Prayer.True and living God, Lord of city streets and country roads, of urban congestion, and rural openness, you are the Lord of life in every type of community. But at the outset of this month with its national focus on Rural Life, we offer grateful and special prayer for those who till the soil and reap the harvest, who provide the products we consume.
We thank you for the gift of food and the experience of fellowship. We are grateful also for the assurance that as we leave this place today, we will be accompanied by your Spirit. Amen.
Club Announcements
Birthdays and Anniversaries
Birthdays
Steele Dehmer May 02
Suman Das May 06
John Sewell May 07
Wedding Anniversaries
Alison and Scott Kelly May 06
Membership Anniversaries
Wyatt Emmerich 28 years, May 01
Bob Ridgway 46 years, May 01
Jon Turner 35 years, May 01
Lori Greer 2 years, May 03
Rotary Membership Drive. Please see the following from Membership Director Lee Jenkins.
" Our Membership Drive is still in progress! For those of you who have brought guests and have interested prospects, thank you for your support in keeping the North Jackson Rotary Club what it is and always has been - a great club with the best members around! We need for "Each One to Bring One" like we talked about last month. If you haven't brought a prospective member yet, think of who you know that would be an asset to our Club and invite them to a meeting. Their lunch is on us!
To encourage more participation, we are planning a Membership Social at "The Fairview Inn" ion May 10th from 5:30-7:00. You must bring at least one prospect in order to attend. We'll have beverages, delicious appetizers, and a little music as well! We want the Social to be fun and give the guests a chance to meet our members and to find out who we are. If you have brought in new members, you and your new members will be invited to the Social as well so don't wait!
Don't forget the incentives available for bringing in new members right now through the end of May.:
1) 500 Paul Harris points for each new member
2) $200 gift certificate to The Manship to whoever recruits the most NJRC members
3) $500 cash for the person who brings in the most new members in the District!
Think about who you can introduce to Rotary! Only we can keep our Club great! Please let me know what I can do to help."
This week’s Rotary Foundation Thought is about Group Study Exchange (GSE).
A GSE team from Holland spent four weeks in California, USA. During their time in California, the Dutch GSE team raised $2,913 for the Inca Educa charity based in Cusco,
Peru to build a school library for underprivileged young adults. The team, led by retired firefighter, Bob Boersma, was composed of people from diverse professions: working in public service, administrative law, public broadcasting and financial services. The team participated in vocational and cultural days and returned home, having made new friends and business contacts, ready to share new ideas with their Dutch countrymen. Has your club sponsored a GSE? It’s a great way to create Service through acquaintance.
Contributions to our Foundation are the oil that makes the Rotary Wheel of service turn.
Billy Brumfield House. The Rotary Club of North Jackson is serving supper once a month at The Billy Brumfield House, a Stewpot Community Services ministry. Our club serves on the 1st Tuesday of each month. Interested members need to meet @ Baker Donelson located at the corner of Eastover Drive and the I-55 North Frontage Road @ 5:15 PM and then travel together to Billy Brumfield. Also, if you are interested in sponsoring a month, the est. cost is $180 for the food. Mike Dawkins is project chair and can be reached @ 601-351-2428 or mdawkins@bakerdonelson.com.
Between the Lions. Please remember to sign up for Between the Lions. During the school year, we read weekly to pre-Kindergarteners at William Walton Elementary School on Bailey Ave. It is a wonderful experience! The children are truly information sponges and very willing learners. Contact Jenny Price (662) 213-1294 for more information. Our reading for the 2017-2018 school year is complete, but please sign up for 2018-2019.
Member Care Committeereminder: for anyone who needs assistance getting to a meeting, please call Luther Munford at (601) 985-4418.
Thinking of Proposing a New Member?
First, discuss with Classification Committee (Paul Miller) He will provide a membership application, check classification availability and discuss occupational qualifications.
Rotary Membership Occupational Qualifications Applicant should be one of the following:
A corporate officer
A Professional (Attorney, CPA, Physician. Engineer, Architect, etc) A Proprietor
An Agent of a reputable company
A Manager or Supervisor of a department or section of a business
Rotarians, don't forget to like the club's Facebook page to stay up to date on the latest happenings. Search us out at Rotary Club of North Jackson or click the link:
Stratford-Upon-Avon club members prepare for the Shakespeare Duck Race.
By Jonathan Craig, secretary of the Rotary Club of Stratford-Upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
Our club meets at lunch and has a membership that is mostly retired. We do have a few younger members who have their own businesses or retired early, but gone are the days when employers encouraged their local bank managers to take two hour lunches. We began to be seen as a club that wasn’t a good fit for young working people. So it became a strategic goal for our club (and also for RIBI) to attract younger members and also more women.
We decided to establish a Satellite Club, although we now prefer not to call it that. Past President Gilly Rushton took it on as a personal project, and identified a handful of people, two or three, who would meet in the evening, joined by a few members from our lunchtime group (but not too many, so as not to dominate the group.) They would meet informally over a drink in a pub, at an agreed upon time and date. The only structure was to fix a date for the next meeting.
Welcoming the new members
Eventually, this “evening group,” as we refer to it, developed into a meeting over dinner, and committee chairs would join them to discuss what was up in their committee. Our club president and an assistant district governor would check in to make sure Rotary guidelines were being followed. We encouraged our evening members to attend lunch whenever they could. Establishing this group as a satellite became part of our strategic plan.
When it was clear that they wanted to join Rotary, we sent out induction letters for each individually, and they were welcomed in front of the whole club at one of our evening meetings (we do have an occasional evening meeting already, mostly on fifth Mondays.) One of the evening members was selected to sit on our council as a full voting member, and in addition the newly-elected honorary treasurer is from the evening group.
The evening group is less formal than our lunchtime meeting, meets twice a month, once for business and once social, in different places. The group is nine members strong, soon to be 10. They are full members of theStratford-Upon-Avon Rotary Club, pay the same dues, and receive the same emails and notices.
Yellow ducks race down the Avon
They set up their own project, a very successful Duck Race on the Avon, which has already been repeated. And they also join some of our other club projects such as a marathon, our biggest fundraiser of the year.
I saw a comment recently about the value of starting an evening group with shared experience, shared administration. It doesn’t have to be intended to become a separate club, as long as it works. The average age of the group is younger, which is not only good for future growth but brings new insights into things like using social media.
We currently have 70 members, nine of which are in the evening group. Of our 11 women members, five are in the evening group. So that says something. It’s been quite a journey for us, and the journey continues.
Engaging Younger Professionals, a new online toolkit, helps clubs better understand younger professionals. From ideas for outreach and engagement to long-term benefits of becoming a Rotarian, this toolkit helps clubs rethink their membership, from a broad perspective down to a tactical level.
The Rotary Club of North Jackson recognized 10 Star Students and their teachers from Jackson Academy, Jackson Prep., and St. Andrew's Episcopal School. The students and their Star teachers are as follow:
Jackson Academy: Dolph Maxwell. His teacher is Schuyler Dickson. They were, unfortunately, unable to join us on the 24th because of a school awards assembly that day.
Jackson Prep: Graham Robertson, Mary Margaret Mitchell, Morgan Williams, and Gregory Vance. Their Star Teachers are Kimberly Van Uden, David Hogue, Lou Ann McKibben, and Marsha Hobbs.
St. Andrew's. Christopher "C.J." Carron, Joe Han, Charley Hutchison, Julia Jia, and Emily Kruse. Their Star teachers are Donna Patrick, Roscoe Stribling, John Applegate, and Ruth Holmes.
The Mississippi Economic Council and its M.B. Swayze Foundation sponsors the Student-Teacher Achievement Recognition (STAR) Program in an effort to encourage scholastic achievement among the state's high school students. The STAR Program has two specific purposes:
1.) Emphasize scholastic excellence and encourage greater scholastic effort among Mississippi students. 2.) Recognition of the teaching profession.
The students and their teachers at the April 24 meeting are shown in the accompanying photo.
Dr. Robert T. Brodell, Professor, and Chair, Department of Dermatology, University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC), spoke to the Rotary Club of North Jackson at the club's April 17, 2018 meeting. The title of his presentation was Instructive Cases from the Deep, Deep, Deep South, Mission Medicine, Who Benefits the Most. It was an illustrated show of a mission trip that he took to Nigeria along with one of his residents, who is a Nigerian.
Dr. Brodell discussed the preparation for the trip, the statistics about Nigeria and the location of the hospital and medical school in which they worked, in Enugu State. He commented that the major problem in Nigeria is the deferred maintenance of infrastructure. For example, the Enugu School of Medicine has no running water.
According to Dr. Brodell, the exposure to the hot Nigerian sun creates a large number of skin cancer cases. He showed examples of these cases in his presentation. The hot humid climate in Nigeria also contributes to frequent skin disorders, not cancerous ones. He also showed examples of these.
Interestingly, Dr. Brodell discussed the culture of Nigeria, which includes gifts to officials for services, such as, a gift to the immigration clerk at the passport desk to overcome a procedural problem one of his colleagues had with his immunizations for yellow fever prevention.
Dr. Brodell also discussed the assistance that his group received from a nonprofit named Drug Relief who donated medicine to them for treating Nigerian patients. We thank him for his very interesting presentation and for his service to the citizens of Mississippi. Dr. Brodell (center)l is shown in the accompanying photo with Club President Witt Ruffin (left), and Matt Monsour, who is program chair for the club.
Mike Hurst, Jr., U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, spoke to the Rotary Club of North Jackson during its April 10, 2018 meeting. Hurst informed club members and guests what the U.S. Attorney’s office does, some recent accomplishments and Project EJECT, a joint crime-fighting task force with local law officers. The Rotary Club of North Jackson meets at noon on Thursdays at The Rickhouse. The first [photo is of Hurst during his speech. In the second photo are from left, Bill Osborne, club member; Darren LaMarca, First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi; Hurst and Anna Powers, club president-elect.
We thank Mr. Hurst for his presentation and he and Mr. LaMarca for their service to our country and, more particularly, to the citizens of Mississippi.
Brent Wilson, President and Chief Executive Officer, Make-A-Wish Mississippi spoke to the Rotary Club of North Jackson at the Club’s April 3, 2018, meeting. He discussed the history of Make-A-Wish Foundation which was founded in Arizona in 1980 and its work in Mississippi, where it helps about 100 critically ill children annually, The Mississippi Chapter's goal is to assist nearly 200 children each year as approximately 165 children develop critical illnesses annually.
When Make-A-Wish assists a child it is at no cost to the child or his or her family. Funding is always a critical item and Make-A-Wish MS is conducting three fundraising events in the spring of 2018:
Starkville Wine & Wishes, April 5, 2018
Evening of Wishes - KENTUCKY DERBY SOIREE, May 5, 2018
Tee it Up for Wishes, June 8, 2018
More details on these events are available on the chapter’s website.
We thank Mr. Wilson for his presentation to our club and for his work on behalf of the families and children of MS. He (center) is shown at the podium during his presentation and following it with Matt Monsour (left), who introduced him, and Club President Witt Ruffin (right) in the accompanying photos.
