Welcome to the new Rotary Year. Hopefully you all enjoyed our changeover evening on Friday, which in true St John’s style was filled with laughter, banter, great fellowship and a few fumbles. For those that were not able to attend, the theme for the year will be “Supporting our Champions”.
Champions are the people in our club or community who are passionate about our community and need the framework to support their initiatives. We are hoping this approach will allow champions to quickly gain the support they need to execute their projects successfully.
We have a busy year ahead with loads of projects, fund raisers and fellowship activities in the pipeline – more on that in future weeks.
I would like to thank the previous President and Board for successfully navigating a challenging year and look forward to working with my team to springboard off their successes.
The Change-over is complete and big congratulations to Robyn and Hugh for organising a fun and memorable evening last Friday.
A total of 57 were in attendance; 33 Members and 24 Guests including one Horse, better known as Sir Tristram, (ST). More about ST later in the story.
As one of her last duties of her Presidential reign, President Robyn welcomed all to this special dinner. Robyn then shared her thoughts on how the year had gone and noted that it was one of highlights with a few hiccups along the way. Although Covid19 tried very hard to derail the year, Zoom came to the rescue, and Robyn's ability to move between physical and virtual meeting formats, highlighted her leadership skills.
She shared with us a photographic record of the many highlights, events, activities, projects and meetings that were achieved during the year and she paid tribute to her Board, Executive Support team and all members who ensured "small acts made a big impact".
Robyn also acknowledged that without the enormous support that she received from First Man Tony, her daughters and their partners, she would not have got through the year. As she thanked her team, two of the night's memorable soundbites were;
"Thank you Alex for completing your duties, your accounting skills are quite unbelievable", and
When thanking Hugh for his input to the Board as President Elect, she also "thanked him for actually turning up tonight"!
Although dinner was beckoning, Robyn had one more formal announcement and that was the presentation of a Paul Harris Sapphire Award to Graham Fabian. Graham's continued support of our club and our activities has been huge and includes; allowing the foyer of his store to be a collection point for the Foodbank, catering at no cost for offsite meetings, provision of Golf Tournament goody bags, donation of Quiz Night food and wine, significant cash donations to Foodbank and to our club, and the list goes on.
Surprised, but delighted to be accepting the award, Graham quite simply said that he wanted to give back to the community because he can, and that he has found that the RCSJ is the ideal platform to do this. Congratulations Graham, so well deserved.
To celebrate his award, Graham then started the annual chair throwing competition!
Following dinner, President Robyn's last official duty was to complete the Change-over by presenting incoming President Hugh with his "Presidential Pin" and the Chain of Office", also fondly known as the clubs necklace! Hugh then shared his thoughts on what he would like to see our club achieve in the year ahead, and he looks forward to working with all club members to achieve his goal of being "Champions in the Community" He then introduced his new Board and the Executive Support Team. This team are introduced in a separate story below.
Hugh finished his first official comments to the club by extending a big thank you to last year's Board and support team and to Robyn and her family. To cap off the formalities, Hugh presented "Past President Robyn" with a caricature as a memento of her very successful year as President.
As mentioned above, we had one horse turn up for Change-over. It was Sir Tristram. ST was an Irish bred Thoroughbred racehorse who stood at stud in Cambridge New Zealand, where he sired an extraordinary 45 Group One winners, including three Melbourne Cup winners. ST was looked after throughout the evening by his very skilled attendant, Helen, who did a wonderful job controlling her Champion ST, who was quite frisky all evening. It was no surprise that ST and Helen won the Best Dressed "Champion Award", the theme of the evening.
Throughout the evening Sophie Garrett entertained us with the beautiful sound of the Harp. Sophie is Tony and Robyn's niece. She lives in Orakei and is a University of Auckland student.
To see more photos of the evening please click on "Read More" below;
Your new Board and the appointed Directors are listed below. We wish the Board well for the year ahead as they stand ready to lead our club over the Rotary Year 2020 / 2021.
Expect to hear a lot more from Hugh and his Directors with our plans for the year, over the coming weeks!
President - Hugh Scott-Russell
IPP & Club Service Director - Rambunctious Robyn Ingram
Presidents Elect - The Twins, Penny McGarry and Lesley Harris
Treasure / Secretary - Awesome Alex Gatt
Foundation Director - Gorgeous Gary Key
Membership Director - The Donald, Donald Bowie
Youth Director - Marvellous Muriel Roake
Science & Environment Director - Sir Peter Buchanan
Community Directors - The Twins Lesley Harris & Penny McGarry
Supporting the Club and the Board is the Executive Support team of;
PR and Web - Colin Robinson; Speakers Programme - Brian Fergus;
Sergeants - Michelle, Murray and Aubrey; Bulletin Editor - Peter Walsh
THURSDAY JULY 2nd - Breakfast Meeting Remuera Golf Club 7.00am:
This will be President Hugh's first meeting. Be sure to come along to support Hugh get his year underway as he shares his vision for the year. An excellent opportunity for business and fellowship.
THURSDAY JULY 9th - Breakfast Meeting, Remuera Golf Club 7.00am:
Our Guest Speaker will be Chris Herlihy. Chris has been invited to share his school's experience of preparing for, and teaching through, the lockdown; and the impact on his school community now that we are out 'the other side'. Chris is a valued member of RCSJ.
THURSDAY JULY 16th - Breakfast Meeting Remuera Golf Club:
Today's Guest Speaker is Sergeant Rhys Smith - New Zealand Police. Sergeant Rhys will talk about Glen Innes community challenges and how RCSJ could potentially offer support. He will also give us some insight into what it was like being in the Police during the Covid19 lock-down.
Motutapu Is. trip, 28 June 2020 through the eyes of Peter Buchanan:
What better activity on a (mostly) fine Sunday than traveling overseas to Rangitoto, and on to Motutapu Is. – continuing Rotary’s 25+ year record of helping with restoration on the island.
Nine of us joined Bridget Winstone, (Motutapu Restoration Trust’s volunteer coordinator for 18 years, and John’s second cousin!) at the ferry terminal. On our arrival at Rangitoto we squeezed into a ‘troop carrier’ for the drive to the plant nursery on Motutapu.
There, we were set to work by Bridget on various tasks around the nursery – relocating plants; removal of large irrigation mats for later installation of overhead irrigation (that our club had earlier contributed funds for); weeding and sweeping; potting out seedlings into planter bags and valeting vehicles ahead of WOF inspections in Auckland.
All of this activity was accompanied by calls of tui and the swoop of kereru in flight. The heaviest shower was conveniently scheduled for our lunch break in the glasshouse, and Bridget made us all (Cheri, Michelle, Muriel, Prabha, Robyn, Avi & Kyle, John L, Peter B) feel most welcome. We will look for further opportunities to assist on Motutapu later this year.
Due to the escalation of Covid-19 in South America the decision has been made to extract Lachlan from Chile as soon as feasible. He is currently registered for the return-leg of a Chilean government-organised charter flight for Chilean's from Melbourne. We all wish Lachlan safe travels for an incident free return to our side of the world! Here is his latest email report to the RYE D9920 Committee:
With a flight booking this last weekend, it looks like this will be my last monthly report. I'll use this opportunity to summarise my rather unconventional exchange.
Please click on "Read More", for Lachlan's full report.