The
Highlighter
October 2009
Vol 83 No 4
Table of Contents
Governor's Message
Tom Novotny
October
is Vocational Service Month. As a past Club Vocational Service
Chair, I think this is one of the most important facets of Rotary we
embrace. However, like most Club Vocational Service Chairs, I was
anointed with the title because nobody else wanted to do it. What a
shame for many and a great opportunity for me!
If you recall, Rotary was founded on Vocational
Service. Paul Harris, our founder, sought out and met with business
professionals in
It may appear that we have grayed the importance we place on Vocational Service when we moved towards the Club Leadership Plan. Nothing could be further from the truth and we will discuss this move in depth at a later date. Please accept the fact that Vocational Service is just as important as it ever was, and every club should still have a Vocational Service Chair. The move to the Club Leadership Plan was intended to free up your Club Boards so that they could start concentrating and planning the future course for the club. While we are moving forward with our strategic planning for the clubs, Vocational Service remains one of the most important axioms of our Clubs.
One of the things separating Rotary from the other service organizations is our Four Way Test. As members of our clubs and representatives of our vocations, we conduct ourselves daily under the tenets of the Four Way Test. When we are at our clubs, in our schools, our businesses, and even in our private lives, we exemplify the Four Way Test. What could be more important to Rotary than that?
Of all the things we lump under Vocational Service, we must remember our roots and how important Vocational Service has always been. I think our foremost duty to Vocational Service as Rotarians is to conduct ourselves in an honorable manner. Think about all that is wrong in our country today, and the think about where we would be if we had forced everyone to conduct themselves in their vocations according to the Four Way Test.
One of our biggest emphases in Vocational Service has been our youth in our communities. It is our responsibility to ethically represent our businesses and clubs to all the schools we work with. I think we owe it to today’s youth to reemphasize ethics. It is obvious that as a whole, we have failed miserably to date to conduct ourselves ethically. We certainly are reaping the benefits today of this loosey-goosey, win at all costs lifestyle.
Let us learn from our history and mistakes and place our club’s emphasis back on Vocational Service. What better message or legacy could possibly want to leave in our communities?
The Future Of Rotary Is In Your Hands!
October 3
Foothill Communities New Generation (provisional) - E-Waste Collection Drive
October 10
Pahrump Valley's Cash Extravaganza
October 18
Arcadia - Octoberfest
October 24
Victor Valley Sunrise's First Annual Car Raffle
Apple Valley's 8th Annual Wannatouchama Chili Cook Off
North Las Vegas Citizen of the Decade Award Dinner and Auction
November 2
November 15
Centennial Hill - Golf Tournament
Rotarians Helping Rotarians
District 5300 Unveils Job Bank: A Vocational Service Outreach
Did you know that Rotary did not start out to be a
service organization? Back in 1905 Paul Harris was a newcomer to
Solidly in line with this Rotary history, the new District 5300 Job Bank for Rotarians was created. This is an idea Governor Tom Novotny adopted from one of his fellow governors in District 5340 for the benefit of members in our district. With sensitivity to the current economic climate, where many Rotarians have had to re-invent their work lives, Governor Tom saw an opportunity for Rotarians to help Rotarians and to make membership in Rotary even more relevant.
The Job Bank can be accessed from the district
website at
www.district5300.org . There is a
link in the blue column at the right of the page in the “new” section,
as well as a permanent link in the yellow column on the left side of the
home page. District 5300 Rotarian employers may post job openings
and those Rotarians seeking a job can post their resumes. For more
information contact Susanne Hayek, District 5300 Job Bank Administrator,
at
susannehayek@gmail.com.
Fall Contest
Last Month's Leaders*
Green Valley with 563
Las Vegas NW with 95
South Pasadena with 27
September-December 2009
Simple Rules
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Each month there will be a question that can be answered by reading the current Highlighter or by referring to a link in a Highlighter article.
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Readers should submit their answers for the current month’s contest by email to the editor by the 15th day of the month in which the Highlighter is published.
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Only one entry per reader.
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The club which submits the highest percentage of correct answers to all quizzes based upon their membership will be declared the winner. The more club members who answer the questions correctly increases your club's chances of winning.
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The club which wins the contest will be announced in the January 2010 Highlighter and will receive a $100 discount coupon for the 2010 District Conference.
*Scores are like baseball averages and represent the %of club members getting the right answer (based on 1000).
This Month's Question:
What does Rosemarie Vasquez do for a living?
Include your name, club name and RI club ID #, with your answer to:
Submission Deadline 10/15/09
It's Time to Give Back What We Received from Others
The most exciting thing about Rotary is the opportunity for service
above self to younger generations.
I started teaching how to write business plans at Eliot Middle School in 1995, then at John Muir HS, in 1997, and at Marshall Fundamental Secondary School in 2005. Over these years, I’ve taught, with the help of 14 Rotarians, maybe a thousand kids. Last week we heard from one of them — Tara Adele Gomez - tell what it meant for her 10 years ago to be in one of those classes. Of how she went on to UCLA for her bachelor’s degree and is now a 4th year PhD candidate at Caltech, planning to become an entrepreneur, and that she will be back in a year to pitch her business plan to us before hitting the venture capital circuit. Obviously, I was ecstatic to hear this.
But it pointed out that education is a slow process, and it takes 10 years or more to see the fruit of one’s efforts. It takes patience and persistence to press on in faith that some seeds will take root and grow and blossom.
My early years as a chemical engineer in the petroleum industry were not like that - I would go to a new oil refinery process unit with a team of engineers to first inspect the equipment handed over by the contractor, test it with high pressure hydrogen gas to be sure it would not leak when the furnaces were lit, load the reactors with platinum-containing catalyst, start the compressors to circulate hydrogen, start pumps to feed raw naphtha to the furnaces and reactors, test the finished lead-free gasoline to ensure a high octane, run performance tests to be sure the catalyst was performing as guaranteed, then turn the plant over to the refinery operators, all within a few months, and leave. Of course, all of that time was devoted to training the refinery staff so they could run the plant by themselves. Then I would go to another refinery and repeat the process, maybe four times each year. That in-depth experience enabled me to eventually get a job at age 33 as project design manager for a complete oil refinery in Sweden.
But education is not like that — it takes time. Since I had no training in teaching kids, I had to find my own way. And it gave me great appreciation for teachers who knew what they were doing and did it day after day without really seeing the fruit of their efforts. I developed my own methods.
I tell the kids in the first few minutes that I am in their classroom to help them make money, I see their eyes light up, they stop chattering, and they pay attention. When I pull out a 1-million dollar bill from my wallet and hand it to the nearest kid to inspect — is it real, all eyes are focused on me. I tell them they can earn their first million bucks by staying in school and earning a diploma, which on average will bring them $25,000 more income over their 40-year working lifetime than if they had no diploma. Now the classroom teacher’s eyes light up. When I pull out a second million bucks, I tell them they could likely earn this if they pay attention to their studies, go on to a 4-year college, and earn a degree.
But when I pull out another four or five bills and tell them this is only possible if they become entrepreneurs, and that I intend to teach them how, I really have their attention. I explain how my younger entrepreneur brother makes a million bucks each year, with only one employee — his son. He seems to take a week’s vacation every month because he is his own boss. Being one’s own boss is the highest objective of minority teenagers, I have read.
The need for job creation in this economy is huge. We Rotarians have the business-savvy to teach the next generation about free enterprise. So let’s do it in our local schools and beyond.
Industry Hills Rotarians Make a Difference
Industry Hills Rotarians, their Interact members, families & friends
assembled 450 rolling backpacks filled with school supplies for 3rd
graders in the Hacienda
La Puente and
HMS Mideract Coin Wars for Polio
“How many doses is that, Ms. Wadsworth?” an eager sixth grade Mideractor hollered at me as we tallied our first day’s collection for
our Coin Wars for Polio campaign. As I write this review, months
later, I can’t help but become teary-eyed again thinking, “They got it.
They got what this campaign was really all about: Service Above Self.”
Our Mideract Club is new on our Huntington Middle School campus in San Marino, and we decided that we would “Go big or go home” with our first international polio campaign. Without a doubt, the students pulled this one off thanks to the vote of confidence given to me by Rotarians Gene Hernandez, Charlie Barr, Debbie Priester, Jim Pink, Lois Table and my campus administrators: Dr. Gary McGuigan, Dave Murray, and Counselor June Gonzalez. Ample planning went into making our first international project successful and our HMS Rotary Mideract club sends profuse thanks to District 5300’s Shirley Pozzuoli from the Pomona Rotary Club for kicking off the campaign with her stirring recount of her life as a child in an iron lung. What a nice surprise it was when Shirley brought four of the 2009-2010 Rotary pins for our 8th grade officers and four of the End Polio Now pins for sixth graders who worked so hard on the pre-planning of the event. The students were so excited to be recognized for their participation. So what happened after Shirley’s presentation?
All 775 of our Huntington Middle School general and special students had an opportunity to learn, listen and volunteer in this project. Volunteering on campus was promoted as a “safe risk,” a term borrowed from Scott Greenberg, a fabulous presenter at our annual Rotary’s Teen Leadership Camp. long with promoting safe risks and better friendships, some of my best teachable moments were when my general education and special education students worked together, each at their own ability level. As the campus Speech-Language pathologist and Mideract advisor, my most cognitively challenged students were assigned tasks such as sorting coins, placing pennies into stacks of ten, and bagging them in groups of 50. My students focused on fine motor skills wrapping their pennies and were proud of their accomplishments. Many of my general education Mideractors had never used paper coin wrappers and were delighted to learn how to use them. Other students learned to fill out our accounting forms to give to our campus accountant. Each child had a purpose and knew he or she was an integral part of the project.
The HMS Mideract Coin Wars for Polio campaign took on a life of its own. Students started talking to other kids about polio. Our Biology teacher explained to his classes about viruses versus bacteria. Some students researched smallpox and everybody talked about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Rotary Challenge. Teachers shared with their classes about friends and family who had been stricken by this virus and how important it was to eradicate it. The students understood it would take energy and commitment to rid our world of polio, and they wanted to make a difference.
To keep the energy in this campaign, announcements were made daily over this ten-day period, updating the students and thanking them and their teachers for support. During daily homeroom, Mideractors collected laminated envelopes filled with coins and occasional bills, emptied them into labeled Ziploc bags, and returned them to my room for snack and lunch counting sessions. This was the key to the success of this campaign: the students bought in. Coins poured into classrooms. Students gave up snack and allowance money and more than one parent wrapped a dollar bill around a ten or twenty to have their child casually drop it in the collection baggies. Neighboring classrooms competed with one another as did grade levels. Carpooling parents heard kids talking about it on the way to school. For an idea to leave campus, cogitate overnight in a middle schoolers’ mind, and end up in a carpool conversation made me grin from the inside out: I knew our students were thinking about polio.
Little hot pink paper polio pigs continued to paper our campus with notes of encouragement and bragging rights for the day. Bragging rights you say? What about tangible rewards? There were no tangible rewards. No pizza parties. No ice cream. No donuts. Our Mideractors agreed that the point of doing good was to do good. Period. This campaign was all about Service Above Self. A paper sign was taped to my door and now resides in my office. On it is written this: “In ten days HMS students raised more than $2,300 to purchase 3500 doses of polio vaccine. Our HMS Rotary Mideract Club humbly thanks you for epitomizing, or being a perfect example of, Service Above Self.”
HMS Rotary Mideract Update: To finish up our first year, we began a monthly Speaker Series with San Marino Police Chief and fellow Rotarian, John Schaefer kicking it off. Monthly 30-minute lunch dances to integrate general and special education students began in May with proceeds benefiting local and national charities of the Mideractors’ choosing. Our first summer book exchange allowed students new titles while remaining titles benefited our campus and community libraries. Finally, during the last four days of the year while emptying lockers, students collected remaining school supplies. These supplies were transported to children in Tijuana through Healing Hearts Across Borders. What an utterly fabulous first Mideract year it was at Huntington Middle School!
Montebello Mayor, City Council Recognizes Work
of
Montebello
Mayor Rosemarie Vasquez along with the city council, honored Montebello
Rotary Club president Martin Castro, along with presidents of several
local service organizations, and recognized the work of their members at
this month’s city council meeting. Vasquez recognized each for his
or her years of service and their commitment to the cause and beliefs
of their organization.
Declaring “community service night,” Vasquez handed out proclamations and gave each president an opportunity to tell the audience about his or her organization and the projects they are currently involved in.
Castro told the audience about the club’s charitable programs, including community and educational activities that promote literacy, vision screening for elementary school students, student scholarships, youth leadership training, vocational youth awards, health and immunization programs and food baskets for the needy at Thanksgiving and Easter.
“We are proud to serve the community any way we can,” said Castro. “The current economic climate and cutbacks at every level of government make the need for the charitable work Rotary does even greater than ever.”
Castro then asked club members in attendance to stand and be recognized.
With 16 years of service, Castro, president of the Mexican American Opportunity Foundation, has been named one of the hundred most influential Hispanics by Hispanic Business magazine, is involved with the California Childcare Network Association, the Los Angeles County AP Alliance and the Mexican Council Office. He has served as club Rotary Foundation chair and is a Paul Harris Fellow.
“I am so honored to serve as president of the Montebello Rotary Club and represent our membership here tonight,” said Castro. “I want to thank all the club members here this evening for sharing in this recognition with me. The evening is made even more special by the presence of our District Governor, Tom Novotny, in the audience.”
“It is with sincere pleasure that the Montebello City Council recognizes the work of the Montebello Rotary Club and Mr. Castro’s leadership ability in guiding this fine service organization,” said Vasquez. “The work of each of your members for the betterment of our community is deeply appreciated.”
Rotary Clubs of ELA and
The
Latino Rotary Club of Fresno contacted President Ricardo Lopez of the
ELA Club to inform him that they had a donation of fruit that the farmer
wanted distributed in
Working with Grace Gonzalez, CEO of the Volunteers of ELA (VELA) and
a member of our club, the distribution plan got rolling. Eighty
community-based organizations, including churches and parks in
At 5 a.m. Saturday, August 22, a refrigerator truck arrived at the
A total of 3200 families received bags of plums and by the afternoon the remaining fruit was picked up by local churches and community-based organizations. What a day! What a successful event! This was a real win, win for everyone: the farmer who donated the fruit, the Latino Fresno Rotary Club, our ELA Club, VELA who connected us to the churches and CBOs, the volunteers who helped, and the families that received bags of fresh fruit.
UP imam's festive fatwa: Eradicate polio
Rtn Smita Mehta, Mesquite Sunrise, sent a link to this article which appeared in The Times of India:
“It is an Eid with a difference this year, one that Maulana Khalid
Rasheed, Imam of Aishbagh Mosque in
“This fatwa has been issued by the International Islamic Fiqh Academy (IIFA), Jeddah, a leading body of Muslim intelligentsia in the world. Also known as the fiqh fatwa, this document highlights the importance of polio immunisation in the light of Islam. The five-page fatwa was issued on the request of Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) “
Click this link for complete article.
Attention PR Directors
Barbara Brisherwelch reports that there are oodles of resources available on the Rotary Zone 25-26 website.
Click this link for more information.
International Matching Grants Status
Due to the unprecedented economic downturn this past year, The Rotary Foundation (TRF) cut its funding for 2009/2010 international Matching Grants by 70%. They also carried over unfunded projects from last year into this funding year. As a result of this combination of reduced funding and doubling up of applications, The Rotary Foundation announced late last week that Matching Grant funds for 2009/2010 have already been depleted (9 months earlier than normal).
Click here for compete report and how it affects your projects.
Wedding Bells
On a happy note, Roger Schulte announced that he and Paulette have gotten engaged. The date is set for sometime next year.
[Ed Note: perhaps at the District Conference?]
November is Rotary Foundation Month