By Roger Tausig
Rotary Club of Orange
As many of you may know, Rotary Club of Orange, like most other Rotary clubs, meets once a week. Oftentimes when I tell this to people who are unfamiliar with Rotary, they are quite surprised by the frequency of our meetings. After all, in this age when everybody is so busy, it seems like a lot of time to devote to this type of activity.
However, there is some wisdom to meeting regularly that I first learned about when I went for my training prior to becoming the club’s president four years ago. At a workshop that I attended that addressed the subject of how to have successful meetings, the workshop leader stressed the importance of regular meetings as being critical to creating cohesion among the club members. He emphasized that when people come together on a regular basis they strengthen their relationships through fellowship. The makes them more likely to want to participate in the many worthy projects that the club undertakes to deliver on our pledge to provide services and aid to those in need locally, regionally and globally.
I also learned that people are more likely to attend meetings that are interesting and offer an opportunity to learn or simply be entertained. With the onset of COVID-19 over two years ago, our meeting format changed to Zoom, which was less than ideal in general and made it particularly challenging to incorporate speakers into our meetings.
If you or someone you know is interested in speaking at one of our lunch meetings (we have two each month), we would love to hear from you. Our goal is to provide our members with a rewarding experience when they come to a meeting. Over the years that I have belonged to our Rotary club in Orange, I have heard many interesting people speak on topics that enriched us, educated us and entertained us.
Examples of past speakers are a CPA who informed us about the new changes to the IRS tax code, a motivational speaker who taught about happiness and how to adjust our thinking to achieve it, an acupuncturist, a hypnotist, an expert on local wildlife, an expert on home organization and decluttering, a chiropractor, elected state officials, a feng shui practitioner and many more diverse and interesting presenters. One speaker was a member who had struggled with a serious, life threatening illness that nearly took their life. They survived to share their story with fellow members.
These meetings were well attended until the pandemic started, which obviously put a wrench in things. But as people feel more comfortable with mixing and mingling in person, our live meetings will resume, so it is critical that we make them as interesting as possible.
If you have a profession, pastime or entertaining skill that you would like to share with our club, please contact me at rogertausig@yahoo.com. We’d love to hear from you.