I can come clean, I’m really not very good with names. I’ve found it very hard to get to know everyone at Rotary – at the time of writing this I’m still finding it hard to get to know everyone.

I’d spoken to Lucy in one of the earlier meetings but still knew very little about her. I’d only been to 12 meetings at this point and still felt very much the new boy. I gather many new Rotarians felt the same way. I thought Lucy had been there for a lot longer but in fact had only started going regularly in March too. New or not, we’d taken on a challenge to run the committee and had a pressing engagement – a Fun Day to organise. In the initial organisation chart I had been put in the Public Relations committee so I had no idea what had been going on in Service Projects. Lucy was within the Service Projects committee under the “International” section. That was a job she’s kept in addition to her new Deputy role. Our club had already set the goal of twinning with a Rotary club in Amiens, that meets at Amiens Cathedral. Lucy’s perfect English accent effectively conceals the fact she’s French, grew up in France and speaks the language fluently. Rather handy member for setting up twinning with a French club then!

In an effort to get to know her more and figure out what the aims of our committee were we met at her local pub. What could have taken an hour ended up taking all night until closing time – the functional bit an hour or so, the rest a lot of interesting conversation. Initially she filled me in on what had happened within the Service Projects committee up until that point. Only one meeting, some initial ideas on what to do at the fun day. I think it was then I discovered that we weren’t organising a whole fun day – but running a stand at a Rotary organised fun day – Phew! Lucy already had the Risk Assessments under control, another couple of members had suggested some activities for our stand to generate some revenue.

We set our objectives as

1. Get as many club members involved in the Fun Day as possible,
2. Raise money for our chosen charity.

The club had already chosen Odyssey as the charity.

I also found out that although Lucy was as new to Rotary membership as I was, she had been a secretary for another Rotarian when she first came to work in England. She already knew a lot about how Rotary worked, how it’s organised and what the protocols are. That knowledge has been very useful – simple things to the experienced Rotarian (like what ‘club assembly’ means) are very confusing to me. Lucy has been picking up on all the times I’ve use the wrong term preventing yet more confusion.

The non Rotary discussions covered how it came to be that a French girl acquires a perfect English accent yet has only been working in the UK for a few years. It turns out her Mum is English and every year after French schools had finished she’d visit England and stay with a pen pal, spending a month in an English school before our summer holidays. One of her brothers now lives in England too – at least for the time he’s not doing charity work overseas. Her degree studies in Paris sounded like hard work but a solid foundation to life too, one of the things I’d like to learn more of is how different education systems work and their strengths and weaknesses.

The more I get to know the other members, the more I feel able to make a difference within the club. Shorter conversations with other club members have already revealed that Karen is a couple of years younger than me and grew up in the same village and went to the same school! I never remember meeting her before, but we must have as children.

Two weeks to go until the fun day, how did it all go? Read on once more….

Post inaugeration and I was keen to see our club start to do things. There were a couple of things going on but all on a very small scale by what I felt our club was capable of. I was keen to see action, I wanted to volunteer my time and skills (assuming I have some of use to the club) but needed someone else to come up with the cause. Then, at the end of one of the Morning meetings Jarle asked me if I’d take on the job of “Chair of Service Projects”. First response: What’s that?

The club is organised for different people to take on different roles to ensure the club runs smoothly.
The club President (Jarle for our first year) runs the meetings and acts as our public face
The President Elect (Karen) will be next years president. Karen is also Chair of the Public Relations committee.
All the functions needed to run a club have a person responsible for managing that area. Without writing hundreds of words, we also have members in the roles of Secretary, Treasurer and Membership. These members also form the club “Board”. I’ve oversimplified here a little, so forgive me for not mentioning every member in every role.

The role of “Service Projects” within the club is to oversea the activities the club is involved in. As a Committee it’s the largest within the club – involving 10 members from our 28 member total after inauguration. As chairperson I would have to run those committee meetings and report to the Board. The committee includes people overseeing our clubs activities within the “Avenues of Service”, that is International, Community and Youth (the forth Avenue is Club Service).

I had to borrow Jarle’s blue book, kind of like an instruction manual of how Rotary works to read about what Service Projects was. Before saying yes I wanted to know I’d be capable and that it would fit alongside other things I do. Having read that, I was happy to say yes – at last I could start feeling useful!

There was good news and bad news in this.
Good news: The board had decided that this committee needed a Deputy to assist in it’s running and Lucy was being asked if she’d like to take this role on. Both of us would report to the board.
Bad News: I had become responsible for organising a Fun Day. That was all I knew, my first fear was that we had to organise everything, including publicity,and it was less than a month away.

Now I had the job, I had to figure out how to do it. Fellowship, a word so often mentioned through Rotary, seemed to be the key…

So far, I’ve been invited to a new club then decided to join a new club. However, the club was still in formation phase. To start a new club Rotary needs it to have a certain number of members and an infrastructure in place. The new club members need to commit themselves to the serving the Object of Rotary. They need to pay their membership fees too (yes, there is a cost to joining Rotary – it’s what pays the expenses of running the system). I’d like to explain more about exactly what hoops the club had to pass through, but the truth is I don’t really know. I’d only been going for 6 or 7 meetings when Inauguration day had arrived. Whatever we as a club had to have achieved, we’d done it and a special meeting was arranged where the whole of Rotary (or perhaps, the local Rotarians able to visit) would get to inspect us as a new club.

Wednesday April 23rd 2008 is a day I will remember for a long time. Before the meeting I saw that the Rotary District Governor* would be joining us for breakfast to officially inaugurate our club and us as new members into Rotary. I recognised the name of the District Governor. Dennis Spiller was, for want of a better word, one of the Youth Leaders who worked with me as a teenager. It was through the Kent Association of Boys Clubs (which later changed it’s name to KABC Kent Youth Trust because there was trouble having Boys in the name, even though girls had been involved for years. It’s now known as just “Kent Youth”). Dennis is also part of a group called the “County Boys Club” (CBC), they organised a range of events and activities for young people on a county wide basis. Actually, I’m still a member of County Boys Club myself but life took me away from that in other directions. One of the things they organised was a set of weekend training courses aimed at developing young people, teaching skills useful in running a youth club. Dennis was one of the several staff organising and teaching on those weekends. One of the things I learnt at those weekends (I still remember) was how to run meetings. The role of the Chairperson, the Secretary, the Treasurer (if there was one), how an agenda works, how minutes work, how to take minutes, how sub committees work, and so on. One of my first observations of Rotary was how the meetings were run the same way as the systems I’d learnt at those weekend training events with the CBC. Meeting Dennis again brought back lots of happy memories of growing up.

The ceremony itself was run like clockwork. As our club meets at Canterbury Cathedral it already made for a most impressive venue. After breakfast, Dennis made a speech about what Rotary is and how important it is that new clubs are formed. Another Rotarian then introduced all of us new members by name and profession. Dennis then made the formal statements that officially announced the “Rotary Club of Canterbury Sunrise” as part of Rotary. He finished at precisely 07:59 and 58 seconds, then the Bells of Canterbury Cathedral rang out as if to join in the occasion (they ring at 8am every morning – but I had to admire the timekeeping of the whole morning).

So, there we all were, a group of new Rotarians, founder members of a club that, if it is as fortunate as other nearby clubs, will last over 100 years. Or maybe it wont, but it’s kind of special to be there at the beginning.

Now we’ve formed a Rotary club, what happens next? Read on dear friend…

*A quick comment on the organisation structure.
Our club is a part of District 1120. The District has a District Governor who in the year we were formed was Dennis Spiller.
The District is a part of RIBI, Rotary International in Britain and Ireland, and that in turn is part of Rotary International.