This Week: A Business Meeting

 There's not much to say about a Business Meeting except that it's basically a report back on the various committees' deliberations and ratification of board decisions.  The board is the servant of the club, not the other way round, so so all decisions made by the board have to be approved by the club.

Last Week

Dr Neal Davidson spoke to us from Maryland, USA.  He has been a member of Rotary for more than 50 years.  He spoke of how he had been introduced to Rotary and how little he knew about it initially.

It was a very interesting talk and resonated with many of us.

The one phrase that captured everybody's attention was that wearing a Rotary badge does not make you a Rotarian.  That talk really centred on what it means to be a Rotarian and our obligations as members.

Next Week

David Schlapobersky will be talking to us about Bukkenburg Pottery in Swellendam and a surprising link that he and Felicity have in common with our club.  More on this next week.

International - Morocco & Australia

Vocational training to improve rain-fed agricultural productivity in Morocco

By Steven Sundstrom, Regional Grants Officer

The vocational training programme in Morocco was funded by a global grant from The Rotary Foundation, supplemented with District Designated Funds from Rotary District 9510 in South Australia (through the Rotary Club of Port Pirie) and contributions from The Rotary Club of Casablanca El Fida.

This project began in 2019, when the Rotary Club of Casablanca El-Fida, Morocco, and District 9510 submitted a vocational training team application to improve rain-fed agricultural productivity in Morocco. This was based on a community assessment conducted by Rotarian Barry Mudge during a visit to Morocco in 2018, with the intention of bringing a team from Morocco to Australia in 2020.

The project was on track for approval in March 2020, however, the COVID pandemic obscured the outlook for everyone. The project contacts ultimately made the difficult decision to cancel the application at the end of 2020, but it was with great pleasure that I received a new application in early 2023.

This set out to not only achieve the goals of their previous application, but they had continued communications throughout the intervening years, and revised the plan based on a new community assessment that also addressed climate change concerns in the project activities.

They also increased collaboration by following the team hosted in Australia with a two-person team to Morocco six months later to conduct follow-up and jointly conduct workshops to disseminate the results. I recently received their final report detailing the successful outcomes, including a total of 239 direct beneficiaries.