A nice cool day at the Hilton Doubletree was the state and venue for today’s meeting.  President John Guthmann tolled the bell at 12:15 sharp – signaling Bob Jones at the piano that he was done with the interlude. PDG Joe Kovarik and Bob led the assembly in God Bless America, and Carol Bufton offered thanks.

 

Paul DeGeest facilitated the introduction of three visitors (family of our 2014-15 exchange student), and three guests, aged 3, 5, and 55 years.  All are prospective members.

President John thanked Patrick Brown and Dick Nicholson for greeting at the door, and gave time for a little club business.  New member introductions were next up, and Club Ten grew by 2% in the space of a few minutes.  Longtime Rotarian David Dominick transferred to Club Ten, former Rotarian Pete Zellmer joined our family, and Molly Bauer rounded out the trio of new Red Stripers.
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Mary Britts introduced Jenny Yang, who will be our next exchange student to Japan.  Jenny’s sister was our exchange student in Taiwan, and inspired Jenny to pursue the same path.

Jim Kosmo then re-took the podium to introduce our fourth Centennial Scholar – Aonga Shalita, who is a
ImageSt. Paul native going to Macalester College this fall.  He spoke about his summer plans, and thanked everyone for helping him with his dreams, that are so expensive without such help.

ADG Alan Ruvelson introduced District Governor Karel Weigel, as all present stood to welcome her to the podium.  Karel is from Rochester, and was president of her club there in 2010-11.  She grew up in Kansas City, but moved to Rochester in 1979, where she spent 30 years with the Mayo Clinic. 


ImageShe thanked Jerry Meigs and Joe Kovarik for their past service as District Governors and more, as well as several other Club Ten members who have worked at the district level for many years.  She spoke about the importance of Rotary in not only the community, but in our personal lives.  The example was a local Rotarian who attended his club meeting the day following his wife’s death.  When asked why, he said his children were traveling to join him, were not there yet, and he needed to be with family.

Karel urged everyone to invest themselves more – and to read the Rotarian magazine, for example.  She said there would be some features on work in our district in upcoming issues. 

There are 1.2 million Rotarians in 34,000 Clubs in 532 Districts in 34 Zones represented by 17 International Directors making up 1 Rotary International.  All of this structure is carefully managed to optimize networking and collaboration all of the way up and down the hierarchy. 

Health, education, peace, strong communities, children – all of these things are our objective, and we work through our hierarchy to leverage people and money in pursuit of synergy and longitudinal impact.  Long term impact is about building capacity to achieve sustainability – we are
Imagestrategic in our work, and we want it to last.

Humanitarian service is our mission – our structure and plan constitute the vehicle to deliver it – but it requires YOU to pedal the bike.  AMEN

John Andrews, Scribe