Vocational & Lester Connock Awards, Assistance with Load Shedding, PETS....and Another PETS

Last Week
It was Awards Week.  First, the Vocational Service Awards:

Three awards were made this year.  Left to Carol Dyantyi CEO of iKageng.  Ikageng is a community-based organisation founded in Orlando West, Soweto where the HIV and AIDS scourge has decimated families, leaving several children orphaned and vulnerable.  Her sponsor was the Rosebank Rotary Anns and Past President Shirley Eustace introduced her.

Top Right, Mandy Davis of Gracepoint Methodist Church who gives so much of her time to a wide variety of projects from blankets to feeding schemes, from teaching at Leeukop Prison to addiction/recovery assistance. Sponsored by David Bradshaw

Bottom Right, Mimi van Deventer who trained to be a teacher as a mature student and is invaluable in running our Interact Club. Sponsored by Cesare Vidulich.

And President Jean naturally did the honours.

Lester Connock Award

This is effectively a bursary awarded to a postgraduate nursing student at Wits.  This year only one award was made, to Takalani Jeffrey Mashadzha.  His field of study is the working environment of psychiatric nurses.  Nurses work longer hours than any other health professional and are subject to a number of traumatic experiences when they first enter the profession.  They also experience compassion fatigue and secondary trauma, violence and abuse from management and patients.  He hopes that his study will ease the negative approach and be a means to implement programmes that will be of benefit to the profession.

With him is Viv Herbert, a Lecturer in Nursing Education at Wits.






This Week
It's a social meeting that gives us a chance to talk to each other rather than listen to a speaker.  There's a Board Meeting beforehand.

Careers Day
Unfortunately we have had to change the date from the 9th March to the 16th March.  I have already sent an email to everyone involved.  It looks as if we may have many more bases this year.

Load Shedding...something that might be of assistance to some Rotarians.
The Ramble was delayed by Load Shedding so I will try and make some suggestions that will certainly be needed when winter comes.

PETS (President Elect Training Seminar) Sat 23rd/Sun 24th February
This is something all incoming Presidents, Secretaries and hopefully some Board Members should attend.  It costs nothing and is in Isando this year so you don't have to spend the night.  You have to take a laptop with you and, judging by last year, it really has been jacked up.

Louisa Horne, a trainer in District 7820 runs her version of the presidents-elect training seminar (PETS) in the spring. 

When she was asked to be a district trainer three years ago, Horne knew she wanted to reshape what she called “drill and kill” sessions that revolved around information participants needed to learn.

“Instead, we leveraged the talents of some highly skilled trainers we happened to have among our members,” says the incoming district governor. “We got people who were adult educators who understood how facilitation should be done and were able to create a very different approach to developing our leaders.”

Horne recruited Doug Logan, a past governor, to help. They named their seminars “Training for Leaders of Clubs” (TLC) to stress the changes they made and persuade those who might not want to attend another seminar to give it a try. They later led a breakout session at the 2018 Toronto convention and have also brought their workshop to others outside of their district.

Strategic doing

The core idea is to get people thinking strategically about what they need to do to make their clubs more attractive to members.

“Decline in membership is not the problem. It is a symptom,” says Logan. “So rather than rushing to develop recruitment strategies, we want people to start thinking, ‘OK, what else is really happening here?’”

Rotary members should be thinking about what they can do to make their clubs more interesting to potential members. Good service projects is one way. Rotarians in Tanzania, above, operate a project helping people with albinism become financially independent. 

Logan and Horne recruit facilitators with a background in management consulting or adult education. They use a variety of tools to encourage “strategic doing.” Participants are asked to create a list of what they’ll do in the next 30 days to help achieve their clubs’ goals and decide how they will evaluate their completed tasks. They then make a list of what they’ll do 30 days after that to keep making a difference.

Succession

The seminars also stress succession planning and courageous leadership.

“This is not just for presidents and secretaries. This is for all leaders and aspiring leaders,” says Horne. “You can’t think of it in terms of ‘my year.’ Most clubs need to have a longer-term plan for what they want to accomplish and how they want to have an impact. Those strategic conversations need to involve people who can give it continuity.”

By shifting responsibility from a single person to a team, Horne says, clubs can make a role less consuming and more appealing. Horne plans to exemplify this approach to her clubs by using the title “chair of the district leadership team” in place of “district governor.”

“We expect our club or district leaders to be all things to all people, and that just doesn’t work,” Horne says. “It has to be a team, and there have to be very simple tools that people can use effectively with some basic training.”