The Rotary Club of Frazier Park & Mountain Communities is having an “All About Rotary – Who, What and Why We Are” informational evening on Thursday, November 19 at 5:30 p.m. at Los Pinos Restaurant. If you are interested in coming to meet us and to learn more, please call to RSVP. You can reach us at 245-4834 (Debbie) or 245-3809 (Judy).

What It Means to Belong to Your Local Rotary Club
By Judy Cadman, Secretary and Past President

People often ask me, “Just what is the Rotary Club?” That can sometimes spark a potentially long response, so I decided to see if I could narrow it down into a few succinct paragraphs.

Firstly, one needs to understand just what Rotary is. Rotary is the world’s first service club, founded in 1905. It is an organization of civic, business and professional leaders from local communities across the globe who are united worldwide to provide humanitarian services, encourage high ethical standards in all vocations and help build good will and peace both in their local communities and the world at large.

Rotarians meet weekly for interesting and informative programs dealing with topics of local and global importance. Membership is by invitation and reflects a wide cross-section of community representation. Rotary clubs are nonpolitical, nonreligious and open to all cultures, races and creeds. We pay nominal dues which cover most of our dinners at the meetings and also includes the coverage of district and international dues and a subscription to Rotarian Magazine.

What being a Rotarian means as it pertains to our local community is the coming together weekly for friendship, professional networking, entertainment by way of programs and speakers and coordinating fundraising projects which support many avenues of service.

For example, the Rotary Club of Frazier Park & Mountain Communities has worked to improve the community in many ways. We have given out scholarships for continuing education beyond the high school level. We send high school students to the Rotary leadership camp in Ojai each spring. We have given out dictionaries to all third-graders on “The Hill” every year since our inception. And this year we gave away over 1200 books to elementary school children at our first Festival of Books. We have sponsored essay contests. We sponsor a high school counterpart of our Rotary club called the Interactors. We sponsored a local young man as an exchange student to Germany this past summer. We have had Breakfast with Santa and Photos with Santa.

Our club has a lot of fun pulling off all these activities and we still manage to have time for some fun of our own. We have several parties every year: We have a Christmas party, a Halloween party, an anniversary party and we have a party to bid adieu to our president at the end of his or her term. Sometimes we have a party to welcome a visiting Rotarian from another part of the world. We had a roaring good time last year with our guest from “Down Under” and with another one who was here from London visiting his son in our Mountain Communities. And also, if that weren’t enough, our local Rotary District, comprised of several clubs, has many social activities we are all invited to. There is no end to the amount of fun one can have as a Rotarian.

So join us for our informational evening on Thursday, November 19 at 5:30 p.m. at Los Pinos Restaurant. If you are interested in coming to meet us and to learn more, please call to RSVP. You can reach us at 245-4834 (Debbie) or 245-3809 (Judy).

This is part of the November 13, 2009 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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