MAY 13, 2020

Meeting Recap

Greetings fellow Rotarians. Today our Club hosted its first speaker during a Zoom meeting. Timothy Brookes joined us to discuss his book “Driveway Diaries – A Dirt Road Almanac”. Tim’s book is a humorous look at the trials and tribulations he and his family faced when they moved from Burlington to a location in rural Essex. Tim described some insights on his inspirations for writing these stories and he shared some excerpts from the book. For more information about Tim and his book please visit: http://www.timbrookesinc.com/?page_id=1531 . In addition to being an author, Tim has spearheaded The Endangered Alphabets Project. The goal of this organization is to preserve endangered cultures by using their writing systems to create artwork and educational materials. Please visit endangeredalphabets.com for more information about Tim’s efforts.

Rotary Satisfaction Survey

In an effort to assess membership's expectations of our Club during these difficult times and to determine the best ways of moving forward, the Board is asking all of our members to participate in a short survey through Survey Monkey. We hope that this brief, 5 question survey will provide us with the data we need to plot our Club's course. With that in mind, we ask that all 64 of our members please participate in this survey. Your responses will be anonymous, so please answer honestly. The survey will be closed by 3:00pm on Friday, May 22nd. You may take the survey by clicking on the following link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MNQJ2C9

Membership

As hard as it is to believe, the Rotary fiscal year is coming to an end. Even though our ability to serve the community is being challenged by the current pandemic, there is still a lot of good that our Club can do. This cannot be accomplished without strong membership, however. Please remember that there is not a one-size-fits all model in terms of member participation. We appreciate all levels of participation by our members, no matter how small or infrequent they may be. Whether your contributions are purely financial or are in the form of periodic assistance at our fundraisers and service projects, they all make a difference! With that in mind, it is our sincere hope that all of our members will renew their memberships for the 2020-2021 Rotary year. If, however, you do not plan to continue your membership, we ask that you please let us know of your intentions by June 15th as we will need to report the 2020-2021 roster to Rotary International before the start of the new Rotary year (which begins on July 1st).

Upcoming Meeting Schedule: Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - Our speaker will be Steve Arms, Principal of the AutoVENT Foundation. This organization is designing an innovative ventilator for global distribution. Weekly meetings may be accessed by clicking https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEldOGoqTkoEtAb_-OM1YNCGnbRU1vA3hud After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. For future meetings, you will need log in at www.zoom.us click Join a Meeting, fill in the Meeting ID of 858 3807 2284 and then the Password of 164477. If you wish to attend by phone, you will just need to dial (646) 558-8656 and then enter the ID and Password noted above.

For the complete list of upcoming speakers and information about the Club, please go to our website at rotaryclubofessex.org Be sure to also follow us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/EssexVermontRotary , on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/essexvermontrotary/ and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/essex_rotary

Yours in Rotary,

Jason Ruwet