Presidents Diary
September 2022
President’s Diary September 2022
Goodbye, Ma'am
Sketch by kind permission of Eleanor Tomlinson Art
This month was overtaken by the sad loss of
our Lady of the Island and Royal Manor of Portland, the Queen.
Our thoughts are with her family and the new King Charles lll
September is Rotary Basic Education and Literacy Month
More than 775 million people over the age of 15 are illiterate. That’s 17 percent of the world’s adult population. Our goal is to strengthen the capacity of communities to support basic education and literacy, reduce gender disparity in education, and increase adult literacy. We support education for all children and literacy for children and adults.
The Rotary Foundation supports education through scholarships, donations, and service projects around the world.
August 26 and 27 saw our Ukraine Collection, thanks to the enthusiasm of our members collecting and Tesco allowing us to collect in their store.
An amazing £680 was raised.
A local group on Portland are visiting Ukraine to take much needed supplies. We have collected a wheelchair and walking aids and despatched on the 20th September.
30 August we held a Treasure Hunt at Abbotsbury. Twenty-five attended and had fun finding the clues. Despite the church being locked David was able to answer one of the clues inside correctly!
£124.61 was generously given and this will go to Deuralitar, our joint water project in Nepal.
Peter and Rosemary won first prize with Celia and Chris second prize after a tiebreaker.
Tabletop Sale on Saturday 10 September was in support of Hedgehog Friendly Portland and raised £154. Well done to Carolyn and the team
President’s Night went ahead, on 10 September, two days after the loss of the Queen and was preceded by a minute of silence. Sixty-eight attended including guests from Yeo Vale (AG Cate) Weymouth, Melcombe, Poundbury, Casterbridge and even Adelaide Rotary clubs! The Masonic did us proud with the meal.
Weymouth band Replay were, as always, brilliant with dancing till nearly midnight. We all had a fantastic evening.
The raffle raised £640 for Nepal. Peter and Rosemary won 1st prize again
The B Side Festival this year was a success, despite the weather. Jayne and Robert put in a lot of work and helped raise the profile of the club.
The club donated £500 to ShelterBox towards flood relief in Pakistan
District Forum - our first face to face meeting since the first lockdown and not many seemed aware it was happening. Also, Weymouth to Bridgewater was a rather long 2 hours each way!
Stan, the District Grants chair informed us there have only been 7 applications for district grants so far this year. There will be more. It just delays getting the application in to Evanston and therefore payment.
The Disaster Response Fund grant of £19,000 plus £10,000 from District, for helping Ukrainian refugees in D1200, has so far helped 97 projects including purchase of school equipment, uniforms, laptops etc. a second grant has successfully been applied for.
Our District has been the conduit for sending funds raised by clubs and D1200 to Rotary in Ukraine, Hungary, Poland. £165,000 has been sent, plus Water Survival Boxes
Keith gave an update on polio and the vaccine derived type 2 polio virus found in London sewage.
Interact Well done to Jayne who gave four presentations to the Atlantic academy and two at the drop in centre. Hopefully there will be a good response and progress on forming a club will continue.
Well done to Elizabeth organising Vire and continuing arrangements for the Brewery visit whilst Stan is away.
Well done to Celia for working behind the scenes on the Community tea.
Indeed well done to the club for supporting our fund raising, Service and social events this month.
A lighter note to finish:
A guest at a Buckingham Palace garden party became flustered as her phone started ringing in her bag. The Queen said “You’d better answer that. It might be somebody important!”
Mark
