,
2. Raise money for our chosen charity.

The club had already chosen Odyssey as the charity.

I also found out that although Lucy was as new to Rotary membership as I was, she had been a secretary for another Rotarian when she first came to work in England. She already knew a lot about how Rotary worked, how it’s organised and what the protocols are. That knowledge has been very useful – simple things to the experienced Rotarian (like what ‘club assembly’ means) are very confusing to me. Lucy has been picking up on all the times I’ve use the wrong term preventing yet more confusion.

The non Rotary discussions covered how it came to be that a French girl acquires a perfect English accent yet has only been working in the UK for a few years. It turns out her Mum is English and every year after French schools had finished she’d visit England and stay with a pen pal, spending a month in an English school before our summer holidays. One of her brothers now lives in England too – at least for the time he’s not doing charity work overseas. Her degree studies in Paris sounded like hard work but a solid foundation to life too, one of the things I’d like to learn more of is how different education systems work and their strengths and weaknesses.

The more I get to know the other members, the more I feel able to make a difference within the club. Shorter conversations with other club members have already revealed that Karen is a couple of years younger than me and grew up in the same village and went to the same school! I never remember meeting her before, but we must have as children.

Two weeks to go until the fun day, how did it all go? Read on once more….