Rotagram for Wednesday, April 10, 2024

Dick Ackerman delivered the Patriotic Thought.
Jeff Hutchinson brought alongtime friend, Mike Montgomery
Johnny Hoag brought 4 guests: Rick Perry, Art Guticwiz, Marlen Pety, and Nei Komirn.
John Phelps & Dick Ackerman shared Matt Nolan
Randy MacFarlane brought his wife
Rebecca Forrester brought Ray Reid
Leslie McCarthy brought Sonia Liekus

Oursong Master, Bill Edmond, had us sing Back ithe Saddle Again.

The recognition Master does is give everybody the opportunity who are having birthdays and anniversaries and everything else to get up and talk about for just a little bit. And so, I'm gonna start with the first one now. Randy McFarlane Are you here? Yeah. Did you do this last year last week? No, you didn't. Okay, Randy McFarlane has an anniversary. And the number of years for your anniversary place is 13 years. That's wonderful. I've seen so I just remember you just kind of met that lady didn't? Is it my memory? Okay, at any rate, Randy, what are you going to do to celebrate your anniversary? It'll be $5, please

That's Bill Hite. Number 43 years.
Dick Ackerman, you are having a Rotary anniversary. That number is 53.
Rick Crane: Next Wednesday evening at six o'clock is a Cal State Fullerton baseball game where our president is going to be throwing out the first pitch.

Cacth Gach: Really exciting news sponsorship opportunities, we are at a commitment of $18,500 which about $17,000 is paid.

My other announcement has to do with our house build in Mexico, which is occurring this Saturday. Six of us are catching the bus that will be leaving Yorba Linda at 4:30am on Saturday, and we are going to Mexico to build a house. This is something that has been done for the last 10 years by the Yorba Linda Rotary Club. And they are allowing the surrounding clubs to participate with them. The great thing about this is you get on that bus at 4:30am You are working well they, we had to upload our passports so that we can expedite the process of getting through the border, which will cut down on lead time. And my understanding is the foundation has already been laid. We are basically building a structure the size of a garage, we will be putting a roof on and the walls, the doors, the septic system has already been put in and that septic system was designed by Pacmin.

Cathy: We have the names of every attendee. Sponsors are to give us the names of those people using their extra tickets. Sponsors get a hold of Leslie with the name of their guests don't mess up because of your guests. They could be embarrassed when they're called their name is not on the list.

Aaron Greg: the only fun part of this event is pouring the wine. Truly, because you get to talk to people, you know, your friends get a little more than just people, you know, like, good things like that. So I've got the signup list. So all we're asking is for volunteers to work for an hour. Yes, sir. I'll give you the list. Okay, so I'm going to be there for 4:30 - 5:30 for set up, and then we've got some people we need to have at the end to clean up and secure any leftover wine.

Matt Howells: On April 28 we have Love Fullerton. Our Rotary Club has partnered up with Tara’s Chance. We have six volunteers who have signed up and we're hoping to get about 20.

Thad Sandford: On the second of May, St. Jude foundation is hosting a neighbors helping neighbors fundraiser.

Jim Ripley: I thank everyone. Before we move on, I just want to do a real quick thank you to Robert Jahncke for putting together our Rotagram.

We have the honor today of inducting brand new members to our club. Bill Christiansen, who is being sponsored by his brother John., come on up. Dan McFarland, who is being sponsored by Bob Sattler.

Leslie McCarthy: I want to thank you all for joining us today. It is with great excitement that I tell you two years ago we celebrated our 100th birthday as Rotary Club in Fullerton. We would like to extend to you guests a hearty welcome. Taking with you the gift of Rotary and either joining us or another wonderful Rotary Club. We're going to be bringing you three keynote speakers to introduce you to Rotary briefly on an international district and local level.

Our first speaker is a two-time mayor of Fullerton, the minority leader for the California State Senate from 2004 to 2008, and chairman of our Rotary district conference under Jim Vanderberg’s presidency, the man with a twinkle in his eye and always a smile on his face, Dick Ackermam.

Dick Ackerman: I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the International things that Rotary is involved with. And I'm going to start with our own club, which has been involved internationally for a long time. Back in 1981, the district governor of our district was at a meeting and he met with a district governor in Japan. And at that time, they formed the relationship and decided to have a sister city relationship with club Fukui North. From that very beginning, it was a humble beginning. We didn't know exactly what we were getting involved with. But since then we've sent over 200 kids from Japan back and forth every year from 1981, only missing a couple of years during COVID. And I'm going to share today we're going to be sending four students from our clubs, to Fukui in July and August. Cooper Kuya, was the grandson of Frank Kawase, Kristian Madea son of Rebecca Forester, Fiona Robinson, granddaughter of Ray Kawase and Cooper Lowe grandson of George Lowe. These kids are going to have a great times in what they call homestays. You go there. In fact, we host every other year.This year, we're sending the kids to Japan. Next summer, they will be sending Japanese kids to us, always having a homestay. So when you're in Japan, you stay with the family over there, which is a great experience. I think it's a great, great time, particularly if you have a chance to go and every every five years we renew our contract with them. They spend a week and a half in Fukui and they truly get treated to all the things close to Kyoto, which is one of the shrine capitals of Japan.

One part of the biggest international project that Rotary has done is eliminating polio. Rotary wanted to eliminate polio in the world. Most of the western countries, i.e. the United States, Canada, Europe, basically had zero polio cases. A lot of a lot of the Lesser Developed countries still had polio. Rotary invested millions of dollars. I think it's close to a half a billion. They had 2.5 billion doses of the polio vaccine and 125 countries. The last major countries they went to in 1995 were China and India, and by the year 2000, they declared with CDC, the world was polio free. In 2004 there were more polio outbreaks in Afghanistan, Egypt and Africa in 2009. The Gates Foundation came to Rotary and asked to partner with them. And of course, we said yes, because they have a big checkbook. So they put in another $200 million. They actually wanted to expand it to polio plus, so in addition to just polio, depending on what area of the world are they going, they are able to give him dose of the medicine, they would either combat yellow fever, Ebola, or some other diseases. And by the year 2020, which was a few years ago, the World Organization again, declared the world to be polio free. I encourage any new members, if they're looking about doing things, not just locally, but internationally, to definitely consider Rotary. They have the horsepower, they have the desire, and they can actually get things done.

Leslie McCarthy: Our next speaker is our past president from the years 2016-2017. He is our immediate past district governor. He's going to be talking to us today about Rotary at the district and some international level as well. He is our gentle giant, Dan Ouweleen.

Dan Ouweleen: When you join Rotary, you're joining a big thing. Just here locally, our district is comprised of Orange County in all of Orange County partners, Southern LA, that's 48 Rotary clubs that we have here in our district, with close to 1700 members currently. We also have some youth clubs in our organization. We have what is known as Rotaract, which is Rotary in the universities. We have 10 universities that have Rotaract clubs. We have Interact clubs at the high school or junior high school level. In this area, we have 48 clubs. So we have very, very vibrant youth programs throughout our district, which I'll talk about a little bit. But really encourage you if you join Rotary, that you get around to some of these other clubs. There's just a great thing about Rotary is making connections, networking, and working and partnering with other clubs, like we're doing with Yorba Linda, on this Mexican Home Building project. I really encourage you to get out, get around and go to some of the other clubs, because that's one of the rich things that you get on Rotary is connecting with people.

I'm happy to say Rotary has been getting younger. When I first joined, I was a young guy at 55. But nowadays, we have a lot of people in their 40s and 30s. Joining Rotary so the the demographics are definitely shifting. And in our district. Back in the 80s. If you were in Rotary, it was an all-male organization. And now in our district, we're about 40% female, growing. We will be 50% soon. So that's why we've become quite a diverse organization here in our local district. So you hear about the district, and I'm going to mention that in a minute. The district has a district governor, just like we have a president for every club. The district governor serves for one year just like the President doesn't the club, and the same thing, the international or international president serves for just one year. So there's a constant rotation of leadership that introduces a lot of opportunity to get involved and get a leadership program here. And from there, I just want to give you a glimpse. This is last year's leadership team at the district level. It's a pretty big team. These are all the chairs, all the different programs that we have in Rotary throughout our district. And we don't have time to go through all those here today. But it's it's a big team. And underneath each of those chairs is a whole other team. The total team I had working for me last year was about 50 people. They're all volunteers. So there are a lot of different grant programs in Rotary that allow clubs to do a lot more with the funds that they have. We have what they call district grants, which are matching grants, it's money that comes back to us from the International Foundation that has given the clubs that they can match to do things in a community. That's one of our strongest programs. We give out about $100,000 each year for the district level to do grants locally. In addition to that, there are global grants, which are referred to and those are grants to do things, either on a global scale, overseas, or locally here. And they started $33,000. That's the minimum grant you can do. We did one here in Fullerton, back a few years ago. We're with an international grant, we helped fund an aged out foster youth home right across the street here with OC United. So if you're passionate about something, and you want to make something big happen, the global grants are a great way to go. And they get matched by the district, by the club, and then by Rotary International. So the money adds up really, really quick. On these global brands, we have global grant scholars that we fund every year, we usually do one or two scholars that are grants of $20 to $40,000, to put somebody through continued education overseas, we have disaster response grants. So if a major disaster happens somewhere, clubs can ask for up to $25,000 from Rotary to handle a major disaster. And we did about four of those two years ago with Ukraine, just from our district alone. And then there are programs of scale, which are new grants, that are up to $2 billion in funds. So these are for tackling major things like malaria, like Polio, a major, major initiative that is global, that you can start going after the program and scale even from a club level. So, so a lot of opportunity here as a district to fun things, and to do great projects. As I mentioned earlier, we have a great number of people, we have a lot of great youth programs. I mentioned Interact, which with the youth at the high schools and junior high school level, we have an exchange program for high school students to go abroad, and also come here from other countries. Now there's both one that takes place for them through the school year, and then the short term one that occurs over the summer. So we have, we've had a lot of kids come in from overseas and do their senior year here. And, you know, a great experience being here. But we can do the same thing by sending students overseas. RYLA is is a incredible camp that our district puts together every year. It's been going for about 25 years. And this is where we take juniors and sophomores each year. And we send about 200 of them up to a camp in Idlewild. And it's a leadership development program. It's mainly for students who are not necessarily the leaders in their current high school, they're maybe the shy ones, the ones that maybe get a little bit ignored. And they go to this camp, and it's it's transformational. It's life changing. And that camp is coming up this month. We have I think we're funding about eight students to go this year. So our club is funding eight students to go. And we'll have those kids come and talk about that afterward. But it's an amazing, amazing camp that we put out every year. And that is Rotaract, which is at the college level. We also have what they call community baseball racks. And that's mainly for students who have graduated from college but aren't really quite the full bore Rotary Club. And we've got several of those that we've started in our district here. We have anti human trafficking committee, a Diversity Committee and Environment Committee, a peace ambassadors committee. And you don't have to be a Rotarian to join. So if you have a spouse, or a friend that is interested in these causes, they can join these committees. And we've had a lot of people become the Rotarians after they got involved with one of these committees. We have grants, training, we have leadership forums. They happen several times a year that bring all the different Rotarians together, each club gets to send about four people to these leadership events, where you get to meet the rest of the people in the district. We have, like I said, concentrated throughout the year, mainly on different positions in Rotary. We do a foundation Gala, every year to raise money for our foundation and to recognize people that have given, and then we have a district conference, and a chili cook off. So there's a lot that happens. This year, we're having a walk from mental health, that's coming up soon. So there's always a lot of great district wide programs to get involved with. At the end of the year, we have a transition. And then we're also part of what they call it zone 2627 which is another that's all 30 districts on the West Coast that we are also part of and again, that's one of the great things that Rotary you get to travel to these different clubs around these districts, and you're always a guest as military you're always welcome to go to any club anywhere in the world. Well over 200 countries. We're bigger than the UN. We have more countries than in the UN and more than the Olympics. We have 46,000 clubs around the world.

Proposed New Members:
Dave Cardenas, Transfer from Pasadena
David Sukert, Daytro Digital Marketing, by Amyn Choi-Wan and Leslie Mc Carthy
Joe Baldo, Higher Ground, by Lana Erlanson and Amy Choi-Wan

Joe Lins: I'm here to talk about the cool kids, which is the people in this room. And I want to thank Dan and Dick for taking up all my time. So this will be short, but not as serious. I appreciate that. But I've been a Rotarian coming on up on 20 years, thanks to a couple of really great friends of mine, Jim Blake and Don Bankhead. I can't tell you how many times Don would call me on Wednesday and say, "Hey, you know, I'm gonna pick you up at your office and take you to Rotary". And I would tell him, you know, Don, I can't, I'm busy. I can't get involved in anything else. I'm sorry. I'm just, you know, give me a call later. One day I said, Yes. I never quit. I kept coming here ever since. I was really wrong about not having the time for Rotary. Just to be frank with you, I love Rotary. It's not what we do on an international level that grabs me. We talked about the international stuff that Dan was talking about. That's not what grabs me. Most of it's what we do on a local level. But the main reason is, everybody that's in this room and our club. And yeah, you know, I love you guys. Now, the problem when I say I love you guys, yeah, it feels really stupid. If I say and gals, I mean, that just doesn't make any sense to me. So it just, you know, it's hokey. So what I really want to say is, ladies and gentlemen, I really do love you guys. So a few things to shout from the rooftops about this club. And what we do on a local level is as follows. First, this room is full of mentors. Everybody in this room will pick up the phone and even answer my call. There. How many of you have watched the show? Full of Acceptance, Friendships, and Engagement. A couple of years ago, I was having a tough period. Matt, Kiernan. Dan, you walked up to me, and we were in the back of the room. in chowline. And you looked at me the same thing you said: "Today, how are you doing?" Okay. And you knew something was cooking. And, but that's all I needed at that time. And I really appreciate that. When, you know, when we have that in this club, of folks that really care about each other. Talk tough conversations, and honest conversations and board meetings, especially one time I remember what they'll shake and dictate though. And, you know, I remember somebody said, Hey, sit down, you guys. This isn't how we behave, and Rotary, and we're at the old chamber office around Chapman. And you know, we missed those two guys, we just lost those two guys. So we listen. But on a local level, I want to give you one example of the action that this club took. We go back a couple of years to COVID. And I was on a walk with a walk every morning with Brian, who at that point was the CEO at St. Jude. And we were coming up on Harbor Boulevard, about five o'clock in the morning. I said, Brian, what do you mean? And picture this: a parking lot with tents. Remember that - all those tents out there? The trucks that nobody talked about? You know, just a packed hospital. People are sick, really sick. And Brian says, "Our caregivers need shields. They need masks, they need face shields." That was on a Friday morning. And later that day, I called Dan Ouwleen and I said Hey Dan, you know, can we do anything as a club to get some face shields for caregivers? He said, I think we can. Before you knew it, Dan and I were talking on Sunday about who to how to get this whole thing together. And we ended up as a club sitting in Dan's factory, putting face shields together manually and then delivering them to the hospital. I think the total count was over 10,000. That's something that this club did just on the spur of the moment, a community need. Take a look at how this meeting is run. You know, this group. There's a lot of people in this room from the preparation to the signing table. Watching, ready to pitch in and help. It's like Dan, setting up the audiovisual here. You have got the front table here checking us in. You know those guys doing that. You got the signs out there. Then it all comes down at the end. You know, people are just working on behalf of each other, and just taking care of each other, making sure it happens. Then speaking of our president, I know firsthand that while this club says that they won't let a president fail. Y'all need to walk the talk. You know, you don't let it. Right? It's amazing. Oh, yeah, and good and bad jokes, and all. I don't know. I want to click on that. McFarlane has started all that stuff. So my reason is the weekly dose that I get being in front of great people that are in this room that I admire doing great things for each other, and others as well. Thanks, guys. I really appreciate it.