Fredericksburg Rotary - A Message from the Club President

I humbly accept the honor of serving as the President of our Fredericksburg Rotary Club. I have spent the last few months thinking about what this coming year will mean to me and how I will serve our club, our community and Rotary International.

This year we are fortunate to have many great masters as our guides, including District Governor Reggie Williams, John Kenny, our Rotary International President and Bill Gates, Senior, the father of Bill Gates.

President Kenny has set the theme for the upcoming Rotary year: “The Future of Rotary is in Your Hands”. Interpreting that slogan leaves us lots of room for interpretation and therein lies the challenge. For we need to ask ourselves what we will be doing that meets the pledge of Service Above Self now and in the future. The challenge presupposes that we will be thinking about the future of our club and about RI in general. It presupposes that we will be doing some long range planning; that we will reinforce the foundations that we have built and depend on that base as we develop and find ways to be even more effective as a force for world understanding. What an opportunity to bring about change throughout the world that will help “improve the health and well-being of not only children but their families and people everywhere”. We share that opportunity through Rotarians around the globe.

Recently Bill Gates, Junior has joined the Rotary campaign to eradicate polio. The steps he has taken to help us in this project, has moved our purpose into high gear. Bill Gates, Senior is a board member of the Bill and Melinda Foundation to eradicate Polio. In that role he has been asked many times how he would define the relationship between Rotary and the Gates Foundation. He has collected some of his answers and recollections in a new book called Showing up for Life. He answers that he believes public service is an important tradition to foster and that “great things can happen when people are connected together in a purpose that is bigger than themselves”. He also states that we should “think big, come up with audacious goals, and then commit enormous resources to achieving them”.

As we begin the new Rotary year, my personal goal is to lead our club in visualizing how we can follow the theme of taking the future of Rotary into our own hands. I want us to visualize showing up for Rotary: participating in service projects, doing the work, getting our hands dirty, attending meetings regularly, joining other clubs in their efforts, going to District and International conferences and “thinking big”.

My fellow Rotarians, I ask you to join the Rotary team this year in accepting the challenge we have been given and work tenaciously to accomplish “audacious” goals .

Yours in Rotary,

Mary Thompson

President

Rotary Club of Fredericksburg, Texas