What it takes to be a leader in Rotary

By Vanessa Glavinskas          Illustrations by Zulema Williams

RI President Barry Rassin says he learned more about leadership from Rotary than he did pursuing his MBA – or even as president of the hospital he ran for years. “It takes more skill to lead volunteers,” he insists. “It’s harder than leading employees.” Rotary also gave Rassin the opportunity to practice public speaking. “When I started in Rotary, I couldn’t make a speech to save my life,” he says – a remarkable admission from a man who is clearly comfortable addressing large crowds today.

There are other benefits to assuming a leadership position at Rotary. The organization’s leaders gain access to world-class training that prepares them for their roles. As they ascend the ranks, they also expand their networks to include accomplished professionals from around the world. 

A new generation of good leaders is essential to Rotary’s future. They help guide the organization, contribute their professional expertise, and build goodwill with other leaders while working toward a common goal: helping Rotarians create sustainable, positive change. 

Thinking of taking on a leadership role? Read on to learn more about different positions available within Rotary and the myths – here debunked – often associated with them.

Club president

Club presidents plan and lead club meetings, set goals, encourage communication between club and district committees, review expenditures, participate in decisions, and motivate club members. They also collaborate with the district governor and assistant governor. Any member in good standing is eligible to become club president, though most presidents have already served their clubs as a committee chair or in some other leadership role.

MYTH: It’s all on you.

“People think they have to be good at everything to be club president,” says Conor Gee, who was president of the Rotary Club of Chicago in 2017-18. “But you’re building a team around you. You learn what you’re good at and what you’re not good at, and you can rely on others to fill the gaps.”

Gee says he has seen candidates shy away from the office, fearful that they lack adequate administrative ability or some other talent. Instead, he says, look at this as an opportunity to improve those skills. He adds that other candidates worry that they don’t know enough about Rotary, such as the ins and outs of securing a global grant. “You don’t have to be a Rotary expert,” Gee says. “You can rely on your district leaders to train you. You just have to lead the club and tie everything together.”

 “The strongest presidents that I have seen in our club are the ones who bring leadership to the club and board, but don’t do all the work themselves,” says Mary Ann Collishaw, who has served two terms as president of the Rotary Club of Whistler Millennium, British Columbia. “Instead, they inspire club members to work hard.”

Collishaw, who works at Whistler’s tourism bureau, notes that her experiences as club president improved her professional skills. “I have learned and practiced leadership, organization, time management, delegation, and more through Rotary,” she says. In addition, “my employer sees the value in having the community connection through Rotary.”

Gee notes that the most important thing a club president should have is a clear vision of how he or she wants to move the club forward. “You don’t have to be a perfect president to be a good one,” he says.

District governor

District governors are an important part of Rotary’s leadership structure. Governors, together with a team of assistant governors and district committees, support, strengthen, and motivate clubs. They also organize training and plan the district conference and other events. Nominees for district governor must have been Rotarians for at least seven years and have served as a club president.

MYTH: It’s impossible to work full time and serve as district governor.

“There are lots and lots of people who were not retired when serving as DG, including me,” says 2017-18 RI President Ian H.S. Riseley. “It’s vital we stop this misconception.”

Riseley, who ran an accounting firm while he was governor of District 9810, worries that misunderstandings about the role discourage too many people from even considering it. “Anything you do that you really enjoy does tend to take over your life a little bit,” he concedes. He suggests leaders ask for support to make juggling the responsibilities easier. “You are part of a family in Rotary,” he says. “We need to encourage people and offer assistance when they put their hand up and want to do the job.”

Because visiting clubs is arguably the most time-consuming part of being district governor, Rotary allows multiclub visits. “There are several districts around the world that believe the district governor is mandated to visit all the clubs,” says 2016-17 RI President John F. Germ. “That potentially weeds out younger people who wouldn’t have the time to get that done.” He points out that gathering members of several clubs for everyone to meet the governor at once can save time and offer opportunities for fellowship.

Sherri Muniz, a Rotarian from San Antonio, Texas, who was a district governor in 2011-12, says that even though she decided to scale back her business selling model cars and trains during her term as governor, her business actually grew that year. The added responsibilities forced her to work more efficiently, focus only on her best customers, and handle more requests remotely, which ultimately benefited her business. “I put Rotary first for a year, and it paid me back twofold,” she says.

RI director

Rotary’s Board of Directors establishes policy for Rotary International and provides guidance to clubs. Past district governors are eligible to serve on the Board, but at least three years must have elapsed since the end of their term as governor. Candidates must have attended two Rotary institutes and a Rotary convention in the previous three years. Each director serves for two years.

MYTH: Directors are appointed by the RI president.

Every director on the RI Board is nominated by one of Rotary’s 34 zones. Regional nominating committees interview candidates and select the one they want to represent them. Clubs then formally elect the directors at Rotary’s international convention.

In 2017, Ian Riseley did appoint a task force of eight past district governors – evenly split between men and women, and all of them in their 40s or younger – to advise the Board during his year as president.

People think they have to be good at everything to be club president. But you’re building a team around you. You learn what you’re good at and what you’re not good at, and you can rely on others to fill the gaps.

Conor Gee

President of the Rotary Club of Chicago in 2017-18

“Most Board members are in their 60s, if not older,” Riseley says. “We have to be conscious of the fact that there are many Rotarians much younger than that.” By offering younger leaders, and more women, the opportunity to weigh in on issues facing the Board, Riseley aimed to diversify the perspectives the Board considered when making decisions. The task force advised on topics such as how to encourage young professionals to join clubs and assume leadership positions in Rotary.

RI President Rassin has opted to keep an advisory panel this year; he says it will play an especially important role because no women are serving on the 2018-19 Board of Directors, which disappoints him. Rassin suggests that Rotarians with similar concerns talk to their zone nominating committees. He also encourages clubs to nurture female leaders at the club and district levels. “That’s where our leaders come from,” he says.

Regional leaders

Rotary’s regional leaders use their skills to support and strengthen clubs, focus and increase Rotary’s humanitarian service, and enhance and heighten Rotary’s public image. They also serve as trainers and facilitators at Rotary institutes, governors-elect training seminars, regional and zone seminars, district training, and other events. Regional leaders are appointed by the RI president or The Rotary Foundation trustee chair and serve a three-year term.

An epidemiologist who helped stem the spread of cholera and AIDS in Africa, Gary Slutkin has a new – and successful – strategy to stop the contagion of violence: Treat it like a disease

Twenty-three years ago, Gary Slutkin moved to Chicago to take a break. A doctor trained in infectious diseases, he had spent his career battling tuberculosis in San Francisco and cholera in refugee camps across Africa. Working with the World Health Organization, he played a key role in reversing the AIDS epidemic in Uganda. But he had also spent more than a decade surrounded by suffering and death. “I was exhausted,” he says. 

Gary Slutkin

Illustration by Viktor Miller Gausa

In 1995, when he was 44, Slutkin left Africa and his job with WHO and moved back to the United States to recharge. Yet the headlines kept him from winding down: Violence dominated the news. “All across the country, I saw that violence was an issue in the same way that cholera or diarrheal disease had been an issue in Bangladesh or AIDS was in Uganda,” he says. So he began to research violence the same way he had investigated the causes and patterns of disease as an epidemiologist.

Last September, Slutkin discussed his findings while speaking about “Peace in the Age of Uncertainty,” the first installment in a three-part Pathways to Peace Series sponsored by Rotary International and the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.

 “Looking at violence,” he explained, “we can see through maps and charts and graphs that it behaves exactly like all other epidemic issues.” And like other contagions, violence tended to cluster, with one event leading to another. “How does that happen?” he asked. “It’s because of exposure. That was the insight I came to years ago. What was the greatest predictor of violence? The answer: a preceding act of violence.” What’s more, he insisted, if violence is predictable, it can be “interrupted.”

With that in mind, Slutkin began investigating new ways to treat violence. He started an initiative originally called the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention; in 2000, it implemented its first program – CeaseFire – in a violence-plagued Chicago neighborhood. Known since 2012 as Cure Violence, it’s based at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Slutkin is a professor at the School of Public Health. 

The Cure Violence model employs three components used to reverse any epidemic: interrupt transmission; reduce risk; change community norms. Cure Violence outreach workers prevent violence by counseling people exposed to violence in their home or community. These “violence interrupters” work with high-risk individuals to discourage them from acting out violently.

Where implemented, the Cure Violence model typically reduces violence by 41 to 73 percent in the first year. In 2011, a film called The Interrupters documented the success of the program, and today its impact is felt worldwide. “We have a global effort to reduce violence through partnerships in multiple regions, in particular Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East,” as well as in 25 U.S. cities, Slutkin says.

 “Public health has been responsible for some of the greatest accomplishments in human history,” he says. “It’s gotten rid of multiple diseases like plague and leprosy and smallpox. Polio is on its way out. Violence is next.”

Slutkin spoke with contributing editor Vanessa Glavinskas about his pioneering methodology, behavior change, ineffective punitive remedies, and ways Rotarians can lend a hand in the fight to cure violence.

Q: How does the Cure Violence model work?

A: All epidemics are managed from the inside out. They’re not managed by outside forces; they’re managed from the inside. The health sector guides and trains in the specific methods for how to detect, how to interrupt, how to persuade, how to change behavior, how to document work, and how to change local strategies when things aren’t working. Epidemics are managed through a partnership between community groups, health departments, and other services. It works over and over again.

Managing disease is something Rotarians are familiar with because of polio eradication. To vaccinate children, health workers go door to door in the communities and talk to parents about the importance of the vaccine. The most important thing that these health workers have is trust. 

Cholera was managed this way when I was working in Somalia. We used Vietnamese and Cambodian outreach workers to reach Vietnamese and Cambodian tuberculosis patients and their families. This is the way it really works. But the U.S. is in a punitive mode about a lot of things that are health problems. 

Rotarians are committed to promoting peace around the world. To implement the Cure Violence health model, someone from the community needs to take the lead. You can start by registering for a Cure Violence webinar for new communities at cureviolence.org/webinar.

Q: Why doesn’t punishment work? 

A: Behavior is not formed, maintained, or changed by punishment. It’s formed by modeling and copying. It’s maintained by social norms. People care more about what their friends think than what some authority is telling them. Belonging is not just a nice thing; it’s a way to survive. This whole carrot and stick idea doesn’t even work for donkeys. It’s very primitive thinking.

Q: What are you doing to change the way the public thinks about violence?

A: The public still has an ideological and punitive lens on what is really a scientific, epidemic health problem. We’re training health workers to speak up. Right now violence is being explained by a punitive sector. We need to stop using scary words like “criminal” and “gang” – all these demonizing terms – and begin to use words from the health sector like “behavior,” “transmissible,” “interruption,” and “outreach.” I think public perception will change if the language changes.

Q: How do you get people to look at violence as a public health issue? 

A: Arguing against an existing narrative doesn’t work. Science tells us this too. The brain is wired for people to stick to their ideas. But the good news is that everyone has an understanding of health, and even if they don’t know exactly what public health does, they understand contagion. They understand that epidemics can be reversed. If we continue to talk in that way, everyone has a space in their brain for a new set of ideas. Then you have to develop the ability to look at the person – not just the person in the hospital, but the person who did the violent act as a person who’s been exposed to violence many times. The brain picks up [violent tendencies] just the way the lungs pick up flu or the intestines pick up cholera. We need to be exposed to the scientific idea that the person who’s being violent is reacting to exposure. 

From the Desk of President Bernie

FROM PRESIDENT BERNIE:

A reminder to RSVP for the Garden Reception for District Governor Diane Fejes on August 15 at the Olson’s.

Alaska State Fair: Brenda Sheldon from the Palmer Rotary extends the following invitation:

“Because the Alaska State Fair is for everyone, we are reaching out to all of District 5010.

On August 23rd, for the price of $30, a Rotarian will get a premium parking pass, a State Fair entrance ticket and a Rotary meeting and meal. Make a day of it at the Alaska State Fair!  

The Palmer Rotary Club would appreciate it if you would forward this information to your club members. In past years, we have had Rotarians from all over our District attend this meeting. It is truly Fellowship at the Fair (and loads of fun).”

Host Families for Open World Delegation We are looking for volunteer Host families for the Open World Russian delegation visit in September. The delegation arrives on September 14 and departs on September 18.”

Bernie

Please continue to bring toiletries to our Thursday meetings so we can package them up and give them to Haven House for distribution to residents.  These items that go into the welcome baskets they provide are so important as many may arrive with nothing.

Ask Winston what's on his Alaskan "bucket list" and see if you can help him check something off! 

Thanks!

Since 1993, Rotarians in Chile and the United States have teamed up to provide life-altering reconstructive surgeries

By Diana Schoberg Photos by Daniela Prado Sarasúa

Ricardo Román was shopping with his wife at a department store in Chile in 2012 when a woman in her early 20s approached him. He didn’t recognize her, he confesses through an interpreter, but there were two good reasons: He had last seen her more than a decade earlier – and her smile had changed drastically.

 1.      Surgeons Lena Pinillos, left, and James Lehman, talk with a father about his child.

2.    

The team evaluated 250 potential patients; the team selected patients based on need and the complexity of each surgery.

3.     A mother finishes paperwork for her son's surgery.

4.      Lehman wears fanciful scrubs to get the kids to smile.

5.      Preparing for surgery.

6.      An anxious father waits on the floor in a hospital corridor; with so many surgeries, there are often more people than chairs. 

7.      Cleft lip and palate have a hereditary component, but their precise cause is unclear.

 E-club of nomads builds connections

Club Innovation: Spread out across thousands of square miles in the eastern states of Australia, Rotarians fire up laptops, tablets, and smartphones and log on to weekly club meetings from their RVs using a teleconferencing app. Members map routes for the jamborees, service projects, and fundraising they plan to do with their club and with the clubs they’ll visit on their journeys.

Campers roll with Rotary: Every day, about 135,000 recreational vehicles roll down Australia’s highways. For Rotarians who have answered the call of the open road, the vagabond nature of an RV lifestyle can conflict with the duties of traditional clubs. For them, the Rotary E-Club of Australia Nomads, a concept hatched in mid-2014 by members of the Rotary Club of Jindalee in Queensland, builds connections for service and fellowship.

After the death of his wife in 2011, “I decided to buy a large touring RV,” a 22-footer, says Wayne Kemmis, a past president of two Rotary clubs in New South Wales. As he pondered whether Rotary could fit into his new lifestyle, a notice in Rotary Down Under magazine about a new club caught his eye, and Kemmis signed on as a charter member of the E-Club of Australia Nomads. (The group stresses that members need not be Australian, just driven to service; one member of the Nomads is an American.) “Most members spend a fair amount of time traveling,” notes Kemmis, a retired newspaper manager.

Geoff St Clair, past president of a club in Lockyer Valley, Queensland, had left Rotary to take up the traveling life when the new club came along. “I was a Rotarian for seven years but left for four years until returning with the Nomads in June 2014, when it was a satellite club,” he says. He rejoined Rotary with his wife, Lorelle, a new recruit, because “the club would allow you to continue traveling but still uphold the ideals of Rotary.” For several months each year, the retired educators roam Australia in their 19-foot trailer with their dog, Josie, a Maltese mix.

Wherever the club members may be, a constant is the Wednesday evening session to chart progress on trips and projects. “The theme of our meetings is having fun,” says Kemmis. “Members come online with their glass of wine or other beverage. They wear casual clothing. Two members usually come in their pajamas. There are no dress regulations.” 

St Clair notes the challenges of developing service opportunities for people who may reside hundreds or thousands of miles from one another. Other obstacles are maintaining a sense of togetherness across distance and teaching computer skills to older members, he says.

Twice-annual musters, some lasting a week, kindle conviviality and rev up good deeds: During their most recent social gathering over four days at Bribie Island, Queensland, club members planted more than 400 trees to stabilize dunes. 

The Nomads adapt their fundraising to their lifestyle. Many club members do crafts such as knitting and crocheting on the road, and when the club holds gatherings, they set up a booth and sell items to the public. And every March they hold a crafts exposition with workshops, speakers, and shopping. The proceeds from these efforts benefit various charities, such as the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Lending manpower to Rotary-sponsored fun runs, concerts, regattas, and festivals across eastern Australia is the peripatetic club’s hallmark. Last September, it assisted the Rotary Club of Carindale with the Brisbane billycart championships. (The event, with engineless carts racing downhill, is similar to American soapbox derbies.) 

“Clubs appreciate us as we often assist them in their projects,” says St Clair, harking to the club motto, Helping Hands Across the Land. —Brad Webber

What is your club doing to reinvent itself? Email club.innovations@rotary.org.

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TORONTO (June 27, 2018) — In acknowledgment of his government’s efforts to achieve a polio-free world, Rotary today presented Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with its Polio Eradication Champion Award at its 109th annual international convention.

Canada has been a champion in the fight to eradicate polio since 1986, when it became the first government to formally fund global polio immunization efforts. Canada has provided over CAD $750 million in support of a polio-free world, including a $100 million pledge to global eradication in 2017. Earlier this month, Canada, as host of the G7 summit, was joined by G7 leaders in affirming a commitment to polio eradication.

“Prime Minister Trudeau has committed Canada to remain a strong partner until polio is completely eradicated,” said Rotary International President Ian H.S. Riseley. “With the unwavering support of the Prime Minister and the Canadian government and their strong assistance with continued vaccination efforts, I’m confident we will rid the world of polio.”

Later this week, Rotary will announce nearly $50.12 million in support for global polio eradication efforts in countries where polio is a threat. Since 1988, Rotary has contributed more than $2.3 billion and countless volunteer hours in the fight to end polio, with Rotary clubs in Canada donating more than $66.6 million towards polio eradication. Rotary members throughout Canada travel regularly to polio-threatened countries to vaccinate children in mass immunization campaigns.

To help create awareness and support for the global effort to protect all children from polio, Rotary’s international convention will feature two virtual reality videos that will immerse viewers into the lives of those still impacted by the disease, and what it will take to eradicate it worldwide. Download the Rotary VR app in Google Play or the Apple App Store to view “I Dream of an Empty Ward." 

Polio eradication has been Rotary’s top priority since 1985. In 1988, Rotary became a leading partner in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, along with the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and later, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Since the initiative launched, the incidence of polio has plummeted by more than 99.9 percent, from about 350,000 cases in 1988 to just 22 confirmed cases in two countries in 2017. 

About Rotary: Rotary brings together a global network of community leaders dedicated to tackling the world’s most pressing humanitarian challenges. We connect 1.2 million members from more than 35,000 Rotary clubs in almost every country in the world. Their service improves lives both locally and internationally, from helping those in need in their own communities to working toward a polio-free world. Toronto’s first Rotary convention took place 94 years ago, with subsequent conventions in 1942, 1964 and 1983. 

About the Polio Eradication Champion Award: Rotary established the award in 1995 to honor individuals who have made significant contributions to the global eradication effort. Prime Minister Trudeau is the third Canadian Prime Minister to receive the award, joining Prime Ministers Jean Chrétien and Stephen Harper. Past recipients also include Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan; Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany; Xavier Bettel, Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Muhammadu Buhari, President of Nigeria; Nevin Mimica, European Commissioner for International Cooperation and Development; and Ban Ki-moon, former UN secretary-general. 

For more information, contact: 

Amanda Federchuk:  +1 (416) 355-7410, Amanda.Federchuk@ketchum.com 

Chanele Williams: +1 (847) 866-3466, Chanele.Williams@rotary.org

EVANSTON, IL (October 2, 2017) — More than 1 billion people around the world live in inadequate housing according to the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements. Through a partnership between Rotary and Habitat for Humanity, more will have access to safe and affordable housing across the globe.

The partnership will facilitate collaboration between local Rotary clubs and local Habitat for Humanity organizations, enabling Habitat to extend their volunteer pool by tapping into Rotary’s 1.2 million members in 200 countries and regions.

“Habitat’s aim to bring people together to build homes, communities and hope aligns perfectly with Rotary’s commitment to make positive, lasting change in communities around the world,” said Rotary General Secretary John Hewko. “With Habitat’s expertise and the power of Rotary’s volunteer network, we will help build the foundation for stronger communities.”

“The values of our organizations are so closely aligned, and the desire to help others runs deep for both groups. That makes us such a perfect match,” said Habitat for Humanity International CEO Jonathan T.M. Reckford. “So many Rotarians have worked alongside Habitat and the knowledge, experiences and connections that are so strong in local Rotary clubs will make them valuable Habitat partners in many communities worldwide.”

Rotary members develop and implement sustainable projects that fight disease, promote peace, provide clean water, support education, save mothers and children and grow local economies. These projects are supported by more than $200 million awarded through Rotary’s grants programs.

Habitat for Humanity joins a list of Rotary service partners including, the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness, Peace Corps, Dollywood Foundation, the Global FoodBanking Network and Youth Service America (YSA).

About Rotary

Rotary brings together a global network of volunteer leaders dedicated to tackling the world’s most pressing humanitarian challenges. Rotary connects 1.2 million members of more than 35,000 Rotary clubs in over 200 countries and geographical areas. Their work improves lives at both the local and international levels, from helping families in need in their own communities to working toward a polio-free world.

About Habitat for Humanity

Driven by the vision that everyone needs a decent place to live, Habitat for Humanity began in 1976 as a grassroots effort on a community farm in southern Georgia. The Christian housing organization has since grown to become a leading global nonprofit working in more than 1,300 communities throughout the U.S. and in more than 70 countries. Families and individuals in need of a hand up partner with Habitat for Humanity to build or improve a place they can call home. Habitat homeowners help build their own homes alongside volunteers and pay an affordable mortgage. Through financial support, volunteering or adding a voice to support affordable housing, everyone can help families achieve the strength, stability and self-reliance they need to build better lives for themselves. Through shelter, we empower. To learn more, visit habitat.org.

Rotary contact: Chanele Williams 847-866-3466 chanele.williams@rotary.org

Habitat for Humanity contact: Laura Layton 404-420-3615 newsroom@habitat.org

I would like to personally invite all Homer - Kachemak Bay Rotary Club members,  and other business and community leaders, to the Rotary Club of Soldotna's second community and economic development forum at the Soldotna Library on July 23, 2018, starting at 9 am.  

This is a no-charge invitation-only event and a catered lunch will be provided to attendees.

Please forward this Email promptly to all of your club members.  We very much hope that your club and its members will participate.

This year's forum will focus very specifically upon identifying underutilized economic resources of all types, matching them with community priorities, then identifying new business opportunities to exploit those underutilized resources and build a stronger local community and economy.  

The intent is to use a well-proven, community-based process to  find new economic opportunities that work for that particular  community by bringing together the wisdom and knowledge of business and community leaders, initially in a brainstorming sort of session and then with more rigorous economic analysis.  The success of this approach depends upon strong participation by business and community leaders.

This process has been used successfully through the US West to help diversity local economies.  I have attached a recent article in The Western Planner journal that discusses the ASAP process and Western counties  where it has been used successfully.

The workshop leader will be Professor Don Albrecht of Utah State University, a leading US authority on economic re-development in the rural US west and the author of the leading book on the topic, "Rethinking Rural".

At the 2017 forum, attendees strongly urged that Soldotna Rotary Club continue the process due to Rotary's non-partisan, non-advocacy community service orientation.

I hope that you can attend and bring along your key staff members and encourage other business and community leaders to attend.  If you have any questions, please give me a  call on my cell, 398-0480 or Email me at kashi@alaska.net   

Yours very truly

Joe Kashi

Solid structure

Erin O’Loughlin

Rotary Club of Holly Springs, North Carolina

In a growing number of schools in the United States, children with autism are placed in classrooms with the general student population. The practice, known as mainstreaming, is intended to better integrate children with autism into society. However, they often don’t get the support they need to succeed, says Rotarian Erin O’Loughlin.

“If we’re not providing them with accommodations, how are they supposed to integrate?” asks O’Loughlin, whose 13-year-old son, Marcus, has autism. “We need to provide an atmosphere in which people with autism are within the community, but getting the support they require.”

One place that provides such support is 3 Irish Jewels Farm, which O’Loughlin created six years ago with her husband, Colm (the organization’s name refers to the couple’s three children). The nonprofit provides services for people with autism as well as their families and operates out of a space in a commercial district of Holly Springs, running programs for children and teens. Eventually, O’Loughlin hopes to set up a residential program in a farm setting where adults with autism can live and work. 

Many schools in the Holly Springs area run year-round, with nine weeks of instruction alternating with three weeks of vacation. This schedule is particularly tough for children with autism, who often thrive on routine. So 3 Irish Jewels created Camp Bluebird, where children from kindergarten through eighth grade can participate in a structured vacation program that teaches skills such as tying shoes, using utensils, sitting still, playing board games, and socializing with other children. 

O’Loughlin had been a Rotarian before moving to North Carolina. When Tim Beck, a member of the Rotary Club of Holly Springs, heard her speak at a fundraising event for 3 Irish Jewels Farm, he recalls, “I immediately thought, ‘We have to have her come talk to the club.’” He asked her if she would be interested in giving a presentation. “She said right on the spot, ‘Actually, I’d like to join.’” 

She became a member of the Holly Springs club in December. “Her passion made me think she was right for Rotary,” Beck says. “We know Erin is going to dedicate the same energy to our projects.

– Anne Ford

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Former senior U.S. diplomat who worked in Peru, Venezuela, and Cuba receives 2017-18 Rotary Alumni Global Service Award

By Arnold R. Grahl                          Photos by Alyce Henson

A career diplomat who served as the U.S. government’s highest ranking representative in Cuba has received the 2017-18 Rotary Alumni Global Service Award.

John Caulfield served as a diplomat for more than 40 years, in nine countries on four continents, fostering international understanding and the protection of human rights. He has displayed a life-long commitment to community development, education, disease prevention, and other causes that Rotary also pursues.

RI President Ian H.S. Riseley, left, and RI Trustee Chair Paul Netzel, right, present John Caulfield, a career diplomat, with the  2017-18 Rotary Alumni Global Service Award Tuesday at Rotary’s Convention in Toronto.

As a 1973-74 Ambassadorial Scholar sponsored by the Rotary Club of Moorestown, New Jersey, USA, Caulfield studied at the Universidade Católica do Salvador in Brazil. During his studies, he attended Rotary club meetings and began to consider a career in diplomacy, as learning Portuguese exposed him to a new culture. 

“When we participate in an experience such as a Rotary fellowship, we end up learning as much about ourselves, and our own countries, as we do about our hosts,” Caulfield said in his acceptance remarks Tuesday at Rotary’s Convention in Toronto. 

“After being an unofficial representative of my country abroad," he said, "it occurred to me that I would enjoy being an official representative."

The Rotary Alumni Global Service Award celebrates alumni whose service activities and professional achievements exemplify the Rotary ideal of Service Above Self. The award was first presented in 1995 and has honored policymakers, ambassadors, educators, and humanitarians.

Caulfield’s assignments repeatedly placed him where diplomatic relations were tense. As chief of the United States Interests Section in Havana, he negotiated agreements on immigration, environmental protection, and cultural affairs that prepared the two countries for the re-establishment of diplomatic relations in 2014.

Before that, in 2008, as deputy chief of mission in Caracas, Venezuela, he took charge after then-President Hugo Chavez expelled the U.S. ambassador. Caulfield guided the embassy through a tense period, maintaining communications with governments, factions opposed to the government, and businesses.

As consul general in London, England, in 2005, he supervised services for the world’s largest American expatriate community, as well as overseeing U.S. visa services. As deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Peru in 2002, he supported Peru’s return to democracy and economic growth after years of terrorism. He led the embassy for a year after the unexpected death of the ambassador.

Caulfield has received many other awards during his career, including a Presidential Meritorious Service Award, the U.S. Department of State’s Distinguished Service Award, and the Secretary of State’s Award for Innovation in the Use of Technology. Caulfield also supports Carmen & Rey’s Kids, a private organization in Cuba that assists children with cancer.

Recently retired, Caulfield is now a frequent speaker at conferences, universities, and civic clubs. He also consults with companies that seek to expand into the Cuban market. 

Caulfield said that interviewing thousands of people traveling to the United States early in his career helped him learn about the economies of the countries where he was assigned. He learned that it’s important for small businesses to broaden their perspectives and understand how they can participate in the world market.

“Throughout the world, I have seen firsthand how Rotarians support each other in business, and support their communities,” he said.

Caulfield said Rotary has a strong presence in all the countries he was assigned to except the most recent, Cuba. But the country is changing quickly, and he sees possibilities expanding there.

 “My hope, and expectation, is that within a few years, there will be an opportunity to re-establish Rotary in Cuba,” he said.

 • Rotarians, alumni, and Rotary program participants can nominate an alumnus for the 2018-19 award from 1 July to 15 September

Rotarians appointed to committees by the Rotary International president help ensure clubs and districts perform efficiently. All RI committees promote the priorities and goals of Rotary’s strategic plan.

Apply for committee openings in 2018-19 (deadline 11 August)

Learn more about the committees and the application process

2018 International Assembly Committee

This committee assists the president-elect in planning the International Assembly and ensures effective and consistent training of incoming governors. 

Chair

Barry Rassin

2018 Toronto Convention

This committee assists the 2017-18 president in planning the Rotary International Convention.

Chair

Gordon R. McInally

2018 Toronto Convention Promotion

This committee assists the 2017-18 president in promoting attendance at the Rotary International Convention in accordance with RI policies governing conventions.

Chair

Bryn Styles

2019 Hamburg Convention

This committee assists the 2018-19 president in planning the Rotary International Convention.

Chair

John T. Blount

Audit

This committee reviews and reports to the Board on RI and Rotary Foundation financial reports, the external audit, system of internal control, internal audit, and other related matters.

Chair

Michael Colasurdo

Communications

This committee guides and advises the Board on effective ways to communicate what Rotary is and what we do, to Rotarians, clubs and districts, and the public. Rotary’s communication tools include printed publications, websites and social media, and multimedia materials.

Chair

Bradford R. Howard

Constitution and Bylaws

This committee serves as counsel to the Board on all matters related to Rotary’s constitutional documents and legislative procedures.

Chair

Adrienne J. Bzura

Districting

This committee recommends any needed adjustments of district boundaries to the Board.

Chair

Karen K. Wentz

Election Review

This committee reviews cases involving complaints or disputes over an election to any RI office, such as charges of canvassing, campaigning, or electioneering, and any related matters.

Chair

Peter L. Offer

Finance

This committee advises the Board on all RI finances. It recommends the annual budget and five-year financial forecast, reviews financial statement activity, monitors revenues and expenses, recommends investment policies, and monitors the performance of investment managers.

Chair

Steven A. Snyder

Global Networking Groups

This committee guides and advises the Board on Rotarian Action Groups, and Rotary Fellowships, and on strategies for promoting vocational service. It also assists Global Networking Groups with applications for official status.

Chair

Robert L. Hall

Joint Committee on Partnerships

This committee advises the Board and The Rotary Foundation Trustees on partnership and sponsorship matters.

Chair

John C. Matthews

Joint Young Leaders and Alumni Engagement

This committee advises the Board and The Rotary Foundation Trustees on building loyalty and encouraging ongoing connections to Rotary with our current Rotary program participants, Rotary alumni, and other youths and young professionals.

Chair

Ann-Britt Åsebol

Leadership Development and Training

This committee guides and advises the Board on Rotary’s leadership training program for Rotary members, clubs, and districts, with special emphasis on district governor training.

Chair

Jennifer A. Scott

Member Benefits

This committee assists in the implementation and promotion of the member benefits initiative, Rotary Global Rewards.

Chair

David J. Harilela

Membership

This committee guides and advises the Board on membership development, retention, and education. It considers developing programs to recruit members, educate and retain members, and encourage the formation of new Rotary clubs in countries that already have clubs.

Chair

Larry A. Lunsford

Operations Review

This committee advises the Board by reviewing the effectiveness and efficiency of operations, administrative procedures, standards of conduct, and other operational and financial matters.

Chair

Frank N. Goldberg

Rotaract and Interact

This committee advises the Board on the Rotaract and Interact programs, and reviews issues and suggestions related to these programs. Under the direction of the president, the committee plans and develops program content for the Rotaract Preconvention.

Co-chairs

Tommie Buscemi
Laura Sophie Verdegaal

Strategic Planning

This committee develops, recommends, and updates a strategic plan for consideration by the Board and The Rotary Foundation Trustees.

Chair

Stephanie A. Urchick

Youth Exchange

This committee advises the Board on the Rotary Youth Exchange program. Under the president’s direction, the committee plans and develops program content for the Youth Exchange Officers Preconvention.

Chair

Bruce I. Goldsen

In the internet age, literacy means distinguishing between fact and fiction

By Vanessa Glavinskas    Illustrations by Harry Campbell  

When the BBC offered a quiz titled “Can You Spot the Fake Stories?” I was confident that I would do well. With a master’s degree in journalism, I thought falling for “fake news” only happened to other people. But I was fooled four times on the seven-question quiz.  

I’m not the only one who has trouble with this. Even the digitally savvy generation now growing up has a difficult time distinguishing credible content from fake stories. In 2015, Stanford University launched an 18-month study of students in middle school, high school, and college across several states to find out how well they were able to evaluate the information they consume online. 

Nearly 8,000 students took part in the study, and the results showed that they were easily duped. Many middle schoolers couldn’t tell the difference between a news story and an ad. College students weren’t able to distinguish a mainstream source from a group promoting a certain point of view. Students often decided if something was credible just by how polished the website looked. The study highlighted a fundamental problem: Today’s students are struggling to differentiate fact from fiction online.

“We’re living in the most overwhelming information landscape in human history,” says Peter Adams, a senior vice president for the News Literacy Project, a nonprofit that aims to add information literacy to middle and high school classrooms across the United States. “It’s confusing because people are consuming information in an aggregated stream, and social media gives things uniformity. A post from a conspiracy theory blog looks the same as a post from the Washington Post.”

To help students learn how to evaluate and verify information, the News Literacy Project launched a virtual classroom called Checkology. One part of the web-based tool allows teachers to present students with news reports, tweets, and other social media posts. The students must determine whether they are credible by looking for a variety of “red flags.”

Jodi Mahoney found Checkology last summer while researching ways to educate her students about fake news. Now she uses it in her classroom, where she teaches students about technology, from email etiquette to basic coding.

Rotary Club of Chicago

Editor's note: We’ll be visiting clubs around the world to highlight the diversity of the Rotary experience. This is the first in a monthly series.

It’s noon on Tuesday, and a waiter at Chicago’s Union League Club is wondering if Cheryl McIntyre plans to eat lunch. “When I was president, I’d get so nervous about speaking in front of everyone that I’d barely touch my food,” she says. 

McIntyre was president of the Rotary Club of Chicago, also known as Rotary One, in 2015-16. That year, she changed the format of the meetings to allow more time for members to talk with visitors. She wanted people to feel welcome, she says, as though they were guests in someone’s home. The club gets its fair share of visitors – as the first Rotary club, established in 1905 and home to founder Paul Harris, it’s a must-stop for Rotarians from out of town.

As a hearty lunch of turkey, mashed potatoes, and roasted vegetables is served – it’s Thanksgiving week – Khaled Akkawi steps up to the podium. “This is my first time leading a meeting, so things will go as planned, right?” he jokes, a slight accent giving away his Jordanian roots. The club’s president-elect, he’s filling in for Conor Gee, who is in Geneva this week to attend Rotary Day at the United Nations. (At 32, Gee is one of the youngest people ever to serve as this club’s president.) 

Akkawi introduces the guests: two prospective members and five visiting Rotarians. One visitor, Alice Atemo, says she hopes to partner with the club on a water project in her home country of Kenya, where she runs a school for 900 orphaned children. 

Rajendran Sabanayagam and his daughter Priya are in town for a steel conference. He’s a member of the Rotary Club of Madras, India, and his daughter is part of a spinoff club created for younger professionals called Madras Next Generation. A couple from La Jolla, California, round out the visiting Rotarians. 

Akkawi then shares a quote he heard on the radio: “It’s so much easier to build a child than to rebuild an adult.” It made him think, he says, about the club’s signature project, Job1, a partnership with Chicago Public Schools that provides training and summer internships to high school students. As part of the program, the club sponsors job readiness training programs, puts together a job fair, and awards scholarships to graduating seniors. Rotarians also mentor the students in the program.

The club established its own foundation in 1938; it manages more than $3 million in assets and disburses between $200,000 and $250,000 every year, Gee says. Through the foundation, the club has funded rehabilitation services for disabled children, a clean-water project in Haiti, scholarships, and polio eradication. 

Situated in Chicago’s Loop, the historic Union League Club is a social, civic, and community hub for the city. It is sometimes referred to as the city’s “other Art Institute” for its large collection of paintings and other works. Although the focus is primarily on American artists – the nearly 800 pieces include works by Grant Wood and John James Audubon – one of the highlights is an 1872 painting by Claude Monet called Apple Trees in Blossom. 

Club members gather for lunch every Tuesday in a ballroom lit by gilded chandeliers. Today, attendance is a bit lighter than usual because many of the 136 members went to an event over the weekend – a send-off for a fire truck and an ambulance for emergency responders in Jalisco, Mexico. Rotary One sponsored the donation together with the Rotary Club of Chicago Little Village; new member George Rabiela, a retired fire captain, helped organize the donation.

At the president’s table, nearly everyone is a guest. Akkawi splits his time chatting with a lawyer considering joining the club and today’s speaker, Jonny Imerman, a cancer survivor who established a support network that connects cancer patients with survivors. 

The Rotary Club of Homer-Kachemak Bay is in need of a motivated individual who will assume the position of 2018-2019 President-Elect (PE) in preparation for serving as the President for the 2019-2020 Club Year. As PE, this dynamic Rotarian will also serve as the 2018-2019 Club year membership chair. 

To insure our continued membership growth and increased support for the community,  it is essential that the PE position be filled as soon as possible.

Thank you for stepping up and accepting the Rotary challenge.

Winston's Shelter Box & West Coast Trip Fundraisers. 

POSTPONED

ShelterBox is an international disaster relief charity that provides temporary shelter and life saving supplies to families displaced by natural disasters.

The fundraiser will be a series of Nigerian meals and a showcase of Nigerian cultures.  It is going to be like Nigeria in Homer!

For more than two decades, Judy Colaneri has guided hikers along ancient pilgrimage routes that crisscross the European countryside. During those journeys, the American-born Colaneri, who splits her time between Spain and the United States, has heard hundreds of stories from those who’ve walked the trails beside her. 

Krishna and Bonnie Arora, members of the Rotary Club of La Jolla Golden Triangle, California, US, have trekked with Colaneri almost a dozen times, and what they told her about Rotary on those journeys made a big impression.

“They’re always talking about their club’s work in Peru or India or Pakistan or Mexico, and I thought, ‘They are such good people,’” says Colaneri, who runs a tour company called Spanish Steps. “I’m at a point in my life where I’m still working so much and don’t have time to do what they do as Rotarians, so I called Krishna and Bonnie one day and asked how I could participate. I wanted to do something to help them.”

Colaneri came up with the idea of leading a trip of Rotarians and donating all profits, and the services of two of her guides and herself, to the Rotary Club of La Jolla Golden Triangle. Club members embraced the opportunity. “We put an item about the trip in the district newsletter, and other Rotarians signed up. We decided we’d pick some projects and ask for donations,” says La Jolla Golden Triangle member Linda Stouffer-Wallis.

On 31 March 2017, 12 California Rotarians from five clubs set off on an eight-day hiking trip, following the last 100 kilometers of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage trail leading to the Spanish holy city of Santiago de Compostela. The fundraiser brought in more than $23,000 from Colaneri’s company and nearly $5,500 in donations collected by the Rotary hikers. 

“For Judy to give all of her profits from the trip to us, as well as volunteering herself and two guides, was extraordinary,” says Stouffer-Wallis, who walked with husband Steve Wallis. A few years earlier she had hiked a portion of the trail through France. 

“The beauty of this trail seeps into your soul,” says Stouffer-Wallis, a banker, who coordinated the fundraising and distribution to club projects. “It’s a deep experience. If you’re open and ready for it, the walk does some transformative healing.” (A number of books and movies have documented the power of the trail, including The Way, a 2010 film starring Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez.)

La Jolla Golden Triangle Rotarian Wayne Davis and his son Steve, a member of the Rotary Club of Escondido After Five, also went on the journey. “I’d heard about the walk for a long time and signed up mainly because of a book I’d read about it, To the Field of the Stars,” says the elder Davis, a San Diego architect. 

“I love historical elements of geography, and I was taking in everything around me, from the weather to the old path, the historical buildings and stone farmhouses, the people – it was all very inspiring to me in terms of history and knowing it was a path that had been walked on for hundreds of years.”

It was also a great shared experience for father and son. “We talked about things we wouldn’t normally talk about because we got to spend a week together, day and night. It was a real bonding experience for us,” Wayne says.

Rotary wins Best Nonprofit Act for its polio eradication work 

By Ryan Hyland

Rotary’s commitment to eradicating polio worldwide won Best Nonprofit Act in the Hero Awards of the One Billion Acts of Peace campaign, an international global citizens’ movement to tackle the world’s most important issues. 

The campaign is an initiative of PeaceJam Foundation and is led by 14 Nobel Peace Prize laureates, including the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Rigoberta Menchú Tum, with the ambitious goal of inspiring a billion acts of peace by 2020. 

Each year, the campaign picks two finalists in each of six categories for their work to make a measurable impact in one of the 10 areas considered most important by the Nobel laureates. Winners are chosen by people from around the world. 

Rotary and Mercy Corps were the two finalists in the Best Nonprofit Act category. Rotary and the five other winners will be recognized at a ceremony on  June in Monaco. Betty Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977 for her advocacy for peace in Northern Ireland, will present the award. 

Rotary Youth Exchange inspired CEO to create low-cost speech device

As a Rotary Youth Exchange student in Ecuador seven years ago, Mary Elizabeth McCulloch volunteered at an orphanage that was home to both adults and children with disabilities. She noticed that those who had trouble speaking – mainly because of cerebral palsy – were seated alone by the windows, and for the most part no one communicated with them. 

Today, at age 26, McCulloch is founder and CEO of ProjectVive, a social enterprise company that has developed a low-cost device called the Voz Box, which allows people who have difficulty speaking to express themselves. The product launches this year in the United States and Ecuador.

Q: What did your experience in the orphanage inspire you to do?

A: After I returned to the United States and started at Penn State (graduating in 2016 with a degree in biomedical engineering), I began working on a low-cost speech generation device that would work in low-income and resource-constrained settings. I worked on it all through college, on evenings and weekends. Along the way, people joined my team, ProjectVive, to develop the Voz Box.

Q: How does the technology work? 

A: Our technology is for people with low motor control, who can’t tap a finger on an iPad or keyboard. We have different interfaces: a glove that works when someone flexes a finger; a watch that senses motion so the wearer can raise their arm to click; or glasses that detect blinking. These work with an application called CoughDrop AAC, which has grids of letters, words, and icons the user “points to” with the interface devices. Our devices can also control other applications, so the user can go to YouTube or Facebook, chat with friends, or look for jobs. 

Q: Who will this technology help?

A: Worldwide, there are 4.6 million people who can’t speak because of ALS or cerebral palsy. Too many people think that if they can’t contribute, it’s because they have nothing to contribute. But these disabilities aren’t reflections of cognitive ability or potential. We are empowering people with disabilities by giving them a voice and the ability to live out their life goals. 

Q: What would the world look like if people with disabilities had a bigger role? 

A: There are a lot of big societal problems facing the world today, and this is an untapped population of global problem solvers. Research shows that someone who has experienced adversity is more apt to make decisions to help others, to have empathy and sympathy. They are natural problem solvers. 

Q: When will the product be available?

A: The launches are in May in the United States and in June in Ecuador. We won’t be exporting from the United States; we are helping local people make and maintain the devices, and training users’ family members and caretakers to take care of them. And we’ll make sure the devices are in the users’ indigenous language, as well as Spanish and English. We are looking for our next pilot countries to launch ProjectVive and give more people with disabilities a voice. 

— Anne Stein

• Read more stories from The Rotarian

The joy of steering your interests toward something completely different

By James Petersen

“When was the last time you did something for the first time? When was the first time you did something for the last time?” Those questions are tacked to the wall of my office. I have, at certain times in my life, received odd bits of wisdom; they all end up on the wall. A cartoon acquired at my first job depicts a sign on a muddy road warning: “Choose your rut carefully. You’ll be in it for the next 18 miles.” My editor had given it to me. When I would complain about a certain task, he would say: “How you deal with boredom may be the most defining of character traits.”

That became one of my core principles: One should always be on a learning curve. It helped that my job demanded discovery. As a writer, I explored new topics every month. The rut I chose lasted 40 years. 

And then it disappeared.

I thought I was prepared. I had the notion that before you retire, you should have three passions on call, three irons in the fire, to fill the sudden abundance of time. I decided to devote more effort to photography; to reread One Hundred Years of Solitude and every mystery by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler; and to learn the guitar riff or the first 10 bars of every Beatles song. (OK, maybe just the ones in the key of E.) 

I soon discovered the flaw behind to-do lists. When the list is accomplished, you hit a “now what?” moment. I had simply spent more time indulging existing talents and interests. And none of those goals took me out of the house, involved other people, or kept me connected. I was no longer taking risks.

The learning curve, I realized, should lead somewhere.

A friend who took up online dating apparently mixed up his likes and dislikes in his profile. It took him months to notice that the women he was meeting were drawing him into activities he had previously avoided – and that he was enjoying himself. 

Something similar happened to me. My likes had brought me this far in life, but what did I know? I met a woman who loved jazz. Before then, I owned maybe three albums of music without words. A year later, my listening now includes Anat Cohen on clarinet, Wes Montgomery and Bobby Broom on jazz guitar, Wynton Marsalis. I sat in the balcony of Chicago’s Orchestra Hall and watched 77-year-old McCoy Tyner grab handfuls of heaven on the piano, delivering an entire lifetime in a single evening. I discovered the American songbook, came to appreciate the phrasing, the power of a single word. Nina Simone. Billie Holiday. The continuing education changed my map of Chicago, my hometown. I discovered the Green Mill, a jazz club that had been a speakeasy in Al Capone’s era. 

The learning curve should lead you out of the house.

I am not a foodie, but in the past year I have eaten at 35 restaurants that were not Cross-Rhodes, the Greek place that was the go-to choice for my kids for 20 years. All in the company of friends, old or new. Ted Fishman, author of Shock of Gray, a book on aging, pointed out that people who adopted the Mediterranean diet, hoping to live longer, were missing the point. In those cultures, breakfast, coffee, lunch, wine, and dinner all happen in the company of other people. Conversation is as important as the nature of calories consumed. Visit a café in Rome: What you notice first is that no one is talking on a phone. They are lost in face-to-face conversations.

The experts recommend learning a musical instrument but say that practicing something you already know doesn’t count. I was a child of the folk scare of the ’60s, so I play acoustic guitar. But I seldom ventured above the fifth fret, and I never bent a note. I belonged to the “learn three chords, play 10,000 songs” school. Suddenly my hands were attempting jazz chords (learn 10,000 chords, play three songs). My hands sometimes cramp up in a Dr. Strangelove spasm. A concerned friend asked, “What’s that?” I responded, “Oh, a D augmented 9th or maybe a G13.”

I have a friend who decided, out of the blue, to learn stand-up bass. He mastered the instrument, formed a jazz quartet with a killer vocalist, and now plays at clubs and galleries around Chicago. 

I met a woman who, after working as an emergency room physician for decades, developed a passion for tango. She takes lessons three nights a week. She travels to tango festivals and has gone to Argentina to work with legendary dancers. She owns multiple pairs of shoes with heels cut to different heights to perfectly match her partners. And you thought golf was equipment-intensive.

A friend asked one day if I would be interested in an afternoon listening to Israeli voices, people telling stories about their experiences on a kibbutz, about attending school, about finding love on the streets of Jerusalem. Why not? One story haunted me for weeks. What was going on? I usually forget the plot of a movie by the time I validate parking. 

I discovered that Chicago is home to a major storytelling community, one you can find in a bar or on a stage every night of the week. This, too, changed my map of the city. I have attended Moth “story slams” from the South Side to the North Shore, sat in intimate Irish pubs being moved to laughter or tears or heartache by the sound of human voices. 

Find a microphone. Tell your story. This campfire has been burning for millennia. It is human connection in its purest form, the exact opposite of what often happens in social media.

Congratulations to Alissa Cole, Breia Gregory and Andie Sonnen - this year's Homer High School Rotary Scholarship recipients!

Beth spent an amazing 4+ days with 4 outstanding students at RYLA in Whitehorse.  They were easy to travel with, insightful and respectful, engaged and inspired.  Thank you for allowing me to have this experience!  Thanks to the Downtown Club for their partnership allowing us to bring more students to RYLA.  They plan to share their experience with us on May 24th at the Club Assembly.  For MANY more pictures of RYLA 2018 go to Homer-Kachemak Bay Rotary at < www.facebook.com/ >

How your brain is keeping you from changing your mind

By By Joe Queenan                                                       Illustrations by Guy Billout

A few years ago, when I was suffering from severe back pain, I consulted a local chiropractor, a practitioner of a medical technique I do not actually believe in. After several predictably fruitless visits, she asked me to lie on a long, vibrating bed that would help me relax by putting my body in harmony with the vibrations of the planet.

“That won’t work with me,” I told her, gathering up my things. “I’m from Philadelphia.”

As an alumnus of the Quaker City working class, I held on to my disdain for all things esoteric and mystical and Eastern – yoga, tai chi, transcendental meditation, chutney – for many years until my back pain got so severe that I finally broke down and saw an acupuncturist. I would never have dreamed of doing this were it not for the intervention of a friend, a man as conservative and straitlaced as they come, who handed me Dr. Lee’s card, recommending him most highly.

“Wait a minute,” I objected. “Guys like you don’t believe in stuff like acupuncture.”

“If your back hurts enough, you’ll believe in anything,” he replied.

The treatment worked; for me, it was a miraculous cure. I am not exaggerating by saying that acupuncture saved my life. This got me to thinking about how hard it is to get a person to change his mind about something unless some sort of personal crisis erupts. 

My list of entrenched beliefs is short but inflexible. I would never change my religion or political affiliation, even when I disagree with the church or the party, and it is impossible to get me to change my views about music. I have disliked Vivaldi – Renaissance Muzak – the Grateful Dead, and smooth jazz for more than four decades, and when a friend took me to see Kenny Chesney and Lady Antebellum, begging me to give contemporary country a fair hearing, I came out hating the genre more than when I went in – something I would not have thought possible.

I loathe beets, kale, cauliflower, clog dancing, Middlemarch, Civil War re-enactors, Billy Joel, Jimmy Buffett, the Dallas Cowboys, folk music, marzipan, and the New York Yankees, and nothing short of divine intervention is going to change my mind about any of them. 

Most people I know have similar, though perhaps less vehement, attitudes toward one thing or another. My liberal friends could never be persuaded to vote Republican, and my conservative friends feel the same way about Democrats. I have breakfast every morning with a group of friends, including one who is quite conservative and another who is extremely liberal. They have locked horns on every major issue – guns, taxes, immigration, global warming, the designated hitter rule – every day for 15 years. Neither has ever persuaded the other to change his opinion about anything. 

People who despise hip-hop, pro basketball, Cats, sushi, coconut water, NPR, or the opera are not going to change the way they feel about those things. The only way I could get most of my friends to listen to Wagner, eat scrapple, or rent a Steven Seagal movie would be if I could prove to them that doing so would cure lower back pain. With the scrapple, even that might not work.

T.J. Elliott, longtime chief learning officer at the Educational Testing Service, scoffs at the notion that you can change people’s opinions by marshaling powerful, insuperable arguments. 

How Jim Marggraff is inventing the way to a better future

I’m in a conference room at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, to interview Jim Marggraff, but before I can even start, he launches into questions of his own: What’s the goal of this article? Who will read it? What do we want them to do with what they learn?

This is the way the serial entrepreneur approaches everything from a talk with a reporter to the lack of map-reading skills in the United States to world peace. “I’m emphatically focused on what is the PTS – what is the problem to solve?” he says. “I ask that multiple times every day, because people typically aren’t clear on it.” 

Marggraff’s focus on problem-solving has made him an enormously successful inventor. His creations have included the Livescribe smart pen, which links handwritten notes with audio, and LeapFrog’s LeapPad, an electronic book that helps children learn to read and has had sales of more than $1 billion since it debuted in 1999. In October 2016, Google acquired Eyefluence, a virtual reality company he co-founded.

After a year at Google, Marggraff “found the allure of a startup too great” and left the tech giant to become CEO of Rival Theory, a company that is developing artificial intelligence personas of world leaders and influencers that will give people access to their support and coaching.

A member of the Rotary Club of Lamorinda Sunrise, Marggraff was the driving force behind Rotary’s virtual reality film One Small Act. The film follows a child whose world has been torn apart by conflict and traces the acts of kindness that make a difference in her life. Developed with Google, it debuted at the 2017 Rotary International Convention in Atlanta and can be viewed on Rotary’s VR app, which is available on iTunes and Google Play. 

A desire to change the world underlies much of Marggraff’s work. “There is a thread that connects all of these technologies,” he says. “It deals with communication, understanding, learning, empathy.” His new book, How to Raise a Founder with Heart, is about raising kids with an entrepreneurial mindset. 

Over breakfast, we talk about the future of virtual reality as a fundraising tool; where he gets his ideas; and how Rotary clubs can learn to think like an inventor.

Q: You have spent two decades bringing together technology and humans. What has been the biggest challenge?

A: With each of my inventions, I thought that after I presented an idea, it would be rapidly grasped and then easily accepted and adopted. I was surprised – although I no longer am – by the amount of time it takes for people to grasp the implication of a new technology, to understand its potential, and then to embrace it.

Q: You’ve said that what motivates your work is making a difference in the world. Where does Rotary fit in?

A: Each time I’d start another company, my neighbor would ask me to speak at his club. I spoke first about an interactive globe I’d invented, and then I spoke about the LeapPad, and then I came in and showed the Livescribe pen, and then, in 2011, I became a Rotary member. 

I’d been an entrepreneur buried in my work so long, and I was looking for a means to give back. I wouldn’t have joined just a social club for businesses. It was Rotary’s commitment to doing local projects. As I began to hear about the global programs as well, I was more impressed and more interested.

Q: Rotary is exploring virtual reality as a way for clubs and districts to share Rotary’s story. How do you explain VR to people unfamiliar with the technology? 

A: Remember the old View-Master? You put this disc in, and it’s got a pair of images taken from slightly different angles, and it gives you a stereo view. VR is like a View-Master, but now the simplest way is to take your phone, put it in the little Google Cardboard box, and put some lenses in front of it. Instead of it just being a static image, it’s a movie. And instead of it just being a movie, you can look around and see 360 degrees. You see above you, below you, to the left and right. You’re inside the movie. 

Q: How can a VR experience help people connect with each other?

A: Here’s an example. Right now, you can connect virtually with 2 billion people on the planet with Google Hangouts or Skype. You can also pick up your phone and utter a phrase and within three seconds have it translated to virtually any language in the world. As we merge those technologies, you’ll be able to virtually sit in someone’s living room and talk to them as the language is translated. You will be able to connect with someone in Libya or Afghanistan or South Africa, and you’ll be able to share your feelings and thoughts. Suddenly, it’s not a remote person in a remote country. It’s an individual you can understand. 

As the technology allows, I’m looking to see what framework we can create. First let’s connect Rotarians to Rotarians. Rotary is a global group, and we feel bonds with each other just because we’re Rotarians. Now let’s connect more personally.

Then let’s reach beyond that and connect people outside of Rotary with Rotarians and then with others. And once this happens, it becomes more difficult for people to allow the leaders in their country to say, “Bomb them.”

Q: Might we invent our way to peace? 

View One Small Act and other virtual reality films on Rotary’s VR app, which is available for Android and Apple devices. Or stop by the Virtual Reality Zone in the House of Friendship at the 2018 Rotary International Convention in Toronto. 

Use VR to share Rotary’s story at your club and district events. Watch for a new VR film in time for World Polio Day in October. Find out more at rotary.org/en/vr.

Dear District 5010 Rotarians:

The annual business meeting for Rotary District 5010 will be held in Seward on Saturday, May 19, 2018.  For the 2018 conference, seven resolutions will be presented and voted upon at the annual business meeting along with nominations received for the (Zone) RI Director Nominating Committee. 

With this communication, we notify clubs that submitted resolutions and the current financials reports are available for review on the district website, http://rotarydistrict5010.org under "Documents" on the right hand side.  Following is a direct link to the packet:

https://clubrunner.blob.core.windows.net/00000050002/en-ca/files/homepage/resolutions-2018/2018-Resolution-Packet-D5010.pdf

The 2016-17 financial report and the year-to-date 2017-18 financial report are also posted, and will be presented in detail at the business meeting.

Substantive proposals to come before the electors at this year’s business meeting include:

• Resolution 5, which establishes procedures in the District MOP for the expenditure of excess reserve funds (those that exceed 12 months of operating expenses), and
• Resolutions 6 and 7, which are identical and propose revisions to the process for selecting the District Governor.

Please review and discuss the proposed amendments in advance with your board and designated electors and be sure the electors come to the meeting prepared to efficiently conduct District business and represent your club’s position.  There will only be an hour allocated for the meeting on Saturday afternoon. If you have questions about these proposals, please contact the sponsors, as follows:

Resolution 5 – District Excess Reserves Fund procedures: 

Andre Layral, Fairbanks Sunrisers, alayral1920@gmail.com

Resolutions 6 & 7 – Changes to DG Selection procedures: 

            Alana Bergh, North Pole Rotary, alanabergh@gmail.com

            Cheryl Metiva, President Susitna Club, clmetiva@gmail.com

Please refer to Article XIII of the District Manual of Procedure for information about how resolutions are submitted and voted upon at the annual district conference (available on the district home page under “Documents”).  The resolutions will be effective July 1, 2018 unless otherwise noted. 

We look forward to seeing you in Seward!  Please don't hesitate to contact me, DG Harry Kieling, or DGE Diane Fejes with questions by phone or email.

Best regards,

Ann

Ann Metcalfe

Administration Committee

anngmet@gmail.com

907-321-3686

From the Desk of President Beth

Thanks to Ed and Jan for a great month of music, art and unique and interesting presenters!  It was a lot of fun to mix things up and learn about and be exposed to new and different things!

We are in need of a Treasurer for the 2018-19 year!  Please let me or Bernie know if you are interested in helping out the club in this way.  It would be ideal to have the opportunity to work with Susie for a couple of months to learn the system before taking over in July!

Don't forget to sign up for the Guess Who's Coming to Dinner event on April 14th!  It's a fun way to enjoy getting to know the fellow Rotarians in our club!

Please continue to bring toiletries to our Thursday meetings so we can package them up and give them to Haven House for distribution to residents.  These items that go into the welcome baskets they provide are so important as many may arrive with nothing.

We need an Ad Hoc committee to work on coming up with a recommendation for how to use the money earned at the Cranium Cup event to enhance our community parks.  We would like to apply for a District grant - so our $2000 will be matched by $2000 and we will have $4000 to work with.  Members of the committee need to investigate needs and come up with a recommendation to present to the Club and Board by the end of March.  Contact Beth if you would like to help with this!

Don't forget to register for the District Conference - held in Seward this year May 17-19!

Ask Winston what's on his Alaskan "bucket list" and see if you can help him check something off! 

Thanks!

Beth

Our Club obtained a global grant to purchase and install a coffee roaster machine, and to train Mayan descendants in a remote mountain village in Guatemala to roast their own coffee.  The farmers' coffee is organically grown in the mountains under the rain forest canopy and is single source and delicious.

The farmers are now able to roast their own coffee to international standards.  Earth Friendly Coffee Company purchases as much of their coffee as they can sell, and at better than fair trade prices.  The company is always looking for new customers.

Many people in our Club used to purchase and drink the coffee before the farmers were roasting their own.  Our members will be pleased with the results of the coffee being sold now.

http://www.earthfriendlycoffee.com

We hope people will continue to support the farmers who we supported with this project.

When membership dropped below 20, the Rotary Club of Central Ocean Toms River, New Jersey took a leap of faith by offering a radically different membership structure to retain and attract members. The risk has paid off with a membership increase of 61 percent in two years.

When Mike Bucca took over as membership chair of the Rotary Club of Central Ocean in July 2015, he knew the club had a problem. Membership was down to 18 and dwindling. Bucca persuaded club leaders to look seriously at membership. 

The club board held three membership summits where they discussed why people join Rotary and why they stay. The result was a proposal to dramatically alter the club's membership structure to attract new members by lowering the financial commitment. 

“We want members to have a place in this club where they are contributing what they can – in time or finances,” Bucca explains. “It’s really worked.”

The Rotary Club of Central Ocean still has standard and corporate memberships, in which a local corporation or business joins with a specified number of qualified employees serving as its designees. Members in both categories pay $399 in dues every six months. The club also offers three alternative types of membership. The first is an introductory membership. New members can join at the rate of $99 for the first six months and $199 for the second. After the first year of membership, they pay the standard rate.

“When I joined, that was my biggest hesitation – the money,” says Bucca. “For $99 I would have joined the first time I was asked and not three years later.” 

The second membership offering is a discount to family members of existing members paying the standard rate. Family members can join for $199 every six months, and that discount applies as long as another family member is paying the standard rate. 

Again, Bucca drew from experience. “My wife and two other members’ wives wanted to join the club, but the family could not afford it. But half price made sense, so we gained three members.” 

The third type is called a friendship membership. This is designed for members who are interested in helping the club and taking part in projects, but cannot commit to meetings. Friendship members pay $249 every six months.

“People felt guilty about not coming to meetings. This eliminates that,” Bucca says. 

The results are clearly in favor of the new system. Membership climbed from a low of 18 in 2015 to 29 in 2017. Many of the new members are in their 30s and many are women, says Bucca. “In 2013, I was the only member under 40; now we have seven. Our club was No. 1 in the district for the number of women who joined.” 

Most importantly, the new members have invigorated the club. “Our club was dying; we were in trouble,” says Bucca. “We turned it around and are thriving.” –Susie Ma

What is your club doing to reinvent itself? Email club.innovations@rotary.org.

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By Ryan Hyland

Rotary.org has been nominated for a Webby Award from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which called Rotary.org “one of the five best sites in the world in its category.”

Nominated in the association category, Rotary.org is competing with four others for the 22nd annual awards.

Rotary International's revamped website has been chosen by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences as one of the best association websites in the world.

“Nominees like Rotary are setting the standard for innovation and creativity on the Internet,” said Claire Graves, executive director of The Webby Awards. “It is an incredible achievement to be selected among the best.”

The Webby Awards are the leading international honor for excellence on the internet. Rotary.org is competing for both a Webby Award, whose winners are selected by the academy, and the Webby People’s Voice Award, whose winners are chosen by public vote. 

The academy judged websites on several criteria: content, structure and navigation, visual design, functionality, interactivity, innovation, and overall experience. 

Help us win the People’s Voice Award. You can vote until 19 April. The winners of each category will be announced on 24 April in New York City. 

The four other nominees for best association site are:

·       Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance

·       11th Macau Design Biennial

·       Trade Works for Us

·       Center for Court Innovation

Visit the webbyawards.com for a full list of categories and nominations.

Vote today!

District 5010 Rotarians!  We have a Mission that we need your support to accomplish! 

What is the mission?  To provide comfort and promote self-worth at the very emotional and difficult time to Alaskan children who are transitioning thru foster care through our new district project, Rotary 5010 Cares for Kids. The goal is to ensure that no child is met with a garbage bag when moving into or around the childcare system by providing age appropriate backpacks with Rotary branded blankets, personal care and comfort items.

Last year in the Mat-Su, South East Alaska and Nome areas alone, 945 children were Out of Home (OOH), 297 were removed from their home and 244 were discharged from Foster Care.  The average child faces two placement changes while in foster care.  While OCS Officers work hard to avoid this, some children are handed a garbage bag in which to place their belongings when they are removed from their home or relocated.  With Rotary 5010 Cares for Kids, backpacks with age appropriate items will be given to children being removed from their primary residence and duffle bags will be distributed to youth being moved between foster homes or when aging out of foster care. All bags will be distributed at the discretion of OCS.

Our pilot project will include Mat-Su, South East Alaska, and Nome.  The Rotary 5010 Cares for Kids committee will work with State of Alaska Office of Children’s Services (OCS) field offices in our partner areas to determine need and establish a protocol for request and distribution. Even though we are starting with a pilot program with three areas, OCS will be able to make requests for the entire state and have access to the backpacks and duffle bags.  We want to make sure this is a sustainable program and want to get all the logistics figured out before we launch a statewide program. 

We recognize that there may be many other needs and we encourage Rotary Clubs to get involved where they can.  Together, we can make a difference in the lives of these children.

 Watch our Rotary Cares for Kids Facebook page as well as the District 5010 Website for updates on the project and how you can get involved.

If you would like to personally donate to the project, ARCS is a 501c3 and all donations are tax deductible. 

Send checks to: 

Rotary 5010 Cares for Kids

c/o Anchorage Rotary Community Services (ARCS)

205 E Dimond Blvd, 515

Anchorage AK,   99515

Together we are Making A Difference!

Lending a helping paw to veterans

When Gil Igleheart and Dick Mellinger heard that veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), including many from their own generation, were being helped by service dogs, they knew they had to get involved. 

Neither Igleheart nor Mellinger, both in their late 60s and at the time members of the Rotary Club of Cayucos-Seaside in California’s Central Coast, served in the military, but they had friends who had served and had come home troubled and scarred. 

So in January 2016, they laid the foundation for the nonprofit organization known today as Pawsabilities for Veterans. 

Although service dogs can help ease symptoms, they are not currently covered by health insurance in the United States. The Veterans Affairs Department provides service dogs for veterans with certain physical disabilities, but not for veterans with PTSD. The VA acknowledges that dog ownership can improve mood and reduce stress, but is waiting for reliable clinical research to confirm and detail the benefits of service dogs for veterans with mental health problems. In the meantime, the costs are paid by a patchwork of nonprofits such as Pawsabilities for Veterans.

Pawsabilities for Veterans leaves the training and placement of the animals to another Central Coast organization, New Life K9s. This nonprofit trains dogs and then places them free of charge. In order to cover the expenses for each placement, it turns to groups such as Paws-abilities for Veterans.

Nicole Hern and her team at New Life K9s train the dogs to wake their PTSD sufferers from nightmares and calm them when they are anxious. Hern says she can always tell when she is out with a veteran who becomes anxious: “They’re usually touching their dog a lot more, because that helps ease that anxiety.”

–Katya Cengel

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Schools get help with clean water and hygiene

An estimated 2.5 billion people lack access to improved sanitation facilities that hygienically separate human excreta from human contact. Rotarian Alfredo Pérez knows the schools in Guatemala and neighboring countries can use all the help available in this area.

The Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) in Schools Target Challenge focuses on providing clean water and sanitation systems, and equipping teachers to educate students on better hygiene practices.

So, when Carlos Flores, then governor of District 4250 (Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras), asked Pérez in 2016 to get involved with the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) in Schools Target Challenge, he quickly accepted. As the name suggests, the pilot program focuses on providing clean water and sanitation systems, and equipping teachers to educate students on better hygiene practices.

“The objective of the project is to develop good hygiene habits in children,” Pérez says. “By reducing absenteeism due to diseases that are acquired due to lack of water, sanitation, and hygiene in schools, we can increase their academic development. Training teachers to help children develop good hygiene habits is key.”

Indeed, more than a year after the effort began, the Rotary Club of Valle de Guatemala, where Pérez is a member, has improved conditions for as many as 1,793 children from 10 schools in the town of Escuintla, about 40 miles south of Guatemala City, the capital. 

Corporación Energías de Guatemala, an energy company, backed the project with a $62,000 grant. Pérez’s club and the Rotary Club of Escuintla worked with local public health officials and urban and rural planners. The project provided toilets, washing stations, and water tanks, and also supported training for teachers so that the facilities would be put to good use.

This year, members of Pérez’s club have a budget of $30,000 for work at five more schools. 

Pérez is giving talks around his country in hopes of recruiting more clubs to take up the challenge in their communities, and he’s seeking international partners to help expand the program.

Educators tell Rotarians that fewer students now miss school because of gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses, which sometimes spread by poor hand washing or lack of safe water.

–Jenny Espino

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Our fundraiser/"meet and greet celebrity Rotarians" dinner last night was a success!

We had 6 guests for a sit down Indian curry meal that we prepared.  The honored celebrity Rotarians were:  Mayor Bryan Zak and City Manager, Katie Koester.  Other guests were City Council member Donna, and Wayne Aderhold, and Parks, Rec...commission member, Ingrid Harrald, and George Overpeck.  Each guest contributed $30 to our Rotary club, and Clyde contributed an additional $30 for a total of $210.00.

The funds raised are designated for a scholarship for a Rotarian who has not attended the District Conference/Assembly to attend the upcoming one in Seward in May, 2018.

There are quite a few "celebrity" Rotarians in our club.  Our original idea was to encourage several people to consider hosting these "meet and greet" dinners and to raise funds for our club.  Rep. Paul Seaton and Tina have already said they are willing to attend one of these as guests of honor.   We now have a "template" we can share with other Rotarians who may be interested. 

The dinner was both fun and interesting. We believe the guests had good opportunities to informally meet with our City leaders, and everyone contributed to great conversations.

Here are some comments from Mayor Zak:  

    As a Rotarian it allowed me to appreciate and learn more about other Rotarians and the other guests that had a high probability of becoming Rotarians. We did not focus solely or much on Rotary but instead we shared our personal experiences and professional experiences that allowed us to get to know and appreciate each other as members of our community. 

    A small amount of fundraising value for the club with a high relationship value.

I attach three photos!

Vivian and Clyde

 How pet owners face end-of-life decisions 

By Paul Engleman

One late night a few months ago, our little dog, Queenie, appeared to be nearing her last breath. She was shivering, moaning plaintively, and – most telling – refusing dog treats. My wife, Barb, wrapped her in a towel and we took turns petting her until we all nodded off.

We were ready for this moment. Truth be told, we were almost looking forward to it. At the ripe old age of 16, Queenie had been on a downward spiral for quite some time, having lost her hearing – not that she ever did much listening – and much of her vision. There was a time when she could “go long” for a dog biscuit, catch it nonchalantly, and scamper back to the line of scrimmage, ready for the next play. These days, a treat gently tossed from a few feet away bounces off her nose and lands on the floor, where she has difficulty locating it. 

Queenie is a puggle – a cross between a pug and a beagle, a so-called designer dog bred to combine the best traits of two breeds. In Queenie’s case, we’ve sometimes joked, the result may have been a blend of the worst. True to her contrarian character, she decided not to go gentle into that good night. The next day, she was back to her old self, as spry as any 16-year-old dog could hope to be. For her, this means snuffling and shuffling between her bed and the pantry door behind which treats are kept, with occasional stops at her food bowl in the hope that someone has filled it with something other than dry dog food, which she eschews.

While Queenie considers her culinary options, Barb and I ponder that difficult question: How will we know when it’s time to say goodbye?

“That is the question that everyone wants the answer to,” says Katie Hilst. It certainly is the question on the minds of most people who contact her. A veterinarian in Madison, Wisconsin, Hilst started out in 2007 offering home veterinary care and soon found that many of the pet owners she visited were facing the decision of whether to euthanize. That led her to establish Journeys Home, a service that specializes in providing at-home euthanasia for pets.

To help her clients, Hilst developed a quality-of-life evaluation tool, an eight-point acrostic built on the word JOURNEYS that allows pet owners to calculate a numerical score based on their own observations. These include jumping or mobility (J), ouch or pain (O), and eating and drinking (E). The pet owner assigns a number from 1 to 10 for each topic; the scale includes examples to consider, such as “Your pet is refusing food and water ” (1 point) and “Your pet is eating and drinking normally ” (10 points).

As thousands of refugees streamed into Berlin, they strained the health care system. Rotarian and physician Pia Skarabis-Querfeld spent the last three years building a network of volunteer doctors to help those in need.

By Rhea Wessel                                Produced by Andrew Chudzinski

On the nightly news and around her city, Pia Skarabis-Querfeld saw the refugees arriving in Berlin after fleeing war, persecution, and poverty in their home countries.

Wanting to help, she gathered a bag of clothes to donate and headed to a nearby gym filled with refugees.

What began as a single act of charity eventually evolved into an all-encompassing volunteer project: Over the next three years, Skarabis-Querfeld would build and run a network that, at peak times, would include more than 100 volunteers helping thousands of refugees at community centers, tent camps, and other shelters across the city.

Today, her nonprofit, Medizin Hilft  (Medicine Helps), continues to treat patients with nowhere else to turn.

That day she went to the gym was a few days before Christmas 2014. Skarabis-Querfeld had been busy with work and preparing for the holidays. She was looking forward to a much-needed break, and she thought clothes for the refugees would be a kind gesture befitting the spirit of the season.

When she arrived at the gymnasium to drop off her donation, Skarabis-Querfeld found sick children, most of them untreated because hospitals in the area were overrun. Helpers were not allowed to give out pain relievers or cough syrup due to legal constraints. All they could do was send people to the emergency room if they looked extremely ill.

Seeing this, and knowing about the treacherous journeys the refugees had just made across land and sea, Skarabis-Querfeld, who is a medical doctor and Rotarian, returned that same afternoon with medical supplies and her husband, Uwe Querfeld, who is a professor of pediatrics and a Rotarian. 

The couple spent most of that holiday treating patients in the gymnasium. 

“The suffering of the people, their bitter fate, it wouldn’t let go of me,” says Skarabis-Querfeld.

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LAKE CHAD BASIN CRISIS

50 years ago, the first Rotaract club was formed to give young adults a place to connect and take action for good. Rotaract members from each decade share what the program was like and how it shaped their lives.

By Arnold R. Grahl

The year is 1968. 

A wall divides East and West Berlin, as the Cold War rages on. The U.S. and the Soviet Union are locked in a space race, and Apollo 8 becomes the first manned spacecraft to orbit the moon, sending back pictures of Earth from deep space.  

And Rotary members in North Carolina, USA, charter the first Rotaract club, to provide young people opportunities for service.

A half-century has passed since those first Rotaract clubs began inspiring young leaders to take action to improve their communities. The world has changed, as has the way Rotaract members connect with one another. But the underlying values of the program, and what attracts people to it, remain remarkably the same. 

To celebrate Rotaract’s 50th anniversary, we asked former Rotaractors from six decades to share their experiences of the program and explain how it shaped their lives. 

Here are their stories.

1960s

Geetha Jayaram, a pre-med student in Bangalore, India, became charter secretary of an early Rotaract club in 1968. Her father was an influential businessman in the city, and he and his friends believed the program was the perfect place for their college-age children.

“They encouraged us to join as a group,” recalls Jayaram, who met her husband, Jay Kumar, the charter president, through the club. “We were all very happy to do it, because we were medical students, engineering students, and students of other vocations who got together and planned what projects we wanted to do. What enabled us to stick together was that on weekends we went around collecting funds for our projects and worked together.”

Within a year, Rotaract was already so established in India that a district conference in 1969 drew thousands. Jayaram believes the program took off so fast there because the need for helping others was so evident.

Geetha Jayaram, left, pictured at one of the health clinics she founded in India, was a charter secretary of a Rotaract club in 1968.

“It was visible, tangible,” she says. “It was not something you thought about doing for somebody in some faraway country. It was right there in front of you.” 

Rotary’s Four-Way Test, with its reference to “the truth,” also appealed to young people. 

“We were post-independence children and Gandhi followers, and speaking the truth was a big thing in those days,” she says. 

Jayaram says Rotaract benefited from Rotary’s reputation as a well-respected organization in India. People felt proud to belong to it. Participating in Rotary was a family activity, so many young people grew up experiencing Rotary events.

“Every time we’d go to some picnic or concert or competition, there were always adults with children involved with all of the games and activities and food preparing,” Jayaram says. 

After finishing her bachelor’s degree, Jayaram came to the United States to pursue advanced degrees in medicine. She joined a Rotary club in Maryland in 1997 and founded the Maanasi Clinic in Mugalur, Karnataka, India, to provide mental health services to indigent women there. A former recipient of a Rotary Grant for University Teachers, she was awarded the Rotary Global Alumni Service to Humanity Award in 2014-15.  She is an associate professor in the departments of psychiatry, public health, nursing, and the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.

“I’m really proud I’m a Rotarian,” she says. “At Johns Hopkins, I always talk about my humanitarian work and how Rotary has enabled me to do so much with very little overhead. It’s hard to find that anywhere else.”

1970s

Lunar rovers explore the surface of the moon. Skylab begins orbiting the Earth. The Vietnam War comes to an end. In Sudan and Zaire, the first outbreak of the Ebola virus occurs. On the entertainment front, the movie Star Wars premieres. The first videocassette recorders enter the market, and Sony introduces the Walkman. Disco becomes popular.

John Skerritt helped charter the Rotaract Club of Carlingford, New South Wales, Australia, in 1978, after reading a newspaper advertisement placed by local Rotarians wanting to start a Rotaract club.

“That was the way you did it before the internet or cable TV,” Skerritt says. 

The new club drew young people from many backgrounds. In Australia in the 1970s, Skerritt says, a significant number of teenagers left high school early to pursue a job in the trades, and fewer than today went on to college. And for economic reasons, many tended to live with their parents until they married or had established themselves in a career.

The Rotaract Club of Ipswich, Queensland, Australia holds a car wash as a club fundraiser in the early 1970s. Rotaract drew young people from many backgrounds.

“The area where we chartered was on the border of an affluent area, where most of the kids went on to college, but also an area that was more working class,” he recalls. “One of the exciting things about it was you actually got to meet people outside the social circles of your own suburb or high school.”

Another interesting aspect, he says, is that the club functioned as matchmaker. “We had probably seven or eight couples get married,” says Skerritt. “We had a pretty even number of boys and girls. I wasn’t one of the seven, but I went to many of their weddings and served as best man in some.”

In some ways, he contends, young people had more freedom then. He recalls two club fundraisers, one where Interact members sat on a platform on top of a pole for 100 hours, and another where the Rotaract members drove cars in a demolition derby. 

“Can you imagine a club doing that now?” he asks.

But it wasn’t all social. Members were also keenly interested in helping their community. “Bringing in speakers was a great way of exposing people to things, especially our members who’d had a more sheltered upbringing,” he says. “We had a speaker from a charity that looked after homeless people, and that was actually a great eye-opener. Many times we’d follow up with a fundraiser, like tossing burgers at the mall to raise money for the homeless.”

One charity his club supported ended up having a big influence on his career. The organization helped people with hard-to-treat epilepsy who lived in a specialized care community. Skerritt went on to research seizure medications as part of his doctoral studies, and today he is therapeutic goods administrator in Australia’s Department of Health. 

Aral Sea neighbors come together to resolve conflicts over a scarce resource

Rotary is tackling one of the biggest environmental and political crises of the 21st century – water resources – and to do so, Rotarians are leveraging their ability to build connections.

“The water crisis is one of the top three crises facing the globe, along with HIV/AIDS and malaria,” says Aaron Wolf, a professor of geosciences at Oregon State University and a water resources conflict resolution expert. “It’s not just waterborne illness and ecosystem degradation; water shortages exacerbate tensions in a lot of already very hostile parts of the world.”

Satellite images from 2001, top, and 2017 show the extent of recent shoreline changes on the Aral Sea. 

NASA.GOV

The Aral Sea basin in Central Asia is one such place. Changes in the basin have a far-reaching impact on Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. River diversion that began in the 1960s, when much of the region was part of the Soviet Union, has nearly desiccated the inland saltwater lake, once the fourth-largest lake in the world. Today, rusting ships lie beached on a desert contaminated by high salinity, and neighboring countries clash over the limited water resources they once shared.

“Central Asia is a tough part of the world for hydropolitics,” Wolf says, “probably one of the most tense of anywhere in the world. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, a lot of the arrangements that had been internal suddenly became international, with all of the complexity and suspicions and tensions that go along with that.”

In 2014 and again in 2016, Rotary Foundation global grants brought representatives from those nations together to help them navigate the delicate territory of diplomacy and transboundary conflict resolution. At the two symposiums, held in the Netherlands at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, participants began to build connections and to communicate in a way that may help head off conflict and lead to more sustainable water use.

Steve Brown, a past Rotary Foundation trustee and past president of the La Jolla Golden Triangle Rotary Club Foundation, learned about the Central Asian water crisis from leaders of the IHE Delft Institute, which has had a partnership with Rotary since 2012.

Brown worked with U.S. embassies to bring in participants, mainly public-sector officials dealing with water, energy, or planning, for the first Central Asia Water Symposium. Sessions featured lecturers who study water conflict management, including Wolf.

The goal of the first symposium was to help the representatives see the crisis through the perspective of their neighbors. Sessions included role-playing using a similar multinational water basin in another part of the world. For example, Wolf says, participants from upstream nations took on the roles of downstream representatives. Workshops also included discussions on conflict management and presentations on water issues.

“So ideally, as they’re doing the training, they’re also having conversations around the issues that are contentious,” Wolf says. “But they’re doing it in the context of training rather that formal negotiation, so the conversation can be a little freer.”

The initial symposium wasn’t intended to solve all of the political and environmental problems of the region; it was an effort to brainstorm and consider ways to approach the problems together.

“For that kind of conversation, we had absolutely the right elements,” Wolf says. “And ideally, this is the kind of conversation that continues and moves forward.”

Brown agrees. “I could see that meaningful relationships were being established and there was a lot of serious thought,” he says.

For the second symposium, held in December 2016, Brown hoped to see two things accomplished: to continue the dialogue, and to bring in representatives from governments and organizations that allocate funds to international water-related issues, including the World Bank.

“The problems are so large, they will take decades and probably billions of dollars to eventually resolve,” Brown says. “Rotary is here as more of a catalyst to move things forward.”

The relationships and connections forged at the first symposium were deepened at the second one, Brown says. “On a personal level, friendships were created between people who work in their respective ministries in these different countries,” he says. “They can actually share ideas.”

– Nikki Kallio

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Hi, attached are photos taken on Wednesday, when Dennis, Bernie, Joan, Sherry and Bob and I delivered 87 dictionaries to the 3^rd grade students of West Homer Elementary and Fireweed Academy.   The students are thrilled to receive this gift from Rotary and they are a huge help to them in their studies.   As one teacher told us last year. She only has one dictionary in her classroom, which means only one at most two students at a time can use it.  This way they have their own.   One of the students commented on seeing words above and below the one they looked up, not like what they get on a computer which only shows one word.   This is probably the most fun thing we do at Rotary all year.

Milli

Rotarians with 3rd Graders

In the mountains of Poland, 26 children traumatized by violence get a chance to be kids again at Rotary camp

By Iuliia Mendel                                                Produced by Monika Lozinska

Beneath the emotional scars of living in a Ukrainian war zone, Mykyta Berlet flashes the same mischievousness of any other 12-year-old boy headed to camp.

He wants to laugh, play pranks and on the last night of camp “we will cover everyone with toothpaste,” he says excitedly.

Mykyta and 25 other Ukrainian youths headed to the resort town of Zakopane in the foothills of southern Poland are naturally focused on fun. But their two-week respite organized by Rotary members has a higher purpose: To help the children heal and cope with the trauma they may encounter when they go home.  

Each camper has a parent or sibling killed or injured in the fighting in Ukraine. Psychologists at camp will guide them along the way during an itinerary that mixes escape and therapy.

Olga Zmiyivska, a member of the Rotary Club of Kharkiv Multinational in Ukraine, has brought children to the camp for two years and has witnessed its impact.

“After the trip, they are more willing to make contact and open their hearts,” she said.

1.      

Valeriia Salohub, 13, father killed

2.      

Mykhailo, 6, and Oleksandr, 8, Kruhlikov, father killed

3.      

Valeriia Tkachuk, 12, father injured

4.      

Andrii Tymkov, 12, father injured

5.      

Dariia Lebkovska, 11, father injured

6.      

Mykhailo, 8, and Zakharii Mazunov, 12, father killed

7.    

Dmytro Tkachuk, 11, father killed 

8.      

Viktoriia Babich, 11, and Khrystyna Treban, 13, fathers killed

9.      

Vladyslava Diachuk, 8, father injured

10.

Yurii Paskhalin, 12, and Vladyslav Tsepun, 12, fathers killed

Ivan Bezruchak, 8, father killed, and Tymofii Zolotarov, 9, father injured

12.

Anastasiia Filonenko, 11, father killed

War came into their homes

Thousands have died and millions have been displaced by the fighting between pro-Russia rebels and the Ukrainian military in eastern Ukraine. 

Growing up in the shadow of that nearly four-year conflict, most of the campers don’t remember a life without war. They tell unrealistic stories about battles and keep silent about real horrors. Some are guarded and hypervigilant. Others endure sleepless nights or nightmares. A few withdraw and emotionally shut down.

In Zakopane, nestled in the scenic Tatra Mountains, Rotary members give the children a chance to heal in a peaceful setting. The children sleep in comfortable cabins along a pristine lake flanked by green, rolling hills.

The program, called Vacation 2017 Zakopane: Well-Being for Ukrainian Kids, includes traditional camp activities and field trips along with support from mental health professionals. More than 100 children have attended over the past four years.

Psychologist and art therapist Olha Hrytsenko helps children work through their grief at Vacation 2017 Zakopane: Well-Being for Ukrainian Kids.

This year’s campers visited a mountain village to learn about local traditions, toured historic Krakow, and saw the castles, salt mines and hot springs of southern Poland. The routine activities are simple but powerful.

Yuriy Paschalin and Vlad Tsepun, both 12, became close friends after their fathers were killed by snipers. The field trips helped both boys start to relax and act like typical, curious children.

“This program allows these kids to stay kids and to live children’s emotions,” said psychologist and art therapist Olha Hrytsenko.

“They will observe and absorb another culture, attitude, and language, (and) will be able to compare and make conclusions about what is good and what is bad. It will help them to find themselves.”

The Board of Directors has approved the proposed Corporate memberships for Cook Inlet Keeper with the proposed  primary member to be Bob Shavelson. Proposed alternate members are Carly Wier and Marissa Wilson.

For Kachemak Bay Title Agency Inc., the proposed primary member is  Lisa Roberts, and the proposed alternate member is Kathy Hemstreet.

Please provide any comments, in writing,  NLT February 14, 2018. 

If there are no objections by the membership, we plan to formally welcome them at the February 22, 2018 meeting.

Column: Three days of peace and music as Rotarians convene at the United Nations

By Geoff Johnson

Walter Gyger is the very model of a modern UN diplomat. When I first meet him – in the lobby of the Intercontinental hotel in Geneva, Switzerland – he’s clad in gray trousers, a white shirt with a dark tie, a gray sweater vest, and a blue blazer. Silver haired and with a trim mustache, he speaks perfect English, albeit with a Continental accent. 

If you called central casting and asked for someone ambassadorial, this is who they would send.

A distinguished veteran of the Swiss Foreign Service and Rotary’s primary representative to the UN in Geneva, Ambassador Gyger has come to the Intercontinental to escort me and some of my colleagues to a fondue dinner at the Café du Commerce. After a mere two months as a senior editor at The Rotarian, I’ve traveled from Chicago to Geneva ostensibly to cover Rotary Day at the United Nations. In fact, the three days that I spend in Genève (as the Swiss call it) will introduce me to the vigorous and transformational spirit that imbues all things Rotary. Walter will serve as one of my guides on this revelatory journey. I mean no disrespect: Sooner or later, everyone calls him Walter.

At the Café du Commerce – where our host is Genève International, a two-year-old Rotary club – about 50 people crowd four long communal tables. John Hewko, the general secretary of Rotary International and an honorary member of the Geneva club, is there, as is Ed Futa, the dean of the network of 30 Rotary representatives who work with the UN and other key international organizations.

Of course they know Walter. Everybody knows Walter. He introduces me to a young Swiss woman named Karen Kienberger. Assisted by a Rotary scholarship, Karen (we’re all on a first-name basis here) is working toward her doctorate in marine biology. Specifically, she is studying jellyfish, and though enrolled at the University of Granada in Spain, she conducts her various experiments in Vienna at Tiergarten Schön-brunn, the world’s oldest zoo.

Karen is representative of the smart, vibrant people who gravitate toward Walter. For instance, at the dinner I also meet Barbora Bruant Gulejova, one of the youngest members of the Geneva club who, with her PhD in thermonuclear fusion, works at CERN, the Geneva-based nuclear research facility that’s home to the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider. And then there’s Rebecca Tolstoy, the Swedish-born Australian Rotarian who leads Path of Hope, which crusades for global solutions to domestic violence and human trafficking.

Convention: Toronto's music scene

Toronto has a vibrant music scene that includes all types of venue, from stadiums to small bars, and features every musical genre. When you’re in town for the 2018 Rotary International Convention, from 23 to 27 June, take time to hear some live music. 

The majestic Massey Hall hosts a mix of classical and contemporary music concerts. Massey Hall was home to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir until 1982, when they moved to the newly built Roy Thomson Hall. 

On 28 June, just after the convention, Aretha Franklin is scheduled to appear at the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts. It’s worth checking the Sony Centre schedule.

The Horseshoe Tavern is the best-known small venue in the city. Since it opened in 1947, many famous faces have appeared on its stage early in their careers, including the Rolling Stones, the Police, and Willie Nelson. 

Jazz enthusiasts will want to check out Jazz Bistro, where the music is accompanied by fine dining, and The Rex, a decades-old hotel, bar, and restaurant where you can hear jazz and blues. 

Lovers of Latin music gather at the Lula Lounge to enjoy salsa bands while eating Latin fusion cuisine. Salsa instructors offer lessons on Friday and Saturday nights. – Randi Druzin

Preregistration discount ends 31 March. Go to riconvention.org.

• Read more stories from The Rotarian

Happy New Year! Hope everyone had a great holiday season!

Thanks for all of the responses to my survey about our club's priorities for fundraising events - it's so helpful to hear from everyone.  Thanks also to everyone who is able to help with the Cranium Cup event - expect to hear more from committee chairs in the coming week!!

Save the date: Homer-Kachemak Bay Rotary Club's First Annual Cranium Cup Trivia Fundraiser - February 10 Alice's Champagne Palace 6:00 - 8:30

Shout out to the Girdwood Rotary Club! A member - Sue Liebner offered to host our exchange student, Winston, as he travels to have the ultimate Alaskan experience - learning to downhill ski!

Beth

I Just wanted to update you and let you know that our inbound exchange student from Nigeria - Winston - arrived on Tuesday December 19th!

He is staying with Paula and John Kulhanek right now.  We will all be able to meet him at our next meeting on January 4th!

Yahoo!  Please reach out to make him feel welcome if you see him over the break or at our meetings!

Beth
 

Thanks to our fabulous Sunshine Committee (Lorna, Dee, Susie and Sherry) for putting on such a wonderful Xmas Party on Sunday!

Thanks to Dennis Weidler for volunteering to be on the Board of Directors for the rest of the 2017-18 year.

We are still in need of a President Elect for 2018-19 whose term would begin in July of 2019.

Don't forget there are no meetings December 21 & 28 See you next year on January 4th!

There will be a Rotary Board Meeting on December 26 at 5:15 at the CACS headquarters building.

Thanks!

Beth

Column: A grieving daughter finds comfort in an unexpected source: customer service 

By Barbara Brotman

Death comes with paperwork. There are credit cards to be canceled, bank accounts to be closed, mutual funds to be transferred. When my mother died recently, I set myself to my tasks. Hers was not a tragic or unexpected death; she was 103. Still, we were soul-close. This, I thought as I began, was not going to be pleasant.

But I was wrong. In a way, it was.

I was continually amazed as every single customer service person I spoke with began by expressing condolences. It happened so many times that I started taking notes:

“First, let me say that I am sorry for your loss.” “Before we go on, I am very sorry for your loss.”   “I can help you with that, but first, my condolences for your loss.” And in a particularly heartfelt moment on the phone with Franklin Templeton Investments: “Oh, Barbara, I’m so sorry.”

I was touched. But I was surprised that I was touched. After all, these condolences were surely company-mandated. Financial firms get calls all the time from people settling their late loved ones’ affairs. They would be foolish not to train employees in how to handle them.

No matter; I was still grateful. This wasn’t a conventional financial transaction; this was the closing-down of my mother’s life.

And there, on the other end of the line, someone understood and was sorry. With a single phrase of condolence, whether they were required to say it or simply responding with reflexive kindness, they had established a human connection.

Suddenly I wasn’t speaking to an anonymous voice, but to someone who might have suffered his or her own loss. There on the phone, we were not customer and customer service rep; we were simply two fellow souls on earth.

My friend Suzy Sachs encountered similar thoughtfulness when she went to her brother’s bank after he died last year.

“The poor guy at the bank showed me unbelievable patience and kindness,” she says. “I talked way too much and gave him details he never needed. When we finally finished, he said again how sorry he was for my loss.

“Every time I’ve been in the branch since, he comes up to me, shakes my hand, calls me by my name, and asks how everything is going,” she continues. “In this painful journey, I am often stunned by the kindness of people – strangers and friends. It gives me faith in humanity.”

Mimi Weyrick found that every financial institution, with one notable exception, dealt tenderly with her after her father, former California Lt. Gov. Ed Reinecke, died. 

“Even little things like canceling his subscription to the Orange County Register – people were just so nice and gentle with me,” she says. “It kind of renewed my faith in people. It’s not like his death was unexpected; he was 92. But it was just nice to have somebody say, ‘Hey, I’m really sorry.’”

Such expressions are profoundly important, says Jane Bissler, a grief counselor in Kent, Ohio, and a past president of the Association for Death Education and Counseling. “We want people to acknowledge where we are in life,” she says. “When we’re grieving, we want people to understand that you need to treat us a little bit differently. We don’t have 100 percent of our brain power; we are living a little bit in our heart, and we’re sad or we’re stressed or we’re anxious.”

When someone is kind in that moment, she notes, “We say, ‘OK, this person is going to get it. They’re trying to understand. They’re trying to meet me where I am.’ ”

Early on – before my mother’s death, but well into her dementia – I called the New York Times and the New Yorker to cancel her subscriptions.

Those were my hardest calls. The Times and the New Yorker defined her; they represented her in her full liberal New York Jewish glory. I had kept her subscriptions going for two years after she had lost the ability to read. 

I didn’t want to simply cancel her subscriptions. I wanted to tell someone who she was. 

“I think she’s probably one of your longest-running subscribers,” I told the woman taking my call at the Times. “She’s been reading the Times since the 1930s. She did the crossword puzzle every day, in pen. Including a half-hour after she came out of anesthesia for open-heart surgery at age 94.”

The customer service rep murmured kindly as I cried.

And the New Yorker: “She not only subscribed for decades, but she once had a short humor piece published,” I told the phone staffer. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” the woman said in tones that made me certain she meant it. I smiled proudly through the tears.

Mine were good experiences. But not everyone’s are. That notable exception Mimi Weyrick encountered?

Her father’s private bank ducked her calls so determinedly when she was trying to find out the value of his account that she had to drive there and waylay a banker in person.

“I could not get them on the phone. Nobody would return my call. We literally had to track them down,” she says. “It wasn’t until my brother threatened legal action that they started to work with us.”

And this report from a friend: “Shortly after my dad died, the pain clinic called my mom to ask when she would be returning his pump. This is the morphine pump that was surgically implanted in his stomach to deliver a steady stream of medicine to try to limit his pain. She was taken aback, and she told them it was buried inside of him. The woman paused for a second or two, then wondered, ‘What about the remote device that went with the pump?’” 

My friend Mike Precker, a writer in Dallas, will never forget the aftermath of his father’s death, though it happened in 1974.

“We had literally just gotten back from my dad’s funeral when a fellow from the local bank called to inquire when we would be paying his credit card bills,” he recalls. “Apparently some poor guy’s job was to read the obits and then call the families.”

Mike cut up the credit card and mailed it to the bank with a letter reading, “Dear Sir, I hope that from the tone of this letter you can infer just what you can do with the enclosed card.”

At Franklin Templeton Investments, the firm that was notably kind to me, Bethany Hendricks is vice president of customer service for the subsidiary whose wealth transfer team handles calls after a death. After her own father died, she called a credit card company to close his account.

“I probably got transferred three different times, and each time I had to say my dad died,” she says. “There was no acknowledgment of what that meant. And at one point there was a language barrier, to the point where I had to keep saying, ‘He’s dead.’ ‘He’s dead.’ It was awful.”

Franklin Templeton tells its people to acknowledge a loss and express condolences. But beyond that, the firm deliberately provides no script.

“We want them to be real people,” Hendricks says. “This is probably the time when you have the biggest opportunity to really be good to a person. Our folks fortunately are in the position to be compassionate in that moment and take a little extra time to be human.

“I don’t want to overstate what we do; we’re just a financial services company,” she says. “But I think people are hungry for finding people who are really people, and connecting with them on a very human level.”

The way companies handle those moments can be crucial, says Rima Toure-Tillery, assistant professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “Any company, anyone that becomes aware of someone else’s loss has to say, ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’” she says. “To most people it wouldn’t seem like they’re doing something extra.”

From a marketing point of view, there are advantages, Toure-Tillery says. All banks offer similar services; warm personal exchanges can be what keeps a customer loyal. But the real impact comes if a company treats a grieving relative poorly. That’s when you get “the nightmare stories,” she says – the ones that make people so angry that they tell them, over and over, for years.

And a bank could lose more than goodwill. Weyrick suspects that her father’s bank was ducking her to keep her from moving his assets elsewhere. In fact, “we would have been happy to leave everything there,” she says. “But it was because of how they treated us in those first few months that we decided to move everything.”

As time passed after my mother’s death, the financial transactions became less fraught. I wasn’t grieving; I was just taking care of business. 

But I never stopped appreciating it when a customer service rep said she was sorry for my loss. Each time, those words turned a transaction into an acknowledgment of our fundamental bond. We are all human, we are all walking the same mortal path, and we can all use a little kindness, even and maybe especially from an unexpected place, to light the way.

• Barbara Brotman is a freelancer and a former writer for the Chicago Tribune. Read more stories from The Rotarian

Until the 1950s, cervical cancer killed more American women than any other type of cancer. Widespread screening has drastically decreased the number of those deaths in the United States, but in the West African country of Senegal, the disease remains prevalent. Every year, more than 1,400 Senegalese women are diagnosed with cervical cancer, and hundreds of them die from it.

To Andrew Dykens, a professor of family medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), the situation is especially galling given how easy this form of cancer is to catch.

“Cervical cancer develops very, very slowly,” Dykens says. “There are five to 15 years from the first cellular changes to the actual cancer development. So you’ve got time during that phase to do something about it.”

1.     

Training for health care workers in Kedougou.

Courtesy of Andrew Dykens

2.     

Training for health care workers in Kedougou.

Courtesy of Andrew Dykens

3.     

Training for health care workers in Kedougou.

Courtesy of Andrew Dykens

4.     

Andrew Dykens, lower left, worked closely with local health care workers and Peace Care volunteers to bring a simple testing and treatment protocol for cervical cancer to Senegal.

Courtesy of Andrew Dykens

That’s exactly what he’s doing, with the help of the Peace Corps, Rotarians, and UIC. 

Dykens – who is a member of the Rotary Club of Chicago, the director of the Global Community Health Track at UIC’s Center for Global Health, and a former Peace Corps volunteer – is bringing together those organizations and Senegal’s Ministry of Health and Social Action to reduce the number of women who die from this highly treatable disease.

A bit of background: In 2010, Dykens launched Peace Care, a nonprofit that helps communities and organizations work together to bring resources where they are needed. “It dawned on me that the Peace Corps should be working more closely with, for example, academic centers, because these centers have technical expertise but don’t have a footprint in local settings,” he says. “Meanwhile, the Peace Corps has people who are extraordinarily knowledgeable about the local context.” 

And Rotary? “Rotary loves to build capacity,” he says. “If we can build the capacity to implement evidence-based solutions that already exist, we don’t need fancy tools like MRIs or robotic surgery. Not that those tools aren’t good, but there’s a basic level of access to primary health care that doesn’t exist.”

After hearing from Peace Corps staff in Senegal about the need for cervical cancer screenings there, Dykens and Peace Care started training health workers in the Kedougou region of the country to detect abnormal cervical cells via a simple but effective method. A vinegar solution, dabbed onto the cervix, reveals abnormal cells that can be killed immediately with a cryotherapy gun and CO2 tank – no electricity required. This is far easier and less expensive than the standard Pap test, which requires looking at cell samples under a microscope to identify abnormalities. 

“Cool, right?” Dykens says. “This technique has been around for decades, and it costs so little and saves women’s lives. So how is it that in this day and age, in Senegal, there are 10 rural regions that have no access to cervical cancer screening?”

Part of the answer is local influence. “In some cases, the local opinion leaders are very conservative on women’s issues, and they are reluctant to help the women go for consultation,” says Manuel Pina, an obstetrician/gynecologist and member of the Rotary Club of Dakar-Soleil who is working with Peace Care. “But Rotarians are also opinion leaders. We have already done local talks on the importance of this project, to help end all of the rumors and bad information linked to cervical cancer.” Pina notes that they also encourage families to have their daughters vaccinated against human papillomavirus, which causes cervical cancer.

Rotarians and Peace Corps volunteers have a long history of working together on projects, and in 2014 the two organizations began a more formalized partnership. The cervical cancer screening project demonstrates how a grassroots effort can benefit from the combined strengths of the two organizations.

The Rotary clubs plan to apply for a Rotary Foundation global grant to help expand cervical cancer screening services to the Tambacounda region. “Not just for the purpose of building capacity, but also to build a training center for cervical cancer screening,” Dykens says. Eventually, that center could also train health workers to screen for and treat other diseases, such as diabetes, hypertension, and other types of cancers, he adds.

Dykens says support of Rotarians in the United States and in Senegal will continue to be key.

“Rotarians do things right,” he says. “They work systematically and always engage local voices and perspectives, and that is what ultimately creates success. Rotary has worked a long time on polio and done an amazing job. And in my mind, access to primary care is the next polio.”

–Anne Ford

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Rotary’s national advocacy advisers are putting polio on the world stage. Here’s how.

By Diana Schoberg 

At the Rotary International Convention in Atlanta in June, world leaders were on hand to celebrate a historic $1.2 billion in commitments to finance polio eradication. It was a huge moment for the polio eradication effort. But how did it come about?

A group of Rotary volunteers has been hard at work behind the scenes: our PolioPlus national advocacy advisers. This team of Rotarians from donor countries has a mission to make sure polio eradication is on the global agenda. In the corridors of power, they relentlessly work their connections – lunches with government officials, phone calls with ministers – to garner money and support for ending the disease.

And they’ve been successful: Since Rotary’s advocacy program started in 1995, it has generated more than $8 billion toward ending polio. The United States is the leading public sector donor to global polio eradication with a cumulative investment that totals $3 billion through fiscal 2017, thanks in large part to the leadership of Past RI President James L. Lacy and members of the Polio Eradication Advocacy Task Force for the U.S. Their advocacy colleagues around the world have done remarkable work as well.

“The national advocacy advisers always come through in knowing the right people to speak with in government and in arranging key meetings,” says Michael K. McGovern, International PolioPlus Committee chair. “No matter the political party in charge, the Rotarians are known and respected.”

This year, the pledging of funds wasn’t the only priority. Working with our Global Polio Eradication Initiative partners, the advocates had the ambitious goal of getting a commitment to polio eradication from the world’s most powerful nations. The advocacy advisers saw two unprecedented political victories when both the health ministers and leaders of the Group of 20, an informal bloc of countries accounting for 85 percent of the global economy, committed to strive to finish our work and end the disease. 

Rotary’s message about ending polio is reaching the key decision-makers. So how did our national advocacy advisers do it? We checked in with three of them to find out what went into their recent successes.