Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart welcomed representatives from Vancouver Rotary, Rotaract, and Interact clubs, and District 5040 on Friday Oct 18th.

He read out and then presented the Proclamation naming October 24th as World Polio Day in the City of Vancouver.

Vancouver City hall will be illuminated in red for the day. 

Rotary has been at the forefront of the global polio eradication campaign for 40 years. Worldwide polio cases have dropped from 1000 per day to less than 100 per year and we are getting close to eliminating this disease forever.

 

Rotary Club of Ladner President Elect Diana Cabott received 55 donated eyeglasses in the collection box for the District's 2020 Vision Conference next April 2020. Rotary District 5040 Past District Governor Sonia Baron made the contribution after collecting over the summer. This contribution will help build a collection being assembled for the Third World Eyecare Society, a Rotary supported project based in Burnaby, by the time of the District's 2020 Vision Conference, April 24 to 26, 2020 in Vancouver.

The 24th Annual Pot of Gold Charity Golf Tournament, jointly organized by the Royal City Rotary Club and the Rotary Club of New Westminster, was another great success.  Under ideal golfing conditions at Mayfair Lakes Golf Club in Richmond, 120 golfers teed off in a Texas Scramble format to compete for team and individual prizes, followed by a delicious buffet and live and silent auctions. 

We should all be involved in unfinished work. That’s Cathedral Thinking. Those who anticipate the long term ramifications of what they do today, and who put in place a vision for success, are often called "Cathedral Thinkers". Former CEO of Tourism Vancouver, which launched the successful bid to bring the 2010 Winter Olympic Games to Vancouver and Whistler, Rick Antonson, will be speaking to us on this visionary approach to how we lead our lives, at the 2020 Vision Conference of Rotary District 5040, April 24 to 26, 2020, at the Pinnacle Harbourfront Hotel in Vancouver.

From sponsoring water parks for children and their families, developing an outdoor fitness course, providing food for children of low income families, to running a bathtub race, cleaning up a street, opening First Nations learning centres, shipping medical equipment to communities in other countries or supplying clean water in Southeast Asia where there is need, the 50 Rotary clubs in Greater Vancouver up the coast to Prince Rupert generated more than 68,500 volunteer hours of service among their 1,500 members in the past year.

 

According to calculations in a special Value of Rotary Volunteering report by Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Civil Society Studies, the monetary value of that time devoted to local, regional and international projects is $1,514,250 in 2017-18 (based on a conservative rate of US$18 per hour). The total time for the 50 clubs over the past five years has been 160,200 hours for an estimated value of $3,604,500.

 

At the Rotary District 5040 conference in Sun Peaks, May 3 to 5, 2019, among the awards presented was the first Public Image Award. Three members of the District Public Image and Public Relations Committee reviewed the entries and recommended a winner. To review the winning entry by way of some sort of general guideline for developing your club's Public Image and Public Relations program, please click here.