Belated message from our President Peter

Hi fellow Rotarians,

The Board has decided to make the Board Minutes available to members. There will be a link in the Bulletin to facilitate this. Briefly in point form some highlights:

*Community Service / A List of Achievements of the Club has been tackled by Sue (with a little help from Angelo) and presents an amazing list of the actions of our Club. This now has to uploaded to Rotary sites.

*More Community – the Club will donate $1000.00 towards the building of a community herb garden at the Baptist Church. Bill Lee has also donated herbs from his herb garden at Artarmon. 

*RI Foundation meeting 7 November will request a donation of $26.50 per member as acknowledgement of 100 years of the RI Foundation. 

*International Grants – we are pursuing 2 Grants – the first; in Timor Leste. The visit by our members in September hopes to bring this closer to fruition.  The second in Nakuru Kenya is being tackled by the Grants Sub Committee with the main input by Claire and Howard.

*Membership – we plan to hold an information night for prospective members on November 15. This will entail present members ‘street walking’ to canvas prospective members plus an active presence by the Club at the Crows Nest Fair in October.  

*The Long Orange Lunch - there are presently 43 acceptances.  Celia and I will see you all there!

*Our Meeting Venue: just to fill you in on what has been happening: two weeks ago, Tom and I met with Adam from the Crows Nest Hotel after Monday’s meeting. Our concerns were, the meeting facilities and the food. Whilst we had a cordial discussion the Hotel is rather inflexible in its outlook. To gain the use of the other room (where the pool table is located) would cost us a room hire fee of approximately $150 to $200.  The menu is common to various hotels in the ALH Group.  The licensee determines what dishes are suitable to his venue.  The dishes change with the season.  There is no scope to change dishes unilaterally.  We put to Adam the dishes were rather tasteless, boring and verging on inedible.  Whilst Adam said he would present our issues to the Licensee, we did not get the impression that any change was going to happen soon: and there has been no response to our visit. 

I believe that we have to leave the Hotel – we do not have to subject ourselves to such food nor are we going to gain any new members whilst we offer them such food for lunch. The question is where to move to?  For a start, we are not going to burn our bridges but test the waters.  My plan is that we meet at PINOS (upstairs) for our August 15 meeting.  See you there!