Hello all. A blog report from Italy. (Sue Dana, eat your heart out.)
CLK Rotary Meeting Oct 28 2009 A Call to Action!
Special Thank You to Lisa Ronan – Irish Times owner – for her stellar work decorating the bar/restaurant for Halloween! We arrived to find spider webs, spiders , mummies and moss all over the place!
Guests included Linda Grahek (without Dave), Scott See, chuck Wicker –Hancock Rotary and Keweenaw County Sheriff Ron Lahti.
Attendance = 20.
Sheriff Lahti presented our program. He explained how the “Secret Santa” program conducted by the Keweenaw county sheriff’s dept worked. The program started 12 yrs ago when it became apparent there were children in Keweenaw County that were not getting Christmas Gifts. Names, along with ages & gender & sizes, were provided by various sources including community members and the Social Services dept.
Last year, the program operated with an $8000 budget and produced Christmas gifts for 79 children! Sheriff Lahti and staff members from the Keweenaw County courthouse spent over 12 hours shopping for the gifts.
Sheriff Lahti said he does negotiate discounts from the merchants to help stretch the $$. CLK rotary helped by providing $500 of Club funds matched with a District grant of $500. We also had 6 Rotarians help with the sorting of the gifts – a necessary task prior to distribution.
A plethora of questions resulted with Sheriff Lahti responding to each. He is very confident no needy children have been missed. He stressed the program is not about the parents or their lifestyle , but is focused upon providing children with Christmas gifts. He said it is common for a family to work their way out of whatever their problem is. Once that happens the children are removed from the list and replaced with others.
The Sheriff department is the focal point, however the entire Keweenaw community participates by conducting fund raisers, submitting names, providing gifts via donation or donating money.
President Jim Lowell states CLK Rotary has budgeted $500 towards this program with additional donations from Rotarians adding another $100!! If each Rotarian donated $20 to the cause, we could get closer to matching last year’s total donation of $1000! Checks should be payable to CLK Rotary .
We also need to continue supporting the project with Rotarians able to help sort the gifts. If you can give of your time, please contact Jim Lowell.
CLK Rotary Business Meeting Nov 4, 2009
Monthly Business meeting with 17 members and guests attending. Guests included Dave 7 Linda Grahek, Bob Sharkey – Ass’t district Gov, and Jeff Slivkoff – guest of Andy Murtagh (gone missing!)
Jim Lowry announced the kickoff of the Copper Country United Way campaign and distributed literature for members to read. Several Happy dollars were paid as well.
President Jim began the business meeting by announcing his notes and agenda were still at home on his computer! He apologized ( with several comments from members about the need to pay up!) and continued a capella; making the following observations:
Club attendance for Oct was 57% - We can do better!!! We need to see our members at the meetings! Members with perfect attendance and members with birthdays were not announced – they will be at the next meeting.
The Financial Report was not available however the updated Budget was presented for members review.
President Jim reviewed the CHOICES program. CLK Rotary is providing trained Rotarians to present the CHOICES program to the CLK and LL/Hubbell Schools. Our Rotary volunteers are Keith Stengel, Tom TIkkanen, Jim Lowell and Kevin Store. We could sure use another 3-4 Rotarians to help present the program. Contact Jim Lowell for more info.
Upcoming programs: Nov 11 = Emily Fiala – Habitat for Humanity. Nov 18 – could not recall who the program was.
Our CLK Rotary Board has pre-approved a number of individuals for membership. We (all of us) need to contact those folks and invite them to lunch! We need to increase our membership.
An active discussion focused upon our practice of fines. Several opinions were expressed – some supporting eliminating fines and others supporting fines - either spontaneous or well-defined. The matter was referred back to the Board.
Our continued support of the Keweenaw County Sheriff Dept Secret Santa program has grown! In addition to the budgeted amount of $500, members have contributed at least another $200 with more contributions coming in – even while the discussion was going on!
We ended with the monthly 50/50 raffle - - Tom Liljegren was the lucky Rotarian!
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