By Shelley Crawford, 2023-24 president of the Rotary Club of Thunder Bay (Port Arthur), Ontario, Canada

As I enter the last month of my presidency in the Rotary Club of Thunder Bay (Port Arthur), based in Northwestern Ontario, it strikes me what an extraordinary experience this has been! Imagine a chance to lead the club in its Centennial celebrations; 100 years of service and fellowship is truly a remarkable opportunity to share Rotary’s story.

This has been a banner year for membership recruitment and fundraising, for building new partnerships, and for engaging our new and long-serving members on many fronts. Our membership has truly brought the club to a new level of accomplishment in the above areas!

Our club won the District 5580 award for number of new members and percentage of new members gained, and that didn’t even include the final “community member,” the Learn and Uplift Foundation (LAUF), which just joined our club. This foundation, under the leadership of Meena and Vijay, works on educational projects with Indigenous youth in remote northern Ontario communities where some of our fundraising efforts have been focussed, so we see opportunities for a partnership down the line.

We instituted a bursary to support membership costs for those who are financially challenged and have two new members who qualified. Both are active and engaged in club service. One is developmentally challenged: Cindy is thrilled to be working monthly bagging over 500 lunches for the hungry at our Dew Drop Inn service activity. This fall she helped at our first Giant Food Drive that raised $4,000 and brought in over 3 tons of food to the RFDA, and she loves welcoming members at every club meeting. The other member, Karan, is a newcomer from India who graduated recently from a post grad Digital Marketing course and is applying his skills to membership recruitment and IT support. Karan is so proud to be a Rotarian.

Engaging new members

Two new members worked extremely hard on our Centennial Gala helping raise over $50,000 in sponsorships, ticket sales, donations, and ads. These two were younger than our average members: Amy and Brent gave this gala their “all.” Amy co-chaired and Brent was the sponsorship and advertising lead. Both are leaders in other club activities with a commitment to taking on more significant responsibilities. Working alongside a few other key members (Albert and me), we saw that their organizational skills and dedication, follow-through, and enthusiasm were just outstanding. Another new family member, Olivia, daughter of our Gala co-chair, Amy, was a co-emcee at the event that saw over 200 attendees and she did a stunning job as a very confident 16-year-old.

Ian, who joined a few months ago, shared that he needed to get engaged in community work and find a social network. He has been active in projects that use his building and electrical skills, helping install automatic door openers at the Wilderness Discovery Centre, a camp with barrier-free lodging. And he helped with electrical installations at the Dew Drop Inn.

Another two new members from the health care sector, who immigrated from Ghana and Nigeria, are already engaged by presenting citizenship awards to high school students. Priscilla and Blessing are volunteering in more upcoming service activities. Their spirit and community values are going to be so helpful to our club.

Building diversity

Another focus has been on building our relationship within Canada Club – a consortium of four local Rotary clubs in District 5580. Most of the other clubs are in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota. The environment and mental health have been front and center with a speaker series called Talking About the Tough Stuff presented at Confederation College. As well on 1 June, many Canada Club environmental committee members worked on cleaning up the new Waterfront Trail, a successful service event by all accounts.

It is incredibly rewarding to see active engagement from new members working in partnership with our long-serving members and new friends in the community. Diversity is a big factor this year, including building a stronger base of women in Rotary through our partnership with Tapestry International Women’s Network and Sisters for Canadian Black Community. Wish us luck as we move forward to build on our next 100 years of service above self.