Lunchtime - Aylesbury Rotary Club

Noel picked me up on time as usual and we set off for a day trip to Aylesbury. It's great being driven around by Noel, he's an excellent driver (ex-European Rally driver!) and great company. We took the country route and arrived ahead of time to the Holiday Inn just off the A41.

I was particularly pleased with this venue because it meant that I would have access to the internet all afternoon via their wifi and my laptop - brilliant!

We were met by members of Aylesbury Rotary Club and made to feel very welcome. President Roger and Hon Secretary James were very good company as was President Elect Sarah. Sarah and I had a good discussion about membership and I hope we'll be able to work together over the coming months to find innovative ways to approach membership development.

It was great to meet Rtn Arnold who has recently rejoined Aylesbury RC having been a member some five years ago - Arnold told me how on reaching the age of 89 he had thought it would be good to 'do something' again, so applied to rejoin!

Having a little bit of experience in Christmas collection floats, I was particularly impressed with the four week collection regime that they undertake with their annual Carol Float.

When questions were invited two in particular come to mind. Firstly, I was asked about how we could make Rotary documents more easily accessible and secondly I was asked about collections in one town being undertaken by Clubs from sourrounding areas.

With regard to document storage, I agree that we need a more straightforward way to access the multitude of Rotary resources that are available to us all. One way, rather then reinventing the wheel, would be for our District website to link to documents (listed in a logical manner) held on the RI and RIBI websites. I will ask our Communications committee to investigate this (they will of course need input/support from each of the Service Project teams to catalogue the resources).

In terms of 'poaching' I feel that Rotary should be seen as one organisation to the public at large. However internally, we need to work together and ensure that we are not treading on each others toes - the key to this is communication, be that between Clubs who operate in a specific geographic region or Clubs who border Districts/Towns. This is something I feel I can help with when cross-District activities are involved; as far as Club efforts go, we just need to remember the four-way test and be fair, by supporting one another and discussing when/where collections are going to take place.

For more information go to http://www.aylesburyrotary.com/index.html